As far as Muir could tell, the American presence in the Arctic had thus far been anything but beneficial. What had happened on St. Lawrence Island was but an extreme distillation of larger forces at work across America’s northernmost frontier. Muir now could see that this icy wilderness was as vulnerable as it was vast—marked by fragile rhythms of migration, interdependencies of population, and patterns of habit many thousands of years in the making. And yet it seemed to be unraveling before his eyes.
