Mardy Murie

Margaret (Mardy) Murie is fondly called the Grandmother of the Conservation Movement, but her love of the land began at a young age.

Born August 18, 1902 in Seattle, Mardy moved to Fairbanks, Alaska while still a youth.

She was the first woman to graduate from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks in 1924. That same year, she married naturalist Olaus Murie. Their honeymoon was a caribou research expedition that encompassed some 500 miles of Alaska's Brooks Range within the Arctic Wildlife Range, by dogsled.

That was just the first of her wilderness journeys with Olaus. Soon, it became second nature for Mardy to pack her babies along with her camping gear for several weeks or even months in the Alaska wilds , accompanying Olaus, a naturalist for the Biological Survey (later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).

Mardy described the family's Alaska adventures in her book, Two in the Far North.

Mardy and Olaus moved to Wyoming to study elk in 1926. In Jackson Hole, they built a log cabin that Mardy lived in until her death in 2003. Both were tireless advocates for wilderness. Olaus was director of The Wilderness Society from 1945 to 1962 and he and Mardy wrote letters and articles, travelled and lectured, and spent most of their time promoting legislation that would protect the last of the wild places from the developers, the bulldozers and the oil rigs.

Mardy has often said that she only saw Olaus cry twice during their 39 years together, and one of those times was in 1960, when they got word that the Arctic Wildlife Range would be designated the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, something Olaus had dedicated his life to accomplishing. Olaus died in 1963, just months before passage of the Wilderness Act. But Mardy attended the signing, by President Lyndon Johnson, in the Rose Garden of the White House in 1964.

Mardy continued the work that she and Olaus had begun together, joining the Governing Council of The Wilderness Society and working for the protection of wild Alaska until the end of her life.

In congressional testimony about the Alaska Lands Act, Mardy said: I am testifying as an emotional woman and I would like to ask you, gentlemen, what's wrong with emotion? Beauty is a resource in and of itself. Alaska must be allowed to be Alaska, that is her greatest economy. I hope the United States of America is not so rich that she can afford to let these wildernesses pass by, or so poor she cannot afford to keep them.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Alaska Lands Act, which increased national park acreage from 7 million to 50 million acres; added 54 million acres to the National Wildlife Refuge System, and 56 million acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System. Four years later, Mardy Murie wrote in Wilderness magazine:

The shining, comforting thought now is that the parks, the forests, the refuges, the wild rivers, are there...and my feeling about it all is that when the oil and the minerals have all been found and taken away, the one hundred million acres of national parks and refuges and wild rivers and forests will be the most beneficent treasure in the whole state. I would plead with all administrators: 'Please allow Alaska to be different, to be herself, to nourish our souls.'

For her lifelong commitment to conservation, Margaret Murie was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President William Clinton in January 1998.