Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (14 page)

But underlying his alarmism was a radical idea. Previously, concern about disappearing wildlife focused on game species and the desire to keep them perpetually in supply for hunters. But Hornaday cast hunters as his villains. Although he was not antihunting, the wholesale destruction that was now taking place, enabled by more powerful firearms and the better access to wildernesses granted by cars, struck him as gratuitous and pointless. The damage being done would be irreversible. Well more than a century after the American Incognitum debates, Hornaday still felt it necessary to stress: “It is time for all men to be told in the plainest terms that there never has existed, anywhere in historic times, a volume of wild life so great that civilized man could not quickly exterminate it by his methods of destruction.”

Hornaday was arguing that the value of wild animals in America wasn’t just utilitarian. He spoke to the growing segment of the public who did not hunt and likely lived in cities and who, he insisted, shared just as equally in the ownership of those animals. He was democratizing wild animals, exposing the interests of hunters as narrow. There were other relationships to enjoy with an elk or a cougar besides shooting it—aesthetic or even imaginative relationships that respected their “value as living neighbors to man.”

Throughout
Our Vanishing Wildlife,
Hornaday seems to be trying out new ways of talking about extinction that might instill an emotional sense that even a country growing so detached from nature had something to lose if more of that nature disappeared. (“The birds and mammals now are literally dying for
your
help,” he wrote. “Can you not hear the call of the wild remnant?”) He was pioneering a new, more emotional style of conservation. And though this approach laid the groundwork for so many modern campaigns—prefiguring, for example, the empowering but also gently accusatory stump speeches I heard Robert Buchanan give about our duty to polar bears while on Buggy One—it only estranged Hornaday from other wildlife advocates of his time. He was criticized as “the Bolshevik element of game conservation” and as effeminate or senile. One historian describes him as being purposefully edited out of the story of American environmentalism.

Hornaday fought on for two more decades, however. By 1930, his American Bison Society had stocked six different preserves around the plains with herds of pure-blood buffalo. He deemed the animal’s future “absolutely secure.” But he’d turned pessimistic about so much else. During World War I, Hornaday had watched humanity take the high-tech artillery it was using on wild animals and turn it on itself, and he’d never really recovered from that terror. The war spoiled his faith in people’s decency and wisdom. He worried about overpopulation. He worried about the Chinese. Mainly, he was dismayed that a second world war seemed inevitable.

As he grew older, it became almost impossible for Hornaday to control his dread.
Introducing a mostly whimsical book about animal intelligence, he recommended America read it now, “before the bravest and the best of the wild creatures of the earth go down and out under the merciless and inexorable steam roller that we call Civilization.” And at the end of his life, he wrote in an unpublished memoir: “Thirty years ago, I was a sincere optimist on the impulses and goodfaith of humanity, and the moral fiber and intelligence of civilized man. Today, I think that speaking generally, Civilized Man is an unmitigated ass.”

I was beginning to notice a corollary to the concept of shifting baselines syndrome, one that doesn’t seem to be discussed in the literature. It’s not just that we start our lives unaware of the damage that preceded us, but that we end them burdened with having witnessed so much damage done. The clean slate we inherit gets mucked up all over again. Maybe there’s a tipping point in every life when that muck is finally too much.

Hornaday died in March 1937. The local Boy Scout troop’s color guard surrounded his coffin, and the buglers played “Home on the Range.”

—

A
MERICA, HOWEVER,
has a way of assimilating revolutionary ideas while forgetting the revolutionaries who originated them. Beliefs that Hornaday had been teasing out in
Our Vanishing Wildlife
—that there is some intrinsic and ineffable value to wildlife; that a moral obligation to care for it has been placed on us—would be at the heart of the Endangered Species Act, too. And even by the time the act passed in 1973, less than forty years after Hornaday’s death, those beliefs had become mainstream enough that affirming them struck virtually everyone in Congress as a wholly uncontroversial and feel-good bit of politics. Signing the Endangered Species Act that December, President Richard Nixon issued a statement that, with its exaggerated patriotism and determination, could have been lifted out of Hornaday’s book:
“Nothing is more priceless or more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed,” Nixon said. “It is a many-faceted treasure, of value to scholars, scientists, and nature lovers alike, and it forms a vital part of the heritage we all share as Americans.”

