A mule deer hunter on Wyoming’s Beaver Rim. Copyright 2017, Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
I COME BACK TO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN:
“A thing is right when it tends toward the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise”[i]— the ecologist and philosopher Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, set down in the summer of 1947, at the end of a long and illustrious career.
A graduate of Gifford Pinchot’s school of Forestry at Yale University in 1909, Leopold had started out as a disciple of the reigning commandment of the conservation movement of the time: the idea of wise use. The continent’s renewable natural resources existed for the benefit of man, the precept ran, but the sensible man would give those resources a chance to renew themselves. Wise use was sustainable use, the emphasis to fall equally on both words.
Yale’s version of this precept had grown from Pinchot’s experience with timber, and the training was intended to prepare America’s first generation of foresters to carry out the mission of the nascent U.S. Forest Service, the federal agency that was to oversee forest and grazing management on the system of national forests Pinchot and his good friend, Theodore Roosevelt, had established.
A hard point on an Iowa rooster. Copyright 2016, Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
Leopold took the Pinchot utilitarian view of resource management to his first assignment with the Forest Service in Arizona where he applied it, as many other conservationists did at the time, to wildlife management as well as forestry. In some of his earliest writings, he was an enthusiastic supporter of predator control as a tool for producing game.
“For some unfathomable reason, there appears to have been a kind of feeling of antagonism between men interested in game protection and between some individuals connected with the stock growing industry,” he wrote in 1915. “. . . It seems never to have occurred to anybody that the very opposite should be the case, and that the stockmen and the game protectionists are mutually and vitally interested in a common problem. This problem is the reduction of predatory animals.”[ii]
It was a point of view that served as common ground in his day-to-day contacts with local ranchers, but even as he wrote it, his professional understanding of wildlife management was already shifting, partly in response to the catastrophic decline of many wildlife species and partly because of his own evolving perceptions. That same year, he wrote a Forest Service plan for wildlife management that began: “The breeding stock must be increased. Rare species must be protected and restored. The value of game lies in its variety as well as its abundance.”[iii]
It was also in 1915 that he was ordered to review a growing problem on the south rim of Grand Canyon, then a national monument managed by the Forest Service. Twelve years before, Teddy Roosevelt had advised Arizonans:
“I hope you will not have a building of any kind . . . to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the Canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. . . . The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”[iv]
In the decade after that speech, the south rim of the Canyon had rapidly become a tourist ghetto with ramshackle hotels, fly-by-night tour companies, electric signs, cesspools, and garbage dumps.[v] Leopold braved the stiff opposition of the entrepreneurs who were responsible for this mess and filed a sixty-eight-page report that recommended major limits on development. “The public visits the Grand Canyon to enjoy a great spectacle of nature,” he wrote in the 1916 report. “At the same time the public needs and demands certain material services and conveniences. The latter are necessarily out of harmony with the surroundings, and it should be the first object of an efficient administration to reduce this necessary discord to a minimum.”[vi]
As he gained experience over the next twenty-five years, Leopold’s ideas on conservation of wildlife and wild land continued to evolve from the strictly utilitarian approach he’d been taught. He couldn’t ignore the problems he saw in American land management, and he began to give more and more weight to the “wise” in wise use.
In 1922, he championed an entirely new concept— federal wilderness— with the establishment of the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico’s Carson National Forest. With several other wildlife experts of the time, he was forced to confront the problems with too many deer on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau, the result of a generation of intense predator control. It was an experience he carried with him as he moved to the University of Wisconsin and faced similar problems with the north country’s burgeoning deer herd. He toured the hyper-managed forests of Germany and came to the conclusion that managing timber like a vegetable garden was not good for wildlife or people.
He became a founding member of the Wilderness Society; he served as president of the Ecological Society of America, and as his understanding deepened, he began to regret some of the things he had thought and done when he was young and certain.
He remembered the brooding black presence of Escudilla Mountain in eastern Arizona, the home of the region’s last grizzly.
“No one ever saw the old bear,” he wrote in 1940, “but in the muddy springs about the base of the cliffs you saw his incredible tracks. Seeing them made the most hard-bitten cowboys aware of bear. Wherever they rode they saw the mountain, and when they saw the mountain they thought of bear.”
At the behest of local ranchers, the federal authorities brought in a trapper who, in due time, killed the bear.
The end of a long day in the elk timber, Wyoming. Copyright 2017, Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
“It was only after we pondered on these things,” he continued, “that we began to wonder who wrote the rules for progress. . . . Escudilla still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It’s only a mountain now.”[vii]
And he remembered helping shoot a wolf and her pup in his early days in Arizona.
“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”[viii]
Twenty years after it was published, Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac became the New Testament of environmentalism, more influential in its way than even Silent Spring. A generation of flower children desperately wanted to believe in Leopold, but before he could be canonized, there was a significant problem to be confronted: He was a hunter. An influential segment of the environmental movement found the idea of a person killing an animal for food, let alone pleasure, simply too repugnant to contemplate.
So they tweaked his biography.
A number of years ago, I was invited to speak at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I can’t remember who issued the invitation, but I said I’d be honored to come speak on the philosophical power of the land ethic. It must have been the allure of the subject that caught local attention— I’m not known as an orator— but whatever the reason, there were a lot of people there that night. Sizable room, pretty well stuffed with humanity.
I stole liberally from Leopold’s marvelous writings, and the speech seemed to be well received. After I finished, the moderator asked if there were any questions or comments from the audience. A young woman at the back of the room raised her hand.
“I think Leopold was one of the greatest environmentalists,” she said. “But it’s really, really important to remember that he quit hunting. All you have to do is read that part where he shoots the wolf, and you can see that, when he got older, there was no way he would kill something.”
All the faces in the audience turned back to me.
“We share a love of Leopold’s writing,” I replied. “In fact, it was Leopold’s writing that made me decide to do my graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I studied right next to the glass cabinet where they kept one of the bows Leopold made. It hung over the original manuscripts of Sand County. I’ve read and reread just about everything that ever appeared under Leopold’s byline, along with some stuff that’s never been published. My advisor was Aldo Leopold’s last graduate student. And I have to tell you, my advisor hunted woodcock with Leopold six months before Aldo died. Leopold was a hunter. All his life. Big game, small game, upland birds, waterfowl, snipe. Archery, rifle, shotgun. I know this is hard to absorb, but Leopold the hunter, Leopold the ecologist, Leopold the philosopher— they were all the same man.”
She wouldn’t believe it.
It wasn’t the first time I’d run into the argument. Yes, it goes, Saint Aldo might have been a sinner in his younger, testosterone-soaked days, but anyone who reads his work can tell that he gave up hunting with all those other antiquated nineteenth-century ideas he’d picked up in the Roosevelt era. Only then could he be accepted as a true environmentalist.
There’s a problem in this that clearly reaches far beyond a distortion of history and a great man’s reputation. It touches on the image of hunting itself.
The end of a successful day in western Nebraska with the young lady who made it happen. Copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
There’s no doubt that the behavior of some hunters, in our time and in Leopold’s, richly deserves censure. Leopold himself had a jaundiced view of many of the things he’d seen hunters do in the field. While much of his writing dealt with the broader issues of human attitudes toward the land, his essays occasionally focused on hunting as he too often saw it practiced. He had a problem with the proliferation of “an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them.” He mourned what he saw as the passing of the “go-light idea, the one-bullet tradition.”[ix]
But there’s also no doubt that hunting was a central part of his life from the time he was old enough to join his dad in the bottomlands of the upper Mississippi to the day the heart attack claimed him as he was fighting a neighbor’s grass fire in 1948. It was much more than recreation for him; it was a way of seeing; it was a way of understanding the natural world.
In one of his later essays, he described a lane he’d cut through the cover behind the little cabin he called “The Shack.” He called it the “deer swath,” and he used it as a way of keeping track of the deer that were trading back and forth between his property and the river. He pointed it out to a number of visitors and watched their subsequent notice of it. Always the scientist, he classified their reactions.
“Most of them forgot it quickly, while others watched it, as I did, whenever chance allowed. The upshot was the realization that . . . the deer hunter habitually watches the next bend; the duck hunter watches the skyline; the bird hunter watches the dog; the nonhunter does not watch.”[x]
In another essay, he wrote: “The true hunter is merely a noncreative artist. Who painted the first picture on a bone in the caves of France? A hunter. Who alone in our modern life so thrills to the sight of living beauty that he will endure hunger and thirst and cold to feed his eyes upon it? The hunter. . . . Critics write and hunters outwit their game primarily for one and the same reason— to reduce that beauty to possession. The differences are largely matters of degree, consciousness, or that sly arbiter of the classification of human activities, language. If, then, we can live without goose music, we may as well do away with stars, or sunsets, or Iliads. But the point is that we would be fools to do away with any of them.”[xi]
And in the actual almanac of A Sand County Almanac, Leopold filled the entire month of October with recollections of hunting. “I sometimes think that the other months were constituted mainly as a fitting interlude between Octobers,” he concludes, “and I suspect that dogs, and perhaps grouse, share the same view.”[xii]
There are many people of good heart and intention in the environmental community who struggle to understand how an intellect as incisive as Leopold’s could possibly reconcile his lifelong commitment to wildlife and wild land with his lifelong passion for the hunt. I don’t find that struggle surprising. My dad once said that trying to explain hunting to a nonhunter was like trying to explain sex to a eunuch— there was simply no common experience, in his view, to serve as a starting point. If any message could bridge that gulf, it was Aldo Leopold’s.
He understood hunting at the emotional level of a participant, at the scientific level of an ecologist, and at the ethical level of a philosopher. It was an almost unique combination, one that contains a critical lesson for anyone who aspires to follow in his footsteps. His admonition to humanity as a whole holds special significance for those of us who hunt: “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”[xiii]
Amen.
[i] pp.224-225, Leopold, Aldo, 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
[ii] p. 47. Flader, Susan and J. Baird Caledcott, 1991. The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI.
[iii] P.146. Meine, Curt, 1988. Aldo Leopold, His Life and Work. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI.
Upland bird cover at sunset in western Nebraska. Copyright 2018, Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
WE CLOSED THE SEASON YESTERDAY, FREYA THE BRITTANY AND I, PASSING THE LAST HOURS IN A LONG WALK OVER THE HILL TO A PLACE I CALL “THE SECRET SPOT” because the best cover is out of sight from the road. We were both limping a bit, Freya because of the screw in her right elbow that holds the end of her humerus together but still gives her some arthritis, and I because an unexpected encounter with a badger hole a few miles back had given one of my aging knees a wrench.
Considering our condition, the prudent thing would have been to call it a day, but this was the last day, and I think it was fair to say that neither of us was willing give up the final hours. I knew it would be almost nine months before we passed this way again. Freya is probably not burdened with such foresight— the chase is simply her reason for being, the white-hot flame that flares in her eyes as she catches the scent and burns there when she points. So we went on to the bitter end.
Which brought us here, to the first day of February, with the northwest wind rattling the windows and threatening snow, bereft. Freya is curled up tightly in her favorite spot, recovering from the last hard week, her eyes following me as I walk in and out of the room, expecting another ride to the country. The vest is hanging in the closet; the boots are in the corner, their seams frayed, their toes polished black by the endless miles of prairie grass, thistle stems, and crop stubble, down at the heel, soles worn smooth. I have chores that have been too long postponed, but for this day at least, I’d rather look back over the last three months and consider what it was I found there.
A Nebraska pheasant after the shot. Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
There were birds, of course: neon rooster pheasants rising with a shower of frost in the first morning sun, coveys of bobwhite quail exploding underfoot, flocks of prairie chickens and sharptails beckoning on the horizon. We hunters speak of such moments in shorthand, stringing them together like jewels on a necklace, even though we all know how rare and fleeting they are.
My overarching memory of the season is far less tangible. It is a feeling of sky and wind on my face; bright sun and snow squalls; cold that penetrated to the skin like an ice pick; sudden, unexpected warmth in the shelter of a cutbank; a short-eared owl floating over the grass; a prairie falcon streaking low over the cover like an arrow from the bow; a guild of tree sparrows and juncos picking seeds in a patch of kochia; crystals of frost clinging to the grass like diamonds in the dawn; a string of mule deer disappearing over the far ridge; the buck standing up, thirty yards away, in a stand of switchgrass; the color of little bluestem in the last five minutes of the day; a skein of snow geese almost invisible against the cirrus, their tenor traveling chorus floating down out of heaven like an anthem. The fuzzy leaves of mullen flat to the ground, green in the depths of winter. The graceful curve of an empty milkweed pod. The drag of the heavy cover on my feet at the end of ten straight hours in the field. Knees that don’t want to lift for the next step.
Such is the content of the hours and hours spent for the second of the shot. When I was young, I wanted one without the other. When the shooting was slow, I was irritated. Little by little, I learned what I was told was patience— distracting myself with thoughts of appointments, commitments, deadlines until the dog caught scent or I heard the slap of a primary on the grass behind me. I’m not sure that approach improved my wing shooting, but I suppose it lowered my blood pressure.
As the miles and the years have passed, I’ve settled into something altogether different. When I’m in the field, a thought will occasionally roll through my head, but mostly, I’m just there, behind the dog, in the moment. If I had to pick one word to describe the mental state, it would be meditation. The occasional points, the shots, the birds in the bag are a critical part of the whole—they supply the motivation for the day and test particular skills in hunter and dog.
But they aren’t the only part.
After sixty years in the field, it seems that what I hunt is not only a bird, not only a day, but a frame of mind. Maybe even a state of grace. I can’t tell where the importance of one stops and another starts. But I think it’s why I keep coming back.
