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

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

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

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

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

He was hired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus wrote Roy Chapman Andrews of the Gobi Desert.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

What we may still fail to appreciate is the place wildness occupies in the human spirit.  All too often, we still assume we can excise the need for it from our character without disturbing anything else.  That’s not too surprising.  After all, it’s the way we’ve dealt with every other unruly facet of nature we’ve encountered.  Maybe it’s time we took a lesson from our failures.  All our best efforts notwithstanding, we are beginning to find that the world doesn’t run properly without some measure of wildness in it.

The same can probably be said of the human animal itself.  Whether we recognize it or not, our hunt is still going on— the same restless search to the horizon that has brought us from the plains of the African Pliocene— or Eden, if you prefer— to where we are now. If we’re far enough removed from wilderness, we may not even recognize the root of the feeling, but that makes very little difference— we still can’t leave it behind.  Now and then, it demands free rein in an empty place, a long run beyond the fences.  Without that, it will subside at last into pacing the perimeter of our circumscribed lives, without direction or rest, looking for a way out and finding none.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Copyright Chris Madson. All rights reserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some thoughts

on the occasion

of the 2010 Census

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fill ’er up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American frontier had vanished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning by example

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

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

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

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