Pilot and Index peaks in the Absaroka Wilderness in northwestern Wyoming. (Photo copyright 2018 by Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
AT ITS HEART, COMMUNICATION REQUIRES TWO THINGS: SOMEONE TALKING AND SOMEONE WILLING TO LISTEN.APARTICULARLY artful communicator may beguile a few more passersby to join the audience in the tent, but in the end, a message won’t catch fire until a large audience is ready to embrace it.
This has certainly been true of the messages that have transformed the American view of some of the most important ethical debates of the last century. Progress toward a higher moral ground hasn’t proceeded in steady linear fashion; instead, it has languished while a tiny minority of messengers strove to convert the majority, largely without success, until one day, the public finally decided to listen, and the nation changed its mind about values as profound and intensely held as whether a woman should have the right to vote, whether a black person has a right to equal treatment in society, whether homosexual couples should be allowed to marry, whether a factory should be allowed to poison its neighbors.
Sometime in the last forty years, Americans decided to stop listening to warnings of environmental deterioration. While I think they were mistaken in much of their analysis, Shellenberger and Nordhaus may have laid their finger on one factor that contributed to this retreat. With the advent of federal agencies like the EPA and a panoply of laws to protect the environment, the public may have felt justified in turning over the details of environmental protection to the professionals in government and the private sector.
It’s also possible that we’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy a respite of sorts— in the last forty or fifty years, we’ve been largely spared the kind of environmental catastrophes that reminded past generations of Americans that what happens in the natural world has a direct effect on people. To the casual observer, the state of our continent at the end of the twentieth century was reasonably good: There were deer in most suburban backyards,
Canada geese in flight. (Photo copyright 2018, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
geese on the golf courses, wild turkeys in the woodlots, trees on the hillsides, fish in the lakes. The brown clouds that had hung over most urban centers through the 1950s and 1960s had largely dissipated; the alarm over the effects of DDT and other organochlorine pesticides had subsided, and out in wheat country, the nightmare memory of the Dirty Thirties had faded away with the generation that caused it and lived through the aftermath. It was easy to believe that, if the war between Americans and the environment wasn’t over, then it had at least reached some sort of détente.
So it seems to me that the general public declared victory and went home. That left two small interest groups— the heirs of the robber barons and the heirs of Aldo Leopold— locked in battle while ninety percent of Americans were otherwise occupied. It’s a measure of the moral power of the environmental message that more hasn’t been lost in the resulting vacuum.
It’s certainly legitimate to insist, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus have insisted, that the supporters of a sustainable human relationship with the environment do everything they can to perfect their message and deliver it to the greatest possible number of people. However, the audience has to be ready to hear that message before it will take effect. And here, I find the tiniest cause for optimism.
The conservation/environmental movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was largely a response to a succession of catastrophes. Then— and now— we’re at our best when our backs are against the wall, and when it comes to the state of our environment, we’re cozying up to the wall again.
A modern dust storm on the High Plains of Kansas. (Photo copyright 1995, Chris Madson, ell rights reserved)
Consider 2017— hurricanes, huge wild fires, a punishing drought, devastating hailstorms. In the contiguous forty-eight states alone, extreme weather did $387 billion in damage and claimed 283 lives. And, while it can be argued that there is no incontrovertible proof that any one of these weather events was caused or made worse by the climate change we’ve created, nearly any expert will tell you that they are exactly what he expects as the planet gets warmer.[i]
In 2018, the southwestern quarter of the nation continued to suffer through an epic drought, a dry spell so severe that the federal Bureau of Reclamation warned that it is “one of the worst drought cycles over the past 1,200 plus years” in the Colorado River basin, source of water for millions of people and some of the nation’s most productive cropland.[ii] Authorities are expecting yet another “above normal” wildfire season in the West[iii], a prediction that has come to pass in California, and south Texas is up to its chin in floodwater— again.[iv]
Where’s the good news in all this? In an especially perceptive article for the Annual Review of Political Science last year, Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam took a hard look at the anemic American response to climate change and pointed out that stimulating real action will require more than instilling an understanding of the problem; it will require an emotional response. “The relevant mobilizing emotions are anger at a perceived injustice, or fear at a perceived threat, and hope that the injustice or threat can be redressed through collective action. . . . The combination of anger and hope has proven to be a powerful motivator in many successful movements.”[v]
Whooping crane among sandhill cranes on Nebraska’s Platte River. (Photo copyright 2017, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
I think we’re beginning to see that combination— the litany of loss of life and property to extreme weather; the continuing problems with air and water pollution; a spreading shortage of fresh water; the ongoing decline in numbers of economically important fish like Pacific salmon[vi] and Atlantic cod,[vii] blue marlin[viii] and bluefin tuna[ix]; loss of crucial pollinators; dwindling numbers of popular game animals, from bighorn sheep to bobwhite quail; and even the scarcity of well-loved songbirds are beginning to generate a wide-reaching feeling of anxiety and anger. The evidence continues to accumulate, and it is as disturbing as it is compelling. We haven’t really solved several of the major environmental problems that have haunted us for generations, and we’re facing a new problem in climate change that may be the most profound threat to humanity in our history as species. The cost, inconvenience, and ultimately suffering these problems produce will spiral upward steadily until we respond effectively.
In short, I think the environment will demand America’s attention even more emphatically than it did a century ago. And we will act as our grandparents and great grandparents acted to preserve what we need . . . and what we love.
We’ve already lost many things that might have been of use to us or given us pleasure, and the hard ecological truth is that we’ll lose many more, no matter how quickly we respond to the circumstances we face. That’s the price we pay for waiting until the crisis to act.
But I think the condition of our environment is about to reclaim its place near the center of our political and social discourse. With some luck and an outpouring of innovation, technology should help ease our way forward, but technology alone won’t be enough. We’ll need a renewed commitment to an ethical code, a part of our shared heritage that has been neglected in recent decades. For that, we could do worse than turn back to Leopold: “A thing is right when it tends toward the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” Words for our future . . .
[v] McAdam, Doug, 2017. Social movement theory and the prospects for climate change activism in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science 20: 189-208.
[viii] Collette, B. et al, 2015. Makaira nigricans, Blue Marlin. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2011.
[ix] Pacific Bluefin Tuna Working Group, 2016. 2016 Pacific Bluefin Tuna Stock Assessment. International Scientific Committee for Tuna and Tuna-like Species in the North Pacific Ocean. July 2016.
Drilling rig in the Green River basin, Wyoming. (Photo copyright 2015, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
AS THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION DOES EVERYTHING IT CAN TO VITIATE THE NATION’S ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS, GUT FEDERAL agencies like theEnvironmental Protection Agency, roll back regulations intended to protect our air and water, accelerate leasing of federally managed lands for mining and drilling, prevent adequate management of rare wildlife, and block any response to the growing problem of climate change, professionals in the field wonder: What happened? How can the political winds have shifted so profoundly in little more than a generation?
If you ask, most Americans will tell you they are environmentalists. A general survey administered by the Pew Research Center over the last twenty years has asked for response to the statement: “This country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.” In July of 1994, 78 percent of Americans surveyed said they agreed with that statement; in March of 2016, 74 percent still agreed.[i]
In the spring of 2018, Pew asked Americans what they thought about federal efforts on a variety of environmental issues. Sixty-four percent said the government was doing too little to “protect air quality;” 69 percent said it was doing too little to “protect water quality in lakes, rivers, and streams;” 63 percent said too little to “protect animals and their habitats;” 57 percent said too little to “protect open lands in national parks and nature preserves;” and 67 percent said too little to “reduce the effects of global climate change.”[ii]
Angler on the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone, northwestern Wyoming. (Photo copyright 2018, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, more than 100 million Americans over the age of sixteen fished, hunted, and/or watched wildlife in 2016, spending nearly $157 billion in the process.[iii] Broaden the scope of the inquiry to all outdoor recreation, and the statistics become even more startling. Nearly 150 million Americans pursue some kind of outdoor recreation. They spend $887 billion each year, which generates $65 billion in federal tax revenue. The outdoor industry creates 7.6 million jobs.[iv]
The environment hasn’t faded from American consciousness. The breakdown seems to have come somewhere between attitude and action. The pool of American interest in the environment is a mile wide . . . and an inch deep.
Why is that? It’s worth considering the possibility that the carefully designed public relations and political action generated by anti-environment business interests over the last forty years may be to blame. In their superb book, Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway analyze the techniques that business interests developed to protect tobacco from increasing regulations. The combination of denial that there was any problem with tobacco, attacks on the veracity of research findings and the discipline of science itself, support of pseudo-scientific “studies,” and delay of actions to control tobacco use turned out to be powerful tools in maintaining the revenue stream from products that had clearly been shown to be dangerous to human health. Oreskes and Conway go on to show how the same techniques have been applied to undermine support for action to reduce acid rain, protect the ozone layer, regulate pesticides, and, most important, control the release of the greenhouse gases.
It’s been argued in some quarters that environmentalists are their own worst enemies. In 2004, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus published an incendiary essay they called “The death of environmentalism,” in which they focused on the issue of climate change and argued that the environmental movement was largely responsible for its own failure to influence climate policy. The traditional groups are locked into outmoded tactics from the 1960s and 1970s, the authors argued; they depend on technical “fixes” and fail to articulate a vision, a set of values, for their movement that engages the general public; they refuse to court new allies like labor unions, and they haven’t widened their view of “environmental” issues to include matters like economic growth, adequate health care, poverty, and war. According to Shellenberger and Nordhaus, they’ve become just one more special interest.[v]
Other analysts have argued that, as the environmental movement has grown, it has fractured into camps that all too often work at cross-purposes.[vi] Some point to the aftermath of the first Earth Day when new-wave activists indignantly claimed that they had entirely different— and much more enlightened— attitudes than the old conservation crowd. As the influence of the environmental/conservation community has continued to slip, some observers have identified other fault lines in the movement— “mainstream environmentalism” versus “environmental justice;”[vii] “eco-pragmatism” versus “preservationism;” advocates of “working landscapes” versus champions of “wilderness.”
