After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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other states, the California Fish and Game Commission would not achieve this level of autonomy until the 1940s. In the years that followed the Flint-Cary debate, the chastened commission turned its efforts away from divisive political campaigns and refocused its work on education, propagation, and law enforcement. Commission officials, including some Berkeley circle alumni, talked less about conservation ethics and the threat of extinction and more about their efforts to supply fish and game for the hunting and fishing license holders who funded the commission’s work.56
By 1915, Grinnell’s first cohort of student assistants began to disperse. Joseph Dixon and Harold Bryant remained with the National Park Service. Harry Swarth accepted a curatorial position in Los Angeles and continued to act as the editor of the Condor. Tracy Storer served in World War I and later founded the Department of Zoology at the University of California, Davis. Loye Miller left for UCLA. And Walter P. Taylor accepted a position with the Bureau of Biological Survey in Arizona.
The second cohort of Berkeley circle students would adopt a different approach to conservation. They never embarked on a legislative campaign, instead focusing on the equally challenging but lower-profile work of bureaucratic reform. During the 1920s they worked for the reduction of predator elimination programs. They also began to think less about state hunting codes and more about federal land management. By 1930 a trio of former Grinnell students working at Yosemite had established the National Park Service’s first science-based wildlife conservation program. These shifts in the Berkeley circle’s focus—from legislative to bureaucratic politics, from state to federal programs, and from hunting regulations to habitat management—would shape wildlife conservation in California and the American West through the New Deal era and beyond.
| CHAPTER THREE | • | The Official Landscape |
In September of 1916, less than two years after the Flint-Cary referendum, Joseph Grinnell and his student Tracy Storer published an essay titled “Animal Life as an Asset of the National Parks” in the journal Science. Their paper served as a manifesto for the next generation of Berkeley circle conservationists. According to Grinnell and Storer, the national parks offered more than just sublime scenery, healthful recreation, and a chance to view big game. They were also some of the last sanctuaries where visitors could observe wild animals and ecological processes relatively free from human influence. They provided opportunities to preserve “natural conditions” for research and education. And they could serve as nurseries for wildlife populations that had become depleted through excessive hunting in adjacent “unprotected areas.” This would be possible only if the National Park Service—which Congress had created less than a month earlier—avoided overdevelopment and unnecessary artificial manipulation and launched a new program of scientific management.1
By suggesting that the national parks should be viewed as wildlife refuges, Grinnell and Storer helped initiate a new phase in American conservation history. The 1920s and 1930s were a time of great advancement in wildlife ecology and conservation, and Berkeley circle members played essential roles in this movement. During this period, they abandoned Progressive Era–style legislative campaigns and worked for change by reforming government bureaucracies from the inside out. They shifted their focus from the state to the federal level and from hunting regulations to habitat protection. They also continued to argue that scientific evidence should guide the management of wildlife in national parks and other nature reserves. In the process, they outlined almost all of the key scientific concepts that would inspire the field of conservation biology decades later, and they described most of the management problems that would shape endangered species debates in the postwar era.2
By 1955 A. Starker Leopold, the eldest son of Aldo Leopold and a lifelong Berkeley circle member, could describe the “complicated legal machinery” of hunting and fishing codes, which had formed the “backbone” of fish and game conservation during the Progressive Era, as flawed and insufficient. In the years since, scientists and managers throughout the country had come to appreciate the role of “habitat as the transcendent force that, more than any other, determines the level of wild populations.” According to Leopold, the idea of habitat conservation had been slow to catch on, but change was under way. It was “now an accepted truism,” he concluded, “that maintenance of suitable habitat is the key to sustaining animal populations, and that [game] protection, though it is important, is not itself a substitute for habitat.”3
The story of wildlife conservation in California and the rest of the United States from the end of the Progressive Era, around 1916, to the beginning of the environmental era in 1964 is, in large part, about the emergence of habitat as a key concept in science and management. Agreement on the centrality of this concept did not, however, lead to a consensus about who should manage habitats, by what means, and for which species. Divergent ideas about the meaning and purpose of habitat conservation fractured scientific societies, split the profession of wildlife management, and led to a division of labor and philosophy among government bureaucracies.
Habitat conservation is a complex endeavor, and disagreements about its techniques and objectives continue to this day. Yet Leopold’s larger point remains: after World War II, habitat conservation became an overarching framework for wildlife management in the United States. After the passage of the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973, however, this framework was increasingly turned on its head. Whereas scientists and managers had initially conceived of habitat conservation as an approach to managing wildlife, environmental activists would come to see wildlife conservation as a way to protect habitat. Setting aside habitat—in the form of parks, wilderness areas, nature reserves, and myriad other land management designations—eventually became an end in itself.
“NATURAL AREAS” IN AMERICAN ECOLOGY
Some of the earliest habitat conservation initiatives in the United States began among ecologists who wanted to preserve natural areas for scientific research. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the field of ecology in the United States was searching for a mission and a clientele that would demonstrate its social relevance and promote its growth and development. The first ecologists set out to address the unintended consequences of westward expansion, population growth, resource extraction, and agricultural development. Several of the discipline’s leaders worked in the Midwest and the Great Plains, where these changes had been particularly dramatic. They believed that the landscape transformations of the nineteenth century had thrown dynamic but orderly communities of plants and animals into disarray. Understanding how North America’s pre-Columbian landscapes functioned thus became a key aspect of their work to reestablish an equilibrium in the balance of nature.4
But the ecologists had two problems. First, they needed a set of objectives and a repertoire of methodologies that would distinguish their discipline. These would have to combine the broad, integrative perspective of field-based natural history observation with the scientific rigor and control of laboratory-based experimentation. It was not immediately clear what this new approach would look like, and ecology’s pioneering figures struggled to define their discipline’s best practices. Second, the ecologists were being outcompeted by specialists in the related resource management fields. New disciplines such as forestry, agricultural entomology, fisheries biology, and range management were already building their professional reputations, specializing in particular economic sectors, developing methods to investigate pressing problems, and winning the allegiance of patrons in government and industry.5
Two of ecology’s founders in the United States, Charles C. Adams and Victor E. Shelford, offered a solution to these problems (see figure 9). They argued that ecologists should move beyond the customary zoological approach of collecting and analyzing biological specimens to a new focus, the study of “natural areas.” They also believed that their fledgling professional organization, the Ecological Society of America—founded in 1915, just a year before the National Park Service—should advocate for the establishment of nature reserves to facilitate this research. According to Adams, it was not enough to preserve skins and bones in dusty museums. It was ecologists’ scientific duty to protect at least some areas where researchers could study “unified assemblages” of animals interacting under normal conditions in their primeval habitats and original associations. “The animal remains themselves