In recent statements and writing, Peter Kareiva, chief scientist with The Nature Conservancy, distorts history, ignores the successes of modern conservation, and undermines the moral and philosophical foundations of the movement.  Do his views reflect the views of his employer?

Photos and writing © Chris Madson, all rights reserved

Defining conservation

PETER KAREIVA, CHIEF SCIENTIST WITH THE NATURE CONSERVANCY, RECENTLY DECIDED THAT IT WAS time to deliver a new message about conservation.  He began late in 2011 with an article in the Breakthrough Journal.  Since then, he has taken other opportunities to publicly restate the fundamental thesis of this article: that “by its own measures, conservation is

failing.” He and his co-authors argue that the only way conservation can succeed is “to embrace marginalized and demonized groups and to embrace a priority that has been anathema to us for more than a hundred years: economic development for all.”

Kareiva’s argument in support of these observations isn’t entirely without merit, but much of it misrepresents history, ecological fact, and political reality. If his views were to serve as the sole basis for conservation in the next century, they could result in a staggering loss of biodiversity as well as significant long-term damage to our prosperity and well-being.  For that reason, I think it’s important to examine his argument in detail.

First, an issue of definition: What does Kareiva mean by the term “conservation”?  In the first paragraph of his Breakthrough essay, he writes that “biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline.” In the second paragraph, he adds that “conservation is losing the war to protect nature despite winning one of its hardest fought battles— the fight to create parks, game preserves, and wilderness areas.”  Later on in his essay, he offers this definition: “Conservation is widely viewed as the innocent and uncontroversial practice of purchasing special places threatened by development.” Since he makes no effort to broaden this definition, I have to conclude that he accepts it.

The lack of historical perspective and ignorance of recent conservation efforts reflected in this definition are breathtaking.  It’s certainly true that American conservationists have long been concerned about the loss of species, the rich variety of living things modern ecologists refer to with the faintly clinical term, “biodiversity,” but the earliest and most effective efforts to maintain species of wildlife were not, as Kareiva suggests, based on establishment of parks or other “very limited ecological systems.”  They were legal and ethical restrictions on overharvest of game animals that were first adopted in the early seventeenth century and covered entire jurisdictions, colonies, and eventually states.  These legal steps were soon followed by the work of natural historians to find and classify wild animals and plants— men like John Lawson, Mark Catesby, the Bartrams, and other pioneer scientists traveled thousands of miles through the American wilderness to record the unique flora and fauna it contained.   Even in the eighteenth century, the conservation movement was extensive in its focus, not intensive as Kareiva suggests.

By the mid-1830s, George Perkins Marsh was espousing the importance of preserving timber and other kinds of ground cover to avoid the loss of topsoil.  Published in 1861, his volume, Man and Nature, laid out the practical reasons for restraint in the exploitation of renewable resources.  In 1872, Arbor Day was established, launching a nationwide effort to plant trees to improve habitat for people as well as wildlife.  In 1885, Congress created the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy, which quickly launched a successful effort to convince Americans of the value of nongame birds in the control of insects.

By the time Gifford Pinchot (or his friend Overton Price) defined the term “conservation” as the sustained-yield use of natural resources in 1907, Americans had been talking about the idea and implementing it for at least a century and, in some cases, much longer.  While John Muir championed a more preservationist view of the natural world in the late nineteenth century, Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt were advancing a very anthropocentric vision that managed the natural world around human activities for the benefit of man.

Of course, the American concept of the national park also arose in the nineteenth century, but it’s important to recognize that the enabling act for Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, defined the area first as “a public park or pleasuring-ground for the people.”  While “the people” clearly did not include the native Americans who lived in

Yellowstone or the settlers, market hunters, and loggers in the vicinity who wanted to exploit the land inside the park, the politicians who created the reserve were fully aware of the need to define some benefit the park would have for the average citizen.  Kareiva’s essay implies that conservationists have somehow neglected the practical politics of parks and reserves, which is ridiculous on its face— Yellowstone and the rest of America’s parks would not exist if the political ramifications of their creation hadn’t been carefully balanced.

It’s also worth noting that the park would probably never have been established if it hadn’t been for the support of Jay Cooke, the president of the nascent Northern Pacific Railroad.  Cooke recognized that the park would be a valuable tourist attraction along the route he planned between Minneapolis and Seattle, and he brought significant money and political pressure to bear in the effort to sell Congress on Yellowstone.  The nation’s first park was more an exercise in economic development and recreation than it was an effort to preserve a wild landscape.

The national wildlife refuge system began with the establishment of Afognak Forest and Fish Culture Reserve in 1891, thanks to the efforts of conservationists.  Today, the refuge system has grown to 150 million acres with another 677,000 acres of wetlands to support ducks, geese, other waterbirds, and hundreds of other species of wildlife.  The compromises that were required to create this system of wildlife habitat included significant provisions for a spectrum of human uses,

and the negotiations over the activities that are allowed on refuge lands continue to this day.  Oil and gas drilling, grazing, and farming are allowed on refuges where these activities are deemed to be consistent with the mission of the refuge, and the refuge system supports a variety of recreational pursuits that are important to local economies. While these areas are fairly small in comparison to the size of the nation as a whole, they are immensely productive— without them, populations of many North American birds would be a fraction of their current size— and they clearly consider human economic interests as well as the goals of wildlife conservation.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was adopted by Congress and signed into law in 1918, an unmistakable sign that its supporters had accurately gauged the political climate and that a large body of Americans supported the sweeping protections it mandated. The legality of the act was subsequently challenged in federal court, and the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality.  Politically and legally, the act passed muster with Americans, who seemed to recognize both the intrinsic worth and the economic and recreational value of the birds it protected.

Then there is the conservation title of the American Farm Bill.  This group of programs traces its roots back to the work of Hugh Bennett and the infant Soil Conservation Service in the 1930s.  It compensates landowners for taking a variety of actions that help conserve soil, improve water quality, and provide habitat for a host of wildlife species, particularly grassland birds, a group that has come on hard times in the last sixty years.  These are voluntary programs that draw huge support from local communities as well as landowners and conservationists.  It would be hard to imagine a more cooperative, human-centered effort on behalf of wildlife and the environment.

This is just a sampling of the salient nationwide conservation efforts that have supported wildlife in the United States for a century or more.  There are many other smaller-scale efforts as well, carried out by states and communities with the full participation of affected people. Suggesting that any of these efforts could even begin without public support and involvement is ludicrous.

The long history of American conservation does not bear out Kareiva’s notion that the movement’s main focus has been the establishment of parks and preserves that are more or less off-limits to people.  I can only conclude that Kareiva was speaking to a small sliver of modern environmental activists when he drafted his essay and that he was focusing on conservation work outside of North America.

While I share some of his concerns about some of the proposals environmental activists make, I can’t share his apparent conviction that they represent the will or primary focus of the entire conservation movement.  His use of the broad brush utterly ignores the accomplishments of past conservationists and unfairly impugns the motives and actions of their modern counterparts.  With his comments on American parks, he invites me to consider the history of the conservation movement in the United States— why, then, does he ignore the main currents of that history?

 

Fragile nature

Kareiva has another bone to pick with modern conservationists.  “Ecologists and conservationists have grossly overstated the fragility of nature, frequently arguing that once an ecosystem is altered, it is gone forever,” he writes.  Not so, argues Kareiva.  “Nature is so resilient that it can recover rapidly from even the most powerful human disturbances.”

Well, of course it can and nearly always does.  When an existing equilibrium is disturbed, a new equilibrium eventually establishes itself, even if there is nothing left but bacteria to begin the process.  However, Kareiva began his essay on this plaintive note: “Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline.  We continue to lose forests in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  There are so few wild tigers and apes that they will be lost forever if current trends continue.  Simply put, we are losing many more special places and species than we’re saving.”

Which of these assertions am I to believe?  If the living systems on earth can absorb any damage mankind can dish out, then there really is no reason for concern.  In fact, The Nature Conservancy and other conservation groups can simply adopt Kareiva’s view of ecological invulnerability, declare victory, and take up other work.

Most ecologists would argue that the drastic loss of “special places and species” Kareiva mentions is dangerous to natural systems and to mankind.  Most would also say that this decline is a result of our own intemperate behavior.

That’s why the term “Anthropocene” was coined: to recognize that our presence is changing the planet at a geologic scale.  Elsewhere in his essay, Kareiva casually suggests that the reason the people of Easter Island disappeared was due, at least in part, to the depredations of the nonnative rats they brought to the island with them.  Did the rats destroy the entire Easter Island ecosystem? Of course not.  They simply destroyed the capacity of the island to support people.  This microcosm should give any thinking person pause.

Over the millennia, humans have exploited many landscapes and have often found, to their sorrow, that deterioration in natural systems leads to problems for man as well as wildlife.  The ancient history of the Fertile Crescent and the

Mediterranean rim is studded with examples.  The Cedars of Lebanon were cut and exported; the Anatolian hills above the Tigris and Euphrates were plowed and overgrazed; the rich fields and foothills of Carthage were exposed to the erosive power of wind and rain.  Native populations of wildlife like the Arabian oryx and Eurasian lion declined or disappeared, a sign that diversity and productivity in the region’s natural systems had been reduced.  Eventually, the same forces that affected wild animals began to touch people.

It’s been estimated that the population of ancient Mesopotamia, the place we now know as Iraq, may have reached five million around 300 B.C. before a combination of invasion, internecine struggles, and the deterioration of the region’s soils brought about a collapse. The area would not see that many people again for 2,000 years when the growing income from recently discovered oil generated economic development the land itself could still not support.

Similar examples of collapse can be found in the archaeological record of the New World.  The Mayan civilization flowered and fell in the jungles of Central America, the victim of wars that may have had many proximate causes but were driven ultimately by a shortage of food.  The Mayans kept no species lists documenting the biodiversity around their city-states, but it’s not outlandish to guess that it declined as agricultural pressure intensified.

The great Mississippian culture of eastern America’s woodlands was already in decline before Columbus arrived in the New World.  Analysis of the physical condition of the people in the great native city of Cahokia shows that the quality of diet had deteriorated over several centuries.  At the end, people were smaller in stature and suffered from a variety of diseases caused by dietary deficiencies.  Local populations of deer, waterfowl, and fish had been overexploited, and so generations of people suffered.

Kareiva argues that the loss of the passenger pigeon and the American chestnut had no lasting effect on the great forests of eastern North America.  I reply that, as an ecologist, he knows better than that.  He knows that the loss of five billion passenger pigeons and the elimination of the most important mast-bearing tree in that forest must have had huge effects on the organization of the system.  The trophic cascades would have reached into every nook and cranny of that forest— if there had been any old-growth forest left.  In fact, the mature deciduous forest of the East had essentially been eliminated by the beginning of the twentieth century.  Our failure to see the effects of the passenger pigeon’s extinction and the loss of the chestnut has more to do with the shortcomings of the science of the time than it does with ecological reality.

