Between the asphalt sprawl of the Los Angeles basin and the fertile flatlands of the Great Central Valley, where the Okies flocked during the Dust Bowl days and the Grapes of Wrath was set (and banned), a vast and surprising wilderness still thrives. Broad pastures, granite-studded hillsides, and icy-blue mountain lake water all lie within an hour’s drive of L.A. smog and concrete, hidden in plain sight as traffic snakes by on the one major freeway through the weathered grandeur of the Tehachapi Mountains. Ancient oak groves offer cool shade, thick stands of piñon pines beckon in an incessant breeze, forests of twisted Joshua trees grope toward the clouds in gnarled supplication. In spring, the hillsides are carpeted in wildflowers, a gaudy sunset of color and fragrance: mariposa tulips, California poppies, baby blue eyes, Indian paintbrush, and owls’ clover offer a last refuge for the vanishing wild honeybee so essential to the orchards and farmlands in the distant valley below. The landscape has barely changed for thousands of years, which is why more than eighty rare and endangered species still prey, roam, roost, flower, and raise their young here. Even the nearly vanished California condor still comes to forage in small, fragile numbers, where long ago whole colonies nested, the skies black with the colossal birds, their broad, dark wings beating the air with the sound of feathery thunder. Now wildlife biologists must help feed and care for North America’s largest bird, because the condors cannot survive on their own. This last Southern California wilderness, this enormous blank spot on the map twelve times the size of Manhattan, provides an important barrier against extinction. There is no other place like it in California, and few to rival it on earth: To stand on a windswept hill at Tejon Ranch is to be at once humbled, enthralled, and saddened by vistas that in years past defined California and the West by their plenty, rather than their dearth. The United Nations has recognized the region as a vanishing geographic breed, one of twenty-five irreplaceable hot spots of biodiversity in the world—a designation reserved for just 2.4 percent of the earth’s surface.
But designation does not necessarily bring preservation. Tejon Ranch also happens to be the biggest piece of privately held property in all of California, and its owners and investors have decided to build and build big.
Where cattle grazing and hunting have been the main activities for the past 150 years, the Tejon Ranch Company and its investors want to construct the single largest master-planned community California has ever seen—which is saying a lot for the state that raised scrape-and-sprawl construction to an art form. They intend to raise out of the wilderness an instant city of 30,000 homes and 70,000 people called Centennial, along with industrial parks, cargo terminals, shopping centers, and a separate resort and luxury home complex, Tejon Mountain Village, abutting the condor’s historic nesting grounds—a supposedly self-contained and self-reliant community. Thirty thousand jobs could be added to a struggling local economy. Completing the project would demand, on average, the construction of one new house every eight hours, 365 days a year, for twenty years.
Sums of money as vast as the landscape are at stake—the raw land alone was valued at $1.5 billion in 1999, and if fully developed as currently envisioned, the ranch would be worth ten, twenty, or thirty times that amount, perhaps much more when all is said and done. To those who see progress in a bulldozer’s blade and beauty in the taming of wilderness, Tejon Ranch is an irresistible plum, more than 250,000 contiguous acres lying a mere seventy miles from downtown Los Angeles, a straight shot up Interstate 5—the Golden State Freeway, as it’s called, transformed into the ultimate driveway to the ultimate bedroom community. The New York Times admiringly described this one-of-a-kind plan for a one-of-a-kind landscape as “Playing SimCity for Real.”
Standing in the path of this future Tejon Ranch is a relatively little-known environmental group with a small budget and outsize ambitions, the Center for Biological Diversity.
On paper, this scruffy outfit with the tree frog logo and the borrowed Tucson gem shop for a headquarters shouldn’t have a prayer against the nearly limitless political, economic, and legal resources behind SimCity, except for the fact that during the past twenty years the Center for Biological Diversity has won close to 90 percent of its 500 cases. This unprecedented success rate has quietly transformed the American landscape, safeguarding hundreds of species from extinction and preserving millions of acres of wilderness. The center has taken down off-roaders and off-shore oil drillers, developers, and Detroit automakers, wolf haters and condor killers, and an entire alphabet soup of government agencies from Washington state to Washington, D.C., and as far away as Okinawa. The Center for Biological Diversity has fashioned itself into the most effective environmental operation you’ve never heard of, routinely outperforming the better-known and more moneyed conservation organizations in exposing corruption and official lawbreaking, then bending local governments, multinational corporations, and even presidents to its leaders’ will. Even its most ardent detractors concede this is not hyperbole: It was the Center for Biological Diversity that finally forced the administration of President George W. Bush to concede, after six years of resolute denial, that there really is such a thing as global warming and that it is killing (among other species) the polar bear.
