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CHAPTER THREE

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The Official Landscape

In September of 1916, less than two years after the Flint-Cary referendum, Joseph Grinnell and his student Tracy Storer published an essay titled “Animal Life as an Asset of the National Parks” in the journal Science. Their paper served as a manifesto for the next generation of Berkeley circle conservationists. According to Grinnell and Storer, the national parks offered more than just sublime scenery, healthful recreation, and a chance to view big game. They were also some of the last sanctuaries where visitors could observe wild animals and ecological processes relatively free from human influence. They provided opportunities to preserve “natural conditions” for research and education. And they could serve as nurseries for wildlife populations that had become depleted through excessive hunting in adjacent “unprotected areas.” This would be possible only if the National Park Service—which Congress had created less than a month earlier—avoided overdevelopment and unnecessary artificial manipulation and launched a new program of scientific management.¹

By suggesting that the national parks should be viewed as wildlife refuges, Grinnell and Storer helped initiate a new phase in American conservation history. The 1920s and 1930s were a time of great advancement in wildlife ecology and conservation, and Berkeley circle members played essential roles in this movement. During this period, they abandoned Progressive Era–style legislative campaigns and worked for change by reforming government bureaucracies from the inside out. They shifted their focus from the state to the federal level and from hunting regulations to habitat protection. They also continued to argue that scientific evidence should guide the management of wildlife in national parks and other nature reserves. In the process, they outlined almost all of the key scientific concepts that would inspire the field of conservation biology decades later, and they described most of the management problems that would shape endangered species debates in the postwar era.²

By 1955 A. Starker Leopold, the eldest son of Aldo Leopold and a lifelong Berkeley circle member, could describe the “complicated legal machinery” of hunting and fishing codes, which had formed the “backbone” of fish and game conservation during the Progressive Era, as flawed and insufficient. In the years since, scientists and managers throughout the country had come to appreciate the role of “habitat as the transcendent force that, more than any other, determines the level of wild populations.” According to Leopold, the idea of habitat conservation had been slow to catch on, but change was under way. It was “now an accepted truism,” he concluded, “that maintenance of suitable habitat is the key to sustaining animal populations, and that [game] protection, though it is important, is not itself a substitute for habitat.”³

The story of wildlife conservation in California and the rest of the United States from the end of the Progressive Era, around 1916, to the beginning of the environmental era in 1964 is, in large part, about the emergence of habitat as a key concept in science and management. Agreement on the centrality of this concept did not, however, lead to a consensus about who should manage habitats, by what means, and for which species. Divergent ideas about the meaning and purpose of habitat conservation fractured scientific societies, split the profession of wildlife management, and led to a division of labor and philosophy among government bureaucracies.

Habitat conservation is a complex endeavor, and disagreements about its techniques and objectives continue to this day. Yet Leopold’s larger point remains: after World War II, habitat conservation became an overarching framework for wildlife management in the United States. After the passage of the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973, however, this framework was increasingly turned on its head. Whereas scientists and managers had initially conceived of habitat conservation as an approach to managing wildlife, environmental activists would come to see wildlife conservation as a way to protect habitat. Setting aside habitat—in the form of parks, wilderness areas, nature reserves, and myriad other land management designations—eventually became an end in itself.

“NATURAL AREAS” IN AMERICAN ECOLOGY

Some of the earliest habitat conservation initiatives in the United States began among ecologists who wanted to preserve natural areas for scientific research. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the field of ecology in the United States was searching for a mission and a clientele that would demonstrate its social relevance and promote its growth and development. The first ecologists set out to address the unintended consequences of westward expansion, population growth, resource extraction, and agricultural development. Several of the discipline’s leaders worked in the Midwest and the Great Plains, where these changes had been particularly dramatic. They believed that the landscape transformations of the nineteenth century had thrown dynamic but orderly communities of plants and animals into disarray. Understanding how North America’s pre-Columbian landscapes functioned thus became a key aspect of their work to reestablish an equilibrium in the balance of nature.⁴