The dust storms of the Dirty Thirties are returning to the high plains of America’s heartland. This storm ripped across eastern Colorado and northwestern Kansas in March of 2014. Photo copyright 2014, Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
AS THE DISCUSSION OVER CLIMATE CHANGE— OR DEBATE OR DONNYBROOK, HOWEVER YOU PREFER TO THINK OF IT— CONTINUES, I THINK IT’S appropriate to pause at the beginning of the new year and consider the adventures in weather we’ve enjoyed across the United States over the previous twelve months. For those of us who have ducked the nastiest the atmosphere has generated, it’s easy to forget the storms, fires, and droughts that caused significant inconvenience across the country. So, in the interest of recalling some of the nation’s most spectacular events, here’s a quick review of 2019 in weather:
Things started off in late February with a strong Arctic cold front that dropped more than a foot of snow on parts of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, driven by winds of nearly sixty miles an hour.[i] As the blizzard moved east, the wind intensified, reaching gust of nearly seventy miles an hour in Massachusetts, New York,[ii] and southern Ontario[iii]. Farther south, the
Flood water on the upper Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois. Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
system brought nearly a foot of rain to the Tennessee valley, causing extensive flooding.[iv] On the night of February 23, the front triggered several tornados, including an EF3 twister that leveled much of the business district in Columbus, Mississippi, and killed one person. Altogether, the storm caused an estimated $1.3 billion in damage and claimed two lives.[v]
On March 14, a strong storm system rolled into the northern plains. With much of the region still in the grip of winter, the heavy rain caused rapid snow melt, all of which ran off still-frozen ground. Nebraska and western Iowa took the brunt of the flooding, but there was significant damage from eastern North Dakota to Missouri as well as Wisconsin and Michigan. The early runoff set the stage for flooding farther down the Mississippi watershed. Estimates of damage ran to $10.8 billion. Three people lost their lives.[vi]
Meanwhile, on the southern plains, severe hail storms from March 22 to March 24 pummeled Oklahoma City, Dallas, and surrounding farmland. People who have not seen a hail storm on the Great Plains would be shocked at the devastation one can inflict. Damage was estimated at $1.6 billion.
A cold front on April 13 and 14 swept through the Southeast, spawning more than fifty tornados across central Mississippi and Alabama and another twenty-five from Georgia to Pennsylvania. High wind and hail also caused damage in several areas. After the front had passed, damage was estimated at $1.3 billion. Seven lives were lost.[vii]
Again on May 16 through 18, a strong cold front caused severe thunderstorms across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Texas. Another $1.0 billion in damage.
Yet another storm front swept across the Great Plains and on to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey from May 26-29. The front spawned 190 tornados, damaging hail, and high winds. Salient among the tornados was an EF3 twister that touched down near Dayton, Ohio, killing one person. Damage estimate: $4.5 billon. Three persons killed.
This succession of storm fronts also led to major flooding in the Arkansas River watershed, from eastern Oklahoma to Little Rock, Arkansas. Officials estimated $3.0 billion dollars in damage and attributed five deaths to the high water.
The flooding that began at the end of winter in the upper Midwest continued through the end of July in many parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana as well as parts of Indiana and Ohio. The cumulative damage done to industry and agriculture by these floods is estimated at $6.2 billion. Four deaths were blamed on the high water.[viii]
On July 4 and 5, storms with hail up to one inch in diameter went through the Denver metro area. Damage was estimated at $1.0 billion.
Then came the hurricane season. By the standard of 2018, it was relatively mild, but in late August, Dorian came ashore in North Carolina, causing $1.6 billion in damage and killing ten people. On September 17, Tropical Storm Imelda brought almost three feet of rain to the Houston area, causing another $5.0 billion in damage and claiming five more lives.[ix]
On October 20, a nasty low-pressure system rolled over Dallas, then continued to Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Estimate of damage: $1.7 billion. Two people killed.[x]
Out in California, the drought that was largely responsible for the catastrophic fires season of 2018 finally broke. The moisture
Rising temperatures and deepening drought set the stage for wildfires across much of the West. This fire burns near Casper, Wyoming. Photo copyright 2012, Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
during the winter and early spring allowed much of the vegetation in the state to recover, which, in turn, provided exceptional fuel for yet another round of wildfires. State officials estimated that almost 8,000 fires consumed nearly 260,000 acres in 2019, destroying more than 700 buildings and killing three people.[xi] Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility whose power lines were found to be responsible for several of the most damaging fires in 2018, took the precaution of turning off electricity to as many as 2.7 million people[xii] when high wind threatened to bring down more electrical lines in 2019. The resulting losses of power were said to be responsible for more than $2 billion in additional economic loss.[xiii]
While it rained— and rained— in America’s heartland, southeastern Alaska found itself in the grip of a major dry spell, beginning in July 0f 2018 and continuing through much of 2019.[xiv] The city of Juneau set all-time records for high temperatures, and, farther north, the ice pack along the melted early as temperatures in the Arctic Ocean were as much as nine degrees above average.[xv]
The heat and drought created ideal conditions for wild fires. By late summer, more than 2.5 million acres had burned, less than the 2004 record of 6.5 million acres but still worrisome. According to Scott Rupp, deputy director of the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks, “What has been changing is the frequency and the magnitude of these fires.”[xvi]
The combination of the fires in California and Alaska did an estimated $4.5 billion in damage and claimed the lives of three people.[xvii]
These are 2019’s biggest weather events: $45 billion in damage and forty-four people dead. Compared to 2018, we got off easy. As you may recall, there were three killer hurricanes in 2018, along with drought and fires and hail. Severe weather alone caused $223 billion in 2018 and took something like 282 lives. Still, even a quiet year like 2019 gets my attention. Forty-five billion here, 45 billion there— pretty soon, you’re talking serious money.
No one knows what 2020 will bring, but the people who have studied climate most carefully say the chances are that it will be worse. It’s impossible to say whether any or all of these events were caused by the increasing amount of heat in the atmosphere, impossible to know if they were just made worse. But these events, their severity and impact, are perfectly consistent with the predictions that several independent groups of researchers have made. In fact, there’s growing reason to believe that the predictions made by the International Panel on Climate Change and other reputable research groups have been unduly conservative, which is to say that things in the real world are getting worse faster than many scientists had predicted.
This year, next year, the year after that, we’ll set new records for high temperatures, new records for intense rainfall, for tornados, hurricanes, flooding, wild fires, even for paralyzing blizzards. The cost in damage and lost lives is the price we pay just to “adapt” to a changing climate. That cost will increase at an alarming rate over coming decades because “adapting” to the changing climate does nothing to stop the root cause— more and more energy trapped in the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land mass of the planet Earth by greenhouse gases. It’s like treating a serious infection with a damp washcloth and an aspirin— it may ease the suffering for a while, but it’s no substitute for an antibiotic.
In the year 2020, we’ll have no choice but to cope with the symptoms of climate change. But that won’t cure the disease.
Flick doing what he did best, on an Iowa rooster. (Photo by Chris Madson, copyright 2019).
This afternoon, Flick joined his predecessors on the other side. The spirit was willing, but his hips finally gave out. As I mourn his passing, I remember the companions who came before him. They were far better at being dogs than I am at being a person. I miss them . . .
IT’S MADE OF BRASS, ABOUT THE DIAMETER OF A SILVER DOLLAR WITH A NYLON STRAP LOOPED THROUGH THE TOP SO IT CAN BE STRUNG ON A COLLAR. It has no markings, but the catalog house that sold it to me, many years ago, said it came from England— certainly, it has that English look and feel, an exquisite bit of craftsmanship from another time that combines simplicity, elegance, and dependability to do a job that is largely irrelevant in the modern age. It has a bright, clear tenor voice, not loud but surprisingly penetrating, even on a day when the first cold front of November is hurrying across the prairie, tousling the bluestem as it passes.
I must have bought it around 1987. I was starting Britt at the time. He was the most talented bird dog I’ve ever owned, and he was just starting to show his worth when we encountered the Conservation Reserve Program. We were used to working fencelines and shelterbelts, long strips of cover Britt could hunt from the outside. When he went on point, he was nearly always out in the stubble where I could see him. The bird might not hold, but there was at least no problem finding the dog.
The first CRP field we hunted was a full section of switchgrass just reaching maturity. Some of the seed heads were eight feet off the ground; the vegetation below was almost impenetrable. We both saw the potential and dived into the jungle with high expectations. I saw Britt’s wake for the first fifty yards, then the grass was still. I stopped to listen for him. Not a whisper. I figured he was within sixty yards of me, almost certainly pointing a pheasant, and there was no way I was going to call him off that point.
I started a spiral search pattern, and in about five minutes, I found him, still holding, but with the relaxed tail that told me the scent had gone cold. The rooster had quietly departed for other hiding places.
By the time that field had finished with us, I could see that Britt and I needed some way of keeping track of each other if we intended to hunt any more CRP. The first generation of beeper collars had just been invented, but fresh out of college, I didn’t have the money to buy one, and I didn’t really want one anyway— that infernal beeping felt a little like spray-painting graffiti on the Mona Lisa. So I bought the bell.
We went back to that section of CRP on a clear, quiet morning with the temperature hovering around five. The frost lay like snow on the grass— I figured Britt would be able to smell a rooster from a quarter-mile away. He skirted the edge of the heavy grass for a hundred yards before a plume of scent lured him into the cover, and listened as the bell traced his progress, out and across the lee of a low rise. Then, suddenly, nothing, a hole in the air where the clear tink-tink had been. I headed toward the last place I had heard the sound, holding the shotgun high enough to keep the grass stems out of my eyes.
I almost stumbled over him, head high, stub tail at full attention, taut as a violin string. One more step and the rooster came straight up, clawing into the blue sky with a clatter and a squawk, his flanks like molten copper in the first light.
Taken by surprise, as I nearly always am when a rooster flushes, I missed with the first barrel but managed to catch him with the second. Britt disappeared into the switch, the bell marking his progress, farther away, farther, then a pause, closer, closer still, and suddenly, two amber eyes out of the wall of grass— Britt with the bird.
OVER THE NEXT TEN YEARS, the two of us spent a lot of time in this strange, one-way telecommunication, Britt transmitting out of sight while I tried to interpret the message. I could tell a lot by the sound of the bell. There was a steady cadence with a syncopated flourish when he was quartering, looking for scent. When something caught his attention, the cadence broke, and the irregular notes of the bell signaled every move of his head. There was a Doppler change in the tone as he worked— higher as he came back toward me, lower as he went away. Early in his career, he was fond of pointing meadow voles, and I could often tell by the bell that his tail was wagging as he pointed, a sign that he was mousing. And now and then, that hole in the air, the sudden silence— a rooster, a covey, a band of chukars, a ruffed grouse, a blue, a bomber. We hunted them all, Britt following his unerring nose while I followed the bell.
One evening, the friend who had told me about Britt’s litter called me about another litter in the same line, so on the way to a quail hunt in the Flint Hills, I stopped to look the pups over. That was how little Meg came to our house.
Flick in the tall stuff with a bird holding tight. Wrong move for the pheasant . . . (Photo by Chris Madson, copyright 2019).
Britt tolerated her, and she paid him the respect due to his age and experience. They hunted together for two seasons before she inherited the bell. She might not have had the talent of her great uncle, but she was still a better bird dog than I deserve. I remember her pointing a pheasant on the slope of one of those huge prairie swales that break up the high plains, staunch in the wine-colored little bluestem as my partner walked in. The rooster flushed wild, and the shot rocked him but didn’t break a wing. We watched and Meg watched as the bird flapped and glided, flapped and glided down the long slope, across the creek bed, and up the other side, almost to the horizon before he sat down.
My eyes dropped back to another movement, Meg crossing the creek bed on line. She trotted up the long slope on the far side, a tiny white speck by this time, paused on the hilltop, then turned back toward us. As she crossed the creek bed, I could see she was carrying something. She disappeared in the grass on our side, and a long minute passed before I heard the bell approaching. She walked up to me with the bird in her mouth. I took it and scratched her ear. Good dog; good dog.
The two of us chased many birds across many states to places I don’t think I would ever have seen on my own: the pocket just under the rim of Tatman Mountain in northern Wyoming where a tiny spring waters a lush stand of wild rye and a perennial covey of Huns and you can see for fifty miles. The terrace in Iowa where there is always a rooster and Meg once pointed the biggest whitetail buck I’ve ever seen, caught napping in the switchgrass. The prairie slope out over the Missouri River in North Dakota with its sharptails, the buffaloberries scarlet on the hillside and the hawthorn fruit fuschia against the gray branches in the draw.
The moments fade in the telling, like picked wildflowers, but in my head they are forever bright against the background of the autumns we shared, the collection of days stitched together by the play of light and shadow on the grass, the sigh of the wind, and the tinkling of a small bell.
NOT LONG AFTER MEG PASSED HER FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY, a friend invited us to hunt his farm in western Iowa. The farm reflects Tom’s commitment to conservation— terraces, grassy waterways, and buffer strips to keep the topsoil in place; blocks of conservation reserve to rebuild topsoil where it’s been lost; and wetland reserve to purify the runoff. That kind of management produces pheasants even when the surrounding farms have been scalped for profit.
Meg was still good for two hours in the morning, and while her pace had slowed, her enthusiasm for the game was as bright as ever. On the morning of the fifth day, I was packing to leave, one bird short of Iowa’s possession limit. Always the gracious host, Tom told me to stop and check one last hillside on my way to the interstate, so I headed south, Meg riding shotgun in the pickup, marking every meadowlark as it flushed off the side of the road.
