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Embracing Nature—Thinking Globally, Acting Locally
The primeval forests—what was left of them—exposed a toxic fault line running through the American body politic. Nearly everyone agreed that we should save the whales, but whales were part of the global commons and no one owned them. The whaling fleets were all owned by foreigners or foreign governments, so Americans had nothing to lose from a whaling ban. In contrast, old-growth forests were rooted on land owned by lumber companies and managed as a crop, and on government forestland where trees are managed by the Department of Agriculture as a crop. Depending on your point of view, old-growth forests were either Nature’s cathedral or a whole lot of standing timber. There was no agreement whatsoever about whether these forests should be preserved.
A conservative backlash against environmental regulation started with the Sagebrush Rebellion in 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act joined the Wilderness Act and the Endangered Species Act to shrink the amount of public land available for grazing, mining, and timbering. Ranchers, miners, and other property owners balked at the new environmental restrictions, and fought for greater local control of federally owned land. Ronald Reagan rode these issues into office, slashed funding for regulators, and removed the solar panels Jimmy Carter had mounted on the White House roof.
James Watt, Reagan’s head of the Department of the Interior, said his job was to “follow the Scriptures, which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns,” and called the environmental movement a left-wing cult. Watt rescinded regulations, leased huge tracts of land to coal-mining companies, opened sweeping areas of the continental shelf to offshore drilling, and agreed to allow more local control over the management of federal lands. He loved cutting old-growth forests. There was suddenly far less for ranchers and miners to object to, and the rebellion fizzled.
In the go-go 1980s, a time of leveraged buyouts and Gordon Gekko’s ethos of “Greed Is Good,” both the lumber companies and the US Forest Service were keen to liquidate their big trees. The corporate and federal view of old-growth forests was neatly encapsulated by Ronald Reagan: “You know, a tree is a tree. How many more do you need to look at?”
The Reagan administration was eager to increase the volume of wood harvested from the national forests, and an easy way to do that was to cut the old trees in the virgin stands and replace them with fast-growing young trees. Reagan’s forest manager, timber attorney John Crowell, believed we could double or even triple the production of board feet from the nation’s forests by clearing out the overmature timber.
Soon large clear-cuts were replacing formerly pristine landscapes, and activists started demanding that the country’s remaining old-growth forests—both public and private—be preserved. From one point of view, you’d have to be out of your mind to cut down the nation’s last acres of primeval forest. From another, you must be mad to think of taking away the private property rights this nation was built on, or telling the government how to manage its forest resources. More than a generation later, the clear-cutters and the tree huggers still struggle to understand each other.
California’s giant redwoods had been harvested since the 1850s, and by the 1980s over 90 percent of the coastal redwoods were gone. East of the Mississippi, almost all of the old forests had already been cut. The forests of the Rockies were nearly all second- and third-growth. The only substantial patches of primeval forest left in the country were in California, Oregon, and Washington. Too bad for the big trees, though, because the US Forest Service had no intention of preserving any additional acreage of old-growth forest. The Reagan plan was to create younger, more productive forests to be harvested every 70 to 120 years.
The largest private owner of redwood trees on the West Coast was the Pacific Lumber Company (PALCO), which had been selectively cutting its 200,000 acres of forestland since the 1930s (200,000 acres is 312.5 square miles, a patch of land just thirty miles long by ten miles wide, and this was the largest privately owned redwood forest in existence). PALCO was cited as a model of wise forest management because they did a selective cut of 70 percent of the redwoods on a given plot every 50 years. This harvest schedule does not allow for old trees, but a properly done selective cut is nearly invisible. The big trees disappear, but you don’t really see it happening. The forest just gets younger, year by year.
In the 1980s, PALCO was debt free with an overfunded pension fund and about $1.8 billion of standing timber. Charles Hurwitz, a corporate raider, and Michael Milken, the king of junk bonds, teamed up to do a hostile takeover of PALCO (which was not for sale). In the fall of 1985, Hurwitz bought PALCO with $800 million in junk bonds. In 1986, he started clear-cutting the redwood forest to cash out. PALCO’s land was in Humboldt County, the unofficial hippie mecca and pot capital of California. There is no way this story was going to end well.
Clear-cutting commenced on PALCO’s old-growth forest in California, and was already under way on public land in Oregon and Washington. Old-growth clear-cuts in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon had inspired direct action by members of the radical environmental organization Earth First!
Earth First! coalesced in 1979 as a leaderless group that used litigation and creative civil disobedience to protect wilderness. It was a group with philosophical underpinnings: they particularly liked Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss and deep ecology. Grounded in the teachings of Baruch Spinoza, Gandhi, and Buddha, Næss claimed that every living being, be it plant, fungus, animal, or insect, has an equal right to live and flourish. This doesn’t mean that you can’t kill a mosquito, just that the mosquito has as much right to a happy life as you do. According to Næss, the natural order—wildness—has intrinsic value that transcends human values. He takes it a step further, too: humans can only attain “realization of the Self” as part of the ecosphere because human beings, as individuals, are a tiny part of the web of life on Earth. Which is to say, whatever harm we do to the balance of life, we do to ourselves. That’s the easy part. The difficult part of deep ecology is that the monocultures of industrial life destroy the Earth’s cultural and biological diversity for convenience and profit—human convenience and profit, that is. And unless we reduce the human footprint on the world, we will destroy its diversity and beauty. Deep ecology claims that the point of protecting ecosystems is not just for humans, but for the Earth itself, and that the human population needs to be much, much lower. The Earth First! slogan is “No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth!” and they mean it.
