Building the Framework of American Conservation: At the Intersection of Crisis, Opportunity and Leadership

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1 DRAFT November 16, 2010 Building the Framework of American Conservation: At the Intersection of Crisis, Opportunity and Leadership Hal Salwasser and Stephen P. Mealey 1 Preface American conservation marks a monumental transformation in how humans interact with the rest of nature. It sits in a context of humanity s varied relationships with wild things and wild places, a story that is very old yet ever evolving. The story will end only when the last human breathes his or her last breath. In this essay we discuss how and why human relationships with nature have changed over time and how those changes came about. We treat the evolution of conservation as if it were a story with each chapter of the book a different phase in the relationships between humanity and wild places and wild life (the original term for native plants, game and non-game animals, including fishes). We focus mostly on the current chapter of the story in the United States, the era of conservation, and about the seminal roles of early sportsmen and especially members of the Boone and Crockett Club in forging its foundation and framework. We would not have conservation in America as we currently know it without pivotal historic principles and the men we cite in this story. These early voices for what would in time come to be called conservation changed the course of humanity s relationships with nature in America as well as Canada in ways that would come to have worldwide impacts. Theirs is a compelling story about vision, audacity, courage and persistence in confronting crisis and critics and creating opportunity by bringing some old and foreign ideas to fresh application in an industrializing society while creating along the way some novel approaches and policies. From reading the history of conservation in America, especially going back before the time of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir, it is clear that the American approach to conservation did not just happen (Matthiessen 1959, Trefethen 1975, Arrandale 1983, Udall 1988, Dunlap 1989, Reiger 2001, Mahoney et al. 2008, Brinkley 2009). It emerged and evolved as society changed, a process of natural selection of cultural rules similar to how other cultural norms arise (Hayek 1978). But the fundamental policies and practices of American conservation as we currently know it did not neatly nor predictably fall into place, i.e., they are not a result of centralized planning. They were created and promoted by leaders who saw crisis in humanity s impact on nature and called people to action to change how nature was being treated. The need for ongoing action and change is still with us so our concluding thoughts are on where the story might go in the future and some possible foci for concerted action. Let s get started by going back to the beginning for some fundamental grounding, well almost the beginning. 1 This paper was originally delivered at Michigan State University as the inaugural Boone and Crockett Program Distinguished Lecture on October 23, 2009 by the lead author. It includes material initially delivered by co-author, Mealey, in a dinner speech at the Boone and Crockett Club s 1989 Annual Meeting. 1

2 Chapter 1: In the Beginning When Homo erectus emerged in Africa nearly 2 million years ago the world got its first experience with what would in time become nature s ultimate apex predator, competitor and engineer, you might say THE keystone species of all time, so far. Erectus was a hunter-gatherer-angler and archaeologists estimate there were very few of them alive at any point in time, perhaps in the low tens of thousands in total. Until around 10-12,000 years ago, all Homo spp. were hunter-gatherer-anglers, i.e., for 99+% of our genus history. For at least the last 1 million years, Homo spp. were also pyro-hunter-gathereranglers, using fire to cook foods, help in the hunt or shape landscapes in their favor. Life based solely on the bounty of wild nature, or wild nature as shaped by human actions, was fundamental to hominid existence for nearly all of our history as a biological lineage. It still is for some people in remote parts of the world. Even for those who live where life is now based almost entirely on foods and materials grown or manufactured for human uses, hunting, gathering and angling remain as vital connections with humanity s primordial source of identity and well being or as intergenerational family traditions. This hunter-gatherer linkage of humanity with nature is so fundamental, so natural, that many do not even think about it today. Some even think it unethical or un-civilized. So, let us say a few more words on it before proceeding with the rest of the story. ~ 1.9 million -.4 million ybp First Homo to leave Africa, in Eurasia ~ 1.8 million ybp Pyro-hunter-gatherer-tool maker Primitive stone tools, fire, vocalization, rafts? Date of Fossil (years ago) Africa: East Turkana 1,800,000-1,600,000 West Turkana Olduvai Gorge 1,500,000 1,300, ,000 Bouri 1,000,000 Swartkrans 1,800,000-1,500,000 Ternifine 700, ,000 Sale 400,000 Israel: Ubeidiya 1,600,000-1,400,000 Europe: Dmanisi 1,750,000 Atapuerca 1,200,000 Java: Modjokerto 1,800,000 Sangiran 1,800,000-1,600,000 Ancestor to H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, H. sapiens (NRC 2010, others) Trinil 900,000? Ngandong 400,000 China: Yuanmou 1,700,000? Lantian 800,000 Zhoukoudian 750, ,000 Hexian 400,000 A hunter, gatherer or angler must know, understand and appreciate how nature works better than just about anyone save perhaps a premier field ecologist or naturalist. Success in the pursuit of wild plants and animals depends on deep knowledge about nature. And survival depends on perpetuating nature s diversity, productivity and processes, though as you will soon see that has not always been the case. These are two of the most important reasons to retain traditions of hunting, fishing and gathering in current and future generations, though beginning with the Axial Age nearly 3,000 to a little over 2,000 years ago traditions emerged in many cultures that abhorred the taking of animal and, in some cases plant, lives to sustain human life, an alternative in human ethics toward nature that runs strong even to this day (Armstrong 2006). Yet today, hunting-gathering-angling may be the only direct experiences 2