But the ecologists had two problems. First, they needed a set of objectives and a repertoire of methodologies that would distinguish their discipline. These would have to combine the broad, integrative perspective of field-based natural history observation with the scientific rigor and control of laboratory-based experimentation. It was not immediately clear what this new approach would look like, and ecology’s pioneering figures struggled to define their discipline’s best practices. Second, the ecologists were being outcompeted by specialists in the related resource management fields. New disciplines such as forestry, agricultural entomology, fisheries biology, and range management were already building their professional reputations, specializing in particular economic sectors, developing methods to investigate pressing problems, and winning the allegiance of patrons in government and industry.⁵

Two of ecology’s founders in the United States, Charles C. Adams and Victor E. Shelford, offered a solution to these problems (see figure 9). They argued that ecologists should move beyond the customary zoological approach of collecting and analyzing biological specimens to a new focus, the study of “natural areas.” They also believed that their fledgling professional organization, the Ecological Society of America—founded in 1915, just a year before the National Park Service—should advocate for the establishment of nature reserves to facilitate this research. According to Adams, it was not enough to preserve skins and bones in dusty museums. It was ecologists’ scientific duty to protect at least some areas where researchers could study “unified assemblages” of animals interacting under normal conditions in their primeval habitats and original associations. “The animal remains themselves are only a very incomplete record,” Adams wrote in 1913. “Their activities and environments are an essential part of the animals and should also be preserved.” Shelford echoed this sentiment when he noted that “from a philosophical and practical standpoint, the unified assemblage of organisms is commonly more valuable than the isolated rare species.”⁶

FIGURE 9. Victor Shelford. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives.

The natural areas that Adams and Shelford wanted to create would serve several functions. They would provide classrooms for teaching, storehouses of native plants and animals, opportunities for scientific research, benchmarks for measuring changes in the surrounding landscapes, and demonstration sites for projects in wildlife management and ecological restoration. “We must know nature,” Shelford wrote, as a “whole, if we wish to treat the simplest everyday problem of our relations to animals intelligently and justly.” Natural areas would also enable ecologists to acquire a professional identity distinct from those of practitioners in other fields who worked in spaces dominated by farming, ranching, logging, or other resource industries. “A branch of biological science which obtains its inspiration in the natural order in original habitats,” Shelford concluded, “must depend upon the preservation of natural areas for the solution of many problems.”⁷

If ecologists were going to build a new discipline based on the study of natural areas, they had to move fast. “Ecology,” Adams wrote, “has developed only at a late stage in civilization, after much of the environment has undergone great changes, so that in order to study the original conditions, which are of such great historic and genetic significance, he must make long journeys, or invade swamps or sterile uplands which man has not yet been able to reduce to the average conditions best suited to his needs.” Wild places were being destroyed, degraded, simplified, and transformed before scientists had a chance to study them—a lesson Grinnell had learned all too well in California. “One can but wonder,” Adams continued, “if the naturalists of the future will commend our foresight in studying with such great diligence certain aspects of biology which might be very well delayed, while ephemeral and vanishing records are allowed to be obliterated without the least concern.” These records included not only species but also habitats and ecological relationships.⁸

Adams and Shelford had status in their young discipline, and they used their influence to promote an agenda of natural areas preservation. Both men had received their doctorates from the University of Chicago, and they were among the country’s first animal ecologists. In 1915 Shelford became the first president of the Ecological Society of America, and two years later he appointed himself head of a new Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions that oversaw the society’s most ambitious initiative. The committee sent out queries, conducted field surveys, and assembled a massive amount of geographical information. By 1921 it had identified about six hundred sites worthy of protection. Shelford’s committee published its study five years later as a 761-page tome, Naturalist’s Guide to the Americas.⁹

