the land ethic

 

 

AS I’VE RUN OUT MY STRING OF YEARS, I’VE DEVELOPED A DEEPENING APPRECIATION FOR THE efforts of the people who fought the fight for the land long before we did. There’s an epigram that’s made the rounds for years. It’s been attributed to Mark Twain, although no one seems to be able to find it in his writing. Chances are good that it was synthesized by that famous writer, Anonymous, and like many things of his, it has a certain weight. “History may not repeat itself,” the saying goes, “but it rhymes.”

I’d like to consider a few of those rhymes, contained in the work of three men in our now-distant past, largely neglected today, who advocated the conservation of renewable resources like soil, water, wildlife, and wild land before the need for conservation was recognized by America at large. They were ahead of their time, which is, all too often, an uncomfortable place to be.

So, the text of this sermon comes from a source I seldom cite: the King James version of the Bible, specifically, the prophet Isaiah, chapter 40, verses 3 and 6:

“The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness . . . And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.”

I am, perhaps, to be forgiven if this biblical passage has stuck in the back of my mind over the course of a career that has spanned more than forty years. Back there in the early 1970s, when my cohort of wildlife people were finishing graduate school, it seemed that the nation was poised on the verge of a wholehearted commitment to the precept of wise use. The Clean Water Act with its migratory bird rule, LWCF, the Wilderness Act, NEPA, wild and scenic rivers, ESA, the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act, ANILCA, the return of CRP under the 1985 Farm Bill, Sodbuster, Swampbuster, NAWMP, NAWCA— Americans were unanimous in their support of conservation of wildlife, both game and nongame, along with a sensible approach to the management of renewable natural resources.

Or so it seemed. As the last forty years have proven, the apparent consensus on conservation and the environment was far, far more fragile than my generation in the profession thought. We’ve watched as the political and financial support for conservation has waned, as traditional coalitions have dissolved, as former allies have declared holy wars against one another, and as special interests have exploited the disarray to begin the job of dismantling the regulatory framework that defined conservation in the twentieth century.

The wildlife profession has been engaged in a fighting retreat for a generation, and the advocates of enlightened conservation find themselves isolated, with little political leverage, our recommendations and objections like “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.”

In such times, I think it’s comforting— and often instructive— to look back over our shoulders and attend to other voices, raised in other times, who also cried out in a wilderness of indifference.

Voices like George Catlin’s.

—————–

CATLIN was crazy. Scion of a middle-class Pennsylvania family, he trained as an attorney, following in his father’s footsteps, and spent two or three years comfortably practicing law before he sold all his law books to buy paint and canvas. With no formal training, he set out to support himself as a portrait painter in Philadelphia. He was far from a brilliant artist, but he managed to make ends meet for several years, and if that was as far as his ambition had taken him, he would have faded into obscurity.

Then, one summer afternoon, a delegation of Winnebagos passed through Philadelphia on their way from Wisconsin to the Great White Father’s house in Washington, D.C., to complain about illicit lead miners on their land. Catlin was transfixed by their costume and bearing. As he told it, he made up his mind on the spot: “The history and customs of such a people, preserved by pictorial illustrations, are themes worthy of the life-time of one man, and nothing short of the loss of my life, shall prevent me from visiting their country, and of becoming their historian.”[i]

Friends and family tried to reason with him. “I broke from them all— from my wife and my aged parents,” he wrote, and “with these views firmly fixed— armed, equipped, and supplied, I started out in the year 1830 and penetrated the vast and pathless wilds of the great ‘Far West’ with a light heart.”[ii] He would be gone for eight years.

In St. Louis, he managed to hitch a ride with William Clark, then the Indian commissioner for the region, as Clark traveled up the Mississippi for a council with several tribes at Prairie du Chien. Along the way, Catlin met a dozen of the tribes gathered along the upper reaches of the river and got his first taste of what was then the American frontier.

Back in St. Louis, he began looking for ways to get farther west and was lucky enough to find a new form of transportation. He booked passage on the steamboat Yellowstone, bound for the mouth of the Yellowstone River on the upper Missouri, where he found what he’d been looking for:

“. . . the interminable and boundless ocean of grass-covered hills and valleys . . . where the bison range, the elk, the mountain-sheep, and the fleet-bounding antelope— where the magpie and chattering paroquettes supply the place of the red-breast and the blue-bird— where wolves are white and bears grizzly— where pheasants are hens of the prairie, and frogs have horns!”[iii]

He spent time with the Crow, the Mandan, the Sioux, the Iowa, the Konza, the Pawnee, and then, down along the Arkansas River, with the Osage, the Cherokee, the Comanche, and back north into Minnesota, with the Chippewa, the Menominee, the Winnebagos, the Sac and Fox— fifty tribes according to one count. By the time he returned to the East, he’d seen most of the Great Plains, and somewhere in his travels, he’d come up with a big idea.

“This strip of country, which extends from the province of Mexico to lake Winnepeg on the North, is almost one entire plain of grass. . . . It is here, and here chiefly, that the buffaloes dwell; and with, and hovering about them, live and flourish the tribes of Indians, whom God made for the enjoyment of that fair land and its luxuries.

“It is a melancholy contemplation for one who has traveled as I have, through these realms, and seen this noble animal in all its pride and glory, to contemplate it so rapidly wasting from the world, drawing the irresistible conclusion too, which one must do, that its species is soon to extinguished, and with it the peace and happiness (if not the actual existence) of the tribes of Indians who are joint tenants with them, in the occupancy of these vast and idle plains.

“And what a splendid contemplation too, when one imagines them as they might in future be seen, (by some protecting policy of government) preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in a magnificent park, where the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the fleeting herds of elks and bison. What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in future ages! A nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!

“I would ask no other monument to my memory, nor any other enrolment of my name among the famous dead, than the reputation of having been the founder of such an institution.”[iv]

It had been the reason he’d set out, and the things he’s seen over the thousands of miles, back and forth across the Great Plains, had only deepened his conviction that this unique North American wilderness should be somehow preserved. All that was left was to use his art to convince the rest of the nation. He spent most of the rest of his life in that attempt, touring the United States with the paintings and artifacts in what he called his “Indian gallery.” The admission price wasn’t enough to support him, so he appealed to Congress, asking them to buy the collection. Congress declined.

Short of funds, he packed up the gallery and headed to Europe where the exhibition generated a reasonable amount of money but not enough to keep him clear of debt. Back in the states, he sold the collection to an industrialist, then began reproducing many of the paintings from memory to support his family. Hungry for the wilderness of his youth, he made extensive trips to Central and South America along with another trip back to the American West.

He died in Jersey City, New Jersey, in the winter of 1872 in the knowledge that his worst predictions concerning the native peoples and wildlife of the Great Plains were rapidly coming true. It would be another seven years before the collection of his art and tribal artifacts were finally donated to the Smithsonian Institution. But just before he died, in the spring of 1872, the nation granted his greatest wish— a “magnificent park,” forerunner of a revolutionary “protecting policy of government” that would set the standard for the world.

—————

WHILE Catlin was crisscrossing the wilderness of the Great Plains, another man of his generation was doing his best to build a life in the much more settled landscapes of Vermont— George Perkins Marsh. The son of a prominent lawyer and Congressman, Marsh attended Dartmouth College, where he graduated at the head of his class at the age of nineteen, then passed the bar exam as Catlin had and set up a law office in Burlington.

Like Catlin, he seemed to have had little taste for the law. After the death of his partner in 1832, his business steadily declined— he closed the office ten years later and launched his campaign for a Congressional seat. He won the election in 1843 and spent the next six years in Congress. The contacts he made in Washington eventually led to an extended career as a diplomat, first as the U.S. minister to Turkey, then as minister to Italy.

From his earliest boyhood, he’d shown a deep interest in the relationship between people and the land. He saw that relationship through two, often conflicting lenses. On one hand, the Calvinist philosophy he had absorbed as a boy remained with him all his life. Unlike Catlin and another contemporary observer of the natural world, Henry David Thoreau, Marsh had little use for wilderness.

In a speech in 1847, he argued that “in North America, the full energies of advanced European civilization were brought to bear on a desert continent, and it has been but the work of a day to win empires from the wilderness. . . . This marvelous change has converted unproductive wastes into fertile fields and filled with light and life the dark and silent recesses of our aboriginal forests and mountains.”[v]

He believed that wildlife was more abundant in areas where the primeval forest had been interspersed with small farms, that the New World was better off for the crops and animals that had been introduced from the Old, and that the waves of emigrants sweeping westward across the continent were actually a pacifying influence.

“The arts of the savage are the arts of destruction,” he believed. “Civilization,” he argued— against all the bloody evidence on both sides of the Atlantic, even then— “is at once the mother and the fruit of peace.”[vi]

In many of his opinions, he was very much a man of his time.

But he was also a keen observer. In that same speech— in 1847— he anticipated a problem that no one else had even considered:

“Though man cannot at his pleasure command the rain and sunshine, the wind and frost and snow, yet it is certain that climate itself has in many instances been gradually changed and ameliorated or deteriorated by human action. The draining of swamps and the clearing of forests perceptibly affect the evaporation from the earth, and of course the mean quantity of moisture suspended in the air. The same causes modify . . . the power of the surface to reflect, absorb and radiate the rays of the sun, and consequently influence the distribution of light and heat, and the force and direction of the winds.”[vii]

He’d watched as the timber had been cleared indiscriminately from the watersheds of eastern Vermont, and he’d seen the results:

“Steep hill sides and rocky ledges are well suited to the permanent growth of wood, but when in the rage for improvement they are improvidently stripped of this protection, the action of sun and wind and rain soon deprives them of their thin coating of vegetable mould, and this, when exhausted, cannot be restored by ordinary husbandry. They remain therefore barren and unsightly blots, producing neither grain nor grass, and yielding no crop but a harvest of noxious weeds. . . . The vernal and autumnal rains, and the melting snows of winter, no longer intercepted and absorbed by the leaves or the open soil of the woods, flow swiftly over the smooth ground, washing away the vegetable mould as they seek their natural outlets, fill every ravine with a torrent, and convert every river into an ocean. There is reason to fear the valleys of many of our streams will soon be converted from smiling meadows into broad wastes of shingle and gravel and pebbles, deserts in summer, and seas in spring and autumn.”[viii]  George Perkins Marsh . . . in 1847.

Thanks to his diplomatic assignments, Marsh had the chance to travel through much of the western Mediterranean, where he saw the lasting effects of millennia of intensive farming and overgrazing: the salt-poisoned soils of the Fertile Crescent, the eroded hills where the vaunted cedars of Lebanon had once grown, the ravaged hillsides of north Africa and Italy, still showing the scars of wounds inflicted by the farmers of the Roman Empire soon after the birth of Christ.

The examples of the Old World and the trajectory of land use in America weren’t lost on Marsh. He began work on a detailed analysis of land management, the culmination of thirty years of observation and largely ineffective proselytizing. It was massive— 465 pages that appeared in 1864. He called it Man and Nature: Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action.

Much of his Calvinist confidence in civilized man seems to have evaporated in his masterwork, no doubt as a result of his experiences in Europe and the rapidly accelerating destruction that was already apparent in America.

“Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste,” he wrote. “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. The proportions and accommodations which insured the stability of existing arrangements are overthrown. Indigenous vegetable and animal species are extirpated, and supplanted by others of foreign origin, spontaneous production is either forbidden or restricted, and the face of the earth is either laid bare, or covered with a new and reluctant growth of vegetable forms, and with alien tribes of life. These intentional changes and substitutions constitute, indeed, great revolutions; but vast as is their magnitude and importance, they are insignificant in comparison with the contingent and unsought results which have flowed from them.”[ix]

A retired medical doctor, Franklin B. Hough, read Man and Nature soon after it hit the streets and was deeply impressed. As the man in charge of the 1855 and 1865 census in New York state, he’d worked through data on shrinking timber supplies and found the numbers alarming. He reported them in an address to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Portland, Maine, in 1873. The day after his speech, the association voted to approach Congress “on the importance of promoting cultivation of timber and preservation of forests.”[x] Three years later, Hough was appointed to begin a study of the condition of American forests, and his report led to the creation of the Division of Forestry in 1881, forerunner of the U.S. Forest Service.

Marsh died the next summer. He lived just long enough to see a lifetime of advocacy validated in the creation of the Forest Service. It would be another fifty years before the federal government translated his concerns over soil erosion into action with the establishment of the Soil Conservation Service— his warnings about the environmental and political consequences of large-scale irrigation were never taken seriously. And his passing thoughts on climate? Ignored at the time, forgotten for a century and a half, and still locked in political paralysis today.

Crying, crying in the wilderness . . .

———————

THERE is a third man of this generation who spoke to a wide audience during his life and has been largely forgotten since. Henry William Herbert was born in England to the offspring of nobility. His father was the unlucky third son of the Earl of Carnarvon; his mother, the daughter of Joshua Allen, fifth Viscount of County Kildare in Ireland. With no hope of inheriting title or estate, the father

trained as an attorney, then turned to religion and died as the Dean of Manchester Cathedral, the income from which allowed his son to gain an outstanding education at Eton and Cambridge while he nursed an abiding sense of having been somehow cheated out of a position among the British elite.

Soon after he graduated, Herbert left England to escape debt. He went first to Brussels, then Paris, and finally to New York in 1831, where he took a position teaching Greek in a fashionable prep school while he began writing novels and historical studies. To fill in the financial gaps between books, he wrote for several magazines, often focusing on hunting and fishing under the pseudonym Frank Forester.[xi]

He was by no means the first writer to advance the code of outdoor sport as it was understood by the aristocracy of Britain and Europe, but he was almost certainly the most influential.

America was, he thought, a paradise:

“There is, perhaps, no country in the world which presents, to the sportsman, so long a catalogue of the choicest game, whether of fur, fin, or feather, as the United States of North America; there is none, certainly, in which the wide-spread passion for the chase can be indulged, under so few restrictions, and at an expense so trifling.”

But he was quick to point out that this state of affairs was at risk.

“All this, notwithstanding, it is to be regretted that there is no country in which . . . the gentle craft of Venerie is so often degraded into mere pot-hunting; and none, in which, as a natural consequence, the game that swarmed of yore in all the fields and forests, in all the lakes, rivers, bays, and creeks of its vast territory, are in such peril of becoming speedily extinct.”[xii]

Some of this, he saw, was due to the thriving market in wild game, which encouraged every farmer’s son to shoot everything he could, whenever he could.   “Knowing nothing, and caring less than nothing, about the habits or seasons of the birds in question, he judges naturally enough that, whenever there is a demand for the birds and beasts in the New York markets, it is all right to kill and sell them. And thanks to the selfish gormandizing of the wealthier classes of that city, there is a demand always.”[xiii]

But the problem reached far beyond commercial traffic in game, he knew. The vast majority of American hunters knew nothing about the animals they hunted— whether they migrated, when they courted and tended young, how many offspring they produced. Without that understanding, too many of them shot as many as they could at any season of the year. Forester pointed out impacts of that unrelenting pressure that were already obvious in the 1830s— the rapid decline of the heath hen, the local extirpation of the wild turkey and white-tailed deer. As Forester saw it, the hunter had a responsibility to know his quarry and conserve it, and he pounded that message home in his writing.