North America is filled with more recent examples of damage caused by the removal— or addition— of just one species.  The loss of ninety-eight percent of the black-tailed prairie dogs on the continent has strained several other wildlife

species: black-footed ferrets, northern swift foxes, ferruginous hawks, mountain plovers, and others.

The introduction of cheatgrass to the West’s sagebrush basins has shifted the fire regime and plant composition on entire landscapes, causing drastic decreases in sage grouse, Columbian sharp-tailed grouse, Brewer’s sparrows, sage thrashers, and pygmy rabbits as well as declines in populations of mule deer and pronghorns.

The effective removal of the canebrake, America’s native bamboo system, has brought the Bachman’s warbler and the eastern panther to the brink of extinction and has caused declines in other wildlife species as well.

Some of these ecological shifts have had little apparent effect on human activities; others have had an immediate and lasting impact.  Unfortunately, our technical analysis isn’t sophisticated enough to predict what ecological damage might touch our economic interests and what damage does not.  That’s why Aldo Leopold’s counsel on conversion of ecosystems still has force: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

The most succinct definition of conservation is the wise use of natural resources.  That means sustainable use of renewable resources and particular care with those resources that are finite and nonrenewable. Buried in Kareiva’s rhetoric, I sense a commitment to that idea, but when he casually advocates “economic development for all” without any qualification or caveat, I worry that many people will interpret his statement as license to take all they can, as fast as they can.

Earth simply cannot support nine billion people whose demands on natural resources are anything like the demands a typical American makes.  There are those who believe that technological breakthroughs will free us from the bioenergetic bonds that threaten to confine us, but those breakthroughs haven’t yet emerged, and even if they do, our history as a species suggests that we will continue to grow until restrained by the shortage of some other key resource.  If a new ultra-clean energy source removes the limits we currently face, we’ll explode until the next limit comes to bear.  Justis von Liebig saw the hard reality of that nearly 200 years ago.

The metaphor of the miner’s canary is apt.  When we exploit natural systems to the point that many wildlife populations are declining and some are in danger of extinction, we may well be on a path that threatens our own well-being.  In his essay, Kareiva points out that, in the future, conservationists will have to find ways to manage “working landscapes” for some kind of “conservation value.”  He offers this as a startling insight when, in fact, a host of conservationists has been working to do just that for more than 150 years.  What he fails to mention is the importance of a more enlightened view of the value of a whole range of conservation options, from inviolate reserves to small pockets of easily accessible urban wildscape.

 

Wilderness and its spokesmen

In a lecture given for the Distinctive Voices @ the Beckman Center in November of 2011, Kareiva expanded on many of the ideas he presented in his Breakthrough essay.  Early in the talk, he took up the concept of wilderness and wilderness preservation.  He picked out a couple of “environmental writers” to attack their idea that people really value the wilderness experience.  The first was Ed Abbey.

He mocked Abbey for writing about the stars over the desert: “Instead of loneliness, I feel loveliness,” he quoted from Desert Solitaire.  He then went on to read a passage from Abbey’s journal, written at the same time, in which Abbey complained about how much he missed his wife.  Kareiva is struck by the irony of Abbey juxtaposing these two sentiments.

Ed Abbey had some good things to say about the desert Southwest, a landscape that commands little respect, but passing him off as a leader in defining the concept of wilderness is ludicrous.  Consistency in reasoning or emotion, nuance in perception, were things Abbey never troubled himself to find.  There are dozens of writers and thinkers who deserve notice for their philosophical analysis of man’s place in nature before Abbey.  However, Ed does serve as a convenient straw man for Kareiva to push over.

Following his sally on Abbey’s journal entry, Kareiva goes on to add a couple of other names to his list of eco-communicators: “Emerson and Hawthorne, [two] of our great naturalist writers.”

I guess it’s been a while since Kareiva has read the works of either writer.  While it’s true that Ralph Emerson wrote an essay he called “Nature,” I think it’s fair to say that he was happy to contemplate the natural world through a stout pane of glass.  For Emerson, nature was just another metaphor in the service of broader philosophical discourse.

Hawthorne, one of America’s first novelists, never bothered himself with the concept of the environment in his major works, except as a stage for the inquiries into human morality and behavior that were his central theme.  Hardly an eco-philosopher.

Then Kareiva mentions Thoreau.  Here, finally, he has found a man who thought deeply about humans and their relationship with the land.

“I bet a lot of you had to read Walden Pond,” Kareiva remarked in his speech.  “‘In wilderness is the preservation of the world,’ and he wrote about his cabin and his pond and all that.  Yeah, right!  His mom came and did his laundry every

weekend.  Yet he painted this picture.”  The picture of Thoreau Kareiva seems to have in his own mind is a man who abandoned civilization for the life of a hermit communing with the trackless wilderness.

It’s hard to believe anyone could pack so much misinformation into such a small package.  Let’s start with the smallest items first: The name of Thoreau’s best-known book is Walden, Or Life in the Woods, not Walden Pond.  Unlike Emerson, Thoreau was qualified to write about a “life in the woods”— he actually spent quite a bit of time outside, most of it walking or working as a surveyor in the country around Concord, Massachusetts, but some of it in what was then bona fide wilderness in Maine.

Contrary to Kareiva’s implication, Walden was never intended to be a defense of wilderness.  In the first paragraph of the book, Thoreau laid out the setting: “When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.  I lived there two years and two months.”  So much for man communing with wilderness.

His purpose in this experiment? “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”  Such were Thoreau’s motives in retreating to Walden Pond.

All this is somewhat beside the point, however, because the quote Kareiva cites does not appear in Walden; in fact, it’s not precisely a Thoreau quote at all.  The passage Kareiva has in mind is actually part of different essay: “Walking.”  And Kareiva gets the quote badly wrong.  Thoreau actually wrote: “What I have been preparing to say is that in wildness is the preservation of the world.”

The difference between Kareiva’s “wilderness” and Thoreau’s “wildness” is immense.  The concept of wilderness is a matter of intense debate among conservationists and ecologists in America and around the world.  It’s a debate worth having, a debate Kareiva seems anxious to join.  He would have served himself and his audience far better if he had been careful to confine himself to that issue and left Thoreau out of the discussion.

Americans have a long history of valuing wildness, even as they settled the wilderness, and over the last century, that value has been confirmed by philosophers and scientists alike.  In his Breakthrough essay, Kareiva implies that he’s quite concerned about maintaining as much of the earth’s biodiversity as possible.  No serious ecologist or conservationist would disagree.  And Thoreau’s famous line is as lucid a statement of that concern as I’ve ever read; in fact, it could serve as the mission statement for Kareiva’s current employer.  Why, then, does Kareiva misquote and impugn it?

It’s particularly ironic that Thoreau’s first purpose in “Walking” is to encourage people to take time every day to get out of the house and office for a walk in the woods.  I assume this is an activity Kareiva would also advocate.  Thoreau, as a man of his time, paid homage to the West, that symbol of freedom and potential in nineteenth-century America, but he

began and ended in the bucolic surroundings of Massachusetts: “From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of men afar,” he wrote.  Like any other commodity, the wild experience becomes more valuable as the supply dwindles, a consequence of supply and demand Thoreau, on a coastal landscape that had been settled for 200 years, had already begun to see in 1840.

As human population grows, the chances to preserve large tracts of unworked land will fade away.  “Quit romanticizing,” Karevia says.  “The notion of untouched wilderness— it just doesn’t exist anywhere. . . . We’ve touched every corner.”

No informed conservationist would disagree.  Unfortunately, Kareiva’s attack on the entire idea of preserving wilderness without any stated exception raises the question of whether we should bother to hold onto any wilderness at all, even the fragments that have already been set aside.  He’s right in pointing out that no point on the earth’s surface has remained untouched by man, but I challenge his implication that this means there is no wilderness left.  I can tell the difference between the North Slope of the Brooks Range and a WalMart parking lot.  Both of them are extreme environments inhabited by a few tough pioneering species; both have been altered by human activity, but the North Slope offers me things the parking lot does not, even if I never find my way to the shores of the Beaufort Sea.

Kareiva raises moral objections to the idea that humans have been displaced to establish many of the world’s parks and wildlife reserves.  It’s a legitimate concern that needs to be considered with care every time a new park is contemplated.  Kareiva is worried about the possibility that the Amazon might be turned into a gigantic reserve, off-limits to people.  At least, off-limits to everyone but the tribes native to the Amazon basin.  That is a difficult moral question, indeed.

Is it better to preserve the forest and the wildlife and human lifeways the forest supports?  Or is it better to sacrifice the forest and its tribes in the name of economic progress for the rest of the nation and the world?  Is it better to shower the native tribesmen of the forest with the benefits— and ills— of twenty-first-century technology or leave them to make their own way in the paths of their ancestors?  Do we have the right to make such choices for them?  Do we have the right to even offer such choices?

As I write this, the New York Times has reported that natives of the Amazon region are being murdered by outsiders who want unlimited access to Brazil’s forests.  Americans should recognize the process, since it’s the same approach we took to the issue of native inhabitants for almost 400 years.  Was it right then?  Is it right now?  Like all the important moral debates, this one seems destined to play out in the twilight between right and wrong.  Certainly not the simple choice Kareiva implies.

On a much smaller scale, consider the example of Central Park, a relatively wild reserve in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities.  What is an acre of real estate in Central Park worth on today’s market?  Would New Yorkers be better off without the park?  Or is the value of the reserve worth the foregone income for the city and its residents?

I submit that we are far from finished with these questions.  While we look for ways to incorporate wildness into the warp and weft of modern life, we would cheat ourselves if we stopped thinking about places held in common ownership where the scale of human activity is reduced and the geological and ecological character of the land is emphasized.  Places where we can walk, as Thoreau suggested, through “some retired meadow” in the setting sun.  Call them what you want: quiet places, wild places, even wilderness; they are important as storehouses of biodiversity and as refuges for the human spirit.

 

Gloom and doom

In his Beckman lecture, Kareiva raises his voice against what he calls “the doom-and-gloom thing.”  According to Kareiva, this is the conservationist’s knee-jerk approach to framing any issue of land management, claiming that the world is about to collapse before our eyes unless something is done.  He’s certainly right when he argues that the potential damage to the land is too often exaggerated and that stretching the truth can undermine support for conservation.