Earth First! members had tried roadblocks to stop the harvest in the Willamette, and soon found that tree-sitting was an effective deterrent. Tree-sits in PALCO’s Humboldt County forest started nearly as soon as clear-cutting commenced.
In 1985, Dave Foreman, one of the earliest members of Earth First!, wrote Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. This how-to book for environmental resistance, or ecoterrorism, includes information on how to disable equipment and destroy roads, how to make a smoke bomb, and how to spike a tree by hammering a metal rod into its trunk, which causes no lasting damage to the tree but deters loggers, who risk injury and damaged saws. Ecodefense is a cultural artifact from a time when sabotage—ecotage—seemed like the only way left to preserve the wilderness.
The hedge-fund manager Hurwitz, who ordered the clear-cutting of the last big chunk of privately owned old-growth forest in the United States, made a speech in which he told his loggers that “he who has the gold makes the rules.” The ecoterrorists explained to the media that the sequoias are the elder spirits of the Earth plane. These people were speaking different languages, and the fight to save this particular patch of forestland lasted fifteen years.
Before it was resolved, a car bomb nearly killed Earth First! organizers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in 1990, 1,000 people were arrested at the then-largest forest protest of 6,000 demonstrators in 1996, Humboldt County deputies swabbed protesters’ eyes with pepper spray at a protest of 9,000 in 1997, an activist was killed by a falling tree cut by a furious logger in 1998, and Julia “Butterfly” Hill completed an internationally famous tree-sit of 738 days in 1999 and finally descended when PALCO agreed to save the tree, affectionately dubbed “Luna,” along with a 200-foot buffer zone. The state and federal government bought 10,000 acres of the forest. The rest is gone.
Earth First! members’ rhetoric and actions seemed over the top until I spent a few days camping in an ancient forest in Idaho. When you start looking for old-growth forests, you begin to understand how rare they are. The National Commission for Science on Sustainable Forestry published an assessment of the nation’s old-growth forest in 2008 that shows that less than 1 percent of the Northeast forest is old growth, and some states have just a few dozen acres. The forests of the Adirondacks have been protected for a century, but nearly all of the trees are second-growth, and the forest will take another few centuries to fully mature. Less than half a percent of the southeast forests is old growth, and around the Great Lakes old forests are even scarcer. The Southwest has a few pockets of old-growth ponderosas, and there are some very old individual trees in folds of land so steep that they couldn’t be extracted, but nearly all of the Rockies were cut long ago. Trees were free money in a time when cash was hard to come by, and humans have enormous ingenuity. If a tree could be transported to the lumber mill, it was.
Bob and I heard of an old-growth forest that was about ten miles long and three miles wide off a tributary to the Selway River in Idaho. The timber was still standing because it was nearly inaccessible, with a ten-mile hike down a slope so steep that a road (and equipment access) was impossible. It was a hike into a forgotten garden of ancient trees.
We all know what a forest looks like. But this Idaho forest of never-harvested cedars was unlike any place I’ve ever been. There were a few different species of trees along the river, but there was only one type of tree in the forest and no shrubbery. Cedars ruled as if they had held a council and decided that every other kind of tree would be excluded.
Instead of being evenly spaced, many of the trees grew in groups of two, three, and even four or five trees together. They seemed like old friends who had lived together peaceably, helping each other, for many centuries. And the forest was ageless, or timeless. One of the very largest trees in the forest had clearly grown on an ancient nurse log that had been equally large. A thousand-year tree growing on top of a thousand-year tree creates a vignette that begins at the time of the Roman Empire, and the tree still stands.
Forest Service employees had built a hiking trail that passes through the valley, and many of the animal trails were equally clearly defined. The difference between a Forest Service trail and an animal trail, I learned, is that you can find axe-cut trees beside the human trail. Of course, animals use the human trail as well, and at one muddy stream crossing we saw the footprints of a wolf, a bear, elk, moose, and deer. The wolf print was so big it was unmistakable and I know bear tracks from Colorado, but I could not have distinguished between the elk and the moose without professional assistance. We were hiking with a retired Forest Service botanist, a friend who carried a can of pepper spray on his belt. There are lots of bears in southwest Colorado, and Bob and I know how to make ourselves big—take a wide stance and spread your arms like an X—so the bear runs away. It works in Colorado. But in a remote Idaho valley that’s home to a pack of wolves, pepper spray is de rigueur because the bolder grizzlies might have displaced the shy black bears. (Fun fact: Forest Service employees don’t shoot charging bears because if you wound the bear you’ve escalated the conflict and your life is now in danger; instead, you release a cloud of pepper spray so the bear runs into it and veers off.)
The old-growth forest and its wide array of animals seemed like a single organism, and we were part of it, walking inside an isolated snow globe of an ancient world. Everything in the forest worked together seamlessly, from the mushrooms on the forest floor to the lichens in the canopy. The air of an old-growth forest holds the magic of the Earth. It is a landscape that inspires wonder.