There had been efforts to control hunting of some high-profile species long before Forester’s arrival in America. New York adopted its first deer season in the mid-eighteenth century,[xiv] and the state adopted a law protecting the heath hen in 1791.[xv] Such statutes, Forester believed, “are intended solely to protect the animals in question, during periods of nidification, incubation, and providing for the youthful broods.”[xvi] The problem, as he saw it, was that these laws “emanated from the dwellers in cities,”[xvii] which encouraged the rural majority to ignore them. Without adequate enforcement, it was clear that regulations would not stem the carnage.

Forester hammered on these issues with a consistency and authority that encouraged more and more people to join the ranks of self-proclaimed “sportsmen.” At the same time, the local extinction of game along the East Coast emphasized the seriousness of the problems facing America’s wildlife.

Had Forester lived as long as Catlin and Marsh, he would have seen the first fruits of his labor. In 1871, Congress created the U.S. Fishery Commission to begin the job of rebuilding dwindling populations of game fish. In 1885, the Division of Economic Ornithology, forerunner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, came into being. Two years later, Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell launched the Boone and Crockett Club, a group of patrician easterners who were prime movers in drafting and enacting laws like the Lacey Act and sweeping new federal programs like the national wildlife refuge system.

Never a contented man, Forester seemed to have great hope for a change in his life when he married for the second time in 1858. He and his bride had just moved into his cottage in rural New Jersey when he was called away on business. While he was gone, a woman came to visit the new Mrs. Herbert and filled her in on the gossip concerning her husband, his rumored violent tendencies and his reported need for cash. Without waiting to confront him, she packed and left.

It was, apparently, the last straw for a man who had spent most of his life in a battle with depression. Late on the night of May 16, 1858, he excused himself from a conversation with a close friend, went into the next room, and shot himself. He was fifty-one.

In the letter he left behind, he asked the members of the press to “let the good that I have done, if any, be interred with my bones; let the evil also.”[xviii] A strange request, it seems, and one that, by accident more than intention, was granted. The memory of his real or imagined sins has long since faded, along with the substantial credit he deserves for mobilizing hunters and anglers in the service of conservation. Only the legacy of his pioneering leadership in the community of American hunters has survived. Another voice in the wilderness . . .

———————

THERE were a few others in this generation who saw the situation in America more or less the same way these three men did and took every opportunity to mount the argument that the nation needed to change its attitude toward the land. But, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the nation wasn’t listening. I suspect some of the people of that time believed the natural resources they consumed were infinite; a few saw the growing evidence of the damage that was being done but didn’t believe they could change the course of events. And a great many simply didn’t think about the impact of what they were doing or where their single-minded pursuit of profit ultimately led.

The shift, when it came, seems to me to have been the result of two forces. One was the undeniable proof of the landscape-scale destruction that was spreading west with civilization. More and more people could see it out their back doors.

The second was the power of the message a tiny group of pioneering conservationists persisted in spreading. It was that message that gave focus to growing doubts and reassured people who might otherwise have believed they were alone in their assessment of the developing problem. The second half of the nineteenth century produced the greatest leaders the conservation movement has ever seen, but I think it’s important to recognize they were as much an effect as a cause. The movement itself rose, with steadily increasing power, out of the grassroots.

My feeling is that this generation of wildlife professionals finds itself in a situation remarkably similar to the one Catlin, Marsh, Forester and their cohort faced almost 200 years ago. We’ve been talking, remarkably few Americans have been listening. Maybe this is a holdover from the 1970s, when it felt like we had all this under control. Or maybe it’s some sort of weird swing of the pendulum, back to a time when the nation was almost entirely controlled by the captains of industry. Whatever the cause, it has led us dangerously close to the precipice of environmental disaster.

I certainly can’t deny that, from the standpoint of wildlife conservation and the broader issues of environmental health, these are dark times, possibly even darker than the circumstances the nation faced in the middle of the nineteenth century. Any light I see at the end of the tunnel could well be just an oncoming train.

But here, I have to express a personal article of faith. It takes dark times to rouse Americans, and I believe these have been dark enough for long enough to do the trick. The people are starting to wake up, as they did in the years following the Civil War. The change in sentiment in those years resulted in our first national park, national forest, national monument, national wildlife refuge; the first laws against water pollution; the first widespread enforcement of hunting regulations; the removal of wildlife from the market, the recovery of the wood duck, trumpeter swan, elk, pronghorn, white-tailed deer; international protection of songbirds, shorebirds, and waders, and on and on and on.

It was startling— a revolution— driven, in part, by harsh necessity, and, in no small measure, by the tireless efforts of people who invested their entire lives in making it happen.

There’s no doubt— we live in different times. We’ve lost the margin of safety that was still in our grasp in the nineteenth century, and frankly, I don’t know whether we can prevail in the face of the crisis we’ve created. But before we can even begin to solve the problems that face us, we need broad agreement on the nature— and seriousness— of those problems. Over the last forty years, the wildlife profession has struggled to engage the mainstream of the American public, even at that elementary level.

I think that’s beginning to change. Conversations that, twenty years ago, were the province of academics and other professionals at the margins of society are merging into the

mainstream— discussions of climate change; sustainable agriculture; plummeting populations of mammals, birds, herptiles, fish, even insects; clean water; declining aquifers, instream flow. The same influences that changed the minds and hearts of other generations of America in other times are at work today. There is undeniable proof of landscape-scale destruction, in the evening news, on Facebook, and right out our back doors. And there is the undeniable power of the message that motivated professionals, like the ones in this room, persist in spreading. It gives focus to growing doubts and reassures people who might otherwise believe they are alone in their concern.

In 1938, the American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote a free-verse narrative that was intended to accompany the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Dix and other contributors to the WPA. At the end of that poem, MacLeish reflected on the central role the American continent played in the rise of the American character:

“We wonder whether the great American dream

Was the singing of locusts out of the grass to the west and the

West is behind us now;” he wrote.

“The west wind’s away from us.

We wonder if the liberty is done;

The dreaming is finished.

We can’t say.

We aren’t sure.

“Or if there’s something different men can dream

Or if there’s something different men can mean by

Liberty. . . .

Or if there’s liberty a man can mean that’s

Men: not land.

We wonder.

We don’t know.

We’re asking.”

I believe that a substantial part of what it means to be an American is not men, but the land. And I believe that, somewhere between MacLeish and today, most Americans lost sight of that fundamental truth. The planet is in the process of reminding us. I believe Americans will be recalled to the duty they owe the land, and the grassroots will rise once again.

History may not repeat itself, but when I look back over the record of the struggle for conservation in America, I can hear the rhyme.

 

This is the text of a speech delivered at the Central Mountains and Plains Section of The Wildlife Society.  My thanks to the organizers for providing the motivation to crystallize some of these thoughts. 

 

---

[i] Catlin, George, 1842. Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians. Volume I. Wiley and Putnam, New York, NY.   p.2.

[ii] ibid, p.3.

[iii] Ibid, p.60.

[iv] ibid, pp. 261-262.

[v] Trombulak, Stephen, C. (ed) 2001. So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh. Middlebury College Press, Hanover, NH. p.2

[vi] Ibid, p.5.

[vii] Ibid, p.10

[viii] Ibid, pp.16-17.

[ix] Marsh, George P., 1864. Man and Nature: Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. p.36

[x] Steen, Harold K., 2004. The U.S. Forest Service: A History. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA. pp 9-10.

[xi] Forester, Frank, 1864. Frank Forester’s Field Sports of the United States and British Provinces of North America. W.A. Townsend, New York, NY. Memoir of the author.

[xii] Ibid, pp.11-12.

[xiii] Ibid, p.21.

[xiv] Trefethen, James, 1975. An American Crusade for Wildlife. Winchester Press, New York, NY. p.40.

[xv] Gross, Alfred O., 1928. The Heath Hen. Boston Society of Natural History, Boston, MA. p.496.

[xvi] Frank Forester’s Field Sports, op cit., p. 19.

[xvii] Ibid, p.19.

[xviii] Ibid, xxx11.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF DECEMBER 21, 1826, forty-one-year-old John Audubon looked out on the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, from his second-story room after a day spent with two naturalists who wanted to learn his techniques for painting birds. He’d been in Edinburgh for nearly two months, away from home for nearly eight, and in spite of the acclaim he had met in the British Isles, he was worn out with luncheons, eight-course dinners, and the attentions of the aristocracy.

“The weather is clear, with a sharp frost,” he confided to his journal. “What a number of Wild Ducks I could shoot on a morning like this, with a little powder and plenty of shot.”[i]

His visit to Britain was a desperate attempt to find support for the project that had been the central dream of his life— an oversized book of his paintings of the birds of North America. America had not supported the idea, partly because engravers there said the plates were too challenging, partly because he had enemies, some of his own making, some who owed loyalty to his predecessor in the work of identifying American birds, the pioneer naturalist Alexander Wilson.

So necessity had brought him to the Old World to find printers skillful enough to reproduce his work and patrons wealthy enough to support it.

He called himself the American Woodsman, and while he was no Daniel Boone, there’s no doubt that, by this time in his life, he had earned his moccasins with years of wandering in the near-wilderness of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. He came to his backwoods experiences by a circuitous route. The illegitimate son of a French naval officer and a slave girl in Santo Domingo, he grew up in the French countryside. It was that experience that kindled the two great passions of his life: birds and art.

During the American Revolution, his father spent some time in the United States and bought a farm near Philadelphia. In 1803, he sent the young Audubon there, partly to help manage the place and partly to put him beyond the insatiable demand of Napoleon’s military draft. Audubon left the farming to the Quaker tenant, preferring to spend his time in the woods. “Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment,”[ii] he remembered years later.

Utterly uninterested in the farm, he set out down the Ohio River in 1807 with his new wife and a friend from France. The stated goal of the trip was to establish a store on the Kentucky frontier, but it soon became clear that Audubon was far more interested in the wilderness than in commerce.

In 1807, settlement of the Ohio River valley was just beginning. While big game and passenger pigeons got top billing in most journals of the time, the flocks of waterfowl were undoubtedly spectacular. Audubon took them mostly for granted, but in his recollections of those early years, a whisper of the old abundance emerges.

“I never spent a winter without observing immense flocks of these birds,” he wrote of the Canada geese along the river, “especially in the neighborhood of Henderson, where I have killed many hundreds of them, as well as on the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville, and in the neighboring country.”

Nor were Canadas the only species of goose he found along the Ohio. He recalled an “English gentlemen, who spent a few weeks with me at Henderson, [and] was desirous of having a tasting of some of our game. His desire was fully gratified, and the first that was placed before him was a White-fronted Goose. I had killed seven of these birds, the evening before, in a pond across the Ohio, which was regularly supplied with flocks from the beginning of October to the end of March. He pronounced it ‘delicious’. . . .”

In the winter of 1810, he and his business partner loaded several barrels of Kentucky whiskey on a keelboat and headed to the settlements in eastern Missouri to try the markets there.

“We could easily perceive that the severe and sudden frost which had just set in had closed all the small lakes and lagoons in the neighborhood,” he remembered eighteen years later, “as thousands of wild waterfowl were flying and settling themselves on the borders of the Ohio.” As they passed Cache Creek, just above the confluence of the Ohio River and the Mississippi, he saw “innumerable ducks driven by winter to the south from the Polar Regions” along with “thousands of paroquets [Carolina parakeets] that came to roost.”

His party stopped at Cache Creek in Illinois Territory where they shared a campsite with a band of Shawnee. The natives had found a lake on the Tennessee side of the river “to which immense flocks of swans resorted every morning.” The swan skins were valuable in trade, so the Shawnee and white men made plans to set an ambush the next morning.

The next day— Christmas Day, 1810, as it turned out— Shawnee women paddled the hunters across the river and spent the morning hunting for nuts while the men made their way through the willow thickets and surrounded the backwater. “There they lie,” Audubon wrote, “by hundreds, of a white or rich cream color— either dipping their black bills in the water, or leaning backwards and gently resting with one leg, expanded. Men were placed behind the trees who knew how to take a dead aim, and every shot told.”

There’s no record of what firearms Audubon carried on this trip, although his shotgun was certainly a flintlock and probably one of the best that could be had with the last of his father’s funds. He was, by all accounts, an excellent wing shot, and his report of this morning suggests that many of the swans were taken on the wing. However, the party was shooting for the market, not for pleasure, and as the birds flew back and forth from one group of men to the other, no mercy was shown.

“What would those English sportsmen . . . say to this day’s devastation amongst the swans? I saw these beautiful birds floating on the water, their backs downwards, struggling in the last agonies of life to the number of at least fifty, their beautiful skins all intended for the ladies of Europe.”[iii]

Such was frontier waterfowling in 1810.

His shop-keeping business and subsequent investments eventually failed, in no small part because Audubon couldn’t bear to tend the store or keep the books. Mired in debt, he escaped down the Ohio, leaving his wife to support their young family as a governess and teacher. With barely a cent to his name, he lived off the land.

In an introduction to one of his series of bird biographies, he offered a generic description of this trip and many others during the lean years he spent in the wilds, combing the backcountry for specimens and shooting for the pot as well as for study: “When evening approaches, and the birds are seen betaking themselves to their retreats, he looks for some place of safety, erects his shed of green boughs, kindles his fire, prepares his meal, and as the Widgeon or Blue-winged Teal, or perhaps the breast of a Turkey, or a steak of venison, sends its delicious perfumes abroad, he enters into his parchment-bound journal the remarkable incidents and facts that have occurred in the course of the day.”[iv]

Eventually, he worked his way down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, where he barely managed to support himself selling chalk portraits to the wealthy citizenry. During his stay, he came by a new scattergun in a most unusual way.

As he walked down the street one afternoon, a veiled woman of fine figure stopped him and asked if he was the French artist who drew birds. Audubon said he was. She gave him an address and told him to meet her there in half an hour. Intrigued, Audubon appeared at the appointed hour and was shown into the young woman’s residence. She asked him to do a drawing of her as she posed— in the nude. Flabbergasted, he agreed and spent five sessions making the drawing.

Subsequent historians have identified her as “Mrs. Andre,” probably the mistress of a wealthy Frenchman who was investing in New Orleans real estate at the time. As the drawing progressed, she inquired about the price. He told her he would be satisfied with whatever she was willing to pay.

“One who hunts so much needs a good gun or two,” she replied, according to Audubon. “This afternoon, see if there is one in the city. I must see it and if I do not like it you are not to have it.”

