Jimmy Carter’s Conservation Legacy

When Jimmy Carter became an honorary national park ranger in 2016, his supporters had little doubt that the former president deserved the highest civilian award from the National Park Service.

Carter’s aggressive conservation push in the late 1970s resulted in the creation of 39 new park sites.

And with the stroke of a pen on Dec. 1, 1978, he used his executive authority to designate 13 national monuments in Alaska alone, giving federal protection to 56 million acres of new land and more than doubling the amount of land managed by NPS.

“That was incredibly, incredibly bold,” said former NPS Director Jon Jarvis, who had gone to Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, to present the former president with a plaque and a broad-brimmed ranger’s hat.

Of all the American presidents, Carter arguably made the biggest impact on both the park service and the state of Alaska. The nation’s longest-living former president, Carter died Sunday at the age of 100.

Perhaps no one knew that more than Carter himself. Often regarded as a humble man, the 39th president nevertheless was always quick to boast about his environmental record while serving just a single term in the White House from 1977 to 1981.

Two years after using the 1906 Antiquities Act to establish the national monuments in Alaska, Carter scored his biggest conservation victory during a lame-duck session after he was voted out of office. After years of negotiations, Congress agreed to protect more than 100 million additional acres under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980.

“It was the greatest contribution to the state of Alaska I believe that anyone has ever made,” said David Raskin, the former president of Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges. “It was not only the greatest conservation law passed in this nation but probably in the world.”

The sweeping law created or resulted in additions to 16 wildlife refuges, 13 national parks, two national monuments, two national forests, two conservation areas, and 26 wild and scenic rivers.

It also designated nearly half of the land — 57 million acres — as wilderness, giving it the federal government’s highest level of protection.

Carter touted the law in 2022, telling The New York Times that it “may be the most significant domestic achievement of my political life.”

“Our great nation has never before or since preserved so much of America’s natural and cultural heritage on such a remarkable scale,” he said.

Summing up Carter’s record, Jarvis ranked Carter as the second most important conservationist president of all time, trailing only Theodore Roosevelt.

‘A true hero …. and a true villain’

While Carter’s work drew high praise from environmentalists and green groups across the country, he also created plenty of enemies who resented the growing reach of the federal government in Alaska.

“He’s a true hero for many of us in Alaska and a true villain to many other Alaskans for sure,” said Rick Steiner, a conservation biologist and retired professor at the University of Alaska.

In an interview with Alaska magazine in 2017, Carter recalled how he was “despised” while attending a state fair in Alaska during his presidency.

“The Secret Service decided to double my protection because of the animosity toward me in Alaska, but I enjoyed getting out in the boondocks and fishing,” he told the magazine.

After Carter designated the monuments, a group of Alaskans repeatedly protested the move as federal overreach that would harm the local economy. Steiner recalled how Carter was even burned in effigy.

But Steiner said Carter later prevailed in winning passage of “the most spectacular land conservation deal in U.S. history,” a deal that wound up creating a multibillion-dollar tourism industry for Alaska and helped win over many skeptics.

"Without ANILCA, all of these lands and waters that the world considers global treasures would have been probably changed forever, and for the worse,” Steiner said.

Carter paid close attention to Alaska throughout his post-presidency, which lasted nearly 43 years.

In 2022, at the age of 97, he sided with conservation groups in filing a legal brief to oppose a land swap approved by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt under former President Donald Trump that would have allowed construction of an 11-mile gravel road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Fearing the move could lead to the unraveling of ANILCA, Carter urged the full 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider the case after a smaller three-judge panel led by two Trump-appointed judges cleared the way for the road’s construction. Carter said he wanted to defend “the unrivaled wilderness in the national public lands of Alaska.”

Raskin, whose organization was one of many that joined in the lawsuit to sue Bernhardt, said that having Carter weigh in on the case “made all the difference in the world because it got the attention of the 9th Circuit.” The full court decided to vacate the ruling by the smaller panel.

Carter’s involvement in the Izembek case irked proponents of the road, who said it is needed to help provide the Aleut people in the isolated community of King Cove with access to medical care.

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, one of the leading critics, said Carter was “strangely confident” in thinking he knew what was best for Alaskans.

“Perhaps he should walk a mile in their shoes, by departing his comfortable home and living there for a while, to see what it is like to be without reliable access to emergency care,” she said.

