Alaska — Land of Immensity

This article was originally written for a conservation organization of which I am a board member, The Nature Conservancy, in February 1999.

Alaska — land of immensity. Both in its realities and its possibilities, Alaska can stir our hearts and minds like no other place on the planet. Where else can bears roam freely, and people roam freely, often on the very same terrain? Where else can we touch the depth and vastness of Creation — not just as observers, but as participants? Where else can the limitless landscape match the greatest reach of our spirits?

Because Alaska remains so wild — home for the bear and the caribou and the eagle, as well as for people who have retained their true respect for other animals — it connects all living creatures in powerful ways. And not just within the wide boundaries of Alaska itself. For the reach of those connections is even greater than that.

Some of the very same geese who settle on the northern slopes of the Brooks Range, far above the Arctic Circle, fly across the Yukon, over western Canada, down the Rockies, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico — and back — each and every year. So by the very beating of their wings, those geese connect some of the most wild and remarkable places on our continent. And, at the same time, those geese connect every person fortunate enough to see or hear them with those very same places. That means the boy in southern Utah who hears their whooshing wings is tied, in a wondrous way, to Alaska. As is the girl, in downtown Chicago, who spies that unmistakable V-formation overhead.

Aldo Leopold, a wonderful writer as well as a dedicated conservationist, was so moved by the flight of migrating geese that he wrote this passage in his journal: “The wind has gone with the geese. And so would I, were I the wind.”

Such wonderful words! Just as we can almost hear those wings, we can almost be in Alaska even when we are thousands of miles distant.

That will only stay true, of course, as long as Alaska stays wild. The flight of geese also brings to mind another passage — a sadder one that contains a sober warning. An old English proverb, penned centuries ago, laments: “They jail the thief who steals the goose from the common. Yet they let loose the greater thief who steals the common from the goose.”

That is the paradox, isn’t it? With the unending power of wild places comes their unending fragility. With their infinite gift comes their infinite peril. And our work, the work of The Nature Conservancy, is to protect those places. Not for just another season, or another session of Congress, but for all time.

Thanks to the work of The Nature Conservancy, brown bear may continue to shamble across the tundra, geese may continue to fly through the skies — -and people may be able to live among them and know the utter immensity of Alaska. And, in the process, of all Creation.