He dutifully went looking and when his choice met her approval, he apologized for the price— $125. According to Audubon, she was unperturbed: “Take this, be happy, think of me sometimes as you rest on your gun, keep my name forever a secret.” She directed him to have the gun engraved with this memorial (in French): “Do not refuse this gift from a friend who is in your debt; may its goodness equal yours.” Under the ramrod, he added, “Property of LaForest Audubon, February 22, 1821.”

He sent a description of the encounter to his wife, who was still in Kentucky and apparently had unbounded faith in her husband.

It was about this time that Audubon began to crystallize his lifelong ambition— a book of the birds of North America. Most critics, then and now, believe that Audubon’s art improved significantly during these years; in fact, Audubon himself set about repainting many of his earlier works in an effort to meet his refined standard. He didn’t paint from life. He killed specimens, used wire to suspend them in more or less lifelike positions, then used a grid system to set down an outline of exactly the same size as the bird itself. Over the next five years, he traveled up and down the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, identifying birds with the aid of a shotgun and adding to his portfolio.

Unable to find backers or engravers willing to undertake the production of his book in America, Audubon scraped together every penny he and his wife had managed to save over five years and left for Great Britain. His paintings and his evident expertise were an immediate sensation. He was inducted into several scientific and honorary organizations, including the Royal Society of Scotland, the Wernerian and Antiquarian societies, the Zoological Society of London, the London Royal Society, and the Linnaean Society of London. This last group honored him with a presentation firearm, a percussion-cap smoothbore built by Thomas Conway of Manchester, England. The inscription on the barrel read: “John James Audubon, Citizen of the United States. F.L.S.L. [Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London]”[v] This shotgun is currently housed at Princeton’s Firestone Library.

With the first plates for his book coming off the press and a heartening list of subscribers in his pocket, Audubon returned to America to continue his painting . . . and shooting. A note from his journal in the Southeast reveals his method of identifying birds: “While I was at General Hernandez’s in Florida, the Pintails were very numerous. They alighted everywhere, and I shot a few in order to satisfy myself that they were of the same species as those I had been accustomed to see.”

He continued his travels, voyaging to the east coast of Canada, then up the Missouri River to Fort Union, writing, painting, and hunting as he went. By the time of his death in 1851, he was regarded as the foremost naturalist of his generation, both in the United States and in Europe, and as the American conservation movement grew in the decades after the Civil War, his reputation grew with it.

In 1886, the editor of Forest and Stream magazine, George Bird Grinnell, proposed the formation of a new conservation group called the Audubon Society, whose members were required to take an oath that they would avoid “killing, wounding, or capturing any wild bird not used for food.” Americans were beginning to wake up to a scarcely believable reality— that humans could wipe out entire species of animals. In some quarters, public sentiment shifted from support for maintaining thriving populations of wild animals to giving them absolute protection.

At about this time, Maria Audubon, one of the great man’s granddaughters, began preparing his journals for publication. Dedicated to protecting her grandfather’s status and reputation, she eliminated anything she found that was out of step with the value system of her age, then destroyed the original journals so that their secrets would be kept. Fragments of the missing journals have emerged from other sources, and these bits of evidence suggest that details of Audubon’s birth, upbringing, and affairs of the heart were eliminated from the published versions.

It’s also likely that some of his descriptions of his shooting were excised, and it’s certain that others were revised to reflect a conservation ethic that was more consistent with the times. And so a granddaughter helped drive the wedge that would eventually separate the conservation movement into two camps.

There could hardly be a more ironic twist to Audubon’s legacy. The conservation movement of the nineteenth century was largely the invention of a group of sportsman-naturalists who combined an appreciation for wildlife and wild places with an enthusiasm for hunting.

Grinnell, the founder of the first Audubon Society, held a Ph.D. in paleontology and was an acknowledged expert on American birds and mammals, a champion of national parks and wildlife refuges, a charter member of the American Ornithological Union, and one of the principal authors of the ground-breaking Model Bird Law protecting nongame birds. He was also a founder of the Boone and Crockett Club and a dyed-in-the-wool hunter.

T. Gilbert Pearson, the executive director of the burgeoning National Association of Audubon Societies at the beginning of the twentieth century, grew up collecting birds and their eggs much as Audubon himself had eighty years earlier. And, of course, there was the leading luminary of the conservation movement, Teddy Roosevelt, an avid hunter and a lifelong birdwatcher, author, at an early age, of The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks.

At the time, there were some who believed, as Maria apparently did, that there was something unnatural in the combination of an affection for wildlife and the attraction of the hunt. Some believe it still. In fact, the two things are inextricably braided together, an emotional whole as old as the human species itself. In John James Audubon, it burned with a particularly pure flame— a scientist’s interest in the diversity of life, an artist’s love affair with things wild and free, a hunter’s passion for the chase. For Audubon, and for generations of hunters before and since, they are all one.

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[i] p. 331. Arthur, Stanley C., 1937. Audubon: An Intimate Life of the American Woodsman. Harmanson Publisher, New Orleans, LA.

[ii] p. 17. Audubon, Maria R., 1994. Audubon and His Journals: Volume I. Dover Publications, Minneola, NY.

[iii] pp. 23-24. Rhodes, Richard, 2006. The Audubon Reader. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY.

[iv] p.vi. Audubon, John J., 1838. Ornithological Biography, or an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America, Accompanied by Descriptions of the Objects Represented in the Work Entitled, Birds of America, Together with an Account of the Digestive Organs of Many of the Species, Illustrated by Engravings on Wood. Volume IV. Adam & Charles Black, Edinburgh, Scotland.

[v] https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2014/02/26/audubons-rifle/

 

STRANGE HOW THE CURRENTS OF TIME EBB AND FLOW.

Not long ago, I found myself on the Mississippi River floodplain, just across from the bluffs of Jefferson Barracks, the historic army post on the southern edge of St. Louis. The plain on the Illinois side is not just flat; it’s almost perfectly level, like a rough-sawn board that’s been run through a planer. Twenty miles long, as much as nine miles wide, it lies at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the work of thousands of years of flood water, dropping uncounted loads of silt.

I was staring up at a substantial hill on that horizontal expanse— a hill where no hill had any right to be— and I found that I shared the view of another traveler who had visited the place before me. In 1813, Henry Brackenridge, a judge in New Orleans, was so impressed that he took the time to write Thomas Jefferson about it:

“There are not less than one hundred mounds in two different groups,” he wrote; “one of the mounds falls little short of the Egyptian pyramid Mycerius. When I examined it in 1811, I was astonished that this stupendous monument of antiquity should have been unnoticed by any traveler: I afterwards published an account in the newspapers at St. Louis, detailing its dimensions, describing its form, position, etc., but this, which I thought might almost be considered a discovery, attracted no notice: and yet I stated it to be eight hundred paces in circumference (the exact size of the pyramid of Asychis) and one hundred feet in height.”[i]

Brackenridge’s mounds were the remains of a mighty city, but, as gigantic as they were, they seemed destined for anonymity. They were overlooked by explorers from Marquette to DeSoto and mostly forgotten, even by the descendants of the people who built them. Americans of Brackenridge’s time reacted to his report with a shrug, and over the next 150 years, generations of local residents mostly shared this indifference.

My fifth-grade teacher, a fanatic enthusiast of local history, arranged to bus our class down to the largest of the ancient monuments, known to locals as Monk’s Mound. As I recall, we walked up a dirt path to the top of what seemed to be a substantial hill on a remarkably flat plain at the edge of the town of Collinsville, Illinois, looked around, and went back to the bus for our peanut butter sandwiches.

By that time, a mound on the St. Louis side of the river, almost as large as Monk’s Mound, had been scooped up by steam shovels, loaded into wagons, and used for fill on a railroad line, while two mounds of similar size on the Illinois side had been flattened for farmland, and several others had been built over. It wasn’t until 1960, when the entire site was threatened by the construction of three interstate highways, that the combination of scientific interest and adequate funding allowed archaeologists to begin a serious analysis of the place.[ii]

It’s called Cahokia today. The real name is lost to memory— Cahokia is the name of a tribe that occupied the area until the 1820s.[iii] A thousand years ago, the residents of the rich bottomland suddenly began building cities. The remains of at least three are known today— the St. Louis complex, the East St. Louis complex, and the greater Cahokia complex. The Cahokia complex alone has more than 120 mounds. Monk’s Mound is the largest earthen structure in the New World, larger even than the stone Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan or the Great Pyramid of Giza.   The great ceremonial mound towers over a fifty-acre central plaza that was once surrounded by a wooden palisade twenty feet high. There was a circular astronomical observatory designed to track the motion of the sun across the heavens. Trade brought rare goods from as far away as the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Superior, and central Wisconsin.[iv] At its height, this city may have had 25,000 residents.[v]

After more than a century of increasing prosperity, Cahokia ran on hard times. There is no evidence of a sudden cataclysm, just a steady decline— by the fourteenth century, the city had been abandoned.[vi] Other, smaller population centers of the Mississipian culture survived and prospered to see the arrival of Spanish invaders and the subsequent plagues that decimated native populations, but by that time, Cahokia was not only gone, but forgotten by the descendants its builders had left behind.

Explanations for Cahokia’s decline vary. One of the leading experts on the site is convinced that it was the result of a steady decay of the social fabric that held the community together. He argues that the root cause may have been political— a loss of confidence in the ruling elite— or religious— a loss of faith. He finds evidence supporting his analysis in the harsher punishments, including decapitation, meted out to residents near the end of the city’s history.

Other Cahokia scholars offer a different explanation. The demands 20,000 people put on the local landscape must have been intense. One archaeologist has estimated that there were more than 600,000 wooden posts in the walls of the houses. More wood was required for beams and rafters. The palisade around the city center was built of something like 20,000 logs and demanded regular repair as the buried wood rotted. Then, there was the constant demand for firewood.

Some of the wood used at the site came from places as far away as the mouth of the Ohio River, 150 miles to the south, and as the city aged, the kinds of trees used in construction changed to less durable species like soft maple, hackberry, and willow. All this suggests that the timber around the city had been used up.

The loss of forests on the flood plain and nearby bluffs would have had the same effect they have today— increased runoff, erosion, flooding. At the same time, the diet of the populace was shifting from a protein-rich combination of fish and game as constant pressure decimated local wildlife populations, and crops like amaranth, goosefoot, and sunflower were replaced with a menu headed by corn.

A steady diet of corn isn’t good for people or the land that supports it. Even on a flood plain where topsoil is periodically replenished by high water, corn exhausts the soil, and it doesn’t provide humans with key nutrients. Analysis of teeth and bones from Cahokia suggests problems with infection and “nutritional stress.”[vii]

The two explanations for Cahokia’s decline aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s quite possible that the political and/or religious fabric of the community frayed over time. That’ll happen when the people are sick and hungry. The question remains: Which is cause and which is effect?

When I first heard the story of the rise and fall of Cahokia, I was struck with how familiar it sounded. Nearly sixty years ago, an agronomist and a conservationist got together to write a history of a different part of the world, the birthplace of western civilization in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East and the shores of the Mediterranean. The book, Topsoil and Civilization, by Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter, is largely forgotten now, just as the ruins of Cahokia were forgotten, but it made a profound impression on me.

Dale and Carter had a view of the decline of the great nation-states that gave rise to modern Europe that diverged from the descriptions offered by generations of historians. While the “experts” focused on political and religious pressures as the forces that caused these societies to rise and fall, Dale and Carter favored a more basic explanation: soil. As they wrote at one point: “This has always been the way of historians and other writers— they usually write about the relations of human beings with each other and seldom about the relations of people to the land.”[viii]

The great cities along the Tigris and Euphrates were built on a foundation of grain produced in the irrigated fields on the river bottoms. As long as the fields produced, the cities prospered; when the fields grew sick from the salt left behind as the irrigation water evaporated, the cities withered. Famine, war, social dislocation followed. The ecological damage done lingers even today, nearly 3,000 years after it was inflicted.

The great city of Carthage suffered roughly the same fate, its fields of wheat eventually reduced to desert by the demands of the populace and the market. The famous cedars of Lebanon were removed from their mountain slopes for sale across the Mediterranean. The resulting erosion, combined with the browsing of growing herds of sheep and goats, kept the trees from growing back and finally stripped the land of any productive soil. Again, the damage done before the birth of Christ has yet to heal.

Greece? Dale and Carter saw the same pattern: “By the time of the Peloponnesian War most of the arable land of Greece was severely eroded and was producing only scant crops.”[ix]

And Rome? Dale and Carter considered the decline of farm productivity in the Roman Empire at great length, concluding with the story of Adria, a town established by the Etruscans on an island in the Adriatic Sea, then several miles from the mouth of the Po River. When the Romans annexed the river valley, local farmers were called upon to feed their masters to the south.

“By the end of the Western Roman Empire,” Dale and Carter wrote, “silt from the highlands had filled in the area so that Adria was no longer on an island, but was on the mainland.”[x] They concluded their chapter on the Romans with a short consideration of the efforts that are being made today to undo the damage that has been done: “The twentieth-century conservation work in Italy will undoubtedly help— but it is two thousand years too late to give the Italian people the resources they need to support a prosperous and dynamic civilization comparable to that of their famous ancestors.”[xi]

——-

There’s an epigram that has made the rounds for many years: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The rhymes in these stories are chilling. The argument could be made that the declines of these civilizations

were ultimately the result of mismanagement, that our modern grasp of soil science, agricultural technique, timber management, ecological relationships, and wildlife conservation should keep us from supplying yet another rhyme in one of mankind’s oldest dirges.

But, with all our knowledge, we’re still losing nearly five tons of topsoil on every acre of cropland in America.[xii] Every year. And that doesn’t consider other impacts like soil compaction from heavy machinery or loss of microflora in the soil community to a variety of pesticides.  A recent report from the World Wildlife Fund estimates that, overall, populations of vertebrate wildlife on earth have declined by sixty percent in the last fifty years. [xiii]  We seem unwilling, or unable, to use what we know.

That’s no accident. In this, as in so many other areas of American life, our appetities and the profit margins of large corporations seem to overwhelm every other consideration. And beyond corporate greed, there’s another force at work— the insistent demand of a growing population. It’s the same pressure that has wrecked landscapes from Babylonia to Cahokia, and we seem no more capable of dealing with it now than the kings and chiefs in those far-off places dealt with it then. It may well be that we are prisoners of our own drive to breed.

As I watched the sun set over Cahokia that cool April evening, I saw, not only the ghosts of a sad and almost forgotten past, but the shades of a future that is uncertain at best. History may not repeat itself, I thought . . . but I can hear the rhyme.

---

[i] pp. 154-155. Brackenridge, H.M., 1818. On the populations and tumuli of the aborigines of North America. In a letter from H.M. Brackenridge, Esq., to Thomas Jefferson. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 1: 151-159.

[ii] Young, Whiting Bloine and Melvin L. Fowler, 2000. Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, IL.  

[iii] p.3. Young and Fowler, 2000.

[iv] P.387ff. Emerson, Thomas et al, 2018. Revealing Greater Cahokia, North America’s First Native City: Rediscovery and Large-Scale Excavations of the East St. Louis Precinct. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[v] p.310. Young and Fowler, 200

[vi] p.310. Young and Fowler, 2000.