The CRP Tom has recommended was a perfect corner for pheasants— bluestem and switchgrass with a mix of broad-leafed plants just below a harvested cornfield. I Unbuckled Meg’s collar and slipped on the bell before I lifted her out of the truck, then grabbed the Model 12 and followed her down the fencerow. She disappeared into the grass, and I waited, listening to the bell as it made its invisible way down the slope. A hundred yards from the truck, it stopped.
I walked that way and found her just a couple of yards into the heavy cover, rock solid. As I passed her ear, two roosters exploded out of the grass. I picked the left bird and crumpled it. Meg Disappeared. Then, I saw her coming back through the short brome of the field edge, tail and head up, with the rooster in her mouth, the light of the December morning warm on them both. A fine way to end a hunt, I thought, and a season.
At the time, I couldn’t know that it was also the end of a career. That Iowa rooster was Meg’s last bird.
The last day of the Nebraska pheasant season. Three birds from three perfect points. (Photo by Chris Madson, copyright 2019).
AND SO THE BELL PASSED TO FLICK. He’s eighteen months old now, with two seasons under his belt, a passion for rabbits, and a talent for birds. He’s presided over the demise of about fifty pheasants already, and just last week, I had a chance to introduce him to some Kansas bobwhite. He didn’t know what to make of the first covey, but he quickly filed the scent under the general heading of “game,” trotted down the edge of the milo field to a thicket of sand plum and pointed a single. Which I promptly missed.
As I strolled along behind my new companion toward the next covert, it occurred to me that a bird hunter measures his life in dogs. With luck, I may have one more after Flick. Or he may be the last. Such thoughts can lead out into areas of metaphysics and theology I’m not qualified to navigate. Is there another world beyond the pale? I’m sure I don’t know. But I find it hard to imagine a place much better than the one we were all born to, this small blue planet where life has gathered against all the odds.
I’m not anxious to leave. If I were given a choice between crossing over into an unknown paradise or melting back into the ground of this one, I think I’d just as soon stay. Still, there is the possibility that, when the time comes, the fields on the other side will be drenched in the morning sun of November with the scent of fall on the breeze . . . and the sound of a small brass bell, fading toward the horizon.
And, if that’s the call, I just might have to follow.
AS I’VE RUN OUT MY STRING OF YEARS, I’VE DEVELOPED A DEEPENING APPRECIATION FOR THE effortsof the people who fought the fight for the land long before we did. There’s an epigram that’s made the rounds for years. It’s been attributed to Mark Twain, although no one seems to be able to find it in his writing. Chances are good that it was synthesized by that famous writer, Anonymous, and like many things of his, it has a certain weight. “History may not repeat itself,” the saying goes, “but it rhymes.”
I’d like to consider a few of those rhymes, contained in the work of three men in our now-distant past, largely neglected today, who advocated the conservation of renewable resources like soil, water, wildlife, and wild land before the need for conservation was recognized by America at large. They were ahead of their time, which is, all too often, an uncomfortable place to be.
So, the text of this sermon comes from a source I seldom cite: the King James version of the Bible, specifically, the prophet Isaiah, chapter 40, verses 3 and 6:
“The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness . . . And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.”
I am, perhaps, to be forgiven if this biblical passage has stuck in the back of my mind over the course of a career that has spanned more than forty years. Back there in the early 1970s, when my cohort of wildlife people were finishing graduate school, it seemed that the nation was poised on the verge of a wholehearted commitment to the precept of wise use. The Clean Water Act with its migratory bird rule, LWCF, the Wilderness Act, NEPA, wild and scenic rivers, ESA, the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act, ANILCA, the return of CRP under the 1985 Farm Bill, Sodbuster, Swampbuster, NAWMP, NAWCA— Americans were unanimous in their support of conservation of wildlife, both game and nongame, along with a sensible approach to the management of renewable natural resources.
Or so it seemed. As the last forty years have proven, the apparent consensus on conservation and the environment was far, far more fragile than my generation in the profession thought. We’ve watched as the political and financial support for conservation has waned, as traditional coalitions have dissolved, as former allies have declared holy wars against one another, and as special interests have exploited the disarray to begin the job of dismantling the regulatory framework that defined conservation in the twentieth century.
The wildlife profession has been engaged in a fighting retreat for a generation, and the advocates of enlightened conservation find themselves isolated, with little political leverage, our recommendations and objections like “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.”
In such times, I think it’s comforting— and often instructive— to look back over our shoulders and attend to other voices, raised in other times, who also cried out in a wilderness of indifference.
Voices like George Catlin’s.
—————–
CATLIN was crazy. Scion of a middle-class Pennsylvania family, he trained as an attorney, following in his father’s footsteps, and spent two or three years comfortably practicing law before he sold all his law books to buy paint and canvas. With no formal training, he set out to support himself as a portrait painter in Philadelphia. He was far from a brilliant artist, but he managed to make ends meet for several years, and if that was as far as his ambition had taken him, he would have faded into obscurity.
George Catlin in 1849 by William Fisk.
Then, one summer afternoon, a delegation of Winnebagos passed through Philadelphia on their way from Wisconsin to the Great White Father’s house in Washington, D.C., to complain about illicit lead miners on their land. Catlin was transfixed by their costume and bearing. As he told it, he made up his mind on the spot: “The history and customs of such a people, preserved by pictorial illustrations, are themes worthy of the life-time of one man, and nothing short of the loss of my life, shall prevent me from visiting their country, and of becoming their historian.”[i]
Friends and family tried to reason with him. “I broke from them all— from my wife and my aged parents,” he wrote, and “with these views firmly fixed— armed, equipped, and supplied, I started out in the year 1830 and penetrated the vast and pathless wilds of the great ‘Far West’ with a light heart.”[ii] He would be gone for eight years.
In St. Louis, he managed to hitch a ride with William Clark, then the Indian commissioner for the region, as Clark traveled up the Mississippi for a council with several tribes at Prairie du Chien. Along the way, Catlin met a dozen of the tribes gathered along the upper reaches of the river and got his first taste of what was then the American frontier.
Back in St. Louis, he began looking for ways to get farther west and was lucky enough to find a new form of transportation. He booked passage on the steamboat Yellowstone, bound for the mouth of the Yellowstone River on the upper Missouri, where he found what he’d been looking for:
“. . . the interminable and boundless ocean of grass-covered hills and valleys . . . where the bison range, the elk, the mountain-sheep, and the fleet-bounding antelope— where the magpie and chattering paroquettes supply the place of the red-breast and the blue-bird— where wolves are white and bears grizzly— where pheasants are hens of the prairie, and frogs have horns!”[iii]
He spent time with the Crow, the Mandan, the Sioux, the Iowa, the Konza, the Pawnee, and then, down along the Arkansas River, with the Osage, the Cherokee, the Comanche, and back north into Minnesota, with the Chippewa, the Menominee, the Winnebagos, the Sac and Fox— fifty tribes according to one count. By the time he returned to the East, he’d seen most of the Great Plains, and somewhere in his travels, he’d come up with a big idea.
“This strip of country, which extends from the province of Mexico to lake Winnepeg on the North, is almost one entire plain of grass. . . . It is here, and here chiefly, that the buffaloes dwell; and with, and hovering about them, live and flourish the tribes of Indians, whom God made for the enjoyment of that fair land and its luxuries.
“It is a melancholy contemplation for one who has traveled as I have, through these realms, and seen this noble animal in all its pride and glory, to contemplate it so rapidly wasting from the world, drawing the irresistible conclusion too, which one must do, that its species is soon to extinguished, and with it the peace and happiness (if not the actual existence) of the tribes of Indians who are joint tenants with them, in the occupancy of these vast and idle plains.
“And what a splendid contemplation too, when one imagines them as they might in future be seen, (by some protecting policy of government) preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in a magnificent park, where the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the fleeting herds of elks and bison. What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in future ages! A nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!
“I would ask no other monument to my memory, nor any other enrolment of my name among the famous dead, than the reputation of having been the founder of such an institution.”[iv]
It had been the reason he’d set out, and the things he’s seen over the thousands of miles, back and forth across the Great Plains, had only deepened his conviction that this unique North American wilderness should be somehow preserved. All that was left was to use his art to convince the rest of the nation. He spent most of the rest of his life in that attempt, touring the United States with the paintings and artifacts in what he called his “Indian gallery.” The admission price wasn’t enough to support him, so he appealed to Congress, asking them to buy the collection. Congress declined.
Short of funds, he packed up the gallery and headed to Europe where the exhibition generated a reasonable amount of money but not enough to keep him clear of debt. Back in the states, he sold the collection to an industrialist, then began reproducing many of the paintings from memory to support his family. Hungry for the wilderness of his youth, he made extensive trips to Central and South America along with another trip back to the American West.
He died in Jersey City, New Jersey, in the winter of 1872 in the knowledge that his worst predictions concerning the native peoples and wildlife of the Great Plains were rapidly coming true. It would be another seven years before the collection of his art and tribal artifacts were finally donated to the Smithsonian Institution. But just before he died, in the spring of 1872, the nation granted his greatest wish— a “magnificent park,” forerunner of a revolutionary “protecting policy of government” that would set the standard for the world.
—————
WHILE Catlin was crisscrossing the wilderness of the Great Plains, another man of his generation was doing his best to build a life in the much more settled landscapes of Vermont— George Perkins Marsh. The son of a prominent lawyer and Congressman, Marsh attended Dartmouth College, where he graduated at the head of his class at the age of nineteen, then passed the bar exam as Catlin had and set up a law office in Burlington.
George Perkins Marsh in 1855 by Matthew Brady. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
Like Catlin, he seemed to have had little taste for the law. After the death of his partner in 1832, his business steadily declined— he closed the office ten years later and launched his campaign for a Congressional seat. He won the election in 1843 and spent the next six years in Congress. The contacts he made in Washington eventually led to an extended career as a diplomat, first as the U.S. minister to Turkey, then as minister to Italy.
From his earliest boyhood, he’d shown a deep interest in the relationship between people and the land. He saw that relationship through two, often conflicting lenses. On one hand, the Calvinist philosophy he had absorbed as a boy remained with him all his life. Unlike Catlin and another contemporary observer of the natural world, Henry David Thoreau, Marsh had little use for wilderness.
In a speech in 1847, he argued that “in North America, the full energies of advanced European civilization were brought to bear on a desert continent, and it has been but the work of a day to win empires from the wilderness. . . . This marvelous change has converted unproductive wastes into fertile fields and filled with light and life the dark and silent recesses of our aboriginal forests and mountains.”[v]
He believed that wildlife was more abundant in areas where the primeval forest had been interspersed with small farms, that the New World was better off for the crops and animals that had been introduced from the Old, and that the waves of emigrants sweeping westward across the continent were actually a pacifying influence.
“The arts of the savage are the arts of destruction,” he believed. “Civilization,” he argued— against all the bloody evidence on both sides of the Atlantic, even then— “is at once the mother and the fruit of peace.”[vi]
In many of his opinions, he was very much a man of his time.
But he was also a keen observer. In that same speech— in 1847— he anticipated a problem that no one else had even considered:
“Though man cannot at his pleasure command the rain and sunshine, the wind and frost and snow, yet it is certain that climate itself has in many instances been gradually changed and ameliorated or deteriorated by human action. The draining of swamps and the clearing of forests perceptibly affect the evaporation from the earth, and of course the mean quantity of moisture suspended in the air. The same causes modify . . . the power of the surface to reflect, absorb and radiate the rays of the sun, and consequently influence the distribution of light and heat, and the force and direction of the winds.”[vii]
He’d watched as the timber had been cleared indiscriminately from the watersheds of eastern Vermont, and he’d seen the results:
“Steep hill sides and rocky ledges are well suited to the permanent growth of wood, but when in the rage for improvement they are improvidently stripped of this protection, the action of sun and wind and rain soon deprives them of their thin coating of vegetable mould, and this, when exhausted, cannot be restored by ordinary husbandry. They remain therefore barren and unsightly blots, producing neither grain nor grass, and yielding no crop but a harvest of noxious weeds. . . . The vernal and autumnal rains, and the melting snows of winter, no longer intercepted and absorbed by the leaves or the open soil of the woods, flow swiftly over the smooth ground, washing away the vegetable mould as they seek their natural outlets, fill every ravine with a torrent, and convert every river into an ocean. There is reason to fear the valleys of many of our streams will soon be converted from smiling meadows into broad wastes of shingle and gravel and pebbles, deserts in summer, and seas in spring and autumn.”[viii] George Perkins Marsh . . . in 1847.
Thanks to his diplomatic assignments, Marsh had the chance to travel through much of the western Mediterranean, where he saw the lasting effects of millennia of intensive farming and overgrazing: the salt-poisoned soils of the Fertile Crescent, the eroded hills where the vaunted cedars of Lebanon had once grown, the ravaged hillsides of north Africa and Italy, still showing the scars of wounds inflicted by the farmers of the Roman Empire soon after the birth of Christ.
The examples of the Old World and the trajectory of land use in America weren’t lost on Marsh. He began work on a detailed analysis of land management, the culmination of thirty years of observation and largely ineffective proselytizing. It was massive— 465 pages that appeared in 1864. He called it Man and Nature: Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action.
Much of his Calvinist confidence in civilized man seems to have evaporated in his masterwork, no doubt as a result of his experiences in Europe and the rapidly accelerating destruction that was already apparent in America.
“Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste,” he wrote. “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. The proportions and accommodations which insured the stability of existing arrangements are overthrown. Indigenous vegetable and animal species are extirpated, and supplanted by others of foreign origin, spontaneous production is either forbidden or restricted, and the face of the earth is either laid bare, or covered with a new and reluctant growth of vegetable forms, and with alien tribes of life. These intentional changes and substitutions constitute, indeed, great revolutions; but vast as is their magnitude and importance, they are insignificant in comparison with the contingent and unsought results which have flowed from them.”[ix]
A retired medical doctor, Franklin B. Hough, read Man and Nature soon after it hit the streets and was deeply impressed. As the man in charge of the 1855 and 1865 census in New York state, he’d worked through data on shrinking timber supplies and found the numbers alarming. He reported them in an address to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Portland, Maine, in 1873. The day after his speech, the association voted to approach Congress “on the importance of promoting cultivation of timber and preservation of forests.”[x] Three years later, Hough was appointed to begin a study of the condition of American forests, and his report led to the creation of the Division of Forestry in 1881, forerunner of the U.S. Forest Service.
Marsh died the next summer. He lived just long enough to see a lifetime of advocacy validated in the creation of the Forest Service. It would be another fifty years before the federal government translated his concerns over soil erosion into action with the establishment of the Soil Conservation Service— his warnings about the environmental and political consequences of large-scale irrigation were never taken seriously. And his passing thoughts on climate? Ignored at the time, forgotten for a century and a half, and still locked in political paralysis today.
Crying, crying in the wilderness . . .
———————
THERE is a third man of this generation who spoke to a wide audience during his life and has been largely forgotten since. Henry William Herbert was born in England to the offspring of nobility. His father was the unlucky third son of the Earl of Carnarvon; his mother, the daughter of Joshua Allen, fifth Viscount of County Kildare in Ireland. With no hope of inheriting title or estate, the father
Henry William Herbert, aka Frank Forester, by Matthew Brady. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
trained as an attorney, then turned to religion and died as the Dean of Manchester Cathedral, the income from which allowed his son to gain an outstanding education at Eton and Cambridge while he nursed an abiding sense of having been somehow cheated out of a position among the British elite.
Soon after he graduated, Herbert left England to escape debt. He went first to Brussels, then Paris, and finally to New York in 1831, where he took a position teaching Greek in a fashionable prep school while he began writing novels and historical studies. To fill in the financial gaps between books, he wrote for several magazines, often focusing on hunting and fishing under the pseudonym Frank Forester.[xi]
He was by no means the first writer to advance the code of outdoor sport as it was understood by the aristocracy of Britain and Europe, but he was almost certainly the most influential.
America was, he thought, a paradise:
“There is, perhaps, no country in the world which presents, to the sportsman, so long a catalogue of the choicest game, whether of fur, fin, or feather, as the United States of North America; there is none, certainly, in which the wide-spread passion for the chase can be indulged, under so few restrictions, and at an expense so trifling.”
But he was quick to point out that this state of affairs was at risk.
“All this, notwithstanding, it is to be regretted that there is no country in which . . . the gentle craft of Venerie is so often degraded into mere pot-hunting; and none, in which, as a natural consequence, the game that swarmed of yore in all the fields and forests, in all the lakes, rivers, bays, and creeks of its vast territory, are in such peril of becoming speedily extinct.”[xii]
Some of this, he saw, was due to the thriving market in wild game, which encouraged every farmer’s son to shoot everything he could, whenever he could. “Knowing nothing, and caring less than nothing, about the habits or seasons of the birds in question, he judges naturally enough that, whenever there is a demand for the birds and beasts in the New York markets, it is all right to kill and sell them. And thanks to the selfish gormandizing of the wealthier classes of that city, there is a demand always.”[xiii]
But the problem reached far beyond commercial traffic in game, he knew. The vast majority of American hunters knew nothing about the animals they hunted— whether they migrated, when they courted and tended young, how many offspring they produced. Without that understanding, too many of them shot as many as they could at any season of the year. Forester pointed out impacts of that unrelenting pressure that were already obvious in the 1830s— the rapid decline of the heath hen, the local extirpation of the wild turkey and white-tailed deer. As Forester saw it, the hunter had a responsibility to know his quarry and conserve it, and he pounded that message home in his writing.
There had been efforts to control hunting of some high-profile species long before Forester’s arrival in America. New York adopted its first deer season in the mid-eighteenth century,[xiv] and the state adopted a law protecting the heath hen in 1791.[xv] Such statutes, Forester believed, “are intended solely to protect the animals in question, during periods of nidification, incubation, and providing for the youthful broods.”[xvi] The problem, as he saw it, was that these laws “emanated from the dwellers in cities,”[xvii] which encouraged the rural majority to ignore them. Without adequate enforcement, it was clear that regulations would not stem the carnage.
Forester hammered on these issues with a consistency and authority that encouraged more and more people to join the ranks of self-proclaimed “sportsmen.” At the same time, the local extinction of game along the East Coast emphasized the seriousness of the problems facing America’s wildlife.
Had Forester lived as long as Catlin and Marsh, he would have seen the first fruits of his labor. In 1871, Congress created the U.S. Fishery Commission to begin the job of rebuilding dwindling populations of game fish. In 1885, the Division of Economic Ornithology, forerunner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, came into being. Two years later, Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell launched the Boone and Crockett Club, a group of patrician easterners who were prime movers in drafting and enacting laws like the Lacey Act and sweeping new federal programs like the national wildlife refuge system.
Never a contented man, Forester seemed to have great hope for a change in his life when he married for the second time in 1858. He and his bride had just moved into his cottage in rural New Jersey when he was called away on business. While he was gone, a woman came to visit the new Mrs. Herbert and filled her in on the gossip concerning her husband, his rumored violent tendencies and his reported need for cash. Without waiting to confront him, she packed and left.
It was, apparently, the last straw for a man who had spent most of his life in a battle with depression. Late on the night of May 16, 1858, he excused himself from a conversation with a close friend, went into the next room, and shot himself. He was fifty-one.
In the letter he left behind, he asked the members of the press to “let the good that I have done, if any, be interred with my bones; let the evil also.”[xviii] A strange request, it seems, and one that, by accident more than intention, was granted. The memory of his real or imagined sins has long since faded, along with the substantial credit he deserves for mobilizing hunters and anglers in the service of conservation. Only the legacy of his pioneering leadership in the community of American hunters has survived. Another voice in the wilderness . . .
———————
THERE were a few others in this generation who saw the situation in America more or less the same way these three men did and took every opportunity to mount the argument that the nation needed to change its attitude toward the land. But, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the nation wasn’t listening. I suspect some of the people of that time believed the natural resources they consumed were infinite; a few saw the growing evidence of the damage that was being done but didn’t believe they could change the course of events. And a great many simply didn’t think about the impact of what they were doing or where their single-minded pursuit of profit ultimately led.
Sylvan Lake, Montana, Beartooth Wilderness, Montana. (Photo copyright 2017 Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
The shift, when it came, seems to me to have been the result of two forces. One was the undeniable proof of the landscape-scale destruction that was spreading west with civilization. More and more people could see it out their back doors.
The second was the power of the message a tiny group of pioneering conservationists persisted in spreading. It was that message that gave focus to growing doubts and reassured people who might otherwise have believed they were alone in their assessment of the developing problem. The second half of the nineteenth century produced the greatest leaders the conservation movement has ever seen, but I think it’s important to recognize they were as much an effect as a cause. The movement itself rose, with steadily increasing power, out of the grassroots.
My feeling is that this generation of wildlife professionals finds itself in a situation remarkably similar to the one Catlin, Marsh, Forester and their cohort faced almost 200 years ago. We’ve been talking, remarkably few Americans have been listening. Maybe this is a holdover from the 1970s, when it felt like we had all this under control. Or maybe it’s some sort of weird swing of the pendulum, back to a time when the nation was almost entirely controlled by the captains of industry. Whatever the cause, it has led us dangerously close to the precipice of environmental disaster.
I certainly can’t deny that, from the standpoint of wildlife conservation and the broader issues of environmental health, these are dark times, possibly even darker than the circumstances the nation faced in the middle of the nineteenth century. Any light I see at the end of the tunnel could well be just an oncoming train.
But here, I have to express a personal article of faith. It takes dark times to rouse Americans, and I believe these have been dark enough for long enough to do the trick. The people are starting to wake up, as they did in the years following the Civil War. The change in sentiment in those years resulted in our first national park, national forest, national monument, national wildlife refuge; the first laws against water pollution; the first widespread enforcement of hunting regulations; the removal of wildlife from the market, the recovery of the wood duck, trumpeter swan, elk, pronghorn, white-tailed deer; international protection of songbirds, shorebirds, and waders, and on and on and on.
It was startling— a revolution— driven, in part, by harsh necessity, and, in no small measure, by the tireless efforts of people who invested their entire lives in making it happen.
There’s no doubt— we live in different times. We’ve lost the margin of safety that was still in our grasp in the nineteenth century, and frankly, I don’t know whether we can prevail in the face of the crisis we’ve created. But before we can even begin to solve the problems that face us, we need broad agreement on the nature— and seriousness— of those problems. Over the last forty years, the wildlife profession has struggled to engage the mainstream of the American public, even at that elementary level.
I think that’s beginning to change. Conversations that, twenty years ago, were the province of academics and other professionals at the margins of society are merging into the
Drilling rig in the Green River basin, Wyoming. (Photo copyright 2015, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
mainstream— discussions of climate change; sustainable agriculture; plummeting populations of mammals, birds, herptiles, fish, even insects; clean water; declining aquifers, instream flow. The same influences that changed the minds and hearts of other generations of America in other times are at work today. There is undeniable proof of landscape-scale destruction, in the evening news, on Facebook, and right out our back doors. And there is the undeniable power of the message that motivated professionals, like the ones in this room, persist in spreading. It gives focus to growing doubts and reassures people who might otherwise believe they are alone in their concern.
In 1938, the American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote a free-verse narrative that was intended to accompany the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Dix and other contributors to the WPA. At the end of that poem, MacLeish reflected on the central role the American continent played in the rise of the American character:
“We wonder whether the great American dream
Was the singing of locusts out of the grass to the west and the
West is behind us now;” he wrote.
“The west wind’s away from us.
We wonder if the liberty is done;
The dreaming is finished.
We can’t say.
We aren’t sure.
“Or if there’s something different men can dream
Or if there’s something different men can mean by
Liberty. . . .
Or if there’s liberty a man can mean that’s
Men: not land.
We wonder.
We don’t know.
We’re asking.”
I believe that a substantial part of what it means to be an American is not men, but the land. And I believe that, somewhere between MacLeish and today, most Americans lost sight of that fundamental truth. The planet is in the process of reminding us. I believe Americans will be recalled to the duty they owe the land, and the grassroots will rise once again.
History may not repeat itself, but when I look back over the record of the struggle for conservation in America, I can hear the rhyme.
This is the text of a speech delivered at the Central Mountains and Plains Section of The Wildlife Society. My thanks to the organizers for providing the motivation to crystallize some of these thoughts.
[i] Catlin, George, 1842. Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians. Volume I. Wiley and Putnam, New York, NY. p.2.
[v] Trombulak, Stephen, C. (ed) 2001. So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh. Middlebury College Press, Hanover, NH. p.2
[vi] Ibid, p.5.
[vii] Ibid, p.10
[viii] Ibid, pp.16-17.
[ix] Marsh, George P., 1864. Man and Nature: Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. p.36
[x] Steen, Harold K., 2004. The U.S. Forest Service: A History. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA. pp 9-10.
[xi] Forester, Frank, 1864. Frank Forester’s Field Sports of the United States and British Provinces of North America. W.A. Townsend, New York, NY. Memoir of the author.
[xii] Ibid, pp.11-12.
[xiii] Ibid, p.21.
[xiv] Trefethen, James, 1975. An American Crusade for Wildlife. Winchester Press, New York, NY. p.40.
[xv] Gross, Alfred O., 1928. The Heath Hen. Boston Society of Natural History, Boston, MA. p.496.
[xvi] Frank Forester’s Field Sports, op cit., p. 19.
Portrait of John James Audubon by John Syme, painted in 1826 when Audubon was touring the United Kingdom to raise money and find a printer for his Birds of North America.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF DECEMBER 21, 1826, forty-one-year-old John Audubon looked out on the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, from his second-story room after a day spent with two naturalists who wanted to learn his techniques for painting birds. He’d been in Edinburgh for nearly two months, away from home for nearly eight, and in spite of the acclaim he had met in the British Isles, he was worn out with luncheons, eight-course dinners, and the attentions of the aristocracy.
“The weather is clear, with a sharp frost,” he confided to his journal. “What a number of Wild Ducks I could shoot on a morning like this, with a little powder and plenty of shot.”[i]
His visit to Britain was a desperate attempt to find support for the project that had been the central dream of his life— an oversized book of his paintings of the birds of North America. America had not supported the idea, partly because engravers there said the plates were too challenging, partly because he had enemies, some of his own making, some who owed loyalty to his predecessor in the work of identifying American birds, the pioneer naturalist Alexander Wilson.
So necessity had brought him to the Old World to find printers skillful enough to reproduce his work and patrons wealthy enough to support it.
He called himself the American Woodsman, and while he was no Daniel Boone, there’s no doubt that, by this time in his life, he had earned his moccasins with years of wandering in the near-wilderness of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. He came to his backwoods experiences by a circuitous route. The illegitimate son of a French naval officer and a slave girl in Santo Domingo, he grew up in the French countryside. It was that experience that kindled the two great passions of his life: birds and art.
During the American Revolution, his father spent some time in the United States and bought a farm near Philadelphia. In 1803, he sent the young Audubon there, partly to help manage the place and partly to put him beyond the insatiable demand of Napoleon’s military draft. Audubon left the farming to the Quaker tenant, preferring to spend his time in the woods. “Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment,”[ii] he remembered years later.