That heritage, I was now learning, is mostly made up of bugs. Well more than half the species on Earth are insects—an estimated five to thirty million insect species, though we’ve only discovered and named about a million of them. Many of those insects have critical impacts on their ecosystems. They are the Pleistocene megafauna writ small. They chew up and decompose the dead to keep things clean and keep energy circulating through its natural cycle. They riddle the soil with holes to aerate it. They spread seeds. They pollinate a third of the foods Americans eat. They are useful, in other words. But the large majority are also characterless and ugly—not quick to draw our sympathy. And even though the Endangered Species Act that Nixon signed did quietly entitle imperiled insects to the same protection as sexier critters like bald eagles and blue whales, the agency then overseeing the listing process, the Office of Endangered Species, was shy about listing any. Wildlife conservation was still a new and controversial idea; insect conservation was barely an idea at all. Eventually, the lone entomologist inside the Office of Endangered Species seized on butterflies as a safe way to test the political waters. By 1976, only two insects had been protected as endangered species—both of them butterflies. Then, on June 1, 1976, six butterflies in California were listed simultaneously. The Lange’s metalmark was one of them.

At first, officially protecting the Lange’s metalmark proved to be the very worst thing for it. The Antioch Dunes were privately owned, and the landowners, assuming that the government would step in to buy the dunes or restrict their use, started selling off the remaining sand there to miners, trying to wring as much value from their property while they could. Truckloads vanished every day. “Sand was being hauled away literally as we were catching butterflies out there,” a lepidopterist named Richard Arnold remembers.

Arnold was a fixture at the dunes in those days, studying the Lange’s as part of his dissertation research at Berkeley. Very little was known about the butterfly, and Arnold was collecting the basic scientific information that the Fish and Wildlife Service would need to recover the species. He spent nine summers on the property, tracking the butterflies’ behavior. Over time, he meticulously diagrammed the flight patterns of more than eight hundred individual butterflies by drawing different identifying patterns on their wings with a Sharpie. Often he’d arrive in the morning to find that the sand of one of his study sites had been mined out from under him.

In the summer of 1979, a landscaper hired by the utility company to maintain the land it owned under the power line towers accidentally rototilled through four or five hundred buckwheat plants—one of two last major butterfly colonies. Ironically, until then the terrain around the towers had remained some of the best-preserved butterfly habitat precisely because it had been built on. For decades, the sand miners had been forced to work around the towers. Gradually, they had dug a wide, deep pit between them, so that by 1979 the towers stood on what are still the most conspicuously dunelike formations left: two spectacularly steep hills, reaching some seventy-five feet in the air. Today the pit opened between those hills has been invaded by shrubs and grasses. Oak trees have put down roots and grown twenty or thirty feet tall; walking around, you feel like you’re in the woods.

—

T
HE
U.S. F
ISH AND
W
ILDLIFE
S
ERVICE
bought the Antioch Dunes in March 1980 for $2.2 million. It had taken more than a year to negotiate the purchase of the land. There were competing offers from condominium developers; a proposal for a “Sand Dunes Waterfront Park,” with a marina, fishing pier, campground, swimming lagoon, and science center; and objections from the city government, which preferred to see a revenue-generating riverfront showpiece built on some of its last accessible waterfront. While everyone haggled, the sand miners kept working, until, by the time a deal was cut, there was little sand left to sell. That summer, Richard Arnold estimated that the Lange’s population had collapsed to eight hundred butterflies, down to half of its size two years earlier. But now, with the establishment of a national wildlife refuge at Antioch Dunes, the government seemed to have beaten back humanity and protected the habitat just in time. The abuse the butterfly had weathered seemed to be over. It wasn’t.

There is an assumption, writes the environmental legal scholar Holly Doremus, that “what nature needs most is for people to leave it alone”—that a landscape will “automatically produce the preferred human outcome, a perfect Garden of Eden, if it is simply walled off from human influence.” But nature doesn’t know what outcome we want, and it doesn’t care. Instead, it perpetually absorbs what we do or don’t do to it, and disinterestedly spits out the effects of those causes. Nature is not a photograph that will always look good if we keep our fingerprints off it. It’s a calculator, adding up numbers we don’t always realize we’re pressing and confronting us with the sum.

