the land ethic

I SAW THE YELLOW FLANK AND THE BRANCHED ANTLERS AS HE  stepped through a thin place in the second-growth timber, maybe seventy yards away. He was gone before I could even slip the rifle sling off my shoulder, let alone shoot, but the wind was in my favor, so I went to the right as fast as I could without making too much noise, stepping rock to rock to avoid the crunch of the frost in the gravel, watching the wall of second-growth lodgepole and limber pine for another break. The seconds ticked by as I made haste slowly, already losing hope. Then, a narrow lane down the slope, and he was there, on the other end, fifty yards away, stock-still and quartering my way, staring right at me, trying to figure out exactly what had made the motion he had caught out of the corner of his eye. Before he ran.

I figured I had about three seconds before he decided to evacuate. For many years, I struggled with this kind of quick-draw confrontation— get the rifle to the shoulder quickly but don’t spook the animal, find him in the scope, decide to make that irrevocable commitment, and squeeze the trigger, all before he jumps. It’s not the kind of shooting they teach at the rifle range, more like taking a pheasant with a shotgun. I held on the near shoulder, and at the sound of the shot, he spun and disappeared.

I walked down to the spot. A splash of red, another, and another. Every jump he took spilled bright lung blood. I looked out fifty yards ahead and saw a branch move— no, not a branch, an antler beam just above the ground. As I arrived, I heard him take his last breath.

There was, in that moment, the wind-sheer of emotion that always takes my breath away, even after fifty years in the field. Relief that the shot was well taken and the animal hadn’t suffered, that I’d found him without difficulty. A sudden release from the discipline big game hunting requires, the day-after-day commitment, physical and mental, the white-hot focus on the moment. Sorrow at his dying and the growing sense that someday, not all that far off, I would take that last breath myself. Regret. Elation. And, as I took out the knives, gratitude for this food, which will feed my family over the next year.

For most of the last thirty years, our household has lived on a steady diet of wild meat— a fair amount of small game, some antelope, some deer, but mostly elk. In spite of that, I’m not sure I’d call what I do subsistence hunting. If the elk gods don’t smile, we can afford supermarket burger, although the price is breathtaking and the process that brings the meat to market turns my stomach. We infinitely prefer hormone- and antibiotic-free, locally grown meat, so big game hunting at my house isn’t just a pastime; it’s something I do for reasons of health and philosophy.

Like many of the really important matters in life, it’s taken me many years to begin to understand my relationship as a hunter with the elk I pursue, and as the light has dawned, I’ve come to recognize a tension between the practical demands of subsistence and the ideal of sport.

It’s all well and good to hunt for the challenge, the experience, the exercise, the fresh air, but if you really want the meat, coming home with nothing in the pickup is a serious matter. Hiking the elk timber ten or fifteen miles a day gives a hunter plenty of time for thought, and as the hours go by with no elk in evidence, such thinking inevitably turns to shortcuts. How to get the easy elk. The sure elk.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It may lead to increased effort or better planning, an oath to get into better physical shape next year, a more careful study of the map or even of elk themselves, but it can also lead to darker behavior that violates the ethical canons of hunting and/or the law.

These cross-currents of need and motive are nothing new—they’ve probably been a part of hunting for as long as hunters have gone looking for meat. For that reason, it’s instructive to consider the attitudes of true subsistence hunters toward their quarry.

There’s a tendency to assume that all hunter-gatherers were paragons of sporting virtue in their relationship with game. Reports from observers who had a chance to witness the day-to-day activities among true hunter-gatherer cultures cast significant doubt on that notion. Many native American hunters succumbed to the siren song of the market as it established a high value in trade goods for game and wild fur, and the resulting pressure began to undermine populations of big game and furbearers well before Europeans took over the slaughter.

Even in pre-Columbian America, the natives used techniques for taking game most modern hunters would find objectionable. Deer and moose were pursued in deep water by canoe and in deep, crusted snow by snowshoe; moose were snared; herds of buffalo were driven over cliffs; rabbits and other small game were driven into nets. The idea of “fair chase” took on a different meaning when a family’s next meal depended on success, not just a sporting effort.

The sustainability of the harvest was built into the primitive hunting-gathering culture. After a particularly successful drive, meat and hides were undoubtedly wasted, but whenever an animal was taken, it was used as completely as human ingenuity and the technology of the time allowed, simply because the group needed the food and fiber. Harvest was limited by the effectiveness of hunting technique and weaponry, and when the game was depleted in a given area, the groups of people in that area moved on. Human populations were severely limited by their tools and regional scarcity of game, which, in turn, limited the impact of their harvest.

This isn’t to say that Paleolithic hunters had no ethical scruples when it came to the chase. Whatever their differences, hunting societies from the pole to the tropics shared one thing— a respect, even reverence, for their prey. Anyone who has spent time in pursuit of wild animals can understand the origins of this attitude. Hunting is never predictable. Sometimes, game seems to be everywhere; other times, it seems to have disappeared for no apparent reason. It’s easy for any hunter to get superstitious about such things, even when he’s carrying a state-of-the-art firearm and has a dependable supply of beans waiting back at camp.

For the men who hunted with bows and atlatls, such superstitions deepened into religion. We can see the ghosts of their rituals in the images left to us by ancient hunters on the walls of the caves at Chauvet and Lascaux. In the hunting cultures that survived into the modern era, there was a common theme of ritual designed to demonstrate the hunter’s respect for the animal that has died and, often, gratitude to the god or gods who provided that animal.

The Inuit of northern Canada have hunted for millennia in one of the harshest environments on earth. Their experience with animals in that hostile place has led them to believe that all living things have spirits.

“The great peril of our existence,” one Inuit elder has said, “lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls.”

For the Inuit and all other subsistence hunters, the failure to propitiate the spirit of an animal that had been killed put the guilty hunter and his entire band at risk of retribution.

The Canadian biologist C.H.D. Clark spent much of his career working in and around the Thelon Game Sanctuary in what is now Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, a corner of the globe that, even today, is about as far from civilization as it’s possible to get.

In the late 1930s, Clark met an old man in one of the local villages. The man had been blind most of his life, and the condition of his eyes showed that he’d lost his sight because of injury, not infection or illness. After Clark had known the local people for several years, he asked one of the elders what had happened. He was told that, when the man was young, he had repeatedly shown a complete lack of respect for the caribou he was killing. Afraid of the spiritual consequences of this irreverence, the villagers put out his eyes.

Whether an animal has a spirit is something each hunter must decide for himself. If the followers of the ancient customs of hunting were right, then a hunter who fails to show gratitude for his quarry may well suffer the practical consequences of having given offense. It may be a long time before another animal comes his way. And there may be other penalties for such failures as well, curses that follow a hunter from this life into eternity.

Of course, in this enlightened age, most people take a different view. For all too many modern folk, animals are soulless beings, put here solely for our sustenance and subject to our dominion. I don’t subscribe to that view myself, but even if it’s true, there are moral ramifications that follow the taking of a life. How an animal dies may, in fact, mean very little to the victim. But it means a great deal to the person doing the killing. Even if there is no one else to witness that final moment, the hunter has to reckon with it himself.

At the very least, we should give the quarry a quick death with as little suffering as possible. Beyond that, we should seek to leave the animal its dignity and beauty, even in death. We should do whatever we can to kill sustainably, leaving enough animals to maintain the population and enough wild country to support them.

Perhaps most of all, we should always kill with respect. A subsistence hunter may see that fact even more clearly than the hunter who pursues game only for sport. Man and animal, hunter and prey are swept along together in the great natural processes of the planet, the individuals no more than the water through which the wave passes. Killing is a part of life, something no living thing can avoid. The test the hunter faces is not whether he kills but how.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FOR THE COMMON MAN. THAT’S WHAT THOMAS JEFFERSON THOUGHT WHEN he forged the deal that made the 800,000 square miles of Louisiana Territory the property of the United States. “The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on,” he wrote to James Madison in 1785. “The small landowners are the most precious part of a state.”[i]

But even before the Americans bought Louisiana from the French, before the French extorted it from the Spanish, possibly even before the French gave it to the Spanish to keep it out of British hands in 1762, that dream of an agrarian society of small landholders in the West, each independent and beholden to no one but himself, had faded into the distance like the rainbow after a thunderstorm.

It may never have been possible. The geography of the land beyond the Missouri was daunting: canyons a mile deep, mountains two miles high; rivers that roared in the spring, then sank into the sand for the summer. Too much sun, too much sky, and always the wind, punishing the land and the life upon it. Until the arrival of the horse, there were large expanses that not even the Indians could endure. Jefferson’s vision of a rural utopia needed rich soil and enough rain to thrive; it found neither in the interior West.