A few observers with an economics bent have speculated that environmentalism is a luxury only a wealthy people can afford, that even in a nation as prosperous as the United States, support for environmental causes waxes and wanes with the stock market. Following that economic argument into the realm of class, a handful of theorists have offered the view that the decline in the environmental movement’s effectiveness has been driven by the growing inequity in American income that has developed over the last thirty years.
There’s an element of truth in all these arguments, but, I wonder: If these are, in fact, the forces that have stopped the environmental movement in the last forty years, how did the movement gain momentum in the beginning?
J.P. Morgan, banker, financier, and owner of 25 of America’s leading newspapers, in 1915. (Bain News Service, courtesy of the Library of Congress)
If the media effort to undermine environmental reform has had such success at the turn of this century, why didn’t it have greater effect at the turn of the last? It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. The robber barons of the Gilded Age and their successors wielded powerful influence over news coverage of the day. Some, like the financial magnates Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan simply owned newspapers in major cities; many others, like the Civil War financier and railroad magnate Jay Cooke, went out of their way to court journalists with everything from entertainments to stock options and loans. As the muckrakers of the Progressive Era sharpened their pens against the tycoons, the multi-millionaires responded with bribes, threats, and increasingly sophisticated public relations campaigns.
The magnates of the Gilded Age had a degree of control over the political system of the time that’s hard to imagine today. Until 1913, U.S. senators were selected by state legislatures, not by popular vote; bribery commonly affected the appointment process as well as subsequent deliberations by the chosen senators. Nearly every major city had its political machine, controlled with merciless tactics by a political boss and his backers. It’s hard to imagine a system less susceptible to the rise of grassroots movements, but some of the nation’s most important grassroots movements rose in this era nonetheless.
If comfortable middle-class income is really necessary to generate an environmental groundswell, it’s more than a little surprising that, in 1900, the average household income in America was $438 a year or about $8,000 in modern spending power. At the peak of the Gilded Age, ten percent of Americans controlled 80 percent of the nation’s wealth. That proportion declined significantly in the 1930s, but by 2010, it had crept back up to 70 percent.[viii] The notion that income or relative equality of income somehow drives support for the environment isn’t borne out by history.
Olaus Murie, son of Norwegian immigrants and a leader in American wildlife research and wilderness protection.
Nor is the idea that race and national origin are somehow driving a decline in support for environmental issues. A century ago, the great American melting pot had barely begun its work—large minorities occupied urban enclaves where Old World attitudes still had a powerful presence. Many of these newcomers couldn’t even speak English and were often the focus of brutal discrimination, but these ethnic tensions didn’t seem to undermine the broad American impulse to reduce pollution, preserve natural areas, and protect wildlife; in fact, several immigrants and children of immigrants became leaders in the movement.
The proliferation of environmental organizations in the United States over the last forty years has allowed specific interest groups to focus more closely on issues they care about, and there’s no doubt that some of these goals conflict. However, conflict is nothing new in the environmental movement. The most notorious fight in the movement during the late nineteenth century was the vituperative confrontation between the Sierra Club’s John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Gifford Pinchot, but there were many other passionate confrontations over issues as fundamental as the constitutional underpinnings of the federal effort to protect migratory birds; as procedural as the management of national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges; and as ethically motivated as the preservation of wilderness areas and wild rivers.
These days, most of the nation’s major environmental groups belong to cooperative associations to coordinate their efforts on major issues. Messaging and lobbying are carried out at a high level of sophistication. If there is still disagreement across the spectrum of environmental activism, it’s hard to believe it’s any more disruptive now than it was a century or more ago.
Environmental issues like water quality touch every American, regardless of income, vocation, race, city dweller or country cousin. (Gooseberry Falls, Minnesota, photo copyright, 2018, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
Shellenberger and Nordhaus accuse environmental groups of failing to relate environmental issues to other concerns American have— employment, health care, national security— and ignoring politically powerful groups like labor unions. Early in 2005, Carl Pope, then the executive director of the Sierra Club, published a scathing analysis of the Shellenberger/Nordhaus accusations, pointing out that the Sierra Club has long made common cause with organized labor on broad issues of environmental quality, job creation, and the ongoing viability of major industries.
Pope also argued that, if Shellenberger and Nordhaus had been looking for a more compelling, less technical approach to the broad issues of people and their relation with the planet, they should have spoken with influential thinkers like Wendell Berry, Paul Shepherd, and Terry Tempest Williams, among many others. S&N failed to contact any such leaders in the area of philosophy or art.[ix]
To that, I can only add that the conservation/environmental community has always reached out to a spectrum of Americans with a message that combines practical recommendations with ethical considerations and a vision of a better future. Such elements can be found in the combined work of men like George Perkins Marsh, Frank Forester, and Henry David Thoreau well before the Civil War. Nor have such efforts diminished since the glory days of the early 1970s. They’ve migrated into new media and focused on a host of urban issues as well as the matters of wilderness and wildlife that some detractors have argued are the primary “elitist” interests of the modern environmental movement. Contrary to the argument Shellenberger and Nordhaus make, the outreach may be better than it’s ever been before. I think something else is responsible for the fading American effort to maintain our environment, and I think that “something” is about to change.
NEXT: REBIRTH
[i] Pew Research Center, March 2016 Political Survey. p.14.
[ii] Pew Research Center, May 2018. Majorities see government efforts to protect the environment as insufficient.” May 14, 2018. p.2.
[iii] U.S. Department of the Interior, USFWS, and U.S. Commerce Department, U.S. Census Bureau, 2018. 2016 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation. FHW/16-NAT. p.4.
[iv] Outdoor Industry Association, 2017. The Outdoor Recreation Economy. Boulder, CO.
[v] Shellenberger, Michael and Ted Nordhaus, 2004. The death of environmentalism. The Breakthrough Institute, Oakland, CA.
[vi] Kloor, Keith, 2012. The great schism in the environmental movement. Slate, December 12, 2012.
[vii] Purdy, Jedediah, 2016. Environmentalism was once a social-justice movement. The Atlantic, December 7, 2016.
[viii] Picketty, Thomas, 2014. Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. p.348.
THAT WAS THE WAY THINGS STOOD WHEN A NEW GENERATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROFESSIONALS EMERGED FROM THEIR TRAINING TO DO what they could to sustain the “integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” I was one of that cohort. I ‘d done my graduate work in the department Leopold established at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Leopold’s last graduate student, Robert McCabe. My colleagues and I studied late into the night in the department’s well-stocked library, looking up occasionally at a bow of osage orange and a quiver of arrows Leopold had made himself, the bow and its arrows hanging in a locked glass case over the original manuscripts of A Sand County.
I think I can speak for many of the professionals of that generation, nearly all of whom are now retired and more or less bitter about the situation as it stands. They— we— expected to lead a charge into the future; instead, we’ve been in a fighting retreat for thirty years or more, which is to say, most of our professional lives.
The momentum of the environmental movement carried the nation for another decade or so after the great surge in public interest and legislative action of the 1960s and 1970s. After bans on their use, concentrations of DDT and PCBs declined in America. Levels of lead in the environment dropped considerably after the ban on lead additives in gasoline. The hole in the ozone layer was repaired. Sulfates and nitrates responsible for acid rain were reduced by forty percent. No rivers have caught fire since the last time Ohio’s Cuyahoga River burst into flames in 1969. The average fuel efficiency of American cars and trucks has improved— ever so slightly—[i] as mileage requirements for new vehicles were raised. Organic farming has managed to get a foothold in the nation’s supermarkets.
Trumpeter swans on Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge, northwest Missouri. (Photo copyright, Chris Madson, 2017, all rights reserved)
Iconic species like the bald eagle, whooping crane, peregrine falcon, trumpeter swan, and black-footed ferret were rescued from the brink of extinction. The gray wolf was successfully reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and the northern forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The rate of destruction of important habitats like freshwater wetlands and native grasslands slowed, kindling some hope among specialists that we would eventually regain some of what had been lost.
But somewhere in the 1980s, the environmental tide turned, and it’s been headed out ever since.
The Clean Water Act of 1972 promised in ringing language “to restore the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” In the first decade after its adoption, pollution from many “point sources,” the effluent pipes from factories and sewage treatment plants, dropped, and there was reason to believe that America’s waters would soon return to “swimmable, fishable” condition.
Unfortunately, the problem of “nonpoint sources” of pollution, the chemicals and dissolved solids that wash off farmland, suburban lawns, and city streets, was left largely unaddressed. As a result, huge quantities of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, herbicides and insecticides, and loads of sediment continued to find their way into the nation’s streams. As we head toward the fiftieth anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the levels of nitrates in our water are about the same as they were when the act was passed; pesticides continue to float downstream; and an entirely new class of pollutants, endocrine disruptors, are beginning to cause significant physiological problems for a growing list of animals from snails to humans.
Duckweed on the upper Mississippi River in southeastern Minnesota. (Copyright 2017, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
The “death” of Lake Erie was one of the most influential parables of the 1960s environmental movement. In that era, a massive overdose of phosphorus from “nonpoint sources” around the lake had triggered gigantic algal blooms. When the algae died and began to decompose, the process consumed most of the oxygen in parts of the lake, creating “dead zones” devoid of any aquatic life. Cooperation between Canada and the United States led to a drastic reduction in particulate phosphorus and a rebound in the lake’s biota, but recent trends in farming have once again boosted the level of dissolved phosphorus, which nourishes huge blooms of blue-green “algae,” actually a form of bacteria that can be highly toxic. The blue-greens have an advantage over true algae in the lake because nothing eats them, not even the exotic zebra mussels that are rapidly displacing native shellfish. The blue-green blooms threaten, not only the wildlife in and on the lake, but people who drink the water.[ii]
On Chesapeake Bay, another of the famous examples of environmental stress in the Sixties, the situation is only marginally better. Thanks to gargantuan efforts and sustained cooperation among several states and the federal government, the bay has shown some improvement in its ecological health over more than forty years, although scientists at the University of Maryland still give its condition no better than a “C” grade overall.[iii] Whether efforts to reduce runoff of sediment and nutrients can be sustained in the face of a steadily growing human population and intensifying farming around the bay is yet to be seen.