[vii] p.233. Emerson, Thomas, et al, 2018.  

[viii] p.90. Dale, Tom and Vernon Gill Carter, 1955. Topsoil and Civilization. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK.  

[ix] p.93. Dale and Carter, 1955.

[x] p.153, Dale and Carter, 1955.

[xi] p.155. Dale and Carter, 1955.

[xii] pp.5-49 and 5-67. USDA, 2018. Summary Report: National Resources Inventory. Natural Resources Conservation Service, Washington, D.C. and Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA.

[xiii] Grooten, Monique and Rosamunde Almond, 2018. Living Planet Report— 2018. Aiming Higher. World Wildlife Fund, Gland, Switzerland.

TWO HUNDRED YARDS TO THE BEND IN THE LANE, ANOTHER 200 DOWN THE HILL AND ACROSS THE PASTURE.  AND WE WERE THERE.

In the adult world, it was a 300-acre tract of timber owned by a local industrial magnate who kept a magnificent house of native stone on one edge of the property, but was seldom in residence, being occupied with the business and pleasures of his holdings somewhere far to the east. It was surrounded on three sides by carefully manicured suburban yards and on the fourth by tiny patches of native prairie that clung to the crumbling lip of limestone bluffs 200 feet above the sun-drenched Mississippi. Six or seven miles away, across the expanse of flood plain on the other shore, another set of bluffs rose on the far side of the Missouri, the river itself invisible in the distance as it finished its travels from the wild country to the west.

For the tribe of kids in our neighborhood, it was just “The Woods.”

I don’t know whether my parents were aware of The Woods when they signed the mortgage papers and moved us into the little brick house on the cul de sac. Probably not. Looking back at it with the perspective of a grownup, I’d guess they were taken up with the worries of adults, trying to stretch an anemic budget and climb off the treadmill of rent payments. I imagine the house was what they could afford. The location was just a lucky break— one of the luckiest of my entire life.

A dozen of us grew up in The Woods. Oh, we spent time elsewhere. We helped with chores around the house and went to school and watched TV, but I think it’s fair to say that The Woods were really our home. Everything else lay on the periphery of our lives. We knew the ways in and out almost as well as the deer— the tangle of black raspberry and greenbrier that blocked the northeast corner, the dense second-growth at the head of the creek, the screen of bois d’arc that hid us from Mr. Miller’s kitchen window. Mr. Miller owned the pasture we crossed to get to The Woods, and we were convinced— on the strength of absolutely no evidence— that he frowned on the idea of ragged urchins helping themselves to the shortcut across his land, so when we went, we went like cottontails, quick and quiet as smoke, there for a second, then gone.

In the summer, we left our houses while the dew was still on the grass, sometimes with a packsack of sandwiches, sometimes not. Ten hours later, as the shadows lengthened, we’d emerge, the sweat drying on our faces, thirsty, hungry, generally late for supper.

Small as it was, it was an unusually pristine remnant of the forest that had once dominated the Mississippi breaks. A spring-fed creek tumbled over ledges of bedrock, sometimes with a fall of twenty feet, pooling under the shady overhangs where ancient pottery shards bore silent witness to the ghosts of people who had lived in this place long before we arrived. Old-growth white and red oak on the ridges, shagbark and pignut hickory, black cherry, and, down along the creek, walnut and silver maple and giant sycamore, their branches tangled with the vines of wild grape. Carpets of mayapple in the spring, hiding the morels and the occasional jack-in-the-pulpit. Prairie trillium, wild geranium, and ginseng. Sumac and bittersweet at the sunny edges. Shade in the summer, shelter from the north wind in the winter. A world unto itself.

We learned to tell the difference between poison ivy and Virginia creeper there; between stinging nettle and jewel weed; the difference between a squirrel track and a rabbit track, between a hickory and an oak. We saw where raccoons had eaten crawdads and deer had paused to drink.

There were other lessons, too, more subtle, harder to describe, but, in the end, maybe more important: The feel of a gathering storm. The way quiet gathers along the creek with the cool of the evening, touching you almost the way the cool touches you. The sense of discovery. The first heady sensation of being on your own. The taste of freedom.

In January of my seventeenth year, we had a heavy snow. When the wind lay and the sun came out, my mom and dad decided to take my two-year-old sister for a walk. They wrapped her up in coat, mittens and insulated bibs, nested her in a kiddy pack on my dad’s back, and set out for the woods. I grabbed the family toboggan and set off in the other direction to meet friends at the top of a near-vertical slope covered in deadfall and oak timber where we often rendezvoused after a snow to test the extent of our teen-aged invulnerability.

When I walked into the house at dusk, wet and hungry, I could tell an adult discussion had just concluded. Mom was grumbling and Dad was apologetic. He turned to me and, almost as a confession, said: “We got lost down there. I’d never really realized there’s a second drainage that comes in below the falls. We took the wrong creek back. Ended up being a long walk. Good thing we had the little one bundled up.”

Mom hmmphed and went out to the kitchen.

I said nothing, but the thought went through my seventeen-year-old head: How in the world could you get lost down there? And in that instant, I realized two things— that my father was human, and that, in this one tiny slice of life, I knew more than he did.

That was fifty years ago. In that time, I’ve found much bigger, wilder places and learned a lot from them, but all those experiences rest on the education The Woods gave me. And, in that, I’m not much different than millions of other people with an interest in wild places. Nearly all the professionals in the field of conservation of wildlife and wild land— biologists, rangers, guides, wildlife photographers, writers— had their own versions of The Woods. For some, it was the creek out back; for others, the draw at the far end of the pasture, a pond, a riverbank, or just some neglected scrap of timber at the edge of a subdivision. Some had adults to get them started; a remarkable number did not.

The same can be said of many others for whom wildlife and wild places are an avocation, not a vocation— birders, wildflower enthusiasts, canoeists, backpackers, hikers, campers, anglers, hunters. For nearly all of us, the beginning can be traced back to a wild place we could call our own.

In recent decades, the conservation community has watched with growing concern as participation in outdoor activities that emphasize wild places has failed to keep pace with the overall growth of population in the United States. Statistics vary, but recent analyses from The Outdoor Foundation provide a sobering overview. In their 2017 report, they found that the proportion of Americans over the age of six who fished has dropped from 19 percent of the population in 2007 to about 16 percent in 2016. The proportion of hunters remained about the same— 5.1 percent in 2007; 5.2 percent in 2016. The proportion of birdwatchers dropped from 4.9 percent to 3.9 percent. The proportion of wildlife viewers dropped from 8.3 percent to 7 percent. Campers— 11.3 percent down to 8.9 percent. Canoeists— 3.5 percent down to 3.4 percent. Backpackers— a small increase from 2.4 percent to 3.4 percent. Hiking— another small increase, from 10.8 percent to 14.2 percent.[i] All this at a time when the nation’s overall population grew by nearly 8 percent.

I suppose those of us who treasure the outdoors can take some faint comfort in the knowledge that competition for access to increasingly scarce resources is waning. Since the quality of most wild experiences decreases as the number of people seeking them increases, these trends will leave better experiences for those of us who remain— at least, for a while. But loss of participants will lead inevitably to a loss of a constituency, which will lead to a drop in funding for wild places and wild things and, even more critical, a decline in the political leverage that has always been crucial in the effort to maintain wildness on the American landscape.

Our wild places need more champions, and for more than twenty years, people who care have tried a variety of approaches to get more people in touch with the wild. It can be argued that the numbers would be even more depressing had it not been for those efforts, but it also seems clear from the statistics that something important is missing in our effort to recruit users— and supporters— of wild land.

I’ve long suspected that one of the missing elements in that effort is the availability of places like The Woods, wild corners that are within biking, or even walking, distance of people who can’t or won’t drive to find them. Places that are not manicured, mowed, trimmed, or pruned, where regulations are kept to a minimum, where a ten- or twelve-year-old can explore without the need for adult transportation or supervision.

A few such places already exist in urban and near-urban settings, some by design, many more by accident, like The Woods. But, as U.S. population grows, such accidents of preservation will happen less and less frequently and are likely to be more and more ephemeral. And, as magnificent as places like New York’s Central Park or Chico, California’s Bidwell Park may be, they’re accessible to only a tiny fraction of local residents who lack motorized transportation.

About four years ago, a team of researchers took a hard look at the growing rift between Americans and the environment, surveying nearly 12,000 people across the country and organizing fifteen focus groups in five of the nation’s biggest cities. The study was led by Dr. Stephen Kellert, a professor of “social ecology” at Yale University and one of the nation’s leading researchers on the relationship between people and their planet. He was assisted by David J. Case and Associates, a firm that has spent most of the last thirty years gathering information on human interactions with the environment.

They published their findings last April in a cooperative report, “The Nature of Americans: Disconnection and Recommendations for Reconnection.”[ii]  They found a number of social and economic forces that separated Americans from contact with nature— one of the most telling was the simple lack of wild places close at hand.

“Physical places, or a built environment, generally discourage contact with the natural world,” they wrote in their summary and then continued with the effect of age on that connection: “For children, nature is located quite literally right out the door, and special places outdoors and unforgettable memories often consist of nearby yards, woods, creeks, and gardens. But in contrast to children, adults tend to set a high and even impossible standard for what they perceived to be ‘authentic’ and unforgettable nature, believing that it requires solitude and travel to faraway places, which reinforces their perceptions of the relative inaccessibility of nature. . . . When asked about places near where they live, minorities and urban residents in particular perceive fewer places nearby to enjoy the outdoors.”[iii]

“Nearby”— that’s a part of wild land management that has been largely neglected in the last seventy years. The government agencies that are charged with creating or preserving wild places have limited funds and manpower. They tend to focus on high-quality parcels that are far from town. We have national parks, monuments, forests, grasslands, recreation areas, wild rivers, and wildlife refuges; we have state wildlife reserves and management areas; we have a scattering of wild reserves owned and managed by land trusts and other local entities. Patterns of land use generally dictate that these places are isolated, often hard to reach, even by car, and nearly always far from metropolitan areas. There aren’t enough of them; we need to redouble our efforts to establish them and keep them wild. But they’re not enough.

The task of providing wild playgrounds for most kids may well fall to urban departments of parks and recreation, agencies that are chronically underfunded and often bound by traditional prejudices about what a city park should be. Soccer fields, ball parks, picnic areas, and jungle gyms are all well and good, but in this disconnected age, children need places where they can get back to the earth.

The good news is that such places require almost no maintenance. The bad news is that every neighborhood, every elementary school, needs its own. Too many unsupervised— and we want them to be unsupervised— visitors can wear out a patch of timber or creek bank in short order. Historically, our response to this fact has been to impose regulations, put up signs, assign a police officer, and keep kids out. The enlightened response would be to recognize that we need more wild places, not more rules.

There’s nothing new in this view. Richard Louv should be given credit for resurrecting it in his powerful 2006 book, Last Child in the Woods. “Our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature,” he wrote. “That lesson is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom— while disassociating the outdoors with joy and solitude. Well-meaning public-school systems, media, and parents are effectively scaring children straight out of the woods and fields.”[iv]

It was a critically important message, but Louv was far from the first to express concern over the American child’s isolation from the natural world. Gary Nabhan and Stephen Trimble published The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places,[v] a collection of essays on what Louv would later call “nature-deficit disorder,” in 1994. Before Nabhan and Trimble, there was Paul Shepard’s 1982 book, Nature and Madness;[vi] Edith Cobb’s 1959 volume The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood;[vii] Jean Piaget’s 1929 study, The Child’s Conception of the World;[viii] and long before that, Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages, first published in 1903. In the introductory chapter of that book, before Seton begins his narrative description of kids building log cabins and tepees, tanning hides, building live traps, foraging for wild fruits and vegetables, hunting and fishing, he offers a thinly-veiled description of his own childhood as the motivation for writing the book:

“His father was in poor circumstances. He was an upright man of refined tastes, but indolent— a failure in business easy with the world and stern with his family. He had never taken an interest in his son’s wildwood pursuits; and when he got the idea that they might interfere with the boy’s education, he forbade them altogether. . . .

“He was a timid, obedient boy in most things, but the unwise command to give up what was in his nature merely made him a disobedient boy— turned a good boy into a bad one. He was too much in terror of his father to disobey openly, but he used to sneak away at all opportunities to the fields and woods, and at each new bird or plant he found he had an exquisite thrill of mingled pleasure and pain— the pain because he had no name for it or means of learning its nature.”

In the dedication of the book, he wrote, “Because I have known the torment of thirst I would dig a well where others may drink.”[ix]

For a century or more, we’ve recognized the crucial need to connect children with the wild world, and yet, we’ve largely failed to provide the single most important and irreplaceable part of that connection: places for children to be wild in.

Here in the United States, we’ve failed to change the way we design urban areas or manage open spaces, and as Richard Louv has written, we’ve done much to deprive our kids of that wild experience, but other countries have begun to experiment with ways to make the connection. In 1993, a group of German educators launched the first forest kindergarten, a pre-school program that was held entirely outdoors. In 2003, there were more than 300 similar preschools in Germany for three- to six-year-old students, popularly known as the “Forest Mice.”[x] In recent years, the concept has spread to the United Kingdom.[xi] The approach has undeniable appeal, and I would love to see America follow suit— the problem is finding the places in our cities and suburbs to hold the classes.

It’s hard to say where the change should begin. Reform of our approach to K-12 education? A more enlightened idea of what urban open space should look like? Parents who have a more realistic view of risk and the importance of independence in a child’s development? All of these things . . . and perhaps something more: an appreciation of the place wildness occupies in the life of every living thing, the human animal not least.

———–

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I traveled back to my childhood home for a funeral. We were in need of a little sunshine in the midst of that somber trip, so one chilly April morning, we paid a visit to The Woods. Thanks to the generosity of its former owner, it is now a wildlife reserve, owned and lovingly managed by a local land trust, The Nature Institute, and surrounded by suburbs. We left the car in a parking lot that I remembered as a pasture and took off down a long draw, heading for a waterfall that is the heart of the place.

Maybe it was the unusual point of entry, or maybe it had just been too many years since my last visit— whatever the cause, I turned up the wrong side drainage and soon had us bushwhacking through the timber, making the hike the hard way.

Still, it was worth the walk. Some things we know as children seem to shrink when we come back as adults. This place hadn’t. Sprays of redbud hung over the creek; jack-in-the-pulpit and spring beauty raised their heads from the blanket of last year’s leaves, and the creek shattered as it dropped over the limestone rim, catching the morning sun and throwing it back into the shaded overhangs below.

As I stood there, the lay of the land came slowly back to me, but I had to smile at the memory of that cocksure teen so many years ago, wondering how his dad could ever get lost here. Strange and more than a little sad how hard it can be to find our way back to childhood. But a trip worth making, now and then, for ourselves and our children. Maybe that’s the only way to really understand how much they need the wild.