The Naturalist’s Guide was more than just an inventory. Its main objective was to locate natural areas and make them more accessible for scientific research, but it also offered a professional agenda for the discipline of ecology that included a broad critique of the traditional biological sciences. According to Shelford, research specialization in particular objects and organisms was impeding crucial integrative studies on “the entire life of natural areas.” Ecologists rejected not only narrow specialization but also “fads” and “crude ideas,” such as “the survival of the fittest.” These notions had given biologists in most other fields a myopic view of nature better suited to sterile laboratories than to the landscapes where organisms actually lived. When he described those landscapes, Shelford used environment and habitat as synonyms. He argued that there could be “no adequate knowledge of fitness to environment without knowledge of environment” and insisted that “knowledge of habitats can be organized into science.” By studying species in their natural habitats, Shelford and his colleagues hoped to transform scientists’ understanding of evolutionary biology.¹⁰

Over the next decade, Shelford continued to update the Naturalist’s Guide with additional assessments, reports, articles, and recommendations. These included a new framework for prioritizing and designing nature reserves. “First-class” sanctuaries would be “areas of natural vegetation containing as nearly as possible all the animal species known to have occurred in the areas within historical times.” Second- and third-class sanctuaries would encompass more modified landscapes, such as sites with altered vegetation and extinct or introduced species. All sanctuaries should have core natural areas that would remain unavailable for human uses other than scientific research. Core areas would be surrounded by buffer zones, which would provide additional habitat for the wide-ranging species that needed the most protection, particularly large carnivores.¹¹

This focus on natural areas helped set ecology on a different path in the United States than in other parts of the world. In Britain, where the field had also taken root, ecologists were not nearly so interested in the types of places that American scientists and conservationists called wilderness. British ecologists, such as Arthur Tansley, regarded traditional land uses as components of the cultural landscape that were essential for the maintenance of many indigenous ecological communities. American ecologists came to view human land uses as disturbances—cattle grazing is a classic example. Yet for Tansley it was the removal of such activities that counted as the disturbance. Only when British ecologists traveled outside Europe to other regions of their empire did they adopt a more American-style approach, which embraced the idea of wilderness, dismissed customary indigenous practices, and provided a convenient scientistic justification for their seizure of lands and natural resources.¹²

During the 1910s and 1920s, Shelford’s work gained support in the Ecological Society of America, which adopted his sanctuary protection plan and became one of the first national organizations to work for habitat protection. Yet by the 1930s, support began to wane. Most ecologists still backed efforts to establish nature reserves, but the society’s membership, which had grown to 653 people by 1930, was shifting toward the view that a national scientific organization should remain apolitical. As early as 1933, members debated whether scientific societies should endorse land preservation efforts or leave this task to the country’s growing collection of activist conservation organizations. The society’s constitution prohibited lobbying on “nonscientific” issues, so part of the question was whether preservation work was sufficiently scientific. This was just the first of several struggles in the society over the proper relationship between science and activism.¹³

In 1937 Shelford threatened to leave the organization he had helped to found more than two decades earlier if it did not amend its constitution to permit his conservation projects. Seven years later he wrote a letter to Science complaining that the Ecological Society of America had made little progress in its preservation work. “With wartime and post-war pressure to destroy nature mounting,” he reflected, “it is well for those interested in its preservation for scientific purposes to look over the machinery by which some of it may possibly be saved.” Later that year he circulated a survey to the society’s members, and 85 percent of the respondents supported his committee’s efforts. The society’s governing board opposed the program, however, and in 1945 it blocked a petition to amend the constitution. The following year the board voted to abolish Shelford’s preservation committee.¹⁴

Shelford did not follow through on his threat to leave the society, but he did partner with sympathetic colleagues to establish a new organization to continue the work of the preservation committee. In 1946 he and more than a dozen other senior ecologists, including four past Ecological Society of America presidents, founded the Ecologists Union. It advocated for the protection of primitive areas in the national forests, passed resolutions against the transfer of federal lands to state and private control, and shifted its focus from Washington, DC, to regions with important natural areas. Once the union established its independence, the Ecological Society of America’s board endorsed its work as a scientifically grounded conservation organization. In 1950 the union changed its name to the Nature Conservancy (TNC). TNC would become one of the world’s largest conservation organizations, and from the beginning it has dedicated its efforts to protecting biodiversity and endangered species through habitat protection.¹⁵