But if there was ever a time when a man could travel to the Shining Mountains beyond the Missouri and live unfettered by the demands of civilization, it had long since passed by the time Lewis and Clark made their way to the Pacific. The American ideal, the democratic association of free men on free land, stalled in the western wilderness. It took a huge bank account and a focused mission to survive, let alone prosper, on these vast, untamed landscapes, which is why the West was opened, not by a few intrepid settlers, yearning to breathe free, but by a succession of well-funded companies that explored and exploited the northern and western frontiers and eventually stripped them of anything that could be converted to profit.

These days, we celebrate the free trapper as the apotheosis of American liberty. We celebrate a myth. We choose to ignore the far-flung corporate conglomerates that forced their way into the heart of the continent: the Hudson’s Bay Company, incorporated in 1670[ii] and a major force in the trade for more than two centuries afterward; the North West Company, established in 1779[iii] to challenge the Hudson’s Bay traders in the wilderness beyond Lake Athabaska; the Missouri Fur Company from St. Louis, led by Manuel Lisa and backed by the powerful Chouteau family;[iv] William Ashley’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company;[v] and the powerful American and Pacific fur companies, formed and backed by the New York entrepreneur John Jacob Astor.[vi]

Men like John Coulter, Jedediah Smith, and Jim Bridger led the fur brigades, but men like Astor made them possible. When Astor incorporated the American Fur Company in the spring of 1808, he invested a million dollars in the firm. Soon thereafter, he established the Pacific Fur Company to exploit the fur trade between the Columbia River and the Far East,[vii] investing another $400,000 in that plan, which included the purchase of a new ship.[viii] Lisa’s Missouri Fur Company started with an investment of $40,000.[ix] It took money to form the fur brigades, provide their equipment and food, furnish trade goods, and transport furs to the markets in Europe. The fur trade was big business.

It was cutthroat business, too. The contest between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company lasted almost forty years before the opponents decided that a merger was better business than the effort to annihilate each other. When the Hudson’s Bay Company found out that American fur traders were spilling over the Continental Divide to compete for the trade, the directors of the English company adopted a scorched-earth policy, doing their best to wipe out the beaver and other furbearers south of the Columbia River so that the Americans would have nothing to trap.[x]

The competition between the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, Astor’s American Fur Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company is the stuff of legend. At times, it may even have transcended harassment and price gouging. Historian John Ewers has described the Hudson’s Bay Company posts along the Saskatchewan River in prairie Canada as “the armories from which Blackfoot warriors obtained their firearms and ammunition.”[xi] It’s likely that British trade guns, powder, and lead claimed the lives of many American trappers.

Smaller operators like Nathaniel Wyeth’s group and Benjamin Bonneville’s brigade were forced out of the trade by the big companies, who had the wherewithal to out-bid the smaller firms, even if it meant taking a loss for the year. It’s been said that the War of 1812, often explained as an American reaction to British interference on the high seas, was at least partly a fight to decide whether American or British companies would have the upper hand in the western fur trade.[xii] The struggle for supremacy among the various factions in the Rockies ebbed and flowed across the decades, but ultimately, another trend decided the future of the industry itself.

The unrelenting pressure on furbearing animals, especially the beaver, had a predictable effect. As early as 1826, naturalist John D. Godman predicted that the beaver was headed for extinction. “A few individuals may, for a time, elude the immediate violence of persecution,” he wrote, but the species would eventually be lost “in the fathomless gulf of avarice.”[xiii] In 1834, the American Journal of Science observed that “the animals are slowly decreasing, from the persevering efforts and the indiscriminate slaughter. . . . They recede before the tide of civilization.”[xiv]

With beaver scarce as timber in the sage, the European market turned to other fibers for the manufacture of hats, and the great beaver hunt in the Rockies came to an end. The last mountain man rendezvous was held on the Green River in 1840, and by all reports, it was little more than a shadow of the great summer gatherings of the early 1830s. As “Doc” Newell, one of the veterans of the fur trade remarked of the affair, “Mr Drips Feab & Bridger from St Louis with goods but times was certainly hard . . . no beaver and everything dull.”[xv]

So ended the first great wave of development on the public domain in the American West. The beaver, whose pelts had built an empire, had been hunted to the brink of extinction. The men who had set the traps were gone, a large proportion of them the victims of violent deaths, the rest fading away on hard-scrabble farms in Missouri or Ohio or Oregon as they mourned the passing of a life they loved and had spent their best years to destroy. The profit from thirty years of toil and danger was in New York and London, in the vaults of the big companies that had run the business. It was a pattern that would become all too familiar over the next century.

The beaver trade died just as American enthusiasm for the elysian fields of Oregon began to take hold. For more than a generation, a handful of land speculators and eastern politicians had sung the praises of the West Coast, and by 1841, the public relations campaign had convinced a handful of restless settlers to emigrate. In 1846, the United States finally settled the long-standing border dispute with Britain, and the boundary between the two nations was set on the 49^th parallel. At the same time, the U.S. took almost half of Mexico by force, adding another 500,000 square miles to the public domain.

With the question of sovereignty settled, traffic on the Oregon Trail increased through the 1840s, then exploded when James Marshall’s 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill became public knowledge. California joined the union in 1850; Oregon followed in 1859, and visionaries began to talk about the need to tie the East and West together. Wagons and sailing ships weren’t enough, the thinking went. The solution was at hand, the miracle of the age: the railroad.

But there was a problem— 2,000 miles of unsettled wilderness between the rapidly growing nation east of the Mississippi and the newly minted states on the West Coast. Railroads were in the business of moving freight, and there was practically no freight to be moved between the Sierras and the Great Plains. Men who knew railroading were unwilling to gamble their own money on a transcontinental line, and in the wake of the gigantic expenditures of the Civil War, Congress wasn’t anxious to pay for the project.

At first, Washington tried to interest the railroads by offering them land. Congress was willing to give the builders all the right of way required across the public domain, and just to sweeten the deal, the politicians threw in the deeds to every other section for ten miles on either side of the tracks. The railroads didn’t bite. So Congress offered $50,000,000 of bonds, with the principle and interest guaranteed by the federal government. The details of the repayment of these bonds were so sketchy that they represented another $43,000,000 of largesse for the railroads.[xvi]

Why this outpouring of generosity? Our eighth-grade history books told us that it was a simple commitment to the idea that the nation should be united by rail, and there’s little doubt that a patriotic impulse was one of the motives the railroad magnates shared. Another was sheer greed. The railroaders distributed $250,000 in bonds around Washington, D.C., to congressmen and other key officials who could help sweeten the deal.[xvii] The bonds were worth nothing if the transcontinental line wasn’t built; they were worth plenty if it was.

State and federal governments were even more generous with land grants. The railroads west of the Mississippi were given 131,000,000 acres of land by the federal government and another 44,000,000 acres by the states.[xviii] Combined with the control the railroads had over routes and choices of town sites, this allowed company insiders to reap huge profits in real estate.[xix] It’s been called “speculation,” but for the executives who played the game, it was really a sure thing.

The deals that were made to complete the three great transcontinental rail lines bear an uncanny resemblance to the speculative bubbles built by Enron and the purveyors of collateralized debt obligations in our century. They were “leveraged’ to the hilt, which meant main players borrowed far more than they could pay back— unless the rail project yielded an immense profit— and many of them found ways to evade any personal financial responsibility to investors through limited liability corporations and other means.

The railroads were built. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines met at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, forming the first transcontinental link across the country. Construction on the Northern Pacific, from Minneapolis to Seattle, began in 1870. Progress was delayed by financial issues, but the line was completed in 1883. The Southern Pacific link across the Southwest was completed the same year.

The insiders in the investment schemes owned controlling interest in construction companies they made sure were hired to build the railroads. These companies charged exorbitant rates— it’s been estimated that the bill for the western part of the first transcontinental line was twice the actual cost. The profits went back to the principle investors. The key players in just the California part of the shell game that built the Union Pacific transcontinental line came away with $10,000,000 in clear profit.[xx]

The chicanery, bribery, and fraud eventually led to scandals, both in California and in Washington, D.C. The Congressional investigation of the Credit Mobiliér lending and construction firm set off months of public outrage. More than thirty members of Congress had taken gifts of shares from the company, but no one was indicted and only two members of Congress were even censured. The organizers at the California end of the line avoided a similar investigation when all the records of their finance and construction company were mysteriously destroyed in a fire.[xxi]

The lack of adequate capital to back the rampant speculation surrounding the transcontinental railroads was largely to blame for the financial panic of 1873 and the six-year depression that followed.[xxii] As always, the brunt of the downturn fell on people of modest means. More than 18,000 businesses closed their doors;[xxiii] small farms failed, and wages in the railroad sector and elsewhere were slashed.

