Jimmy Carter had a very detailed knowledge about what he was protecting, and rebuffed GOP Alaska Senator Ted Stevens trying to sneak in changes to better help land developers:
> We never would have had the Alaska lands bill, which doubled the size of the National Park Service. Carter was down on his hands and knees with the maps on the floor of the Oval Office, and when Ted Stevens, the senator from Alaska, came in and tried to buffalo him and tell him, ‘I’ll vote for the bill if you exclude these areas,’ Carter said, ‘No, those are the headwaters of this, and there’s habitat there.’ In a limo on the way back to Capitol Hill, Stevens said to an aide, ‘That son of a bitch knows as much about my state as I do.’ If he hadn’t done that, that bill would have been gutted and the developers would have gotten their way.
Guardax OP t1_jdsoe18 wrote
Reply to comment by Lavatis in TIL Jimmy Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the single largest expansion of protected lands in history which more than doubled the size of the National Parks System by Guardax
Size as in acres not parks