Underscoring how complicated conservation decisions can be in Alaska, the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Biden administration in November approved a plan for a land swap that could eventually lead to development of the road. The decision came two years after Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visited residents of King Cove to hear about their frequent difficulty getting to a nearby all-weather airport, which can fly sick people out to hospitals in Anchorage.

On Sunday, Murkowski posted a short tribute to Carter on the social media platform X that did not mention any disagreements over Alaska policies.

"President Jimmy Carter will be remembered for his service to our nation and his post-presidency dedication to humanitarian efforts across the globe," she wrote. "He led a remarkable life and left a legacy of peace."

Fighting ‘the power of big oil and developers’

Before Sen. Edward "Ted" Kennedy decided to challenge Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980, Carter famously promised to “whip his ass” if he tried.

And he did just that, before losing in a landslide in the general election to Ronald Reagan.

Carter’s bitter battle with Kennedy, the late senator from Massachusetts, helped define his reputation as a fighter. And his relish for a good political fight was often on full display in Alaska, where Carter took on Democrats and Republicans alike.

After visiting Anchorage to celebrate the 20th anniversary of ANILCA in 2000, Carter went public with his complaints, saying Alaska Republicans made up “the worst environmental delegation imaginable in Congress.”

And he took special aim at Tony Knowles, then the state’s Democratic governor, after Knowles criticized Carter for urging then-President Bill Clinton to designate Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a national monument. Knowles told local reporters that Carter had traveled to Alaska just to use the state as “a media prop” to send a message to the president.

Carter issued a statement with a reply to the governor: “The power of big oil and developers in Alaska is overwhelming among public officials.”

One irony: While Carter gained so much attention for his use of Antiquities Act to create national monuments, he didn’t even know that the law existed when he became president in 1977.

Before NPS was officially created in 1916, Teddy Roosevelt used the 1906 law to create 18 national monuments, including some that later became national parks, such as the Grand Canyon.

But Jarvis, who served eight years as NPS director under former President Barack Obama, said Carter’s assertive use of the Antiquities Act in 1978 was “precedent-setting” in the modern era and paved the way for future presidents to protect ever larger swaths of land by designating them as national monuments.

Carter explained his thinking in 2017 in his interview with Alaska magazine, saying he decided to go big when a staffer in the Interior Department brought his attention to “this ancient law.”

“Eventually, we designated areas of Alaska, including key and controversial parts, as national monuments, and Congress couldn’t change what I did,” he added.

‘The early days were rough'

After Carter lost the White House and headed back to Plains, NPS workers had to fight to lay claim to the federal government’s new holdings in Alaska.

"The early days were rough," said Jarvis, who served as superintendent of Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve from 1994 to 1999. "The tradition prior to these designations was that it was a free-for-all, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted to do, ... get in your bulldozer and just head across the tundra to build a cabin or whatever."

Jarvis outlined the hostilities the agency faced in a book he wrote last year: Some restaurants and gas stations refused to serve NPS employees; a ranger station and NPS plane were both set on fire; and bumper stickers proclaimed that park rangers were “blood-sucking maggots.”

In addition, Jarvis said, Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation did not even want the basic rules of a national park to be enforced.

"We manage lands, we get involved in what people are doing, and this was new to Alaska," he said.

He said the situation in the state was also unique because ANILCA allowed Alaska Natives to use public land for their subsistence, continuing to fish and hunt. And while Native people were driven off the land to create Yellowstone and other national parks, Jarvis said the U.S. never had a similar tribal conflict with Alaska Natives.

When Jarvis made Carter an honorary park ranger in 2016, he said the former president embodied both “the spirit and principals” of the park service. His Georgia home, where Carter will now be buried, became a national historic site in 1987 and was renamed as a national historic park in 2021.

Carter, shown beaming in pictures when he accepted his award, called it an honor and said he was proud to have “been an integral part of the conservation movement.”

Nearing the end of his life, Carter didn't react to more recent developments about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, including Biden administration moves to restrict oil development there and a more recent plan to hold a oil lease sale in January to comply with a 2017 law approved by Congress.

But Carter has repeatedly venerated the remote coastal plain, which in 1995 he called “America’s Serengeti,” a place where polar bears, musk ox, wolves and caribou could roam freely.

In 2022 he told The New York Times that visiting the refuge had been “one of the most unforgettable and humbling experiences” of his long life.

“We had hoped to see a few caribou during our trip,” Carter said. “But to our amazement, we witnessed the migration of tens of thousands of caribou with their newborn calves.”