The trains rolled on steel rails, but in the nineteenth century, the railroads were built with wood. It took more than 2,000 ties to build a mile of track and at least thirty poles to string the telegraph line alongside,[xxiv] timber the forests along the routes supplied. It’s been estimated that between twenty and twenty-five percent of all timber cut in the last third of the nineteenth century found its way into railroads.[xxv]

The demand was so intense that the mountains within thirty miles of the tracks in Wyoming were almost denuded. Since the ties were floated down local streams wherever possible, the beds of these creeks were scoured by the annual run of ties, then smothered with silt from the surrounding hillsides, and since most of the ties were laid without any treatment and, in many cases, lasted only three or four years, the demand for replacements remained strong for decades.

Once again, the common folk shouldered the brunt of the cost of the great project, in money, heartache, and blood. The environment sustained a heavy blow, and a handful of wealthy speculators reaped the profit.

Mining in the West didn’t wait for the railroads. After the California rush of 1849, there were several other major strikes across the West before the golden spike was driven in Utah. The romantic image of those miners is the gray-bearded prospector leading a burro up some lonesome mountain valley, which is no more accurate than our conception of the fur trade. Mineral deposits on the West’s public domain were often discovered by individual prospectors, but the extraction of minerals took equipment and men, commodities the independent operator could seldom afford. Control of the gold, silver, and copper quickly passed into the hands of well-financed companies.

There were two ways to remove precious metals. One was to follow the veins back into the solid rock of the mountains. Mines of this kind required huge quantities of timber to guard against cave-ins. A mining engineer working on the Comstock silver lode in western Nevada invented a new approach to shoring up mines that consumed up to 80,000,000 board feet of lumber per year on the Comstock alone. One historian of the area has written that “the people of the Comstock walk over a forest of underground timbers of enormous dimensions.”[xxvi]

One of the members of the Hayden expedition visited the Front Range of Colorado in 1869 and reported that “the rapid increase in mining operations and population in the mining sections, which are in the heart of the pine regions, is rapidly consuming, for building purposes, fuel, &c., the pines around these points.”[xxvii] He went on to add that “saw-mills are being erected in the interior of the mountain districts, as water-power is easily obtained along the little creeks.”

By 1879, mills were so common in Wyoming that the territorial legislature passed a law to stop the disposal of sawdust “into any river, creek, bay, pond, lake, canal, ditch, or other water course.”[xxviii] It was one of the West’s earliest pollution laws, but without enforcement, it had little effect.

The hunger for wood continued for the next twenty years. In 1897, the General Land Office reported that the steady loss of forest “fully demonstrated the want of wisdom in placing the public timber thus free of cost at the disposal of the public. It is also unjust in granting exceptional privileges to the residents of the States, Territories.”

The problem was that the trees weren’t going to the average citizen. “Large corporations and companies have secured permits at different times to cut many millions of feet,” the 1897 report observed. And sometimes, the big operators didn’t bother with permits. “For illustration, suit was recommended against the Bitter Root Development Company in 1894 for $315,250, the value of 31,525,000 feet of saw logs,” the report added. “This company has been one of the principal factors in supplying timber to the Anaconda Mining Company, being, in fact, an adjunct of the latter.”[xxix]

Placer gold was distributed through large deposits of loose dirt and gravel across the West. How much a company made depended on how fast it could process the mixture, In 1853, Edward Matteson, a California miner, updated an ancient technique to expedite matters— he built dams uphill from his diggings, then brought the water through a ditch and then a hose and nozzle, generating a high-pressure stream that washed tons of gravel into his sluices.[xxx] It was called hydraulic mining, and it was quickly adopted anywhere mine companies had a source of water uphill from their operations.

While the technique had undeniable advantages for the miners, it was disastrous for the watercourses downstream. Tons of silt choked rivers and streams, exacerbating floods and, after particularly heavy runoff, depositing thick layers of mud in the flood plains and crop fields below. Often, the silt carried heavy metals and acids that killed fish and other aquatic life for miles. Once again, the public’s interest suffered while the profit from the public’s land found its way into the coffers of big companies.

Out on the flatlands, the situation wasn’t much better.

Stockmen had been grazing cattle and sheep in parts of the West since Cortez hit the beach. While the conquistadors indulged their obsession with gold and silver, Spanish settlers and their animals brought some measure of stability and permanence to the early colonies. The herds advanced with Spanish settlement, first to the country around Santa Fe, then into the lower Rio Grande valley of Texas, and at last to the missions of California. Farther north, the Hudson’s Bay Company saw the first emigration into Oregon Territory from the fledgling United States in the early 1840s, and officials there expanded their farming operations along the Columbia River, including a thriving herd of beef and dairy cattle, in an effort to solidify the British claim to the region.

The markets for the commodities these early herds produced were mostly local, simply because the transportation systems of the time couldn’t move them from the frontier to population centers. As a result, domestic livestock had little impact on the public domain. That changed suddenly soon after the close of the Civil War.

The biggest change, of course, was the explosive growth of the American rail system, but there were other developments as well. The development of a practical system of refrigeration for railroad cars and ships in the late 1870s allowed producers and processors to move fresh meat thousands of miles without spoiling. And, out on the frontier, the great war machines of the Comanche and Sioux were finally defeated, which made the business of ranching safer on thousands of square miles of western grassland.

Starting a ranch, even a small operation, took some start-up capital. The cattleman needed a good remuda of horseflesh, the tack to saddle them, the money or equipment to keep them shod. He needed to prove up a claim on a piece of land for headquarters— the Homestead Act allowed him 160 acres free of charge, if he occupied them for five continuous years, or he could buy them for $1.25 an acre. The Desert Land Act of 1877 expanded grants to a full section of 640 acres at a price of twenty-five cents an acre.

And he needed some cows. The price of a Texas longhorn at the northern railheads varied between three dollars and eight dollars a head,[xxxi] and that investment wouldn’t begin paying dividends until this spring’s calves had grown into two- to-four-year-old steers. A cattleman, as opposed to a cowboy, was a man of property who might have to wait years to see a return on his investment.

In the years after the Civil War, America’s appetite for beef far outstripped the supply, and the producers who could furnish cattle made quick fortunes. That effect was heightened by the situation in Europe where outbreaks of hoof-and-mouth disease and anthrax in the 1860s took a heavy toll on livestock.[xxxii] There was money to be made with American cattle, and it didn’t take long for investors in Britain and Scotland to take advantage of the situation.

The first British cattle corporation to operate in the United States formed in 1879, raising capital of $350,000 with which it bought up ranches in South Dakota and Wyoming. Over the next twenty years, thirty-six more British corporations invested $34,000,000 in the western cattle business. These were just the offshore investments; at the same time British capitalists were making their presence felt, well-heeled Americans from the East and Midwest were buying into the business. What had been a family-run, hand-to-mouth calling became an industry, and as was the case with most other industries of the time, the big money took complete control.

In the years of the open range on public land, the big conglomerates played the system to gain control of key tracts of land. In 1884, The New York Times reported on the General Land Office’s investigation of illegal claims on the public domain. According to the newspaper, inspectors from the Land Office had found “between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 acres are now illegally fenced, and that several million acres are fraudulently entered” as claims with the Land Office. One of the officials was quoted as saying, “Cattlemen will employ men to herd their stock and then will give $50 or $100 to each one to make an entry for 160 acres. When he has secured his patent, it is understood that he must transfer it to the person who advanced the money. Many of the cattle dealers will not employ men unless they will agree to make the entries.”[xxxiii]

In 1880, the governor of Wyoming estimated that the ranching operations in the state ran 540,000 head of cattle and about 375,000 head of sheep.[xxxiv] Over the next three years, the number of cattle in the state rose to about 800,000, where it plateaued, and the number of sheep continued to climb, reaching more than 6,000,000 by 1909.[xxxv]

At the turn of the last century, it was clear that the grasslands of the state couldn’t sustain that kind of pressure. In 1900, B.C. Buffam of the University of Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station wrote: “The natural ranges have greatly deteriorated through over-stocking, which has prevented the best grasses from re-seeding themselves for so long a time that they have run out.”[xxxvi]

The condition of pastureland across the West was essentially the same— thirty years of intense grazing had done damage to grasses and broad-leafed forage plants that would last for decades or even longer. At the same time, invasive plants like cheatgrass had been imported with contaminated seed, which would damage the rangeland in the Great Basin forever. The dreaded cattle disease brucellosis was brought to North America with infected livestock and was probably introduced into Yellowstone bison shortly after 1900 when domestic cows were used to foster young buffalo in an effort to preserve the species.[xxxvii]

After less than a century, this is what Jefferson’s dream for his beloved western territory looked like: a land controlled and operated by millionaires and conglomerates, many of whom had stretched the law or simply flouted it to control the economy and politics of the public domain. A land stripped of its pristine promise: the range overgrazed; the forests over-cut; mountainsides raw and bleeding from the pitiless extraction of precious metals; streams polluted; the great herds of game, the beaver, the sage grouse all but extinct.