During the Beckman lecture, he remembered visiting Yellowstone National Park as a child: “I went when I was a kid with my family. There were no wolves or grizzly bears, and there weren’t many buffalo.”  He goes on to report the recovery of grizzlies and bison as well as the reintroduction of wolves.

Dr. Kareiva finished his bachelor’s degree in 1973.  If he started his undergraduate work straight out of high school, that means he’s a year younger than I am— chances are good that the two of us first visited Yellowstone about the same time, in the decade of the 1960s.  But the two of us saw different realities.

There were, in fact, no wolves documented in the park in the 1960s, but there were grizzlies— the park estimated that there were between 200 and 250 in that period.  There were also bison— between 350 and 1,000, according to park estimates.  And so the bad old days Dr. Kareiva describes in Yellowstone weren’t quite as bad as he suggests, and he seems guilty of exactly the kind of eco-exaggeration he decries elsewhere.

Kareiva also mentions a trip he took as a child with his father: “Dad took me to Pittsburgh. I was about twelve, and the three rivers in Pittsburgh were so polluted you didn’t go near them.  It stank.  People didn’t want to live along the river. Now they have bass fishing contests in the three rivers.  Real estate is at prime, and it’s a wonderful place to run.”

Clearly, the situation in Pittsburgh in the 1960s fell somewhere short of “doom,” but as Kareiva describes it, the condition of its rivers was well out on the scale of “gloom.”  He offers the anecdote as an example of the kind of progress that can be made when we put our minds to the task, which is fair enough, but he fails to point out that the Clean Water Act and its precursors were controversial in their time— their adoption was the result of a lot of “doom-and-gloom” rhetoric, verbal and printed, that motivated Americans to make a change.

As upset as Kareiva claims to be with the “doom-and-gloom” claims of rabid environmentalists, these excerpts show that he’s not above engaging in a little doom and gloom himself when he feels the circumstances call for it.  Nor should he be.

Doom-and-gloom rhetoric has been responsible for the passage of many of our most important conservation and environmental laws: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Bald Eagle Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, Federal

Land Policy and Management Act, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and many others, federal and state.

In his lecture, Kareiva argues that the dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers in the Pacific Northwest aren’t a major obstacle for wild salmon on those rivers: “The federal dams have been so well engineered, they’re really not that much of a problem for the salmon.  The private dams are a huge problem.  Massive federal investments have made the federal dams not such a problem.”

The modifications that have been made in dam design in the Columbia River drainage have helped salmon, although there are experts who would argue that the dams still constitute a profound threat to wild salmon stocks, especially on the upper Snake, but there would have been no massive investment in these modifications if it hadn’t been for the “doom-and-gloom” rhetoric of two generations of conservationists.  The same can be said of other modifications in structures and industrial processes that government and corporations have adopted— if these entities aren’t held accountable when they’re causing harm, they have no incentive to remedy it.

The bad news is that there is a lot of bad news on the conservation front.  Kareiva is right to point out that conservationists need to showcase successes and hold out hope for the future.  But in an era when a growing majority of humanity is estranged from the land, conservationists have to talk straight about damage to the planet as it occurs or people will simply not be aware of it.

I find it interesting that, after attacking many of the dire, but inaccurate, predictions of environmental doom that have been made over the last generation, Dr. Kareiva freely says, “Climate change predictions are NOT deeply flawed.”  I think he’s right, but if there’s a more daunting body of information than the emerging analysis of climate change, I haven’t seen it.  If the predictions are right, we’re irrevocably committed to a century or more of climatic shifts that will generally cause intense difficulty for most people and a spectrum of wildlife and wild places as well.  And, if we don’t act soon to reduce our emissions, that prediction of doom and gloom could well extend for a millennium or more.

I think it’s vital that people become aware of this threat to the future.  Dr. Kareiva seems to agree, but his general opposition to the expression of “doom and gloom” raises doubts about where he stands on this and many other issues.

There is a delicate equilibrium to be struck in our discussion of the planet’s ecological health.  Most Americans are largely ignorant of the environmental circumstances facing them and the consequences those conditions may have for people as well as other living things.  They need to know enough to get motivated but not so much that they despair.  The middle ground between the two is admittedly narrow, but we won’t even take up the task of change as long as we remain ignorant.

 

The upshot

The list of practical reasons for maintaining biodiversity and a certain degree of wildness on earth grows with our understanding of natural processes.  It’s a long list that still hasn’t been well integrated into our thinking about the future.  I hope Dr. Kareiva and I agree on the importance of remedying that. But, beyond the economic and ecological justifications for conservation, there are spiritual and moral issues that need our attention.

A wise man once told me that he thought humanity would go out, not with a bang, but a whimper.

“We are an arrogant species,” he continued.  “We believe we can destroy the world.  There’s no way we can do that; life on earth is unimaginably tough.  But there is a far more delicate thing that is in our power to destroy.  Human happiness.  The question is whether we’ll have the wisdom to preserve what makes us happy.”

Our kinship with the rest of life on this planet is undeniable, stretching back over more than four billion years of change and adaptation.  Such ties don’t evaporate in a few generations of city living.  Even the most confirmed urbanite still wears the marks of that legacy: We keep flowers on the windowsill, fountains in the lobby.  Our blood pressure drops when we stroke a pet.  We feel the cycle of the sun and still fear the dark. We are bound to the land in thousands of ways, many of which we no longer recognize.

I share Kareiva’s concern over “special places and species,” not only because their loss could unravel ecosystems on which we depend— though it might— but because the world would be a grayer, sadder place to live in if we lost them.  This is the spiritual argument for conservation.  It doesn’t rest on a foundation of hard data and economic necessity, but

that doesn’t make it any less important.  Kareiva counsels conservationists to abandon this foolish spiritualism, to quit selling the idea that occasional solitude in a wild place is a balm to the human soul.  I think he’s wrong. He wants to confine the conversation to our standard of living; I think we should spend some time talking about our quality of life.

There is also an obligation to be considered.  Almost seventy years ago, Aldo Leopold famously championed a new ethical relationship with the land:

“A thing is right,” he wrote, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

It’s certainly true that conservation is generally profitable and always prudent.  It is also the right thing to do.

In his Beckman lecture, Kareiva offers these mnemonics for conservation in the twenty-first century: “Restore, reconnect, people, communities, growth and opportunity, technology for nature, green infrastructure, greening business.”  They’re all laudable reminders, although not a single one of them is new to the mainstream of American conservation.  But I note that there is not a single hint of moral responsibility in his list.  He seems ready to abandon key moral and spiritual elements of the traditional argument for conservation.  These may not be particularly useful for a group like The Nature Conservancy, but they remain crucial to the ultimate success of the larger movement and to the quality of our lives.

In a  New York Times column last year, Thomas Friedman called on the Republican Party to renew its commitment to conservation issues.  In that column, he quoted another official of The Nature Conservancy, Glenn Prickett, as saying, “We spent the 20^th century protecting nature from people; and we will spend the 21^st century protecting nature for people.”  Here in North America, at least, that characterization of the past and present is simply not true.  In fact, we’ve spent much of the last century searching for ways to support wildlife on tamed landscapes, to provide outdoor recreation

in a wide variety of settings, to hold onto vital natural resources like topsoil, clean air, and clean water.  When professional conservationists like Kareiva and Prickett fail to recognize such efforts, they damage the credibility of past conservation work and undermine the future of conservation.  Thomas Friedman is an influential voice in modern America— if the cracked view of conservation history Kareiva and Prickett offer is coloring Friedman’s view of the past and future, then these two spokesmen for conservation have already done significant harm.

Conservationists have learned important new lessons in the last sixty years and relearned some old ones.  It’s clear that little significant conservation work can proceed without public support— we’ve learned that in several international projects and relearned it here at home.  At the same time, conservation should never simply settle for convenient solutions.  Coping with the really big problems— like climate change— will be decidedly inconvenient.  While we will never be able to force people to conserve, we should never stop trying to convince them.

In the end, I have the feeling that Kareiva is confusing conservationists with a certain kind of environmentalist.  For decades, I resisted the distinction between conservationist and environmentalist entirely, feeling that it was redundant, that all people who were interested in holding onto the variety of living systems shared a common focus and set of goals.  However, vocal members of both persuasions have harangued so long and so passionately about the fundamental differences between the two groups that I’ve finally been forced to concede that they must have fundamentally different motives.

Perhaps Kareiva is addressing some of the more radical environmentalists, hoping to persuade them to include humans more often in their visions of the future.  While that is a laudable end, I doubt that his argument will move many of the radicals.  In any case, his mischaracterization of the conservation mainstream does a disservice to generations of dedicated people who achieved great things at great personal cost.  It devalues the example their work set and neglects the many successes they had in convincing the rest of the nation, and much of the world, to embrace the concept of wise, sustainable use of natural resources.  Perhaps worst of all, Kareiva distorts or ignores important discoveries and precepts in the science of ecology.

He bases his argument on the premise that “conservation is failing.”  I can’t refute that assessment.  To me, it seems obvious that an increase in human population and human appetite will complicate any effort to maintain significant tracts of major natural systems and the wildlife they support.  In the twenty-first century, conservationists may lose more than they win.  There is a movement afoot among some conservation professionals to avoid these losses by a simple expedient— don’t ask for anything you’re not sure you’ll get.  That approach certainly makes the score sheet look better, but it also concedes many cases where the ultimate issue is in doubt.

Failure isn’t always a bad thing.  Sometimes, it raises public awareness of an issue and changes attitudes.  A classic example was the fight over Glen Canyon in the American Southwest.  The Bureau of Reclamation wanted to build a dam at the mouth of the canyon and flood it; a coalition of conservationists fought the idea.  In the end, the dam was built, but there’s good reason to believe that the furor over Glen Canyon headed off a proposal to build a dam across the mouth of the Grand Canyon.

Kareiva seems to be one of those conservationists who is willing to confine his efforts to “win-win” solutions.  I’m a fan of “win-win,” but in the end, the problems that yield to a “win-win” approach are the easy ones.  Many of the greatest conservation decisions of the past had winners and losers, and if we expect to hold onto more than a scrap of the wild heritage we share, there will more “win-lose” choices in our future.  I think the people of the world need to discuss those choices fully, not concede the issues before they arise.

Kareiva seems willing to think smaller, to focus only on those situations in which conservation has a clear and immediate economic benefit for everyone involved and quick agreement is a foregone conclusion.  He suggests that we bring conservation into our cities and onto our farmland, as if that hasn’t been going on for generations.  And he tells us to give up our “romantic notions” about wilderness, implying that we should get comfortable with ever more far-reaching and destructive alterations of entire landscapes.