“Wonder is like grace,” wrote novelist David James Duncan, “in that it’s not a condition we grasp; it grasps us. Wonder is not an obligatory element in the search for truth. We can seek truth without wonder’s assistance. But seek is all we’ll do; there will be no finding. Unless wonder descends, unlocks us … truth is unable to enter. Wonder may be the aura of truth, the halo of it. Or something even closer. Wonder may be the caress of truth, touching our very skin.”
The wildness embodied by an ancient forest is inclusive, inviting you to be part of it as well. It is wondrous. And yet the forests of the Pacific Northwest would have disappeared without the Endangered Species Act and the spotted owl. The spotted owl—a species that depends on northwestern old-growth forests—was recognized as an impediment to Forest Service clear-cutting by 1982, when the Reagan plan for rejuvenating the nation’s forests included preserving enough old timber to support at least 375 pairs of spotted owls. (Biologists estimate that 2,000 pairs survive today.)
Spotted owls are a species with a low population density and a large home range. They are a classic umbrella species, where a single protected species can shield many other species in the entire assemblage. It is simpler to get legal protection for one species than for many, and the Endangered Species Act was designed to preserve habitat. Protecting the spotted owl was a way to save the remaining old-growth forests, and everything in them. In early 1987, the environmental organization Greenworld petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list the owl as an endangered species; they were joined by another twenty-nine environmental organizations that summer.
The concept of sustainable development entered the public consciousness in 1987 with the help of Norway’s prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who chaired a committee that published a visionary report, Our Common Future. The Brundtland report showed linkages between environmental degradation and poverty, and presented a version of sustainability that included the environment, the economy, and social equity. “Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” wrote Brundtland.
Sustainability was a concept that made intuitive sense. Ecologically, sustainability is “the property of biological systems to remain diverse and productive indefinitely.” Instead of overpopulation, overconsumption, pollution, and the resulting societal collapse predicted by Limits to Growth, we could live within limits that allowed wildness to exist. We could live, and let live.
Razing the last old-growth forests did not meet anyone’s definition of sustainable. The argument had been that these forests were not important, and it didn’t matter if they were cut. Framing this as a problem of sustainability brings up the awkward fact that these forests were not being replaced. There’s a charming old tale from Oxford’s New College, in which administrators had set aside a forest to be harvested a thousand years hence when the timbers of the college’s great hall, built of thousand-year oak, would need replacing, but that is not the American way. The spotted owl was threatened with extinction because nearly all of the old-growth forests were already gone, and they weren’t being regrown.
Conservatives had learned from the fierce public backlash to Reagan’s environmental deregulation that it was more effective to question the seriousness of environmental problems and discredit environmentalists as radicals who distort evidence and exaggerate problems than to openly support pollution and clear-cutting. The spotted owl and the Endangered Species Act became a political meme. The issue was framed as jobs vs. owls, or money vs. the environment, but the reality was more complex. The sad truth is that sawmills and towns had been built to harvest old-growth forests, and by 2015 all of the forests would have been cut and the sawmills would have become obsolete. The loggers’ jobs were scheduled to disappear, and the forests would have been gone as well.
The rhetoric around logging old-growth forests and preserving a way of life in lumber towns was like wool carders centuries ago and coal miners today: people should be able to do the same work as their fathers. But it wasn’t just that people valued these forests differently; it was a full-fledged clash of American cultures. Free market ideology bumped up against the Endangered Species Act, private property rights clashed with the public’s desire to preserve the last acres of old-growth forest, and representative democracy was not receptive to public participation in federal policy. And that is putting it politely.
The Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service both agreed that cutting should continue, and offered a grab bag of reasons. Sawmills built for large trees would become obsolete, they argued, and up to 28,000 jobs would be lost, leading to “increased rates of domestic disputes, divorce, acts of violence, delinquency, vandalism, suicide, alcoholism, and other problems.” Consumer prices for wood would rise. The BLM pointed out that fine furniture and musical instruments have to be made with old-growth wood, and as a society we have no choice but to cut these trees. Our public servants were making feeble arguments to cut the last old forests in the contiguous United States, but it was really about money—one estimate put the loss of state revenues from old-growth forests in Oregon and Washington at $1.96 billion.
Citizens organized sit-ins at company offices, tree-sits, blockades of logging trucks, lawsuits, and demonstrations attended by tens of thousands of protesters. Folk singer U. Utah Phillips summed up the problem: “The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and the people who are killing it have names and addresses.” After a fractious period of public disagreement and legal intervention, the US Fish and Wildlife Service finally listed the spotted owl as a threatened species in 1990.
In the end, some of the old forests in California, Oregon, and Washington were preserved: a 2009 study found that 6 percent of the forestland in these three states is old-growth. That’s a lot, compared to the rest of the country. The spotted owl and the Endangered Species Act were accused of ruining people’s lives, but the region has changed since then. Instead of an economy based on natural resources—fishing, agriculture, and lumber—Oregon, for example, now relies on a mix of manufacturing, services, high-technology, and agriculture. Many tourists visit for the scenery and craft beers. The big trees are worth more standing than they would have been cut, and their total value is much less than the annual value of Oregon computer and electronic products today. Saving those trees was a net gain for the northwest (and of course the sawmills were retooled to manage smaller trees). There was no economic disaster, but in some forest towns there aren’t any jobs cutting trees anymore, and new businesses have not taken root. Economic transitions are never painless.