The entire nation was appalled. Faced with the ruin wrought by an unfettered market and a moneyed elite, a generation of Americans began looking for a different way to realize the democratic ideal in the arid West. It began in 1872 with the creation of the world’s first national park, continued in 1890 with the protection of our first national forest, and culminated in the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, two laws that mandated better management of BLM lands.

The movement proceeded from the notion that our common interest is sometimes best served when we own some things together. The idea of places and resources held in the public trust gained traction with wildlife in the 1840s[xxxviii] and was extended over the next century to the great open spaces of the West’s public domain.

The form and function of the consensus has been hammered out over the last hundred years. It has changed with time, and it will continue to change as the people who care about the public domain change, and as the land itself changes. Finding consensus among 300 million citizens is always a challenge, and it is especially difficult when we look for consensus on managing public land in the West.

But neither history nor recent experience supports the notion that these lands would better serve America if they were in state ownership or private hands. The demands big business continues to make on the public domain in the West haven’t changed, they’ve been held in check only by federal regulations that seek to control the management of national forests and BLM holdings. If these lands were to be given to the states or sold to private interests, these smaller governing entities or owners would not have the power to resist the influence the corporations wield. Even the federal government struggles to resist that influence. Land use would quickly return to the patterns that developed in the nineteenth century. The resources on the public domain, renewable and nonrenewable, would be sacrificed to enhance profits and the public would lose its right to visit what was left.

These days, Americans are dispossessed, confined in our apartments, on our quarter-acre lots, estranged from the land that, in large part, has defined our character as a people and a nation. We are held prisoner by economics. One of the few physical expressions of freedom we have left is the public domain. Together, we can use it without destroying it; we can enjoy it without dividing it.

We should never give it up.

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[i] Jefferson, Thomas, 1984. Writings. Letter to James Madison from Fontainebleau, France, October 28, 1785. p. 840. Library of America, Penguin-Putnam.

 

[ii] DeVoto, Bernard, 1952. The Course of Empire. Houghton Mifflin, New York, NY. p. 126.

 

[iii] DeVoto, Bernard, 1952. p.302.

 

[iv] Dolin, Eric Jay, 2010. Fur, Fortune, and Empire. WW. Norton & Company, New York, NY. p. 183.

 

[v] DeVoto, Bernard, 1947. Across the Wide Missouri. Houghton Mifflin, New York, NY. p. 23.

 

[vi] Dolin, Eric Jay, 2010. p. 194-196.

 

[vii] Dolin, 2010. p. 194.

 

[viii] Dolin, 2010. p. 197.

 

[ix] Chittenden, Hiram Martin, 1902. The American Fur Trade of the Far West. F.P. Harper Company, New York, NY. p. 140.

 

[x] Dolin, 2010. p. 285.

 

[xi] Ewers, John C., 1958. The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK. p.56.

 

[xii] Dolin, 2010. p. 212.

 

[xiii] Dolin, 2010. p. 283.

 

[xiv] Dolin, 2010. pp. 282-283.

 

[xv] Newell Robert, 1959. Memorandum of Robert Newell’s Travles in the Teritory of Missourie. Champoeg Press, Portland, OR.

 

[xvi] White, Richard, 2011. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. WW. Norton & Company, New York, NY. pp.22-23.

 

[xvii] White, 2011. p. 22.

 

[xviii] White, 2011, pp. 24-25.

 

[xix] White, 2011. p. 156.

 

[xx] White, 2011. p. 36.

 

[xxi] Folsom, Burton W., 2010. The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America. Young America’s, Herndon, VA. p. 22.

 

[xxii] Lubetkin, John M., 2006. Jay Cooke’s Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, The Sioux, and the Panic of 1873. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK. pp. 276-285.

[xxiii] Public Broadcasting System. The American Experience. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/grant-panic/?flavour=mobile

 

[xxiv] Department of Agriculture Forestry Division, Bulletin No.1, 1887. Report on the Relation of Railroads to Forest Supplies And Forestry. Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office. pp. 14-15.

 

[xxv] MacCleery, Douglas W., 2011. American Forests: A History of Resiliency and Recovery. Forest History Society, Durham, NC. p.19.

 

[xxvi] Davis, Samuel, 1913. The History of Nevada. The Elms Publishing Company, Reno, NV and Los Angeles, CA. p. 410.

 

[xxvii] Thomas, Cyrus in Hayden, F.V., 1869. Preliminary Field Report of the United State Geological Survey of Colorado and New Mexico. Washington: Government Printing Office. p. 151.

 

[xxviii] Session Laws of Wyoming Territory Passed by the Sixth Legislative Assembly, 1879. Leader Steam Book and Job Print, Cheyenne, WY. p. 117.

[xxix] Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1897. Washington: Government Printing Office. p. 76.

 

[xxx] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldrush/peopleevents/e_landscape.html

 

[xxxi] Brayer, Herbert O., 1949. The influence of British capital on the western range-cattle industry. The Journal of Economic History 9: 85-98 (Supplement: The tasks of economic history)

 

[xxxii] Brayer, 1949.

 

[xxxiii] The New York Times, August 24, 1884, p.5. “Millions of acres fenced and fraudulently entered by the cattle kings.”

 

[xxxiv] Hoyt, John, W., 1880. Report of the Governor of Wyoming Territory, Made to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1880. Washington, D.C. Government Printing Office. p. 4.

 

[xxxv] Larson, T.A., 1965. History of Wyoming. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE. p. 367.

 

[xxxvi] Buffam, B.C. and W.H. Fairfield, 1900. “Forage Plants.” In the Annual Report of the University of Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station. p.3.

 

[xxxvii] Meagher, Mary and Meyer, 1994. Origin of brucellosis in bison. Conservation Biology 8 (3): 645-650.

 

[xxxviii] Martin v. Waddell 41 U.S. 16 Pet. 367 (1842)

WHEN I FIRST HEARD THE NEWS, I THOUGHT IT WAS A FACEBOOK SCAM. BUT, NO: THE MONTANA DEPARTMENT OF FISH, WILDLIFE AND PARKS HAS CLOSED 183 MILES OF THE Yellowstone River to all recreation. That includes swimming, tubing, floating, wading . . . and fishing.

The reason? An outbreak of a fatal disease called proliferative kidney disease in the river’s whitefish and trout. Managers with the department closed the river to “protect the fishery and the economy it sustains.” They added that “the closure will also limit the spread of the parasite to adjacent rivers through boats, tubes, waders and other human contact.”

Biologists with the department estimate that tens of thousands of mountain whitefish have already died, and there is evidence that rainbow and cutthroat trout have also succumbed.

A release from the department added that the impact of the disease was exacerbated by exceptionally low flows in the river, high water temperatures, and disturbance from recreational activities.

The closure may well last through September, throwing a huge wrench in the local economy, but for people who care about rivers like the Yellowstone, the economic impact of the closure is only a footnote to the much larger question: What does this mean for one of the great trout streams of the Rocky Mountain West?

Unfortunately, I suspect that critical parts of that question will never be addressed.

How, for example, did water levels and temperatures get so low? It’s common knowledge that the last six months have been warm and dry in Yellowstone country, so the stock answer to that question will be “drought.” Which is fine, as far as it goes. We won’t bother ourselves with the trend in weather over the last thirty years or more.

Fact is that there have been a lot of warm, dry years in the central Rockies over the last thirty years. What we’re seeing on the Yellowstone this summer is likely to be the new normal as temperatures continue to rise and snowpacks dwindle. Less water always means warmer water, so the lack of flow this year has been a double whammy for the Yellowstone’s coldwater fish. That’s what global climate change looks like along the Yellowstone. We all share responsibility for that developing environmental catastrophe, and so far, we’ve done little, if anything, to stop it.

