Terry Tamminen found a way to strike a blow for environmental protection through collaborating with government and industry, but there are times when saving a piece of the natural world can be accomplished only through a more traditional approach: protest and conflict with the powers that be. So it was with Carole Allen and her quarter-century battle to bring the imperiled Kemp’s ridley sea turtle back from the brink of extinction. She marshaled an army of schoolchildren to demand protections for an endangered species. She took on the powerful Texas Gulf Coast shrimping industry, which had long resisted reform. And she belied conventional wisdom that individuals are powerless in the face of monied entrenched interests.
As a result, the graceful Kemp’s ridley, once the most endangered sea turtle in the world, is making a strong comeback—a testament to the fact that the measure of an eco baron is not a matter of wealth or fame, and that one committed person can have an outsize impact. “I’m no millionaire, that’s for sure,” Allen chuckles. “But I do know right from wrong, and what was happening to these wonderful creatures, who have been around since the age of dinosaurs, most certainly was wrong.”
Allen has been fascinated by turtles since age six, when she was growing up in Illinois and had a pet red-eared slider freshwater turtle she tried to cart around everywhere. Today her home north of Houston is something of a turtle shrine—with turtle statues, plush turtles, and turtle pictures.
She and her husband, Bill, a geologist, moved to Texas in the 1970s so he could work in the oil industry there. When he became ill with a heart condition, Allen decided to return to college so she could earn a degree and find work that would support the family, which by then included a young daughter. She received her degree in journalism just before Bill died, and Allen went to work for the juvenile probation department to support herself and her daughter.
In 1978, she read about a new experiment being conducted to restore a breeding population of Kemp’s ridley sea turtles to the Texas Gulf Coast. The species is named for Richard Kemp, a fisherman in Florida who was interested in natural science and who recognized the turtle as a unique species. He submitted a specimen to a local university in 1906. The Kemp’s ridley, once plentiful in the region, is a seafaring, air-breathing marine reptile with a heart-shaped shell. It grows to about eighty to 100 pounds, making it the smallest of the seven sea turtle species left in existence, all of them listed as endangered since the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973.1 They live 100 years or more, and to breed and lay eggs they return to the same stretch of sand where they were born, thanks to their ability to sense the earth’s magnetic field and use it to navigate for thousands of miles—nature’s own Global Positioning System. In Texas, these turtles had been killed for their meat, shells, and eggs and, as unintended “by-catch,” they also had been killed in great numbers by the busy gulf shrimping fleet. The shrimp vessels dragged long nets that often scooped up the turtles, which then died, unable to reach the surface to breathe. If they were hauled up still alive, the shrimpers might throw them back into the water to take their chances with the nets again, or just as often simply kill them as pests or for a meal.
Their last known mass breeding place, a few hundred miles south of Brownsville, Texas, was a beach in Mexico, called Rancho Nuevo. In 1947, about 40,000 of the turtles were filmed by a Mexican rancher as they emerged from the surf in a mile-long procession—la arribada de las tortugas, the arrival of the turtles—for a single day of mass nesting and egg laying in their ancestral sands. Poachers had a field day there, too, following right behind the stately tan and green tortoises, greedily scooping up their precious eggs to consume or sell at a tidy profit: There is a myth that the eggs contain a powerful aphrodisiac. By the late 1970s, the arribada numbered no more than 200 in a single day. The world population had declined to 3 percent of its original numbers, so this species was the most endangered turtle on earth. And since it had only one main nesting place left in the world, one ill-timed hurricane during egg-laying season could wipe out the species. The Kemp’s ridley would soon be extinct, scientists feared. Some thought it was already too late to save the species.
The federally funded program Allen heard about, called Operation Head Start, was intended to restore a breeding population of the turtles to south Texas and thereby give the species a fighting chance at survival. Every year, Mexico—which had made harming the turtles or their eggs a federal crime—would donate 2,000 Kemp’s ridley eggs (each turtle lays about 100 eggs at a time, so the surviving Mexican population of about 500 breeding females could spare that many). The National Marine Fisheries Service would fly the eggs to South Padre Island in south Texas to incubate in the warm sand until they hatched, so the hatchlings would form an “imprint” with the South Padre beach, and if all went well, return there to breed when they matured years later. After the imprinting, the turtles were brought to Galveston, where the fisheries service ran the nation’s only marine sea turtle research and rehabilitation lab, and they were allowed to mature for ten months to give them a better chance at survival in the wild. Newborns generally had a high mortality rate; as the little turtles floated wherever the currents carried them, all along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, as far north as Canada, they were eaten by just about anything that flies or swims. As they matured, they would return to shallow coastal waters, primarily in the Gulf of Mexico. The shells of the Head Start turtles were marked so that if they returned to their new nesting area, the researchers would know.
Allen was enchanted by the juvenile turtles and the program aimed at bringing them back. She visited the turtle hatchery in Galveston, Texas, in 1978, and three years later she talked the principal at her daughter’s grade school into arranging a class outing there. Two hundred students made the seventy-mile trip one Saturday to see the freshly hatched babies, still in buckets of sea water after being plucked from the sand, black at that stage of life and only half the size of a child’s hand. While the children learned about a turtle’s life at sea, its urge to return to the sand on which it hatched, and the many threats that are making the Kemp’s ridley ever more rare, Allen heard from the hatchery director that the new Reagan administration was cutting funding for the program. When she shared this with the elementary school kids, they immediately asked how they could help. The lab director pulled Allen aside and said pointedly, “What these turtles really need is a constituency.” Allen translated for the kids: “If these turtles are going to make it, they need some friends.”
Out of that, a constituency was born—elementary school children. Allen suggested a community awareness and fund-raising campaign to obtain feed for the growing turtles. The kids, inspired by the turtles’ heart-shaped shells, suggested that the campaign be given the acronym HEART, for “Help Endangered Animals—Ridley Turtles,” and the name stuck. It turned out that four dollars was enough to buy a supply of Purina Turtle Chow for one hatchling, and every kid who brought in donations was rewarded with a red heart cutout placed in a little cardboard turtle house. Allen worked as a volunteer in the classroom and then in the whole school, handling the donations and making and doling out the turtle houses. After one of the Houston newspapers picked up the story, Allen started getting calls and letters from around the state and the country, and soon dozens of schools and thousands of kids were raising money to save the sea turtles, and sending penciled letters to Congress and the White House, pleading for more government protection for the turtles. The program became both a fund-raising tool and a teaching opportunity for elementary schools, whose pupils learned about sea turtles, extinction, and the Endangered Species Act. In 1981 HEART became a nonprofit and a nearly full-time volunteer pursuit for Allen, in addition to her full-time paying job at the probation department. She and a group of other volunteers started making presentations to classrooms and civic clubs on the problem of the sea turtles’ possible extinction, drumming up support for Head Start and for the turtles, which were among the earliest listings under the Endangered Species Act, yet had little or no protection and no critical habitat.
Every year in May, when the hatchlings had grown to the size of a laptop computer, Allen and a group of student volunteers—a few of them had started with HEART in elementary school and were still taking part in college—would go out with the marine fisheries service and release the juvenile turtles in the warm gulf waters. Gently tossing the turtles into the ocean had been a sort of an annual rite, a source of hope and inspiration for the volunteers. “This is what all the work and the fund-raising and the lobbying is for, this moment,” Allen exulted after she had the honor of releasing the final turtle of 1987. She did not know it would be the last time for this yearly ritual.
The danger to the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle was no longer from egg poachers—there were no more mile-long processions to raid, and the Mexican government sent armed soldiers to protect the few straggling breeding tortoises that clambered out of the water at Rancho Nuevo. Instead, by the mid-1980s more Kemp’s ridley and other sea turtles than ever before washed up in the Texas Gulf Coast mutilated or dead—200 or 300 a year. This toll was devastating to species on the brink of extinction. Most of the dead turtles had suffocated in shrimp nets; others had died in collisions with boats or the boats’ propellers. A substantial number of the dead turtles were females laden with eggs, multiplying the loss a hundredfold. In the midst of the carnage, in 1988, Allen and her student volunteers were upset to learn that the ten-year-old Operation Head Start had been canceled by the marine fisheries service and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Commerce. Allen and her students had extended the life of the program several years more than it might otherwise have lasted; the power of publicity had held off the budget cutters for a time. But Head Start had finally become too vulnerable: None of the imprinted hatchlings had ever been observed to return to South Padre Island, despite regular patrols by Allen and her crew of HEART volunteers searching for signs of the marked turtles (or any Kemp’s ridleys, for that matter). The experiment had been deemed a failure.
Allen pleaded for more time. “You need to be more patient. They will come back,” she predicted. So little was known about the migratory patterns and wild behavior of these turtles that they might yet surprise us, she said. And even if they don’t return, we are still giving an endangered species a chance for survival, and giving children an unparalleled learning opportunity. Her pleas were politely, but firmly, rejected.
And that, she recalls, led to a change in direction for HEART. Instead of closing up shop with the end of the program to bring life to the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, she instead focused on the industry that was bringing death to the species. A report by the National Research Council2 had concluded that the 17,000-vessel shrimp trawling fleet in the Gulf of Mexico posed the single greatest threat to sea turtles, killing more of the animals than all other causes combined. Statistics compiled by the Department of Commerce showed that 14,000 turtles of all kinds were snared in shrimp nets each year in the gulf, and an estimated 4,000 of these were killed.
“There was really no choice,” Allen would say later. “The commercial shrimp fleet was, despite their denials, driving the turtles into extinction. I knew it would be hard. But not as hard as watching a creature that has been on this earth for a hundred million years get wiped out in one generation.”
Commercial shrimpers make their catch through bottom trawling, an indiscriminate form of fishing that wreaks havoc on ocean ecosystems, tearing up the seabed. Typical shrimp trawlers drag two forty-foot nets pulled from outriggers. The nets have boards attached to them that hold the mouths open and force the nets downward against the ocean floor, allowing them to scoop up bottom-feeding shrimp in huge numbers. But the nets gobble up everything else in their path—sharks, starfish, large game fish, turtles. Habitats and hatcheries are crushed in the process, and trawling is particularly damaging in the shallows, where it destroys whole sea life nurseries. Bottom trawling churns up sediment and pushes nutrients up in the water column, in turn promoting algal blooms. The algae are then consumed by hordes of bacteria, which strip the water of oxygen, creating dead zones where no fish can survive. In 2005, one such dead zone in the gulf reached the size of New Jersey.3
Just as the Endangered Species Act charged the Fish and Wildlife Service with protecting endangered land and freshwater species, the National Marine Fisheries Service had responsibility for protecting imperiled marine life. The agency prepared a recovery plan for the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle that focused on the danger of being trapped in shrimp trawls. The plan championed a new device developed by the fisheries service, called a turtle excluder device (TED), which could be sewn into shrimp trawl nets, providing protection for the turtles without impairing the catch. The TED consists of thin metal bars in an oval frame that spans the net midway between the wide mouth, which scoops up the catch, and the other end: the “bag,” where the catch accumulates. As shrimp flow in, they simply pass through the bars of the TED and into the bag. But larger and heavier creatures, such as turtles, strike the bars and they pop open to form a hatch-way out of the net, ejecting the creature into the open water, then closing behind it. The ingenious device allows sea turtles to avoid being trapped and suffocating. (Kemp’s ridleys don’t actually drown; when they are submerged, involuntary muscles close their airway, so a turtle trapped too long underwater will suffocate.) A long series of tests by the fisheries service showed that a properly installed TED saved turtles 95 percent of the time, and allowed no more than 5 percent of a shrimp catch to escape. Because a TED also eliminated all sorts of by-catch—not just turtles but other unwanted creatures and debris—the shrimp catch came out of the water much “cleaner,” and therefore could have about the same value as a slightly larger shrimp haul made without a TED.
Shrimp fishermen complained that the first version of the TED was too heavy, so the government developed a lighter model, which the shrimpers found too bulky. The government then offered a collapsible TED. The devices were distributed free to the fleet in a voluntary program beginning in 1982. But despite the modifications and pleas from environmentalists and government officials, only about 2 percent of shrimpers used the devices. The shrimpers hated the TED, and many fishermen swore they’d never use it, convinced that it would drive them to financial ruin and that the lost catch would be far larger than the government asserted; one industry study put the figure at 30 percent, six times the federal estimate. “There will be violence if they try to force this on us,” one fisherman told a news reporter at the time. “We’re on the edge, and that will put us over.”
Allen and HEART were among the first to publicly assert that voluntary programs would not save the turtles. She began lobbying her congressmen, the congressional committees overseeing endangered species and fisheries, and the larger Washington-based environmental organizations with their big budgets and insider savvy, pushing for a federal rule making the TED mandatory. She spoke out at public meetings, wrote newspaper op-ed pieces, and testified at a series of rancorous federal hearings, where she was vilified by the shrimpers, who felt that their livelihood and their way of life were being threatened by this “turtle lady.” Her argument that shrimping and species protection could coexist without driving anyone out of business simply did not jibe with the experience and traditions of the close-knit shrimping community.
The shrimpers rallied around Tee John Mialjevich, a blustery, 300-pound, six-foot-four advocate of the shrimp industry from Louisiana, who vowed neither he nor his supporters would ever obey a government edict that required them to use the TED. “We’re not the culprits here,” Mialjevich insisted, accusing Allen and other conservationists of a smear campaign. He said that in all his years of shrimping he had caught no more than six turtles, and that he had thrown them all back into the water alive.
Allen found those numbers doubtful at best, and certainly not typical—too many injured and dead turtles washed up on Texas beaches during the shrimping season, and then these numbers rapidly diminished once the trawlers departed. Allen also argued that “when a species is on the verge of going extinct, catching and possibly killing six of them is a disaster—particularly when there are close to twenty thousand other shrimpers out there in the gulf doing the same thing.” She added, “Losing one turtle at this point is a disaster.”
Allen had been a loyal, small-government Republican all her adult life, a believer in the wisdom of Ronald Reagan’s view that the less regulation there was, the better—but these beautiful, endangered animals had given her new respect for the power of a well-placed regulation and the political will to enforce it. The voluntary approach had been tried. It had failed. Now, she argued, it was time to enforce the Endangered Species Act. For this, she was branded a traitor, a radical, a job-killer; she received hate mail, hang-up phone calls, and threatening calls. But she gave as good as she got, deriding fishermen who elevated a slightly higher profit margin for an unessential appetizer over the survival of an entire species. And when a letter to the editor questioned the purpose of saving turtles from extinction, Allen fired off a typically sharp reply: “In response to the question—Exactly what is the purpose of a turtle?—one might ask, what is the purpose of a bald eagle, a swan, a fish or a flower? Turtles don’t have to justify their existence anymore than the writer of the letter does.”
With Allen, HEART, and a coalition of national and state environmental organizations urging action, the National Marine Fisheries Service finally made the TED mandatory in 1988. Tee John Mialjevich and his supporters persuaded the state of Louisiana to sue the federal government on the shrimpers’ behalf. (“Turtles don’t vote,” Governor Edwin Edwards explained.) The suit failed to remove the mandate, but the shrimpers persuaded Congress to postpone the effective date of the new regulations for another year. When the law requiring the TED finally took effect on July 1, 1989, Mialjevich led the shrimpers in a mass act of civil disobedience: more than 200 trawlers blockaded all shipping in the Houston waterways and blocked traffic into and out of America’s largest oil depot for thirty-six hours. Tensions ran high, and the shrimpers threatened violence if they were forced to move; they even rammed a Coast Guard vessel that was shooting water cannons at the trawlers. And it worked. The administration of President George H. W. Bush (the first President Bush) began negotiations with Mialjevich, and Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher decided to suspend the TED regulations and to consider alternatives—such as an unenforceable and largely useless requirement that trawlers lift their nets out of the water every 105 minutes to look for snared turtles. “Shrimpers Triumph Over TEDs,” the next day’s headline said. Mosbacher claimed that he had the legal right to suspend the rules—although no such power was granted under the Endangered Species Act—because a “recalcitrant industry” had created a public safety emergency.
“I look to Secretary Mosbacher to enforce the law we worked for and not give in to mob action, which is what he’s doing,” a dispirited Allen told reporters.
Now it was her turn to sue, and HEART was joined by several larger environmental organizations as plaintiffs. A year later, they won reinstatement of the regulations. The shrimpers would have to use the TED, or face stiff fines, the feds promised. Within a year, the marine fisheries service was reporting that its new, tough attitude had produced better than 90 percent compliance. The major environmental groups who had come to Allen’s assistance considered it a victory and moved on, leaving Allen to wonder why a combative industry that had been on the verge of insurrection would suddenly roll over. Hadn’t the industry succeeded in backing down Mosbacher, the billionaire member of the first President Bush’s inner circle, one of Houston’s wealthiest and most influential citizens (who, in 2008, would become general chairman of Senator John McCain’s campaign for president)?
“Something isn’t right,” Allen told her friends. “I saw the way they looked at me at those hearings. They don’t give up that easily.”
Then the deaths of sea turtles began to mount. The deaths should have declined with the TEDs in place, but instead, more and more of the turtles were washing up along the Texas coast. In 1994 there was a record high of 500, half of which were Kemp’s ridleys. The stakes were especially high then because, in the early 1990s, the imprinted turtles that had been brought up from Mexico, hatched, and released from South Padre Island had finally begun to return to nest. First just a couple, then a dozen, then thirty-eight had appeared during the nesting seasons. Their Operation Head Start markings were unmistakable—and they were mixed in with other turtles that had not been imprinted.
Allen had been right when she had begged for a reprieve for the project—the long-lived turtles simply took until age thirteen to fifteen to begin nesting.
One of the junior biologists on the original Head Start project, Donna Shaver, now took charge, having made the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle her lifework as a scientist. The new eggs would be protected from predators in a secure hatching area on the beaches, watched over around the clock (often by Shaver herself, sleeping on a cot on the beach). The hatchlings had to be released at the optimum time, when they emerged from their nest using all their energy reserves in a frenzy of swimming motions to propel themselves out to sea. Shaver found that hatchlings she had watched over in the old project were now coming back to give birth. She felt like a grandmother, she later told Allen.
At the same time, the population of Kemp’s ridleys in Rancho Nuevo has surged to more than 3,000 nesting turtles each year, bolstered by the Mexican government’s stringent protections of the eggs and the animals. But that progress, too, could be undone by the rising number of turtle deaths off the Texas coast.
Allen knew she needed outside help again. This time she contacted Todd Steiner—head of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, based in San Francisco—who had worked many times with the Center for Biological Diversity on protecting sea life in the Pacific Ocean. Steiner was dubious at first, but soon realized from the data Allen provided that she was right: There were far too many turtle deaths, and the evidence suggested that these turtles had been killed by humans, not natural causes. Within a few months, HEART and Steiner filed suit under the Endangered Species Act, demanding that all shrimping in the gulf be halted until the enforcement of the TEDs regulations was improved. The government maintained it was enforcing the regulations and getting excellent compliance, but Steiner and Allen recruited the Humane Society to make an undercover investigation, which revealed that four out of ten ships in the shrimp fleet were not using TEDs. Large numbers of shrimpers were either removing the devices while at sea, or sewing them shut.
The much publicized investigation created yet another firestorm, and the victims, as usual, were the sea turtles. Mutilated turtle corpses began washing up on Texas beaches: flippers cut off, heads cut off, spikes driven through shells. One poor creature had been wrapped in chains and then thrown to its death, Mafia-style. The Sea Turtle Restoration Project and HEART offered a $5,000 reward for information about the culprits, and they began a public campaign for a permanent coastal preserve where shrimp trawling would be banned. HEART and other organizations also purchased billboards in Texas asking, “How many endangered Texas sea turtles get killed for your shrimp?”
In the end, the cruel tactics against the turtles generated a backlash against the shrimp industry among a public already unhappy about the earlier blockade. Hearings on creating the state-run coastal preserve that Allen had proposed began in 1998, and support for the idea appeared to be overwhelming—90 percent of public comments were favorable. Still, while the state continued to debate what to do, the turtle corpses kept washing up. There was no longer any question who was responsible: When a temporary ban on shrimp fishing was imposed for eight weeks in 1997, the numbers of dead and injured turtles turning up on beaches dropped dramatically, averaging not even two a week. Before and after the shrimping ban, strandings had been running between fifteen and twenty-five a week.
Allen and Steiner decided to attempt to shame the authorities into acting. They recruited protesters to wear turtle costumes and follow the governor—George W. Bush, who had launched his campaign for president in 1999. The protesters followed him throughout Texas and into California, relying on the assumption that as a candidate, Bush would want to do something to improve his abysmal record on the environment in Texas. Then HEART and the Sea Turtle Restoration Project bought two full-page ads in The New York Times, decrying the plight of the sea turtle and Bush’s inaction. One of the ads had the heading, “If Governor Bush doesn’t save the Texas sea turtle maybe President Gore will.” Two days later, Bush deputized seventy game wardens to assist with patrolling the gulf and enforcing the federal shrimping regulations. The feds, meanwhile, finally began to enforce the law vigorously, for the first time charging a shrimper with a criminal violation of the Endangered Species Act instead of doing the equivalent of writing a speeding ticket. In a criminal case, the trawler, the equipment, and the catch are seized. Instead of a fine, now one violation of the TED regulations could put a shrimper out of business. In a few months, compliance with the TED requirement increased from 60 percent to 75 percent.
By 2000, officials in Texas had agreed to a partial coastal preserve: Shrimping would be banned within five miles of the coast between December 1 and July 15, and there would be no night shrimping at all. There were also other restrictions on trawling, intended to complement federal protections for sea life. It was not the year-round ban in shallow coast waters that Allen sought and that 96 percent of public commenters at the hearings had endorsed, but it was enough to keep the trawlers away during the nesting season.
The shrimpers remained bitter, but accepted the regulations at last, and they have gotten some relief through legislation that limited the import of foreign shrimp. By law, shrimp can be imported only from nations that also require TEDs.
After working to protect the turtles for more than twenty-five years, Allen still remains vigilant, organizing teams of volunteers to comb the beaches during nesting season, searching for the turtles’ distinctive half-moon tracks in the sand. In 2007, 128 Kemp’s ridley sea turtle nests were counted—a record—and protected through Donna Shaver’s program and by Allen’s volunteers. HEART is no longer Allen’s little nonprofit; it’s now the Gulf Coast branch of the much larger Sea Turtle Restoration Project, and Allen’s work there is now her job, after many years of volunteerism. She will not give her age, saying only that she is a “pre-boomer,” but her enthusiasm for turtles, for being present during the hatchings and releases, is undiminished as she continues to work for more rigorous protections for the Kemp’s ridley, the species she saved from extinction.
“Turtles don’t do anything quickly,” she says. “So when you are into turtles, you learn to be patient, too.”