While I enthusiastically support the idea of bringing more wildness into our communities, I challenge Kareiva’s implication that we will be able to maintain the earth’s biodiversity simply by adjusting our management of “working landscapes” and providing for more urban open space.  Some species are equipped to cope with the kinds of rapid change we work on the land; others are not.  If we expect to hold onto species like gray wolves and grizzlies, barren ground caribou and bighorn sheep, Attwater’s prairie chickens and Gunnison’s sage grouse, then we will have to leave room for them.  Human activity in such places may not always be excluded, but it will have to be constrained.

For four generations or more, there was a consensus on the need for conservation in America.  It crystallized when we recognized the depth and breadth of the damage we had done to wildlife, forest, native prairie, wetlands, clean water,

and the very air we breathed, and it carried us into the 1980s.  Over the last thirty years, that consensus has eroded.

It’s up to this generation of conservationists to rebuild it.  The situation on the land is, in many ways, no different than it was at the turn of the last century.  We face ecological challenges that rival or surpass the problems Americans faced in the era of the Roosevelts.  The nature and extent of these challenges is becoming clearer with every passing year, and several of them are beginning to impinge on the lives of average people around the globe. I believe that, as more and more of us recognize the gravity of these issues, it will get easier and easier to consider serious responses, even if they entail significant cost and sacrifice.  Now is not the time to abandon the discussion; now is the time to press it.

The successes conservation achieves in the twenty-first century will be built on the foundation that has been laid over almost 200 years.  They will be evolutionary, not revolutionary, and I believe they will depend as much on a moral renaissance as on technical or political breakthroughs.  If Kareiva is uncomfortable with that notion, he is free to pursue his own vision, of course.  But I hope he will grant other people who are equally concerned and committed the freedom to choose a different path to the goals I believe we both share.  And I expect him to observe the same discipline he demands of others and get his facts straight.

__________________________

 

If you’re interested in reviewing the original texts of Dr. Kareiva’s remarks, consult these sources:

Kareiva, Peter, Robert Lalasz, Michelle Marvier, 2011.  Conservation in the Anthropocene.  The Breakthrough Journal 2. Article source: http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-2/conservation-in-the-anthropocene

Distinctive Voices at the Beckman lecture, November 10, 2011, sponsored by the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BOEQkvCook&list=UUOzWn948D9YO41K3G7vl_Zg&index=10&feature=plcp

 

FOR THIRTY YEARS AFTER JIM HANSEN AND HIS COLLEAGUES AT NASA FIRST WARNED US THAT WE WERE CHANGING THE EARTH’S CLIMATE, the discussion focused on ways to reverse, or at least stabilize, the process. That dialog gained volume and urgency as the relationship between rising concentrations of greenhouse gases and increasing worldwide temperature was described with greater precision over a longer and long span of time.

Over the last decade, the discussion of climate change has dilated to include a new concept: adaptation. The release of the recent report from the IPCC’s Adaptation Committee has stimulated another round in the conversation about how we should respond to the heating of the planet.

As far as I can tell, the idea first emerged as a cynical fallback position among climate change deniers, who were forced by accumulating data to admit that climate was, in fact, changing but who were unwilling to accept any proposals that would reduce human emissions of greenhouse gases. In recent years, it has been taken up by people on the far side of the spectrum in the debate, those observers who have lost hope that our species can restrain its appetite for fossil fuels in time to avert major, and essentially irreversible, shifts in climate.

I have little patience for the deniers’ view of the issue, which is so clearly driven by a combination of contempt for science and a vision of politics, economics, and ecological reality that would be comic if it weren’t so dangerous. On the other side of the debate, the people who have lost hope in our ability to stop climate change make a frighteningly plausible argument, but it has about the same effect as the case made by climate deniers: It tends to divert attention from the disease— the planet’s unprecedented capture of solar energy— and focuses on treatment of symptoms— which is to say, adaptation.

The word “adaptation” has a reassuring ring. It implies that we can cope with whatever challenges climate change may throw at us, that dealing with a global shift in climate shouldn’t be more than a footnote in human affairs over the next century. Anyone who has been paying attention realizes that we’re already adapting to the effects of climate change. While no reputable scientist in the field will argue that a specific storm or drought is the direct result of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, the scientific community is advising us that the probability of damaging events has already risen.

And so the restrictions on water use in drought-stricken California may well be an adaptation to climate change. These will certainly take a toll on the agricultural economy of California, and they’ll probably mean that I eat less lettuce in the next few months as well. The lingering drought on the southern and central plains has contributed to increasing grain prices, which have their effect on prices of commodities from breakfast cereal to the ethanol in our gas.

We’re in the process of spending billions of dollars to restore New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and billions more rebuilding the central Atlantic coast after Superstorm Sandy. Apparently, we’re not ready to adapt to rising sea level and the prospect of more intense storms by moving away from these risky coasts, but we are willing to divert huge amounts of money from other public works to maintain life as usual in the face of growing risk.  It’s part of the cost of adapting.

In the wake of the mudslide that killed at least thirty people in Oso, Washington, we hear that a study issued in 2000 warned of the risk of “catastrophic failure” on the slope.  At the time, county officials considered buying all the property on the hillside and moving the residents. The cost was estimated at $1.6 million, more than the county wanted to spend, and the buyout probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, since it depended on convincing all the owners to sell.

Will owners in similar situations be willing to sell now? Will local governments be willing to spend the money necessary for such buyouts? Will new zoning ordinances be passed to restrict the public’s freedom to build in such high-risk areas?  What is the price of this kind of “adaptation”?

Similar questions arise in the “wildland-urban” interface, where the rising risk of forest and brush fires poses an increasing threat to homes built by people who want to get away from it all.  Over the last five years, the federal government, primarily through the U.S. Forest Service and Department of Interior, has spent an average of more than $3,400,000,000 (that’s billion) a year fighting wildfires.[i] That figure doesn’t count the money spent by the Federal Emergency Management Administration or state and local entities to save private property from wildfires. It also neglects the cost of wildfires in human lives.  Who in the arid West will ever forget the news from Arizona last summer when nineteen members of a hotshot crew lost their lives in half an hour?

In 2010, the World Bank estimated that helping the developing world adapt to a two-degree C. rise in temperature between now and 2050 will cost humanity between $70 billion and $100 billion a year.[ii] No one has been bold enough to offer an overall estimate of what it will cost to adapt to changing climate here in the United States, but at least one economist has estimated that the cost of Hurricane Katrina alone topped $250 billion.[iii] As impressive as it is, this number fails to assess the price in human life exacted by Katrina— more than 1,800 souls, according to officials.[iv]

Judging from the relative indifference the nation shows toward climate change issues, we seem willing to accept costs of this magnitude as a form of adaptation. Some have argued that a major rebuilding effort has its own economic benefits; the gross domestic product may show little, if any, response to the effects of a major storm, simply because the damage is at least partly balanced by the expenditures made during the recovery. That may be the case, from a strictly economic perspective, but there’s no progress in the transaction, no net benefit. Instead of choosing our way forward, we allow a deepening crisis to define our priorities for us and squander our efforts and capital in a losing battle to maintain the status quo.

Whether we decide to move large populations away from major weather threats, whether we choose to build massive levees to protect them from too much water or massive dams and pipelines to protect them from not enough, whether we leave them where they are, exposed to the dangers of storm and drought, then pay the cost in dollars and lives to deal with ensuing disasters, the best analysis from climate scientists tells us that the cost will continue to climb as concentrations of greenhouse gases and world temperatures rise. Without an adequate response to the underlying cause, the trouble we face is certain to get worse.

And unless we do something about the trend in global temperature, the concept of “adaptation” will eventually require more than new public works projects, a change in zoning, or a Congressional bill for disaster relief.  It could eventually lead us into the primal realm of organic evolution, where success is defined by survival. Residents of temperate regions could be exposed to tropical pathogens and insect vectors for the first time. Regional shortages of fresh water and food, extended drought or widespread flooding could leave millions of people around the globe in desperate circumstances. At some point, shifting climate could mean the difference between life and death for a large fraction of humanity.

Which is why I’m uncomfortable with a discussion about climate change that ends with adaptation. We’re adapting, and with the damage we’ve already done to the atmosphere, we’ll have no choice but to continue to adapt over the coming decades. I’m the first to recognize that we need to be smart about that process, to make sure that the steps we take are efficient and durable over the long term. But dealing with the symptoms of climate change isn’t going to protect us from its deepening effects. We need to treat the disease. No discussion of climate change is complete without a commitment to a cure. Adapting won’t be enough.

Congress continues to bleed America’s most important conservation program

WELL, AFTER MORE THAN THREE YEARS OF DEBATE AND CLOAKROOM POLITICS, WE FINALLY HAVE A NEW FEDERAL FARM BILL.  The scope of the programs it authorizes is almost beyond imagining. So is the cost: around $960 billion between now and 2023.[i]

Most of the angst over the bill has focused on the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and various subsidies to farmers, particularly direct payments to farmers who raise certain crops, whether the prices for those crops are high or low, and special treatment for commodities like milk and sugar. Largely lost in the discussion has been Title II of the 2014 farm bill, the section that defines most of the federal conservation programs that apply to farmland.

Several of the conservation groups who lobby Congress on these matters have expressed general satisfaction with the outcome of the extended negotiations over the farm bill and with good cause, I guess— the damage to the conservation title could have been much worse. Various farm interests were interested in getting rid of Sodsaver, the provision that gives grasslands some measure of protection by limiting farm subsidies for any farmer who plows native prairie. Conservation groups managed to keep Sodsaver.

A farmer who wants to take advantage of the massive subsidies in the new crop insurance program has to comply with the provisions of the conservation plan he and the Natural Resources Conservation Service design for his property. Some farm interests didn’t want that provision, but they got it anyway.

And the crown jewel of the farm bill’s conservation title— the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)— wasn’t killed in the crossfire over food stamps between liberals and Tea Baggers. That’s something.

The conservation lobbyists who negotiated these concessions worked miracles in a Congress that would rather feud than breathe. At this point, they have little choice but to make their peace with the final outcome and get on with life.

But you’ll pardon me if I’m more than a little dismayed at the outcome. We’ve been compromising on the farm conservation programs ever since the 1985 farm bill became law. That was the bill that created CRP, a provision that paid farmers to plant permanent cover on highly erodible cropland and leave it for ten to fifteen years. In some cases, the ten-year payment was as much as the price of the land itself, but conservationists didn’t complain because the cover drastically reduced soil erosion, improved water quality, and provided habitat for a spectrum of wildlife species, many of which had been suffering long-term declines before CRP was launched.