Utterly uninterested in the farm, he set out down the Ohio River in 1807 with his new wife and a friend from France. The stated goal of the trip was to establish a store on the Kentucky frontier, but it soon became clear that Audubon was far more interested in the wilderness than in commerce.
In 1807, settlement of the Ohio River valley was just beginning. While big game and passenger pigeons got top billing in most journals of the time, the flocks of waterfowl were undoubtedly spectacular. Audubon took them mostly for granted, but in his recollections of those early years, a whisper of the old abundance emerges.
“I never spent a winter without observing immense flocks of these birds,” he wrote of the Canada geese along the river, “especially in the neighborhood of Henderson, where I have killed many hundreds of them, as well as on the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville, and in the neighboring country.”
Nor were Canadas the only species of goose he found along the Ohio. He recalled an “English gentlemen, who spent a few weeks with me at Henderson, [and] was desirous of having a tasting of some of our game. His desire was fully gratified, and the first that was placed before him was a White-fronted Goose. I had killed seven of these birds, the evening before, in a pond across the Ohio, which was regularly supplied with flocks from the beginning of October to the end of March. He pronounced it ‘delicious’. . . .”
In the winter of 1810, he and his business partner loaded several barrels of Kentucky whiskey on a keelboat and headed to the settlements in eastern Missouri to try the markets there.
“We could easily perceive that the severe and sudden frost which had just set in had closed all the small lakes and lagoons in the neighborhood,” he remembered eighteen years later, “as thousands of wild waterfowl were flying and settling themselves on the borders of the Ohio.” As they passed Cache Creek, just above the confluence of the Ohio River and the Mississippi, he saw “innumerable ducks driven by winter to the south from the Polar Regions” along with “thousands of paroquets [Carolina parakeets] that came to roost.”
His party stopped at Cache Creek in Illinois Territory where they shared a campsite with a band of Shawnee. The natives had found a lake on the Tennessee side of the river “to which immense flocks of swans resorted every morning.” The swan skins were valuable in trade, so the Shawnee and white men made plans to set an ambush the next morning.
The next day— Christmas Day, 1810, as it turned out— Shawnee women paddled the hunters across the river and spent the morning hunting for nuts while the men made their way through the willow thickets and surrounded the backwater. “There they lie,” Audubon wrote, “by hundreds, of a white or rich cream color— either dipping their black bills in the water, or leaning backwards and gently resting with one leg, expanded. Men were placed behind the trees who knew how to take a dead aim, and every shot told.”
There’s no record of what firearms Audubon carried on this trip, although his shotgun was certainly a flintlock and probably one of the best that could be had with the last of his father’s funds. He was, by all accounts, an excellent wing shot, and his report of this morning suggests that many of the swans were taken on the wing. However, the party was shooting for the market, not for pleasure, and as the birds flew back and forth from one group of men to the other, no mercy was shown.
“What would those English sportsmen . . . say to this day’s devastation amongst the swans? I saw these beautiful birds floating on the water, their backs downwards, struggling in the last agonies of life to the number of at least fifty, their beautiful skins all intended for the ladies of Europe.”[iii]
Such was frontier waterfowling in 1810.
His shop-keeping business and subsequent investments eventually failed, in no small part because Audubon couldn’t bear to tend the store or keep the books. Mired in debt, he escaped down the Ohio, leaving his wife to support their young family as a governess and teacher. With barely a cent to his name, he lived off the land.
In an introduction to one of his series of bird biographies, he offered a generic description of this trip and many others during the lean years he spent in the wilds, combing the backcountry for specimens and shooting for the pot as well as for study: “When evening approaches, and the birds are seen betaking themselves to their retreats, he looks for some place of safety, erects his shed of green boughs, kindles his fire, prepares his meal, and as the Widgeon or Blue-winged Teal, or perhaps the breast of a Turkey, or a steak of venison, sends its delicious perfumes abroad, he enters into his parchment-bound journal the remarkable incidents and facts that have occurred in the course of the day.”[iv]
Eventually, he worked his way down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, where he barely managed to support himself selling chalk portraits to the wealthy citizenry. During his stay, he came by a new scattergun in a most unusual way.
As he walked down the street one afternoon, a veiled woman of fine figure stopped him and asked if he was the French artist who drew birds. Audubon said he was. She gave him an address and told him to meet her there in half an hour. Intrigued, Audubon appeared at the appointed hour and was shown into the young woman’s residence. She asked him to do a drawing of her as she posed— in the nude. Flabbergasted, he agreed and spent five sessions making the drawing.
Subsequent historians have identified her as “Mrs. Andre,” probably the mistress of a wealthy Frenchman who was investing in New Orleans real estate at the time. As the drawing progressed, she inquired about the price. He told her he would be satisfied with whatever she was willing to pay.
“One who hunts so much needs a good gun or two,” she replied, according to Audubon. “This afternoon, see if there is one in the city. I must see it and if I do not like it you are not to have it.”
He dutifully went looking and when his choice met her approval, he apologized for the price— $125. According to Audubon, she was unperturbed: “Take this, be happy, think of me sometimes as you rest on your gun, keep my name forever a secret.” She directed him to have the gun engraved with this memorial (in French): “Do not refuse this gift from a friend who is in your debt; may its goodness equal yours.” Under the ramrod, he added, “Property of LaForest Audubon, February 22, 1821.”
One of Audubon’s smoothbores, this one built by Thomas Conway of Manchester, England, and given to Audubon in recognition of his work as a naturalist and artist.
He sent a description of the encounter to his wife, who was still in Kentucky and apparently had unbounded faith in her husband.
It was about this time that Audubon began to crystallize his lifelong ambition— a book of the birds of North America. Most critics, then and now, believe that Audubon’s art improved significantly during these years; in fact, Audubon himself set about repainting many of his earlier works in an effort to meet his refined standard. He didn’t paint from life. He killed specimens, used wire to suspend them in more or less lifelike positions, then used a grid system to set down an outline of exactly the same size as the bird itself. Over the next five years, he traveled up and down the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, identifying birds with the aid of a shotgun and adding to his portfolio.
Unable to find backers or engravers willing to undertake the production of his book in America, Audubon scraped together every penny he and his wife had managed to save over five years and left for Great Britain. His paintings and his evident expertise were an immediate sensation. He was inducted into several scientific and honorary organizations, including the Royal Society of Scotland, the Wernerian and Antiquarian societies, the Zoological Society of London, the London Royal Society, and the Linnaean Society of London. This last group honored him with a presentation firearm, a percussion-cap smoothbore built by Thomas Conway of Manchester, England. The inscription on the barrel read: “John James Audubon, Citizen of the United States. F.L.S.L. [Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London]”[v] This shotgun is currently housed at Princeton’s Firestone Library.
With the first plates for his book coming off the press and a heartening list of subscribers in his pocket, Audubon returned to America to continue his painting . . . and shooting. A note from his journal in the Southeast reveals his method of identifying birds: “While I was at General Hernandez’s in Florida, the Pintails were very numerous. They alighted everywhere, and I shot a few in order to satisfy myself that they were of the same species as those I had been accustomed to see.”
He continued his travels, voyaging to the east coast of Canada, then up the Missouri River to Fort Union, writing, painting, and hunting as he went. By the time of his death in 1851, he was regarded as the foremost naturalist of his generation, both in the United States and in Europe, and as the American conservation movement grew in the decades after the Civil War, his reputation grew with it.
The portrait of a pair of Canada geese from Audubon’s Birds of North America, now held by the Library of Congress.
In 1886, the editor of Forest and Stream magazine, George Bird Grinnell, proposed the formation of a new conservation group called the Audubon Society, whose members were required to take an oath that they would avoid “killing, wounding, or capturing any wild bird not used for food.” Americans were beginning to wake up to a scarcely believable reality— that humans could wipe out entire species of animals. In some quarters, public sentiment shifted from support for maintaining thriving populations of wild animals to giving them absolute protection.
At about this time, Maria Audubon, one of the great man’s granddaughters, began preparing his journals for publication. Dedicated to protecting her grandfather’s status and reputation, she eliminated anything she found that was out of step with the value system of her age, then destroyed the original journals so that their secrets would be kept. Fragments of the missing journals have emerged from other sources, and these bits of evidence suggest that details of Audubon’s birth, upbringing, and affairs of the heart were eliminated from the published versions.
It’s also likely that some of his descriptions of his shooting were excised, and it’s certain that others were revised to reflect a conservation ethic that was more consistent with the times. And so a granddaughter helped drive the wedge that would eventually separate the conservation movement into two camps.
There could hardly be a more ironic twist to Audubon’s legacy. The conservation movement of the nineteenth century was largely the invention of a group of sportsman-naturalists who combined an appreciation for wildlife and wild places with an enthusiasm for hunting.
Grinnell, the founder of the first Audubon Society, held a Ph.D. in paleontology and was an acknowledged expert on American birds and mammals, a champion of national parks and wildlife refuges, a charter member of the American Ornithological Union, and one of the principal authors of the ground-breaking Model Bird Law protecting nongame birds. He was also a founder of the Boone and Crockett Club and a dyed-in-the-wool hunter.
T. Gilbert Pearson, the executive director of the burgeoning National Association of Audubon Societies at the beginning of the twentieth century, grew up collecting birds and their eggs much as Audubon himself had eighty years earlier. And, of course, there was the leading luminary of the conservation movement, Teddy Roosevelt, an avid hunter and a lifelong birdwatcher, author, at an early age, of The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks.
At the time, there were some who believed, as Maria apparently did, that there was something unnatural in the combination of an affection for wildlife and the attraction of the hunt. Some believe it still. In fact, the two things are inextricably braided together, an emotional whole as old as the human species itself. In John James Audubon, it burned with a particularly pure flame— a scientist’s interest in the diversity of life, an artist’s love affair with things wild and free, a hunter’s passion for the chase. For Audubon, and for generations of hunters before and since, they are all one.
[i] p. 331. Arthur, Stanley C., 1937. Audubon: An Intimate Life of the American Woodsman. Harmanson Publisher, New Orleans, LA.
[ii] p. 17. Audubon, Maria R., 1994. Audubon and His Journals: Volume I. Dover Publications, Minneola, NY.
[iii] pp. 23-24. Rhodes, Richard, 2006. The Audubon Reader. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY.
[iv] p.vi. Audubon, John J., 1838. Ornithological Biography, or an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America, Accompanied by Descriptions of the Objects Represented in the Work Entitled, Birds of America, Together with an Account of the Digestive Organs of Many of the Species, Illustrated by Engravings on Wood. Volume IV. Adam & Charles Black, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Monk’s Mound, the largest remaining mound at Cahokia Mounds State Historical Site. (Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
STRANGE HOW THE CURRENTS OF TIME EBB AND FLOW.
Not long ago, I found myself on the Mississippi River floodplain, just across from the bluffs of Jefferson Barracks, the historic army post on the southern edge of St. Louis. The plain on the Illinois side is not just flat; it’s almost perfectly level, like a rough-sawn board that’s been run through a planer. Twenty miles long, as much as nine miles wide, it lies at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the work of thousands of years of flood water, dropping uncounted loads of silt.
I was staring up at a substantial hill on that horizontal expanse— a hill where no hill had any right to be— and I found that I shared the view of another traveler who had visited the place before me. In 1813, Henry Brackenridge, a judge in New Orleans, was so impressed that he took the time to write Thomas Jefferson about it:
“There are not less than one hundred mounds in two different groups,” he wrote; “one of the mounds falls little short of the Egyptian pyramid Mycerius. When I examined it in 1811, I was astonished that this stupendous monument of antiquity should have been unnoticed by any traveler: I afterwards published an account in the newspapers at St. Louis, detailing its dimensions, describing its form, position, etc., but this, which I thought might almost be considered a discovery, attracted no notice: and yet I stated it to be eight hundred paces in circumference (the exact size of the pyramid of Asychis) and one hundred feet in height.”[i]
Brackenridge’s mounds were the remains of a mighty city, but, as gigantic as they were, they seemed destined for anonymity. They were overlooked by explorers from Marquette to DeSoto and mostly forgotten, even by the descendants of the people who built them. Americans of Brackenridge’s time reacted to his report with a shrug, and over the next 150 years, generations of local residents mostly shared this indifference.
My fifth-grade teacher, a fanatic enthusiast of local history, arranged to bus our class down to the largest of the ancient monuments, known to locals as Monk’s Mound. As I recall, we walked up a dirt path to the top of what seemed to be a substantial hill on a remarkably flat plain at the edge of the town of Collinsville, Illinois, looked around, and went back to the bus for our peanut butter sandwiches.
By that time, a mound on the St. Louis side of the river, almost as large as Monk’s Mound, had been scooped up by steam shovels, loaded into wagons, and used for fill on a railroad line, while two mounds of similar size on the Illinois side had been flattened for farmland, and several others had been built over. It wasn’t until 1960, when the entire site was threatened by the construction of three interstate highways, that the combination of scientific interest and adequate funding allowed archaeologists to begin a serious analysis of the place.[ii]
It’s called Cahokia today. The real name is lost to memory— Cahokia is the name of a tribe that occupied the area until the 1820s.[iii] A thousand years ago, the residents of the rich bottomland suddenly began building cities. The remains of at least three are known today— the St. Louis complex, the East St. Louis complex, and the greater Cahokia complex. The Cahokia complex alone has more than 120 mounds. Monk’s Mound is the largest earthen structure in the New World, larger even than the stone Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan or the Great Pyramid of Giza. The great ceremonial mound towers over a fifty-acre central plaza that was once surrounded by a wooden palisade twenty feet high. There was a circular astronomical observatory designed to track the motion of the sun across the heavens. Trade brought rare goods from as far away as the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Superior, and central Wisconsin.[iv] At its height, this city may have had 25,000 residents.[v]
Mound at Cahokia Mounds State Historical Site with Monk’s Mound in the background. (Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
After more than a century of increasing prosperity, Cahokia ran on hard times. There is no evidence of a sudden cataclysm, just a steady decline— by the fourteenth century, the city had been abandoned.[vi] Other, smaller population centers of the Mississipian culture survived and prospered to see the arrival of Spanish invaders and the subsequent plagues that decimated native populations, but by that time, Cahokia was not only gone, but forgotten by the descendants its builders had left behind.