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[i] p.37. Anon, 2017. Outdoor Participation Report 2017. The Outdoor Foundation, Washington, D.C.   https://outdoorindustry.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/2017-Outdoor-Recreation-Participation-Report_FINAL.pdf. Accessed March 29, 2019.

[ii] Kellert, Stephen R., D.J. Case, Daniel Escher, Daniel J. Witter, Jessica Mikels-Carrasco, and Phil T. Send, 2017. The Nature of Americans: Disconnection and Recommendations for Reconnection. https://natureofamericans.org/. Accessed April 2, 2019.

[iii] pp3-4, Kellert, et al.

[iv] p.2. Louv, Richard, 2006. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC.

[v] Nabhan, Gary Paul and Stephen Trimble, 1994. The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places. Beacon Press, Boston, MA.

[vi] Shepard, Paul, 1982. Nature and Madness. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA.

[vii] Cobb, Edith. The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood. Columbia University Press.

[viii] Piaget, Jean, 1929. The Child’s Conception of the World.   Redwood Press, Ltd., London, UK.

[ix] Seton, Ernest Thompson, 1903. Two Little Savages: Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned. Doubleday and Company, Garden City, NY

[x] dePommereau, Isabel, 2003. All outdoors, all the time. Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 2003. https://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0513/p16s01-lecl.html. Accessed April 19, 2019.

[xi] Outdoor kindergarten at Woodland Adventurers. https://www.outdoorkindergarten.org/. Accessed April 19, 2019.

IT’S FAR BETTER THAN THE OLD-FASHIONED CELL HIS GRANDPARENTS LIVED AND BRED IN TWENTY YEARS AGO.  HERE, AT least, he can feel the sun on his back, roll in the grass, and escape from the prying eyes of visitors if he chooses. But it is still a cage. The chain link fence is buried two feet into the ground and folded back underneath to ensure that he doesn’t dig his way out. There is a path worn into the dirt just inside the fence where he trots, the spring-steel wolf lope carrying him effortlessly around the acre of landscaped compound, lap after lap, mile after mile.

If there were a way to ask him why he continues his ceaseless rounds, what he’s looking for, I’m sure he’d reply within the compass of his own experience. He would probably ask for another five pounds of meat or a female in heat. Not freedom, certainly, since he has no grasp of it. If he were turned loose on the tundra where his great-grandfather was whelped, he would probably die of starvation or be ripped to shreds by the resident wolves. And yet, whether he knows it or not, I think I know why he runs. He is hunting caribou, still hunting after four generations in a cage.

It may be stretching a metaphor too far to empathize with him, but I don’t think so. More than ninety percent of us live in cities these days. Most of us are at least two generations removed from the farm and perhaps 400 generations removed from the days when men left home in the morning with spears in their hands for appointments with bison and mammoths. We’ve done our best to domesticate ourselves in all those years to serve as an example of what the tamed beast should be. For the advantaged, our cities are large and comfortable, at least inside the rather selective parameters we use to gauge comfort. If we were asked what more we could possibly want, we would reply within the compass of our own experience. A sixty-inch television perhaps, or a new car. We would explain our unfocused restlessness and depressions, the coronaries and nervous breakdowns, the three-martini lunches, the addictions and suicides, as individual aberrations. And yet I think I know why we run.

Under the thin veneer of civilization we’ve imposed on ourselves, we are still largely untamed creatures living in cages of our own making, penned in with a constant, fundamental contradiction. We pride ourselves on our penetrating insight, our astonishing technological aptitude, but we’re faintly uncomfortable with our appetite for beef. We dote on our gifted children filling classrooms with newly discovered knowledge but chastise them for staring out the window on a warm spring afternoon. We make plans to visit other planets and try to forget our fear of the dark. In short, we are pleased to have the intellectual legacy of our African ancestors but embarrassed by the covenant that comes with it.

The last 8,000 years of Western culture have been characterized by our violent struggle to deny that covenant. Somewhere in the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer, we took up the destruction of wilderness with a terrible enthusiasm. It was more than an effort to protect our flocks and fields, more than the pursuit of wealth. For many generations, it amounted to a holy war.

We had nearly finished the job before we began to recognize the potential cost. The list of practical values of wild places has mounted with our understanding of native environments. At the turn of the last century, we finally recognized what wetlands and timber meant to the protection of topsoil and clean water. In the years since, we have found out much more: the possibility of new drugs and fibers; natural pesticides to protect our crops, new genes to make them more efficient; natural processes that soften the effects of global warming, pollution, and desertification. There has been sophisticated discussion of natural diversity as an investment in global stability— something even a Wall Street stockbroker can appreciate.

What we still fail to appreciate is the place wildness occupies in the human spirit.   All too often, we still assume we can excise the need for it from our character without disturbing anything else. That’s not too surprising— after all, it’s the way we’ve dealt with every other unruly facet of nature we’ve encountered. Maybe it’s time we took a lesson from our failures. All our best efforts notwithstanding, we are beginning to find that the world doesn’t run properly without some measure of wildness in it. The same can be said of the human animal itself. Whether we recognize it or not, our hunt is still going on— the same restless search to the horizon that has brought us from the plains of the African Pliocene to where we are now. If we’re far enough removed from wilderness, we may not even recognize the root of the feeling, but that makes little difference— we still can’t leave it behind. Now and then, it demands free rein in an empty place, a long run in the tall grass and timber. Without that, it will subside at last into pacing the perimeter of our circumscribed lives, without direction or rest, looking for a way out and finding none.

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ON FEBRUARY 1, 1902, DAN NOWLIN BECAME CHIEF GAME WARDEN FOR THE STATE OF WYOMING. NOWLIN WAS A PRODUCT OF THE WESTERN frontier. Born in Kerr County, Texas, in 1857, he joined the Texas Rangers in 1873 at the age of sixteen. In 1888, he was elected to a two-year term as sheriff in Lincoln County, New Mexico, following the famous lawman, Pat Garrett, in that post. Eventually, he moved to Wyoming Territory to start a ranch in the as-yet-unsettled country along the upper Green River.

In his first year as Wyoming’s game warden, he traveled more than 1,000 miles on horseback to contact his deputies and inspect game herds, a feat he seemed to accept as a routine part of the job. During an eventful life, he’d faced renegade Comanches and Kiowa, tracked down rustlers and robbers, and built a home in some of the last wilderness of the West. He wasn’t daunted by the challenges of enforcing the emerging precepts of wildlife conservation on the frontier. What he seemed to find most discouraging was the task of convincing state lawmakers to fund the conservation effort with the hunting license money it raised.

In his 1902 report to the legislature, he had this to say: “Since the present game law has been in force— four years— non-resident hunters have paid into the State game fund, in round numbers, twenty-four thousand dollars; and a conservative estimate of the amount paid by them to citizens of Wyoming for guiding, equipment, etc., places the sum at one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. The sport and profit derived by our own citizens from our wild game during this period cannot be estimated; the expense to our taxpayers has been nil— not a dollar has been appropriated to assist in protecting our game.

“. . . [S]ince the date of my appointment . . . there were unpaid claims . . . aggregating nearly three thousand dollars. These claims were compelled to await payment until the State game fund had been replenished by the contingent moneys derived from the sale of hunting licenses, and from fines.

“The diversion of so much money from a fund that is inadequate at best has greatly crippled the service; notwithstanding this shortage of funds much effective work has been done. . . .”

In 1902, Wyoming collected $7,439.65 in hunting license fees and fines, but the legislature saw fit to spend only $4,184.50 on game. The lawmakers looked on income from hunting licenses as no different than any other revenue stream: When they saw a little black ink in the state’s ledger, they were inclined to approve a little more budget for the game warden; when times were lean, they were happy to divert the lion’s share of license fees away from game management to other priorities.

Nor was Wyoming in any way unusual in this. Most infant wildlife departments lived the same sort of street urchin’s existence, tending game populations that raised a tidy sum in license fees and economic benefits, then begging their masters for a pittance to support the work.

In 1907, the Pennsylvania state treasurer decided that a law granting the fines from all game law violations to the Game Commission was inconvenient, so he deposited them in the state’s general fund instead. In 1913, the Pennsylvania Game Commission managed to convince the state legislature to require all resident hunters to buy a $1 license, but in 1922, the newly elected governor, Gifford Pinchot— the same Pinchot who had helped Teddy Roosevelt establish the U.S. Forest Service— decided to channel all the license funds into the state’s coffers and fund the department with legislative appropriations.

In 1927, the director of the Colorado Game and Fish Commission headed off a similar effort. “They tried to take our game cash fund from us,” he wrote to a friend in Utah, “ which is money paid in licenses and things of that sort and belongs really to the sportsmen, but they were trying to put it in the general fund to appropriate as they pleased.”

The uncertainty of the financial support for state wildlife work may have been even more damaging than the paltry sums that were often granted to game managers by their legislatures, since they disrupted any plan that involved more than a year’s work. And lack of money was just one of the problems facing early conservationists. Once state wildlife departments began paying salaries to their employees, the jobs themselves often became embroiled in politics.

In 1931 Gifford Pinchot returned for a second term as Pennsylvania governor and set off another round of controversy by interfering with the Game Commission’s firing of four employees. Perhaps the most egregious example of pork barrel politics in state wildlife agencies came two years later in Missouri. A newly inaugurated governor chose Wilbur Buford, a politically connected attorney from St. Louis, as the state’s new commissioner of game and fish. At the end of his first year in office, Buford reported that he had accomplished a complete turnover of department personnel.

As the conservation movement gained momentum through the last half of the nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, the use of jobs as rewards for party stalwarts, the back-room redirection of license income and fines collected from poachers were the rule, not the exception, in state wildlife agencies. If reports of specific cases seem to be scarce, it’s simply because there was nothing unusual in these maneuvers— they were the tools of the political trade at the time.

The pioneering wildlife advocates who built the first state conservation departments were well aware of the political landscape in which they operated.  Joseph Kalbfus, the director of the infant Pennsylvania Game Commission at the turn of the last century, was not alone in preferring a guaranteed appropriation from the legislature for wildlife conservation rather than supporting it with hunting license dollars, but across the country, wildlife advocates found that no other funds were forthcoming.  In most cases, these pioneer conservationist had manipulated the system to enact wildlife laws and create agencies to enforce them. But they quickly recognized that, without some insulation from the vagaries of politics, conservation would make no headway, and the only dependable source of income were the fees paid by hunters and anglers.

Reform proceeded slowly at first, as powerful sportsmen’s groups in a handful of states brought pressure to bear on legislatures to fund conservation departments and stay out of their personnel decisions.

Finally, in 1928, John Burnham, president of the American Game Association, stood up in front of the 15th American Game Conference in New York and made a proposal. He pointed out a variety of problems that faced wildlife conservation and outdoor recreation: loss of habitat, the effects of increasing human population and demand for hunting, limited access to recreation on public and private land. And the lack of adequate funding for the enforcement of game laws, wildlife management, and research.

Burnham suggested that the country needed an overarching policy to guide the management of wildlife and wildlife-related recreation. The assembly agreed and a twelve-man committee was formed to draft a statement of goals for review at the next annual meeting. The committee was chaired by an itinerant biologist who had recently left the U.S. Forest Service to begin a survey of game populations in the upper Midwest— Aldo Leopold.

Leopold had been instrumental in reforming the state wildlife agencies in New Mexico and Wisconsin, and his experience with the game survey would soon prompt him to write the pioneering text, Game Management, a classic in its field. He was the perfect choice to lead the effort to define the needs of the struggling conservation movement.

He defined the committee’s goal with disarming simplicity: “This is a plan for stimulating the growing of wild game crops for recreational use,” he wrote. “While this plan deals with game only, the actions necessary to produce a crop of game are in large part those which will also conserve other valuable forms of wild life.”

The committee spent two years hammering out the details and came to the 1930 American Game Conference with a final draft. There is no record of the debate that ensued or a count of the final vote, but in the end, the professionals in attendance adopted the proposal.

The American Game Policy was a wide-ranging document. It pointed out that “our present attempt to restore game by the control of hunting seasons and bag limits alone has failed”— and called for active management “to provide favorable environments” for game on the modern landscape. It discussed ways to encourage private landholders to help create and maintain habitat, advocated a drastic increase in funding for research, and called for “harmonious cooperation between sportsmen and other conservationists.”

After considering the major ecological and political issues facing wildlife, the committee turned its attention to the emerging profession of wildlife management. The members emphasized the need for technically trained biologists, wildlife administrators, and field workers along with national funding for wildlife research. They also called for reorganization of state conservation departments.

The first step, in their view, was establishing a policy-making body that had some degree of independence. The members of this commission would be appointed by the governor; they would serve without pay, and their terms would be staggered “to avoid sudden reversals in policy.” This commission would have the power to set all hunting and fishing regulations, and it would hire the department’s director. “If this vital point is compromised,” the policy stated, “the whole idea breaks down.”

The director would hire all department personnel and be responsible for the execution of all management and enforcement. The commission should avoid “meddling in executive detail”— according to the authors of the game policy, “This is always fatal.”

The game policy went on to call for an increase in the price of hunting and fishing licenses. “It goes without saying,” the authors wrote, “that in no case should the sportsmen tolerate diversion of a single dollar of state game license funds for general state purposes.”

These recommendations weren’t pie-in-the-sky ideals; they were based on seventy years of hard experience. And, for the most part, they worked.

Numbers can be hard to come by, but consider some of these population estimates: In 1940, there were about 22,000 elk in Montana outside of Yellowstone; in 1951, there were 40,000, and in 1978, 55,000. Managers in Idaho have estimated that the state’s deer population was about 45,000 animals in 1923; by 1963, it had increased to 315,000. In 1925, Missouri officials estimated the state’s deer population at around 400; by 1944, it had grown to 15,000, and today, it stands at about 1.4 million. In 1927, writer and conservationist Nash Buckingham concluded that “the wild turkey is in a critical situation through most of its present range”— in 1952, America’s turkey population was estimated at more than 320,000 birds, and today, it is over five million. In 1931, there were thirty-five trumpeter swans left in the world; in 1957, the population had grown to almost 500, and today, it has grown to more than 63,000. The populations of most wild animals in North America, game and nongame, followed a similar trend through the middle of the twentieth century.

And so sportsmen and other conservation-minded members of the public coasted through three generations of wildlife prosperity, beneficiaries of a policy most of us have forgotten and none of us appreciated. As active support from conservationists waned and fragmented, the back-room politicians decided to re-assert themselves. Bit by bit, one bad decision at a time, they started to meddle in the organization of wildlife agencies.

It began with moves to consolidate state agencies with broadly environmental missions. In the 1930 game policy, the Leopold committee had good things to say about “coordination of forestry, game, fish, and parks, and other related activities,” but the move toward departments of natural resources that began in the 1970s departed from the game policy’s recommendations in important ways. These mergers often eliminated the independent wildlife commission or buried it in bureaucracy. The independent director was also buried and found himself reporting to one or more high-level administrators who owed their positions to the governor, not an independent commission of unpaid citizens with a special interest in wildlife.