Doremus describes the example of the Hutcheson Memorial Forest, a sixty-five-acre tract of old-growth oak and hickory trees in central New Jersey, which was set aside as a preservation area in the 1950s. But foresters eventually noticed that maple trees were overtaking the forest’s signature oaks and hickories. Analysis of tree rings suggested that Native Americans had regularly set fire to the woods, until about 1700, probably to flush out animals while hunting or to maintain travel routes. These fires would have killed off any new maple tree growth, allowing the well-established oaks and hickories to continue to dominate. In 1954,
Life
magazine did an extravagant spread about the Hutcheson Forest, with a series of Disneyesque paintings showing the mourning doves, red fox cubs, downy woodpeckers, toads, raccoons, fawns, rabbits, song sparrows, and beavers that lived in the woods. The area was meant to be a living diorama of a natural world that we’d otherwise lost, now that “man has colonized the planet from its white polar regions to the hot midriff of the equator.” But when we left the forest alone, the nature that took its course there didn’t look like the nature in the paintings.

At Antioch, nearly a century of sand mining had shredded an equally complicated ecology. By the time Fish and Wildlife stepped in, gusts of wind still lifted up what sand remained, but with no sloping dunes there to catch it, it couldn’t pile up. It merely scattered into the river or across the street, dispersing out of the system forever. Leaving the dunes alone at that point would only have allowed them to keep unraveling. The original order—the moving mosaic of sand, plants, and butterflies—had to be either set back in motion or forever simulated. We had to do the opposite of leave the ecosystem alone. We had to disturb it. As one lepidopterist who has worked on the Lange’s metalmark recovery told me, “We can’t just throw up a fence and think everything’s going to go back to how it used to be.” Still, that’s almost exactly what happened after the government bought Antioch Dunes.

The dunes were the first national wildlife refuge set aside for only insects and plants. The Fish and Wildlife Service had less experience with bugs and shrubs, and, operating outside its comfort zone, the agency worried that interfering to improve the landscape for butterflies could, in some way, wind up damaging it for the two endangered plants. There were a few attempts to plant new expanses of buckwheat, but Fish and Wildlife was largely paralyzed.

Meanwhile, all the controversy prior to the government’s purchase of the property had raised the profile of Antioch Dunes. Before, locals hadn’t thought much about the land out by the gypsum plant. Now guys on dirt bikes vaulted off the remaining hills. More fishermen, vagrants, and campers turned up. A few campfires got out of control. In 1984, a butterfly poacher was apprehended there after netting at least one Lange’s.

For anyone rooting for the Lange’s metalmark, the first official years of the Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge were frustrating—maybe a little disillusioning. Then, in October 1985, there was a catastrophe.

—

T
HE WHALE WAS
forty feet long and estimated to weigh forty tons. It was a humpback and diverged from its migration route along the Pacific coast, from Alaska to Mexico and appeared to have entered San Francisco Bay sometime on October 11.

The whale kept swimming. It headed northeast, inland, with great purposefulness, as if it knew where it was going and was running late. It swam into the Carquinez Strait, then the mouth of the San Joaquin River. It kept going. A week later, it had traveled under a series of bridges and more than sixty miles upriver, into the Sacramento River, and halfway to the state capital. Then it let up and lingered outside the small town of Rio Vista.

Biologists were convinced that if the whale stayed in the river much longer it would die. There was nothing for a whale to eat in a river, and as the water got less salty upstream, the animal would become less buoyant and expend more energy to stay afloat. Its skin already looked pallid and its breathing seemed irregular. But, truthfully, not enough was known about humpback whales in 1985 for anyone to say for sure, or to explain what the hell the animal was doing. “Perhaps he’s insane,” one bearded scientist told
Nightline
. By this time, the whale was a national story. A scattershot armada of government officials, biologists, and several hundred local volunteer boat owners coasted alongside it every day, trying to turn it around. Everyone called the whale Humphrey the Humpback.