Alaska Wildlife Refuge Under Siege by Pressures for Access, Development : Environment: Giant brown bears have thrived under U.S. protection, and officials are trying to strike a balance that will allow more use of wilderness without endangering animals.

KODIAK, Alaska — For half a century, the only pressures on the giant brown bears living in the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge were trophy hunters who wanted to make them into a rug.

Today, despite successful efforts to protect the bears, pressures on the refuge are multiplying:

* Private owners of large pockets of land in the refuge want to develop it or sell it back to the federal government.

* Power companies, having pushed through one hydroelectric dam project in the refuge, plan two more.

* Sport fishermen increasingly seek access to the rich salmon streams; snowmobilers want easy access in winter; developers are promoting lodges, wilderness getaways and private homes.

* Hunters still flock to shoot the Kodiak browns--the largest land bears in the world--as well as trophy deer. Tourists increasingly want to look at and photograph the bears.

* One Alaska native corporation wanted a nuclear waste dump on its refuge land.

“A lot of conflict is inevitable,” said Vic Barnes, research biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and probably the world’s foremost expert on the Kodiak brown bear. “We have to cater to all these interests.”

To address the matter, federal wildlife managers are putting the final touches on a plan to restrict access to the 1.9 million-acre refuge to protect the bears and other resources from humans.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the refuge by executive order on Aug. 14, 1941, to preserve the brown bear and other wildlife. The refuge later was expanded and now includes land on Kodiak, Uganik, Afognak and Ban islands in the Kodiak Archipelago--an area larger than Delaware.

Meanwhile, two federal laws--the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 and the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act--gave Alaska natives title to 310,000 acres inside the refuge to settle aboriginal land claims. The 1980 law, among other things, allowed unlimited access to refuge land by aircraft.

The goal of the refuge has been met: The bears’ numbers today are estimated at 2,700 to 3,000--greater than when it was established.

But Barnes and others are issuing a warning about the future.

“We have basically a wilderness area here,” he said. “If we start allowing more and more recreational use . . . we stand to encroach on this wilderness area and you’re going to cause problems for the bears.”

Such encroachments of civilization have in past decades decimated bear populations across Europe and lower-latitude portions of North America, where now mostly remnant populations of native brown and black bears survive.

“The history is pretty predictable,” Barnes said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is scrambling to control history on Kodiak.

On July 5, it opened a brown-bear viewing site at O’Malley Creek that runs into Kodiak’s Karluk Lake, deep inside the refuge. “It’s probably one of the highest concentrations of bears anywhere,” Barnes said.

And the federal government is revising its refuge management plan with new restrictions on public access--including a system to be used on federal refuges throughout the state to allocate permits to big game outfitters and guides.

The state’s permit system has been overturned by a court as unfair. The new one would be based on competitive bidding.

An original draft would have been even more restrictive on guides and public access by aircraft and snowmobiles, but outdoor groups howled when the draft was released in March 1990, and it has been extensively revised, said Jerry Stroebele, deputy associate manager for refuges at Fish and Wildlife’s regional headquarters in Anchorage.

“We’re backing off from what we had proposed. There’s still restrictions, but it will be ones dictated by wildlife needs,” Stroebele said.

Some old-time hunters and guides on the island, meanwhile, say controls on guides aren’t as important as controls on outfitters who use boats and aircraft to bring ever-increasing numbers of fisherman and hunters into the refuge.

“I’m having to hunt places I’ve never had to hunt before,” said Leon Francisco, who has guided big game hunters from his place at Old Uyak near Larsen Bay since 1964.

The lack of restrictions on the number of aircraft that can land in the refuge is a “detriment to bear hunting,” he said. “We used to go back here and you’d never see another hunter, a deer hunter or a bear hunter. That’s changed dramatically.”

But some of the biggest changes in refuge land use may come from natives’ efforts to develop and use the land they received title to under the law.

At Karluk Lake, one of the world’s foremost salmon fishing areas and a prime bear habitat, native groups own about half the lakefront land; the other half is designated refuge.

At the mouth of the Ayakulik River, a native corporation has built a wilderness lodge. Near Larsen Bay where Francisco lives, natives have subdivided 15 10-acre parcels for sale.

Refuge watchers this spring were given a look at what some saw as the worst possible scenario.

Ahkiok-Kaguyak Inc., a merged native corporation for those two villages, applied for a U.S. Department of Energy grant to study putting in a nuclear waste dump for spent reactor fuel. The application was turned down at the end of June, but not until a number of environmental groups had geared up to fight it.

In addition, at recent hearings in Anchorage and Kodiak for input on two new hydro dam proposals, virtually no opposition surfaced.

“There’s just a whole lot of issues that are simmering--and when they start to boil is anybody’s guess,” Barnes said.

But the importance of addressing the conflicts is critical, he added.

“If we’re going to save any place--this is it.”