Celia Hunter (January 13, 1919 – December 1, 2001) was an American conservationist and advocate for wilderness protection in her home state of Alaska.

[1][2][3] Celia M. Hunter was born January 13, 1919, in Arlington, Washington and was raised a Quaker on a small farm during the Great Depression.

She sought college education only decades later, earning her Bachelor of Arts in botany in 1964 with a minor in economics and anthropology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Her first flight lesson was the week following her 21st birthday, and during World War II, she became one of first women to pilot planes needing domestic transport for the military.

"We ferried them from factories clear across the US, but 'sorry, gals, turn them over to the men here' and they got to fly them on the Northwest Staging Route through Edmonton, Fort Nelson, Watson Lake, and Whitehorse to Fairbanks," Hunter told students at Linfield College during a 1997 speech.

Hunter served as a flight attendant on the first-ever tourist trips to Kotzebue and Nome and planned the first sightseeing tours of Fairbanks.

After a semester in Sweden, Hunter and Wood spent ten months bicycling through war-torn Europe and eventually hitchhiked on tankers back to the United States, where they returned to Alaska.

[1] Their stated management philosophy was "to create a setting in which our guests, staff, and even casual visitors would be aware of the wonders of the natural world that surrounded us.

"[11] The trip that Olaus and Mardy Murie made in 1956 to the Sheenjek River at Lost and Lobo Lakes in the foothills of the Brooks Range was the catalyst that started the conservation movement in Alaska.

[13][14] The group soon realized that setting aside the Range was virtually impossible to do through Congress, because the congressional delegation of Alaska was adamantly opposed to any withdrawals of land for conservation purposes.

She spent her last night writing letters to Congressmen in support of protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.

The Rampart Dam would have created a lake 300 miles (480 km) long and affected climates and ecosystems clear into the Yukon Territories.

As well as submerged numerous small villages, inundated millions of acres of rich waterfowl and wildlife habitat, and displaced large numbers of mammal populations.

[1] He toured the state and convinced the Alaskan delegation and the Anchorage and Fairbanks Chambers of Commerce of the economic benefits that would result from a permanently open port at Point Hope.

The University's professors demanded to know how Dr. Teller and the AEC would identify the impacts of fallout from a nuclear explosion with no pre-blast knowledge of the land and its inhabitants.

Leading up to Congressional deliberation, The Wilderness Society advanced Hunter to the executive director position in 1976, requiring her to temporarily move from Fairbanks, Alaska to Washington, D.C. She thereby became "the first woman to head a national environmental organization.

Fish & Wildlife Service wrote of Hunter's leadership in a 2020 governmental report on "Women in Conservation": As a leader, she was an unforgettable lesson in the power of grace, humility, and humor in response to bias and criticism.

[2]Terry Tempest Williams, another next-generation wilderness advocate, invoked the ideals of Celia Hunter in her 2012 essay urging against federal opening up of the Arctic shelf for exploratory oil drilling.