A study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Stephen Meyer showed how the Endangered Species Act affected the economies of all fifty states from 1975 through 1990: It didn’t. He found no adverse economic impact of ESA species’ listings in the states with the most listed species, and many of these states actually had higher economic growth. Protecting endangered species enhances the economy. A healthier ecosystem has wide-ranging benefits, and some of them are financial.
With the protection of the old-growth forests came the realization that within the United States, some types of ecosystems have nearly been eradicated. The grasslands have been relentlessly plowed, and less than 4 percent of the tallgrass prairie remains. In some states the only remnants of these grasslands were found in country graveyards and railroad right-of-ways. In the 1970s, it was found that this ecosystem (then at 1 percent of its original range) is easily restored by returning to old patterns of fire and grazing, and tens of thousands of acres of tallgrass prairie reserves, complete with buffalo, have been created since then.
New research shows that you can mimic the biotic complexity of an old-growth forest by knocking down trees in a young forest and leaving them to decompose on the forest floor. This simple step increases the variety of habitat in a forest, and could help speed forest restoration. About half of the country’s wetlands, land that cleans flowing water and allows it to percolate down to the groundwater, have disappeared since the 1700s. Wetlands were relentlessly filled or drained until 1989, when President George H. W. Bush adopted the policy of “no net loss of wetlands,” a compromise that requires new wetlands acreage to be created or restored whenever wetlands are filled. Many types of habitat are being protected and improved.
Animals depend on specific habitat, and to save wildlife you have to preserve the ecosystems they depend on. But until quite recently, wildlife managers saw their job as preserving songbirds and game and saving a few species from extinction. In 1933, Aldo Leopold described game management as the “art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wild game for recreational use.” To protect songbirds, hawks and owls were shot on sight. To protect game, larger predators, including wolves, bears, and mountain lions, had been reduced to remnant populations by the early 1900s. The public wanted their national parks to be like outdoor zoos, and the Park Service tried to accommodate them. Tourists wanted to see deer and elk, so these animals were guarded and sometimes fed, while predators were killed to save the innocent grazers.
By the twentieth century, smaller predators like coyotes and bobcats still preyed on sheep herds, and prairie dogs still ate grass. Woolgrowers were the best-organized livestock group in the West, and they controlled the stock growers’ associations, so they controlled many state capitals and delegations to Washington. The federal government made a quiet project of creating a varmint-free range to aid the sheep that grazed on public land.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service protected wildlife with one hand, and poisoned coyotes and prairie dogs (and everything else) with the other. Before World War II, the federal government paid to have coyotes poisoned with strychnine-laced carcasses; after World War II, the new poison sodium fluoroacetate (named Compound 1080 after its wartime test number) was found to be extremely toxic to rodents and canids (a lethal coyote dose is 1.6 grams per hundred pounds of horsemeat). Prairie dogs were also aggressively poisoned, using thallium-covered grain that killed millions of game birds and songbirds as well. In the 1950s, the US Fish and Wildlife Service annually distributed many tons of 1080-baited meat, sometime sowing whole areas with poisoned bait dropped from airplanes. About half the land in the West was in reach of a poisoning station, including 91 percent of the rangeland in Idaho.
“Coyote getters” are stand-alone devices that kill coyotes. A mixture of sodium cyanide is packed into a .38 special cartridge case, and a primer ejects the poison into the coyote’s mouth when it takes the bait; they were pegged into the ground by the tens of thousands. In the 1960s, government trappers used over 6 million strychnine pellets coated with a paste of sugar and lard. Some of the sheepmen with grazing allotments in national forests would prep their piece of public land with sacks of strychnine pellets, some in peanut butter, some in honey, and kill everything in the area before they brought their sheep in.
Predator control decreased the need for herders, fences, lambing sheds, and even dogs. In the early 1960s, a rancher marveled that he had raised “7,000 lambs that spring without a single known loss to predators! And this was accomplished on lambing in the open range, no herders, no fences!” (He was so shocked by the lack of predation that he couldn’t stop using exclamation marks.)
By the 1950s and ’60s, public land in the West had been effectively sterilized by poison. Charles Orlosky, a retired government trapper in a remote area of the Rocky Mountains, spoke to a writer for Sports Illustrated in 1971.
Around here the poisoners have wiped out weasel, marten, mink, fox, badger, and they’ve got the coyote hanging on the ropes.… There aren’t enough fur-bearing animals left in these mountains to support a trapper, and I don’t care how hard he works at it. Mostly, I blame the 1080 poison. They say it’s only dangerous to canine species, but that’s just not true. I’ve found all kinds of birds feeding on 1080 stations—eagles, magpies, Canada jays, Clarke’s nutcrackers, woodpeckers—and those that don’t get killed pack away the poisoned meat in places where the martens and the weasels can find it and get poisoned themselves. Last winter was the first time in years that we didn’t have a pair of eagles feeding up here. They just disappeared. And where there used to be magpies all over the place, we didn’t see one all winter. These are major changes, crucial changes. My God, if they can wipe out whole species way back here in this part of the Rockies, they can wipe them out anywhere.