The situation on the delta of the Mississippi River is a variation on the same general theme: nutrients have created an oxygen-depleted dead zone off the coast of Louisiana that covered an area the size of New Jersey last summer.[iv]
Then there is the case of the Everglades. Disruption of the historic flow of water and nutrient pollution from massive farming operations and a growing human population have threatened the integrity of America’s most famous wetland for more than a century, but the situation has gotten significantly worse in the last decade. The International Union for Conservation of Nature now includes the Everglades on its list of critically threatened natural areas.[v]
In its most recent assessments of water quality, the EPA found that only twenty-eight percent of the nation’s streams are in “good” biological condition.[vi] Forty percent of the nation’s lakes have “excessive levels” of phosphorus; thirty-five percent have “excessive levels” of total nitrogen; a third of all lakes show problems with invertebrate populations.[vii]
Against this backdrop, the U.S. Supreme Court, in 2001, decided to drastically restrict the scope of one of the Clean Water Act’s most critical terms: “waters of the United States.” The problem of regulating “nonpoint sources” of pollution was difficult enough when it could be addressed at a national level. Now that the smaller tributaries and isolated wetlands are left to the tender mercies of special interests in the states, runoff of nutrients and other pollutants from wide areas will have no control at all and many ephemeral marshes will face the threat of being filled in entirely. Water quality, on the surface and underground, will suffer, along with hundreds of species of wildlife, especially the migratory birds that depend on the continent’s wetlands.
My copy of the state of Wyoming’s fishing regulations is open on my desk. On page 12, it warns me to limit my consumption of the fish I catch from some of the waters here to “2 meals per week (8 ounces per meal before cooking).”[viii] This, in a state with only 560,000 people, a region known for its pristine wilderness. These days, most state fishing regulations carry a similar warning, just one more reminder, if another reminder were needed, that the Clean Water Act is far from achieving the laudable goals it set for itself.
The Clean Air Act has generally done better. Since 1980, the average concentration of carbon monoxide at U.S. sampling stations has dropped eight-five percent; lead levels have dropped ninety-nine percent; nitrogen dioxide levels have dropped sixty-one percent; ozone, by thirty-one percent; sulfur dioxide, by eighty-seven percent.[ix] All of these pollutants are now below standards set under the act. So are particulate emissions. In fact, there’s only one major challenge left in the struggle, but it’s turned out to be the most dangerous of all.
Dust storm in northwestern Kansas, May 2014. (Photo copyright 2017, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
Greenhouse gases. In the mid-1950s, a young chemistry student, Dave Keeling, wondered whether our rapidly increasing use of coal and oil might be affecting the composition of the atmosphere and increasing the amount of solar radiation trapped on earth. By the middle of the twentieth century, many scientists were considering the same possibility. It wasn’t a new idea. The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius proposed the notion that the burning of massive amounts of coal might raise world temperature in 1896, and in 1938, British engineer Guy Callender reported preliminary data that supported Arrhenius’ view.
Keeling’s contribution to studying the relationship was an improved instrument to measure CO2 and a better place to take samples— Hawaii, a site that could be easily reached but was thousands of miles from local sources of CO2, natural or human, that might distort results. He began measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory in March of 1958. That month, the average CO2 level was 315.71 parts per million. In April of 2018, it averaged 410.26.[x]
In 1965, the members of the President’s Environmental Pollution Panel were concerned enough about climate change to give it an entire chapter in their annual report, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. They concluded that, “by the year 2000 the increase in atmospheric CO2 will be close to 25%. This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate, and will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature and other properties of the stratosphere.”[xi]
Now, we have the benefit of fifty more years of data collected in a wide-ranging array of climate studies, from the analysis of ancient ice and fossil pollen to the prediction of the future by hyper-sophisticated computer models. The message from all that information and analysis is the same as it was when Keeling first started his CO2 measurements: We’re heating the planet. So is our response: The problem is more than we want to tackle.
While these overarching indicators of American environmental quality have followed their depressing tracks, similar trends have haunted my world, the world of wildlife and wildlife habitat, over the last forty years.
Up until the 1960s, the nation dealt with rare species of wildlife one at a time. High-profile animals like the bison and trumpeter swan captured national attention and were given some support as a result. Rare species with less notoriety were generally neglected.
The nation’s commitment to rare wildlife broadened with the endangered species conservation acts of 1966 and 1969,[xii] and when those laws proved largely ineffective, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act of 1973, a law that established “a program for the conservation of such endangered species” in order to safeguard “the Nation’s heritage in fish, wildlife, and plants.”[xiii] ESA passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 390 to 12;[xiv] in the Senate, by a vote of 92 to 0,[xv] but, within a decade, it was under attack and has remained one of the nation’s most controversial environmental laws ever since.
An amendment to the law in 1982 is just one example— it created a mind-bending new classification for species that have been proposed for listing as “threatened” or “endangered”: the idea that a listing is “warranted but precluded.” It’s an admission that, although scientific analysis supports a listing, federal wildlife officials are not going to list it. One of the most recent wrinkles in the ongoing assault is a provision in the last four federal budgets that prohibits the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from spending any money on processes that might lead to the listing of the greater sage grouse in the interior West.
The act has had its share of successes: Species like the grizzly, gray wolf, whooping crane, California condor, and trumpeter swan, needed more protection from a variety of human activities. When we gave them that protection, they also began to recover. A few, like the black-footed ferret, were specialists that required a specific habitat in order to survive. When we provided that habitat or protected what was left and found ways to produce animals in captivity so they could be reintroduced to the wild, they began to recover, at least to the limit of the habitat they had left. Many of these specialists were probably never abundant or widely distributed— they occupied a relatively small niche on the landscape and could survive nowhere else.
We’ve succeeded where the challenges were relatively straightforward and where there was general public support for the species in need. Where the challenges are more complex, we’ve struggled, partly because of the limits of our scientific understanding of ecology of rare and declining species but mostly because the agency charged with executing ESA has been hamstrung by attacks on its funding and authority.
In the forty-year span of my professional life, three North American birds— the Bachman’s warbler, Eskimo curlew, and ivory-billed woodpecker— probably disappeared from the world. The warbler nested in the swamps of the southeastern United States; the woodpecker was a year-round resident in pristine bottomland forests of the Southeast; the curlew swept across the prairies in America’s heartlands between its tropical wintering areas and its nesting grounds on the northern tundra. In addition, four Hawaiian birds have been extirpated since 1965.
A male Attwater’s prairie chicken displaying on one of the species’ last breeding grounds in southern Texas. Copyright 2015 Chris Madson, all rights reserved.
The Attwater’s prairie chicken of the Texas Gulf coast continues to teeter on the ragged edge of extinction in the wild, and the Gunnison’s sage grouse clings to a precarious existence in the mountain valleys of central Colorado.
As depressing as the ongoing decline of rare birds has been, I’m even more dismayed by the trajectories in populations of common birds I grew up with, species like the eastern meadowlark, once a presence on every other fencepost in the Midwest, a species that has been declining at the rate of more than three percent a year, a drop of nearly ninety percent, since surveys began in 1966.[xvi] Or the northern bobwhite quail— since 1966, bobwhite populations have declined by eighty-eight percent.[xvii]
According to recent research, about a third of the 551 bird species wintering in the United States “have declined over the last five decades, some of them quite dramatically.”[xviii] Some groups are at particular risk. More than half of the fifty-four bird species that live on the oceans around North America are at “high risk,” according to the North American Bird Conservation Initiative. Same proportion applies to the 478 species in America’s tropical and subtropical forests.[xix]
There have been surprising and disheartening declines in the populations of other kinds of wildlife as well. Populations of the mule deer, one of the icons of the American West, have been slipping for nearly forty years across most of the species’ range for reasons researchers and wildlife managers still don’t fully understand. North American bats are reeling under the attack of new diseases. Shocking numbers of amphibians are beset by their own special illnesses and are losing ground as a result. Bees, both our native species and the imported honeybee, are under stress, a trend that threatens the businesses of many farmers who depend on pollinators to fertilize the flowers that eventually become almonds, apples, and other fruit. Numbers of the monarch butterfly, the bug that must surely hold the record among arthropods for greatest human fan base, have dropped by eighty-four percent in the last twenty years.[xx]
Parched federal wetland in the Dakotas. (Photo copyright, 2000, Chris Madson, all rights reserved)
No small part of this downward spiral among wild things is due to a loss of key habitats. Two-thirds of the original marshes in the prairie pothole region of the northern prairie have been drained and are now farmed.[xxi][xxii] The tallgrass prairie system that once surrounded these wetlands is in even greater distress— somewhere between eighty-six percent and ninety-nine percent of it has gone under the plow.[xxiii] Farther south, the bottomland forests of the Southeast’s great river systems have been reduced to scattered fragments. Louisiana’s experience is probably typical— one report states that the loss “is estimated to be 50 to 75% of the original presettlement acreage, statewide. Old-growth examples of this habitat type are very rare.” The strange thickets of native bamboo that frontiersmen called “the canebrake” have been reduced to about two percent of their original area and are considered a “critically endangered ecosystem.”[xxiv]
Much of this damage occurred before the environmental movement peaked in the early 1970s. There’s a lag time between the destruction of a habitat type and the disappearance of the animals that depend on it, so the extinction of animals that depended on these systems is, to a marked degree, the legacy of land-use decisions that were made and executed before I was born. The ongoing declines in populations of more common wildlife since the 1970s are, in part, a reflection of outright loss of habitat, but they’re also a frightening indicator of the poor health of the wild places we have left.