3 many people have with the most fundamental aspects of what we are as a biological species a consumer, competitor and predator -- and how we once fit into the larger scheme of life on Earth. As you will see shortly, it is this understanding, appreciation, and reverence for wild nature from hunters and anglers that fueled the conservation movement in America. Evolved in Africa, spread Africa (NRC 2010, others) ~ 800, ,000y bp Pyro-hunter-gatherer-advanced tools Primitive language, religion?, bury dead, built shelters Ancestor to H. neanderthalensis, H. sapiens? Hunted megafauna, primitive wooden projectile spears Bodo d'ar 600,000 Broken Hill Israel 700, ,000? 400, ,000? Gesher Benot 790,000 Europe Arago Cave 450,000 Atapuerca Boxgrove 800, , , ,000 Ehringsdorf ,000 Mauer 500,000 Petralona Cave Steinheim 400, , , ,000 Swanscombe 400,000 Vértesszöllös China 475, ,000 Dali 200, ,000 Jinniushan 280,000 Maba 169, ,000 Now, back to H. erectus. Pre-modern hominids first spread from Africa to Asia, then southern Europe more than 1.5 million years ago. Then they disappear from the fossil record around.5 to.3 million years ago. Around that time, possibly several hundred thousand years before, a new hominid emerged from the H. erectus line in Africa, H. heidelbergensis (NRC 2010). H. heidelbergensis is believed to be ancestral to all subsequent Homo spp. They made primitive tools, appear to have had rituals/religion, and built simple shelters. They hunted large mammals with wooden spears. Heidelbergensis dispersed from Africa around 790,000 ago and began invading Asia and Europe by around 600,000 years ago. Then, in Europe and Asia, around 150,000 years ago, another new hominid line emerged, H. neanderthalensis. Currently known Neanderthal fossils occur only in European and Asian sites. Neanderthal was cold adapted, sewed and wore clothing; made complex shelters and made more sophisticated tools than H. heidelbergensis. They also hunted large mammals using knives and stone projectile points. Sometime between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago, fully modern Homo sapiens began replacing the earlier hominids in Africa. And around 60-70,000 years ago, they repeated the invasions of Asia and Europe, eventually displacing Neanderthal by around 50,000 years ago in Asia and by around 30,000 years ago in southwestern Europe (Shreeve 2007, NRC 2010). 3

4 ~ 150,000 35,000 ybp NOT ancestral to H. sapiens Evolved in Eurasia, stayed there Cold adapted Sewing/clothes Pyro-hunter-gatherer-angler-sophisticated tools Landscape use of fire, complex shelters, hunted large mammals, jewelry, ritual defleshing/cannibalism?, language?, high frequency healed skeletal injuries similar to rodeo riders (NRC 2010, others) ~ 200,000 - present < 10K ybp pyro-hunter-gathererangler Out of Africa Model East Africa: Herto, Middle Awash Date of Fossil (years ago) 160, ,000 Omo 1 195,000 Laetoli 120,000 South Africa: Border Cave 115,000-90,000 Klasies River Mouth 90,000 Israel: Skhul and Qafzeh 92,000-90,000 Australia: Asia: Lake Mungo 60,000-46,000 Ordos (Mongolia) 40,000-20,000? Liujiang (China) 139, ,000? Shellfishing, fine stone blades, grindstones, stone points, long-distance exchange, fishing, bone tools, barbed points, etched items, microlithic blades, beads, images (NRC 2010, others) Zhoukoudian (China) Europe: Peştera cu Oase (Romania) Combe Capelle (France) Mladeč and Předmostí (Czech Republic) Cro-Magnon (France) 27,000 36,000-34,000 35,000-30,000 35,000-25,000 27,000-23,000 The extensive dispersals of various Homo spp. from their places of origin to new territories can only be interpreted to mean that hominids have both a high propensity to populate their habitats to capacity, given prevailing technologies, and a high capacity for adaptation to new environments. The estimated low numbers of total populations indicate that the natural capacity for occupied habitats to support hominids is far less than that made possible by agriculture, public health and technological advances. 4

5 Though, as we shall see, these advances and the human populations they enabled have come at great expense to the rest of creation. Early pre-humans, i.e., H. erectus, heidelbergensis and neanderthalensis, lived and moved about the landscape through multiple glacial and interglacial periods the last major interglacial prior to the one we are currently in being around 130,000 years ago -- proving remarkable tenacity and adaptability as early humans changed their distribution in response to ice, vegetation and climate. Since the advent of agriculture, humans have only lived in an interglacial period. Think about this in the context of current concern for climate change. Current humans have not yet been pushed to adapt nearly as much as were our ancestors. And we are far more sedentary and populous in our hardened abodes and communities, much less able to move infrastructure and cultures when conditions change. Pre-humans and early humans killed large mammals and birds everywhere they went -- the Pleistocene megafauna -- as well as smaller creatures. They gathered foods and fibers. They used fire to cook their foods and shape their landscapes in ways more favorable to their existence. They moved their abodes seasonally in response to where the natural resources on which their very survival depended were most available or abundant. They made tools, many for killing and preparing food. They lived in small bands of around individuals. They often killed one another; even in current primitive cultures 30% of male mortality is a result of conflict as opposed to around 3% in civilized cultures (need to get citation). Some of them ate other humans as some still do to this day. They had rituals, the early stirrings of attempts to know their place in the grand scheme of being and probably to acknowledge or revere the sources of their subsistence. The most recent forms developed languages, perhaps as early as H. heidelbergensis or H. neanderthalensis. 5