And the crucial distinction between income from sportsmen’s licenses and legislative appropriations was sometimes blurred. When Kansas decided to merge its wildlife agency with its parks department in the 1980s, this confusion led to several years of misappropriation of federal wildlife aid. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered the violation of the Pittman-Robertson Act, it required the state to return all the misused funds before it received any P-R dollars. The process took years of budget belt-tightening to complete.

In some states, the commission’s authority to hire the wildlife department’s top administrators is eroding. In 1995, the Wyoming legislature gave the governor authority to appoint the department’s director, and since then, the list of “at-will” employees in the department has been expanded to include deputy directors and division chiefs. In Montana, the director of the Fish, Wildlife and Parks department is part of the governor’s cabinet and serves at his pleasure. In Kansas, the secretary of the Wildlife and Parks Department is appointed by the governor. It’s the same in at least four other states.

The revenue from sportsmen’s licenses continues to be earmarked for wildlife work, although state legislatures occasionally consider proposals that would redirect this income to other uses, even to this day. One pivotal element of the Leopold committee’s blueprint for state wildlife agencies was that “the public should help bear those costs which affect the public interest,” including research, general habitat protection, and wildlife education. A handful of states— Missouri, Arkansas, Colorado, and Arizona— have adopted laws that guarantee their wildlife departments a small percentage of sales tax revenue or income from lotteries, a commitment from the non-sporting public the original game policy committee would have applauded, but most state wildlife work still depends on funding from license sales and excise taxes on arms, ammunition, and fishing tackle.

Even as the scope of conservation challenges expands, state legislatures seem less and less inclined to consider earmarked funding for wildlife, whether the money comes from a license fee increase or a tax. When the lawmakers decide to throw a bone to conservation, they prefer to support one-year appropriations. This works fine for short-term projects like building hatcheries or buying a specific tract of habitat, but when the appropriations support ongoing management efforts, there is a constant risk that the job will be disrupted before it’s finished, either because a legislator has found another pet project or because he has an ax to grind.

State agencies are created to serve their constituents. The process is inherently political. There’s no way to completely insulate a state wildlife agency from political influence, and even if there were, it would be a bad idea to do it. But almost a century ago, the conservation community recognized that wildlife management in the states couldn’t survive the constant buffeting of statehouse politics. Leaders of the movement found a way to guarantee that the people retained a voice in the discourse on wildlife matters while wildlife managers maintained some measure of consistency in their programs, personnel, and funding.

The authors of the 1930 American Game Policy conceded that, when it comes to effective conservation work, “the attitude of the public, the governor, and the legislature counts for more than the form of organization.” But, they continued, “given the right attitude, there is such a thing as a best form for a state conservation department.”

The system they outlined may well have been that “best form,” or something very close to it. Based on three generations of experimentation and the collected wisdom of the nation’s most experienced wildlife professionals, it worked well in state after state as it was adopted in the 1930s and 1940s, and it can work just as well today— when it’s given a chance.

The reorganizations of state wildlife agencies across the country, the increase in “at-will” employees, the refusal to dedicate revenue from the general public for conservation work are largely the work of people with no stake in the agencies or their mission. They undermine wildlife management when we need it most. Before we tear down the system that has served us so well for so long, it would seem wise to get answers to a simple question: Why mess with success?

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ABOUT A WEEK AGO, A WOMAN ON FACEBOOK POSTED A DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE QUESTION: “WHY DO MEN HUNT?”  I DON’T THINK  she intended to be provocative, but whether she wanted to start a heated argument or not, she certainly succeeded. Since I’ve been a hunter all my life, I was curious to find out how the responses to her question described my motives and psyche.

Looking down through these comments, I saw that various people thought of me me as one or more of the following: 1) a hypocrite who talks about living with the planet while entertaining myself by killing my fellow creatures; 2) a control freak who hunts to establish my dominance over lesser creatures; 3) a fiend driven by an excess of testosterone; 4) a sadist who kills simply for the pleasure of shedding blood; 5) a eunich who attempts to compensate for his lack of sexual prowess by exerting “extreme ultimate power” over other animals; 6) a male who is driven to kill by the instinct to procreate; or 7) a person so lacking in self esteem that he must kill to cover his weakness and impotence. These insights are offered mostly by people who freely admit that they do not hunt and have never hunted.

Any effective answer to the original question would fill most of an encyclopedia. I have a stack of books here on my desk that attempt to respond, and I’m working on another one myself. Here, I’d like to make just one or two points.

First, it is not possible for a human to live on earth without killing. Taking the vegan pledge doesn’t relieve a person of the responsibility for the death of many fellow beings. We all have an effect on other living beings, whether we eat meat or not. We demand space, water, and food, all of which deprives other living things of resources they must have in order to survive. We are changing the climate with our appetite for energy; we kill millions of animals on our highways; we pollute the world’s air, water, and soil. The effects of these elements of our lives are infinitely more pervasive and dangerous to wild land and the wildlife it supports than any hunting that currently occurs in North America.

Those who depend on vegetable sources for protein should take a hard look at the impacts agriculture has on the natural world. Take a look at a harvested soybean field, which is about as welcoming to life as a Walmart parking lot. And the vegetarian kills plants. Is this somehow less objectionable than killing animals? We know that plants are sentient, capable of sensing their environment, reaching for key nutrients, even responding to sound and touch. I submit that the distinction we make between plants and animals is a distinction of convenience, nothing more. We make it because an objective ecological analysis would reveal an uncomfortable reality: The vegetarian kills to live, just as surely as the omnivore. Some may consider this as a manifestation of original sin, a trap of immorality that we cannot escape. I prefer to see it as an affirmation of our inextricable link with the land. Either way, it is a fact of life.

Industrial-scale production of food as it is practiced in the civilized world today is unspeakably violent, whether the final product is cotton, soybeans, chicken, or beef. The reality of domestication itself may be the most nakedly violent projection of human dominance in our long history on the planet. None of us can completely divorce ourselves from these realities of western civilization, but, as strange as it may seem, hunting is an effective way to minimize support for some of the most distressing of them.

Nearly all the meat my family and I have eaten over the last forty years has been taken in the wild. I have to face the violence that provides that meat. I see the life fade from the eyes of the beautiful wild things I take to feed my family. I confront the natural process that brings life from death. I do it with humility and gratitude. I do it sustainably, partly because that is an element of the ethical debt I owe to the animals I have killed and partly because, from a very practical point of view, I depend on the continued well-being of the game populations that support me.

Wild country has always been the centerpiece of my life. I enjoy wild places in many ways— hiking, backpacking, canoeing, feeding birds in the backyard. These are all sources of insight and peace in my life. But they also reinforce the mistaken feeling that I am somehow apart from the natural world. When I take the role of predator, I am a part of the natural world. I feel that, and the animals I pursue feel it as well. I am a participant, not an onlooker. I come away from the hunt with an understanding of wild places and wildlife I could not get any other way. And I come away with a sense of belonging, a reverence for the world that supports me, and a fundamental understanding of my place in it all. For me, hunting is, at once, a practical harvesting of sustenance, an immersion in places and processes outside of my otherwise urban way of life, and, finally, a source of spiritual renewal.

I have had this conversation with many people who have never hunted. Now and then, I meet a person who is willing to consider the history and prehistory of human hunting, who is willing to stretch his or her imagination to grasp some of what I’m trying to express. More often, I simply can’t find a way to communicate matters of this depth. Occasionally, I’m accused of self-deception, outright lying, or a cynical effort to camouflage my real intentions. I can only say that I am being as honest as I know how in my effort to describe a central part of my life, a communion that I have inherited from generations of hunters, whose traditions and emotions may be older than the human species itself. I don’t claim to speak for any other hunter, only myself. I cherish the hope that some of you who read this will do me the courtesy of believing that I am at least sincere.

 

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IN 2001, THREE LUMINARIES OF THE WILDLIFE PROFESSION, VALERIUS GEIST, SHANE MAHONEY, AND JOHN ORGAN, were called upon to consider the role hunting has played in the development of wildlife conservation in America. The paper they presented at the 66^th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, “Why hunting has defined the North American model of wildlife conservation,” (Geist, et al., 2001) was immediately hailed as a ground-breaking analysis of the influence hunters have had in the recovery of wildlife populations, many of which were on the brink of extinction little more than a century ago.

As hunting and hunters have come under renewed attack in the last thirty years, the message this paper delivered has become more and more important. For generations, hunters have provided irreplaceable funding and political support for conservation, and their demand for abundant, widely distributed game populations has protected millions of acres of habitat and provided the impetus for the creation of millions more. The bond between hunters and the places they hunt has proven to be a powerful force in conservation, and it will continue to exert great influence for generations to come.

Many of the most persuasive voices in the conservation movement have belonged to hunters— Frank Forester, John James Audubon, George Bird Grinnell, Theodore Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, and scores of others convinced the American public that wildlife and wild land are essential parts of our national heritage, as precious as the American flag and our founding documents.

For all these reasons, the wildlife profession not only embraced the Geist paper but began to refer to it in the same reverential tones once reserved for A Sand County Almanac. “The North American Model” has become a catch phrase in any philosophical discussion of wildlife management and an instant rebuttal to nearly any criticism leveled against the profession. Since we in the business offer it as a comprehensive defense against any attack, it should come as no surprise that, in recent years, a small but growing number of critics have pointed out what they believe to be shortcomings in our implementation of the model and, in a few cases, blind spots in the model itself. [See, most recently, Artelle, et al., 2018.]

This ongoing interchange has led to several newer publications. Perhaps the most comprehensive is The Wildlife Society’s technical review, “The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation,” [Organ, et al., 2012] undertaken by sixteen wildlife professionals, including the three authors of the 2001 paper. In that document, the authors list challenges the seven tenets of model face and offer responses.  What they do not do is offer any revisions to the tenets as they were originally stated.

I think there’s great virtue in several of the tenets described by Geist, et al.: Our wildlife should be held in trust for the public, as they point out; it’s generally a good thing that, with some salient exceptions, markets for wildlife are no longer legal; allocation of wildlife by law is right and proper, as is the “democracy of hunting,” which grants “all citizens the opportunity to participate.”

But I think there are elements of the other three tenets in the model that are confusing and, with increasing regularity, expose the profession of wildlife management to criticism it does not deserve.  Probably most important, the model as it currently exists fails to give weight to one of the longest standing missions of wildlife managers and wildlife conservation itself.  Here are my concerns:

Wildlife can only be killed for a legitimate purpose

There continues to be vigorous debate over the idea that “wildlife can only be killed for a legitimate purpose.” The devil resides in the definition of “legitimate.” In Wyoming, hunters are allowed to leave the neck and ribs of a big game animal in the field while taking only the

upper legs, loin, and tenderloin. In Alaska, this would be considered wanton waste. Is one of these more legitimate than the other? Faced with justifying the take of furbearers for no more than their pelts, the professional manager may have little more than historical precedent to offer in defense of this as a “legitimate purpose.” All this confusion when, from a strictly ecological point of view, the whole idea of meat, hide, extremities, or internal organs left in the field as being somehow “wasted” is an oxymoron. Unused parts from a dead animal are more surely wasted if they are consigned to a sanitary landfill than if they are left in the habitat where the animal died. The wildlife profession approaches this issue with remarkably little underlying thought or consistency. At the very least, we should consider an overarching definition or definitions of the word “legitimate.”

Wildlife are considered an international resource

Another tenet of the model is that “wildlife are considered an international resource.” Well, animals that move back and forth across international boundaries are certainly considered “an international resource,” except, possibly, in the cases of some marine mammals and fishes. While we use this expansive classification quite successfully in the management of

waterfowl, it seems to me that we struggle to apply it effectively in the conservation of locally rare mammals like the wolverine and gray wolf, as well as many of the neotropical migrant birds. The concept of a “distinct population segment,” which could be considered as a challenge to this tenet since it is essentially contradicts the general idea of connectivity and broad distribution, is a matter of repeated legal confrontations. We continue to engage in periodic donnybrooks over the authority of state wildlife managers versus their federal counterparts when it comes to populations of wildlife that may cross state boundaries or move in and out of federal reservations. Some wildlife is remarkably sedentary; other wildlife often moves inconveniently across all sorts of political boundaries. This tenet as it has been understood and is currently applied seems to be the subject of extensive debate. At the very least, it could use some clarification.

Science is the proper tool for discharge of wildlife policy

And the one remaining tenet: “Science is the proper tool for discharge of wildlife policy.” These are the words in the original paper, and they are carefully chosen. Certainly, we would be remiss if we did not collect pertinent data on how a given management decision affects the wildlife population it’s designed to influence. Easily said— much harder to do. Dependable indices to population size are a starting point in nearly any management effort, but as any field professional will tell you, getting really dependable indices is remarkably difficult and expensive for most big game populations and nearly impossible for most species of small game, especially when those estimates need to be made at a landscape scale at least once a year. The profession does the best it can, but I think we have to admit that the application of science to the task of monitoring game populations is still far from perfect. Where data are incomplete or lacking, management decisions still have to be made.

Beyond the practical challenges of applying sound techniques of data collection on a landscape scale, I’m concerned that this tenet has been paraphrased into something like: “We believe in science-based management.” Geist and his colleagues stressed that science was a tool for the “discharge” of wildlife policy. The paraphrased version of the Geist tenet can easily lead off toward the idea that wildlife policy should be based on science.

I don’t know how that can be done. An unbiased approach to collection of data can answer a lot of questions about the current state of a wildlife population and its habitat. It can help us understand the effect of a management action or other changes in the environment. In a few cases, it may even help us predict the effect of an action we haven’t yet taken.

What it cannot do is answer any question that starts with: “Should we . . . ?” Science can’t tell us whether we should protect a species from extinction. It can’t tell us whether we should allow construction in a deer migration corridor, dam a creek, log a hillside, apply a pesticide, impose antler restrictions, or close a hunting season. These are questions that can only be answered by consulting our values. Wildlife policy has always been driven by collective preference, prejudice, and, quite often, moral judgment. The only help science can give us in these matters has more to do with opinion surveying than aerial transects or call counts. To suggest that science can somehow help us decide what we want is not only inaccurate but opens science to accusations of bias that damage the discipline.

The missing eighth tenet: the importance of nongame

This brings me to a glaring omission in the Geist paper. There should be an eighth tenet. Boiled down to its essentials, it should go something like: “All wildlife has value, whether we hunt it or not.” This would account for the huge gathering of wildlife that is classified as “nongame.”

I’m not surprised that Geist and his co-authors neglected this element of wildlife conservation in North America. Their primary goal in drafting the paper for the North

American was to defend hunting as a critical part of the broader conservation movement. Their use of the broad term “wildlife” faintly implies that nongame species have benefited from the application of the model— which is true— but tenets that stress “elimination of markets,” allocation of wildlife,” and “the democracy of hunting” suggest strongly that, in this paper, “wildlife” mostly means “game.” In the context of the argument the authors were making, this is understandable.