There was no incentive for the US Fish and Wildlife Service to accurately count how many non-target animals were killed by strychnine and Compound 1080. Strychnine baits were recently used in Alberta, Canada, to kill wolves in an attempt to increase woodland caribou herds. Their kill lists were incomplete, but they counted 154 poisoned wolves, 36 coyotes, 91 ravens, 31 foxes, 2 fish, 2 weasels, 4 martens, and 3 lynx. Another Alberta study using strychnine to protect livestock counted 183 wolves, 42 coyotes, 99 ravens, 45 magpies, 3 eagles, and 7 foxes.
Poisons emptied the West, and if you ever hear anyone say that we have more wildlife now than in the 1950s, gently explain that’s because we had almost killed absolutely everything by then, first with guns and traps, and then with poison.
When predators are eradicated, irruptions—big increases in prey populations—follow, along with the inevitable population crash when the food runs out. Deer irruptions became common after the 1920s, when most of the predators were gone (except in the southeast, where screw worms and hound dogs trimmed the herds). A famous deer irruption occurred in the Kaibab Plateau, adjacent to the Grand Canyon. The predators were eradicated to boost the deer herd, starting in 1906, and the scheme worked all too well. Aldo Leopold wrote that it was “as if someone had given God a new pruning shears and forbidden him all other exercise.” Every twig and leaf below the height of a deer standing on its hind legs was gone. The deer herd had multiplied, all right, and eaten themselves out of a food supply. The range was damaged, and some of the weakened survivors died of disease. Without predators, the deer herd became weak, sickly, and sparse, and the environment was degraded.
“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend,” wrote Aldo Leopold. “You cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.” It is fairly recent news that predators, instead of being evil, are a necessary part of the web of life.
In the process of conquering the wilderness, we exterminated prairie dog towns, shot wolves, poisoned coyotes, and clubbed the pups. But starting in the 1960s, bears, wolves, coyotes, foxes, owls, and hawks were suddenly valued instead of vilified. Ronald Ingelhart developed a theory in The Silent Revolution that industrial societies, including the United States, shifted in the 1960s and ’70s from an emphasis on materialist values—jobs, security, religion, and traditional sex roles—to post-materialist values centered on quality of life issues. Suddenly, some people expected the government to protect the environment, humanities, and arts. Some people wanted to engage in direct democracy, and to address issues of race, gender, and diversity. Included in this post-materialist mind-set is an increase in the political skills of the citizens, allowing people to play a greater role in political decisions.
President Nixon’s February 18, 1972, State of the Union address set the goal of eliminating predator poisons. He announced an end to the use of Compound 1080, strychnine, and cyanide on public land, and his intent to prevent their use on private land. There would be no more general reduction of predator populations; instead, the offending animal would be removed. A month later, the EPA banned all interstate shipments of thallium, cyanide, strychnine, and 1080 for predator control.
Starting in the 1970s, people wanted their national parks to be fully functional ecosystems instead of outdoor zoos. They wanted to see a landscape with the full complement of wild mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, mollusks, and insects, and with all their behaviors intact. In the New Age, people wanted to save everything.
Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer wrote Animal Liberation in 1975. He believes that we should seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, and that all pleasure or suffering counts equally. “If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration … [and] I don’t think we should discount the suffering of a being because of its species.”
By the 1980s, the United States was getting pretty good at saving bird species. The populations of trumpeter swans and nene (the Hawaiian goose), whooping cranes, herons, egrets, and ducks were all recovering. There were fewer than seventy wild trumpeters in 1933, and over 46,000 birds by 2010. There were about thirty nene in 1952, and in 2004 there were an estimated 1,800 birds, with 800 in the wild. The whooping crane numbered twenty-three in 1941 (including two captives); by 2015, there were about 600, including 161 captive birds.
The condor was more problematic, though, because its impending extinction was not from hunting or habitat loss. The condors had been common enough in the Gold Rush days in California that their quills were used to store gold dust, at about 10 cubic centimeters per quill. Hunting had thinned the ranks of these giant birds, but it was poisons and lead bullets aimed at other species that destroyed them. In 1987, the last twenty-two wild California condors were captured for a captive breeding program; condors were reintroduced to the wild starting in 1991. At the end of 2016, there were about 450 California condors, more wild birds than captives, soaring off the cliffs of California, Utah, Arizona, and Mexico.
Bears and wolves were the hardest sell for the new ethic of keeping all species in the ecosystem, because plenty of ranchers hate large predators, and ranchers ran the range for many years. In Colorado, the spring hunting of black bears (along with bear dogs and bear baiting) was outlawed in 1992. The bear population has grown substantially since then, which many people enjoy. Many ranchers, however, do not. Sheep herds used to be sent into the national forest to their grazing allotment with almost no protection, but now that predators have returned the herds have to be protected with dogs or llamas. Meanwhile, sheep dogs that protect flocks in high mountain pastures are different creatures than homebound Fidos. Some of these dogs are bred to rip out the throats of wolves or coyotes. Dogs that live with the herd can be so intensely protective of their sheep that they’re dangerous to hikers who don’t know to steer clear of a flock.