City and country, farmer and urbanite, everybody got something out of CRP, but even in that first bill, there was a substantial compromise: With permission from the Department of Agriculture, farmers could hay or graze their CRP land during a severe drought. That reduced the protection from erosion CRP provided and nearly eliminated residual wildlife food and cover when wildlife needed them most. It was a huge compromise, but the conservation community accepted it as a necessary step in gaining important protection for farmland and wildlife.

We’ve been compromising ever since. The 1985 farm bill set a ceiling of 45 million acres for CRP.[ii] In 1996, the ceiling was reduced to 36.4 million acres.[iii] In 2008, it was reduced again, this time to 32 million acres.[iv] And the 2014 farm bill reduces the ceiling again— now, it’s 24 million acres, barely half the original target for CRP.[v]

As the ceiling has been lowered, the number of acres in CRP has declined. In 2007, we had 36.7 million acres in CRP; in 2013, we were down to 26.8 million acres.[vi] Some of this drop was the result of record high prices for corn, soybeans, and wheat— faced with a choice between CRP rental payments and the income from a corn crop at $8 a bushel, many farmers let their CRP contracts expire and got on the tractor— but there’s little doubt that the reduced CRP ceiling has played a major role in the loss of CRP acres across the farm landscape.

I suppose it could have been worse— there was at least one proposal in the House of Representatives to slash the budget for CRP, even though the program has what’s known as “mandatory funding” under the farm bill. The attempt to reduce CRP appropriations failed, but between 2003 and 2010, similar efforts cut $7.5 billion in funding for other programs in the farm bill’s conservation title. More compromises . . .

 

So the suits in Washington have made their deals and held their news conferences, and the conservation title of the farm bill has once again suffered the consequences. What do we in the real world stand to lose as a result?

Well, there’s the topsoil, of course. CRP began as a program to tack down highly erodible fields, and it has had marked success in achieving that goal. In 1982 before the advent of the modern farm bill, croplands were losing 7.3 tons of soil per acre every year. That was something like 3,061,000,000 tons of topsoil down the river or into the sky. Every year.[vii]

In 2007, that loss had dropped to 4.8 tons per acres, a 43-percent reduction in soil loss.[viii] Some of this reduction is undoubtedly due to new minimum-till farming techniques, but a large part is the result of cover crops planted on CRP acres.

As human population moves toward 500 million in the United States and 9 billion or more in the world, we may well find that the most important single natural resource we have in America is our topsoil. It would a good idea to hold onto as much of it as we can.

Holding soil in place also means better water and air quality. Researchers at the University of Missouri estimate that CRP cover hold 259 million tons of nitrogen, 56 million tons of phosphorus, and 23 million tons of organic carbon on the land instead of allowing them to leach into waterways.[ix] This not only improves the fertility of the land but reduces pollution and eutrophication in the water. The researchers also estimate that CRP keeps 335 million tons of dust out of the air.

These days, a growing number of people (including me) are worried about the continued build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A significant part of the conversation about saving ourselves from being roasted alive has been the idea of somehow trapping carbon dioxide underground. The coal industry and other business interests are looking for high-tech ways of removing CO2 from the air and pumping it thousands of feet below the surface of the earth, where they hope it will stay.

There’s an easier way—just fund more CRP. Researchers in Michigan studied a field that was being returned to a corn-soybean rotation after twenty-two years in CRP. In the first year after the field had been replanted, they found that the soil released 6.4 tons of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide per acre. They estimated that the field would release another 21.9 tons of greenhouse gases per acre over the next several years until some sort of equilibrium was reached.[x]

It’s been estimated that, at its peak area in 2007, CRP locked up 84 million tons of carbon dioxide in a single year.[xi] If the Department of Agriculture manages to meet the ceiling in the new farm bill, we’ll see a thirty-four-percent reduction from the 2007 acreage of CRP—plowing thirteen million acres will release millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and cripple one of the best sequestration systems we have.

And farm wildlife will take a beating. CRP hasn’t been a boon for every wild animal on the agricultural landscape— no single approach to habitat can provide all things to all wildlife— but the net effect has been overwhelmingly positive. At least one species, the tiny Henslow’s sparrow, might very well be listed as threatened by now if it hadn’t been for the advent of CRP. Prairie ducks have prospered in the CRP era, as have prairie sharp-tailed grouse and several species of songbirds.

The coming of CRP revived the Midwest’s populations of ring-necked pheasants as well. In 1986, hunters in South Dakota, long the heart of pheasant country, had bagged just over 600,000 birds; in 1991, five years after the CRP program was launched, the harvest doubled to 1.2 million. Iowa, another mecca for pheasant hunters, reported a harvest of just over 800,000 roosters in 1986; just three years later, hunters took more than 1.4 million, thanks to a year of gentle weather and nearly 2 million acres of new CRP cover.

The decline of CRP over the last seven years has had the opposite effect across the pheasant’s current range. Here’s a quick look at the change in Midwestern pheasant harvest since 2007:

 

                                     2007                            2012

Iowa                           600,000                       158,000

Nebraska                    480,000                       198,000

Kansas                       383,000                       234,000

Minnesota                   655,000                       290,000

South Dakota           2,100,000                    1,428,000

North Dakota              907,000                       650,000

 

Much of this drop has been caused by stunningly bad weather over the last five years— extended drought on the central plains, a succession of horrific winters and/or spring deluges in Iowa and parts of Minnesota. Still, good habitat is a shock absorber. It can’t eliminate the effects of a bad year, but it does minimize them, and it accelerates the recovery once the weather improves. The Midwest’s prime pheasant states have lost nearly 8 million acres of CRP since 2007, which leaves pheasants and most other wildlife exposed to the full impacts of whatever cold front happens to blow through.

No one who knows anything about pheasants is surprised by the effect of this deepening habitat loss. Saddened but not surprised.

Pheasant populations are more carefully followed than the numbers of any other bird in farm country. If a bird as tough as the ringneck is struggling, it’s almost certain that sharptails, prairie chickens, and prairie ducks will follow. That’s bad news for hunters and bird enthusiasts, of course, but it’s also horrible news for local economies. In 2012, pheasant hunters spent $172 million in South Dakota alone[xii]. As recently as a decade ago, pheasants supported an industry worth half a billion dollars in the upper Midwest, an income stream that was produced almost accidentally by a conservation program designed to protect soil and bolster crop prices.

 

The boys in Washington are desperate to cut federal spending— I get that. And like most Americans, I support the idea of a balanced budget. But if we’re going to cut costs, it seems sensible to cut programs that don’t work very well, don’t serve many of our citizens, or both. CRP and several of the other programs in the conservation title of the farm bill deliver a spectrum of important benefits to nearly every American: They save precious topsoil, help support prices of grains and other farm commodities, clean our water and air, trap carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, keep rare wildlife species off the federal list of threatened and endangered species, provide recreation, and inject income into rural economies.

And they accomplish all these things at a surprisingly modest cost.

The farm bill as a whole is breathtakingly expensive, but it’s important to remember that eighty percent of that amount pays for food stamps and other nutritional programs. Another nine percent goes for subsidies on crop insurance (more on that in a minute), and another five percent for a variety of crop subsidies.

Only six percent of the farm bill budget is spent on conservation programs, most of it on CRP, and over the next ten years, the new federal farm program will cut more than $3.3 billion in CRP funding. Meanwhile, the cost of our subsidies to farmers for crop insurance will go up by $5.7 billion.[xiii]

I think it’s appropriate for us, as taxpayers, to help farmers cope with some of the risks inherent in their business. Agriculture is one of the cornerstones of the American economy, and it’s likely to become even more important in the future. But, for the life of me, I can’t understand why we should offer a farmer support by underwriting his crop insurance. Those of us who live in town reap no benefit whatsoever from the insurance program.

The farm bill’s conservation programs offer a far better conduit for support. Participating farmers receive a guaranteed income, regardless of flood, drought, or hail, and at the same time, the nation as a whole gets cleaner air and water, more productive topsoil, more wildlife, and a step toward heading off climate change. Everybody wins.

I’m tired of paying for the backroom deals while I watch compromise after compromise erode the parts of the farm bill I want most. Congress tries to pass a farm bill every five years or so, which means that, before the issue heats up again, Americans have three years to think about what we really want for the trillion dollars we’ll spend on the next farm bill.

It’s time to move the debate out of the backroom. And quit compromising.

As I remember, I first came across the work of Roy Chapman Andrews in the summer of my tenth year.

Andrews was one of the more remarkable men of the early twentieth century. He put himself through college doing taxidermy work, and with his fresh bachelor’s degree in hand, he went to New York, walked into the American Museum of Natural History, and asked for a job.  The man at the museum told him there was nothing available.

“I’m not asking for a position,” Andrews replied.  “You have to have someone to clean floors.  Couldn’t I do that?”

The boss reportedly expressed doubt that a young man with a college degree would scrub floors for a living.

“Not anybody’s floors,” Andrews said. “But the Museum floors are different.  I’ll clean them and love it, if you’ll let me.”

He was hired.

Over the next couple of years, he worked his way into the museum’s taxidermy department while he completed a master’s degree in mammalogy at Columbia.  In 1909, he began a series of collecting expeditions in the East Indies, the Arctic, and China, and in 1920, he convinced the director of the museum to launch a series of expeditions to central Asia. Over the next decade, he and his colleagues explored the vast interior of Mongolia, collecting some of the most significant paleontological specimens ever found, while dodging bullets, brigands, invasions, revolutions.

Some people say Andrews was the inspiration behind Indiana Jones.  I wouldn’t know about that.  But Andrews wrote about the life of an explorer and scientist in a way no ten-year-old boy could ignore. He wasn’t given to extended descriptions, but between his stiff-upper-lip tales of high adventure, he occasionally paused to evoke the spirit of the Gobi Desert:

“We looked out over a wild chaos of ravines and canyons and gigantic chasms, yellow, red and gray,” he wrote in This Business of Exploring. “A huge obo built by the Mongols as an offering to the gods of this fantastic spot crowned a sentinel butte. Sunset shadows filled the mysterious chasms with soft purple masses. Pinnacles and spires stood in silhouette against the sky. Over this tumultuous land sea lay the exquisite calm of a desert evening.”

At another point, he offered this description of a sandstorm approaching his camp: “A breathless silence, suddenly dropping like a pall over the desert, brought me out from dinner in the mess tent the night we made camp. In the west a tawny cloud shot through with shafts of dull red boiled up out of the flaming pit into which the sun had disappeared. Already the purple line of distant mountains was blotted from the sky. A twisting, whirling skirmish line of tiny wind devils danced their way across the basin floor. Behind them the solid yellow mass advanced swiftly, ominously, engulfing the hills and canyons of the badlands like a devouring monster. Slowly we became conscious of a pulsing throb, which beat upon our eardrums in an un-earthly, soundless noise . . .”

