Nature's Ghosts

Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology

Mark V. Barrow, Jr.

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226038155
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

The rapid growth of the American environmental movement in recent decades obscures the fact that long before the first Earth Day and the passage of the Endangered Species Act, naturalists and concerned citizens recognized—and worried about—the problem of human-caused extinction.

As Mark V. Barrow reveals in Nature's Ghosts, the threat of species loss has haunted Americans since the early days of the republic. From Thomas Jefferson's day—when the fossil remains of such fantastic lost animals as the mastodon and the woolly mammoth were first reconstructed—through the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir, Barrow shows how Americans came to understand that it was not only possible for entire species to die out, but that humans themselves could be responsible for their extinction. With the destruction of the passenger pigeon and the precipitous decline of the bison, professional scientists and wildlife enthusiasts alike began to understand that even very common species were not safe from the juggernaut of modern, industrial society. That realization spawned public education and legislative campaigns that laid the foundation for the modern environmental movement and the preservation of such iconic creatures as the bald eagle, the California condor, and the whooping crane.

A sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative that unites the fascinating stories of endangered animals and the dedicated individuals who have studied and struggled to protect them, Nature's Ghosts offers an unprecedented view of what we've lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. On the history of this landmark legislation, see Steven Lewis Yaffee, Prohibitive Policy: Implementing the Federal Endangered Species Act (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982); Shannon Petersen, Acting for Endangered Species: The Statutory Ark (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Brian Czech and Paul R. Krausman, The Endangered Species Act: History, Conservation Biology, and Public Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer, Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Dale D. Goble, J. Michael Scott, and Frank W. Davis, eds., The Endangered Species Act: Renewing the Conservation Promise, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006); Congressional Research Service, A Legislative History of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, as Amended in 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, and 1990 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982).

2. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Endangered and Threatened Species Conservation Act of 1973, Report no. 93– 412, republished in Congressional Research Service, Legislative History, 143.

3. Most discussion at the time centered around concerns that the proposed legislation might usurp state authority on wildlife issues. Petersen, Acting for Endangered Species, 28.

4. Quoted in Congressional Research Service, Legislative History, 196.

5. Richard M. Nixon, “Statement on Signing of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, December 28, 1973,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), 1027–28.

6. On the history of the modern environmental movement, see Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Hal Rothman, The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States since 1945 (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace, 1998); Donald Fleming, “Roots of the New Conservation Movement,” Perspectives in American History 6 (1972): 7–91; Riley E. Dunlap and Angela G. Mertig, eds., American Environmentalism: The U.S. Environmental Movement, 1970–1990 (Washington, D.C.: Taylor and Francis, 1992); Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); and Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).

7. Quoted in Shabecoff, Fierce Green Fire, 113.

8. On the history of natural history, see Paul Farber, Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Peter J. Bowler, The Norton History of the Environmental Sciences (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); and Janet Browne, “Natural History,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. J. L Heilbron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 553–59.

9. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

10. Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000); Lucile Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Botanic Gardens, reprint ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002); and Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

11. Allen, Naturalist in Britain.

12. Farber, Finding Order, 22–36; Paul Farber, Discovering Birds: The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

13. See the example of the American Ornithologists’ Union, which was established in 1883, discussed in Mark V. Barrow, Jr., A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

14. Quoted in Farber, Finding Order, 9.

15. See, for example, Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

16. On the growing popularity of bird-watching, see Barrow, Passion for Birds, chap. 7; Stephen Moss, A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching (London: Aurum Press, 2004); Felton Gibbons and Deborah Strom, Neighbors to the Birds: A History of Birdwatching in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988); Joseph Kastner, A World of Watchers: An Informal History of the American Passion for Birds—from Its Scientific Beginnings to the Great Birding Boom of Today (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986); and Scott Weidensaul, Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2007).

17. Marston Bates decried this tendency in his classic The Nature of Natural History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950).

18. On graduate education and its impact on ornithology, see Barrow, Passion for Birds, 184–90.

19. On the relationship between traditional natural history and biology, see Lynn Nyhart, “Natural History and the ‘New’ Biology,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 426–43.

20. On the emergence of ecology and its relationship to laboratory biology, see Robert Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Joel B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank: The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). On the rise of ethology, see Richard W. Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

21. Charles Elton, Animal Ecology (London: Sigdwick and Jackson, 1927), 1.

22. David S. Wilcove and Thomas Eisner, “The Impending Extinction of Natural History,” Chronicle Review 47, no. 3 (September 15, 2000): B24. See also Robert Michael Pyle, “The Rise and Fall of Natural History,” Orion (Autumn 2001): 17–23; and David J. Schmidly, “What It Means to Be a Naturalist and the Future of Natural History,” Journal of Mammalogy 86, no. 3 (2005): 449–56.

23. See, for example, Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); and William C. Cronon, “The Trouble with Nature; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1 (1996): 7–28.

24. Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 5:135.

25. C. William Beebe, The Bird: Its Form and Function (New York: Henry Holt, 1906), 18.

26. On the commodification of nature in America, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), and Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

27. William Temple Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation (New York: New York Zoological Society, 1913), 14, see also p. 63 and his statement that “no species can withstand systematic slaughter for commercial purposes” in William Temple Hornaday, Wild Life Conservation in Theory and Practice (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1914), 9.

28. Quoted in Sharon Kingsl...