Читать книгу After the Grizzly - Peter S. Alagona - Страница 8

INTRODUCTION

One hot morning in the spring of 2004, I found myself in a distant corner of the Mojave Desert, standing in a field surrounded by saltbush and sage, feeling disoriented, overdressed, and a little embarrassed. A biologist named Peggy Wood had agreed to let me tag along with her while she tracked a small population of desert tortoises in a fenced area to which they had been moved to make way for the construction of an automobile test track. Peggy had handed me a radio telemetry receiver and an antenna and explained how to use the two devices to locate the tortoises she and her colleagues had fitted with beacons as part of the project’s wildlife translocation and mitigation effort. I set off on foot to search for a signal, and within a few minutes, sure enough, the receiver’s faint, intermittent chirps merged into a loud, continuous buzz. According to the receiver, I was standing practically on top of a fifteen-inch-long adult desert tortoise with a plastic and metal radio glued to its back. I had heard that desert tortoises were masters of disguise, but this was absurd. Here I was, just feet from the Mojave’s most famous endangered species, and I couldn’t find it. All I could see in front of me, when I turned away from the graders and bulldozers next door, was miles and miles of desert.

I did eventually find the tortoise, with Peggy’s help—it was lying as still as a rock, and looking like one too, against the gravelly desert floor—a couple meters away, in the shadow of a creosote bush. I had nearly stepped on the poor critter.

On the way home that evening, after the temperature began to drop and my pride started to heal, I realized that even though I had missed the tortoise, I had stumbled upon an invaluable insight. Studying an endangered species is only partly about surveying populations, tracking movements, and documenting behaviors. It is also an exercise in comprehending the politics of land use and natural resource management, the laws that structure our relationships with nonhuman beings, and the drivers of regional economic and environmental change. Perhaps most important, it is as much about the places where endangered species live as it is about the species themselves. Don’t get me wrong: many people care deeply about wildlife and the threats of species extinction and biodiversity loss. But endangered species are by definition rare, and, like the inconspicuous desert tortoise, most remain unseen except by highly trained experts. It was clear to me that the conservation efforts I had witnessed earlier that day were part of a much larger scientific, legal, and bureaucratic project, which was as much about protecting the Mojave—fencing off at least some of those vast desert miles—as it was about conserving the tortoises that lived there (see figure 1).¹

FIGURE 1. Street sign in the Mojave National Preserve near Cima, California. Courtesy of Christopher Woodcock.

These observations are not new. Since the 1970s, dozens of endangered species conservation conflicts have captured national media attention. Many commentators have noted that in such struggles, the species in question often serve as proxies for much larger debates involving the politics of place, which I define as an ongoing cultural conversation about who should have access to and control over lands and natural resources. Seen in this way, endangered species debates are about not only the conservation of biological diversity but also the allocation of scarce public goods, the appropriate level of government intervention in a market economy, the distribution of legal authority among state and federal bureaucracies, the proper role of scientific expertise in democratic institutions, and divergent visions for the political and economic futures of communities and even entire regions. Endangered species have become surrogates for environmentalists who use them to pursue broader political agendas—such as preventing development, establishing nature reserves, or reducing carbon emissions—and scapegoats for those who oppose further regulation or stand to lose from changes in government policies. When it comes to endangered species, one person’s totem is another’s effigy.

It is one thing to identify a proxy debate but a more complex matter to explain that debate’s antecedents, origins, development, and peculiar political framings. How did the United States develop a political system capable of producing and sustaining debates in which endangered species serve as proxies for broader cultural conflicts with such far-reaching social and economic consequences?

In the pages that follow, I argue that the endangered species debates that have rocked American environmental politics since the 1970s are the product of a more than century-long history in which scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as inextricable from the ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived. Endangered species advocates adopted the concept of habitat to describe these circumstances and relationships, and over time habitat conservation became a central tenet of wildlife management. The word habitat has many contexts and meanings. This book shows how habitat became the concept that connects endangered species to contested places and how this connection has allowed people to use those species as proxies for a host of broader social conflicts. It describes how a particular version of habitat conservation—the “protected natural area”—became the dominant paradigm for endangered species management in the United States. Finally, it suggests that although the protected areas paradigm probably helped prevent many extinctions in the twentieth century, this approach has encountered a range of problems and paradoxes in the twenty-first century, jeopardizing the survival of myriad threatened and endangered species.²

Readers who have studied endangered species issues will notice that this thesis differs from most other accounts, which identify the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) as the source of so many subsequent conservation conflicts. The ESA, which calls for the protection of all plant and animal species, as well as vertebrate subspecies and distinct populations, no matter the cost, passed Congress with nearly unanimous support in 1973. By the end of that decade, however, it had become perhaps the country’s most controversial environmental law. Today the ESA remains not only one of the most formidable and comprehensive U.S. environmental statutes but also the most ambitious biodiversity conservation measure ever enacted by any country.³