Camped on the shore of Chagan Nor, the White Lake, looking out toward the Altai Mountains from the edge of a field of dunes, he made this journal entry:

“ Late in the afternoon, there was a little rain, and, just at sunset, a glorious rainbow stretched its fairy arch from the plain across the lake to the summit of Baga Bogdo. Below it, the sky was ablaze with ragged tongues of flame; in the west, billowy gold-margined clouds shot through with red, lay thick upon the desert. Wave after wave of light flooded the mountain across the lake— lavender, green, and deepest purple— colors which blazed and faded almost before they could be named. We exclaimed breathlessly at first and then grew silent with awe. Never might we see the like again.”

Thus wrote Roy Chapman Andrews of the Gobi Desert.

I finished my first Andrews book in late June of 1961, and as luck would have it, my family took its first vacation west in August of that same year.  We went all the way to the Olympic Peninsula on the Washington coast. For my sisters and me, it was two weeks studded with firsts: Summer snow and the alpine tundra.  Old Faithful and the Norris Geyser Basin.  Black bears and prairie dogs.  Streams so clean we could drink out of them.  The impossibly huge Doug fir and Sitka spruce of the Olympic rain forest. The waves of the Pacific.

I’d never presume to designate one of those places as “the best,” not then, not now.  But for me, the South Dakota badlands were something special.  Maybe that was Andrews’ doing; I don’t know.  What is there about those strange saw-toothed ridges of clay chiseled out of the horizontal immensity of the High Plains?  I took to following the dry watercourses up into the formations where they narrowed down to shadowy slits in the ground, a hundred feet below the surface, like caves without roofs, only the sliver of prairie sky far above.  And when I felt confined, I’d find a crack and scramble up to the top of one of the ridges to stand on the crumbling knife edge with a view to the horizon so far away it seemed to curve in the distance.  Unlike Andrews and his men, I found no fossils, though I’m sure I passed by many without recognizing them, and the lack of old bones made no difference whatsoever.  I was simply captivated by the land itself.

The word “weird” has been trivialized in modern use.  These days, it’s used mainly by teenagers to express mild surprise tinged with disapproval.  My Scandinavian ancestors took the word much more seriously.  It was originally the name of one of the three goddesses who wove the fabric of the destinies of gods and men.  The Norsemen used the word as a noun, not an adjective— the modern synonym is probably “fate,” although for the Norse, the term carried nuances of the unexpected, the supernatural, that it has long since lost for us.

When I think of my first encounter with the badlands, the word comes to mind, in its original, almost magical, sense.  It was a landscape of the weird, a place where the veil between what we understand and what is hidden grows thin.

South Dakota’s badlands have drawn me back many times since that inaugural visit, first with my parents, later on my own, and I’ve also had the chance to indulge my taste for barren ground in other desert country across the West, from the saguaro expanses of Sonora to the Missouri Breaks in Montana, from the Cretaceous chalk of the Smoky Hill in western Kansas to the rainbow clay of Adobe Town.

The inclination seems as natural to me as breathing, but over the years, I’ve often been called upon to defend it, usually by some upper-class inmate of a major metropolitan area whose idea of star-gazing is attending a Broadway play on opening night.  I have found the exercise . . .  daunting.  It’s a little like being challenged to mount a rational explanation for the way I feel about my children— there are some things in life that simply aren’t covered by logic.  In fact, some of the very best things . . .

 

If there is any way of understanding, rather than simply feeling, the lure of the desert, it begins with an appreciation of our roots. According to the best evidence we have at hand today, Homo sapiens has been around some 200,000 years, give or take.  We spent at least ninety-five percent of that immense span of time as hunter-gatherers, which is to say, entirely dependent on wild places for our sustenance and shelter.

In spite of our best efforts at domesticating 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 meat.  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 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 decades 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 man-made climate change and pollution.  There has been sophisticated discussion of natural diversity as an investment in global stability— something even a Wall Street stockbroker can appreciate.

What we may 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 probably 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— or Eden, if you prefer— 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 very little difference— we still can’t leave it behind.  Now and then, it demands free rein in an empty place, a long run beyond the fences.  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.

This is why wild places exert such a gravitational attraction on many of us— they are our home.

But here, we’re considering a very specific wild place, the desert, which, I’ll readily admit, is not the first landscape most Americans think of when they drive out of town, looking for a refuge.  That shouldn’t come as a great shock— over the millennia, the human view of desert has always been equivocal.  These days, there’s a tendency to focus on what we find inconvenient or uncomfortable in these forsaken lands, but there is a long tradition of other, more positive associations.

More than 4,000 years ago, a Sumerian scribe sat down with his clay tablets and recorded a tale that had grown among the people of the Fertile Crescent, the story of Gilgamesh, a king of the ancient world.  He was “supreme over other kings, lordly in appearance,” the story went, a mighty warrior consumed by ego, so arrogant he offended the gods.

One of the Sumerian goddesses decided to restore a balance in the kingdom by offering a challenge to the king, and so, the scribe recorded, “in the wildness, she created valiant Enkidu, born of silence, endowed with strength,” a being who “knew neither people nor settled living,” a child of the desert places.

He was not evil.  The tablets described him as eating grasses with the gazelles and joining the animals at the watering hole.  But he was powerful, “the mightiest in the land,” the tablets said; “his strength is as mighty as the meteorite of Anu!“  In the course of the story, a trapper sees Enkidu on the other side of a water hole far out in the wilds. “On seeing him, the trapper’s face went stark with fear.  He was rigid with fear, though stock-still, his heart pounded and his face drained of color.”

It was the first written expression of a theme that would emerge from time to time over the centuries— the desert as the province of the supernatural, a place of power, a counterpoint to the civilized world.

The Old Testament is rooted in this same tradition.  The desert is often a place of danger where believers can lose their way or a metaphorical landscape watered by divine intervention, but, at times, it is a refuge for believers and occasionally provides the backdrop for divine revelation.  Consider Isaac [Genesis 21:20]: “God was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in the wilderness and became an archer.”  Or Moses [Exodus 3: 1-2]: “Now Moses . . . led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush [was] not consumed.”  Or David [1^st Samuel 23: 14]: “David abode in the wilderness in strong holds, and remained in the wilderness of Ziph. And Saul sought him every day, but God delivered him not into his hand.”

In the New Testament, miracles occurred in the untamed fastness of the desert.  You may recall that, according to Saint Mark, Jesus fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fishes [Mark 6: 31-42].  You may not recall that the 5,000 were without food because they had followed Him “out of all cities . . . into a desert place” far from the comings and goings of civilization.  According to Mark, Jesus began the work of redemption when he heard a voice from heaven saying, “’Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.  And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.”  [Mark 1: 11-13]

I’m not any kind of expert on the Gospel, but I have to offer my own view of this passage.  Some have found it to be proof that Satan himself lived in the desert.  I challenge that notion.  The temptations Jesus faced in that lonely place seemed to be temptations he brought with him.  It was clear that He needed to confront them, cast them out.  I wonder if the voice sent Him to the desert because it was easier to recognize them there.

In the end, this may be the magnet that draws at least some of us to these desolate spaces: the simplicity.  Certainly, from an ecological point of view, the desert is not complicated.  Few living things, plant or animal, have the endurance to make a living there, so the bones of the country lie naked to the sky and the silence is seldom disturbed by anything except the wind.

And the desert isn’t burdened with humanity.  There are no fences, no houses, few roads, fewer signs.  Through most of the year, there are no people at all.  Those few who are persistent enough— or crazy enough— to get out into the country earn the shelter of solitude . . . and a feeling of possession, not the kind that comes with a deed but the kind you get when there’s no one within forty miles to dispute it.  The desert strips away distractions and quiets the hive of details that follows us all in more settled places so that we can hear ourselves think.  These are gifts some of us have always cherished, and as the world fills with people, they become ever more precious.

 

Several years ago, I was rambling out under Joe Hay Rim on a warm, dry day in early September. I could see Continental Divide Peak off to the north, and I suddenly took it into my head to drive up that way from the south and west, an approach I’d never tried before.  I took the first two-track to the north and wandered out into the Bear Creek Basin, the Martian landscape of the Honeycombs on the horizon.

No one had been on that trail that day; in fact, when I got to the first of the dry washes, I discovered that no one had been there since the last significant rain, which had probably fallen sometime in July.  The runoff had cut down a couple of feet or more, right through the two-track, leaving a low vertical wall in the clay on each side.

Over my years in the backcountry, I’ve discovered a major disadvantage of four-wheel-drive— it doesn’t work when all four wheels are off the ground. With that in mind, I studied the cut for a minute and decided I wasn’t interested in getting high-centered on either edge of the wash or down at the bottom.  So I broke out the shovel and “improved” the grade, which took about fifteen minutes of heavy-duty earth-moving, then made the crossing without incident.

There were four more of these washes, each one requiring an extensive and temporary modification before I could pass.  It was a little more than two hours before I eased out on the alkali flat at the base of the Honeycombs.

I grabbed a camera and a canteen and hiked up into the breaks.  The find of the afternoon was a clay arch twenty feet tall, the kind of temporary attraction the badlands produce and erase in a matter of days.  I was taking pictures when the light suddenly dimmed.  I walked out of the ravine to see a line of thunderstorms over the hills to the west.  The lightning flickered silently through the curtains of rain, too far away to be heard.

I looked back at the truck.  I had a little less than an hour before the squall line arrived.  It was two hours back to the gravel by the way I’d come, maybe an hour and a half to a dependable road north and east.  Which was to say that I couldn’t get out in time.  The floor of that basin is mostly bentonite, a mineral that mixes with water to produce a colloidal substance combining the most inconvenient properties of fish slime and Elmer’s glue.  If the rain came, I was going to spend the night right where I was, and possibly the next day as well.

So I sat and watched, taking the lesson in patience for what it was.  The clouds darkened and rolled inexorably toward me, until, at the last minute, the waters parted.  The cell to the south drifted off toward Chain Lakes Flat, and the cell to the north rumbled up over South Pass, leaving a Technicolor sunset in its wake.  Now and then, I get lucky.

As I stood there in the last orange light of the day with the silence seeping back into the basin, I recalled a passage from Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow.  He wrote of the country along the Frenchman River straddling the border between Montana and Saskatchewan, but it applies as well to the big sky country of the Red Desert.

“”Desolate?  Forbidding?  There was never a country that in its good moments was more beautiful.  Even in drouth or dust storm or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous, once you have submitted to it with all the senses.  You don’t get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it.  You don’t escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back.  You become acutely aware of yourself.  The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small.  But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.

“It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people.  But not humble ones.  At noon the total sun pours on your single head; at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long.  Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed.  This is a land to mark the sparrow’s fall.”

