Jimmy Carter's Alaska Legacy: How ANILCA Protected 104 Million Acres

Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, turned 100 on October 1, 2024. For Alaska, a tribute from the National Park Service's Alaska Region argued, he was also one of the greatest — and least acknowledged — conservation figures in history, deserving a place beside Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, and Olaus and Mardy Murie.

ANILCA

In 1980, after years of debate in Congress, Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) — often called the most significant land conservation law in the nation's history.

President Carter signs ANILCA into law, 1980. Jimmy Carter Library.

With it, he created or enlarged:

• In all, 104 million acres of Alaska wildlands were protected — conservation on an ecosystem-sized scale.
• It more than doubled the size of the national park system, and remains the largest single expansion of protected lands in history.
• It set aside more congressionally designated wilderness than any conservation law before or since.
• It also protected the homelands of Alaska Native people, giving them a land base from which to sustain their cultures and ways of life — a model of conservation that lets people stay on the land while wild places are preserved.

Why it matters

Carter is often said to have had a more consequential post-presidency — his work for world peace, against Guinea worm disease, and with Habitat for Humanity — than his four years in office. The tribute disagreed: ANILCA, like the solar panels he put on the White House roof 43 years before they were mainstream, showed a president who saw further ahead than most.

As climate change brings sea-level rise, extinctions and ecological collapse, Alaska's protected lands will serve as scientific benchmarks in a changing world, room for species to migrate, and sources of services everyone depends on — carbon storage, intact ecosystems, clean water, air and land, and wildlife habitat. The lands exclude no one: they offer everyone room to roam and explore, free of what the wilderness explorer Bob Marshall called the "clutches of a mechanistic civilization."

In November 2023, the Alaska Wilderness League gave Carter its Mardy Murie Lifetime Achievement Award for his conservation work in the state — recognition, the tribute hoped, that will grow as the value of these wild lands rises with their scarcity.

Sources

Based on "Happy 100th Birthday, Jimmy Carter," by Peter Christian, director of communications for the National Park Service's Alaska Region, National Park Service, 2024; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The source spells the award "Mardie Murie"; Mardy is meant, as elsewhere in the article. Photograph: Jimmy Carter Library.