6 In some places, early humans made drawings on cave walls, many of scenes of the hunt. In many places this hunting eventually drove large mammals off the landscape, many to the point of extinction. The Pleistocene faunas of Europe, Australia, North and South America, until a time approximately coincident with the arrival of Homo sapiens, contained very large mammals and birds, a megafauna currently only remnant in parts of Africa and Asia, Fig. 1 (Johnson 2009). Island faunas were especially vulnerable to the first wave of human colonization. When modern humans finally got to North and South America, 6

7 likely more than 13,000 years ago, they lived off the megafauna and smaller animals, fish and plants until there were no more mammoths, mastodons, camels, giant ground sloths, glyptodonts, giant bison, giant beavers, short-faced bears, American lions, saber-tooth cats or dire wolves. Estimated arrival date of modern Homo sapiens in different parts of the world in relation to megafaunal extinctions, against the background of changes in global temperature through the Last Glacial cycle 1: NZ 2: Mdgscr 3: NE Siberia 4: NA 5: So Eur 6: Tasmania 7: Australia 2009 by The Royal Society (Johnson, C. Proc. R. Soc. B doi: /rspb ) Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions did not occur during the time of H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis or H. neanderthalensis. These species either were never sufficiently abundant or they lacked sufficient 7

8 technology to affect extinctions. But for Homo sapiens, it is a different story. While the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions may have been caused by some combination of climate change, landscape transformation through use of fire (Williams 2006), and harvest by humans in excess of replacement capacity (Martin 1973, Ripple and Van Valkenburg 2010), Johnson (2009) makes a very compelling case that hunting by modern humans was the predominant cause. These extinctions had profound impacts on the ecosystems that no longer contained very large herbivores and their predators, but now contained humans, effects possibly reverberating still to this day (Johnson 2009). Why did these megafaunal extinctions not occur in earlier times when pre-modern hominids and climate change were also present or in parts of Africa and Asia to this day? Science lacks conclusive answers, but it may have something to do with the cognitive powers of H. sapiens, with their tool making skills and social structure, and with how long modern humans and large mammals coexisted prior to advances in hunting technologies or population numbers. Whatever the constellation of forces in action, the primordial impact of humans on nature from earliest times to the present appears to have been to tame and simplify nature by killing the biggest, wildest things cohabiting the land and change the landscape (Marsh 1864, Thomas 1956, Clark et al. 1990). We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared (Wallace 1876, p. 50) K ybp - present AND DON T FORGET LANDSCAPE FIRE! Hunting then, as in some places to this day, was done for food and other materials necessary for life, to reduce competition for the former, or to reduce predation on the hunters themselves. Geist (1995) posits that elimination of large predators made the landscape safe for human habitation. In places where hunting reduced prey populations, in some cases causing their local extirpation or extinction, its combination with fire transformed nature, usually to a simpler, tamer ecosystem than before. That s it for pre-history. You might be wondering, why start the American story here and not in, say, 1492 or 1776 or 1864? How is it relevant to the American conservation story? It is relevant not only 8

9 because this first chapter also happened in North America, it is relevant because it is still the whole story in some parts of the world where human communities remain in the pyro-hunter-gatherer-angler subsistence mode. It also makes the conservation chapter in our story about humans and nature in America even more compelling. In at least some places humans decided to reverse their primordial relationship with nature, changing it from exploiter, dominator and exterminator only to exploiter and conservator, yet always a transformer. America, over the past 100 years, showed the world that protection and restoration of wild places and wild life from the outcomes of primordial and pre-conservation era human-nature relationships and its subsequent sustainable use through conservation could be accomplished by a human population growing in size and total resource consumption habits. And it continues to show that conservation of wild places and wild life based on shared, sustainable and ethical uses of natural resources can create wealth, some of which can be used to finance the conservation enterprise, rather than come at the expense of a nation s economic well being. Chapter 2: Another Way Emerges Emergent Civilization But humanity did not go from exploiter-dominator-exterminator to exploiter-conservator in one giant leap. A second chapter in the human-nature story opened around 10-12,000 years ago. In the Fertile Crescent (present-day Egypt to Turkey to Iraq), the Indus River Basin (north eastern India and western Pakistan), and the Yellow River Basin (eastern China) people began domesticating wild plants and animals and early agriculture emerged. Squash and potatoes were domesticated in Central America by 5-6,000 years ago, maize around 3,000 years ago. Agriculture allowed humans to augment then replace their total dependence on wild nature with a less migratory way of life, a way that allowed for larger communities to form. It enabled more complex social structures, division of labor and division of power, what we now recognize as emerging civilization. It also ushered in a new form of human-induced transformation of the land farming -- to augment the transformations caused by use of fire and simplified local food webs. In addition to fire and assisting in the extinction of some very large animals humans began changing the land in the vicinity of their communities from wild places for wild things to farms and pastures for domesticated plants and animals, further displacing even the animals and plants they did not hunt or gather. At least one-third of the forest cover on Earth at the apogee of post-glacial forest advance, ca. 6,000 years ago, has now gone under the plow, perhaps as much as half (Williams 2006), and most of the native grasslands as well since the advent of metallurgy. The bronze and iron ages of 5,000-3,500 BCE necessitated further forest clearings for wood to fuel smelters and forges, eventually replaced by coal and coke in some places. Deforestation also often accompanied local wars as either a source of materials or a tactic to deprive the enemy of materials (Perlin 1989, Ruddiman 2007, Williams 2006). These land transformations happened everywhere agriculture and civilization appeared. And they were massive in impacts. In those places forest-dwelling wildlife declined or disappeared in proximity to the agrarian enterprise. 9