Some of the wild species in decline are specialists whose limited niches are under special stress. Many more are generalists, capable of exploiting a wide variety of food and cover, often traveling over vast areas of the hemisphere. Their struggle may be the most accurate assessment we have of the ecological condition of the continent, and that picture is far from encouraging. Leopold described the view of many wildlife specialists of this generation when he wrote that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”[xxv]
[vi] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2016. National Rivers and Streams Assessment 2008-2009: A Collaborative Survey. EPA/841/R-16/007, Washington, D.C. p.xiii.
[vii] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2016. National Lakes Assessment 2012: A Collaborative Survey of Lakes in the United States. EPA 841-R-16-113, Washington, D.C. p.1.
[viii] Wyoming Game and Fish Department, 2018. Wyoming fishing regulations. Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Cheyenne, WY. P.12.
[xviii] Sykan, Canadan U., et al, 2016. Population trends for North American winter birds based on heirachical models. Ecosphere 7(5):12.
[xix] North American Bird Conservation Initiative, 2016. The state of North American birds. Environment and Climate Change Canada, Ottawa, Ont.
[xx] Throgmartin, Wayne, E., et al, 2017. Monarch butterfly population decline in North America: identifying the threatening processes. Royal Society Open Science 4: 170760. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170760.
[xxi] Dahl, Thomas E., 1990. Wetland losses in the United States, 1780s to 1980s. U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington, D.C. p.6.
[xxii] Dahl, Thomas E., 2014. Status and trends of prairie wetlands in the United States 1997 to 2009. U.S. Department of the Interior; Fish and Wildlife Service, Ecological Services, Washington, D.C. p.18.
[xxiii] Samson, Fred B., Fritz L. Knopf, and Wayne R. Ostlie, 2004. Great Plains ecosystems: past, present, and future. Wildlife Society Bulletin 32(1): 6-15.
[xxiv] Platt, Steven G. and Christopher G. Brantley, 1997. Canebrakes: An ecological and historical perspective. Castanea 62(1): 8-21.
[xxv] Leopold, Aldo, 1953. Round River. Oxford University Press, New York, NY. p.165.
THE SUMMER OF 1947 WAS QUIETER FOR ALDO LEOPOLD THAN HE’D EXPECTED.
He was at the peak of a remarkable career: founder and chair of the world’s first department of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin; a sought-after essayist and public speaker; one of the founders of the Wilderness Society; honorary vice president of the American Forestry Association; and president of the Ecological Society of America, elected even though he seldom attended the ESA’s annual conference and did not consider himself an active member.[i]
He was also wrestling with a manuscript for a nature book he’d promised the editors at Alfred A. Knopf. It was a project he’d been considering for six years and had discussed with Knopf for at least three.[ii] The book project had proven to be unexpectedly challenging — the wordsmiths at Knopf struggled with the eclectic nature of the essays he submitted, some intensely personal and descriptive, others expansive and deeply philosophical.[iii] And Leopold couldn’t find the time to give the work his undivided attention.
It took a doctor’s order to slow him down. Sometime in late 1945, he had begun suffering occasional spasms of extreme pain on the left side of his face. At some point, he sought medical attention and was given a name for the problem— trigeminal neuralgia— and few options for treatment. By early 1947, the attacks had become frequent and temporarily debilitating. In May, he submitted to an “alcohol block,” an injection his doctors hoped would deaden the trigeminal nerve. The specialists weren’t sure how precise the injection would be, how much it would relieve the pain, or how long the effect would last, but, short of surgery, it was the only palliative they could offer. They cautioned their patient to step back from his hectic schedule and rest over the summer.[iv]
With those directions in mind, Leopold scheduled just a single June trip to Minnesota where he attended the Wilderness Society’s annual council meeting and stopped in Minneapolis on the way back to address the conservation committee of the Garden Club of America, a speech he called “The Ecological Conscience.” With those commitments fulfilled, he settled down to prepare his essays for publication.[v]
Sometime in late July, as the painful spasms in his face returned and he reflected on a lifetime spent in defense of wildlife and wild land, his thoughts turned back to something he’d said to the Garden Club. It reflected a broadening of the precepts he’d been taught as a student in Gifford Pinchot’s School of Forestry at Yale; in the subsequent thirty-eight years, he had reached beyond purely technical analysis and Pinchot’s utilitarian “wise use” of natural resources to a philosophical whole that combined ecological reality with human morality.
“Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient,” he wrote. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise.”[vi] He called this “the land ethic.”
It was— and remains— one of the great ideas in American thought, and, like most great ideas, it wasn’t entirely original. Its roots reached back across the generations to the experiences of the first generation of Europeans to settle in the New World.
As early as 1626, the residents of New Plymouth, Massachusetts, adopted a local ordinance to protect the colony from the “inconveniences as do and may befall the plantation by the want of timber.” Before a colonist cut down a tree, he was required to seek “the consent approbation and liking of the Governour and council.”[vii] And the colonial concern over impending scarcity wasn’t limited to lumber. In the winter of 1646, the council of the settlement of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, ordered “that there shalbe noe shootinge of deere from the first of May tell the first of November and if any shall shoote a deere with in that tyme he shall forfitt 5 pounds.”[viii]
The discovery was repeated again and again as each generation of emigrants ventured into territory they considered to be unsettled, built their cabins, and lived off the fat of the land while they labored to transform it. As stands of old-growth white pine, chestnut, and oak melted away under the onslaught of the timber barons, as populations of bison and elk disappeared at the edge of the frontier and the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet began their free fall toward extinction, the idea of a more judicious approach to the management of natural resources steadily gained public support.
And so Americans began to organize. The trend began among zoologists and enthusiasts of natural history: the American Fisheries Society in 1870;[ix] the American Forestry Association in 1875;[x] the Nuttall Ornithologists’ Club in 1873, which became the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1883;[xi] the Boone and Crockett Club, a gathering of influential patrician sportsmen and scientists, in 1887.[xii]
George Bird Grinnell, pioneer conservationist and founder of the Audubon Society
In February of 1886, George Bird Grinnell, editor and publisher of Forest & Stream magazine, called for “an association for the protection of wild birds and their eggs, which shall be called the Audubon Society.”[xiii] Within three years, membership in the society had grown to more than 50,000.[xiv]
In response to a groundswell of public concern, the federal government began to act. Congress created a division of fisheries management in 1871, a division of forestry in 1881, and a division of economic ornithology to research the practical benefits of songbirds in 1885. The first national forest was established in 1891; the first national wildlife refuge, in 1892. In 1890, it became illegal to “throw rubbish, filth, refuse, or waste of any kind into the navigable rivers of the United States.”[xv] By the time Teddy Roosevelt moved into the White House a decade later, the electorate had clearly demonstrated its support for practical conservation, and the government’s role in advancing the doctrine had already become a prominent part of the nation’s political dialogue.
As the currents of pragmatic management of natural resources gathered force, another school of thought also developed. While Pinchot stressed the importance of use in his approach, his contemporary, John Muir, championed a less utilitarian relationship between humans and wild places: “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul,” he wrote in 1912[xvi]
The antecedents of Muir’s view stretch back as far the origins of practical conservation. Its origins can be traced through the popular writings of John Burroughs; through the work of artist-naturalists like Audubon, Alexander Wilson, and Mark Catesby; into the musings of Henry David Thoreau— “In wildness is the preservation of the world”;[xvii]— and even earlier in the journals of men who are now largely forgotten, pioneers like John Lawson— “. . . the loftiest Timbers . . . proper Habitations for the Sweet-singing Birds . . .”[xviii] and Thomas Morton— “’Twas Nature’s Masterpiece . . . If this land be not rich, then is the whole world poore.”[xix]
This less pragmatic ideal found its way into federal policies even before the more practical approaches to conservation were adopted. As the Civil War raged to its conclusion in 1864, President Lincoln took time to sign a grant of land to the state of California, a parcel “known as the Yo-semite valley . . . with the stipulation . . . that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation . . . for all time.”[xx] Eight years later, Congress voted to set aside a much larger tract of land “lying near the Head-waters of the Yellowstone River . . . as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”[xxi] Just what constitutes a “pleasuring-ground” remains the subject of heated debate in some circles even today, but by the time the National Park Service was formed in 1916, it was clear that at least part of Yellowstone’s purpose was to serve as a refuge for wildlife as well as people.
Esthetic and even spiritual sentiments had drifted in and out of the developing canons of practical conservation for generations before Leopold was even born, and the trendrils of such perceptions reached back across the Atlantic, disappearing at last into the mists of prehistory in the Old World. What Leopold added was a stiff shot of ecology. Along with other scientific pioneers like Charles Elton and Herbert Stoddard, Leopold had stepped back from the disciplines of zoology and natural history to consider the processes and interactions that drive natural systems. His land ethic combined the scientific, practical, and esthetic elements of the conservation imperative and did it with a grace and poetic economy that was unprecedented.
It was a lucky thing for those of us who came after that he found the respite to finish his work that summer. By August, the neuralgia had intensified to the point that Leopold scheduled surgery to have the trigeminal nerve severed. The surgeons at the Mayo Clinic declared the procedure a success, but it left him with partial paralysis on the left side of his face, difficulty speaking, a chronically dry left eye, and, most disturbing, problems with his memory. While he recovered slowly, finally resuming his normal lecture schedule and contributing to a few technical conferences the following spring,[xxii] he managed to write only two more short essays for the book before his death on April 21, 1948, at the age of sixty-one.[xxiii]
Knopf dropped the book before Leopold’s death, but thanks to Leopold’s son, Starker, Oxford University Press picked it up,[xxiv] and after the family and several of his close friends finished the final editing, the collection appeared under the title, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, in 1949.[xxv]
It’s an interesting footnote to history that several editors were uncomfortable with the philosophical essays Leopold had included in Sand County. They saw more market value in the nature vignettes that made up the almanac itself. In retrospect, it was precisely the philosophy that led to its initial success and has accounted for its ongoing popularity. Even more than Silent Spring, Sand County’s “Sketches Here and There” and “The Upshot” were the new testament of environmental stewardship in America. They crystallized the sentiment that had shaped almost a century of action by the government, the scientific community, a host of organizations, and millions of Americans.
