After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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federal government is anything but a monolithic entity with a coherent set of interests and objectives. Federal agencies have diverse institutional cultures, histories, missions, and alliances, making interagency cooperation challenging under the best of circumstances. Even in cases where one agency, or one group within an agency, appears to have the legal authority to advance its agenda, complex power relations often thwart action. The two federal ESA-implementing agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have seen their legal responsibilities increase, but they remain underfunded, understaffed, and underresourced.7
Second, although the states have lost some of their autonomy, they still have administrative control over almost all of the nonendangered wildlife inside their boundaries. In recent years they have continued to develop their regulatory frameworks and administrative capacities. By 2012 only four states lacked some form of endangered species legislation, and the fifty states together issued 90 percent of all regulatory permits related to the environment. Not surprisingly, many state officials now believe that laws and cooperative agreements other than the ESA grant their wildlife agencies, not the federal government, the lead role in endangered species programs. The states will only continue to reassert their authority in the future, as pressure builds to remove more species from the federal list and return them to state jurisdiction.8
The federal government has played a pivotal role, however, in the area of habitat conservation. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, state fish and game programs focused on artificial propagation and the regulation of take: establishing open seasons, bag limits, and other rules meant to limit hunting and fishing to sustainable levels. The states owned little land, and they had few precedents or incentives to allocate space for wildlife habitat. Beginning in the 1930s, a series of conservation initiatives, including several associated with federal New Deal recovery efforts, set out to protect and restore habitat in the national parks and new national wildlife refuges. Laws regulating take remained, and divergent visions for habitat conservation competed for dominance in various agencies. Yet overall, increased federal intervention fostered a new approach that moved beyond managing fish and game by regulating individual animals to managing land as habitat for wildlife conservation.9
The federal government did not invent the notion of habitat conservation. The idea of managing land to produce fish and game probably dates back millennia, but a more modern rationale emerged during the 1910s and 1920s among the founders of the discipline of ecology in the United States. Key figures, such as Victor Shelford, the first president of the Ecological Society of America, argued that the concept of habitat—understood as the biophysical relationships among species and between species and their environments—could provide an organizing framework for the entire field. For Shelford, habitat provided the keys to understanding ecology, and ecology opened the doors to understanding evolution. Habitat also provided spaces for rare or imperiled species and for the scientists who studied them.10
Ecology and conservation have changed in many ways since Shelford’s time, but at least one aspect of his philosophy has survived. During the early twentieth century, ecologists argued that protected areas—including national parks, wildlife refuges, and other nature reserves—offered the most value for science and conservation when in their “original” condition. This meant that the most pristine areas, in terms of human influence, held the greatest value for habitat conservation. “Unprotected” sites would prove of little use as human activities increasingly altered them, and this meant that nature reserves would need vigilant protection against outside forces to maintain their value. These same themes would reemerge among the first generation of professional wildlife managers during the 1930s and among the founders of conservation biology in the 1980s. This approach lives on today, in modified form, as the protected areas paradigm.11
Creating nature reserves is not the only way to protect endangered species or even safeguard their habitats, but in the United States, and increasingly elsewhere, it has become the preferred approach. People who advocate for more protected areas have good reasons for doing so. Protected areas enable efficient management and provide diverse social and ecological benefits. Their administration can prove controversial, but it tends to incite less conflict than regulating the take of protected species on private property or multiple-use public lands. Protected areas render nature more legible for bureaucratic institutions by reducing unruly patterns, dynamic processes, and blurry boundaries to lines on a map that define the extent of conservation programs. Protected areas build on a strong legal rationale in that they can be owned outright, as either public or private property—a concept with high regard in American society. The protected areas approach also has a cultural resonance, in reinforcing the traditional American penchant for preserving relics of pristine nature in the form of national parks and wilderness areas. Finally, in an era when habitat loss constitutes the most important driving force behind most species declines, the creation of nature reserves offers a practical conservation approach that has probably already prevented numerous extinctions. And for that, we can all be thankful.12
Since the 1990s, however, the protected areas paradigm has come under criticism from scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Historians such as Alfred Runte and Richard West Sellars have critiqued the political and bureaucratic processes by which U.S. national parks were selected, established, and managed. The geographers Robert Wilson and Nathan Sayre have completed similarly provocative and enlightening studies of political conflict and administrative folly for wildlife refuges in the American West. A series of authors, led by William Cronon, have argued that the modern American idea of wilderness is based on a peculiar and problematic cultural history that fetishizes primeval nature over the places where most people live and obscures the diverse human values and activities that have helped produce all contemporary cultural landscapes. Numerous researchers in the interdisciplinary subfield of political ecology have adopted postcolonial and neoliberal development theories to show how, in economically poor but ecologically rich regions of the world, nature reserves have often served as a form of enclosure that privileges the environmental objectives of wealthy northern and western countries while making it more difficult for local people to access scarce natural resources. In response, conservationist biologists have defended their work and rethought their approaches. Nevertheless, scholarly debates about protected areas have often devolved into contests pitting ecological protection against social justice—a dichotomy that drastically oversimplifies the issues.13
This book builds on these insights and debates but focuses on a somewhat different problem. It locates the origins and logic of natural areas preservation not only in broad cultural ideas about nature but also in the specific and intertwined histories of American ecological science, environmental law, and natural resource management. The result is that this book focuses less on debates about ecological protection versus social justice than on the question of how the protected areas paradigm emerged and spread as a principal approach for biodiversity and endangered species conservation and whether, in the face of much political conflict, nature reserves established for these purposes are fulfilling their goals.
The results to date are mixed. Efforts to manage wild species inside legally bounded but ecologically porous nature reserves have always proved difficult. Endangered species managers increasingly rely on privately owned reserves that have more administrative flexibility than public lands do but whose permanence remains in question. Government agencies are suffering from unprecedented shortfalls in funding and resources, which have exacerbated conflicts over their land management priorities and raised the question of whether reserve administration is, in fact, less contentious than the regulation of take on nonreserve lands. Recent research suggests that wildlife-habitat relationships are more complicated and less understood than previously believed; some species that seemed relatively tolerant of human activities now appear to be much less so, while others once thought to require remote wilderness areas have found refuge in the most unlikely of built environments.14 Species declines that were once assumed to stem from a few limiting factors actually resulted from complex, multifarious, and synergistic forces. Global climate change threatens to transform all habitats, including those “protected” in nature reserves. And although habitat conservation has probably helped forestall many extinctions, it has not yet proved to be an effective tool for recovering endangered species to self-sustaining populations.