Page 529

contraceptive techniques and strategies. All of that will not be enough to solve the problem, however. Congress must enact laws permitting the BLM to dispose humanely of these animals.

IMMEDIATE ACTIONS REGARDING ALASKA

Alaska is a special case and deserves immediate action.*” When Alaska was admitted to the Union in 1959, nearly its entire landmass was federally owned; therefore, Alaska was granted the right to select 104 million acres (out of 375 million acres) to manage for the benefit of its residents.** In less than eight years, Alaska selected 26 million acres. Then-Interior Secretary Stewart Udall—who served during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations—put a freeze on further land selections to protect any claims that might be asserted by Native Alaskans.*”

Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968 made resolution of the issue by Congress a matter of urgency. As a result, in 1971, Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), which allowed the Native community to select 44 million acres.

Environmentalists, upset that too much of the land they coveted would be selected by the state and Native Alaskans for development, demanded the inclusion in the act of a provision— Section 17(d)(2)—that ordered the Interior Secretary to withdraw 80 million acres for future designation by Congress as parks, refuges, wild and scenic rivers, and national forests.” The deadline for this congressional action was 1978, and as it neared, the Carter Administration, impatient and worried, decided to force Congress’s hand. The Administration unilaterally withdrew 100 million acres from any use by the state or Native Alaskans.” Alaska promptly sued, charging that the Administration had failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act.

In a lame duck session at the end of 1980, Congress passed (over the objections of the Alaskan delegation) the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which revoked all of the withdrawals of the Carter Administration and substituted congressional designations that put 100 million acres permanently in federal enclaves, doubled the acreage of national parks and refuges, and tripled the amount of land declared to be wilderness. Through all of this, Alaska pressed for the DOI to convey the lands to which Alaska was entitled by federal law, but the department grudgingly transferred only portions of that land.

By the time Ronald Reagan took office, Alaska had received less than half the lands to which it was entitled after its admission into the Union, and Native Alaskans had received only one-third of the land due to them.* From January of 1981 through 1983, however, under Reagan, Alaska received 30 million acres and acommitment of land transfers at the rate of 13 million acres annually. In the same period, Native Alaskans received 11 million acres, which constituted nearly 60 percent of their entitlement, and an additional 15 million acres were transferred by the end of 1988.°°