The ESA plays a central role in this book, but I consider it part of a much longer story. Concern about extinctions dates back to at least the 1880s in the United States, and ambitious species and habitat conservation efforts began during the first half of the twentieth century, decades before the ESA’s passage. The ESA is important here not because it was unique or unprecedented but because it continued two long-term trends: increasing the government protection of imperiled species, and elevating habitat to the status of a key concept in environmental science, law, management, and politics. Indeed, one of the reasons the ESA has become so powerful and controversial is that after its passage it evolved—through a series of legislative amendments, court decisions, and administrative rules—from a species protection law into a habitat protection law far stronger than almost anyone could have anticipated.⁴

There is another important reason why the ESA became such a powerful and controversial law. During the 1970s and 1980s, at the same time that environmental law was beginning to mature as a legal subfield, conservation biology was becoming established as an interdisciplinary scientific profession in academia, government, and nongovernmental organizations. In its early years, conservation biology focused mainly on developing theories and models to guide the selection and design of nature reserves for the conservation of habitat and biodiversity. Practitioners in these two fields still complain about the gulf that separates science from law, which they believe hampers effective policy and management. With a little historical perspective, however, it becomes clear that the two fields emerged and grew together, informing and shaping each other along the way. This reciprocal process, known as coproduction, creates what science studies scholars call hybrid concepts. Today it is impossible to provide a complete definition of either habitat or endangered species without referring to both science and the law and the relations between them.⁵

This book also takes a different perspective than most other endangered species research on the subject of federalism, which remains at the heart of many environmental debates. Historians often note that over the past two centuries, the United States government has extended its authority to new regions, peoples, and resources, in the process growing in size and increasing the range of its powers. Although this has occurred in many ways and in many areas, few topics seem to represent the theme of federal expansion better than wildlife. Before the twentieth century, the states retained nearly complete authority over the fish and game within their boundaries. Beginning in 1900, however, Congress passed a series of laws that increased federal involvement in wildlife management. To many observers, the ESA, which is essentially a receivership program that authorizes the federal government to step in and act on behalf of species that have suffered under state authority, represents the culmination of a process through which the U.S. government gradually expanded its influence over wildlife and natural resources, often at the expense of states’ rights and local control.⁶

A closer look reveals a more complicated story. First, the federal government is anything but a monolithic entity with a coherent set of interests and objectives. Federal agencies have diverse institutional cultures, histories, missions, and alliances, making interagency cooperation challenging under the best of circumstances. Even in cases where one agency, or one group within an agency, appears to have the legal authority to advance its agenda, complex power relations often thwart action. The two federal ESA-implementing agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have seen their legal responsibilities increase, but they remain underfunded, understaffed, and underresourced.⁷

Second, although the states have lost some of their autonomy, they still have administrative control over almost all of the nonendangered wildlife inside their boundaries. In recent years they have continued to develop their regulatory frameworks and administrative capacities. By 2012 only four states lacked some form of endangered species legislation, and the fifty states together issued 90 percent of all regulatory permits related to the environment. Not surprisingly, many state officials now believe that laws and cooperative agreements other than the ESA grant their wildlife agencies, not the federal government, the lead role in endangered species programs. The states will only continue to reassert their authority in the future, as pressure builds to remove more species from the federal list and return them to state jurisdiction.⁸

The federal government has played a pivotal role, however, in the area of habitat conservation. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, state fish and game programs focused on artificial propagation and the regulation of take: establishing open seasons, bag limits, and other rules meant to limit hunting and fishing to sustainable levels. The states owned little land, and they had few precedents or incentives to allocate space for wildlife habitat. Beginning in the 1930s, a series of conservation initiatives, including several associated with federal New Deal recovery efforts, set out to protect and restore habitat in the national parks and new national wildlife refuges. Laws regulating take remained, and divergent visions for habitat conservation competed for dominance in various agencies. Yet overall, increased federal intervention fostered a new approach that moved beyond managing fish and game by regulating individual animals to managing land as habitat for wildlife conservation.⁹

The federal government did not invent the notion of habitat conservation. The idea of managing land to produce fish and game probably dates back millennia, but a more modern rationale emerged during the 1910s and 1920s among the founders of the discipline of ecology in the United States. Key figures, such as Victor Shelford, the first president of the Ecological Society of America, argued that the concept of habitat—understood as the biophysical relationships among species and between species and their environments—could provide an organizing framework for the entire field. For Shelford, habitat provided the keys to understanding ecology, and ecology opened the doors to understanding evolution. Habitat also provided spaces for rare or imperiled species and for the scientists who studied them.¹⁰