Of course, there’s another reason the Yellowstone is anemic this summer. In the upper Yellowstone basin of Montana, there are 383,000 acres of irrigated land, most of it producing alfalfa or other livestock forage. That’s a lot of water that isn’t in the river, a hard fact government officials and mainstream conservation groups are likely to ignore because any discussion about the environmental effects of irrigation in the West immediately turns into a no-holds-barred brawl.

Another question worth asking is: Where did this disease come from? The pathogen is now known to be Tetrocapsula bryosalmonae, a myxosporean parasite with a complicated life cycle that seems to include other simple forms of aquatic animal life, the bryozoans. The cause of the disease was discovered about thirty years ago, and specialists are still studying the details of its natural history and various forms. However, fish with the symptoms of the disease were reported in Europe as early as 1924.

Here in the United States, the first known cases were found in 1981 at the Hagerman State Fish Hatchery in Idaho. I doubt that anyone will ever bother to do the sleuthing and lab work to determine whether the PKD pathogen was brought to America by human agency, but the relatively recent appearance of the disease on this side of the Atlantic, especially in an inland hatchery, suggests that somebody probably brought it over.

In the last five years, a vocal group of biologists has suggested that we should give up the effort to exclude exotic species from new environments. They argue that such invasions are so common and so difficult to head off that trying to stem the tide of exotic species is a waste of money. They go on to assert that new species can actually increase biodiversity in an area, and isn’t biodiversity a feature of the natural world we should support?

If, as I suspect, PKD is a recent import, this closure is one more in a litany of examples that show why this laissez–faire attitude toward the introduction of new species is so dangerous. Lots of bad things can happen when an exotic species is transplanted to a new environment, most of which we won’t recognize until it’s too late.

Over the last 150 years, recreational anglers have played a significant role in such importations, damaging the very waters they value so highly. Western fisheries managers are still trying to cope with whirling disease, Didymo infestations, and disastrous introductions like the mackinaw in Yellowstone Lake. The magnitude of the mess we’ve created is reflected in the state inspection stations for aquatic invasives that have been established across the West, in the directives that warn us to treat our waders with chlorine solution every time we fish a new drainage, in the luxurious growth of “rock snot” on the bottoms of beautiful streams. And in a two-month closure of the Yellowstone River, not only to fishing but to all recreation.

Every time I think about it, I feel like I just backed into a concrete wall with a new car, sick to my stomach and pounding my forehead at my own stupidity. Are we ever going to check the mirrors before we throw the car in gear? Or are we just going to keep smashing into walls?

THE MONTH OF JANUARY WENT PRETTY MUCH THE WAY I’D EXPECTED— MORE AND MORE MILES FOR FEWER AND FEWER ROOSTERS. We were still seeing birds, Flick and I— fifty or sixty a day, sometimes— but as the month wound down, the average range of flushing birds steadily increased until, when Flick started working scent at my feet, I found myself watching the ridgeline for the flicker of wings. The GPS tally of the walks mounted steadily as the days passed: 12 miles, 13 miles, 14.8 miles, 15.2 miles of kochia and switchgrass and little bluestem, up and down the Nebraska hills from sunrise to sunset, hoping for one or two good chances. Hoping.

The last of the bird seasons closed at sunset on January 31, so, of course, Flick and I were on the road at four in the morning, the dog snoozing in a tight ball on the right seat while I navigated the black ice on the interstate in order to be in the cover at first light. We arrived to find four inches of fresh powder lying gently on the prairie grass, the stems bent in delicate arches under the roof of snow, draped with crystals they had gathered during the night, each crystal flashing as the sun touched it, the light shattered momentarily into the colors of the spectrum against the blue shadows.

It was a quarter of a mile from the road to the first patch of cover. I eased the truck door closed and started across the intervening corn stubble as quietly as I could, Flick at heel to minimize the chance of a wild flush. Ten minutes later at the northwestern corner of the grass, I released him with a wave of the hand, and he disappeared, leaving a trail of snow suspended in the air above the switchgrass as he made his first swing.

We worked our way down the east slope of the ridge into the draw where the old International pickup body rusted slowly away in half an acre of kochia. For all our care, the birds knew we were coming. A rooster flushed wild sixty yards to my right, out of range on the far slope, followed by a second bird even farther away. Disappointment. I’d expected them, but I’d hoped the snow would convince them to hold a little longer. At the sound of the wings, Flick popped out of the grass thirty yards to my left and froze with his ears perked up and a look of disgust. I had to smile.

And, right then, the third rooster jumped, thirty yards away instead of sixty. I’ve played the game long enough now to keep the jolt of panic from an unexpected flush under some sort of control, but the urge to hurry was nearly overwhelming, as it always is. I shifted my feet as the Model 12 came to my shoulder, swung through the bird as he hit high gear, and pulled the trigger just an instant too early. He rocked but didn’t fall. The second shot was longer but more considered. It caught him just as he rose to clear the cutbank on the other side of the cover, and he crumpled. Flick was there three seconds later to make sure he didn’t run.

On the last day, one rooster in the bag is a major success, but it was early and, with the snow, there was reason to hope for more. We checked the patch of kochia at the corner of the field where we moved a lone hen who ran 200 yards before she flushed at the shoulder of the ridge and disappeared.

As I turned south, I saw another set of tracks headed south through the corn stubble. Flick wasn’t on the trail— yet— but I took the gun off my shoulder and quickened the pace. As I came over the next rise, he’d come out of the cover and was trotting down the field edge when a plume of scent grabbed him by the nose, spinning him ninety degrees as he pointed. I hurried to catch up, thinking that this was another hen— on the last day, roosters never hold to points.

But this one had. Flick was certain sure, as tight as a fiddle string, and I stepped in front of that unerring pink nose, reminding myself to relax, just as the rooster exploded out of the switchgrass in a cloud of snow, incandescent copper and green against a flawless morning sky, cackling as he went. He swung right, and just as the muzzle of the gun caught up with him, banked back left. I managed to reprogram the change in trajectory, and he went down. Flick was there in a heartbeat to make sure he didn’t run.

We worked another kochia covert that should have been loaded with birds, pushing one rooster out at more than eighty yards and crossing the tracks ten or fifteen birds had left as they melted into the wheat stubble to the south. Then up the southern edge of the grass, a part of the field that had never produced before. Half way up the slope, Flick pointed emphatically. I walked in, kicked the cover, and turned to look at the dog. He moved three steps and locked up again. I was doubtful— roosters don’t hold this way on the last day, especially on public land. With the gun on my shoulder, I kicked half-heartedly at the tangle of grass in front of the dog . . . and a rooster flushed, headed low over the cover to my left.

I’ve missed that shot on many occasions. But not this time. He fell through the snow-covered canopy just short of the fence, leaving a sparkling cloud of frost in the air. And Flick was there to make sure of him.

As we walked the half-mile back to the truck, I found myself puzzling over my feelings about the morning.

It had been almost perfect. The landscape, so often cold and colorless at this time of year, had been transformed in the middle of the night into a fairyland. With the experience of another long season under his belt, Flick had done his job about as well as it could be done, instinct and training running straight and true in an ancient channel, and after a season of out-maneuvering and out-thinking hunter and dog, the birds had yielded, at least for an hour or two. I’d even managed to do my part with the wingshooting.

I’ve chased birds and dogs for more than fifty years now, and if there’s anything I’ve learned over that time, it is that hunting well, with grace and honest effort, respect and appreciation, is difficult, even for those of us who have done it all our lives. What brings me back is the pursuit of perfection.

But, in spite of the marvelous morning, I was more than a little down in the mouth as I realized that this was the last day. It’ll be nine months before Flick and I have another rendezvous with the birds. A long time to wait. If the birds had all been wild; if the dog had run ahead and flushed the only rooster; if I had missed the one good chance, as I so often do; if the wind had swung into the north and pummeled us; if we had come back to the truck at sunset, footsore, chilled, and hungry with nothing to show for the effort except blisters and the questionable benefit of ten hours of hard walking— if, in short, it had been what the last day almost always is— then it might have been easier to let go.  As it was, this hour had transcended the sum of its exquisite parts.  Everything— the weather, the land, the light, the birds, the dog, even the hunter— had been close to some sort of unspoken ideal, and the combination was so fine that it brought a smile to my face and a tear to my eye.  It’s hard to let go of such days.