Whenever energy began to flag, people were goaded by another in a succession of sobering natural catastrophes: Wisconsin’s Peshtigo fire in 1871, a hurricane of flame that claimed the lives of at least 1,500 people; the “Big Burn” of 1910, another inferno that laid waste to an area the size of New Jersey and killed 85 people in just two days; the Galveston hurricane in 1900 that erased a city and killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people; the Mississippi Flood of 1927; the Dust Bowl; rivers catching fire in major urban areas; high-profile animals like the bald eagle and whooping crane leading scores of other species on the way toward extinction, all of them reminders of the consequences of a failure to understand and respect the land and the processes it supports.
Dust storm in Baca County, Colorado, 1936. (D.L. Kernodle, courtesy of the Library of Congress)
The momentum that had driven the growing environmental movement through the last third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth reached some sort of peak in the decades following the appearance of Sand County. A groundswell of support led to federal laws that promised to control air and water pollution, imposed limits on pesticide use, protected endangered species, reduced erosion on vulnerable cropland, established wildlife habitat there, and mandated a thorough review of the consequences of any major federal development project before it could begin. The Land and Water Conservation Fund was established in 1964,[xxvi] a program that diverted billions of dollars of income from offshore oil leases to projects as diverse as improving water treatment plants and expanding national parks and wildlife refuges, and the Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970.
Other programs emerged in the same era, arguably less pragmatic but solidly in the tradition of the esthetic and spiritual concerns captured in Leopold’s land ethic: the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, the Marine Mammals Protection Act of 1972, the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1960, and the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980, legislation that added nearly 44 million acres to the national park system, almost 10 million acres to the nation’s wildlife refuges, and more than 9 million acres to the area of federally protected wilderness. There was every reason to believe that Americans were unalterably committed to a sustainable relationship with the land they called home.
NEXT INSTALLMENT: THE TIDE GOES OUT
[i] p. 493. Meine, Curt, 1988. Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI.
[vii] p.28. The Compact with the Charter and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth: Together with the Charter of the Council at Plymouth and an Appendix. Dutton and Wentworth, Printers to the State, Boston, MA, 1836. From Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth
[viii] Brigham, Clarence, S., ed., 1901. Early Records of the Town of Portsmouth. E.I. Freeman & Sons, State Printers, Providence, RI. p.34.
[x] Steen, Harold K., 2004. The U.S. Forest Service: A History. Forest History Society in association with the University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA. p.9.
[xi] Orr, Oliver H. Jr., 1992. Saving American Birds: T. Gilbert Pearson and the Founding of the Audubon Movement. University of Florida Press, Gainesville, FL. p.22.
[xii] Reiger, John F., 2001. American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation. Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, OR. p.4.
[xiii] Grinnell, George Bird, 1886. “The Audubon Society” in Forest and Stream: A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun, Vol. 26:3, p.41, Feb. 11, 1886.
[xiv] Trefethen, James B., 1975. An American Crusade for Wildlife. Winchester Press, New York, NY. p.130.
[xv] Statutes at Large of the United States of America, Volume XXVI. Fifty-first Congress, Session I, Chapter 907, 1890. p.453.
[xvii] p. 239. Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems. The Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, New York, NY.
[xviii] p. 63. Lawson, John, 1709. A Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of that Country: Together with the Present State Thereof and a Journal of a Thousand Miles Travel’d thro’ Several Nations of Indians Giving a particular Account of their Customs, Manners, Etc. London, UK.
[xix] P. 54. Morton, Thomas, 2000. New English Canaan. Digital Scanning, Inc., Scituate, MA. Originally published 1637 in Amsterdam.
[xx] Statutes at Large, Thirty-Eighth Congress, Session I, Ch. 184, 1864. p.325.
[xxi] Statutes at Large, Forty-second Congress, Session II, Chapter XXIV. p.32.
THIS PLACE IS CLOSE TO THE CENTER OF THE BIG EMPTY IN WYOMING. THE RIDGE TO THE SOUTH IS KNOWN TO A HANDFUL OF LOCALS AS PINE HILL. THE mountain range just out of this picture to the west is too small to be a part of any national forest. It’s held and mostly neglected by the Bureau of Land Management. The local population of residents consists primarily of sage grouse, pronghorns, a handful of black-footed ferrets, and a herd of elk that drifts back and forth from the high country to the prairie as the season and the whims of its members dictate. As I went out last week to pursue a few of those elk, I found half a dozen of these flimsy antennae scattered across the area. They’re called “met” towers— “met” short for meteorological— and they’re the first step in installing yet another series of 400-foot-tall wind generators.
At a recent public meeting on the new “development,” a man who cowboyed on a local ranch as a youth and has hunted here all his life asked the representative of the energy corporation why he would build in such a place.
“It’s some of the very last of the very best,” he said. “What you want to do would destroy it.”
The rep listened perfunctorily and replied, “Tough.”
I believe in alternative energy. My wife and I are reaching into our life savings to install solar panels on our roof this fall. But wind and solar energy development at an industrial scale causes many of the same problems that industry in other forms has caused across the continent. It seems the goal of the big wind energy firms is the same as any other big company’s— maximize return on investment, nothing else. And for those of us who think that some places are too precious to scar, even in the name of clean energy, their message is clear:
IT’S THE BUSIEST INTERSECTION IN WYOMING, A CROSSING I MAKE, AT somerisk of life and limb, nearly every morning on my way back from running my Brittanies. As I wait for the light to change, my gaze settles on the ground at the curb. Heaven only knows how many times this dirt has been turned over as the roads have been built and widened, sidewalks and bike paths laid, Little League fields developed, big box stores and fast-food drive-throughs added. If there was ever any topsoil here, it’s long since been buried or scraped off and moved elsewhere. What’s left is mostly clay with a scattering of gravel, a substrate that is nearly as impervious to living things as the concrete and macadam pavement nearby.
Still, a few plants manage to take root here. Some, like the crested wheatgrass, brome, and fescue, were planted on purpose to hold the ground in place. Others, like the occasional stem of toadflax and sweetclover, are outlanders, tough enough to shoulder their way into the bare spots where other plants can’t survive. And right next to the curb, a tiny holdover from what once was— a patch of blue grama and buffalograss claiming a square yard among the exotics.
How these natives have survived the decades of abuse is beyond understanding. But here they are, a reminder of the history of this place, a history that has been otherwise erased.
A few years back, I picked up a copy of John C. Fremont’s journals. Captain Fremont set out from St. Louis in the spring of 1842 with a small detachment to explore the route across the plains to South Pass. According to Fremont’s journal, the group spent the night of July 12 about five miles south of what is now this corner. There was no timber to provide firewood, so they cooked over buffalo chips. The next morning, they headed north and crossed “a small creek in which there was water, and where several herds of buffalo were scattered about among the ravines, which always afford good pasturage.”
The bones of Fremont and his men have long since returned to the dust, along with the buffalo that fed them and the Sioux and Cheyenne that called this corner of the plains home. And here at my feet is the grass that supported them all— “good pasturage,” indeed.
For a moment, the roar of the road fades, and there is nothing but the weight of the sun on my shoulders, and the cool, prairie breeze whispers in my ears, just as it did for them. I find myself looking out over the creek, remembering something I never saw. All of them gone now. But the grass remains. Something important there, if I could just grasp it. The blare of a horn. Light’s green. Time to cross back over . . .
FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS, MY WIFE WAS ONE OF THE LONG-SUFFERING PEOPLE WHO WENT OUT on an elementary school playground to enforce the house rules on an unruly mob of first through sixth graders. This time of year was particularly challenging. After a summer of more or less feral recreation, the young kids had to be introduced to the regulations on the playground, and the older kids had to be reminded.
Inevitably, Kath would apprehend a youngster throwing a rock, jumping out of a swing, shoving another kid, or otherwise breaking the rules. When she confronted the wayward child, a variety of alibis were proffered. One of the most popular was, “Well, HE [SHE] was doing it!’ There followed a short lecture on basic ethics: The fact that he [she] is doing it does not excuse your doing it.
Of course, there’s a practical justification for this rule: That rock you threw might hit and hurt somebody, which could easily result in another rock coming back to hit and hurt you. Even if the kid next to you managed to jump out of the swing without injury, that doesn’t mean you can follow suit without breaking an ankle, arm, or other portion of your anatomy. The rules are there to protect you.
There’s also a more philosophical rationale: We should not blindly follow another person’s example, depend on that other person’s judgment. The responsibility for distinguishing right from wrong lies with each individual. This is the foundation of all human morality, even more basic than the golden rule.
And it seems to be a lesson we struggle to master.
In the litany of reasons that have been used to justify the ongoing American failure to grapple with the underlying causes of climate change, one of the most common has been that the United States is responsible for just 13 percent of world CO2 emissions. China is responsible for 24 percent; India and the European Union produce 7 percent each, and setting those nations aside, the rest of the world is spewing half of all the carbon that finds its way to the atmosphere. These statistics clearly demonstrate that, even if the U.S. stopped emitting CO2 altogether, it wouldn’t do much to curb the increase in greenhouse gases.
Or, to put it in terms a seven-year-old could understand: “Well, THEY’RE doing it!”
It’s true that we can’t stop the increase in climate-changing gases by ourselves, but that doesn’t mean that an effort in that direction wouldn’t help the situation. The United States is uniquely positioned to design and test new technology that would reduce our carbon footprint. Breakthroughs in that arena would not only help us but would give the rest of the world the tools it needs to follow suit. It would be nice to think that we would donate new technology to any nation that needed it, but even if we insisted on payment, we would be on the cutting edge of what could easily prove to be the most important market sector on the planet.
A serious American commitment to reducing greenhouse gases would also serve as an example to other nations. At best, it would be a demonstration of techniques that would eliminate greenhouse emissions with a minimum of economic upheaval, but even if the transition proved to be a greater challenge than it appears, we would at least prove that a nationwide commitment is politically possible. Think of it as leadership or as an effort to bring pressure to bear on other major emitters— either way, it would show a way toward a solution to perhaps the most dangerous problem the human species has ever faced.
