OLAUS AND MARDY LIVE ON: National Public Radio’s Morning Edition featured a July 26 report commemorating a July 1956 trip by Olaus and Mardy Murie to the upper Sheenjek River of Alaska's Brooks Range. The survey by these Jackson residents, writers and wilderness activists set in motion the effort to protect what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). George Schaller, a young field biologist who volunteered for the trip, went on to become a world-renowned naturalist. To celebrate the golden anniversary of that first voyage, he returned to the Sheenjek. He found the region still pristine -- and yet still threatened by the potential for development and oil exploration. In a film created after their 1956 voyage, the Muries described a “a wide-open valley defined by a sinuous river and towering limestone peaks, a place where even superlatives seem small.” Using photos and records from the original expedition, Schaller and a group of graduate students looked for signs of climate change. "Olaus and Mardy would be pleased," Schaller told NPR. "Have the trees grown? Are there new trees in the picture? There are, so things are going at their own slow pace here in the Arctic. And that is, in many ways, how Olaus and Mardy worked -- one step at a time, learning, advocating." On the last night of the 2006 expedition, the group listened to a 1956 recording of Mardy Murie reading from the "Letter from the Sheenjek": “This, then, is the Sheenjek country. The Arctic wilderness of the Brooks Range. Will we have the wisdom to cherish such places? To leave such parts of the earth in their natural state, humbly and with appreciation?” The Murie Center in Moose carries on the traditions of these naturalists.
- posted by Michael Shay @ 9:41 AM