Ecology and conservation have changed in many ways since Shelford’s time, but at least one aspect of his philosophy has survived. During the early twentieth century, ecologists argued that protected areas—including national parks, wildlife refuges, and other nature reserves—offered the most value for science and conservation when in their “original” condition. This meant that the most pristine areas, in terms of human influence, held the greatest value for habitat conservation. “Unprotected” sites would prove of little use as human activities increasingly altered them, and this meant that nature reserves would need vigilant protection against outside forces to maintain their value. These same themes would reemerge among the first generation of professional wildlife managers during the 1930s and among the founders of conservation biology in the 1980s. This approach lives on today, in modified form, as the protected areas paradigm.¹¹

Creating nature reserves is not the only way to protect endangered species or even safeguard their habitats, but in the United States, and increasingly elsewhere, it has become the preferred approach. People who advocate for more protected areas have good reasons for doing so. Protected areas enable efficient management and provide diverse social and ecological benefits. Their administration can prove controversial, but it tends to incite less conflict than regulating the take of protected species on private property or multiple-use public lands. Protected areas render nature more legible for bureaucratic institutions by reducing unruly patterns, dynamic processes, and blurry boundaries to lines on a map that define the extent of conservation programs. Protected areas build on a strong legal rationale in that they can be owned outright, as either public or private property—a concept with high regard in American society. The protected areas approach also has a cultural resonance, in reinforcing the traditional American penchant for preserving relics of pristine nature in the form of national parks and wilderness areas. Finally, in an era when habitat loss constitutes the most important driving force behind most species declines, the creation of nature reserves offers a practical conservation approach that has probably already prevented numerous extinctions. And for that, we can all be thankful.¹²

Since the 1990s, however, the protected areas paradigm has come under criticism from scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Historians such as Alfred Runte and Richard West Sellars have critiqued the political and bureaucratic processes by which U.S. national parks were selected, established, and managed. The geographers Robert Wilson and Nathan Sayre have completed similarly provocative and enlightening studies of political conflict and administrative folly for wildlife refuges in the American West. A series of authors, led by William Cronon, have argued that the modern American idea of wilderness is based on a peculiar and problematic cultural history that fetishizes primeval nature over the places where most people live and obscures the diverse human values and activities that have helped produce all contemporary cultural landscapes. Numerous researchers in the interdisciplinary subfield of political ecology have adopted postcolonial and neoliberal development theories to show how, in economically poor but ecologically rich regions of the world, nature reserves have often served as a form of enclosure that privileges the environmental objectives of wealthy northern and western countries while making it more difficult for local people to access scarce natural resources. In response, conservationist biologists have defended their work and rethought their approaches. Nevertheless, scholarly debates about protected areas have often devolved into contests pitting ecological protection against social justice—a dichotomy that drastically oversimplifies the issues.¹³

This book builds on these insights and debates but focuses on a somewhat different problem. It locates the origins and logic of natural areas preservation not only in broad cultural ideas about nature but also in the specific and intertwined histories of American ecological science, environmental law, and natural resource management. The result is that this book focuses less on debates about ecological protection versus social justice than on the question of how the protected areas paradigm emerged and spread as a principal approach for biodiversity and endangered species conservation and whether, in the face of much political conflict, nature reserves established for these purposes are fulfilling their goals.

The results to date are mixed. Efforts to manage wild species inside legally bounded but ecologically porous nature reserves have always proved difficult. Endangered species managers increasingly rely on privately owned reserves that have more administrative flexibility than public lands do but whose permanence remains in question. Government agencies are suffering from unprecedented shortfalls in funding and resources, which have exacerbated conflicts over their land management priorities and raised the question of whether reserve administration is, in fact, less contentious than the regulation of take on nonreserve lands. Recent research suggests that wildlife-habitat relationships are more complicated and less understood than previously believed; some species that seemed relatively tolerant of human activities now appear to be much less so, while others once thought to require remote wilderness areas have found refuge in the most unlikely of built environments.¹⁴ Species declines that were once assumed to stem from a few limiting factors actually resulted from complex, multifarious, and synergistic forces. Global climate change threatens to transform all habitats, including those “protected” in nature reserves. And although habitat conservation has probably helped forestall many extinctions, it has not yet proved to be an effective tool for recovering endangered species to self-sustaining populations.

Many endangered species need more nature reserves, not fewer, if they are to persist in a world of rapid environmental change and mounting ecological problems. And despite major achievements in using nature reserves to maintain biodiversity in the United States, the protected areas paradigm does not offer a panacea for the problems facing endangered species and their keepers in the decades to come. But the time has also come to rethink the role of protected areas in a broader program of land, wildlife, and biodiversity conservation for the twenty-first century.

