Obituary, Walter Hickel, former US secretary of the interior

WALTER Hickel, who was governor of Alaska, US secretary of the interior and then governor again of the nation's last frontier state, confounded critics by ricocheting from pro-business stalwart to ardent environmentalist and back again.

A self-made millionaire, Hickel was governor of the 49th state from 1966-68; interior secretary in the Nixon administration in 1969 and 1970; and then – after running as the nominee of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party – governor again from 1990-94. He later re-registered as a Republican and disavowed the idea that Alaska should secede.

It was an ardor for Alaska's vast wilderness – its craggy peaks, blue coastal ice sheets and rolling tundra, and its caribou herds, musk oxen, wolf packs, moose and millions of migratory birds – and a longing to tap into the oil and gas riches below the surface that propelled Hickel's contradictory and sometimes quixotic quests.

Hickel said he was opposed to "conservation for conservation's sake" weeks before his confirmation hearings for interior secretary in 1969, drawing condemnation by the environmental community.

Yet by the time he addressed the National Petroleum Council in Washington in July 1970, his tune had changed. "Let's find new ways, better ways of doing business so that our industries can prosper and our environment flourish at the same time," Hickel said. "The right to produce is not the right to pollute."

He backed up his words with deeds. Soon after his arrival in Washington, a Union Oil Company well blew out in California, spilling nearly 100,000 barrels of crude along the coast. He responded by issuing stricter offshore drilling regulations.

When a Chevron platform in the Gulf of Mexico caught fire in March 1970 and spewed more than 40,000 barrels, Hickel authorised an investigation. It found that Chevron had failed to install required safety devices on 90 wells. He pressed the Justice Department to file a suit charging 900 violations of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953.

"Nobody in Washington," Life magazine wrote of Hickel in August 1970, "seems to have come to so instant a realisation that the environment is now as sacred as motherhood".

Perhaps most surprising were Hickel's efforts to delay approval of the trans-Alaska pipeline. As an Alaska "boomer" – the state's pro-development forces – Hickel, in his first term as governor, had pushed for the construction of an 800-mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast to the port of Valdez on Prince William Sound near Anchorage.

He took over as interior secretary convinced that it was safe to build the pipeline. But he listened to concerns of geologists that it could despoil millions of acres of tundra, unless the oil companies made major safety alterations. With many of those changes in place, the pipeline was completed in 1977.

But well before construction of the pipeline was approved, Hickel had been fired by president Richard Nixon, who had often been irked by his outspoken independence. Irk became ire on 20 May, 1970, when Hickel sent a letter to the president at the height of the turmoil over the Vietnam War, not long after the National Guard shootings at Kent State University in Ohio.

The letter, leaked to the press before it was delivered, said the administration had found itself "embracing a philosophy which appears to lack appropriate concern for a great mass of Americans – our young people".

Life said: "Walter Hickel is an endangered species." Within months, Hickel was dismissed. He returned to Alaska, reinvigorated his business empire and again, as an avid proponent of development, began his bid to return to the governorship.

Alaska was not his native state. Walter Joseph Hickel was born in Claflin, Kansas on 18 August, 1919, the eldest of ten children of Robert and Emma Zecha Hickel, tenant farmers.

He worked as a carpenter in California while trying to arrange passage to Australia. When he learned he could not immediately get a passport, he bought a steerage ticket to Alaska. According to legend – some say self-spun – he arrived in Anchorage with 37 cents in his pocket.

Hickel saved enough so that by 1946 he was able to buy and complete a half-finished house in Anchorage. He sold it, built two more and sold them. He eventually built several hundred homes, started a motel chain and developed the Northern Lights Shopping Centre.

Hickel had a liking for grand plans. In one he proposed building a 2,000-mile pipeline down the Pacific Coast to carry fresh water from Alaska to the parched regions of Southern California. It did not happen. "Sure, I'm a dreamer; that's what Wally Hickel is all about," he said at the time. "Our goose that laid the golden egg, the North Slope oil, is running out, so we've got to build more geese."