MAP 1. Species richness (combining both quantity and rarity) and endangerment in the contiguous United States. The numbers indicate species listed as threatened or endangered, per state. Richness data courtesy of Oxford University Press.

      California’s human history also makes it an ideal place for a study of this type. The state experienced dramatic environmental changes during the nineteenth century, was home to some of the first park and forest conservation movements, and hosted several innovative early experiments in wildlife management. After World War II, it developed a vast network of research universities, an influential community of activists, and pioneering environmental policies that provided the basis for similar measures by other states and the federal government. Wildlife conservation initiatives began later in California than in the Northeast and Midwest, but the state eventually built the country’s largest wildlife management infrastructure. In the 1980s and 1990s, it became a hearth for the development of conservation biology, witnessed some of the country’s most infamous endangered species battles, and hosted novel experiments in policy and management, including the nation’s first habitat conservation plans (HCPs). California has spent far more on terrestrial and aquatic habitat conservation than any other state. In 1999 its legislators passed the Marine Life Protection Act, which launched a process for designating marine protected areas along the state’s 840-mile coastline and made it the national leader in marine habitat conservation. In American endangered species history, California has played an outsize role at once unique, representative, and influential.

      This book recounts a series of stories told from the perspectives of scientists, conservationists, bureaucrats, farmers, ranchers, developers, and others who live and work in California. These characters most often deal with issues close to home, but they also travel and correspond and collaborate with colleagues around the state and the country. The species they discuss often cross boundaries too, and as a result this book frequently wanders beyond the state’s borders. By writing this history from the view—instead of at the scale—of California, I have attempted to give the state’s experience a broader context while maintaining my conviction that endangered species debates are best told as historical narratives about the politics of place.

      The first part of the book, chapters 1 through 4, is organized chronologically and thematically and spans from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Chapter 1, from which the book takes its name, focuses on the epic tale of the rise and fall of the California grizzly, the state’s official mascot and a ubiquitous symbol from a formative time when residents were debating what kind of place California should become. Chapter 2 moves on to the Progressive Era and the state’s first wildlife conservation campaign, led by the zoologist Joseph Grinnell and his Berkeley circle of students and colleagues, who set out reform state fish and game laws and in the process laid the foundation for future endangered species and habitat conservation efforts in the state. Chapter 3 follows the Berkeley circle’s shift, in the decades that followed, from grassroots campaigning in state-level politics to working for bureaucratic reform and habitat conservation on the growing federal lands. Chapter 4 picks up in the postwar era, when diverse social forces converged to enable the passage of the ESA, a law that would have profound and unexpected consequences as it evolved from a species protection measure into a broader mandate for habitat conservation.

      Part 2, chapters 5 through 8, presents four case studies of endangered species in California, including the events that resulted in their declines and listings, and the conservation debates, failures, and occasional successes that followed. The four species hail from different taxonomic groups and represent regions of California with different economic geographies, political dynamics, and endangered species–related conflicts. Chapter 5 considers the California condor controversy, which exposed an awkward split between wildlife managers and wilderness preservationists but eventually led to a philosophical consensus among conservation biologists that combined scientific management with habitat preservation. Chapter 6 follows the story of the desert tortoise, a species whose decline helped launch a new era of land management in the Mojave Desert but which has continued to suffer despite having vast areas set aside on its behalf. Chapter 7 introduces the San Joaquin kit fox, the flagship species of an industrialized agricultural landscape, whose history illustrates our still limited understanding of wildlife-habitat relationships. Chapter 8 turns to the delta smelt, an indicator species for the California Bay-Delta that became embroiled in a water war and whose predicament casts doubt not only on the protected areas approach to endangered species recovery but also on the very idea of habitat conservation as Americans have traditionally understood it.

      The emergence of habitat as a key concept in environmental science, law, management, and politics is one of the great, untold stories in American conservation history. It is also essential for understanding contemporary endangered species debates. This book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on the importance and accomplishments of the protected areas paradigm while highlighting the limitations of nature reserves as a conservation strategy. It ends with a call for a broader vision that moves beyond an approach that served conservationists well in the past but has little chance of recovering endangered species in the future.

      Californians are surrounded by bears. Most of these creatures are not the coy, mischievous black bears that prowl Yosemite campgrounds after dark, raiding ice chests and eating bologna sandwiches out of “wildlife resistant” trash bins. No, these are massive, fearless, humpbacked, barrel-chested, dagger-clawed grizzly bears—and they are everywhere. They lurk behind picnic tables in city parks, patrol the entrances to government buildings, gnash their teeth next to bus stops, and splash in fountains alongside children. Sometimes they wear plastic pink leis and funny hats. During an hour’s walk on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, an intrepid naturalist can view at least twenty-seven resident grizzly bears in an area of just three square miles. Scientists have not attempted a current census, but the state’s grizzlies must number in the hundreds of thousands. California truly is the land of the bears.¹

      Of course, none of these animals are alive. They are all only images and monuments. In the mid-nineteenth century, California was home to as many as ten thousand living, breathing grizzly bears—a greater population density than in present-day Alaska, and around a fifth of all the grizzlies in the United States at the time. Zoologists believe that the California population constituted a unique subspecies: the California grizzly, or “chaparral bear,” a label that referred to its affinity for the region’s scrubby foothills and brush-covered mountains. The chaparral bear’s numbers seem to have peaked around the time of the gold rush, in 1849, then plummeted during the second half of the nineteenth century. The last captive California grizzly died in 1911, and any remaining