This book explores these issues through a history of endangered species and habitat conservation, with a focus on vertebrate wildlife, in and around California. Since 1967 the FWS and NOAA have listed around fifteen hundred types of plants and animals throughout the country as threatened or endangered. Every state now has listed species. Yet none offers a richer ecological context in which to study endangered species than California. This state has a greater diversity of plant and animal species than any other. It has the second-largest number of endangered species—more than three hundred as of 2012—after Hawaii (see map 1). It also has by far the largest number of species at risk of becoming endangered in the future, with at least 50 percent of its vertebrate fauna falling into this ominous category. The California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) estimates that seven vertebrate species or subspecies have gone extinct in the state since the gold rush. Several factors have contributed to these patterns, but habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, and a legacy of overhunting all rank near the top of the list.¹⁵

MAP 1. Species richness (combining both quantity and rarity) and endangerment in the contiguous United States. The numbers indicate species listed as threatened or endangered, per state. Richness data courtesy of Oxford University Press.

California’s human history also makes it an ideal place for a study of this type. The state experienced dramatic environmental changes during the nineteenth century, was home to some of the first park and forest conservation movements, and hosted several innovative early experiments in wildlife management. After World War II, it developed a vast network of research universities, an influential community of activists, and pioneering environmental policies that provided the basis for similar measures by other states and the federal government. Wildlife conservation initiatives began later in California than in the Northeast and Midwest, but the state eventually built the country’s largest wildlife management infrastructure. In the 1980s and 1990s, it became a hearth for the development of conservation biology, witnessed some of the country’s most infamous endangered species battles, and hosted novel experiments in policy and management, including the nation’s first habitat conservation plans (HCPs). California has spent far more on terrestrial and aquatic habitat conservation than any other state. In 1999 its legislators passed the Marine Life Protection Act, which launched a process for designating marine protected areas along the state’s 840-mile coastline and made it the national leader in marine habitat conservation. In American endangered species history, California has played an outsize role at once unique, representative, and influential.

This book recounts a series of stories told from the perspectives of scientists, conservationists, bureaucrats, farmers, ranchers, developers, and others who live and work in California. These characters most often deal with issues close to home, but they also travel and correspond and collaborate with colleagues around the state and the country. The species they discuss often cross boundaries too, and as a result this book frequently wanders beyond the state’s borders. By writing this history from the view—instead of at the scale—of California, I have attempted to give the state’s experience a broader context while maintaining my conviction that endangered species debates are best told as historical narratives about the politics of place.

The first part of the book, chapters 1 through 4, is organized chronologically and thematically and spans from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Chapter 1, from which the book takes its name, focuses on the epic tale of the rise and fall of the California grizzly, the state’s official mascot and a ubiquitous symbol from a formative time when residents were debating what kind of place California should become. Chapter 2 moves on to the Progressive Era and the state’s first wildlife conservation campaign, led by the zoologist Joseph Grinnell and his Berkeley circle of students and colleagues, who set out reform state fish and game laws and in the process laid the foundation for future endangered species and habitat conservation efforts in the state. Chapter 3 follows the Berkeley circle’s shift, in the decades that followed, from grassroots campaigning in state-level politics to working for bureaucratic reform and habitat conservation on the growing federal lands. Chapter 4 picks up in the postwar era, when diverse social forces converged to enable the passage of the ESA, a law that would have profound and unexpected consequences as it evolved from a species protection measure into a broader mandate for habitat conservation.

Part 2, chapters 5 through 8, presents four case studies of endangered species in California, including the events that resulted in their declines and listings, and the conservation debates, failures, and occasional successes that followed. The four species hail from different taxonomic groups and represent regions of California with different economic geographies, political dynamics, and endangered species–related conflicts. Chapter 5 considers the California condor controversy, which exposed an awkward split between wildlife managers and wilderness preservationists but eventually led to a philosophical consensus among conservation biologists that combined scientific management with habitat preservation. Chapter 6 follows the story of the desert tortoise, a species whose decline helped launch a new era of land management in the Mojave Desert but which has continued to suffer despite having vast areas set aside on its behalf. Chapter 7 introduces the San Joaquin kit fox, the flagship species of an industrialized agricultural landscape, whose history illustrates our still limited understanding of wildlife-habitat relationships. Chapter 8 turns to the delta smelt, an indicator species for the California Bay-Delta that became embroiled in a water war and whose predicament casts doubt not only on the protected areas approach to endangered species recovery but also on the very idea of habitat conservation as Americans have traditionally understood it.

The emergence of habitat as a key concept in environmental science, law, management, and politics is one of the great, untold stories in American conservation history. It is also essential for understanding contemporary endangered species debates. This book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on the importance and accomplishments of the protected areas paradigm while highlighting the limitations of nature reserves as a conservation strategy. It ends with a call for a broader vision that moves beyond an approach that served conservationists well in the past but has little chance of recovering endangered species in the future.