The Ecological Society of America’s shift away from natural areas preservation had another effect: it helped to facilitate the emergence of wildlife management as a profession. Wildlife management coalesced in the 1920s and 1930s, combining features of forestry, ecology, natural history, and fish and game conservation and often focusing on the vast new public lands created by the New Deal. The first generation of wildlife managers believed that public officials should administer natural resources for the common good, but they held diverse opinions on what this meant in practice. Academic scientists, government officials, recreational hunters, conservation activists, and landowners and users, including farmers and ranchers, thus waged a series of struggles over the meaning and purpose of wildlife management that shaped the young profession and created a context for future conflicts about endangered species and habitat conservation. The most important of these battles was over predator control.

PREDATOR CONTROL

In the early twentieth century, most people viewed predators as varmints. This included animal welfare activists concerned about the plight of prey species, hunters worried about the loss of game, and ranchers anxious about the security of their livestock. It also included many scientists and government officials. In 1925 Edward A. Goldman, a prominent scientist from the Smithsonian Institution and the Bureau of Biological Survey, expressed a common sentiment when he wrote that “large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock and to game, no longer have a place in our advancing civilization.” Other prominent authors, such as Ernest Thompson Seton, expressed regret that large carnivores, such as the wolf and the grizzly, were disappearing from the North American landscape, but even Seton agreed that such extinctions were the inevitable price of progress.¹⁶

Beginning in the 1880s, the Bureau of Biological Survey, under the direction of C. Hart Merriam, published a series of reports on the economic effects of predators. Its early work took a relatively positive position compared to that of its later work, which focused on the damage that predators caused. Merriam, Albert K. Fisher, and other bureau officials emphasized the services predators provided, such as culling sick animals, consuming carrion, and devouring rodent pests. They even took positions on public policy. As early as 1886, Merriam publicly criticized a law passed the previous year in Pennsylvania, dubbed the Scalp Act, that issued a bounty of fifty cents on hawks, owls, weasels, and minks. Using a simple cost-benefit analysis, he calculated that in its first year the program had operated at a loss of more than $3.8 million. The same could be said, he believed, of similar programs in states throughout the country.¹⁷

Merriam’s moderate view was an exception to the rule. Predator control remained a ubiquitous practice throughout the United States into the 1920s. Federal agencies, state fish and game departments, university extension programs, county animal control boards, livestock organizations, and private landowners all pursued their own programs. Control efforts in California grew along with its farming and ranching industries. Between 1919 and 1947, the state employed two full-time mountain-lion hunters, Jay Bruce and C.W. Ledshaw. In his autobiography, Cougar Killer, Bruce claimed to have bagged 669 of the animals. According to a study published in 1931 by Jean Linsdale, another of Joseph Grinnell’s students, poisoning programs aimed at predators and rodent pests were under way on more than a third of California’s land, at a cost of $812,478. Grinnell calculated that these programs were killing more than fifty million animals per year, including members of many “non-target” species, some which were in danger of extinction.¹⁸

Early in his career, Grinnell seemed conflicted about how to deal with predators. He supported the control of rattlesnakes and mountain lions, advocated the sustainable harvest of fur-bearing mammals, proposed experiments in game farming, and accepted that scientific management would require some limited local culling of problem species. But he thought it was wrong to poison animals or subject them to unnecessary suffering, and programs that sought to eradicate rather than control predators horrified him. Over time, he became convinced that most control programs were wasteful, destructive, and unsupported by scientific evidence, and he called for an end to indiscriminate shooting, trapping, and poisoning. By 1930 Grinnell had emerged as the country’s foremost opponent of predator control policies and practices.¹⁹