10 Deforestation for smelter fuel ~ 5k YBP Some in our current generation think about human impacts on native fauna and flora as relatively recent phenomena, i.e., accelerating with the industrial age. They most certainly are not merely recent. It is a naïve delusion to think that prior to industrialized cultures humans lived in benign harmony with the rest of nature (Botkin 1990, Mann 2007). But as our story will tell, some human-induced ecosystem transformations are at least partially reversible. For many agrarian communities even to this day some species of wildlife ceased to be a source of subsistence and became a nuisance or threat to life or property, e.g., Canis lupus in proximity to livestock operations. Hunting, in addition to augmenting cultivated foods and fibers, became either a means to protect property or human life or a sport, often reserved for landowners or nobility. (Some early Celtic hunting customs indicate some stirrings of an ethic about the quarry, presaging our current North American fair chase hunting ethic by several thousand years.) The processes of human-induced transformation and de-wilding the land have certainly accelerated in recent centuries and they continue to this day in many places. Where this second chapter in the story about humanity and nature is also the last or current chapter, one sees devastated landscapes, denuded hills, abandoned farms, silted rivers, and much diminished wildlife, e.g., the eastern Mediterranean countries cited in Man and Nature (Marsh 1864) and poverty-stricken areas of Africa and central Asia to this day. Where large wildlife species did thrive through this chapter, it was in inaccessible places, places where terrain or lack of effective weapons allowed wild prey to withstand human hunting pressures, where hunting was reserved for those in power, or where local custom precluded harvesting down to the last individual of the species. In the United States, from European colonization to the late 1800s, this chapter was being played out in much the same way it had earlier in other parts of the world, except we did not have a nobility holding rights to the game. American game was an open-access resource for all who cared to exploit it. 10

11 Chapter 3: A Conservation Ethic Emerges But something happened in America, starting in the late 1700s, that would, in time, open yet another chapter in humanity s relationships with nature. Local and state sportsman hunter and angler groups in the East began working to halt excessive harvest of game and fish. For many decades they waged a noble but largely ineffective campaign. By the late 1800s, native fish were decimated in the East and many large mammals and their predators had been extirpated from the Rocky Mountains east. (Have you ever thought about how Buffalo, New York or Elkton, Kentucky got their names?) Killing fish, birds and large mammals for meat, fur, hide, or plume markets decimated edible fish and large mammal and bird populations in many parts of the growing nation. 1800s destruction of wild places and wild life, accelerating post Civil War Weak, unenforced laws No sustainability ethic Wildlife in the U.S., initially by custom and now by law, does not belong to landowners or a ruling class as they had in Europe and Asia; they belonged to whoever killed or caught them, a tradition affirmed by the Supreme Court in While the U.S. constitution affirmed social order by the rule of law, there were few to no game laws in most states or territories and where laws did exist there was little means of enforcement. Further, there were no state or federal agencies charged with protecting wild places or wild creatures. There weren t even states yet in most of the west. Biologist Garrett Hardin would later call this condition a tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968). Adding to habitat losses caused by agricultural development, wildlife and edible fish in the U.S. of the 1800s were exploited and commercialized by progress, especially after the Civil War with improved weaponry and transportation provided by rapidly expanding railroads. This situation applied to many other natural resources in the growing nation. It caused people who cared about wild things and wild places to become even more vocal than in earlier years and they set out to turn the tide of ecosystem simplification. 11

12 William Henry Herbert Frank Forester John Muir George Perkins Marsh Robert Barnwell Roosevelt Charles Hallock Gifford Pinchot George Perkins Marsh wrote eloquently about the effects of this part of chapter two in our story (Marsh 1864). But he was not the first and Man and Nature was not even his first writing on the subject (Marsh 1857). James Fennimore Cooper wrote about forest and wildlife destruction in the 1820s (Brinkley 2009). Despoiling nature drove the writings of William Henry Herbert ( Frank Forester ), as early as the 1840s, of Theodore Roosevelt s uncle Robert Barnwell Roosevelt in the 1860s-80s, of William T. Porter, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in mid century, and of John Muir and John Burroughs later in the century. It inspired the art of John James Audubon, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. All these men were prominent early voices for turning the juggernaut of land and nature abuse around. But they were by no means the only such voices, nor were they, with the possible exception of Muir, environmental idealists (Reiger 2001). Some of the early voices for nature in America are identified with Transcendentalist and Romanticist literary, artistic and philosophical traditions (for example, Muir and Burroughs with roots in Emerson and Thoreau) as opposed to progressive utilitarian traditions (George Bird Grinnell, Theodore Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot with roots in John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume). But lost in our mythology about the men who led the conservation movement at that pivotal time in our nation s history is that, with few exceptions, e.g., Muir, each was a hunter and/or angler throughout his life. And in viewing the leading voices of utilitarian conservation, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, often overlooked is that they were also very keen to the aesthetics and beauty of wild things and wild places (Reiger 2001, Brinkley 2009, Egan 2009). Roosevelt loved wild places with no roads and Pinchot abhorred clear cuts to his dying day. In the beginning of what became the American conservation movement, before it was even called conservation, it wasn t either or, preserve or use, it was both. And it remained both for some time though a sharp divide would eventually emerge, leading by the mid-1900s to the emergence of environmentalism as a competing ideology with conservation. The former invokes Muir as its hero, the latter Roosevelt, and Pinchot with Aldo Leopold striving to bridge the divide. 12