And yet, unlike the developers of Tejon Ranch, the center has never been the subject of an admiring profile in The New York Times. More typical is the Wall Street Journal’s twelve-hundred-word feature gleefully headlined, “Rancher Turns the Tables,” which gave short shrift to the organization’s remarkable string of victories and instead lionized the one person in twenty years who successfully sued them. The New Yorker magazine, in a 1999 piece by the usually astute Nicholas Lemann, portrayed the center’s leaders and staff as humanity-despising destroyers of the great hunting, ranching, and cowboying traditions of the American West, closing the piece with this dark pronouncement:
They’re outlaws. Outlaws cause trouble, alter the established order, and make authority figures angry. And, in the end, they get dealt with.
This surprising metaphor seems especially ominous, given that the center’s executive director has received repeated death threats, and it is curiously off base factually, too, because the signature position of the Center for Biological Diversity is not that laws ought to be disobeyed, but that the nation’s existing environmental laws ought to be enforced. The group arguably can be called inflexible, infuriating, and litigious, and its leaders are at times—at least from their detractors’ points of view—uncompromising, even extreme. Yet this idea the center pushes—actually enforcing laws rather than merely paying them lip service as whole species and ecosystems expire—is the precise opposite of the “outlaw” stance. It does, however, turn out to be a deeply unpopular position among the genuine environmental outlaws in government and industry, as well as the media and even some mainstream environmental organizations, whose corporate donors prefer gentler compromises with polluters and developers. But the center’s staffers are used to being cast in the black-sheep and underdog roles, this eclectic hodgepodge of fifty-five underpaid and overworked lawyers, biologists, activists, and otherwise pissed-off ordinary folks, accepting the wrath of loggers, builders, ranchers, cowboys, developers, conservatives, journalists, and bureaucrats. “Oh, guess what, the New Yorker says we’re outlaws who ought to be killed,” the executive director informed his staff after the Lemann article appeared. Then, only half joking, he said, “Let’s use that in our next fund-raiser.”
Though few outside the rarefied world of environmental litigation are familiar with the center, evidence of its work is ubiquitous. When there is a news report about some nearly extinct bird or bear or sea turtle receiving official protection, or a habitat or forest preserved from development, or perhaps some new court ruling aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions or improving fuel efficiency for sport utility vehicles, more often than not, it’s the result of a lawsuit, real or threatened, by the Center for Biological Diversity. Almost every species grudgingly listed by the Bush administration as imperiled since the year 2001—a total of eighty-seven—has been protected because the center used the courts to force the issue on a recalcitrant White House. Since the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973,1 70 percent of the plant and animal species given protection under the law were listed because of efforts by the center. In the process, more than 70 million acres of wildlands have been preserved as habitats for these endangered species—an area nearly twice the size of all the national parks in the contiguous forty-eight states combined. The center’s work has transformed overgrazed, trampled, and befouled federal lands that had been all but given to cattle barons and left for dead into thick, lush riparian forests. Thousands of miles of ocean waters nearly stripped of life have been made off-limits to deadly dragnets, bringing endangered sea turtles and depleted wild fisheries back from the brink of extinction. One court case pursued by the center halted logging not in a single habitat, not in a single forest, but in every national forest in the Southwest—all eleven of them—after it was shown that the feds were routinely breaking the law by giving loggers carte blanche to cut down ancient trees in environmentally sensitive public lands.
It is no exaggeration to say that the modern American environmental movement has been reinvented by the center, and especially by two of its founders and leaders—Peter Galvin, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service owl expert, scientist, and mystic who devises intricately ruthless environmental campaigns; and Kieran Suckling, a former engineering student turned philosopher and amateur chef who combines an encyclopedic knowledge of animal species facts with a political opposition researcher’s instinct for the other side’s jugular. (“Boxing’s not about hitting hard,” Suckling likes to say, explaining the center’s technique of burying officials with flurries of lawsuits, investigations, petitions, and press releases. “It’s about jabbing the other guy over and over and over, before he has a chance to recover.”) This amalgam of grit, talent, and willingness to repeatedly poke the entrenched and powerful has allowed these two iconoclast outdoorsmen to enter the ranks of America’s eco barons—not because they have money, but because they don’t seem to care about it, throwing themselves headlong into David-and-Goliath battles others have written off as hopeless. Their opponents (and, sometimes, other environmental groups that disapprove of the center’s tactics) have never forgiven them for what usually happens next: They win.
Their latest target is the most threatening source of environmental damage, extinctions, and habitat loss yet—global warming—and Tejon Ranch is ground zero. The center’s leaders envision curtailing or halting outright the planned development at Tejon Ranch as a milestone blow against climate change—an attempt to stop America’s insatiable, unsustainable drive to pave over the last bits of her wilderness, which absorb greenhouse gases, and to replace them with new cities, carports, and commutes that pump out those deadly gases by the ton. The center wants to force developers at Tejon—and elsewhere—to quantify their contribution to global warming, and then do everything feasible to eliminate that impact, from installing solar roofs to creating electric-powered bus lines to mandating zero-emission vehicles for all residents. And if the developers refuse such “mitigation,” the center argues, the entire project should be scuttled.
Of course, no developer has ever had to do such a thing. It’s ludicrous, the Tejon Ranch people say. It’ll never happen.
Except—with the Center for Biological Diversity, there’s always an “except”—what if it turned out that there have been obscure laws on the books since the 1970s that already require builders to limit greenhouse gases and slow global warming? What if the only problem is that no one thought to ask?
Until now.
Before he created Pumalin Park, before he threw himself into saving Patagonia’s wild places, Doug Tompkins built the Foundation for Deep Ecology so that he could provide seed money—sometimes a few thousand dollars, sometimes a few million, usually somewhere in between—to support activists who were trying to advance the ideals of deep ecology. He wanted to dispense grants to groups who were protecting biodiversity and “wildness,” who were pioneering ecologically sound agriculture, and who wanted to combat the forces of globalization and what Tompkins calls “megatechnology.” That meant the foundation did a little bit of everything that Tompkins cared passionately about. It bought a six-month blitz of weekly full-page ads in The New York Times as part of Tompkins’s “Turning Point Project,” decrying such issues as genetically engineered produce, the extinction crisis, oil spills, and “welfare ranching.” The foundation organized and funded mass protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), most famously in 1999 in Seattle, where 40,000 protesters forced the WTO to end a critical ministerial meeting in failure. It published evocative large format, photo-essay books such as Clearcut and Fatal Harvest. Most of all, the foundation helped pay the bills for some scrappy, hard-core, visionary environmental organizations, the sort of groups that corporate foundations often wouldn’t touch, because they were perceived as too radical, extreme, or uncompromising. These groups were outlaws only in the sense that the Center for Biological Diversity was an outlaw: they didn’t hesitate to go to court to enforce laws, irrespective of the politics of the situation or the popularity of the projects and programs that might be scuttled.
Tompkins sent millions to such groups as the antiwhaling Sea Shepherd Conservancy, the Rainforest Action Network, the Tides Foundation, the Earth Island Institute, Forest Guardians, and Friends of the Earth, and to more than 500 other environmental groups. Tompkins’s foundation hosted a meeting of prominent environmentalists in 1991 who launched a new cooperative initiative they called the Wildlands Project. Tompkins provided more than $500,000 to kick-start this little-known, immensely ambitious project, a 100-year plan that seeks to knit together the immense and mostly unoccupied public lands in the western United States into a network of wilderness zones. Natural areas would be joined by wildlife corridors and buffers from civilization, in the hope that the Wildlands Project could eventually “re-wild” large portions of North America—a much larger version of the green corridor Tompkins helped create in Argentina at El Pinalito Park. Tejon Ranch, for instance, is seen as a potential (and critical) link in California’s leg of the project. Michael Soule (who pioneered the discipline of conservation biology) and Dave Foreman (cofounder of Earth First!) first conceived of the ideas behind the Wildlands Project. Dozens of conservation groups, state agencies, and property owners have agreed to participate. But Earth First!—with its motto, “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth,” and its long history of protests, civil disobedience, and “monkey-wrenching” developments and logging that the group considers environmentally unsound—has long been a target of criticism, particularly from the political right, and Foreman’s involvement raised instant suspicions in some quarters about the Wildlands Project. The project’s re-wilding proposals are scientifically uncontroversial—the focus is primarily on restoring, connecting, and providing buffer zones for wilderness on public lands that have no permanent human residents. But critics feared a power and land grab, portraying the Wildlands Project as an attempt to trample on property rights, to limit hunting and off-road recreation, and to return half of North America to a depopulated, prehistoric condition. Web sites such as “The Wildlands Project Revealed,” some subsidized by conservative foundations intent on balancing Tompkins’s foundation, went up to denounce the project; the popular Free Republic site likened Wildlands Project organizers to a “green al-Qaeda.” The ambitious project slowed considerably during the Bush administration, which agreed with the critics.
Tompkins gave millions more in grant money to media watchdog groups (including the Public Media Center and AdBusters); to his old mentor, the former adman Jerry Mander, who had founded the International Forum on Globalization to highlight concerns about the effect of globalization on democracy and public accountability; to food safety and anti-biotechnology organizations led by the attorney and author Andrew Kimbrell (a leader in calling for reforms in the beef industry and for safeguards against meat tainted by mad cow disease); and to the provocative economist Jeremy Rifkin, a critic of bioengineering and other so-called “Frankenstein” technologies, as well as an advocate for a new “hydrogen economy” to displace oil, coal, and natural gas.
Just about every group and activist the foundation funded was, in effect, a professional thorn in the side of one or another industry or government agency, or of Wall Street’s conventional wisdom about economics and regulation; most of the recipients would have decried the global practices of Esprit, the source of the largesse distributed by the Foundation for Deep Ecology. Tompkins wasn’t interested in giving money to organizations with artful brochures or with a reputation for playing nice with the other side; he wanted fighters.
His foundation found a most likely match in the Center for Biological Diversity: led by two guys with beards and hiking boots, who were as comfortable sleeping on a mountaintop ledge as Tompkins, who felt best when they were in wild places, who were convinced of their own righteousness and happy to fight for it—so long as it meant preserving a threatened piece of the natural world. Over the years, the foundation has given the center more than $200,000—up to $65,000 in one year. In the early days, when the center was paying its people less than the minimum wage and lawyers were sleeping on the office floor, that money kept the organization alive. The center is not quite so lean these days—it receives larger grants from several sources, and thousands of smaller donations through membership drives—but Tompkins and his foundation played an important role early on in sustaining what would turn out to be some of America’s most effective environmental activists.
The story of the Center for Biological Diversity begins not with lawsuits or protests, but with the hooters.
In 1989, the U.S. Forest Service began sending owl survey crews into the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, one of America’s most rugged and remote public forests, a mix of mountain, chaparral, meadow, and woods where the legendary conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote of learning to “think like a mountain.” The government surveys were in response to the concern that heavy logging in the Gila was driving the gentle, brown Mexican spotted owl into extinction—a concern first raised by Robin Silver, an emergency room doctor in Phoenix with a passion for nature photography. The persistent physician, who would join Suckling and Galvin in cofounding the Center for Biological Diversity, had demanded protection for the spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, relying on what was then an obscure provision that empowered citizens to petition the government to enforce strict safeguards for imperiled species. Those safeguards, Silver knew from reading the text of the act, made science paramount. Economic concerns, jobs, progress, and development—including logging—had to take a backseat under the law when extinction was at stake.
At the time, President Reagan had made opening public lands to timber companies and other extraction industries (oil, gas, gold mining, coal, and more) a top concern. Dr. Silver’s petition compelled the Forest Service to shift that focus and determine what threatened the owl and what protections it might need. And to do that, the Forest Service had to figure out how many owls were left in the Gila. The downy birds with the huge dark eyes are elusive nighttime predators, notoriously difficult to track and count, so the Forest Service adopted a technique in which crews would walk through the tall grasses and beneath stands of ponderosa pines and firs, imitating the mournful, four-note call of the spotted owl, then listening for a reply in the darkness. Responses could be rare, but sometimes the owls would alight on a nearby branch and stare down at the strange, featherless creatures that had called to them; some of the best callers could hold out dead mice and get the owls to swoop out of the trees and seize them with strong, sharp claws. These survey crews called themselves hooters. Surveying was a low-paid summer job, undertaken only reluctantly by the Forest Service and viewed with suspicion by the loggers and ranchers who worried that the lucrative public timber supply might be closed to them, but the work had its rewards: brilliantly clear starlit skies; nearly mystical encounters with the ghostly raptors; a sense that something important might be happening, a shift in the way the forest would be treated, if only the hooters could find enough owls.
Peter Galvin, working toward an undergraduate degree in conservation biology at Arizona’s Prescott College, hired on that summer as a contract employee directing a survey crew operating out of Catron County, New Mexico, near the heart of the Gila. One of his hooters was Kieran Suckling, a wild-haired neo-hippie philosophy grad student and former anti-logging activist with Earth First! Galvin had also done a stint at Earth First! and had chained himself to a tree or two in the Pacific Northwest during the timber wars there (a biographical note he somehow hadn’t mentioned to his Forest Service colleagues). He recognized a kindred spirit in Suckling, and they soon became roommates, beginning what they call a “conversation” about nature, man, and extinction that has continued for twenty years and has become the guiding force of their Center for Biological Diversity.
Of the two men’s journeys to the Gila, Suckling’s seems the more circuitous, although his affinity for animals has been apparent since he was ten. He chose Francis as his confirmation name in the Catholic church, after Saint Francis of Assisi, the twelfth-century monk and patron saint of animals and the environment who was said to have preached to the birds and to have negotiated a truce between a wolf and some angry townspeople. Francis’s position that all life was sacred and worthy of protection sounds more than a bit like deep ecology; today, as Suckling sees it, Francis would probably be called a radical. Or perhaps an outlaw.
The son of a civil engineer, young Kieran moved every few years as his dad went about building power plants, pulp mills, and other major infrastructure projects—the sort of projects that tend to make environmentalists cringe. They lived in Nevada and Peru, and in the shadow of an oil-fired power plant on Cape Cod. A nuclear power station in South Korea would have been next if his parents had not split up. He and his mother stayed in Cape Cod, where he attended high school in Sandwich and toyed with the idea—not for the last time—of rejecting everything his engineer father stood for by attending culinary school, for he loves to cook, and he’s good at it. Instead, Suckling eventually decided to seek a four-year degree, initially at Salve Regina College in Rhode Island, which had only recently gone coeducational and was overwhelmingly female. The strict rules of the Sisters of Mercy who founded the school in 1934 still held sway despite (or perhaps because of) the advent of men, and Suckling found himself invited to leave and not return after being apprehended in the women’s dormitory one morning. He landed next at Worcester Polytechnic Institute as an engineering student, back on the path his father and older brother had taken before him. Worcester was an alternative school, unusually for an engineering college, and Suckling admired its focus on project-based learning and instruction in the humanities intended to produce well-rounded engineers. The humanities courses, particularly the philosophy electives, eventually entranced Suckling far more than the study of lines, angles, and stress points. He had thrown himself into the classics of philosophy several years earlier when a cousin he admired, a former missionary in charge of a seminary on the outskirts of Boston, told him the seminary was closing and he could take home anything he wanted. Suckling carted off the library’s entire philosophy collection and began reading it one book at time, even though at age fifteen he understood only a small fraction of the ideas. The seminary’s well-worn cloth-bound volumes of Heidegger and Kant and Plato still occupy significant space on the crammed bookshelves in his home office in Tucson.
Suckling made it all the way to the last quarter of his senior year at Worcester Polytech, then abruptly quit without obtaining his engineering degree, although he had very little work left to do in order to receive it. His family was shocked, as much by his unusual explanation as by his decision: “I just felt that if I had that degree, it would always be there. You could always fall back on it, get a job. It’s kind of like a scar. It’s with you the rest of your life, and you can’t take it back. You’d always have that backup.” He practically spits out the word “backup” when he recalls this cusp, appalled at the very idea of it, this brush with the life and label of an engineer causing a mental shiver at what he might have been if he hadn’t followed his heart and fled. Years later, when he would be living in a frigid log cabin, subsisting on old rutabagas and spending what little money he had on faxed press releases about the Forest Service’s latest environmental travesty, he would never have to worry about the lure of creature comforts dragging him toward engineering, a steady paycheck, and a life of compromise. But his opponents—governments, corporations, risk managers, and politicians who always have an offer, a compromise, a backup, in their hip pockets—would have to deal with a guy who didn’t believe in fallback positions.
With engineering banished for good, Suckling opted for a proudly impractical philosophy degree, undergraduate and then postgraduate (everything but the dissertation—still outstanding after a dozen years). He focused on the continental philosophers, phenomenology, and deconstructionism, and their ideas color his environmentalism to this day, as he thinks and writes on the paradoxical relationship between linguistic diversity, which is vanishing at an alarming rate, and biological diversity, which is also disappearing. He doesn’t have to worry about the dreaded career backup with those sorts of intellectual inquiries. “With a philosophy degree, there’s nothing to fall back on; it’s like casting yourself to the wind,” he says. Now pride, sheepish but real, colors his voice. “You get that degree, they kick you out the door, and you have to figure out what you’re going to do with your life. You’ve given up the safety net.”
After he left school he took off without much of a plan, spending months driving around the country with two friends, camping in national parks, living on very little money, sleeping in a rattletrap car, grabbing ears of corn from roadside fields and eating them raw. (An amused farmer strode out of one of these fields and informed Suckling and his pals that they had been munching on animal feed corn; the farmer handed them some human corn and sent them on their way.) He settled in Missoula for a time, worked at odd jobs, then moved on, eventually landing at an Earth First! rendezvous in New Mexico, where the radical environmental advocacy group inspired by Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang had assembled volunteers to protest a national forest timber sale. This was a natural for Suckling: He had been protesting things since he was a kid, beginning in 1979 with his refusal to participate in a mandatory high school rally that was being passed off as a spontaneous student demonstration over the Iranian hostage crisis. He was as upset by the crisis as the next guy, but when his teachers started handing out signs they had made to look like student art, he was outraged. He staged a counterprotest against the “Soviet-style state-sponsored rally” and was promptly suspended. He met a similar fate at the New Mexico Earth First! event, where he was arrested for sitting down in front of a logging truck in an unsuccessful attempt to block its entry into the forest. But the authorities had done him an unintended favor: At the local jail, he met and fell in love with a woman who, as luck would have it, had accepted a job as one of Peter Galvin’s hooters, and she invited him to come down to the Gila to see about joining the crew with her.
Galvin’s journey also began in Massachusetts, in the town of Framing-ham, west of Boston, where he was raised in a household suffused not with engineering, but with discussions of social justice, man’s inhumanity to man, and classic liberal politics. His grandfather was a Yiddish scholar and his father a devoted Thoreau aficionado, and Galvin’s youth was marked by family debates about man’s and God’s law, about how it was that the Nazis could rise to power, and why the rest of the world could allow the Holocaust to occur. Why didn’t Franklin Roosevelt bomb the trains, young Peter wanted to know, and stop the shuttling of Jews to the concentration camps? Why didn’t the European powers act sooner when they knew the atrocities Hitler had set in motion? Why didn’t more people speak up in the face of evil? These are searing questions for anyone to consider deeply, and the fact that he took them seriously as a teenager presaged the life of adult activism to come, the outrage that simmers beneath a soft voice and outward gentleness. Still, these were academic questions to a boy born in the 1960s to middle-class comfort and privilege. Those horrors seemed to him long past, of a different world, for certainly there could never be another Holocaust.
Such life-and-death questions pondered from afar suddenly cut a lot closer to the bone in 1979, when Peter was diagnosed with testicular cancer. There was nothing academic about listening to his divorced parents argue over which doctor they should trust with their son’s life—the one who advocated a series of major, painful surgeries, or the other who would rely primarily on a difficult course of chemotherapy. Each treatment had its own risks, upside, and downside. There were no guarantees; just terrifying discussions of mortality rates and survival rates. And it was Peter who had to make the call in the end. He was fifteen years old.
Galvin opted for three major surgeries, and after a prolonged illness, he made a complete recovery; he has been cancer-free ever since. But his brush with major illness and mortality inevitably altered him. The former captain of the junior varsity basketball team, the boy with the sunny disposition, became withdrawn and solitary, spending long hours holed up in his room reading; his team and his old pursuits, the activities that once had been the center of his days and life, were no longer of interest. He had made a promise to himself, to God, to something—that if he survived the cancer, if he got his future back, he would live a purposeful life, he would find a mission, he would try to make a difference. A hopeful cynicism is how he describes the new outlook. He found his mission while studying biology in 1983 at Lewis and Clark College, and he learned what wildlife biologists and other scientists had gradually begun to realize: Planet earth was experiencing a major “extinction event.” Life was dying everywhere, in unprecedented numbers, at unprecedented speeds. To him, as had happened so long ago with the death camps, it seemed no one was doing anything about it.
Extinction itself is neither extraordinary nor unexpected. Mostly invisible (to us), extinction is a regular, natural event—the environment changes and the recipe for life changes with it, which is why some species adapt and survive, and the rest die out. Only the rate of extinctions varies,2 making earth’s story, at least for the last billion or so years for which evidence still exists, a cyclic balance of extinction and renewal. That story is written in the fossil record, buried deep in the earth and in the beds of ancient and vanished seas, and it reveals that the normal cycle of gradual extinction has been broken five times in the last 500 million years, when massive catastrophes caused major global extinction events. The most devastating, the Permian-Triassic extinction event, occurred 250 million years ago, when the Earth’s landmass was largely contained in one supercontinent, now called Pangaea. Ninety-six percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all land-dwelling species—plants as well as insects and vertebrates—died out, leaving behind only fossilized shells, bones, leaves, and imprints in sandstone. Even those species that avoided extinction were nearly wiped out, suffering a 90 percent mortality rate, so that, overall, the total number of individual organisms on earth was reduced by 95 percent. This is when the ancient trilobites, the sea arthropods that once were the dominant form of animal life on earth, vanished, along with countless other creatures of every shape and size. There are several theories about what triggered this greatest of mass extinctions—catastrophic volcanic eruptions, a series of enormous meteor strikes, or releases of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas from deep in the oceans. Any of these could have brought about ruinous changes in the atmosphere, the climate, and ocean currents and chemistry. Because this happened so long ago, the evidence is insufficient to pinpoint the cause (or, more probably, the combination of causes), but that it occurred is certain. The story of life laid waste, of primordial forests dying en masse, can be read like a book, its fossil layers so deep and thick with ancient corpses that the Permian-Triassic event is often referred to as “The Great Dying.” If whatever caused “The Great Dying” occurred in 2009, and humanity suffered similar mortality while avoiding total extinction, it would be as if the current world population of 6.7 billion had been reduced to 335 million—basically where the human race stood 1,000 years ago at the end of the Dark Ages.
The other extinction events were not as severe, but neither were they walks in the Jurassic park. The most recent completed extinction event—the Cretaceous-Tertiary, 65 million years ago, believed to have been caused by an asteroid collision—drove half of all species then living into extinction, including the dinosaurs. It had the additional effect of opening the way for the rise of what was then a minor and barely surviving category of creatures, the mammals. The sixth major extinction event, the Holocene, is not complete: It is taking place now, moving far more swiftly than any of the extinction events before it. Some biologists are predicting the disappearance of half the planet’s species in the next 100 years. (Previous extinction events were spread out over hundreds of thousands of years.) This is the first extinction event for which there is no natural cause. It is, Peter Galvin was horrified to learn, strictly man-made.
