WILBUR MILLS: Barren-ground grizzly, North Slope It is our final frontier: the last piece of this nation's soil where a walker can lose himself in distances and in the vastness of his horizons; the last place where the prehuman inhabitants, the land's animals, can live and die without knowing the smell of man. It is a roomy refuge for the human spirit in a crowded age of cities. It is the blankest spot on our map; the widest unmarked tract in our geography of hope. to questions we are too dull as yet to ask; a reservoir of potential; a terrain fertile of possibilities, where man has not yet begun reducing the diversity and the mystery of what God put here in His subtler wisdom The proposed trans-Alaska oil pipeline would thread through its center, in a The line's maintenance road would ramify. With time " the adventitious roads would multiply and connect, like ice crystals on a ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS Unloading pipe at Valde: A loss becomes tragic when it is unnecessary. The Alaska pipeline is that; the wrong way to deliver oil to the wrong place A trans-Alaska route benefits neither Alaskans nor the rest of the American public. It profits no one but the oil companies. The injury would be mostly to an idea. Those who care about wildness would have lost the big one. their minor victories would taste of defeat. It is the difference between defending a virgin and a whore BUREAU OF SPORTS, FISH AND WILDLIFE: Tundra scars |