What I have more trouble understanding is why the wildlife profession has still not included nongame explicitly in its “North American model.” It certainly isn’t because we’ve ignored nongame. As early as 1705, researchers were in the field in the American wilderness, risking their health and often their lives to catalog nongame species. John Lawson, Mark Catesby, the Bartrams, Alexander Wilson, and a score of others labored to open the eyes of people on both sides of the Atlantic to the diversity and abundance of wildlife in the New World. By the time Audubon came on the scene, a community of natural historians was already well established in America, and they were already concerned about the declines of nongame species and natural systems they were witnessing.

The smoke had barely cleared from the battlefields of the Civil War when a new generation of conservationists— almost all of them hunters— began the effort to protect nongame animals from the ravages of habitat loss, overharvest, and pest control. The federal government’s Bureau of Economic Ornithology was established in 1885 with the primary mission of convincing farmers that most nongame birds weren’t threats but assets. In 1886, the avid hunter George Bird Grinnell launched the Audubon Society, mainly to galvanize protection for plume birds. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was adopted in 1918, not only to rebuild populations of waterfowl but to protect all migratory nongame birds.

In the modern era, wildlife managers with federal and state agencies along with a host of private-sector groups are moving mountains to understand the ecology of nongame species, from plants to mammals, and protect populations that are in trouble. The Endangered Species Act gives legal protection to rare plants and animals and has been instrumental in the recovery of taxa as diverse as the bald eagle and the Colorado butterfly plant. The nascent State Wildlife Action Plan has mandated a comprehensive approach to cataloging nongame and provided some money to help the work along. More funding, more manpower would help the work go faster, but there’s no doubt that nongame management is an intrinsic part of modern conservation.

None of this is even mentioned in the “North American Model” as it is currently written.

From a strictly philosophical point of view, I find this disturbing. It neglects a rich part of

the history of the wildlife management profession and fails to stress that, over the history of conservation, hunters have been motivated by much more than a selfish interest in producing targets.

From a more practical point of view, the failure to present a model that accurately portrays wildlife conservation leaves the profession and the community of ethical hunters open to criticism from groups who are genuinely interested in maintaining abundant, diverse wildlife as well as organizations whose main interest is in disrupting the conservation traditions that have brought us so far. When we’re called on to defend our efforts, it would be useful to have an accurate description of American wildlife management in the “model” that intends to define it.

The upshot

I certainly don’t offer this critique to impugn the contribution represented by the original paper. It’s clear that the profession needed a statement of philosophy when Geist and his colleagues made their presentation, and it remains an excellent foundation on which to base our work. However, I think there are difficulties with the current description of wildlife management contained in the model, and I don’t agree with the authors of the TWS review that we should not “revise, modify, or otherwise alter what has heretofore been put forward as the Model.”   We should do precisely that.

I hasten to point out that I’ve been a hunter all my life. I feed my family on wild game. I hunt for the freezer; I hunt for connection with the wild world; I hunt for spiritual renewal. I heartily support the notion that hunting has been, is, and, in all likelihood, will continue to be a critical part of wildlife conservation in America. But game management, hunter management, are subsets of the profession of wildlife conservation. We would serve ourselves better if we gave the world a model that accurately reflects everything we do, not just a part.

I hope these comments encourage discussion to that end.

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Literature cited:

Geist, Valerius, Shane P. Mahoney, and John F. Organ, 2001. Why hunting has defined the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Transactions of the 66^th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference 66: 175-185.

Artelle, Kyle, A., John D. Reynolds, Adrian Treves, Jessica C. Walsh, Paul C. Paquet, and Chris T. Darimont, 2018. Hallmarks of science missing from North American wildlife management. Science Advances 4(3): eaao0167, 7 March 2018.

Organ, J.F., V. Geist, S.P. Mahoney, S. Williams, P.R. Krausman, G.R. Batcheller, T.A. Decker, R. Carmichael, P. Nanjappa, R. Regan, R.A. Medellin, R. Cantu, R.E. McCabe, S. Craven, G.M. Vecellio, and D.J. Decker, 2012. The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. The Wildlife Society Technical Review 12-04. The Wildlife Society, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

ON FEBRUARY 14, 1901, THE MEMBERS OF THE SIXTH WYOMING LEGISLATURE DID SOMETHING THAT SEEMED UTTERLY OUT OF character. These were men who had settled the frontier, cattlemen and miners, an unsentimental bunch of hard-nosed businessmen who spent most of the session deliberating over placer claims, wolf bounties, and licenses for the sale of liquor.

For someone looking back on the men and their times, it’s a bit of a shock to come across this passage in Governor DeForrest Richards’ message to that legislative body “I would respectfully recommend that some measure be passed guaranteeing protection to our song and insectivorous birds.” Ten days later, Senator Charles Guernsey introduced “an act to protect birds and their nests and eggs.”

“Any person,” Senator Guernsey wrote in his draft legislation, “who shall kill or catch any wild bird other than a game bird shall for each offence be subject to a fine of not more than five dollars for each such bird killed or imprisonment for not more than ten days, or both, at the discretion of the court. . . . Any person who shall take or needlessly destroy the nest or the eggs of any wild bird shall be subject for each offence to a fine . . . or imprisonment. . . .”

The record doesn’t tell us who voted for and against, but a majority of the legislators supported the proposal, and it took effect immediately on its passage. Wyoming’s sudden commitment to the protection of songbirds was surprising enough, but even more unexpected was the fact that Wyoming was the first state in the nation to approve such wide-ranging protection for nongame birds. Eight other states passed similar legislation in 1901, but Wyoming was the first to adopt the law and the first to put it into effect.

Conservation was not a foreign concept in the Wyoming of that time. Responsible citizens of the new state had recognized with growing concern the decline of big game, sage grouse, and trout and had taken the first steps toward reversing the losses of these valuable species, but this action on behalf of dickeybirds was something different. It was a commitment to a broader definition of wildlife’s value to the nation, and it was brought to Wyoming by a man with a talent for drawing and a passion for birds.

Frank Bond climbed off the westbound train in Cheyenne sometime in late March 1882. He was twenty-five years old with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa and an appointment as a draftsman with the Wyoming surveyor-general’s office.

He’d grown up on a prosperous farm near Iowa City where he developed an abiding love of the outdoors in general and birds in particular. With his twin brother, Fred, he collected and preserved more than 500 bird specimens during his college career, donating the collection to the university at the end of his undergraduate work. The opportunity to come west to the ragged edge of the frontier must have been irresistible.

When he wasn’t in the office, he was in the field, acquainting himself with new landscapes, collecting more bird specimens, and making careful notes on his natural history observations. By 1884, he’d completed his work for a master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and in 1887, he joined the American Ornithologists’ Union, a group of scientists and amateur birders that had formed in New York in 1883.

That year, he wrote his first ornithological paper, which appeared two years later in the AOU’s journal, The Auk. The subject was the Townsend’s solitaire, but his introductory remarks showed that his time in the field wasn’t spent solely in scientific pursuits.

“On December 7, 1887,” he wrote in the technical note, “I was invited by a conductor on the Cheyenne and Northern Railway, to go out to the end of the road and take a shot at mountain sheep. For the last three miles the road winds along in the magnificent North Platte Cañon and looks, from the brow of the perpendicular precipices on either side, like two silver threads glistening in the sun, and the construction train appears like the toy train of the nursery. I had with me only my long range Sharps rifle and was wholly unprepared to collect bird skins where were to be had here for the taking.”

He went on to report “countless thousands” of Townsend’s solitaires, robins, red-breasted nuthatches, and Steller’s jays feeding on juniper berries, “like school children out for a holiday.” The flocks chattered as they flew back and forth across the canyon— “It warms one’s heart,” he wrote, “to enter such a vale of melody in cold December.”

Bond’s obvious affection for songbirds was widely shared in the America of his time, but there were other views. Many immigrants from eastern and southern Europe embraced the traditions of the old country, which included the use of a wide variety of birds for the pot, with little concern for season or limit. They either shot the birds themselves or bought them from market gunners. In addition, a broad segment of the agricultural community was convinced that nongame birds ate grain before it could be harvested, and there was a widely held opinion that hawks and owls were a constant threat to poultry, which led many farmers to shoot raptors and songbirds on sight.

These motives must have accounted for the loss of a substantial number of nongame birds, but they paled into insignificance compared with the slaughter of birds for feathers used on women’s hats. Demand for the plumage of many species was intense, but the most prized were the breeding plumes of snowy and American egrets and a few other preferred species of wading birds.

One observer of the feather trade at the turn of the nineteenth century wrote: “In 1903 the price of plumes offered to hunters was $32 per ounce, which makes the plumes worth twice their weight in gold.” (At the time, gold was selling for an average of $19 an ounce.) He reported that, in 1902, a single wholesale house in London sold 1,608 thirty-ounce packages of heron plumes. “These sales meant 192,960 herons killed at their nests, and from two to three times that number of young or eggs destroyed.”

In 1886, William Dutcher, a member of the AOU’s committee on bird protection, offered a similar report: “A New York taxidermist informed me that he had in his shop thirty thousand bird-skins, made up expressly for millinery purposes.” Demand had changed little in 1903 when he wrote that “nearly 80,000 Snow Buntings were found by a State game warden in a cold storage house in one of the larger eastern cities.  The writer of this report has recently seen offered for sale by one of the leading department stores in New York such valuable birds as Flickers made up for millinery ornaments.”

One of the AOU’s primary reasons for being was to stop this uncontrolled carnage. In this first year of the organization’s existence, its members pressed the federal government to begin research on the ways birds benefitted agriculture. This pressure led to the formation of the Bureau of Economic Ornithology, forerunner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

AOU member George Bird Grinnell used his position as editor of Forest and Stream magazine, which was the nation’s most influential outdoor periodical, to launch a new organization for the public. He called it the Audubon Society. The only requirement of membership was to sign a pledge to protect nongame birds. Within three years, the group had 50,000 members.

In its ongoing protection effort, the AOU drafted a model statute protecting nongame birds. The intent was to apprise state legislators of the problem and give them a way of solving it. Over the next fifteen years, AOU members visited states across the eastern part of the country in an effort to get the model law passed— with little success.

Bond was undoubtedly aware of all these measures. He remained active in the AOU and continued to contribute articles to The Auk as his knowledge of the region’s bird life expanded. At the same time, he was rising to a position of respect in the community. In 1890, he served a term in the state’s first legislature and by 1895, he had left the surveyor-general’s office and taken over as editor of the Wyoming Tribune, Cheyenne’s leading daily newspaper. If anyone was in a position to proselytize for adoption of AOU’s model bird law, Bond was the man.

Most of the issues of the Wyoming Tribune Bond edited have been lost to the deterioration of high-acid paper and poor storage, so there’s no way of knowing whether he used his position with the paper to push conservation the way George Bird Grinnell used Forest and Stream magazine on the national stage. It’s possible he editorialized on the issue, but considering the number of people in the state, he probably didn’t need to use print. In 1900, the city of Cheyenne had just over 14,000 residents, and the entire state’s population was under 100,000. Bond was in a unique position to sell the AOU’s model bird law to the handful of people who had settled in Wyoming, and following the examples of other prominent AOU members farther east, he certainly must have.

The governor’s support for a model law and the fact that Guernsey’s version passed so early in the session suggest that someone with connections had taken the time to acquaint the lawmakers with the plight of nongame birds and the growing public support for measures to protect them. Bond was almost certainly that someone.

Two months after Wyoming passed its version of the law, Bond called an organizational meeting in Cheyenne to propose the establishment of an Audubon Society for the state. In a report later that year, an observer wrote that “quite a crowd of enthusiastic ladies and gentlemen assembled in the parlors of the Inter Ocean Hotel. It was found that public sentiment was overwhelmingly with the bird-protection movement, and that the new Audubon Society would soon embrace in its membership more than a thousand persons, in fact, two thousand members in Cheyenne, alone, did not appear an extravagant figure to those who met at the Inter Ocean hotel last evening.”

Frank Bond was elected president of the new group and immediately directed the treasurer to order another thousand pledge cards because the first thousand were “nearly exhausted.”

It’s an odd quirk of history that Bond launched the new group just as he was preparing to leave the state. The owner of the Wyoming Tribune, Joseph Carey, had just hired a new editor for the newspaper because Bond had accepted an appointment in Washington, D.C.

Irrigation wizard and Wyomingite Elwood Mead was in charge of “irrigation investigations” for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the time. He knew Bond from their years in Cheyenne and was aware of Bond’s background as a cartographer with the Wyoming surveyor-general as well as his ability as a writer. Sometime in 1901, Bond made the move east, first to Mead’s irrigation investigations unit, and then to the federal General Land Office, forerunner of the modern Bureau of Land Management

The move to D.C. didn’t stop his conservation efforts, however. When Teddy Roosevelt set aside Pelican Island as a refuge for birds in 1903, Bond saw an opportunity to create a system of similar reserves on federal land elsewhere in the nation. He made a careful study of federal holdings and began to recommend especially productive habitats as “bird preserves.” According to T. Gilbert Pearson, who was then the chief executive of the National Association of Audubon Societies, Bond’s work effectively led to the creation of the national wildlife refuge system.

“It was he who prepared the Executive Orders and important explanatory letters of transmittal to the President for the remaining fifty-one

reservations,” Pearson wrote in 1911. “No man, at this early period in the bird-protection movement, can even estimate the value of these reservations to the rising generation, which is now taking up the burdens of human existence, much less foretell the blessings the increase in bird life will confer upon those who follow in centuries to come.”

Bond’s expertise in cartography was useful in the protection of national parks and monuments as well as refuges. He came to the 1912 conference on national parks held in Jackson Hole, where other attendees repeatedly sought his comments on pending reservations, challenges to titles, inholdings, and budgets. He had earned the respect of the greatest conservationists of the age, combining personal commitment with professional expertise to render exceptional service to the movement when it was desperately needed.

He remained with the General Land Office until his retirement in 1926, rising to the position of chief clerk, and he maintained his membership in the American Ornithologists’ Union until his death in 1940 at the age of eighty-four.

History is a quirky thing. Some people are woven into the commonly accepted narrative; others, often just as important in changing the flow of events, are forgotten. Frank Bond helped change the course of conservation in America. The fact that he’s been forgotten is no reflection on the magnitude of his contribution; it is due entirely to the vagaries of historical discourse and the faulty memories of those of us who came after him.

Gilbert Pearson remembered sitting with Bond on the veranda of the Endicott Hotel in New York one summer evening, entranced by the man’s ability to mimic the songs of American birds. It was the clearest possible evidence of Bond’s affection for “the vale of melody” that had claimed his attention over a lifetime. And it can be said that, as much as any other man of his time, Frank Bond saved those songs and the birds that sang them.

