Olaus Murie

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Olaus Murie’s passion for wilderness began simply, during his childhood in the fertile Red River valley of Minnesota. Born in 1889, the son of Norwegian immigrants, Murie would become a renowned biologist and one of the country’s greatest champions of wildlife and public lands.

Striking west, Murie studied at Pacific University in Oregon before taking a position as a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, now the Fish and Wildlife Service. His work for the Survey took him to Alaska, where he began landmark studies of caribou herds in northern Alaska’s Brooks Range and found his lifetime companion, a Fairbanks native named Mardy.

Scientist, visionary, president of The Wilderness Society. Murie’s vision helped establish the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and shaped a new way of thinking about predators and ecosystems.

Olaus and Mardy took their vows in 1924 in a 3 a.m. sunrise ceremony on the Yukon River. They took their honeymoon by boat and dogsled, continuing Olaus’s wildlife studies. From then on, Olaus and Mardy adventured as a team, sometimes with their newest baby bundled into the boat with them. Mardy herself would become active in The Wilderness Society and, fondly known as the “grandmother of the conservation movement,” she advocated for wilderness until her death at the age of 101.

An assignment to study the local elk herd brought the Muries to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, their home for the rest of their lives. Olaus studied local fauna, earning his reputation as “the father of modern elk management.” Yet his views were often unpopular. Studying the “coyote problem” in Yellowstone, he became an early, staunch defender of predators and their crucial role in ecosystems. The skepticism of his colleagues never deterred Murie from insisting on what he knew was true. As he stated, “The use of the term 'vermin' as applied to so many wild creatures is a thoughtless criticism of nature's arrangement of producing varied life on this planet.”

In 1937, ready to act on his knowledge, Murie joined the council of the young Wilderness Society. “That was the best time,” Mardy Murie said later. “It seemed that our lives just blossomed. He felt free to do what he wanted to do.”

In those first Wilderness Society years, he pushed for replacing the artificial, human-centered boundaries of national parks with lines that fit the land. He helped convince President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to add surrounding rain forests to Olympic National Monument.

With his younger brother Adolph Murie, also a wildlife biologist, he worked to establish Jackson Hole National Monument in the valley below the Teton Range, the Muries’ own backyard. Most of that National Monument eventually merged into Grand Teton National Park to preserve an extensive, coherent landscape. Just as he saw the interdependence of predator and prey, Murie understood the connection between mountains and adjacent valleys: one could not be protected without preserving the other.

In 1950, The Wilderness Society named Murie its president. The Muries’ log cabin in Moose, Wyoming, at the base of the Tetons — now a National Historic District — became an unofficial Wilderness Society headquarters. As president, Murie lobbied successfully to prevent large federal dam projects within Glacier National Park and Dinosaur National Monument. He urged his countrymen to rein in their arrogance toward the earth — from blind faith in technology to efforts to get rid of “harmful” wildlife like wolves and to “control” rivers with dams. He even opposed naming natural features after people.

Arguing against building a church on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, Murie said: “We human beings should forget our modern exultation in material progress and approach the Grand Canyon and similar places with humility, in the hope that we can improve ourselves.”

Murie’s views brought together the ecological and the ethical — a process that occurred slowly, through years of studying nature. In his early years in the field, he remembered, “I was more concerned with the what of nature; now I care more about the why. I try to form philosophies — linkages of knowledge.”

Murie’s ideals found their greatest manifestation in the quest to preserve what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in northeast Alaska, around the same area where he had studied caribou decades before. In 1956, Mardy, Olaus, and a few others spent several weeks on an Arctic expedition, collecting data, making a film, and reveling in the magic of the awe-inspiring, wildlife-rich area. Then, armed with their evidence, they returned to the lower 48 and spent four years campaigning tirelessly to protect the place so dear to them.

The idea of preserving entire ecological systems was new and visionary. Nevertheless, in 1960, President Eisenhower set aside 8 million acres as the Arctic National Wildlife Range. Later, it was expanded and redesignated as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as part of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act signed by President Carter in 1980. Mardy later said news of the establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Range moved Olaus to tears — one of two times in a 40-year marriage that she saw Olaus cry.

Olaus Murie left more subtle legacies as well. He served as a mentor to young biologists and conservationists. He insisted on the universal value of wild lands, eschewing more material pursuits: “Many of us who travel in wilderness have not been burdened by large bank accounts.”

He published several volumes, including A Field Guide to Animal Track, first published in 1954 within the famous Peterson series and still in print with Murie’s original drawings in place.

Even in his last years, until his death in 1963, Murie kept up his life’s work, including corresponding with Rachel Carson. In the words of George Schaller, one of Murie’s students, Murie taught “that the collecting of scientific facts is only the first step of a long process to give work meaning and value.”

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