Those are the practical justifications. There is also the moral justification: We should do everything in our power to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere BECAUSE IT IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO. At this point, it would probably not eliminate the suffering that rising world temperatures will inflict on us, but it would reduce that suffering for ourselves, our children, and grandchildren, for residents of the wealthiest nations and for the majority of humanity that does not enjoy our standard of living. I believe there is power in a commitment of that kind, but even if it persuaded no one else, it would go far toward relieving us of the responsibility for the situation we have created.
It’s easy to profess a high moral standard when it doesn’t cost anything. The test of a moral people is how they respond to a challenge when that response is uncomfortable, even painful. America is unique among nations in its aspiration to a higher moral ground. We’ve risen to the challenge of hard times before— hard times face us again. Will we rise? Or will we point to the failure of others and use it to justify our own? Either way, our choice will be remembered.
GUILT, THE PSYCHOLOGISTS SAY, IS A CORROSIVE EMOTION. SO IS REGRET, THEY SAY. AND I SUPPOSE they’re right. Obsessing over mistakes that have already been made may not be a good recipe for maintaining mental health, let alone finding constructive solutions for intransigent problems. It’s possible that such emotions are best left to old people who have the time and memories to indulge them. That may be why I find myself so often despondent these days— an old man looking over his shoulder at what might have been.
On August 1, The New York Times magazine published an article called “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” It’s a well-researched piece that discusses, in painful detail, how close the United States came to addressing the problem of greenhouse gases in a nonpartisan way in the 1980s. In that essay, the author mentions an earlier report, “The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate,” published in April of 1979. Heart-breaking to read this prescient analysis of the efforts that were made nearly forty years ago to respond to the impending dangers of climate change.
And, as I reviewed the NYT Magazine article, earlier efforts came to mind. The report of the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, published in November of 1965 with an entire chapter titled “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” “By the year 2000,” the report concluded, “the increase in atmospheric CO2 will be close to 25%. This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate, and will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature and other properties of the stratosphere.”
And the ground-breaking technical paper by British investigator, Guy Callendar: “The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature,” which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. In 1938. “It is evident that present temperatures, particularly in the northern hemisphere, are running above the calculated values,” Callendar wrote after extensive analysis of CO2 emissions and their behavior in the atmosphere and oceans. He thought this was good news, since it would allow a northward expansion of farming and delay “the return of the deadly glaciers.” He was certainly right about the glaciers.
And, of course, the seminal paper on climate change by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.
The technical community has been analyzing the effects of carbon dioxide on global climate for more than a century and warning us about the consequences of increasing CO2 emissions for at least fifty. We almost took the warning to heart in the 1980s but drew back, paralyzed by the size of the problem and its solutions.
So we find ourselves at this place, still paralyzed by a problem that grows steadily larger and more overwhelming with solutions that are ever-more draconian. Still beset by men like James Inhofe whose names will be written with Hitler’s and Stalin’s for the commission of crimes against humanity. They will be remembered as long as the written history of our species survives . . . which, sadly enough, may not be that much longer.
Can an understanding of past mistakes help us find our way in the future? Perhaps. Certainly, George Santayana thought it was a necessary first step. But as my hair turns gray, I begin to doubt the human animal’s capacity to learn, even from the most horrendous errors. Too often, the solutions to our problems cost more than we are willing to pay, and so we pass them on to another generation, a legacy of neglect, greed, and shortsightedness that makes me sick with shame.
Opportunities missed, warnings ignored. Guilt. Regret. The burdens of old men . . .
IT MAY BE MY FAVORITE TROUT STREAM, PARTLY BECAUSE, AS SMALL AS IT IS, IT REGULARLY yields browns and cutthroatsover five pounds, and in large measure because it isn’t anything like what most people imagine when they think of trout water. It’s a sun-baked, sand-bottomed creek that winds through the sage thirty miles from the mountains that give it birth, a stream more likely to water pronghorn than elk. And, once upon a time, it was a great place to fish.
The last time I stopped there was about five years ago one sunny afternoon at the beginning of August, on my way to a meeting in Jackson. There was nothing rising, so I tied on a number 18 Copper John and worked my way past the first low bluff, dead-drifting the nymph through the lazy pools in the shade until the indicator stopped unexpectedly. I lifted the rod tip and felt a surge as a long shadow broke away from the bottom and headed upstream. A brown about half as long as my leg. The adrenalin surged, and I wondered whether I’d be able to turn him when the tension on the rod eased and the fish rolled to the surface. I reeled him back carefully, fully expecting an explosion when he saw me. But he lay on his side, gill covers working, while I got the hemostats on the nymph and twisted it free as he floated at my feet. He lay there for a long five seconds, exhausted by a fight that would have shamed a six-inch cutthroat, then swam slowly away.
Strange, I thought, as I watched him go. Then I put my hand back in the water. I didn’t have a thermometer, but it quickly became apparent that I could take a comfortable bath in the pool. I’d never worried about water temperature in that stream before. I’ve worried about it ever since. It’s been five years since I’ve fished that creek.
That’s one of the ways climate change has touched me, but by no means the only way. These days, I often wait until January for the first northern mallards to arrive on my favorite stretch of river in southeastern Wyoming— once upon a time, I could expect them reliably by Thanksgiving. Three out of the last four years, I’ve closed the pheasant season on the High Plains hunting in my shirtsleeves. Shirtsleeves in western Nebraska on the last day of January. While a mild winter may augur well for pheasant survival, the droughts and violent weather in the springs and summers over the last five years have taken a toll on hens and their chicks. The net result has been fewer roosters in the fall.
It’s been said that we should simply adapt to changing climate, and I’ve followed that advice. I’ve given up fishing my favorite trout stream. I’ve learned to live with one or maybe two good mallard hunts in the last week of the season in place of the two months of waterfowling I once enjoyed. I carry plenty of water for my Brittany when we’re hunting the uplands, and I’ve gotten used to the idea that I’ll probably walk fifteen miles before he points that third rooster. I’m adapting. I have no choice.
And I imagine the folks in Houston and Miami and Puerto Rico are learning to adapt as well. The insurance adjusters estimate that this fall’s hurricanes did around $200 billion in damage in the United States alone. The storms also claimed the lives of 217 people.
Forest fires from Montana to Washington burned 8.4 million acres, along with several hundred homes. Another $2 billion. The fires in California: another $180 billion, forty-four more dead, and counting. The drought in the Dakotas and Montana: $2.5 billion. That hailstorm nobody outside of the southern Great Plains heard about last May: $2.2 billion.
The Kanorado, Kansas, grain elevator during an April dust storm
Major bouts of severe weather in the United States alone cost us $387 billion in 2017 and something like 283 lives. That’s a lot of adapting. And, while it can be argued that there is no incontrovertible proof that these weather events were caused or made worse by the climate change we’ve created, nearly any expert will tell you that they are exactly what he expects as the planet gets warmer.
The trouble with simply adapting is that it won’t solve the underlying problem or even stop it from getting worse. The physics are straightforward: Increase the amount of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere, and you will trap more solar energy in the air, water, and landmass of the earth.
Purists insist that this process shouldn’t be called “global warming” because the effect of that increasing solar energy varies, depending on locale and time of year. It may mean reduced snowpack in some areas, increased rainfall in others. It may mean more intense blizzards during the winter, more intense thunderstorms in the summer. It may mean more fire or more flood.
Whatever you want to call it, it’s costing us a lot already, and it will keep costing us more and more until we eliminate the root cause. The climate change conversation is nearly always couched in the future tense. That’s appropriate— we need to worry about the long-term effects, some of which are already inevitable. But climate change is affecting our lives today. Right now. Hardly a week goes by without another bit of proof, another penalty to be paid. I hope that, sometime soon, we’ll move beyond the unavoidable process of adapting to climate change and get down to the hard and unavoidable task of dealing with it. The hour is late, and the stakes could not be higher.
Aldo Leopold (right) and his last graduate student, Robert McCabe in the field during McCabe’s research.
In 2014, I was invited to give the keynote address for the annual meeting of the Mountain and Plains Chapter of The Wildlife Society, the organization of professional wildlife biologists. The situation on the conservation front was challenging then; it may be even more challenging now. Here are my remarks:
THE WORD “PROFESSIONAL” HAS BEENSADLY COMPROMISED in recent decades. These days, it’s generally taken to describe someone who does what he does for money. Webster’s offers a definition I find more appropriate: “characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession.” In some lines of work, this “conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession” begins with an oath. Medical doctors still swear to uphold the Hippocratic creed; attorneys take an oath to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the states in which they practice.
Wildlife professionals aren’t required to take an oath before they begin their practice, but I think we all agree that there is a code in our profession. The Wildlife Society has written some of it down in the organization’s code of ethics, which requires its members, among other things:
To use sound biological, physical, and social science information in management decisions;
To promote understanding of, and appreciation for, values of wildlife and their habitats;
And to uphold the dignity and integrity of the wildlife profession.
Like so many ethical matters, these precepts are relatively easy to set down in high-flown prose. They’re a lot harder to live by. In the typical Hollywood film or best-selling paperback, the approach of an ethical dilemma is foreshadowed in not-so-subtle dialogue; the moment of truth is announced with a fully orchestrated John Williams fanfare, and Bruce Willis or Mark Wahlberg or Jason Statham emerges victorious at the end, bloodied but unbowed, to the applause of an appreciative crowd, on-screen and off.
In the real world, none of that happens. Ethical dilemmas sneak up on us, camouflaged in appeals for compromise and heartfelt tales of economic hardship. The pivotal moment in the debate is generally buried in months of committee meetings, hearings, and white papers, and the professional who stands up on the side of sound information and transcendent values is as often vilified as praised.
In spite of those harsh realities, the wildlife profession has a proud history of standing up, a history that’s worth remembering when really troubling ethical questions arise. Here are three examples:
Olaus Murie and the campaign to eradicate predators
Olaus and Mardy Murie in the backcountry of the Tetons.