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A WHILE BACK, I FOUND MYSELF IN A HOTEL CONFERENCE ROOM WITH THE BLINDS DRAWN, GLASSES AND PITCHERS OF WATER ON the draped tables, a projector for Powerpoint presentations, a flip chart and magic markers in the corner. This was clearly a place that had been equipped for some deep thinking. Fifteen or twenty of us were sequestered behind closed doors, charged with plotting the future direction of a major conservation group, and we were all contemplating a draft mission statement on the screen. While the wordsmithing went on, my attention was drawn to a phrase near the beginning: “We have an opportunity to create a world in balance, a world where human needs do not come at the expense of nature.”

I lingered a while over the notion of “a world in balance,” the quaint idea that, in spite of the constant shifts in everything from incoming solar energy and the orientation of the earth’s axis to the evolution of bacteria, it might be possible to establish some sort of stasis on an entire planet. Neither physics nor biology held out much hope for a balance, but I thought I knew what the authors of this draft were trying to say, so I drifted to the second half of the sentence: “a world where human needs do not come at the expense of nature.”

Creeping around in the background of that statement, unexpressed but palpable, is one of modern man’s most enduring prejudices— that, somewhere in our rise to enlightenment, we transcended our animal lineage and became qualitatively different, and distinctly better, than the menagerie that surrounded us. In this case, the phrasing went on to imply that we could find ways to live that made no demands on ecological systems— we could exist without appetite or impact, almost like angels.

The question is one of the most central issues in human thought: Are we a part of nature or are we apart from it? It haunts our discourse on philosophy and religion, shapes our debate on practical ethical matters from our appetite for meat to our concepts of animal welfare, and colors the way we use land and the resources it provides. Not too surprisingly, it emerges in nearly every discussion of conservation and the environment.

Of course, the differences that distinguish us from all other living things are unmistakable, even though it’s proven remarkably difficult to build a quick, air-tight definition of what sets us apart. When I first stepped into a college classroom, anthropologists were describing us as the tool-using animal, but in the last forty years, we’ve found many examples of other animals, from chimps to sea otters to crows, that use tools. In some cases, these animals use items that are handy without altering them, but in others, they modify an object before using it, which calls into question the revisionist claim that we are the only tool-making animal.

It can be argued that, even if we can’t make an absolute distinction in this behavior, there is certainly a difference of degree: We’re much better at making and using tools than any other species, which has turned out to be a good thing for us, at least in the short run, since we can’t run, jump, swim, or fly nearly as well as other life forms do.

There’s no doubt that we’re unique; we fill a niche in the scheme of things, and we’re one endpoint in four billion years of selection for success. The same can be said of every other living thing that shares the planet with us. We’re different, for certain, but not necessarily better.

No one really knows when the concept of human exceptionalism began, but I suspect it’s a relatively recent development. Probably the earliest undeniable record we have of abstract human thinking comes from places like El Castillo Cave in northern Spain and Chauvet Cavern in southwestern France, where complex artwork was committed to the cave walls almost 40,000 years ago. Earlier engraved lines and dot patterns may be much older, but the images of game animals in these and other caves are testament to an advanced ability to translate three-dimensional reality into two dimensions, along with a remarkable eye for the unique anatomy of a number of wild animals, and the capacity to refine and apply pigments so that they last for millennia. The paintings suggest that those ancient artists understood the earth and its teeming life in much the same way as contemporary Stone Age cultures do. It seems likely that then, as now, people whose lives depended on good hunting and foraging for their livelihood felt a close kinship with other animals, a relationship that transcended the pragmatic and took on the trappings of religion.

Among the modern subsistence hunting cultures that have been studied, each species has its unique place in the world, but no species, not even man, exerts control over the whole. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to assume that the prehistoric hunters who painted in the caves felt much the same way.

It’s interesting that there are no strictly human figures among the artistic subjects at Chauvet or the more recent cave paintings in places like Lascaux and Altamira. The occasional images that suggest humans have the heads of bison or horses. Archaeologists have speculated that these may be drawings of shamans or possibly illustrations of visions from trances. Either way, they leave the impression that the people of that time and culture felt an intimate relationship with the living things around them— they saw themselves as a part of nature.

I suspect the shift in our attitude began with the domestication of key crops and animals some 13,000 years ago. It was a slow-motion revolution that may have stretched over 4,000 years or more and left no record beyond the melted remains of a few adobe huts, fragments of discarded tools and pottery, and the altered DNA in the organisms that led us into farming.

Before we began to farm, our lives and fortunes were clearly shaped by the same forces that defined success and failure for all the animals and plants around us. A severe drought or winter, an outbreak of disease, a shift in the constant push and shove between predator and prey all sent immediate ripples through the populations that supported us and inevitably took their toll on each tiny group of wandering humans they touched. By the time we had settled down, we’d created a domain we thought we could control. The natural world beyond the fence was no longer a part of a universal brotherhood; it was a potential threat. We were estranged.

Irrigation expanded our sense of control and eventually led to the first great cities, places where specialists in various trades could divorce themselves almost entirely from the daily demands of producing food. The world’s first written epic, “Gilgamesh,” arose from some of the earliest of those hydraulic cultures.  It includes the wild man Enkidu, immensely powerful, drawing his strength from the wild world outside the control of the empire. Eventually, the emperor finds a way to domesticate the wild man and reduces him to the status of a slave, albeit, a valued slave, who assists the monarch in a series of adventures. Enkidu’s story reads remarkably like the biblical expulsion from Eden or the life of a modern office worker, set down in cuneiform 2,500 years before the birth of Christ.

As far as I can tell, these are the roots of the notion that the human animal stands somehow outside of nature— an idea that, in western culture at least, has complicated our thinking about our relationship with the earth ever since.

In its most extreme form, this concept has led to expressions of open hostility toward the unruly places that are seen to resist domestication. In the classic history of early colonial life in New England, Of Plimoth Plantation, the Puritan cleric William Bradford had this to say about the land he and his companions had chosen as their new home:

“What could they see but a hideous & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men? And what multitudes there might be of them, they knew not Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face; and the whole country, full of woods & thickets, represented a wild & savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar & gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.” It was a view many Americans would take over the coming centuries.

One of the most succinct modern expressions of this attitude I’ve ever seen is literally cast in concrete on the University of Wyoming campus. Construction on the building that first housed the UW engineering department began in the early 1920s. In 1926, as the building neared completion, someone asked Earl D. Hay, dean of the college of engineering at the time, to compose a motto to be enshrined over the main entrance. After some thought, he came up with this: “Strive on; the control of nature is won, not given.”

I find it more than a little ironic that, in the spring of 1927, as Dr. Hay and his students were moving into the new building, the Mississippi River contested his notion that nature is susceptible to control. Always an unruly watercourse, the Mississippi had already been contained behind an extensive network of levees, but rain and snowfall across the heartland were unusually intense from August 1926 to the following April. Driven by nine months of exceptional runoff, the river ruptured the levees, flooded 127,000 square miles of bottomland, drove 700,000 people from their homes, and killed 250. And this rain-soaked winter immediately preceded the catastrophic ten-year drought of the Dust Bowl. Strive on. …

I’d like to think we’ve learned a few things since Dr. Hay issued his challenge to engineers and the implacable opponent he identified only as “nature”— although I have to say that some of our activities in the last decades shake my faith more than a little. However, for the sake of argument, I’ll concede that we may be beginning to think more in terms of cooperating with the land rather than dominating it.

Having said that, I still find us struggling with the fundamental question: Are we a part of nature or apart from it? The conservation and environmental communities are not immune. At one extreme is a specific group of hunters the sociologist Stephen Kellert has labeled “dominionistic” because they view wildlife and the rest of the planet as property to be disposed of as people see fit. The human species, in this view, stands clearly apart from, and somehow above, the rest of the natural world.

But many of these hunters speak movingly of their outdoor experiences— it’s why they take the time and trouble, go to the expense, involved in hunting. They feel involved in natural processes when they’re in the field, and often, they place a high value on the meat they bring home. It gives them a sense of connection. They see themselves as apart from the natural world in the authority they have over it but very much a part of the natural processes and landscapes they enjoy.

Animal rights activists represent another extreme. They’re passionate about the kinship between people and the rest of life on earth. We are a part of nature, they argue— animals are our brothers. But they are morally repulsed by the idea that humans would participate in some of the most basic processes in the natural world, like eating meat and killing other animals to get it. They see humans as unique moral beings— a part of the natural world in our genes, but apart from the natural world in our moral responsibility.

Somewhere in the middle, there is the well-meaning phrase in that organizational mission statement: “a world where human needs do not come at the expense of nature.” It’s a mainstream sentiment, one that would fit nearly any conservation group, but it implies a sharp division between “human” and “nature.”

From a strictly ecological point of view, that’s sheer fantasy. Every physical need we have is filled “at the expense of nature,” as the drafters of this language know as well as I do, but when challenged with expressing an overarching mission, they struggle to acknowledge our dependence and leave the impression that billions of people could somehow find a way to live and prosper without making any demands on the planet that supports us all.

The roots of the conservation movement reach back much further than most history books recognize. Alarmed by the disappearance of their deer, the residents of the town of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, outlawed spring deer hunting in 1647. And the notion of providing some protection for wildlife was not new in the New World. It stretches back through the game preserves of kings and nobles to the Fertile Crescent and the reign of the Assyrian emperor Ashiburnipal.

Through all those centuries down to the first effective conservation efforts in America, we approached the task much as we approached our backyard gardens. We admired some things for their beauty, some for the way they tasted. We set aside a corner out back, cultivated it, built a fence, and chose the varieties we wanted to grow.

Early in the development of wildlife management, its advocates used the metaphor of the garden to explain how they thought about the process. There were stocks of wildlife that needed our attention, and if we watered and weeded with sufficient care, we would eventually have a crop to harvest. A good gardener was careful not to overharvest his perennials so they would yield another crop next year, and with the annuals, he made sure not to eat all the seed so he had something to plant the following spring. A little prudent thinning down the row helped production. So did a little manure. It was a useful metaphor, as far as it went, emphasizing the renewable nature of the “resources” we managed in a way that an agrarian population could readily appreciate.

But it had its limits. There was a casual chauvinism in the distinctions we made between crops and weeds that often failed to recognize the interdependence of the organisms we were managing or the processes that supported them. With a certainty bred of ignorance, we did things that seemed like a good idea at the time, only to discover years or decades later that we had failed to account for some key variables.

The collapse of the mule deer herd on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau was among our first lessons in America. Massive predator control and highly restricted hunting allowed the population to grow from 4,000 animals to between 50,000 and 100,000 in a matter of eighteen years between 1906 and 1924. Conservationists celebrated until the herd finished chewing the last of its forage down to the roots and collapsed from its own too-much.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the people of Wyoming began feeding elk to keep them off private stocks of hay. Eventually, there were more elk than private citizens could afford to feed, so state and federal governments took over the program. It seemed like a durable compromise, an expensive but effective way to have elk in the mountains while avoiding conflicts with ranchers on winter range in the valleys. Until brucellosis came along. And the possibility of chronic wasting disease.

We thought common carp would be a welcome addition to the nation’s fisheries, and in spite of a hundred years of bad experience with that introduction, we subsequently decided to import grass carp. And black carp. And silver carp. We weren’t satisfied with the interior West’s native trout, the cutthroat, so we brought in brookies and rainbows, and German browns and mackinaw and walleye and broadcast them over the landscape without considering the

possibility that some or all of them might not coexist comfortably. We dammed nearly every river in the region without bothering to think about how a wall across a river might affect the movements of salmon, sauger, sturgeon, humpback and razorback chubs, Colorado pikeminnows, and the host of lower-profile wild things that must move up and down a watercourse to survive the floods and droughts that shape it.

Sometimes, visualizing a garden isn’t the best way to think about the world.

The garden metaphor carried another message, too. Was that subtext accidental or intentional?— I can never decide. Either way, it was easy to jump to the conclusion that we owned the garden. We could decide how big it should be. If we suddenly decided that we needed another wing on the house or a new shed, we could move the beds or cut them in half, and if the crops and ornamentals were more trouble than they were worth, we could lay down some weed barrier, cover it with rocks, and give up the whole exercise. The garden, while often useful and sometimes entertaining, was something we could do without. We were apart from it.

I’m the first to concede that our willingness to provide for natural systems has grown with time. Here in Wyoming, we have the world’s first national park and first national forest, both monuments to our changing perspective. In the last forty years, we’ve made a commitment, however uneasy, to preserve native biodiversity by protecting rare species, whether they are charismatic or not, and we’ve begun to appreciate that an organism can’t survive without the wild places that shelter it, a perception of habitat that demonstrates a growing ecological sophistication.

But we still struggle to come to grips with our place in it all. Do we exist on some higher plane, out of reach of “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”? Are we overseers, partners, or just participants, feeling our way toward survival like every other living thing on the planet? Is the impulse to protect wildlife and wild places an act of selfless charity or self-preservation?

Conservation is defined as “wise use.” There are many paths to that wisdom. Science reveals the unimaginable complexity of natural systems and helps clarify the way human actions ripple through them. If we spent more on research, we would have a better grasp of the challenges we face and the often unintended effects our decisions have.

But a technical grasp of the situation isn’t enough. We need to come to terms with the emotional and ethical ties that bind us, not only to each other, but to every other living thing.

So here’s how I see it. It’s time to return to a reality the artists in Chauvet Caverns understood and that we, in our technological hubris, have long abandoned: The human animal is a part of the natural world. Skin and bone, flesh and blood, right down to the last strand of DNA, we are creatures of the earth. We depend on it for food, water, shelter, raw materials, the very air we breathe. It shapes our conscious and unconscious, our minds and souls. It defines us.

We should return to the idea that all living things are interdependent. Diversity yields stability, an ecological truth that is, at once, practical and esthetic.  As Aldo Leopold so wisely observed: “to keep every wheel and cog is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” At the same time, we need to come to grips with the fact that many of the natural processes on which the living world is based are violent and cruel.  Predation, parasitism, catastrophic loss of habitat, the killer winter, the grinding drought, the endless competition for resources and even space, as savage as they may seem to a human wrapped in a cocoon of his own making, are facts of life, inextricable parts of the whole. They are sources of great suffering and, at the same time, the forces that produce what we most admire in ourselves and the rest of the natural world— grace, beauty, strength, ingenuity, courage, commitment to family and social unit. Even now, at the pinnacle of our technological power, we are not free of these primal forces, nor of our need for the sustenance the earth provides.   We can’t suspend our impacts, direct and indirect, on other living things; the best we can do is to make sure our demands are sustainable.  Other species have found ways to restrain their demands to match the supply their environment provides.  We must find our own path to that way of living, or the inevitable forces of the planet will intervene to find it for us.

We are a part of nature. Nature is a part of us. From the simplest viruses to the most complex life on earth, we’re all in this together. I don’t know that accepting this will make our decisions concerning the land any easier, but there’s a good chance it will make them better.

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