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Wilderness Watch Alaska Chapter Share
Action Alert: Voice Your Support for Protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge!
 Over half of the National Wilderness Preservation System is in Alaska (about 57.5 million acres), with the system’s largest units all here – Wrangell-St. Elias (9 + million acres), Arctic (8 million acres), Gates of the Arctic (7.2 million acres) and Noatak (5.7 million acres). The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) of 1980 designated most of the Alaska’s Wilderness. While ANILCA was generous with adding Wilderness to the national system, it did so with several exceptions to the Wilderness Act of 1964. For example, airplanes, motor boats and snowmachines are allowed in most Wildernesses in Alaska. These and several other exceptions create great challenges for stewardship of the Alaskan half of our nation’s Wilderness system.
The Alaska Chapter of Wilderness Watch was organized in April of 2002 when a group of Alaska wilderness activists met with staff from Wilderness Watch’s national office at the Cloudberry Lookout B&B in Fairbanks. The activists recognized that if they were going to hold the line on Wilderness in Alaska they needed to organize and draw on the expertise of Wilderness Watch for help.
Our members are a diverse lot including: retired and current resource agency people, bush pilots, wilderness guides, professors, writers, and teachers. Our members have been busy on several fronts. Central to our work is the tradition of gathering folks together for pot-luck dinner meetings with the Denali Group of Sierra Club to share information, discuss issues, plan activities, and foster kinship in the art of watch-dogging wilderness stewardship. In 2004, the 40th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, we co-sponsored an Alaska Wilderness Forum along with The Wilderness Society. The forum brought together key figures in the Alaska conservation community to review and chart future goals for wilderness stewardship in Alaska. The Alaska Chapter organizes grass roots comments on various proposals effecting Alaska Wilderness. Examples of some of our recent work are listed below:
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