Explanations for Cahokia’s decline vary. One of the leading experts on the site is convinced that it was the result of a steady decay of the social fabric that held the community together. He argues that the root cause may have been political— a loss of confidence in the ruling elite— or religious— a loss of faith. He finds evidence supporting his analysis in the harsher punishments, including decapitation, meted out to residents near the end of the city’s history.
Other Cahokia scholars offer a different explanation. The demands 20,000 people put on the local landscape must have been intense. One archaeologist has estimated that there were more than 600,000 wooden posts in the walls of the houses. More wood was required for beams and rafters. The palisade around the city center was built of something like 20,000 logs and demanded regular repair as the buried wood rotted. Then, there was the constant demand for firewood.
Re-creation of a small section of the palisade that once surrounded the plaza and major mounds at Cahokia Mounds State Historical Site. (Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
Some of the wood used at the site came from places as far away as the mouth of the Ohio River, 150 miles to the south, and as the city aged, the kinds of trees used in construction changed to less durable species like soft maple, hackberry, and willow. All this suggests that the timber around the city had been used up.
The loss of forests on the flood plain and nearby bluffs would have had the same effect they have today— increased runoff, erosion, flooding. At the same time, the diet of the populace was shifting from a protein-rich combination of fish and game as constant pressure decimated local wildlife populations, and crops like amaranth, goosefoot, and sunflower were replaced with a menu headed by corn.
A steady diet of corn isn’t good for people or the land that supports it. Even on a flood plain where topsoil is periodically replenished by high water, corn exhausts the soil, and it doesn’t provide humans with key nutrients. Analysis of teeth and bones from Cahokia suggests problems with infection and “nutritional stress.”[vii]
The two explanations for Cahokia’s decline aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s quite possible that the political and/or religious fabric of the community frayed over time. That’ll happen when the people are sick and hungry. The question remains: Which is cause and which is effect?
When I first heard the story of the rise and fall of Cahokia, I was struck with how familiar it sounded. Nearly sixty years ago, an agronomist and a conservationist got together to write a history of a different part of the world, the birthplace of western civilization in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East and the shores of the Mediterranean. The book, Topsoil and Civilization, by Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter, is largely forgotten now, just as the ruins of Cahokia were forgotten, but it made a profound impression on me.
Dale and Carter had a view of the decline of the great nation-states that gave rise to modern Europe that diverged from the descriptions offered by generations of historians. While the “experts” focused on political and religious pressures as the forces that caused these societies to rise and fall, Dale and Carter favored a more basic explanation: soil. As they wrote at one point: “This has always been the way of historians and other writers— they usually write about the relations of human beings with each other and seldom about the relations of people to the land.”[viii]
The great cities along the Tigris and Euphrates were built on a foundation of grain produced in the irrigated fields on the river bottoms. As long as the fields produced, the cities prospered; when the fields grew sick from the salt left behind as the irrigation water evaporated, the cities withered. Famine, war, social dislocation followed. The ecological damage done lingers even today, nearly 3,000 years after it was inflicted.
The great city of Carthage suffered roughly the same fate, its fields of wheat eventually reduced to desert by the demands of the populace and the market. The famous cedars of Lebanon were removed from their mountain slopes for sale across the Mediterranean. The resulting erosion, combined with the browsing of growing herds of sheep and goats, kept the trees from growing back and finally stripped the land of any productive soil. Again, the damage done before the birth of Christ has yet to heal.
Greece? Dale and Carter saw the same pattern: “By the time of the Peloponnesian War most of the arable land of Greece was severely eroded and was producing only scant crops.”[ix]
And Rome? Dale and Carter considered the decline of farm productivity in the Roman Empire at great length, concluding with the story of Adria, a town established by the Etruscans on an island in the Adriatic Sea, then several miles from the mouth of the Po River. When the Romans annexed the river valley, local farmers were called upon to feed their masters to the south.
“By the end of the Western Roman Empire,” Dale and Carter wrote, “silt from the highlands had filled in the area so that Adria was no longer on an island, but was on the mainland.”[x] They concluded their chapter on the Romans with a short consideration of the efforts that are being made today to undo the damage that has been done: “The twentieth-century conservation work in Italy will undoubtedly help— but it is two thousand years too late to give the Italian people the resources they need to support a prosperous and dynamic civilization comparable to that of their famous ancestors.”[xi]
——-
There’s an epigram that has made the rounds for many years: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The rhymes in these stories are chilling. The argument could be made that the declines of these civilizations
Monk’s Mound, the largest remaining mound at Cahokia Mounds State Historical Site. (Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
were ultimately the result of mismanagement, that our modern grasp of soil science, agricultural technique, timber management, ecological relationships, and wildlife conservation should keep us from supplying yet another rhyme in one of mankind’s oldest dirges.
But, with all our knowledge, we’re still losing nearly five tons of topsoil on every acre of cropland in America.[xii] Every year. And that doesn’t consider other impacts like soil compaction from heavy machinery or loss of microflora in the soil community to a variety of pesticides. A recent report from the World Wildlife Fund estimates that, overall, populations of vertebrate wildlife on earth have declined by sixty percent in the last fifty years. [xiii] We seem unwilling, or unable, to use what we know.
That’s no accident. In this, as in so many other areas of American life, our appetities and the profit margins of large corporations seem to overwhelm every other consideration. And beyond corporate greed, there’s another force at work— the insistent demand of a growing population. It’s the same pressure that has wrecked landscapes from Babylonia to Cahokia, and we seem no more capable of dealing with it now than the kings and chiefs in those far-off places dealt with it then. It may well be that we are prisoners of our own drive to breed.
As I watched the sun set over Cahokia that cool April evening, I saw, not only the ghosts of a sad and almost forgotten past, but the shades of a future that is uncertain at best. History may not repeat itself, I thought . . . but I can hear the rhyme.
[i] pp. 154-155. Brackenridge, H.M., 1818. On the populations and tumuli of the aborigines of North America. In a letter from H.M. Brackenridge, Esq., to Thomas Jefferson. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 1: 151-159.
[ii] Young, Whiting Bloine and Melvin L. Fowler, 2000. Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, IL.
[iii] p.3. Young and Fowler, 2000.
[iv] P.387ff. Emerson, Thomas et al, 2018. Revealing Greater Cahokia, North America’s First Native City: Rediscovery and Large-Scale Excavations of the East St. Louis Precinct. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[v] p.310. Young and Fowler, 200
[vi] p.310. Young and Fowler, 2000.
[vii] p.233. Emerson, Thomas, et al, 2018.
[viii] p.90. Dale, Tom and Vernon Gill Carter, 1955. Topsoil and Civilization. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK.
[ix] p.93. Dale and Carter, 1955.
[x] p.153, Dale and Carter, 1955.
[xi] p.155. Dale and Carter, 1955.
[xii] pp.5-49 and 5-67. USDA, 2018. Summary Report: National Resources Inventory. Natural Resources Conservation Service, Washington, D.C. and Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA.
[xiii] Grooten, Monique and Rosamunde Almond, 2018. Living Planet Report— 2018. Aiming Higher. World Wildlife Fund, Gland, Switzerland.
Beaver Falls on the Olin Nature Preserve near Alton, Illinois. (Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
TWO HUNDRED YARDS TO THE BEND IN THE LANE, ANOTHER 200 DOWN THE HILL AND ACROSS THE PASTURE. AND WE WERE THERE.
In the adult world, it was a 300-acre tract of timber owned by a local industrial magnate who kept a magnificent house of native stone on one edge of the property, but was seldom in residence, being occupied with the business and pleasures of his holdings somewhere far to the east. It was surrounded on three sides by carefully manicured suburban yards and on the fourth by tiny patches of native prairie that clung to the crumbling lip of limestone bluffs 200 feet above the sun-drenched Mississippi. Six or seven miles away, across the expanse of flood plain on the other shore, another set of bluffs rose on the far side of the Missouri, the river itself invisible in the distance as it finished its travels from the wild country to the west.
For the tribe of kids in our neighborhood, it was just “The Woods.”
I don’t know whether my parents were aware of The Woods when they signed the mortgage papers and moved us into the little brick house on the cul de sac. Probably not. Looking back at it with the perspective of a grownup, I’d guess they were taken up with the worries of adults, trying to stretch an anemic budget and climb off the treadmill of rent payments. I imagine the house was what they could afford. The location was just a lucky break— one of the luckiest of my entire life.
A dozen of us grew up in The Woods. Oh, we spent time elsewhere. We helped with chores around the house and went to school and watched TV, but I think it’s fair to say that The Woods were really our home. Everything else lay on the periphery of our lives. We knew the ways in and out almost as well as the deer— the tangle of black raspberry and greenbrier that blocked the northeast corner, the dense second-growth at the head of the creek, the screen of bois d’arc that hid us from Mr. Miller’s kitchen window. Mr. Miller owned the pasture we crossed to get to The Woods, and we were convinced— on the strength of absolutely no evidence— that he frowned on the idea of ragged urchins helping themselves to the shortcut across his land, so when we went, we went like cottontails, quick and quiet as smoke, there for a second, then gone.
In the summer, we left our houses while the dew was still on the grass, sometimes with a packsack of sandwiches, sometimes not. Ten hours later, as the shadows lengthened, we’d emerge, the sweat drying on our faces, thirsty, hungry, generally late for supper.
Creek on the Olin Nature Preserve near Alton, Illinois. (Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
Small as it was, it was an unusually pristine remnant of the forest that had once dominated the Mississippi breaks. A spring-fed creek tumbled over ledges of bedrock, sometimes with a fall of twenty feet, pooling under the shady overhangs where ancient pottery shards bore silent witness to the ghosts of people who had lived in this place long before we arrived. Old-growth white and red oak on the ridges, shagbark and pignut hickory, black cherry, and, down along the creek, walnut and silver maple and giant sycamore, their branches tangled with the vines of wild grape. Carpets of mayapple in the spring, hiding the morels and the occasional jack-in-the-pulpit. Prairie trillium, wild geranium, and ginseng. Sumac and bittersweet at the sunny edges. Shade in the summer, shelter from the north wind in the winter. A world unto itself.
We learned to tell the difference between poison ivy and Virginia creeper there; between stinging nettle and jewel weed; the difference between a squirrel track and a rabbit track, between a hickory and an oak. We saw where raccoons had eaten crawdads and deer had paused to drink.
There were other lessons, too, more subtle, harder to describe, but, in the end, maybe more important: The feel of a gathering storm. The way quiet gathers along the creek with the cool of the evening, touching you almost the way the cool touches you. The sense of discovery. The first heady sensation of being on your own. The taste of freedom.
In January of my seventeenth year, we had a heavy snow. When the wind lay and the sun came out, my mom and dad decided to take my two-year-old sister for a walk. They wrapped her up in coat, mittens and insulated bibs, nested her in a kiddy pack on my dad’s back, and set out for the woods. I grabbed the family toboggan and set off in the other direction to meet friends at the top of a near-vertical slope covered in deadfall and oak timber where we often rendezvoused after a snow to test the extent of our teen-aged invulnerability.
When I walked into the house at dusk, wet and hungry, I could tell an adult discussion had just concluded. Mom was grumbling and Dad was apologetic. He turned to me and, almost as a confession, said: “We got lost down there. I’d never really realized there’s a second drainage that comes in below the falls. We took the wrong creek back. Ended up being a long walk. Good thing we had the little one bundled up.”
Mom hmmphed and went out to the kitchen.
I said nothing, but the thought went through my seventeen-year-old head: How in the world could you get lost down there? And in that instant, I realized two things— that my father was human, and that, in this one tiny slice of life, I knew more than he did.
Spring beauty on the Olin Nature Preserve near Alton, Illinois. (Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
That was fifty years ago. In that time, I’ve found much bigger, wilder places and learned a lot from them, but all those experiences rest on the education The Woods gave me. And, in that, I’m not much different than millions of other people with an interest in wild places. Nearly all the professionals in the field of conservation of wildlife and wild land— biologists, rangers, guides, wildlife photographers, writers— had their own versions of The Woods. For some, it was the creek out back; for others, the draw at the far end of the pasture, a pond, a riverbank, or just some neglected scrap of timber at the edge of a subdivision. Some had adults to get them started; a remarkable number did not.
The same can be said of many others for whom wildlife and wild places are an avocation, not a vocation— birders, wildflower enthusiasts, canoeists, backpackers, hikers, campers, anglers, hunters. For nearly all of us, the beginning can be traced back to a wild place we could call our own.
In recent decades, the conservation community has watched with growing concern as participation in outdoor activities that emphasize wild places has failed to keep pace with the overall growth of population in the United States. Statistics vary, but recent analyses from The Outdoor Foundation provide a sobering overview. In their 2017 report, they found that the proportion of Americans over the age of six who fished has dropped from 19 percent of the population in 2007 to about 16 percent in 2016. The proportion of hunters remained about the same— 5.1 percent in 2007; 5.2 percent in 2016. The proportion of birdwatchers dropped from 4.9 percent to 3.9 percent. The proportion of wildlife viewers dropped from 8.3 percent to 7 percent. Campers— 11.3 percent down to 8.9 percent. Canoeists— 3.5 percent down to 3.4 percent. Backpackers— a small increase from 2.4 percent to 3.4 percent. Hiking— another small increase, from 10.8 percent to 14.2 percent.[i] All this at a time when the nation’s overall population grew by nearly 8 percent.