13 John James Audubon Albert Bierstadt Thomas Moran Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau John Burroughs Reiger (2001) argues that it was concern for wild life by affluent hunters and anglers and especially by affluent anglers for Atlantic salmon and brook trout that first drove the conservation movement. In timing, fish conservation came first, then wildlife conservation and later forest conservation. He builds a compelling case. Brinkley (2009) concurs with his assertions. The leading hunter-conservationists of the mid to late 1800s organized in local or regional sporting clubs. They used print, the only communication medium of the time, to promote their conservation agenda, though the word conservation would only later come into common use. They succeeded in getting game and fish protection laws passed in counties and states in the East prior to the Civil War. In addition to decrying the wasteful, unregulated harvest of native species, often for markets or local subsistence, these early advocates for wild life also railed against deforestation, land use conversion to farms and pollution of waterways. And their appeal for change included advocacy for a European ethic about proper relations between sportsman and prey, an ethic of the elite classes known as the code of the sportsman (Reiger 2001). Three historic principles, in place at the time though not always carried out, formed the foundation for what would become the framework of conservation in America: the rule of law (laws are evolved general rules that are universally applied by a society; they govern individual and social action and no one is above the law), the public trust doctrine (certain resources are reserved for public use and government is responsible for maintaining sustainable uses), and the code of the sportsman. The rule of law, discussed since the time of Plato and embraced by western cultures since the Magna Charta (1225 CE) and the public trust doctrine are not unique principles of American conservation but they are necessary antecedents. They evolved through larger and earlier social processes. 13

14 No one person was more successful in advocating the code of the sportsman and leading and inspiring its role in the budding conservation movement than George Bird Grinnell, a member of the wealthy Eastern establishment. Grinnell was a Yale PhD paleontologist. He became the natural history editor of Forest and Stream in 1876 and its owner and editor-in-chief in 1880, a position he held until From this national magazine, Grinnell waged a relentless campaign to halt the massacre of game and birds for meat, hide and plume markets, to further a hunting ethic and to promote the protection of non-game, fish and wild places for future generations. But it took him decades to succeed, building on the advocacy started by other sportsmen many decades before. Success also needed more than advocacy in the sporting media of the day. It also required advocacy in the general media, e.g., Atlantic Monthly, Colliers, Harpers Weekly, and other periodicals, and help from politicians such as Secretary of the Interior John C. Noble, Presidents Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt, Senator George Vest and Congressman John Lacey. All except Harrison and Cleveland were Boone and Crockett Club Members during or after their contributions (Grinnell 1910). Grinnell clearly stood on the shoulders of those who came before him, as would all those he worked with and those who followed him in time. In 1885, Grinnell reviewed Theodore Roosevelt s book Hunting Tales of a Ranchman in an issue of Forest and Stream, calling Roosevelt s perspectives naive. Roosevelt challenged him over the review. The result though was a partnership that changed the course of American human-nature relationships, becoming the direct precursor to conservation as we now know it. A crisis-driven window of opportunity created by the devastation of large mammals, waterfowl, waterways and fish and the despoiling of wild places such as forests and marshes was matched by the alignment of powerful voices in the media and politics not only ready to lead the charge but in the right places at the right time. 14

15 Sect. William Hallett Phillips Rep. John Lacey Sen. George G. Vest Madison Grant J. N. Ding Darling Naturalist since Childhood Multiple Books on Hunting Founder of Boone and Crockett Club THE Conservation President 148 million acres forests reserved (National Forest System) 5 national parks 54 wildlife refuges 18 national monuments 7 national Conservation Conferences Conservation champion post-presidency Roosevelt = Darwin (evolution) + Grinnell (ethical hunting) + Pinchot (utilitarian) + Burroughs (naturalist) + Muir (preservation) Together with several other well-heeled friends who loved to hunt big game in accord with the code of the sportsman, Roosevelt, Grinnell and eight others formed the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, its purposes: To promote manly sport with the rifle; To promote travel and exploration in wild and unknown, or but partially known, lands; 15

16 To work for the preservation of the wild animal life of this country, especially big game, and so far as possible, to further legislation for that purpose, to assist in enforcing the existing laws, and to educate the American public in the importance of proper game preservation; To promote inquiry into and to record observations on the habits and natural history of the various wild animals; To encourage making the results of sport available for scientific study in museums; and a couple others not germane to our story. What distinguished the Club from like-minded organizations before it were its national and eventually continental focus and its ready access to the halls of power in our democracy. Club leaders immediately took sharp aim on two top priority challenges of the time: stop game and fish killing for markets and protect wild places. These actions put the public trust doctrine to the test. Grinnell and Roosevelt proved an irrepressible tag-team in the arena. But they were not alone. They enlisted like-minded hunters and anglers to their cause, notably Gifford Pinchot, the greatest champion for forest conservation the nation has ever known. They did not grow the Club to enlist masses of members or to solicit broadly-based financing for their agenda as do some current environmental groups; regular membership has always been capped at 100 invited individuals. They did however enlist legislators, educators, artists and early federal agency leaders to their ranks as associate/professional members, e.g., Senators, Congressmen, the first five Chiefs of the U.S. Forest Service and the first four Directors of the National Park Service. This practice was renewed in the 1990s to also include Directors of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management. In retrospect, it is clear that early Boone and Crockett Club leaders led or contributed to shaping the foundation and framework of conservation in America, including what has lately come to be known as the North American Model for Wildlife Conservation (Geist and McTaggert-Cowan 1995, Geist et al. 1996, Mahoney et al. 2008). We differentiate here the framework of American conservation from the North American Model for Wildlife Conservation (Mahoney et al. 2008) because we are addressing conservation more broadly than just wildlife as have the leaders of the Boone and Crockett Club since its inception. Our view of the framework for conservation in America includes the North American Model plus more. Parts of the framework and of the Model in particular were present many decades prior to the late 1800s (Mahoney 2004), e.g., rule of law and public trust doctrine. The rest had to be built from the ground up. Both the framework and the Model were crafted, strengthened and augmented by others outside the Club and outside the sportsman hunter-angler community who wanted many but not necessarily all of the same outcomes. John Muir is the best known of these early advocates for wild places and wild things who did not come from the sporting hunter or angler community. It is also important to know that early Club leaders advocated for actions that had little to do with perpetuating hunting or fishing as conservation tools. Grinnell, for example, is credited with co-founding with Club member-to-be Frank M. Chapman what would eventually become the National Audubon Society a year before he became a founding member of the Boone and Crockett Club. He also worked to bring women into the conservation movement and gave them a voice in Forest and Stream (Merchant 2010). Club member and President Madison Grant started the New York Zoological Society in It is true that some of these leaders advocated for things we today would not consider ethical. But that s another story. 16

