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Membership Meeting, January 19, 2021, 5 pm AKT


Arctic Refuge, A Symbol for a Time of Global Change   Please join us online or by phone Tuesday, January 19, 2021, 5-6pm (AKT), for our Friends monthly meeting with guest speaker, Roger Kaye of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  

Webinar Recording


Roger Kaye has done it all – worked the Slope, spent a winter on a trapline, flew his own float and ski planes, hunted, hiked, explored all over Alaska, wrote a book on the Arctic and earned a PhD at University of Alaska Fairbanks.  He has spent much of his 41-year career with the Fish & Wildlife Service experiencing, thinking about and advocating for true wilderness, particularly of the Arctic Refuge.  On this 60th Anniversary of the Refuge, Roger Kaye will share some of his vast knowledge and take us back to the seven-year struggle to establish the Arctic Refuge.   He will explore the similarities with the struggle to defend the Refuge today.  

Olaus and Marti Murie, two giants of Alaska conservation and science,
were instrumental in protection of the Arctic through the designation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Arctic Refuge establishment was among the first, unprecedented American conservation initiatives of the 1960s that came about in response to concern over the worsening environmental degradations accompanying the prosperous postwar march of progress.  The campaign to establish the Refuge became emblematic of the larger contest between competing views of the appropriate relationship between postwar American society and its rapidly changing environment. Which notion of progress should this landscape represent—that underlying the prevailing rush toward attaining an ever-higher material standard of living, or that underpinning the emerging ecology-based perspective that emphasized sustainability and called for restraint? The question of whether or not to preserve this preeminent wilderness symbolized “the real problem,” as campaign leader Olaus Murie characterized it, “of what the human species is to do with this earth.”

Now again we face a new order of environmental threat, a convergence of global energy and resource scarcity, climate change, and widespread biospheric alterations. And now the Arctic Refuge is at the center of one of the nation’s longest and most contentious environmental debates. The question of oil development verses wilderness preservation here transcends the issue of potential resource impacts within the Refuge’s boundaries and has become symbolically intertwined with these larger, global issues. Again, the Arctic Refuge stands as a national symbol of pivotal questions and decisions Americans face: How does our consumption and material standard of living affect the national and global environments, and what quality of them are we to leave to future generations?

Roger Kaye skipped his college graduation ceremony in 1974 to come to Alaska and  work at Camp Denali for famed Alaskan conservationists Cecelia Hunter and Ginny Woods.  He started grad school but dropped out to earn enough money working on the Slope to buy his first airplane.  Once he met that goal, he took off on a series of Alaska adventures until the money ran out.   Then, he started his wildlife career first with ADFG and for 41 years the Fish & Wildlife Service.  He has been a planner, refuge pilot, Native liaison and in recent years, the agency’s Alaska wilderness coordinator. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Alaska where he has taught courses on wilderness, environmental psychology, and the Anthropocene. He is the author of Last Great Wilderness: The Campaign to Establish the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and numerous journal and popular articles related to wilderness. Currently, he is working on a book considering the future of the wildness of Wilderness in the Anthropocene. Roger lives in Fairbanks and works for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.


This webinar was recorded.  Watch below:



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Membership Meeting: November 17, 2020 at 5pm AKT


Bird Camp!  Birds and Biologists on the Canning River

Please join us online or by phone Tuesday, November 17, 2020, 5-6pm (AK), for our Friends monthly meeting with guest speaker, Timothy Knudson of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  

Come along on a journey to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to explore a remote field research camp on the Arctic Coastal Plain.  For more than 40 years, biologists have flown into this distant place to study tundra nesting birds.  Hear stories from the Canning River Delta ‘Bird Camp’  first hand from one of Arctic Refuge’s wildlife biologists. Learn about the different types of research carried out on the Canning River. See the preliminary results and catch the latest updates on the future of these projects. Get a glimpse of the ecosystem through the interactions of the lemmings, foxes, and the birds that connect this remote place to YOUR backyard.

What does it take to live and carry out research in this isolated place for nearly two months?   What changes have occurred to the tundra nesting bird population since research began at the Canning River Delta more than 40 years ago? How does the range expansion of the red fox into the Coastal Plain impact nesting birds and arctic foxes? Tim will address these questions and more.

Timothy Knudson is the Logistics Coordinator for projects on the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  He ran the Canning River Delta Research Camp and was the tundra nesting bird field lead in 2019.  Tim has a B.S. in Natural Resources Wildlife and Water Resources Management from the University of Minnesota Crookston and an MS in Zoology from Southern Illinois University.  He did his thesis research on seabird ecology with the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge.  Prior to coming to Alaska, Tim worked on the Audubon and Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuges.

This meeting and presentation was recorded. Watch video below: