After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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wild-caught game for two main reasons. The first and most obvious was that at the time, many conservationists believed that market hunting was the main cause of wildlife declines. A second but equally important reason was that state-level hunting and fishing regulations were already well established and widely accepted, whereas other options, such as habitat protection, had little if any legal or political precedent.
Despite longstanding legal precedents for state-level hunting and fishing codes, the Berkeley circle’s campaign sparked a vigorous political debate that soon grew to encompass a variety of much broader issues. A debate about wildlife soon became a debate about the public good versus private interests, government regulation in a market economy, the role of bureaucratic versus democratic decision making, and the importance of race, class, gender, and citizenship in shaping access to and control over lands and natural resources. This debate began later in California than in other states with Progressive political majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. It also took a different course and came to a different conclusion, at least for a time. Yet by 1915, conservationists across the country were looking to California and the work of the Berkeley circle as a model for what had gone right and what had gone wrong in the Progressive Era wildlife movement. The insights they gained would shape subsequent conservation efforts into the New Deal era of the 1930s and beyond.
What is perhaps most remarkable about the Berkeley circle’s work during the Progressive Era is how much it anticipated future developments in conservation science and environmental ethics. This is not to say that the group’s members were somehow ahead of their time—they were very much creatures of it. Yet their story challenges, or at least complicates, the widespread belief that many features of contemporary conservation, including concern for nongame and uncharismatic endangered species, did not emerge until the second half of the twentieth century. By 1915 the Berkeley circle’s members had developed an intellectual foundation for what, over the next two decades, with the addition of a strong focus on habitat management, would develop into a comprehensive vision for wildlife science and conservation backed by almost every major ethical rationale that supports the work of conservation biologists today.5
The Progressive Era wildlife debates in California are important to the story of American endangered species conservation for another reason. Scientists and legal scholars who write about the Endangered Species Act often cite its widespread popularity at the time of its passage, in 1973, as evidence that conflicts about species conservation emerged only later, in response to the act’s unintended consequences. It would be unwise to underestimate the ESA’s capacity to provoke controversy, but this version of the story tends to truncate the history of endangered species debates. Controversies that have surrounded the ESA since the late 1970s are part of a much longer legacy of disputes about species loss and conservation that began more than a century ago, have waxed and waned, and continue in modified forms today. To understand the origins of these struggles, there is nowhere better to start than with the life and work of the Berkeley circle’s leader, Joseph Grinnell.
THE HOUSE GRINNELL BUILT
Joseph Grinnell was born in 1877 on the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Indian Agency near Fort Sill in Indian Territory. His Quaker family traced its ancestry New England’s earliest French Huguenot colonists, and his father worked as a physician on the reservation. They soon moved to the Pine Ridge Agency, in Dakota Territory, where Joseph spent his early childhood with the Oglala Sioux. During their time at Pine Ridge, Joseph and his father earned the friendship of a local patriarch, Chief Red Cloud. In 1885 the Grinnells moved to California and settled in Pasadena, then a small town surrounded by remote mountains and wild animals. Joseph spent the rest of his childhood and young adulthood hunting, fishing, and studying natural history near his home. One summer, he even found grizzly tracks in the lower Arroyo Seco. In 1898 he left for his first expedition, a voyage to Alaska, where he collected some fourteen hundred birds and eggs. He returned to California the following year and began his graduate work in zoology under the direction of Charles H. Gilbert and David Starr Jordan at Stanford University. In 1901 he became the youngest fellow in the history of the American Ornithologists’ Union (see figure 7).6
Grinnell was still pursuing his doctorate and teaching part time at the Throop Polytechnic Institute, the future California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, when he met Annie Alexander. Alexander was a remarkable woman. Born in 1867 in Honolulu, she was an heir to the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company fortune. Her father, Samuel, introduced her to natural history at a young age, and in 1904 he took her on a trip to hunt big game in Africa. The two were setting up for a photograph on a ledge overlooking Victoria Falls when construction workers, building the now-famous bridge on the cliffs above, dislodged a boulder. The rock ricocheted off the canyon wall and struck Samuel. Doctors amputated his leg that night, but he died of his injuries the following morning. It was a disastrous end to what had begun as an exuberant expedition.
Undeterred, Alexander decided that her father would have wanted her to pursue her passions, and upon her return from Africa she enrolled in natural history courses at the University of California. She soon became one of the most accomplished female hunters and collectors of her time. Over the next four decades Alexander and her longtime partner, Louise Kellogg, took dozens of expeditions throughout the North American West. They collected tens of thousands of plant, animal, and fossil specimens, and they explored remote corners of the continent at a time when few women participated in scientific research or traveled alone. In 1947, at the ages of eighty and sixty-eight, Alexander and Kellogg set off with the botanist Annetta Carter for a three-month plant-collecting expedition in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. The trip would be Alexander’s last. Yet when asked if she or her companions had ever been frightened, as elderly women traveling without an escort in a foreign country, Alexander replied, “Somos tres mujeres sin miedo”: we are three women without fear.7
FIGURE 7. Joseph Grinnell at work in the field. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
In 1906 Alexander contacted Grinnell to ask for advice in preparation for her first collecting trip to Alaska. The Berkeley paleontologist Jon C. Merriam and the first chief of the federal government’s Bureau of Biological Survey, C. Hart Merriam (no relation), had both recommended Grinnell to Alexander as an expert on Alaskan fauna. Grinnell impressed Alexander, and she soon approached the young scientist with a proposition. She wanted to use her inheritance in a way that would honor her father’s memory, and she had decided to donate a portion of her money to the University of California for the establishment of a zoology museum. She hoped that Grinnell would accept a position as its first director, an unusual opportunity for a young man who was still pursuing his doctorate. Grinnell agreed, and Alexander spent the next year negotiating with the university for space, resources, and administrative autonomy. It was the beginning of a collaboration that would last for more than three decades.8
When the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology opened, in 1908, it joined the larger movement to establish natural history museums throughout the United States. Many of these museums began as “cabinets of curiosities”—the personal collections of specimens and artifacts that wealthy patrons donated for public education and entertainment. The contributors and board members of these institutions were among the country’s richest and most powerful people. They represented a political elite that included politicians, leaders of industry, and prominent activists behind a variety of Progressive Era causes, from child welfare to occupational safety, public education, women’s suffrage, and conservation. Some also participated in anti-immigration groups, and many supported efforts to “improve society” through eugenics.9
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, institutions such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology grew in scope and influence. They mounted ambitious expeditions to remote lands, assembled catalogues of specimens from around the world, constructed ornate Victorian buildings to house their collections, and produced elaborate public displays to represent the diversity of life. These were scientific institutions in the