India, Nov. 4 -- On December 2, 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed a law that reshaped Alaska's public-land map. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, known as ANILCA, placed more than 104 million acres under conservation protections, including 57 million acres designated as wilderness. The legislation, recorded in the 1980 volume of the United States Statutes at Large, settled a long-running dispute over how much of Alaska's vast federal land should remain protected and how much could be open to development. The final acreage exceeded the 80 million acres contemplated in the 1971 law.

The act protected land and water valued for wildlife, subsistence, recreation, science, scenery, and history. It expanded a network of par...