As I write this, Flick is sleeping in the corner, whining now and then, his feet twitching as he follows fresh scent through the coverts of his dreams. In this, as in so many other aspects of the hunt, he gives me an example to follow.  Fall will come again.  In the meantime, I’ll take his lead and remember this day, savor it, until next November.

THE TALE OF HUGH GLASS AND THE GRIZZLY IS ONE of the most treasured stories in the mythology of the mountain man. Most of the best parts understandably come down to us by word of mouth, since Glass was alone during the legendary crawl and never wrote a word about the experience.

However, there are a few generally accepted facts that ground the story: Glass met the grizzly around August 23, 1823, on the Grand River near what is now the border between North and South Dakota. It took him a month and a half to make his way back to Fort Kiowa, an American Fur Company outpost on the Missouri River near what is now Chamberlain, South Dakota. There had been two serious fights with the Arikara earlier that summer, the first in June involving the men of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company; the second, a retaliatory strike led by Colonel Henry Leavenworth and the Sixth Infantry. There was also a skirmish with the Mandans on the Grand River.

As Kevin Bacon said in “A Few Good Men,” “These are the facts of the case, and they are not disputed.”

Like many aficionados of western history, I’ve always admired the Hugh Glass story, and like many fans of Hollywood, I looked forward to Alejandro Iñárritu’s film adaptation, “The Revenant.”

Well, I’ve seen it. I have to give a nod to Leo DiCaprio, who may well deserve an Academy Award for his work in the film, for raw endurance, if nothing else. There is some exquisite photography of marvelous landscapes.

But about those landscapes. Many of us with an affection for the West had hoped that Hollywood had finally outgrown the need to set every film with a western theme in Jackson Hole or Monument Valley. Kevin Costner showed the way in “Dances with Wolves,” a film about the High Plains actually filmed in the grassland wilderness of the High Plains.

Iñárritu couldn’t decide where to place Hugh Glass in “The Revenant.” Anyone with the slightest grasp of western geography is likely to get whiplash as scenes jump from snowbound mountain passes to dense coniferous forests and then, for three minutes or so, onto the grasslands before returning to the mountains. Glass was mauled on the High Plains; he crawled 200 miles across the High Plains to get back to Fort Kiowa, an encampment on the Missouri River in the heart of the Great Plains. None of the forts of that time— Fort Henry, Fort Tilton, Fort Kiowa— were in the high mountains. They were all in or near major rivers like the Missouri or the mouths of the Yellowstone and Big Horn. Grassland settings.

Iñárritu couldn’t even decide WHEN his story took place. Near the beginning of his version, Glass and his companions have already seen major snowfall— winter is coming on. Glass is mauled by a sow grizzly with two cubs that should be half the size of their mother by late fall; instead, the two youngsters are about the size they would be in May.

It looks a lot like winter as DiCaprio’s Glass crawls out of his shallow grave and heads for Fort Kiowa with a broken leg and deep lacerations. There are no bugs, precious few berries— in short, no food for a man who is unarmed and all but immobilized. No flies to lay eggs in the festering wounds so that the maggots can clean the injuries and keep Glass from dying of infection or blood poisoning.

I can accept certain embellishments to the traditional Hugh Glass story— giving Glass a son by a Pawnee woman, inventing an Arikara chief who is searching for his kidnapped daughter, twisting the end by allowing Glass to kill Fitzgerald— but was it really necessary to make the crawl even more difficult than it really was? I guess being abandoned without firearms or a horse 200 miles from the nearest help with a broken leg and multiple puncture wounds and lacerations wasn’t a big enough challenge. Iñárritu just had to spice it up a little.

If Iñárritu didn’t want to take the time to research the story or visit the places where it happened, he could have hired somebody to do the digging. As it is, he turned what might have been an engaging piece of historical fiction into a fantasy of violence. “The Revenant” reminds me of “A Clockwork Orange.” It could have been something much better.

A long day of watching a sky devoid of waterfowl, staring into the endless blue until my eyes burn and the muscles at the base of my neck stab me every time I turn my head. A pair of buffleheads scoot in over the decoys at eleven. A harrier kites along the shore at noon. A magpie at one. A gull at two. The whisper of the ripples eating at the shelf of ice at the head of the bay, the hours passing until the sun drops low in the west and the light gives the illusion of warmth while the breeze finds a way through to the nape of my neck, just to remind me that it’s December. As if I needed the reminder, laid out on the sand, rock hard with the frost with nothing but a double layer of burlap under me, all this interminable day.

 

Evening. Time to pick up. As cold as it is here on the ground, it’s not as cold as it will be out in the water, up to my waist, retrieving the decoys and winding the anchor lines as ice water runs down my sleeves. Still, it’s time to pick up. Stand up, and the blood that has pooled in my legs, losing its heat, comes back to the core and the shiver comes hard and fast. Put on another layer, then wade out into the water, thick and dark like molasses in the cold. Wrap a decoy and pitch it up on the bank. Blow on my hands to keep them working. Wrap another decoy, thirty-four of them until all the blocks I can reach without going over my waders are up on the beach.

 

I walk down the shore and over the point to where I hid the boat, and the exercise quells the shivering. The motor— the old five-and-a-half Johnson that was my dad’s— starts on the first pull, a minor blessing, and I run back around the point, slowing to an idle, then killing the motor as I reach the first of the goose decoys, the ones on twenty-foot anchor lines so I can get them out where they can be seen by a passing flock on the main lake. Five passes to get them all in the boat and another ten minutes to get the lines wound up so they don’t tangle. Back to shore to pick up the shells. Then bag the spread, case the unused gun, load everything in the little boat until there’s barely room for my feet, push off, and haul myself in one more time.

 

As I point the boat east down the reservoir, my eye catches the movement I’ve watched for all day— a line of mallards, high, so high, against the deepening blue of the evening sky. And another. And another. I follow the procession back toward the horizon, and as far as I can see, the tracery of mallard flocks shivers in the wind, black lace against the indigo of space until the patterns fade in the distance. And they keep coming. For half an hour as the old Johnson pushes me toward home, the formations pass to the west.

 

There was a time in my waterfowling career when I would have taken this hard. Were the old Greeks right? Do the gods make sport of men just to amuse themselves? There was a time I thought so and cussed the fates that so often make light of our best efforts, but slowly, over the years out on the water, I’ve absorbed the hard lesson, the discipline of patience. And now, on the other side of patience, there’s another lesson waiting. This was a day that had not given me what I’d come for. It had given me something else instead.

 

Many years ago, my grandmother told me I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. It’s taken me this long to realize how right she was.

I NEED TO STATE AT THE OUTSET THAT I AM A COMMITTED CONSERVATIONIST.  I trained in the field and have spent my entire adult life in the effort to maintain native biodiversity in the United States, and I continue to embrace that goal as one of the most important in my life.

I am also a hunter.  I’m not a trophy hunter.  I’ve hunted big game all my life to provide healthy, organic wild meat for my family from sources close to home.  I’ve never been to Africa, and I have no desire to hunt big game there.  While I’m not familiar with all the details surrounding the shooting of “Cecil” the lion— and I submit that very few people have those details— I’m emphatically opposed to practices like baiting big game that dishonor the principles of fair chase and smear the reputations of all hunters.

Having said that, I’m dismayed by some of the arguments against hunting that have been made in the wake of this lion’s death.  I think they threaten key elements of conservation in sub-Saharan Africa.  Here are four I find particularly dangerous:

1) Much of the money paid by trophy hunters in Africa never finds its way either to conservation or to local impoverished communities.

There are corrupt regimes in sub-Saharan Africa.  In these regimes, income from all kinds of sources is routinely diverted for the benefit of a ruling elite.  I don’t doubt that this happens with income from the sale of hunting licenses and associated services.  It also happens with income from the sale of oil, diamonds, timber, and any number of other natural resources.

I fail to see how nonresident hunters are in any way responsible for such diversions.

There are a few governments in sub-Saharan Africa that recognize the value of healthy, widely distributed game populations.  In these countries, partnership between the public and private sectors has resulted in effective conservation, which includes optimum sustained yields for trophy hunters and even for commercially sold meat.  Hunting is an important part of conservation funding in these nations and will probably remain so for many years.

So the problem with getting money from the First World to conservation efforts and local support in the Third World is essentially political.  It nothing to do with legal hunting.  And I have to add that income from ecotourism or any other source that passes through the hands of government officials in corrupt systems is no more likely to reach the common man or conservation work than the income from hunting licenses.  And I suspect that government officials in such regimes are not likely to smile on programs that try to bypass government because such programs would cut into the graft that drives these systems.