Olaus Murie was born in the spring of 1889 to Norwegian immigrants in Moorhead, Minnesota, a railroad town on the eastern edge of the northern prairie. His boyhood was tough by modern standards— from time to time, he boarded out to work on local farms, cut wood for money, and delivered milk to help support the family, but he also found time to indulge his passion for the outdoors in the prairies and timber along the Red River.
After he worked his way through Fargo State College and Pacific University, Murie went to work as a game warden in Oregon until he got the chance to join an expedition to Hudson’s Bay headed by an ornithologist from the Carnegie Institute in 1914. When the other members of the expedition headed home that fall, Murie stayed in the North without wages to continue collecting specimens over the winter. He learned the art of driving a dog team and picked up a scrap of the Inuit language in the process. He went south the following summer but returned to northern Quebec two years later for a second collecting expedition.
In 1920, he hired on with the Bureau of Biological Survey, forerunner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to study the caribou herds in Alaska and the Yukon. He spent the next eight years in Alaska, doing wildlife research the old-fashioned way by living, almost year-round, with his subjects. He wrote the first major technical report on the caribou in the region before his bosses re-assigned him to Jackson Hole, where concerns had been raised about the health of the local elk herd.
Murie’s rise as a researcher with the Biological Survey came at a time when the agency had taken on a huge new function. The survey began in 1885 as the Section of Economic Ornithology in the Department of Agriculture. The unit owed its existence to the influence of the American Ornithologists Union, whose conservation committee had pressed the government to collect information on the food habits of birds in order to convince farmers that most birds didn’t eat crops but helped control the insects that did. With that background, the new unit spent more time on research than it did on pest control.
That began to change in the early 1900s as Congress pressed the agency for more tangible results. The leaders began research on using poisons against insects and issued publications on trapping and poisoning methods to control predators that were taking livestock. In 1915, the division, rechristened as the Bureau of Biological Survey, started its own trapping and poisoning program, with the stated intent of “destroying wolves, coyotes, and other predatory animals.”
In 1921, the year after Murie hired on with the bureau, federal trappers reported taking more than 24,000 coyotes, 694 wolves, and 129 mountain lions. It was estimated that another 25,000 to 30,000 coyotes died of the lingering effects of strychnine and were not recovered.
Congress was overjoyed. In 1923, the appropriation for predator control was more than $400,000, and bureau trappers claimed a scalp count of 25,000 coyotes, 599 wolves, and 158 lions. “In the campaign which has been waged for the destruction of timber wolves,” bureau chief E.W. Nelson reported, “most gratifying results have been obtained.” The kill on coyotes continued to rise— 34,000 in 1924, 37,000 in 1925— while the count on gray wolves dwindled— 202 in 1926, 47 in 1927.
In the 1920s, there weren’t many Americans who advocated complete protection of wolves and coyotes, but there were researchers in the scientific community who were concerned about what seemed to be a program to eliminate predators rather than controlling them around livestock. Dr. Lee Dice at the University of Michigan was one of the first to raise his voice against government-funded eradication efforts.
“I do not advocate that predatory mammals be encouraged nor permitted to breed everywhere without restriction,” he wrote in 1924, “but I am sure that the eradication of any species, predatory or not, in any faunal district, is a serious loss to science.”
Murie had observed wolves hunting caribou in Alaska and Canada and was convinced that the packs had little effect on the herds, regardless of popular sentiment among settlers who had recently come into that country. As part of his work in Jackson Hole, he had started a detailed analysis of coyote food habits to find out whether coyotes were taking an important toll on local elk. Again, he concluded that coyotes had little effect on elk.
In the spring of 1929, he wrote a five-page memo to the chief of his bureau, Paul Redington, considering the tone that the predator control program had developed:
“In the predatory animal division . . . there is constant effort to produce hatred. . . . It seems entirely unnecessary and undesirable to kill offending creatures in a spirit of hatred, call them “murderers,” “killers,” “vermin” in order to justify our actions. . . . Glaring posters, portraying bloody, disagreeable scenes, urging some one to kill, are working against the efforts of our other selves, who are advocating conservation, appreciation of wild life.”
He pointed out that the American attitude toward predators was changing: “Many people, as you know, are advocating a certain balance between predatory species and the game, merely that the predatory animals may have some small place in our fauna. I certainly think this is a reasonable request, especially where legitimate pursuits are not interfered with.”
Murie was criticizing a program that, in 1929 alone, attracted $559,000 in Congressional appropriations and matching funds of $1.8 million from states and livestock groups. I can find no record of Chief Redington’s reaction to the memo, but as a thirty-six-year denizen in the bowels of two state wildlife bureaucracies, I think I can guess what it was.
By 1931, Murie had collected more than 700 scat samples from coyotes in the Jackson country, along with sixty-four stomachs. With help from his brother Adolph, then at the University of Michigan, he analyzed these samples and prepared a manuscript to report the results. He finished his final draft during the winter of 1931-32 and circulated it to officials in the bureau as well as to outside experts like Dr. Joseph Grinnell, a mammalogist at the University of California-Berkeley.
The paper showed conclusively that coyotes were hardly eating elk or livestock— the overwhelming majority of their diet was voles and pocket gophers. Murie followed where the data led.
“Of the long list of items in the coyote’s year-long diet in the Jackson Hole country, 70.29 percent may be credited to the animal as indicating economically beneficial feeding habits; 18.22 percent may be classed as neutral, and only 11.49 percent may be charged against the coyote,” he concluded. “To sum up, the fur value of the coyote, the potential value of its beneficial habits, the fact that the animal is intrinsically interesting and has a scientific value, however much derided, can be given considerable weight. After all, the wildlife question must resolve itself into sharing the values of the various species among the complex group of participants in the out-of-door and wilderness wealth, with fairness to all groups. Under such considerations, with possible local exceptions, the coyote deserves to remain a part of the Jackson Hole fauna, with a minimum of control, and that only in the case of unusual local situations.”
Joseph Grinnell and other academics thought Murie’s research was sound and his conclusions, valid, but the reviewers at the bureau were not pleased. At least one official complained that Murie was not a part of the food habits research unit and, thus, should not be collecting scat samples, even to find out whether coyotes were eating elk. Another reviewer wrote that “Mr. Murie seems to favor the predator on every occasion possible.” The manuscript disappeared into the bureau’s central office and was not published until October 1935.
When the report finally appeared, the editor of Audubon’s Bird Lore, predecessor of Audubon magazine, invited Murie to write a popular article on his findings. When the bureau’s chief of wildlife research found out about the project, he wrote the editor: “In view of the comparatively limited experience that Mr. Murie has had with the coyote and the limitation in his study of the food habits and economic relationships of the coyote . . . the Bureau is not warranted in approving for publication at this time the article as submitted by Mr. Murie.”
Murie was also denied permission to present his findings at a technical conference that year.
After twenty-five years with the bureau, Murie resigned in 1945 to become the executive director of the Wilderness Society, his profound differences with the bureau’s leadership never resolved. Murie never offered a pubic explanation for his early departure, but it’s reasonable to believe that he left, at least partly, because of the abiding conflict with his administrators. Shortly after he resigned, he wrote to Clarence Cottam, who was serving at the time as associate director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, as the Biological Survey had come to be known.
“I know stockmen who are much more tolerant of coyotes that our Service is. I know many hunters who are much more tolerant. I know numerous people who would like to have a tolerant world, a world in which wild creatures may have a share of its products. Many people like to think of the beneficial side, the inspirational and scientific values, of creatures like the coyote, as well as the destructive side. This is the opposite of our official position.”
Olaus Murie. Professional.
Aldo Leopold and the deer wars
Aldo Leopold during his tenure as the first professor of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin.
About the time Murie was deciding to part ways with the Fish and Wildlife Service, another confrontation over wildlife management flared up in Wisconsin with Aldo Leopold at its center. A contemporary of Murie’s, Leopold grew up in more comfortable circumstances in Dubuque, Iowa, hunting and fishing along the Mississippi with his father and brothers. His parents could afford to send him to prep school in New Jersey, and when the time came for college, Aldo chose Yale, primarily because of its newly established school of forestry, the brainchild of Gifford Pinchot.
At the time, Pinchot was presiding over the nascent U.S. Forest Service, and the Yale School of Forestry served as an academy to prepare young foresters for careers in his outfit. Pinchot laid heavy emphasis on the idea of “use” in the term “wise use.” His utilitarian approach to resource management put him at odds with men like John Muir, who emphasized the spiritual importance of wild places, but it fit well with political realities of the age.
Young Aldo finished at Yale in 1909 and immediately accepted an appointment on the Carson National Forest in New Mexico. His early positions on game management reflected his training and the prevailing attitude of the time. In 1915, he called for more appropriations to support the Bureau of Biological Survey in “the excellent work they have begun,” and as late as 1920, he wrote: “It is going to take patience and money to catch the last wolf or lion in New Mexico. But the last one must be caught before the job can be called fully successful.”
Hard to believe that, twenty years later, the same man could mourn the loss of the “fierce green fire” in a dying wolf’s eyes and write: “I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” Like Murie, Leopold had the strength of character to re-examine his positions on key issues when the facts demanded it, the strength to change his mind.
Of the contentious issues Leopold addressed— the place predators deserved on the landscape, the importance of wilderness, the extension of the human ethical code to the rest of the natural world— none was as controversial or exposed him to such intense attacks as his position on deer management in Wisconsin.
Leopold had left the Forest Service for a job surveying game populations in the upper Midwest, a project that led to Leopold’s book, Game Management, and an appointment as the world’s first professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin in 1933.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the forests in the northern and central part of Wisconsin began to recover from two generations of clear-cutting, and the young stands of shrubs and deciduous trees offered perfect food and cover for white-tailed deer. The combination of excellent habitat and stringent legal protection allowed the state’s herd to explode. As the second growth aged, reports of starving deer in the north country began to trickle in through the early 1930s. For several years, Leopold pressed the state’s conservation department to research the problem, but the department resisted until 1940, when a change in leadership and increasing mortality among deer finally resulted in a technical inquiry into the cause, which turned out to be a classic case of overbrowsing. In 1942, Leopold was appointed to a nine-member Citizen’s Deer Committee, charged with making an independent assessment of the deer situation.