I suppose those of us who treasure the outdoors can take some faint comfort in the knowledge that competition for access to increasingly scarce resources is waning. Since the quality of most wild experiences decreases as the number of people seeking them increases, these trends will leave better experiences for those of us who remain— at least, for a while. But loss of participants will lead inevitably to a loss of a constituency, which will lead to a drop in funding for wild places and wild things and, even more critical, a decline in the political leverage that has always been crucial in the effort to maintain wildness on the American landscape.
Our wild places need more champions, and for more than twenty years, people who care have tried a variety of approaches to get more people in touch with the wild. It can be argued that the numbers would be even more depressing had it not been for those efforts, but it also seems clear from the statistics that something important is missing in our effort to recruit users— and supporters— of wild land.
Eastern redbud blossoms near Alton, Illinois. (Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
I’ve long suspected that one of the missing elements in that effort is the availability of places like The Woods, wild corners that are within biking, or even walking, distance of people who can’t or won’t drive to find them. Places that are not manicured, mowed, trimmed, or pruned, where regulations are kept to a minimum, where a ten- or twelve-year-old can explore without the need for adult transportation or supervision.
A few such places already exist in urban and near-urban settings, some by design, many more by accident, like The Woods. But, as U.S. population grows, such accidents of preservation will happen less and less frequently and are likely to be more and more ephemeral. And, as magnificent as places like New York’s Central Park or Chico, California’s Bidwell Park may be, they’re accessible to only a tiny fraction of local residents who lack motorized transportation.
About four years ago, a team of researchers took a hard look at the growing rift between Americans and the environment, surveying nearly 12,000 people across the country and organizing fifteen focus groups in five of the nation’s biggest cities. The study was led by Dr. Stephen Kellert, a professor of “social ecology” at Yale University and one of the nation’s leading researchers on the relationship between people and their planet. He was assisted by David J. Case and Associates, a firm that has spent most of the last thirty years gathering information on human interactions with the environment.
They published their findings last April in a cooperative report, “The Nature of Americans: Disconnection and Recommendations for Reconnection.”[ii] They found a number of social and economic forces that separated Americans from contact with nature— one of the most telling was the simple lack of wild places close at hand.
“Physical places, or a built environment, generally discourage contact with the natural world,” they wrote in their summary and then continued with the effect of age on that connection: “For children, nature is located quite literally right out the door, and special places outdoors and unforgettable memories often consist of nearby yards, woods, creeks, and gardens. But in contrast to children, adults tend to set a high and even impossible standard for what they perceived to be ‘authentic’ and unforgettable nature, believing that it requires solitude and travel to faraway places, which reinforces their perceptions of the relative inaccessibility of nature. . . . When asked about places near where they live, minorities and urban residents in particular perceive fewer places nearby to enjoy the outdoors.”[iii]
Jack-in-the-pulpit on the Olin Nature Preserve near Alton, Illinois. (Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
“Nearby”— that’s a part of wild land management that has been largely neglected in the last seventy years. The government agencies that are charged with creating or preserving wild places have limited funds and manpower. They tend to focus on high-quality parcels that are far from town. We have national parks, monuments, forests, grasslands, recreation areas, wild rivers, and wildlife refuges; we have state wildlife reserves and management areas; we have a scattering of wild reserves owned and managed by land trusts and other local entities. Patterns of land use generally dictate that these places are isolated, often hard to reach, even by car, and nearly always far from metropolitan areas. There aren’t enough of them; we need to redouble our efforts to establish them and keep them wild. But they’re not enough.
The task of providing wild playgrounds for most kids may well fall to urban departments of parks and recreation, agencies that are chronically underfunded and often bound by traditional prejudices about what a city park should be. Soccer fields, ball parks, picnic areas, and jungle gyms are all well and good, but in this disconnected age, children need places where they can get back to the earth.
The good news is that such places require almost no maintenance. The bad news is that every neighborhood, every elementary school, needs its own. Too many unsupervised— and we want them to be unsupervised— visitors can wear out a patch of timber or creek bank in short order. Historically, our response to this fact has been to impose regulations, put up signs, assign a police officer, and keep kids out. The enlightened response would be to recognize that we need more wild places, not more rules.
There’s nothing new in this view. Richard Louv should be given credit for resurrecting it in his powerful 2006 book, Last Child in the Woods. “Our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature,” he wrote. “That lesson is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom— while disassociating the outdoors with joy and solitude. Well-meaning public-school systems, media, and parents are effectively scaring children straight out of the woods and fields.”[iv]
It was a critically important message, but Louv was far from the first to express concern over the American child’s isolation from the natural world. Gary Nabhan and Stephen Trimble published The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places,[v] a collection of essays on what Louv would later call “nature-deficit disorder,” in 1994. Before Nabhan and Trimble, there was Paul Shepard’s 1982 book, Nature and Madness;[vi] Edith Cobb’s 1959 volume The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood;[vii] Jean Piaget’s 1929 study, The Child’s Conception of the World;[viii] and long before that, Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages, first published in 1903. In the introductory chapter of that book, before Seton begins his narrative description of kids building log cabins and tepees, tanning hides, building live traps, foraging for wild fruits and vegetables, hunting and fishing, he offers a thinly-veiled description of his own childhood as the motivation for writing the book:
“His father was in poor circumstances. He was an upright man of refined tastes, but indolent— a failure in business easy with the world and stern with his family. He had never taken an interest in his son’s wildwood pursuits; and when he got the idea that they might interfere with the boy’s education, he forbade them altogether. . . .
“He was a timid, obedient boy in most things, but the unwise command to give up what was in his nature merely made him a disobedient boy— turned a good boy into a bad one. He was too much in terror of his father to disobey openly, but he used to sneak away at all opportunities to the fields and woods, and at each new bird or plant he found he had an exquisite thrill of mingled pleasure and pain— the pain because he had no name for it or means of learning its nature.”
In the dedication of the book, he wrote, “Because I have known the torment of thirst I would dig a well where others may drink.”[ix]
For a century or more, we’ve recognized the crucial need to connect children with the wild world, and yet, we’ve largely failed to provide the single most important and irreplaceable part of that connection: places for children to be wild in.
Here in the United States, we’ve failed to change the way we design urban areas or manage open spaces, and as Richard Louv has written, we’ve done much to deprive our kids of that wild experience, but other countries have begun to experiment with ways to make the connection. In 1993, a group of German educators launched the first forest kindergarten, a pre-school program that was held entirely outdoors. In 2003, there were more than 300 similar preschools in Germany for three- to six-year-old students, popularly known as the “Forest Mice.”[x] In recent years, the concept has spread to the United Kingdom.[xi] The approach has undeniable appeal, and I would love to see America follow suit— the problem is finding the places in our cities and suburbs to hold the classes.
It’s hard to say where the change should begin. Reform of our approach to K-12 education? A more enlightened idea of what urban open space should look like? Parents who have a more realistic view of risk and the importance of independence in a child’s development? All of these things . . . and perhaps something more: an appreciation of the place wildness occupies in the life of every living thing, the human animal not least.
———–
Prairie trillium on the Olin Nature Preserve near Alton, Illinois. (Photo copyright 2019, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I traveled back to my childhood home for a funeral. We were in need of a little sunshine in the midst of that somber trip, so one chilly April morning, we paid a visit to The Woods. Thanks to the generosity of its former owner, it is now a wildlife reserve, owned and lovingly managed by a local land trust, The Nature Institute, and surrounded by suburbs. We left the car in a parking lot that I remembered as a pasture and took off down a long draw, heading for a waterfall that is the heart of the place.
Maybe it was the unusual point of entry, or maybe it had just been too many years since my last visit— whatever the cause, I turned up the wrong side drainage and soon had us bushwhacking through the timber, making the hike the hard way.
Still, it was worth the walk. Some things we know as children seem to shrink when we come back as adults. This place hadn’t. Sprays of redbud hung over the creek; jack-in-the-pulpit and spring beauty raised their heads from the blanket of last year’s leaves, and the creek shattered as it dropped over the limestone rim, catching the morning sun and throwing it back into the shaded overhangs below.
As I stood there, the lay of the land came slowly back to me, but I had to smile at the memory of that cocksure teen so many years ago, wondering how his dad could ever get lost here. Strange and more than a little sad how hard it can be to find our way back to childhood. But a trip worth making, now and then, for ourselves and our children. Maybe that’s the only way to really understand how much they need the wild.
[ii] Kellert, Stephen R., D.J. Case, Daniel Escher, Daniel J. Witter, Jessica Mikels-Carrasco, and Phil T. Send, 2017. The Nature of Americans: Disconnection and Recommendations for Reconnection. https://natureofamericans.org/. Accessed April 2, 2019.
[iii] pp3-4, Kellert, et al.
[iv] p.2. Louv, Richard, 2006. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC.
[v] Nabhan, Gary Paul and Stephen Trimble, 1994. The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places. Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
[vi] Shepard, Paul, 1982. Nature and Madness. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA.
[vii] Cobb, Edith. The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood. Columbia University Press.
[viii] Piaget, Jean, 1929. The Child’s Conception of the World. Redwood Press, Ltd., London, UK.
[ix] Seton, Ernest Thompson, 1903. Two Little Savages: Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned. Doubleday and Company, Garden City, NY
Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi), an endangered species in the Southwest. (Controlled situation). (Photo copyright 2016 by Tim Christie, all rights reserved).
IT’S FAR BETTER THAN THE OLD-FASHIONED CELL HIS GRANDPARENTS LIVED AND BRED IN TWENTY YEARS AGO. HERE, AT least, he can feel the sun on his back, roll in the grass, and escape from the prying eyes of visitors if he chooses. But it is still a cage. The chain link fence is buried two feet into the ground and folded back underneath to ensure that he doesn’t dig his way out. There is a path worn into the dirt just inside the fence where he trots, the spring-steel wolf lope carrying him effortlessly around the acre of landscaped compound, lap after lap, mile after mile.
If there were a way to ask him why he continues his ceaseless rounds, what he’s looking for, I’m sure he’d reply within the compass of his own experience. He would probably ask for another five pounds of meat or a female in heat. Not freedom, certainly, since he has no grasp of it. If he were turned loose on the tundra where his great-grandfather was whelped, he would probably die of starvation or be ripped to shreds by the resident wolves. And yet, whether he knows it or not, I think I know why he runs. He is hunting caribou, still hunting after four generations in a cage.
It may be stretching a metaphor too far to empathize with him, but I don’t think so. More than ninety percent of us live in cities these days. Most of us are at least two generations removed from the farm and perhaps 400 generations removed from the days when men left home in the morning with spears in their hands for appointments with bison and mammoths. We’ve done our best to domesticate ourselves in all those years to serve as an example of what the tamed beast should be. For the advantaged, our cities are large and comfortable, at least inside the rather selective parameters we use to gauge comfort. If we were asked what more we could possibly want, we would reply within the compass of our own experience. A sixty-inch television perhaps, or a new car. We would explain our unfocused restlessness and depressions, the coronaries and nervous breakdowns, the three-martini lunches, the addictions and suicides, as individual aberrations. And yet I think I know why we run.
Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi), an endangered species in the Southwest. Controlled situation). (Photo copyright 2016 Tim Christie, all rights reserved).
Under the thin veneer of civilization we’ve imposed on ourselves, we are still largely untamed creatures living in cages of our own making, penned in with a constant, fundamental contradiction. We pride ourselves on our penetrating insight, our astonishing technological aptitude, but we’re faintly uncomfortable with our appetite for beef. We dote on our gifted children filling classrooms with newly discovered knowledge but chastise them for staring out the window on a warm spring afternoon. We make plans to visit other planets and try to forget our fear of the dark. In short, we are pleased to have the intellectual legacy of our African ancestors but embarrassed by the covenant that comes with it.
The last 8,000 years of Western culture have been characterized by our violent struggle to deny that covenant. Somewhere in the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer, we took up the destruction of wilderness with a terrible enthusiasm. It was more than an effort to protect our flocks and fields, more than the pursuit of wealth. For many generations, it amounted to a holy war.
We had nearly finished the job before we began to recognize the potential cost. The list of practical values of wild places has mounted with our understanding of native environments. At the turn of the last century, we finally recognized what wetlands and timber meant to the protection of topsoil and clean water. In the years since, we have found out much more: the possibility of new drugs and fibers; natural pesticides to protect our crops, new genes to make them more efficient; natural processes that soften the effects of global warming, pollution, and desertification. There has been sophisticated discussion of natural diversity as an investment in global stability— something even a Wall Street stockbroker can appreciate.
What we still fail to appreciate is the place wildness occupies in the human spirit. All too often, we still assume we can excise the need for it from our character without disturbing anything else. That’s not too surprising— after all, it’s the way we’ve dealt with every other unruly facet of nature we’ve encountered. Maybe it’s time we took a lesson from our failures. All our best efforts notwithstanding, we are beginning to find that the world doesn’t run properly without some measure of wildness in it. The same can be said of the human animal itself. Whether we recognize it or not, our hunt is still going on— the same restless search to the horizon that has brought us from the plains of the African Pliocene to where we are now. If we’re far enough removed from wilderness, we may not even recognize the root of the feeling, but that makes little difference— we still can’t leave it behind. Now and then, it demands free rein in an empty place, a long run in the tall grass and timber. Without that, it will subside at last into pacing the perimeter of our circumscribed lives, without direction or rest, looking for a way out and finding none.