2) Management agencies that are funded with income from hunting licenses inflate harvest quotas to unsustainable levels to get more money.

This accusation is frequently leveled against state wildlife agencies in the United States.  I can’t speak with authority about wildlife agencies in sub-Saharan Africa, but my distant impression is that many of them are as committed to the ideal of conservation as wildlife professionals in the First World.

Wildlife biologists who manage hunting quotas in the U.S. understand all too well that game is a renewable resource.  Managed properly, it yields a harvestable surplus that is never exhausted.  Managed poorly, it quickly yields no surplus, and once that kind of damage has been done, the game populations may take years, even decades, to recover.  Selling too many licenses in the short term means a huge loss of income in the long term.  That sort of cynical overharvest not only violates the ethical canons of the profession, it significantly reduces the long-term funding for the wildlife agency.

As I say, I can’t certify that national wildlife management agencies in Africa would never knowingly overharvest a game population, but the assertion that overharvest is a necessary effect of using hunting as a source of income reflects an utter lack of knowledge, at best, or, at worst, an entrenched prejudice against hunting.

3) Ecotourism is a better approach to raising money for conservation than is well-regulated hunting. 

In the absence of an honest government, any money that flows through the hands of officials is likely to be diverted.  This is just as true of money paid by ecotourists as it is of fees from hunting licenses and other permits required of hunters.

Beyond that harsh reality, there is the issue of the scale of management required to provide photographic subjects for tourists as opposed to the scale needed to produce harvestable surplus of game for hunters.  The truth is that all the demands of ecotourism can be provided in a relatively small area set aside in national parks.  The cost of protecting these areas is relatively low, because of their small size, and the local politics are simplified, because large areas of relatively wild country are made available for “development.”

As convenient as this approach is, it runs a grave risk of distorting or destroying huge components of entire natural systems.  The migration of terrestrial ungulates is an excellent example of a natural process that is hard to contain in a small, easily managed national park.  When migrations are disrupted or eliminated, predation can become a threat to confined herds, leaving park managers with the challenging puzzle of adjusting populations of various species so that they all remain in adequate numbers.

Ethical hunting, on the other hand, requires widely distributed, abundant populations of wildlife and unlike tourism, it’s a discipline that doesn’t survive crowding.  Providing space for hunting requires that there be more space for wildlife.  This can’t be said for ecotourism— a relatively high-quality nonhunting experience can be provided in a much smaller space than hunting demands.

The best game management takes an extensive approach to maintaining wildlife populations— managers use natural processes to encourage native forage and habitat and allow wildlife to move as it will across the landscape.  This extensive approach has its own challenges, since, on the modern landscape, it often depends on the cooperation of local landholders, herders, and other residents, but it has had significant success in many places, preserving natural processes like extensive migrations, predation, and seasonal cycles in consumption of forage.  It’s no accident that this extensive approach to management also benefits a wide array of nongame.

There are other, more intensive management approaches to producing harvestable surpluses of game: captive breeding of animals, providing processed feed, confining wildlife in relatively small areas.  I have to say that, as a hunter, I’m not a fan of these approaches, partly because they undermine the principles of fair chase that are the foundation of ethical hunting and largely because they produce game animals without providing an adequate habitat base, which means that the animals produced are somehow less wild, and that the value of management to native nongame species is reduced.

However, even these intensive techniques support sustainable populations of game, along with many nongame species.  While they aren’t the best approach to conservation, they’re far better than allowing wildlife to disappear or confining it in zoos.

I’m not belittling ecotourism as a way of supporting wildlife conservation, but I think it is naïve in the extreme to think that depending solely on ecotourism as a source of funding and political support has no consequences for free-ranging wildlife.  The consequences are, in fact, profound, and at least as damaging, in their way, as well-regulated, ethical hunting.

4) Harvest of mature males is always bad for a population.

I recognize that killing a dominant male lion can have profound effects on the structure of the pride he controlled.  I submit, however, that his death is inevitable and that the upheaval in pride structure is bound to occur, whether he’s shot or pulled down by younger males.  Setting aside romantic illusions about the social structure among lions, I think the only practical conservation question this raises is the question that is the foundation of all conservation: What level of mortality is sustainable?  Answering that question is a challenge but not an insuperable one.  It requires research, data collection, and, if hunting is involved, a strict control of harvest.

The argument that trophy hunting removes the fittest males from any population neglects important realities of genetics and management.  Among ungulates that grow horns, these badges of male dominance increase in size with age.  Among ungulates that grow antlers, racks may dwindle when a male is extremely old, but the biggest racks still belong to males that have been sexually active for several years.  Trophy ungulates are not just mature males; they are males that are practically at the end of their social and reproductive lives.  The overwhelming majority of their genetic contribution to the population has already occurred.

The trophy value of large predators is judged by less obvious standards than those used to assess horned and antlered game.  Still, the predator’s trophy value is generally measured by its overall size, which also relates to the animal’s age.  There is a good chance that an exceptional trophy has left his genetic mark on the population.  It’s also worth pointing out that sheer size isn’t a guarantee of social and reproductive dominance among predators, so the notion that killing the largest mature males in a population of big cats or bears necessarily cause problems is at least open to question.

The removal of these aging males need not have any significant effect on the genetics or social function of the population as a whole.  The key to avoiding such problems is, once again, solid research and strict control of harvest.  Neither of these is impossible to achieve.

The upshot

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is in the process of listing the African lion as “threatened” under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act.  If that decision stands, the species will gain a large measure of protection from what is now legal hunting.  I frankly doubt that a complete cessation of legal hunting will be enough to protect lions, since they face a host of other problems that have nothing whatsoever to do with trophy hunting, but there may be ethical justification for a moratorium on legal lion hunting, whether it helps lions or not.

However, I believe that a categorical end to all legal hunting of big game in Africa would be a huge mistake.  Actions like Delta Airlines’ refusal to transport legally taken trophies could well prove to undermine African conservation rather than advance it.

I recognize that many people with a genuine interest in conservation find hunting repugnant.  I think that view fails to credit the seminal role hunting has played in the development of our species and, at an even more fundamental level, neglects the influence predation has as a natural process that shapes much of what we find most beautiful in this world.

I won’t try to make the case for that view here, but I do want to argue a more practical point: Ethical hunting has been an irreplaceable force for conservation over the last two centuries, and it continues to be critical to the success of wildlife conservation in North America and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa with stable, ethical governments.  Hunters need to police their ranks and banish people who fail to live up to the standards of the discipline.  Society at large clearly has a part to play in that effort.  But I counsel anyone who cares about the future of African wildlife to be careful about eliminating any approach that can help in the conservation effort, including well-regulated hunting.  The most profound threats to the future of that unique fauna can be found in the economics and politics of emerging nations, not in ethical hunting.  We’ll need every tool we can find to head off the loss of Africa’s free-ranging wildlife.

 

IT’S ONE OF THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL rules of ecology: Each species has its niche, the unique combination of food, water, shelter, and nursery that, taken together, are home for the breed.  Without that place, the species would not exist.

As the deadline for the federal decision on whether to list the sage grouse approaches, I’ve found myself wondering about the inverse of that idea.  If a species disappears, it seems logical to conclude that its niche has also been badly damaged or destroyed.

A recent analysis of trends of sage grouse lek counts published by Dr. Edward Gorton and colleagues suggests that the numbers in many populations, including Wyoming’s, continue to decline, in spite of the fairly uninspired conservation efforts that have been made on their behalf over the last several years.  The bird’s decline is the most powerful possible indication that the wild sage is melting away as well.

The bird can’t exist without the place.  And in ecological and spiritual sense, the place won’t exist without the bird.

ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2015, CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON published an essay in the New York Times titled “Leaving Only Footsteps in the Woods?: Think Again.”  The premise of Solomon’s piece was that every human being that enters a wild area has an effect on the wildlife living there.

It’s an important observation, one that gets surprisingly little attention in an era when many outdoors folk desperately want to believe that their activities are “nonconsumptive” and not a bit like the depredations of bloodthirsty hunters and anglers who go out with the express purpose of committing mayhem against defenseless wild things.

Of course, there’s no such thing as “nonconsumptive use” in the outdoors.  The research literature is replete with studies that demonstrate that cars and trucks, ATVs, hikers, and horseback riders all have deleterious effects on many wild animals, sometimes killing or maiming them or, more often, displacing them temporarily or permanently, often with short- or long-term effects on their well-being.