 

Few visitors appreciate the desert. Most see the drive across the sage basins as the price they have to pay in order to see the Tetons and Old Faithful.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.  On one hand, their indifference leaves the desert to the tiny minority of people who treasure it.  As many of my other favorite places are discovered, it’s good to know there is this one last refuge.  On the other hand, in this modern age, no wild place can survive for long without a large and committed group of backers, people who will stand for a piece of country because they simply couldn’t live without it.

More than a century ago, one of my heroes, George Bird Grinnell, took over a publication called Forest and Stream.  It covered the outdoor sports, but it also championed the emerging cause of conservation.  The masthead of the magazine bore this credo: “A refined taste in natural objects.”  A refined taste in natural objects— that’s what the desert requires of us.  It hides its secrets in plain view, drifting on the wind, warming the evening light, changing the way we see.  It is a place where the wild in us can run free.  A place that sustains the spirit.

Copyright Chris Madson. All rights reserved.

It’s the kind of industrial efficiency America admires. In 1997, Ultra Petroleum sank a gas well on the Mesa, a long, flat-topped ridge along the Green River in western Wyoming. Over the previous sixty years, other outfits had drilled in the gas-rich strata of the Pinedale Anticline under the Mesa, but the rocks turned out to be what geologists call a “tight formation” with few cracks and fissures that would allow gas some distance from the well shaft to move toward it as the gas closer to the shaft was removed.

Ultra was the first operator to loosen the anticline strata with a technique called “fracking,” in which a mixture of fluids and sediment were pumped into the well at high pressure where it opened cracks along seams in the rock, allowing the gas to move more easily so that it could be economically collected. Ultra’s first well was such a success that the company immediately drilled three more, and corporations like Shell, Questar, and BP scrambled to get a piece of the action.

The Mesa is more than a ridge with natural gas underneath. It’s also critical winter range for mule deer that summer on the west flank of the Wind River Range. As the demand for drilling permits accelerated, reaction among local wildlife biologists, hunters, and other conservationists deepened from concern to alarm. Industry representatives were sure the mule deer would learn to coexist with the intensifying activity on the gas field; the BLM needed hard evidence of impacts on the deer, and all the local biologists had was the puckered feeling that came through the seats of their jeans. While that feeling was based on decades of experience and observation, it wasn’t quantified, so in 2000, the BLM authorized 700 more wells and directed the drilling companies to pay for a long-term study of the local mule deer.

Enter Hall Sawyer and his colleagues at Western Ecosystems Technologies, Inc. (WEST). In 2000, WEST landed the contract for an extensive study of deer and their habitat on the Mesa and nearby winter ranges that weren’t being drilled— Sawyer won the dubious distinction of leading the investigation, which combines extensive vegetation sampling with radio telemetry and aerial surveys to estimate deer populations and track changes in population and patterns of use, along with satellite imaging to measure the amount of habitat that has been lost to drill pads, storage tanks, and roads that have been installed since 2000.

Last September, Sawyer and his team released their tenth annual report on the deer of the Mesa, and the hard data confirm the seat-of-the-pants assessments wildlife managers had made when the gas rush first began. About three percent of the deer habitat on the Mesa has been lost to well pads and access roads with an additional unmeasured loss to pipeline rights of way. And, even though companies have made good-faith efforts to reduce traffic on roads and minimize the dirt work on drilling pads, the deer continue to avoid the disturbance around the gas field. The nine-year weighted regression analysis of the winter deer population on the Mesa between 2001 and 2009 shows a decline of thirty-six percent. In that same span, the entire deer herd in the area, including the animals that use the Mesa, has declined by twenty-one percent, while the part of the herd wintering on nearby undisturbed range has actually increased.

Sawyer’s analysis shows that annual survival of does on the Mesa in 2009 was ten percent lower than average survival over the last ten years. Most of the mortality occurred in May. “These deer came off the winter range, made it through most of their migration, and just sort of tipped over,” Sawyer said. “We have never seen anything like this before, but it certainly raises a red flag.”

The BLM’s plan for the Mesa requires the agency to increase its mitigation efforts if the Mesa’s deer population drops more than fifteen percent in any year or cumulatively over years since 2005. (A note here: It’s interesting that BLM should use the year 2005 as a baseline, since the population estimates for that year had already dropped sixty percent from estimates made in 2001, the year Sawyer started winter survey flights.) Between 2008 and 2009, the estimates of Mesa mule deer numbers dropped by forty-five percent, which has at least triggered a discussion about the possibility that mitigation efforts should be intensified.

In the case of the Sublette mule deer herd, mitigation has consisted mainly of buying conservation easements on large ranches along the upper Green River drainage. These easements should protect the habitat on these ranches from encroachment by ranchettes, but even though efforts are being made to improve the conserved habitat, it will probably not produce enough deer to offset the losses that seem to be occurring on the Mesa. And it’s worth considering that the influx of well-paid workers as a result of the natural gas play in the area is a significant part of the increase in demand for ranchettes. In this case and in other similar situations, mitigation isn’t likely to give us back the deer we’ve lost; the best we can hope is that it will reduce subsequent losses we would otherwise suffer.

Perhaps the most discouraging part of this story is the way the decision to develop was made. The informed opinions of experienced biologists carried no weight compared to the demands industry made on BLM officials. Oil and gas companies were required to fund wildlife research, but in the end, the burden of proof concerning the impacts of development fell on wildlife managers and conservationists, even though the proposal to transform the Mesa came from industry.

Thirteen years after the first successful well, we have the proof, which comes, as it usually does, too late to affect the sale of leases or the pattern of development in the gas field on the Mesa. The estimated life of the reserve is forty to sixty years, which assumes that neither the market for natural gas nor the technology for extracting it will change much, two assumptions that are questionable at best. But, at some point in the future, the gas will finally run out, and my grandchildren or their children may get the chance to try reclaiming the winter range on the Mesa, at which point they’ll find out how much is really known about the surprisingly delicate ecology of the sagebrush grasslands.

In the meantime, the approaches to development that were applied on the Mesa have already been used on other oil and gas fields in Wyoming. These fields don’t involve much crucial winter range, but they do occupy huge tracts of cover that are important to deer, pronghorns, sage grouse, Columbian sharptails, and the weather-beaten outdoorsmen who pursue them across the high desert.  The basins and foothills of the interior West are a unique landscape, rich in resources that are increasingly rare in modern America— silence, solitude, and the freedom to travel to the far horizon without asking leave of any man. They deserve better from us.

The WEST report can be found at: http://www.wy.blm.gov/jio-papo/papo/index.htm. Click on “2010 Mule Deer Monitoring Annual Report.”

Some thoughts

on the occasion

of the 2010 Census

On April 14, 1996, biologists with the National Park Service opened the gate of a pen on Rose Creek, a small tributary of the Lamar River in the northeastern corner of Yellowstone National Park. The five wolves inside had waited two months for the moment. They had been trapped in northern British Columbia and flown to Yellowstone that January, an adult female and her three pups from one pack and a dominant male from another pack nearby. After two months of confinement, they stepped through the gate and became the most famous wolves in the history of their species— the Druid Peak pack.

At the time, northern Yellowstone supported more than 17,000 elk and 500 bison, none of whom had ever seen a wild dog larger than a coyote. Part of the world’s first national park, it afforded complete protection from trappers and other humans, and on the day the gate opened, there were only twenty-six other wolves in the country. For the five new immigrants, it must have seemed like Eden.

They staked out a territory of 300 square miles, much of it in the sagebrush prairie on either side of the Lamar, where their activities could be easily watched and filmed. Wolf groupies gathered along the highway by the hundreds with Leica binoculars and Questar spotting scopes in hand, while filmmakers captured most of the pack’s daily affairs for documentaries on public television and the BBC.

By 1999, there were 118 wolves in Yellowstone and eight in the Druid pack. It was in that year that biologists saw the first signs of trouble in paradise. Only two of the Druid’s six pups survived the summer and only thirty-eight of sixty-four pups in the park lived to see the end of the year. Subsequent blood tests suggested that most of the pups had died of canine distemper, a disease they probably picked up from other wild animals in the park. The blood analysis showed that the wolves had also been exposed to parvovirus and hepatitis.

Nor was disease the only killer. Two wolves in the Soda Butte pack, a neighbor of the Druids, were killed by other wolves. The following year, the Druid’s dominant female was killed by other members of the pack, probably the two subordinate females she had ruthlessly disciplined for two years.

By 2002, there were thirty-seven animals in the Druid pack, many of which left during the spring to form three new packs, which inflicted casualties on each other and the Druids as they competed for control of the Lamar valley. Three more adult wolves died in fights for territory. In 2003, five more were killed in territorial struggles; in 2004, at least four more; in 2005, eight more.

Another round of canine distemper swept the wolf dens in 2005— only twenty-two of sixty-nine pups whelped in the park survived. All the pups produced by the Druid pack died. At the same time, mange appeared among the wolves. Mange is caused by a small mite that nibbles on the skin of its host, then feeds on the fluids that ooze from the tiny wounds. As the mites multiply, the inflammation causes the infected animal to shed patches of skin and hair. A case of mange isn’t fatal by itself, but it deprives an infected wolf of the fur it needs to withstand sub-zero temperatures during the winter. The increased energy demand is often more than the wolf can sustain. At least three wolves died of the effects of manage in 2005.

The Yellowstone wolves killed four more of their number in 2006, four in 2007, and ten in 2008. The Druids numbered thirteen that year, but only five of their eighteen pups survived to year’s end, probably because of another outbreak of distemper, and the pack members that remained were hard-pressed by mange and competition from surrounding packs.

Last March, Doug Smith, Yellowstone’s wolf biologist, announced that the Druid pack was probably on its way out. “They’re down to one,” he observed, “and that one probably won’t make it through the winter.” When last seen, she was suffering from a severe case of mange and was likely to die a lingering death from exposure and starvation. So much for the world’s most famous wolves.

By the numbers

In the natural world, this is how populations are controlled. At the beginning when a small group of animals finds its way into new country, the pioneers have to learn the landscape and the opportunities it offers, a process that can take several generations, during which the population grows slowly as individuals struggle to learn the ropes.

With luck, members of the population eventually hone their ability to exploit their environment. In some species, this may be learned; in others, it may be the result of natural selection. Either way, these generations are set to succeed. Better fed, better sheltered than their predecessors, they produce more young and manage to get more of their infants to adulthood. At the same time, adults tend to live longer. The result is a drastic increase in the rate at which the population grows.