As predators become more plentiful, people who don’t use guardian animals to protect their sheep are more likely to lose them. It doesn’t help that predators can wreak havoc in a herd, killing animals in gruesome, careless ways. A local sheep farmer elected to state representative was outraged when a hungry spring bear killed fifty of his sheep by tearing off all of their udders as an especially tasty treat. A bear killed my fifty sheep, he said; we need to restore the spring bear hunt. His constituents replied, your fifty sheep killed my bear, and you need a bigger guard dog. Spring hunts were not reinstated.
Yellowstone National Park, nearly 3,500 square miles, was the first national park where wildlife biologists tried to restore the original biota by bringing back wolves and allowing the population of grizzly bears to increase. It was the only place grizzlies had survived in the lower forty-eight states—there were 136 in 1975—and the 1982 recovery plan included five additional zones for grizzlies in the contiguous forty-eight states. Today, there are an estimated 1,200 to 1,400 grizzly bears, and they are still feared, but they are welcomed. Wolves had also been fearsome, back when the wilderness was feared, but when wilderness became wonderful, so did the wolf. There are now more than 5,500 wolves in the contiguous United States.
In 1999, the first of more than 200 lynx were released in southwestern Colorado, and the population has become self-sustaining. The unexpected part of this reintroduction is that these lynx aren’t afraid of people, and they are often seen and photographed during the winter (when they are easier to see). They live in a world without traps or guns, and the people they meet would leave them mounds of cat food if they could. And it’s not just the newly reintroduced lynx that people embrace. Our neighborhood bobcat leaves footprints in the mud when it rains and was recently sitting on our porch. When I see him, I feel lucky.
There has been a change in the western zeitgeist, an embrace of nature that has resulted in wildlife being welcomed virtually everywhere. Jackrabbits overran Fargo, North Dakota, in 2015, and no one unholstered his or her gun. Humpback whales have returned to New York Harbor after 150 years, dolphins play in Boston Harbor, and sea lions have taken over Pier 39 in San Francisco Bay. Sea turtle populations are recovering after more than fifty years of protections. When young loggerhead and green turtles were swept ashore by Hurricane Irma, more than 1,500 baby turtles were brought in to Florida’s Brevard Zoo. People really want to help.
No matter how warmly people feel towards wildlife, there is a big logistical difference between saving bird species or marine mammals and saving terrestrial mammals. Bird species fly to their various feeding and mating grounds and marine mammals swim, while terrestrial mammals need to walk from place to place.
Some of the predators that have been reintroduced since the 1970s have gigantic ranges. The lynx needs a modest twenty square miles, cougars use tens to hundreds of square miles, black bears from five square miles to a thousand square miles; wolf packs need from tens to thousands of square miles, and a grizzly bear needs up to 1,500 square miles. Like the whales, it’s a wonder these animals can even find each other.
To successfully reintroduce large predators into the landscape, they have to be able to meet other family groups that might live far away. The problem of finding an unrelated mate led people to think about the importance of landscape connectivity in wildlife habitats. What else do habitats need to provide for these predators to survive?
It is currently believed that a functional ecosystem depends on flows of organisms, materials, energy, and information across the landscape. An ecosystem depends on connectivity. Without any one of these flows, biodiversity will not be maintained and you end up with an unsustainable system: an outdoor zoo. This means that without functional linkages between blocks of wildlife habitat, the number of species in any block of habitat will dwindle. Unless refuges are connected, gene flow, migration, recolonization of areas without populations, and adaptation to climate change will be impossible.
Meanwhile, there are four broad categories of ecosystem services that wild land provides for humans: production of food, fiber, and water (provisioning); control of climate, floods, and disease (regulating); nutrient cycling, oxygen production, soil formation, water cycling, and crop pollination (supporting); and spiritual, aesthetic, and recreational benefits (cultural). In general, ecosystem services depend on the ecological flows across the landscape, so connectivity is an essential part of the system. If we want ecosystems to be sustainable, or if we want them to provide the services that we need, then our wildlife refuges and pieces of public land will need to be connected into an integrated whole.
Improving the connectivity of land-based refuges goes hand in hand with the recognition that waterways have also lost their connectivity. Dams fragment the watershed and change free-flowing, cold, highly oxygenated rivers into series of warm, still lakes. A free-flowing river carries sediment and nutrients downstream, and plants and animals move freely along it. Dams are being removed from waterways across the United States, often with spectacular results. When fish are able to return to their ancestral spawning grounds, the waterways are cleaner, the wildlife is better fed, and the soil has more nutrients in it.
We understand more about how to support nature, but the US political system has become polarized around environmental issues. When the Soviet Union fell, conservatives replaced “the Red scare” with “the Green scare” that tree huggers cripple the country’s economy with environmental regulations. Bill Clinton was flanked by Al Gore, a vice president who wrote Earth in the Balance, a bestselling book about global warming. It was easy to make a clear distinction between environmentalists and Republicans.
The 1992 Rio Earth Summit was the first international attempt to address global warming. Under Reagan, the United States had successfully tackled ozone depletion with international cooperation, and used market-based pollution credits to sweeten acid rain. Instead of continuing to provide the world with bipartisan environmental leadership, the Republicans chose a different direction. According to sociologist Aaron McCright, the rise of global environmentalism generated a heightened level of antienvironmental activity by both congressional Republicans and the conservative movement as a whole.
Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1994, and positioned the GOP as the official party of the fossil-fuel industry. Oil, gas, and coal companies had traditionally donated to both parties, but in the 1990s, they started to funnel their money to Republicans and front groups and think tanks that were devoted to undermining climate science. Unlike the simple-minded denial used by cigarette manufacturers, climate change deniers used a multifaceted approach that came to be known as environmental skepticism.
Environmental skepticism was the strategy used in the uproar over the spotted owl. The first step is to establish that the problem is not important and the science is wrong. After rejecting environmental science, the next step is to prioritize economic, social, and environmental problems, with the environment pulling up last. The low priority assigned to the environment dovetails with the anti-regulatory ethos and the urge to reduce corporate liability for environmental degradation. The final theme of environmental skepticism is defending modernity from environmentalists, who are “waging a war against progress.”
In the decades since Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, the GOP has become reliant on campaign cash from the fossil-fuel industry, particularly the Koch brothers, whose donations of hundreds of millions of dollars to Republican politicians and think tanks are predicated on the recipients actively opposing climate change legislation. Think tanks that promote climate change denial have published over a hundred books based on environmental skepticism since the early 1990s, weakening the United States’ commitment to environmental protection. Climate change denial has become part of the Republican identity.
Proposed solutions to climate change include government intervention in the form of pollution taxes or emissions restrictions. Add in environmental skepticism, and you arrive at the rubric of “climate change is a hoax, and all proposed solutions are plots to grow the government and raise taxes.” Republicans who embrace the seriousness of climate change can face a well-funded primary challenger, or see their donations evaporate. As with gun control, it is currently politically safer for Republicans to embrace skepticism than to align with Democrats. And with the GOP takeover of Congress, the committees that oversee climate policies are now led by avid deniers. Unless people start to vote on this issue, the Republicans may continue to be the world’s only political party that embraces climate change denial.
Humans and nature are facing unprecedented challenges in the coming decades, and changes in rainfall patterns will surely trigger mass migration. If ever there was a time to work with other nations to reduce our output of carbon dioxide and methane, to prepare for rising seas, increased migration, and shifting agricultural regions, it’s now. And yet our politics are frozen, with half of the population convinced that we can’t deal with these problems.
But we know how to fix things. We have done terrible things to the environment in the past, and corrected a lot of our depredations. Nature has proved to be remarkably resilient. Our progress in transitioning from fossil fuel to sustainable energy sources has depended on which political party is in power, but as people learn more about nature’s benefits, more people want to protect the environment. As environmentalist activist and author Edward Abbey wrote, “It’s not enough to understand the natural world, the point is to defend and preserve it.” Individual actions, like tree-sitting and planting native species in our gardens and towns, are changing the landscape. Collective actions involving hundreds and sometimes thousands of people in decades-long projects like wolf restoration and dam removal are also changing the landscape.
The United States has about 74,000 dams, most of which are relatively small. We think of dams as permanent structures, but they’re not. Over time, dams fill with silt and their capacity decreases, ultimately to zero. As dams age, they may become unstable, and many dams have a design life of fifty years. According to the National Registry of Dams, more than half of them are over fifty years old.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) licenses are required for non-federal dams that are used to generate hydropower, and they need to be renewed every thirty to fifty years. Since the last time most dams were licensed, American attitudes towards nature have undergone a sea change. In 1986, the Electric Consumers Protection Act required FERC to give “equal consideration to the purposes of energy conservation, the protection, mitigation of, damage to, and enhancement of fish and wildlife, the protection of recreational opportunities, and the preservation of other aspects of environmental quality.” To get their licenses renewed, dams now have to be environmentally friendly. And sometimes that’s just not possible.
Today, dams are being taken down. From the East Coast to the West, hundreds of small- and medium-size dams have been removed, allowing rivers to oxygenate and clean themselves up. In the South, everyone from local town councils to the US Army Corps of Engineers are starting to see dam removal as a way to flush out dirty rivers. “No other action can bring ecological integrity back to rivers as effectively as dam removals,” wrote John Waldman, a biology professor at Queens College in New York, in 2015. It is the most economical way to restore a watershed.
In total, about 1,300 dams have been removed, and around 1,000 of these have been taken down since 1996. According to a meta-analysis done by the US Geological Survey, a river changes fast after a dam is removed—much more quickly than anyone had anticipated. Fish often swim upriver to recolonize empty habitat within days or weeks. Fish, amphibians, and mussels lay thousands of eggs (which comes in handy for recolonizing habitat) and their populations are reviving in years rather than decades. The sediment trapped behind a dam is washed downstream into a new, stable location, often within months.
This is especially true of large dams. Of the 1,300 dams that have been removed, there were eighty-three dams over ten meters tall. The sixty-four-meter Glines Canyon Dam and the thirty-two-meter Elwha Dam in northwestern Washington State, removed in 2014, were among the largest, releasing over 10 million cubic meters of stored sediment. Removing these dams restored access to high-quality fish habitat, and the salmon are moving right back in.