17 Protecting wild things for shared, sustainable and ethical uses necessitated protecting their abodes in wild places. Since the 1870s, the nation had a flagship state park in the Adirondacks and a national park in Yellowstone. But deer were being killed in the Adirondacks by methods far outside the sportsman s code and Yellowstone in the late 1880s still was not protected from poaching of trees, geological wonders or wildlife. Club leaders seized on Yellowstone and the Adirondacks as prime opportunities to demonstrate the conservation ethic with a public advocacy campaign, led by Grinnell, and legislative work to see that change eventually came. Attempts by a syndicate led by the Great Northern Railroad to build a rail line into Yellowstone and develop private destination facilities festered through the 1880s. By 1890, Club leaders brought those plans to a permanent dead end. As advocates even prior to forming the Club, members-to-be got the U.S. Army to station soldiers in Yellowstone to stop poaching in Poaching big game in the park continued into the early 1890s but it began to come under control when Capt. George Anderson (Club member) was dispatched as superintendant. By 1894, he had effectively brought the ideal of wildlife protection in Yellowstone into reality. Knowing that parks alone were insufficient to protect game ranges and for purposes of securing good flows of water, Club leaders led by forester Pinchot advocated for reservation of forests from the public domain throughout the mid to late 1880s. They supported and advocated for bills that were introduced in the Congress to extend forest protection for those purposes. This was finally accomplished when Club member and ex-secretary of the Interior William Hallett Phillips guided passage of the enabling clause in the Appropriations Act of Club member and Secretary of the Interior John C. Noble then persuaded President Harrison to reserve the Yellowstone National Park Timberland Reserve in that year, initiating what would in 1905 become the National Forest System with Pinchot as the first Chief Forester of the nation. Pinchot and Muir also joined forces on an 1896 National Forest Commission report that was used to convince President Cleveland to reserve another 38 million acres of public domain forests in 1897(Egan 2009), just months before leaving office. Club leaders in 1897 also finally succeeded in banning the killing of deer driven by dogs into Adirondack lakes from boats (Grinnell 1910). These early conservation actions culminated when as President, Theodore Roosevelt reserved an additional 148 million acres in 150 units of what would become national forests, 54 federal game and bird reserves (an idea originating at a meeting of the Club s Executive Committee), 5 national parks, and 18 national monuments, and convened 7 major conservation conferences to bring the conservation cause to national and state attention. Parallel in time, Club member Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior for the Dominion of Canada was doing the same thing for his nation. Imagine if you will, what our nations lands and wildlife might be like today were it not for these gifted communicators, administrators and politicians a century ago. Pinchot and Roosevelt used their bully pulpits and public outrage over the forest fires of 1910 to gain budget support for the underfunded Forest Service and to get the Weeks Act passed in 1911, allowing the purchase of degraded farm and forest lands in the east for addition to the National Forest System (Egan 2009). Grinnell, the brains of the Club (Reiger 2001), did the marketing through Forest and Stream for Club Member Madison Grant to eventually succeed in getting Glacier National Park declared in the first decade of the 20 th century. Few know or may not care to know that it was hunter and angler-conservationists, promoting the code of the sportsman, who led the way on every one of the grand ideas that now form the framework of conservation in our nation. And they still lead the way, though they now have many allies who do not 17

18 hunt or fish. Protecting wild places and wild life in the early 1900s was just the start. Conservation in America would come to need much, much more than just protecting a few wild places and species. Chapter 4: Building Infrastructure and Re-wilding the Land The states and the nation needed effective laws to protect and regulate the uses of wild lands and wild life, laws that crossed political jurisdictions as did the ecosystems and species themselves. And they needed agencies to oversee and implement those laws. In many places the land needed human-assisted restoration and re-wilding, that is, the recovery of native vegetation and the re-introduction of locally extirpated species, processes that began in the early 1890s and continue to this day. Bison, for example, were taken from the remnant population in Yellowstone to start a new herd in the National Bison Range in Montana. Elk, deer, pronghorn, mountain sheep, wild turkeys, and native fish were reintroduced to restore locally extirpated populations, a process that continues to this day. Forest cover was returned to degraded farmlands in the East. Another key part of the American conservation chapter in our story is the use of science to inform policy and management. Beginning in the late 1800s and blossoming in the early 1900s, the science of forestry began informing forest managers on how to sustainably restore, use and perpetuate productive forestlands. Most conservationists today know this. Few, however, know that the science of fish culture predated forestry by at least three decades. And the first forestry experiments in shared and sustainable resource use occurred on a private hunting preserve in Pennsylvania in the 1870s (Reiger 2001). Gifford Pinchot started his path-breaking forestry work at Biltmore Estate twenty years later. Pinchot did start a forestry program at an American university in the 1890s, Yale, but even that was not the start of scientific forestry. The Bisby Club had established a forestry program on its hunting preserve in New York in the 1880s, with Berhard Fernow as its forestry advisor. Fernow was Pinchot s predecessor in the USDA Division of Forestry. He also started forestry at Cornell University in But let s go back to Yale for a moment. Among the many future leaders of conservation to emerge from Pinchot s early Yale forestry program was a young Midwesterner named Aldo Leopold s 1930s-1940s 18

19 Leopold accepted a field assignment with the newly minted Forest Service in 1909 and proceeded to hone his skills and perspectives in the American Southwest. At first he persecuted predators to increase game abundance, only to reverse his thinking a decade later. Elimination of mammalian predators was widely accepted public policy at the time and remained so for many decades thereafter. His field reports speak of land health and the urgent need to reduce livestock grazing. By 1915, he had clearly set his course on wild life, completing the first Game and Fish Handbook for the U.S. Forest Service. He eventually took a position with the University of Wisconsin, wrote the first textbook on game management in 1933 (Leopold 1933) and founded the first graduate program in wildlife science in the nation. He and his students and a few others would found and nurture the professional field of wildlife biology the original science of conservation biology (Hammerstrom and Hammerstrom 1934), in the depth of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era, a crisis of enormous proportions. Leopold was the senior author of the first American Game Policy in 1930 (Leopold et al. 1930). He was not alone but he was another Club member example of a bold and visionary leader with the right skills and intense passion to match the needs or opportunities of the time. Throughout the early to mid-1900s Boone and Crockett Club leaders advocated for state game laws, federal treaties for migratory species, protection of places where wildlife could roam and thrive, and enforcement of those laws and protected places. Heeding Leopold s advice and recognizing the need for wildlife science and professional wildlife managers, Club leaders advocated for creation of Cooperative Wildlife Research Units at the nation s land grant universities to expand the education of wildlife professionals and build the body of scientific knowledge about wildlife. J. N. Ding Darling, the first director of what is now the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, brought the Coop Units into being and led the movement to restore migratory waterfowl. He was a Club Member. Club leaders led the move to create an excise tax on hunting gear, to fund in part state agency conservation programs. It is likely that the Club in those days did what it does now: identify the leading thinkers, scientists, communicators, and artists and bring them into the fold as professional members to augment the regular member s rich business and political connections to get needed work done. By the mid 1900s, the components of what is now called the North American Model for Wildlife Conservation were shaping up, though it would be decades before the Model was first described in print by Club member Valerius Geist (Geist 1995). Here is what characterized the Model by the late-20th century as articulated by Club member Shane Mahoney and others (Mahoney et al. 2008). 1. Wildlife belongs to the people as a whole, not to individuals or land owners. This is a distinct break from feudal societies. We say here that wildlife is managed by agencies of state and federal governance as a public trust. The New York Sportsmen s Club, established in 1844 by Frank Forester, was early and most strongly associated with this principle. 2. Commerce in illegally taken animals is a crime (state laws and the Lacey Act of 1900). 3. Conservation laws and policies are made through democratic processes, rule of law. This principle is integral to the nation s constitution and not just for wildlife conservation. 4. Access to hunting is open to all and allocated by the states according to law. The 2 nd Amendment right to bear arms allowed all citizens to possess the means to hunt if they so chose. 5. Wildlife should only be killed for legitimate purposes such as food, fiber or for personal or property defense. Early advocacy for this principle also dates back to the 1860s. 6. Some species and populations of wildlife are international resources and must be accorded protection under formal treaties between respective nations. 7. Science, when available and as applicable should be used to inform conservation and management policies, plans and practices. 19

20 These core principles have been called the seven sisters or pillars of the North American Model. But they are not all there is to the American experience in wildlife conservation or to American conservation in general. Nor are they all secure for all time, as articulated by Williams et al. (2009) and Mahoney and Cobb (2010). Other significant aspects of the current framework for American wildlife conservation include: 8. Hunting for other than protection of person or property should always be done ethically under practices of Fair Chase. Killing for legitimate purposes is a necessary but insufficient pillar for a conservation ethic. Based on the code of the sportsman, Fair Chase was an early tenet of local sporting clubs. As you might surmise, it along with hunting season and bag restrictions for protecting wildlife populations was fiercely resisted by regular folks and especially market hunters and anglers as an attempt to save wildlife and fish for only the wealthy. R. B. Roosevelt, however, was clearly thinking of those who depended on wild animals and fish for food in his writings of the 1860s and 70s. 9. Keeping habitats healthy, as naturally diverse as possible, productive, resilient and connected is a first principle for having healthy, productive, diverse and resilient wildlife populations. Aldo Leopold eloquently articulated this concept as a Land Ethic in the 1940s (Leopold 1949). To Leopold, the land ethic is a fundamental principle of conservation; it is the land (ecosystem) analog to the hunting ethic, deriving from the ancient code of the sportsman as applied to land rather than just pre 10. User pays, then shared financing of conservation is accomplished by users of wildlife paying most but not all of the bills through hunting and angling licenses and taxes on equipment. This was first advocated by Grinnell in 1880 in Forest and Stream. General tax funds now support part of state wildlife agency budgets, and much of the budgets for federal land and wildlife research and management agencies. 11. Keeping nature wild and re-wilding has been extended beyond game species to recovery of species headed for extinction since the Endangered Species Act of 1973, including some of the very predators once so mercilessly removed from the land, e.g., gray wolf and grizzly bear. These restorations of top predators, while driven by the ESA mandate for species recovery, are actually accomplishing much more. They are restoring diversity and resilience to wild ecosystems at landscape scales. 12. Public-private, state-federal partnerships and shared responsibility, lately called collaborative conservation (E.O ), are increasingly seen as key to sustaining the rich legacy of wildlife in America. Such partnerships have been around for many decades, but only recently codified as part of the foundation of American wildlife conservation policy. State, federal and tribal agencies cooperate in shared responsibilities for administering conservation laws and regulations. They assist private landowners who wish to sustain habitats and wildlife in working landscapes that are also producing food, fiber, wood and other natural resources vital to the quality of human life. The nation s universities educate conservation professionals and carry out much of the nation s wildlife research in partnership with government agencies, in the case of land grant universities also extending that scientific knowledge to landowners. 13. Because land and waters are finite and humankind is so numerous and growing more so with each new year, shared, sustainable and ethical uses of wildlife with other uses of lands and waters will be essential in perpetuating diverse ecosystems outside of what are known internationally as strict nature reserves, i.e., the few and often unconnected places dedicated primarily or exclusively to nature protection. Perpetuation of the richest diversity of wild plants and animals will require conservation in working landscapes where wild life shares the land with other uses, e.g., wood, food and fiber production. 20