A population in this phase of its growth may take some interesting evolutionary paths. If an individual isn’t limited by food, it can afford to spend more of its time and energy on specialized behaviors and structures. Competition for mates is often more important than competition for resources in these populations. All this can easily lead to a heavy investment in the rituals that surround sex— males may get larger and more powerful; they may develop outlandish symbols of their virility like the antlers of a seven-point bull elk or the specialized plumage and air sacs of a sage grouse cock; they may invest in intense courtship displays.

An evolutionary biologist would caution against making any value judgments about such developments; from a strictly evolutionary point of view, they are simply ways to ensure survival of certain associations of genes. But it’s hard to look at any wild population in this maximum growth phase and not reach the conclusion that life is exceptionally good for animals that have found a way to succeed but haven’t yet run into shortages of food or cover. The chances are good that each individual will live a long, healthy life with plenty of food, plenty of room, appealing mates, and many thriving offspring. Does it get any better than that?

It is one of the tragedies of life on earth that all resources are finite. Sooner or later, a growing population begins to encounter shortages, spotty at first, more pervasive and longer-lasting as time goes on and numbers grow. Different animals have different ways of responding to growing numbers of their own kind. When there are too many elk on Yellowstone’s north range, the herd damages the plants it depends on for food. Less food means more starving elk; more starving elk leads to greater winter losses and fewer newborn elk— eventually, the population falls.

Wolves may run into the same fundamental limits when it comes to food, but often, their increasing numbers cause trouble in their social order before a lack of food comes to bear. Issues of territory and dominance typically begin to constrain their population growth before the game runs out. This strife may not be pretty, but it insulates the wolves from the local extinction that would occur if their numbers overshot their prey and they killed the very last game animal.

Of course, predators also take a hand in the control of any population of animals. We think of predators in terms of tooth and claw, but they aren’t always powerful and ferocious. Some are single-celled creatures that stalk their prey through alternate hosts and prefer to do their feeding inside their victims. Large predators like grizzlies and small predators like distemper viruses share few outward traits, but they tend to react in the same way to a change in a prey population. When a given species of prey is rare, predators and diseases have trouble finding victims; as the population density of potential prey increases, losses to both predators and disease are likely to increase. That rule applies to wolves as surely as it does to rabbits.

From the point of view of an overall population, I suppose success can be measured strictly by the numbers— the closer a population comes to filling its niche and fully exploiting its resources, the more successful it is. But a look at life in the Druid pack over the last decade suggests that an individual’s life isn’t all that enjoyable as the population hits the wall. Life spans tend to be shorter. Females bear fewer young, and fewer of those young survive their infancy. Disease is more common, both because animals are in poorer shape and because communicable diseases spread more easily in dense populations than in sparse ones. Violent behavior between members of the same species increases.

It’s interesting that one of Yellowstone’s annual reports on the Druid pack mentions, in passing, that “compared to other wolf pups in Yellowstone, the Druid pups were slightly smaller.” There are several possible explanations for the disparity: It may have been a temporary variation or a statistical anomaly; it may have been due to the large number of pups the Druid pack whelped that year. It could also have been a reflection of growing population stresses in the pack, stresses that reached even into the nursery.

Fill ’er up

Radio host Michele Norris had just finished her segment on the demise of the Druid pack when my wife bustled into the kitchen and thumb-tacked an official-looking form on the bulletin board, her way of suggesting that I ought not forget it. I took a closer look— it was from the U.S. Census Bureau. Well, I thought to myself, on the scale of federal forms, this one’s not so tough. And I’m happy to do my part in the pursuit of an accurate national nose count, curious— and more than a little apprehensive— about what the 2010 census will show.

The growth of America’s population is as much a matter of myth as fact. No one knows whether Daniel Boone ever said that he was moving west to find “more elbow room,” but an Englishman who traveled the American frontier in 1796 and 1797 did record this conversation with the backwoodsman:

“He said he had a great deal of land given him on the first settlement of the country; but that when societies began to form around him, he moved off, and divided his land among his relations, unwilling (as he expressed himself) to live among men who were shackled in their habits, and would not enjoy uncontrolled the free blessings which nature had bestowed upon them. Since this time, he told me he had spent his time a great deal on the frontiers; and at this present moment he said he was going to hunt for beavers in some unfrequented corner of the woods, where undisturbed he might pursue this amusement, and enjoy the pleasures arising from a secluded and solitary life.”

The pattern of Boone’s life— the move from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, from Carolina to Kentucky, from Kentucky to Missouri— reflected the habits and preferences of an entire class of Americans. They were a people who remembered what it was like to scratch a living from ten acres of farmland that belonged to another man. Many of them were fresh from the harsh realities of a Europe that was increasingly crowded, a place that was controlled by a landed class that passed the privileges of rank from one aristocratic generation to the next.

The American frontier was fraught with a unique set of dangers, but for all the risk, it offered free land, free water and timber, free fish and game. The advantages were not lost on emigrants from the Old World. Wave after wave of them took the measure of the new continent and agreed with one of Boston’s earliest residents, Thomas Morton, who wrote that “the more I looked the more I liked it. And when I had seriously considered the beauty of the place, with all her fair endowments, I did not think that in all the known world it could be paralleled.”

Unfortunately, the frontier lifestyle carried the seeds of its own destruction. When the first U.S. census was taken in 1790, the nation’s population stood at 3,929,214. In the next decade, it increased by thirty-five percent and by another thirty-six percent the decade after that. As the march toward Manifest Destiny picked up speed, some observers were ambivalent about it. John C. Calhoun, a Congressman from South Carolina who later became vice president of the United States, commented on the growing risk that the nation would split into smaller countries. “We are greatly and rapidly— I was about to say fearfully— growing,” he said in an address to the House of Representatives in 1817. “This is our pride and our danger; our weakness and our strength.”

By 1870, American population had increased by a factor of ten, and in 1890, the superintendent of the Census Bureau, Robert Porter, noted an unprecedented change in the nation’s demographic affairs:

“Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.”

The American frontier had vanished.

Historians have debated the importance of this milestone in national development ever since Frederick Jackson Turner first commented on it in 1892, but regardless of its effect on the American character, it had no effect on the growth of American population. In 1915, U.S. population passed 100 million, three centuries after the first English-speaking colony was established at Jamestown. We reached our second hundred million in 1968, fifty-three years later. We added our third hundred million in 2007, thirty-nine years after that. The specialists estimate that we’ll add our fourth hundred million by 2039, thirty-two years after the third.

Some observers of this trend are buoyantly optimistic about having another hundred million people in the United States, believing that a youthful, growing population will give us a powerful competitive edge in an aging world. It’s an appealing fantasy, based on a child-like faith in the past. As Denver columnist and talk-show host Mike Rosen puts it: “I’ll cast my fate with freedom, human ingenuity and revolutionary technologies creating new resources, as has been the case throughout history.”

We’ll see how “human ingenuity and revolutionary technologies” help us with 100 million new bodies in the next thirty years. We’ll need something like 10 billion more gallons of water each day, and that’s assuming every new user applies the kind of conservation measures that Tucson, Arizona, has adopted to cope with water shortages. At current levels of consumption, those new Americans will need 260 million more gallons of petroleum a year, 75 trillion more cubic feet of natural gas, and a trillion kilowatt-hours of new electricity. They’ll need 3 billion more bushels of corn a year, 500 million more bushels of soybeans, and another 500 million bushels of wheat.

If Joel Kotkin, author of The Next Hundred Million, is right, about 60 million of these new Americans will settle outside of major cities in suburbs or exurbs. At 2.57 people per household, that will be about 23 million new houses on something like 10 million acres of land. Unless we radically change the way we build houses, that will take about 368 billion board-feet of lumber.

I have little doubt that we’ll do a better job of conserving resources in the next thirty years than we do now— we’ll have little choice. And Rosen may be right; some wunderkind in one of our universities may come up with a new battery that helps us build a better electric car. Still, there will be 100 million more Americans on the highway, at the mall, looking for a place to park, a place to stand, a place to be alone. We will be less free than we have been for the simple reason that one man’s freedom ends where another’s begins.

It’s fashionable in some circles to sneer at the predictions of population disasters that Thomas Malthus made 200 years ago, that Paul Erlich famously repeated in The Population Bomb in the 1960s. It’s easy to sneer when you’re living in the richest country in the world, with a population density that is eight percent of India’s and thirteen percent of Great Britain’s. If we had lived the last forty years in Somalia, Sudan, the Congo, Haiti, or Bangladesh, we might see the Malthusian warnings in a different light, but I’ll concede the point that an apocalyptic population crash may not be in our immediate future.

What seems to be happening is more subtle. Many societies seem to be feeling the crush of their numbers almost instinctively and reacting to it. In Europe, where human density has passed 600 people per square mile, demographers are predicting a significant decline in population over the next century. The economic reasons for this trend are clear to anyone who lives in a first-world country— these days, it takes longer for young adults to educate themselves and get into the workforce, and the cost of bearing and raising children continues to increase. Some observers argue that these market forces are having similar effects in China, even that the stabilizing Chinese population has more to do with the market than with their infamous one-child policy.

The advocates of infinite growth express relief that America is bucking the downward population trend in these countries. As Kotkin puts it: “Because of America’s unique demographic trajectory among advanced countries, it should emerge by mid-century as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history.” I guess we’ll see which view of 400 million Americans turns out to be more accurate— the economist’s or the ecologist’s.

Learning by example

In the short term, at least, the question isn’t whether we’ll live; it’s how well we’ll live. Many animal populations survive indefinitely in the gray world just short of collapse, but it’s not a comfortable existence. Yellowstone’s wolves have come to that uncomfortable place. The passing of the Druid pack is not a sign that wolves will disappear from Yellowstone anytime soon— there are already wolves vying to claim the territory the Druids left vacant. It is a sign that the Yellowstone wolves are approaching the limits of that environment, if they haven’t passed it already. The population will persist, but life for individual wolves will continue to be what it was for the Druids, an uphill struggle against disease, starvation, social upheaval, and internecine violence.

The fate of the Druids is more than a metaphor; it’s a practical demonstration of the pressures that come to bear on a population when it approaches the limits of the resources that support it. We’re not wolves, but in spite of our technological prowess, we’ll bow to the same forces in the end.  Even here in the empty quarter of the continent, we feel them already in the shortage of resources as mundane as fresh water and as ethereal as untrammeled open space.

Like the Druid wolves, we live in a finite world. Unlike the Druids, we can choose how we live. We can decide to set our own limits and live lives unconstrained by scarcity.  Or we can continue to breed our way into a confrontation with the limits nature imposes on us, hurling ourselves against the wall like a pack of wolves, only to fall back, bruised, bloodied, and surprised by a reality we ought to have understood two centuries ago.

For all our intellect and ingenuity, there’s no third choice.