Large dam removal projects in the Pacific Northwest get the most public attention, and are often the result of failing to meet FERC relicensing requirements: when dams are not in compliance with the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act, it is often cheaper to take them down than to fix them. But most dams are structures too small to need FERC licenses, and are removed by local grassroots groups working to revive their river. As a rule, these people are trying to improve river vitality and bring back the fish. Many of these dams are so low that spring waters rush over them, but they are still high enough to block most spawning fish.
In Maine, entire watersheds have been rewilded in the last decade. Maine has three great rivers: the Kennebec, the Penobscot, and the St. Croix. Before the construction of the 7.3-meter-high and 280-meter-long Edwards Dam in 1837, the Kennebec River was a spawning ground for Atlantic salmon, striped bass, river herring (alewife and blueback herring), and sturgeon comparable to the Chesapeake Bay. When the dam’s license expired in 1997, FERC refused to issue a license unless a significant fish ladder was installed.
Before the dams were removed, the official count of the spring spawning run was down to just 3,500 in the Kennebec. The Edwards Dam was taken out in 1999 and the upstream Fort Halifax Dam in 2008, releasing more than a thousand miles of river habitat. The Kennebec is now home to one of the largest river herring runs in North America. Nearly 3.8 million fish were counted at its fish passages in 2016, including shad, salmon, eels, and alewives. There are a thousand times more fish in the Kennebec now that the dams are gone.
On the Penobscot River, two dams were removed between 2010 and 2013 and a fish lift was installed at a third dam, reconnecting almost a thousand miles of freshwater habitat. The Penobscot now sees nearly 2 million fish a year, including thousands of endangered sturgeon—up from one lonely fish when it was dammed. The return of sturgeon was big news to the Penobscot Indian Nation. “Our members are very excited to see our relatives coming back to this reservation,” said John Banks, the tribe’s director of natural resources.
The opening of fish passages on the St. Croix in 2013 restored access to another thousand-plus square miles of habitat across the Maine interior, some of which was seeded with thousands of fry by the Department of Marine Resources; the St. Croix’s 2016 run was 158,000 fish, the largest in twenty years, and these rivers are just getting started.
There are about 6 million new fish in Maine rivers since 1999, and it’s likely that millions more will be swimming upstream in the coming decade. These fish transform algae and insects into fish flesh, cleaning lakes and ponds while improving water quality. They are a key forage species for larger animals, packed with the fat craved by halibut and cod, otters and mink, kingfishers, ospreys, and eagles. In 1970, there were fewer than thirty breeding pairs of bald eagles in Maine, and today there are more than 2,500 pairs feasting on millions of river herrings. Ted Ames, a fisheries researcher and MacArthur Foundation genius fellow, predicts that Maine’s new fish runs will allow the cod populations to rebound.
Farther south, watersheds are being rewilded and changing the species balance in other ways. An old dam torn down on the Neuse River in North Carolina opened more than 900 miles of spawning grounds, bringing back shad, striped bass, and sturgeon. The giant mud cats—flathead catfish and blue catfish—are gorging and growing enormous, and photos from recent Carolina catfish tournaments show men straining to hold up fifty- and sixty-pound cats by their wide, whiskery mouths.
Dam removal cleans a river by allowing the water to flow more quickly, and by removing toxic materials that may be leaching from the silt trapped behind an old dam. Columbus, Ohio, removed two dams and restored nine miles of river for public use. Even the Cuyahoga is being restored to a wild river. After spending about $2 billion to clean it, some sections still do not meet EPA clean water standards. The Gorge Dam, about thirty-five miles upstream, is scheduled for removal in 2019, fifty years after the fire that gave birth to the EPA. It’s possible that the Cuyahoga River will soon be swimmable.
The connectivity of cities is also changing. Cities are reconnecting with nature by developing riverfront and shoreline parks and recreation, and promoting swimming, rowing, paddling, and sailing in their newly clean waterways. Many municipalities are starting to integrate cars, bicycles, buses, and rail into transportation networks that allow people to move around more efficiently, reducing our collective carbon footprint. Millions of individuals are recycling, millions of buildings are more energy efficient, millions of solar panels have been installed. Town by town, millions of people are addressing climate change, and when the people lead, the leaders will eventually follow.
Local foods are enjoying a renaissance, along with community-supported agriculture. Every city, town, and village has a farmer’s market now, where people sell produce they picked the day before. The fruits and vegetables are fresher, and likely to be heirloom varieties bred for taste rather than the hardiness demanded by industrial agriculture. But the best part of the farmer’s market is that you get to know who’s growing your food. I get pig parts from Margaret, eggs from Rick, and dried beans from Jim. It’s personal. The beans are really tender, and I get to report back: “Gee, they’re great.” I sold seedlings at the market on a Saturday in May, and covered my greenhouse costs for the year. Connecting people with the food they eat, and connecting small producers to a larger market, is part of the process of reconnecting the countryside to the cities they feed.
There is growing agreement across western nations that we are all connected to the Earth, and that the natural world must be respected and preserved for the future. Climate change poses enormous challenges, and we stand on the brink of disaster. Our landscape is wracked by floods and fires, the Earth’s biota is disappearing, and the way forward is unclear. At a time of great uncertainty, many Americans have embraced aboriginal attitudes toward wildness.
Like the Hopi, we must sign up to be nature’s guardians.
Like the Abenaki, we seek balance.
Like the Chinook, we give thanks.