Galvin came to believe that the world was experiencing nothing less than a new global holocaust, a term which is not used lightly in his family, but which he believes to be appropriate—a holocaust against nature, entirely caused by humanity’s outsize imprint on the planet and the environment. It poses a cruel irony, he says, and a great moral quandary, because mankind is at once the executioner of other species, and standing right along with them on the gallows, awaiting the noose just like everyone else.
Galvin dropped out of Lewis and Clark in favor of several years of direct action and protest with Earth First! and other environmental groups, feeling compelled to act and to speak out, but uncertain that chaining himself to trees with unbreakable Kryptonite bike locks was really accomplishing much. He had been in elementary school when a previous generation of protesters helped end the Vietnam War, but the old activist tactics weren’t stopping the clear-cuts, the strip mining, or the utter refusal to protect endangered species that began in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan claimed a mandate to gut regulations and give free enterprise free rein. If there really was a new global holocaust in the making, it seemed Peter Galvin was going to need more than a bicycle lock and good intentions to help avert it.
So he returned to school to complete his degree and his training as a wildlife biologist, transferring his credits to Prescott College because of its reputation for hands-on, rugged, outdoors natural sciences and its focus on student-designed independent studies. Galvin had loved owls since he was a kid, regularly clamoring to visit the Boston Museum of Science so he could see Spooky, a much-loved great horned owl who lived at the museum for a record-breaking thirty-eight years. Owls are high-level predators and fairly ubiquitous in nature, and therefore they make a great index species, as their health in a population often mirrors the overall health of an ecosystem. If owls are thriving, the theory goes, the food chain is intact, top to bottom, and the whole ecosystem is likely to be thriving, too.
When it was time for field study, Galvin chose the Greater Gila Region, which straddles the New Mexico–Arizona border. He was attracted by the land’s beauty and remoteness and the opportunity to study an owl species that was clearly in trouble, as its habitat was systematically being cut down. He moved into a tepee near Luna, New Mexico, and contacted the local office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to see what the staff could tell him about the spotted owl—scientific research, population studies, habitat maps, whatever they had. One of the office workers groaned and said, “Hey, we just had a Freedom of Information Act request on the spotted owl from Dr. Robin Silver over in Phoenix. You know him? No? Well we just sent him a shitload of documents. Why don’t you call him?” The worker, eager to avoid another round of time-consuming paperwork, provided the number.
Silver was wary at first, but then became intensely excited when Galvin explained he was studying the owl for his undergraduate degree and had just moved to the Gila region. Silver asked, “Can you get over here tomorrow at three?”
Galvin made the five-hour drive to Phoenix in his old VW microbus and found a dark, barred house awaiting him, and—once the doctor cautiously admitted the long-haired young man on the doorstep—a Spartan interior, except for the spectacular nature photography. Silver explained the barred windows: his opposition to logging had brought him several death threats. It didn’t take long for Galvin to determine that Silver was completely dedicated to nature photography and environmental causes. The house was barely furnished. The refrigerator had many rolls of film stored inside but very little to eat. He later learned that Silver, though he made a doctor’s generous salary, lived on only $25,000 a year, channeling the rest into activism. Galvin, Silver decided, would be his next project—he agreed that day to become Galvin’s patron.
Silver would pay all Galvin’s costs for studying the owl—driving, phones, food, living expenses—and in return, Galvin would help with endangered-species petitions on the spotted owl and other creatures who had, at that time, only Silver for a part-time defender. Galvin, who was chronically broke, drove back to his tepee hardly able to believe his good fortune. When he got back home, a message was waiting. The Forest Service had heard he was studying the spotted owl. Would he like to run a crew of hooters? Galvin was stunned by this run of good luck: He would be paid by the government to study the owls and, in effect, to gather the information he intended to use against the government. Galvin remembers thinking, “Huh, someone’s paying me to sit here in the forest, which I love to do, and imitate owls. This is the greatest job ever!” He got paid thirty-five dollars a day—a long-haired, long-bearded guy in a tepee, contracting with a very straitlaced federal agency he believed to be in the pocket of the timber industry, and he had never been happier.
A few weeks later, an old friend came by to accept his invitation to join the owl crew, and she introduced her new boyfriend, Kieran Suckling. Galvin had another hooter—and the partner he never knew he needed.