Leopold had seen what too many deer could do to themselves and their habitat. He had been with the Forest Service in the Southwest at the beginning of the Kaibab debacle; he had done a detailed study of deer for hunt clubs in northern Michigan; he had watched with great interest as similar problems developed in Pennsylvania, and he had toured the intensively managed forests of Germany, dark stands of mature timber with no understory— and precious few deer.
In May, 1943, he reported the findings of his committee to the state’s conservation organization and recommended an antlerless-only deer season for the fall. He also suggested that the bounty on wolves be lifted and that artificial feeding efforts be curtailed. The cure for whitetails was straightforward in his mind— it was the management of people, not deer, that most concerned him.
“There is no doubt in our minds,” he wrote in his final report, “that the prevailing failure of most states to handle deer irruptions decisively and wisely is [due to the fact] that our educational system does not teach citizens how animals and plants live together in a competitive-cooperative system.”
He was about to find out how right he was.
As the deer season ended that year, opponents labeled it “the Crime of ’43.” In 1944, a group of incensed deer hunters formed the Save Wisconsin Deer Committee and began publishing a monthly newspaper. In the first issue, the committee identified the man they held responsible for the new management policy: “The infamous and bloody 1943 deer slaughter was sponsored by one of the commission members, Mr. Aldo Leopold, who admitted in writing that the figures he used were PURE GUESSWORK. The commission accepted his report on this basis. Imagine our fine deer herd shot to pieces by a man who rates himself a PROFESSOR and uses a GUESS instead of facts.” Another irate hunter wrote: “ Perhaps, the big mistake that has been made is the fact that we do not have an open season on experts.”
Leopold took this sort of public thrashing until his death in 1948 and never responded directly, preferring to refine and restate the case for antlerless deer seasons as a way of maintaining both deer and deer habitat, an approach that is universally accepted in the technical community today even though it’s still controversial in some sectors of the public, as many people in this room know all too well.
Aldo Leopold. Professional.
Rachel Carson and persistent pesticides
Rachel Carson in 1944 toward the end of her career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Not long after Leopold’s untimely death, another biologist made national headlines. She held a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University and had worked her way up to a position as chief editor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service after a sixteen-year career translating the technical reports from the Service’s biologists and managers into plain English. Her name was Rachel Carson.
Widely respected for her skill as a writer, Carson had published one book, Under the Sea Wind, along with many popular articles on marine biology for major magazines, but she’d never made enough with her words to depend on them for a full-time living.
Until The Sea Around Us. Published in 1952, her book on life in the ocean rose almost immediately to second place on the New York Times’ best-seller list. Its success made her an instant celebrity and allowed her to take early retirement from federal service. The public looked to her for more charming, insightful words on the marvels of nature. What they got was Silent Spring.
I think most of us in this line of work think of Silent Spring as one of the most important environmental books of all time and rate Rachel Carson as one of the most influential environmentalists of the last century, all of which is true enough.
As we look back on the warm glow of her fame fifty years after Silent Spring first hit the streets, it’s easy to forget what the book cost its author.
Carson first became concerned about the side effects of the wide use of DDT in 1945, as researchers at the Patuxent Research Center began to study its effects on waterfowl and other birds as well as beneficial insects. She wasn’t against the use of pesticides entirely, but she was worried about their effects when they were used indiscriminately at a landscape scale. At the time, she couldn’t interest an editor in the subject, which was probably just as well, since anything she might have written at the time would have been scrutinized by federal officials before it could be published.
In 1957, on her own and with a national best-seller to her credit, Carson turned her attention back to the growing scientific literature on the effects of DDT and other pesticides. She began serious work on the subject the next year, while also looking after her terminally ill mother and an obstreperous grand nephew she had adopted after his mother’s death. The analysis of the technical literature and unpublished research on the effects of pesticides was a daunting task, both in terms of the sheer volume of emerging information and its technical complexity.
It was also politically sensitive. As the USDA’s Agriculture Research Service began to recognize Carson’s intentions, administrators tried to block access to information she wanted from the agency. She eventually got what she needed from people inside ARS who shared her concerns and leaked information.
Two years into the research and writing, she was diagnosed with an ulcer, followed by a bout of pneumonia and then, in the spring of 1960, breast cancer. She kept writing, often while in bed recovering from surgery, radiation therapy, and associated infections.
Even before the book was finished, friends warned Carson that she was courting controversy. Clarence Cottam, who had recently retired as director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, wrote to her in 1961: “I am certain you are rendering a tremendous public service; yet, I want to warn you that I am convinced you are going to be subjected to ridicule and condemnation by a few. Facts will not stand in the way of some confirmed pest control workers and those who are receiving substantial subsidies from pesticides manufacturers.”
Silent Spring was published on September 27, 1962, and the reaction from the chemical industry was immediate and intense. One company threatened legal action. Industry representatives and lobbyists arranged for an avalanche of complaints to the publisher, many of them anonymous. A biochemist with American Cyanamid wrote that “if man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” He accused her of being “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.” Her academic credentials were denigrated; her motives were questioned; her character was assaulted. Former secretary of agriculture Ezra Taft Benson is said to have written a letter on Carson’s book to Dwight Eisenhower, wondering “why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics.” He went on to speculate that she was “probably a Communist.”
Time magazine thought that “her emotional and inaccurate outburst in Silent Spring may do harm by alarming the nontechnical public, while doing no good for the things that she loves.” The National Agricultural Chemicals Association spent more than $250,000 attacking assertions in the book. Some members of the academic community were severely critical while others expressed tepid support.
It was a firestorm of corporate and bureaucratic outrage, and it came at a time when Carson was struggling with weakness and angina caused by repeated radiation treatments. In spite of her deteriorating health, she accepted several invitations to speak on the issue of pesticides, defending her work and conclusions quietly, but with passion and technical precision. In the spring of 1963, she was interviewed for an hour-long installment of CBS Reports, titled “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson,” and in May, she gave testimony on pesticides before two committees in the U.S. Senate.
The cancer had metastasized into her bones and liver. By fall, she could barely walk, and as the new year dawned, she came down with a severe respiratory virus. On April 14, 1964, with the debate she had started still galvanizing the nation, she died. As for Silent Spring— before she died, she said that “it would be unrealistic to believe one book could bring about a change. But now I can believe I have at least helped a little.”
Rachel Carson. Professional.
The upshot
Three exceptional people but by no means the only exceptional people in this field. Over the years, I’ve known at least four who gave their lives in the line of duty and two others who came dangerously close. I’ve also known a number who’ve stood up when the standing was hard:
The group of biologists with the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks who stopped the proposal to dam the Yellowstone River. They won that fight, and after everyone else had declared victory and gone home, they were re-assigned and eventually eased out of the department. The Yellowstone remains the only major undammed, free-flowing river in the contiguous forty-eight states as a result of their work and sacrifice.
In 2003, A Wyoming Game and Fish biologist spoke at the North American Interagency Wolf Conference in Pray, Montana. The Wyoming legislature had just passed a wolf management law that ignored the Game and Fish Department’s recommendation that wolves be classified as trophy animals across the state. This biologist expressed the view that the legislature’s plan probably didn’t provide enough habitat to maintain a viable wolf population, which would land the wolves right back on the federal list of endangered species. He had the data to back up his position, but that didn’t matter much to Wyoming politicians. He was summarily placed on administrative leave, pending a review of his comments. It took an outcry from professional organizations and biologists across the region to return him to duty.
In 1983, that same biologist first pointed out the impacts a fence on Red Rim in the southern Wyoming desert would have on antelope and other big game. The fence was built by a wealthy Texan, who argued that the department was mismanaging the antelope. The biologist told reporters, “I’m morally responsible to those animals. It’d be tougher than hell for me to sit back and watch them die.” The landowner lawyered up and did his best to woo the state’s politicians to his side, but in the end, the fence came down.
In the 1990s, several biologists were swept up in the deer wars in southwestern Wyoming as local herds were devastated by almost a decade of drought. Often undercut by their own leadership, these men continued to emphasize the relationship between deer and forage, pointing out again and again that you can’t have any more deer than the habitat will support. I think they laid the groundwork for the calmer, more productive conversations that characterize deer management in the state today.
Then there were the confrontations over mined land reclamation, instream flow, and John Dorrance’s exotic game farm, the call for an end to sage grouse hunting.
There’s no doubt that an employee owes a certain degree of loyalty to his employer. In Wyoming, it’s popular to say that we should always “ride for the brand.” But there are other loyalties to be considered. The Wildlife Society’s code of ethics states that its members should “recognize the wildlife professional’s prime responsibility to the public interest, conservation of the wildlife resource, and the environment.”
Our “prime responsibility.”
I can’t say how far that responsibility should carry any professional. These are dangerous times in conservation— the public constituencies that once supported enlightened wildlife management are increasingly divided and often caught up in their own self-centered demands, which makes it harder for a biologist to speak truth to power. But, as hard as it may be, it is still the most important part of the biologist’s job.
It’s often said that, as professionals, we need to pick our battles, and I agree with that, since it suggests that there are some battles worth fighting. And I would go further: There are some battles worth fighting, even if there’s a chance we’ll lose. Sometimes, a loss prepares the way for a victory. A classic example was the struggle to stop the Glen Canyon dam on the Colorado River. Conservationists eventually lost that fight, but the high-profile public debate on the issue changed the American view on dams and headed off another dam proposal that would have flooded the lower part of the Grand Canyon.
Professional wildlifers have worked miracles across America and here in the mountains and plains, often at great personal sacrifice. You are the bearers of that proud tradition. It can be a heavy load, but one well worth carrying. I’ve always liked Teddy Roosevelt’s view of the matter. “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer,” he told a crowd in 1903, “is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” You have that chance. Make the most of it.