It’s worth remembering that, while human presence itself has an undeniable effect on wildlife and wild places, that direct damage is dwarfed by the effect of our demand for resources.  The SUV used to drive to that primeval forest, the gasoline burned on the trip, the wool in the sweater, the petrochemical in the shoes, the lunchmeat in the sandwiches multiplied by 320 million constitute a threat orders of magnitude greater than any form of recreation we pursue.  And this damage is inflicted by every person in America, not just backpackers and off-road aficionados.

I do want to raise one objection to Solomon’s piece.  He carries things too far when he argues that a person on foot has more impact than a person on a snowmobile or ATV.  He cites a study in Alaska by Grant Harris and colleagues that gathered data on the effect of snowmobiles on wintering moose in the Kenai.  These researchers also reviewed the scientific literature to find studies of other winter activities, particularly Nordic skiing.  A couple of these studies suggested that a moose’s response to a person on skis might be greater than its response to a snowmobile.  Solomon concluded that there was “more evidence of impacts by hikers, backcountry skiers and their like than by the gas-powered crowd.”

Not really.  Harris and his co-authors gave a more accurate assessment when they wrote that “nonmotorized recreation causes fewer, stronger disturbance effects in relatively smaller areas while motorized recreation generates more, weaker disturbances across larger areas.”  I would add that motorized disturbance involves MUCH larger areas and often inflicts more severe long-term ecological damage as well.

Extensive research on elk at the Starkey Experimental Forest and Range in northeastern Oregon has concluded that ATVs and mountain bikes generally cause greater disturbance for elk than hikers and horseback riders, results that are supported by many other studies from other parts of the country assessing disturbance of other wild animals.  Add to that body of information the lasting ecological effects of backcountry roads and the unauthorized trails that ramify over public lands across the country and you have a scale of damage that pedestrians could never match.

Kudos to Solomon for reminding us that “we’re all complicit” in the ongoing deterioration of wild places.  But I would add that, if you find the muse calling you to the wild country and you’re looking for a way to reduce your impact, park the vehicle, tighten the laces on your boots, and walk.  You’ll see more and hurt less.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS.  I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THE SIXTIES (AND EVEN A PIECE OF THE FIFTIES) WITH SOME FONDNESS, BUT THERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS ABOUT THAT ERA I’d just as soon forget, especially in the environmental arena— massive fish kills, rivers catching fire, and not least, a federally funded campaign to destroy wetlands.  Between the 1950s and the 1970s, nine million acres of wetlands in the contiguous forty-eight states were drained, filled, plowed, destroyed— an average of 458,000 acres a year. 

Efforts to respond to this casual abuse culminated in 1972 with the Clean Water Act.  The first paragraph of the act set out a clearcut objective: “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.”  Among other goals, the authors wanted to achieve “water quality which provides for the protection and propagation of fish, shellfish, and wildlife and provides for recreation in and on the water.”

Authority for enforcing the provisions of the act was split between the Army Corps of Engineers and the nascent Environmental Protection Agency, and over the next thirty years, treatment of domestic sewage improved markedly, even as the nation’s population increased, and pollution from point sources like industrial plants decreased, even as the economy grew. Overall, the Clean Water Act has significantly improved water quality in many urban areas, while rural areas have seen less improvement, mainly because of heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides.

Another benefit of the act was undeniable: By 2000, headwater streams had been afforded some measure of protection against toxic run-off from mines and silt from overzealous timbering and road-building and the drainage of freshwater wetlands had been almost halted.  Part of that shift was the result of ongoing efforts of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and private-sector conservation groups like Ducks Unlimited, but much of it rose from the protection the Clean Water Act offered against unregulated drainage, filling, or pollution.  Wetlands are the most productive, diverse natural systems on the continent.  They’re a mainstay for North America’s waterfowl, but they support hundreds of other species of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates as well.  And headwater streams, especially in the mountainous West, are crucial nurseries for trout and salmon as well as refuges for a variety of rare fish species.

Which explains why hunters, anglers, and other conservationists were so distressed when, in 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Clean Water Act’s authority to protect “isolated” wetlands.  Five of the justices challenged the scientific understanding that nearly all water is connected, either directly when water runs from one drainage into another or indirectly through the movement of groundwater or migratory birds that travel from one wetland to another.  Their majority ruling immediately exposed wetlands like the prairie potholes in the northcentral United States to the dredging and filling operations that had previously been regulated by Section 404 of the Clean Water Act and called into question the act’s protection of headwater streams far from the continent’s major river systems.

Ever since the Supreme Court decisions in SWANCC v. Corps of Engineers and Rapanos v. United States, the Corps of Engineers and the EPA have been struggling to redefine a key concept in the Clean Water Act: the phrase “waters of the United States.”  After a decade of discussion and public input, the two agencies proposed a new definition last April.

Complicated?  I guess.  The proposed rulemaking filled eighty-six pages in the Federal Register.  In recognition of the limits placed on their authority by the court, the two agencies reiterated and clarified many of the exemptions they had granted in their earlier permitting and enforcement.  Farmers were granted all the exemptions they had enjoyed before the Supreme Court decisions, including exemptions for irrigation that continue to cause serious water quality problems.  Water-filled depressions created during construction were given a pass along with gullies, artificial ponds created on dry land as ornaments or for stock watering, irrigation, or rice culture.  Groundwater was exempted; the state authority over water rights was recognized. 

And the concept of an “isolated” wetland is clarified.  In order to be protected under the Clean Water Act, a wetland would have to “significantly affect the chemical, physical, or biological integrity” of a larger body of water, considered to be a “water of the United States.”  In the case of a system of isolated wetlands like the prairie potholes, the entire system would have to “significantly affect” one of those major waters.

The proposed rule is a huge compromise for conservationists, but it provides more protection for headwater streams and isolated wetlands than the current situation in which the corps or EPA has to decide case by case whether a creek or marsh is covered by the Clean Water Act.  It’s better than nothing.

The new proposal has its opponents, of course.  There are many economic interests that would just as soon be free to degrade or destroy watercourses and wetlands.  They would be more than happy to return to an arrangement that left the public with poisoned water, dead fish, and burning rivers.  And, inevitably, these interests have friends in Congress.

On September 9, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill called the “Waters of the United States Regulatory Overreach Protection Act of 2014,” 262 votes in favor to 152 opposed.  If enacted, the bill would block the proposed rule and order the corps and EPA to reach consensus with all fifty states before proceeding.  Bear in mind that the state-by-state approach to water quality before 1972 is what left us with fires on the Cuyahoga River, millions of dead fish on the Mississippi, and poisoned salmon runs on the West Coast.

The bill has little chance of passing the Senate and no chance of being signed into law.  Still, the action by the House is appalling.  The majority seems more than willing to sacrifice clean water and wildlife in order to please their corporate contributors.

Perhaps the most distressing part of this is the lip service these Congressmen pay to “the sportsman.” Of the 262 who voted and/or cosponsored this bill, 198 are members of the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus.  That’s the group that claims “to protect and advance the interests of sportsmen and women through policies that address sportsmen’s conservation issues such as hunting, recreational angling and shooting and trapping.”

I’m an avid waterfowler, so the future of the prairie potholes concerns me.  I’m an avid pheasant hunter, so the winter cover those potholes provide is a matter of some interest to me as well.  I like to fish for trout in the high country, which means I’m a supporter of good water quality in the West.  One of these days, I hope to get over toward the coast and wet a fly for steelhead, so I like to think those rivers will be clear and full of fish when I get there.  In short, I’m a sportsman, so I care about clean water.  Nor do I think I’m alone in this concern— tens of millions of other hunters and anglers recognize that we can’t have wildlife without water.  It’s an ecological fact that even the members of the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus ought to be able to understand.

We’ve tried cleaning up our streams and protecting our wetlands state by state— it doesn’t work.  The quality of our water affects us all; it’s a national issue and it requires a national solution.

If you happen to live in Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, or Vermont, your representative didn’t vote for the “Waters of the United States Regulatory Overreach Act.”  If you live anywhere else, there’s a chance he or she did. If you live in Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Oklahoma, the chances are pretty good, and if you live in Utah, Wyoming, North or South Dakota, it’s a certainty.

The next time that glad-handing politician slaps you on the back and tells you what a dyed-in-the-wool nimrod he is, how many mallards he shot last year, how many bass he caught, ask him how he voted on this one.

It takes more than a gun or a fishing pole to make a sportsman.