Accidental Activists Answer the Call

FAIRBANKS, Alaska —  Drive 10 miles north of Fairbanks, down a narrow gravel road marked “Moose Ox Trail,” through the spruce trees and there, in the lovely garden on the right, you will find two of the most powerful forces in the battle to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.

Ginny Wood, 83, is bent over her cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage, behind a staked fence high enough to keep the moose out. Inside the log cabin they share, 82-year-old Celia Hunter is likely to be kneading bread dough or putting up raspberry jam or packing her gear for a river rafting trip.

There may be no more formidable voices in the environmental movement than these two women, with their gray hair pulled back in ponytails and barrettes and their habit of interrupting each other’s stories to get to the punch line.

There’s the one about how they flew P-51s, P-47s, B-17s and B-29s to military bases across America as ferry pilots during World War II; how they went to Europe after the war and wound up hitching home on a Norwegian oil tanker via Aruba; how they built their own log cabins by hand; how the Alaskan bush caught hold of two women, who had seen much of the world, and kept them there.

“It’s like so many things that happen in Alaska. I came up here to look, and, 50 years later, I’m still here looking around,” Hunter said. “Everybody accepted you for what you were and what you knew. And they gave you the chance to try anything you wanted.”

Back in the 1950s, when the state was mostly given to trophy hunters, gold miners and others who had washed up to make a buck, Hunter and Wood founded the Alaska Conservation Society, started Alaska’s first wilderness camp at Denali National Park and helped convince President Eisenhower to set aside the original Arctic National Wildlife Range in 1960.

Earlier this month, the conservation group gave the two women its first lifetime achievement awards. During the ceremony, Wood and Hunter were credited with helping set aside 19 million acres of Arctic wilderness and with leading the charge in many of the state’s signature environmental battles: They fought to stop the Atomic Energy Commission’s plans to explode four nuclear bombs in northwest Alaska during the 1950s that were to carve out a new harbor. “We would have had a Chernobyl up there . . . if we wouldn’t have stopped them,” Hunter said. They also succeeded in blocking a huge hydropower dam on the mighty Yukon River and battled plans for mining on the Fortymile River in Alaska’s eastern interior.

In 1976, Hunter took the fight to Washington, D.C., becoming president and later executive director of the Wilderness Society--the first woman to head a national environmental organization.

Now Hunter and Wood are squaring off against Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, the state Legislature and much of the public here, which sees opening the 1.5 million-acre coastal plain to drilling as a means of building jobs and lessening the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

In letters, columns and public appearances over the last year, the two women have fought a low-key campaign to protect the refuge they helped designate. “The decision we make of whether or not to drill for oil there is an indicator of the kind of choices we will make during the 21st century,” Wood wrote to Knowles recently. “Will greed, growth, rampant consumption and corporate feudalism drive them, or will ecological wisdom, compassion and respect for all living things and their habitats be our bottom line?”

In the kitchen of their cabin (Hunter gave up her cabin next door to a family member a few years ago and moved into Wood’s basement), Hunter is prowling restlessly and scanning the windows for possible rain, while Wood sits next to a stack of books with her feet up. The subject of ANWR comes up unbidden.

“The irony is, you could save that same amount of oil on so many other things,” Hunter said. “If you would just increase the gas mileage [vehicle requirements] by one or two miles a gallon, you could save more oil than the whole of that Arctic refuge,” Wood said.

Most of their conversations go like that. One starts. The other interrupts or embellishes or contradicts. “Now that we’re older,” Hunter said, “we’ve decided we have one memory between us.”

They both grew up in rural Washington state during the Depression and met in the Women’s Air Service Pilots corps during World War II. Afterward, they went to Europe together to see what the war had been about. It was an intoxicating time.

“All the youth of Europe had spent years either fighting, being interred or being stuck in a town where you had to sleep in a bomb shelter every night,” Wood said. “So the war was over, and the youth of Europe was on the road. Going there at that time changed our lives. First of all, it made us citizens of the world.”

They returned to an America in which they no longer felt at home. As Hunter would later describe: “There were all these undamaged towns, and each town looked like the next, and there seemed to be such complacency and smugness.”

So Hunter and Wood set out for Alaska. The flight from Great Falls, Mont., in a couple of Stinsons took 20 days, waiting for good visibility along the way. As they approached Fairbanks, they found themselves in the middle of a snowstorm.

As the weather worsened, Wood hand-signaled toward the ground to Hunter flying on her wing: land. Hunter signaled back, her finger thrust forward: proceed.

Wood and Hunter settled in the woods outside Fairbanks, building cabins without any electricity or running water. They learned to cut their own firewood (still do) and bake their own bread. (Wood was married for a few years, but it didn’t last.)

The idea for the wilderness camp at Denali grew out of their own experiences. It would allow people from all over the world to spend days or weeks in the wilderness, at the foot of Mt. McKinley, living on their own resources next to grizzly bears and wolves.

But as tourists began to flock to Alaska, Wood and Hunter feared that too many were taking advantage of its beauty--without giving anything back to the land. So they founded the Alaska Conservation Society, the first organization that mobilized Alaskans, as opposed to conservationists from outside the state, for resource protection.

“Coming from the Lower 48, we knew what had happened to places we cared about, and we knew it was going to happen here,” Hunter said.

“The thing is, if the exploiters lose, they just lose a round, they come back with another scheme,” she said. “If we lose, we lose forever.”