21 Parts of the framework for conservation in America are set in law, others are ideals. Some are being whittled at, and others are still maturing (Mahoney et al. (2010). American conservation is a work in progress and probably always will be. From local to global scales the challenges ahead for conservation will be every bit as difficult as those for Grinnell, Roosevelt, Pinchot and Leopold. Current and future challenges are all driven by continued growth in the human enterprise, new technologies and their impacts on lands, waters, wildlife and the planetary climate. Some of the forces impinging on the North American Model (Williams et al. 2009, Mahoney and Cobb 2010) are: Global population growth, climate change and economics, urbanization all impinge upon wild places and wild life. Invasive species have created novel ecosystems for which many native species are poorly adapted. How the bills will be paid and by whom in the future is highly uncertain. On private land holdings large enough to encompass entire annual ranges, where public access is restricted, the critters may belong to the people but in reality their future depends on choices made by who owns the land. This may work against Model principles of public trust and equity in access to hunting but it often also works to the benefit of wildlife diversity and productivity. Markets now exist for meat raised in licensed game farms and for genetically modified animals. Access to hunting is being commercialized through fees on private lands, though some such lands are or may become the best places for diverse assemblages of native species to inhabit. Equity in access to hunting may also be impeded by special hunt auctions and requirements for outfitters or guides that exclude all but the very wealthy hunter. The challenges of keeping working landscapes diverse and well connected to places protected for wildlife gets harder with each increment in the growth and spread of humanity across the land. With the decline in the percentage of people who hunt, traditional support for conservation is shifting to groups that have not traditionally paid the bills and hunting declines as a much needed conservation tool. Are the Model and its core principles set in stone or are they organic, capable of change through time? Will what worked in the past serve us well into the future? Will we even think about change and adaptation if we do not engage over these and other questions about the future of conservation in America? We spent a fair amount of time in this story on the roles and impacts of specific individuals in changing relationships between humankind and nature. Those we mention are by no means the only Club members who made significant contributions to conservation in America. Nor were or are all advances in conservation made by Club members. But we want to return to the role of leaders because beneficial change in social systems does not just happen and the Club is revitalizing its historic role as a conservation leader through a network of Club-affiliated university programs. Change happens when windows of opportunity, often created by crisis, are aligned with the presence of people capable of leading others to a different place. Grinnell, Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot had crises 100 years ago to propel change but the crises were long standing and were eventually avoided at least in part only because of what they did. The same can be said of Muir and Darling, Rachel Carson and Aldo and Starker Leopold. 21

22 Professional Member Olaus Murie helped get Olympic and Grand Teton National Parks declared and along with colleague biologist and Club member Aldo Leopold led the movement that eventually resulted in Congress designating Wilderness Areas. As a Forest Service manager in New Mexico in the 1920s, Leopold caused to be designated the first primitive area that would later become a Wilderness with passage of the Wilderness Act of NEPA 1970 ESA 1973 NFMA 1976 Aldo Leopold s pioneering thinking and writing about a conservation conscience and a land ethic in the 1930s and 1940s (Leopold 1949) established at least part of the philosophical foundation for both the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973, both of which also changed the course of relationships between Americans and American wild life and wild places. His son, Starker, also a Club member, chaired the Advisory Board on Wildlife Management for the Secretary of the Interior from One of their reports propelled Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall to change the management philosophy of the National Park System, including the return of natural ecological processes such as fire where appropriate and the conservation of large predators (Leopold et al. 1963). Another Board report on predator control (Leopold et al. 1964) was so controversial it took a reformulated committee (Cain et al. 1972) to finally convince President Nixon to ban the use of predicides on federal lands. We cite these cases to show that the framework of conservation is subject to periodic improvement, i.e., it is not immutable. Preparing people to recognize opportunity and possess the right tools and skills to lead change is what universities are all about. It is certainly what the Club has in mind in creating alliances with leading universities in this country. In just one century in the long sweep of humanity s existence, a growing population of humans, producing and consuming more resources, found ways to simultaneously protect and restore wild lands and wild life for the public good. And the hunters and anglers who led the change financed nearly all the costs of the successful outcomes. This has, by no means, been done to perfection yet, not that it ever will, but the mere fact that conservation leaders in this country were able to partially reverse the historical relationship between humanity and nature as exploiter-exterminator-dominator to exploiter- 22