Pronghorn herd near the Granite Mountains, Wyoming. In 1922, there were about 30,000 pronghorns in the American West. Thanks to enlightened management in several states, the populations had risen to 380,000 by 1964. (Photo copyright 2015, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
ON FEBRUARY 1, 1902, DAN NOWLIN BECAME CHIEF GAME WARDEN FOR THE STATE OF WYOMING. NOWLIN WAS A PRODUCT OF THE WESTERN frontier. Born in Kerr County, Texas, in 1857, he joined the Texas Rangers in 1873 at the age of sixteen. In 1888, he was elected to a two-year term as sheriff in Lincoln County, New Mexico, following the famous lawman, Pat Garrett, in that post. Eventually, he moved to Wyoming Territory to start a ranch in the as-yet-unsettled country along the upper Green River.
In his first year as Wyoming’s game warden, he traveled more than 1,000 miles on horseback to contact his deputies and inspect game herds, a feat he seemed to accept as a routine part of the job. During an eventful life, he’d faced renegade Comanches and Kiowa, tracked down rustlers and robbers, and built a home in some of the last wilderness of the West. He wasn’t daunted by the challenges of enforcing the emerging precepts of wildlife conservation on the frontier. What he seemed to find most discouraging was the task of convincing state lawmakers to fund the conservation effort with the hunting license money it raised.
Dan Nowlin, second chief game warden in Wyoming.
In his 1902 report to the legislature, he had this to say: “Since the present game law has been in force— four years— non-resident hunters have paid into the State game fund, in round numbers, twenty-four thousand dollars; and a conservative estimate of the amount paid by them to citizens of Wyoming for guiding, equipment, etc., places the sum at one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. The sport and profit derived by our own citizens from our wild game during this period cannot be estimated; the expense to our taxpayers has been nil— not a dollar has been appropriated to assist in protecting our game.
“. . . [S]ince the date of my appointment . . . there were unpaid claims . . . aggregating nearly three thousand dollars. These claims were compelled to await payment until the State game fund had been replenished by the contingent moneys derived from the sale of hunting licenses, and from fines.
“The diversion of so much money from a fund that is inadequate at best has greatly crippled the service; notwithstanding this shortage of funds much effective work has been done. . . .”
In 1902, Wyoming collected $7,439.65 in hunting license fees and fines, but the legislature saw fit to spend only $4,184.50 on game. The lawmakers looked on income from hunting licenses as no different than any other revenue stream: When they saw a little black ink in the state’s ledger, they were inclined to approve a little more budget for the game warden; when times were lean, they were happy to divert the lion’s share of license fees away from game management to other priorities.
Nor was Wyoming in any way unusual in this. Most infant wildlife departments lived the same sort of street urchin’s existence, tending game populations that raised a tidy sum in license fees and economic benefits, then begging their masters for a pittance to support the work.
In 1907, the Pennsylvania state treasurer decided that a law granting the fines from all game law violations to the Game Commission was inconvenient, so he deposited them in the state’s general fund instead. In 1913, the Pennsylvania Game Commission managed to convince the state legislature to require all resident hunters to buy a $1 license, but in 1922, the newly elected governor, Gifford Pinchot— the same Pinchot who had helped Teddy Roosevelt establish the U.S. Forest Service— decided to channel all the license funds into the state’s coffers and fund the department with legislative appropriations.
In 1927, the director of the Colorado Game and Fish Commission headed off a similar effort. “They tried to take our game cash fund from us,” he wrote to a friend in Utah, “ which is money paid in licenses and things of that sort and belongs really to the sportsmen, but they were trying to put it in the general fund to appropriate as they pleased.”
The uncertainty of the financial support for state wildlife work may have been even more damaging than the paltry sums that were often granted to game managers by their legislatures, since they disrupted any plan that involved more than a year’s work. And lack of money was just one of the problems facing early conservationists. Once state wildlife departments began paying salaries to their employees, the jobs themselves often became embroiled in politics.
In 1931 Gifford Pinchot returned for a second term as Pennsylvania governor and set off another round of controversy by interfering with the Game Commission’s firing of four employees. Perhaps the most egregious example of pork barrel politics in state wildlife agencies came two years later in Missouri. A newly inaugurated governor chose Wilbur Buford, a politically connected attorney from St. Louis, as the state’s new commissioner of game and fish. At the end of his first year in office, Buford reported that he had accomplished a complete turnover of department personnel.
As the conservation movement gained momentum through the last half of the nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, the use of jobs as rewards for party stalwarts, the back-room redirection of license income and fines collected from poachers were the rule, not the exception, in state wildlife agencies. If reports of specific cases seem to be scarce, it’s simply because there was nothing unusual in these maneuvers— they were the tools of the political trade at the time.
The pioneering wildlife advocates who built the first state conservation departments were well aware of the political landscape in which they operated. Joseph Kalbfus, the director of the infant Pennsylvania Game Commission at the turn of the last century, was not alone in preferring a guaranteed appropriation from the legislature for wildlife conservation rather than supporting it with hunting license dollars, but across the country, wildlife advocates found that no other funds were forthcoming. In most cases, these pioneer conservationist had manipulated the system to enact wildlife laws and create agencies to enforce them. But they quickly recognized that, without some insulation from the vagaries of politics, conservation would make no headway, and the only dependable source of income were the fees paid by hunters and anglers.
Reform proceeded slowly at first, as powerful sportsmen’s groups in a handful of states brought pressure to bear on legislatures to fund conservation departments and stay out of their personnel decisions.
Finally, in 1928, John Burnham, president of the American Game Association, stood up in front of the 15th American Game Conference in New York and made a proposal. He pointed out a variety of problems that faced wildlife conservation and outdoor recreation: loss of habitat, the effects of increasing human population and demand for hunting, limited access to recreation on public and private land. And the lack of adequate funding for the enforcement of game laws, wildlife management, and research.
Burnham suggested that the country needed an overarching policy to guide the management of wildlife and wildlife-related recreation. The assembly agreed and a twelve-man committee was formed to draft a statement of goals for review at the next annual meeting. The committee was chaired by an itinerant biologist who had recently left the U.S. Forest Service to begin a survey of game populations in the upper Midwest— Aldo Leopold.
Aldo Leopold making an entry in his journal at his shack in Wisconsin. Leopold chaired the committee that wrote the American Game Policy and was probably its primary author.
Leopold had been instrumental in reforming the state wildlife agencies in New Mexico and Wisconsin, and his experience with the game survey would soon prompt him to write the pioneering text, Game Management, a classic in its field. He was the perfect choice to lead the effort to define the needs of the struggling conservation movement.
He defined the committee’s goal with disarming simplicity: “This is a plan for stimulating the growing of wild game crops for recreational use,” he wrote. “While this plan deals with game only, the actions necessary to produce a crop of game are in large part those which will also conserve other valuable forms of wild life.”
The committee spent two years hammering out the details and came to the 1930 American Game Conference with a final draft. There is no record of the debate that ensued or a count of the final vote, but in the end, the professionals in attendance adopted the proposal.
The American Game Policy was a wide-ranging document. It pointed out that “our present attempt to restore game by the control of hunting seasons and bag limits alone has failed”— and called for active management “to provide favorable environments” for game on the modern landscape. It discussed ways to encourage private landholders to help create and maintain habitat, advocated a drastic increase in funding for research, and called for “harmonious cooperation between sportsmen and other conservationists.”
After considering the major ecological and political issues facing wildlife, the committee turned its attention to the emerging profession of wildlife management. The members emphasized the need for technically trained biologists, wildlife administrators, and field workers along with national funding for wildlife research. They also called for reorganization of state conservation departments.
The first step, in their view, was establishing a policy-making body that had some degree of independence. The members of this commission would be appointed by the governor; they would serve without pay, and their terms would be staggered “to avoid sudden reversals in policy.” This commission would have the power to set all hunting and fishing regulations, and it would hire the department’s director. “If this vital point is compromised,” the policy stated, “the whole idea breaks down.”
The director would hire all department personnel and be responsible for the execution of all management and enforcement. The commission should avoid “meddling in executive detail”— according to the authors of the game policy, “This is always fatal.”
The game policy went on to call for an increase in the price of hunting and fishing licenses. “It goes without saying,” the authors wrote, “that in no case should the sportsmen tolerate diversion of a single dollar of state game license funds for general state purposes.”
These recommendations weren’t pie-in-the-sky ideals; they were based on seventy years of hard experience. And, for the most part, they worked.
Mule deer on wheat stubble north of Burns, Wyoming. (Photo copyright, 2018, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
Numbers can be hard to come by, but consider some of these population estimates: In 1940, there were about 22,000 elk in Montana outside of Yellowstone; in 1951, there were 40,000, and in 1978, 55,000. Managers in Idaho have estimated that the state’s deer population was about 45,000 animals in 1923; by 1963, it had increased to 315,000. In 1925, Missouri officials estimated the state’s deer population at around 400; by 1944, it had grown to 15,000, and today, it stands at about 1.4 million. In 1927, writer and conservationist Nash Buckingham concluded that “the wild turkey is in a critical situation through most of its present range”— in 1952, America’s turkey population was estimated at more than 320,000 birds, and today, it is over five million. In 1931, there were thirty-five trumpeter swans left in the world; in 1957, the population had grown to almost 500, and today, it has grown to more than 63,000. The populations of most wild animals in North America, game and nongame, followed a similar trend through the middle of the twentieth century.
And so sportsmen and other conservation-minded members of the public coasted through three generations of wildlife prosperity, beneficiaries of a policy most of us have forgotten and none of us appreciated. As active support from conservationists waned and fragmented, the back-room politicians decided to re-assert themselves. Bit by bit, one bad decision at a time, they started to meddle in the organization of wildlife agencies.
It began with moves to consolidate state agencies with broadly environmental missions. In the 1930 game policy, the Leopold committee had good things to say about “coordination of forestry, game, fish, and parks, and other related activities,” but the move toward departments of natural resources that began in the 1970s departed from the game policy’s recommendations in important ways. These mergers often eliminated the independent wildlife commission or buried it in bureaucracy. The independent director was also buried and found himself reporting to one or more high-level administrators who owed their positions to the governor, not an independent commission of unpaid citizens with a special interest in wildlife.
And the crucial distinction between income from sportsmen’s licenses and legislative appropriations was sometimes blurred. When Kansas decided to merge its wildlife agency with its parks department in the 1980s, this confusion led to several years of misappropriation of federal wildlife aid. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered the violation of the Pittman-Robertson Act, it required the state to return all the misused funds before it received any P-R dollars. The process took years of budget belt-tightening to complete.
Bighorn sheep in the Platte River Canyon, Wyoming. Recovery of bighorn populations has been almost entirely due to the efforts of state wildlife agencies, in cooperation with private-sector conservation groups. (Photo copyright 2017, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
In some states, the commission’s authority to hire the wildlife department’s top administrators is eroding. In 1995, the Wyoming legislature gave the governor authority to appoint the department’s director, and since then, the list of “at-will” employees in the department has been expanded to include deputy directors and division chiefs. In Montana, the director of the Fish, Wildlife and Parks department is part of the governor’s cabinet and serves at his pleasure. In Kansas, the secretary of the Wildlife and Parks Department is appointed by the governor. It’s the same in at least four other states.
The revenue from sportsmen’s licenses continues to be earmarked for wildlife work, although state legislatures occasionally consider proposals that would redirect this income to other uses, even to this day. One pivotal element of the Leopold committee’s blueprint for state wildlife agencies was that “the public should help bear those costs which affect the public interest,” including research, general habitat protection, and wildlife education. A handful of states— Missouri, Arkansas, Colorado, and Arizona— have adopted laws that guarantee their wildlife departments a small percentage of sales tax revenue or income from lotteries, a commitment from the non-sporting public the original game policy committee would have applauded, but most state wildlife work still depends on funding from license sales and excise taxes on arms, ammunition, and fishing tackle.
Even as the scope of conservation challenges expands, state legislatures seem less and less inclined to consider earmarked funding for wildlife, whether the money comes from a license fee increase or a tax. When the lawmakers decide to throw a bone to conservation, they prefer to support one-year appropriations. This works fine for short-term projects like building hatcheries or buying a specific tract of habitat, but when the appropriations support ongoing management efforts, there is a constant risk that the job will be disrupted before it’s finished, either because a legislator has found another pet project or because he has an ax to grind.
State agencies are created to serve their constituents. The process is inherently political. There’s no way to completely insulate a state wildlife agency from political influence, and even if there were, it would be a bad idea to do it. But almost a century ago, the conservation community recognized that wildlife management in the states couldn’t survive the constant buffeting of statehouse politics. Leaders of the movement found a way to guarantee that the people retained a voice in the discourse on wildlife matters while wildlife managers maintained some measure of consistency in their programs, personnel, and funding.
The authors of the 1930 American Game Policy conceded that, when it comes to effective conservation work, “the attitude of the public, the governor, and the legislature counts for more than the form of organization.” But, they continued, “given the right attitude, there is such a thing as a best form for a state conservation department.”
The system they outlined may well have been that “best form,” or something very close to it. Based on three generations of experimentation and the collected wisdom of the nation’s most experienced wildlife professionals, it worked well in state after state as it was adopted in the 1930s and 1940s, and it can work just as well today— when it’s given a chance.
The reorganizations of state wildlife agencies across the country, the increase in “at-will” employees, the refusal to dedicate revenue from the general public for conservation work are largely the work of people with no stake in the agencies or their mission. They undermine wildlife management when we need it most. Before we tear down the system that has served us so well for so long, it would seem wise to get answers to a simple question: Why mess with success?
