CHAPTER 1

Revised June 1997

1.1 DEAD AS A DODO

The dodo was a large flightless pigeon that once inhabited the remote island of Mauritius (Figure 1.1). It was clubbed into extinction by sailors in the 17th century for food and sport. The dodo is remembered today mainly as a symbol of stupidity: it was too dumb to get out of the way of humans and was therefore wiped out. Unfortunately, most species sharing this island planet with us are dodos. They cannot get out of the way of human "progress" and will be beaten to extinction unless we actively protect them and their habitats. The essays that follow attempt to show you why this last statement is true and describe how humans and other forms of life are interdependent. They also provide some ethical and practical tools you can use to help improve the situation. If you choose not to be consciously involved in the conservation of forms of life other than your own, you should at least be aware that by doing nothing you are still having an impact on the biota of this planet. The water you drink, the food you eat, the land you live on, and the air you pollute were all obtained at the expense of other creatures. The decisions we make today on how we are going to share these resources will determine which other species will inhabit Earth for the indefinite future.

Figure 1.1. The dodo from Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. These birds stood about 1 m high and weighed 20-25 kg. From Greenway (1967).

1.2 WILDLIFE ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION

This course, WFB 10, has been taught at UCD since about 1970. The change in subject matter over the short period of time since its inception reflects the change in the attitudes towards wild vertebrates (wildlife) of wildlife biologists and of the public. The earliest versions of the course were concerned primarily with economically important species such as deer, ducks, trout, and salmon and how to manage them to provide maximum harvest. Endangered species and environmental degradation were discussed only as a minor component of the lectures. Gradually the emphasis has shifted. The management of economically important species of wildlife is still discussed in the course but in the context of a concern for the preservation of all wildlife, from the most obscure species of small fish to spectacular predators like mountain lions. The course does focus on vertebrates as the traditional "wildlife," but vertebrates should be regarded mainly as the forms of life with which we have the most empathy, being vertebrates ourselves. The conservation problems we are having with vertebrates are problems we are having with all forms of life and their interactions with each other (biodiversity). The conservation of biodiversity is the subject of a new, rapidly growing field called Conservation Biology. Conservation Biology gets its theory from ecology and the social sciences, its applied orientation from traditional wildlife and wildland management, and its ethics and energy from the environmental movement. This course is now in many respects a course in conservation biology, emphasizing vertebrates.

1.3 HUMANS AND WILDLIFE: AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Once humans were wildlife, a not particularly abundant species of primate coexisting with a wealth of other species in parts of Africa. The next discusses how, as we humans emerged from this situation to become the dominant species, we have attempted to set ourselves apart from other species. In many respects, this is the root cause of the present-day environmental crisis. In this section, however, I have a less ambitious goal, which is to provide a brief, more or less factual history, of human-wildlife interactions, focussing on North America. The rather arbitrary "eras" into which this historical account is broken follow Shaw (1985). The next chapter provides some further insights into these eras.

1.3.1 PreEuropean Era (? B.C. to 1500 AD)

Humans invaded North America some time during the last ice age, when sea levels were lower, so presumably they could walk across the so-called Bering Land Bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska. It is also possible that humans invaded even earlier, using boats to move along the coast. Although evidence is scanty, it seems likely that the invaders spread across the continent and throughout South America as well in less than 1000 years. From the beginning, these humans probably had a major impact on wildlife. One hotly debated effect is "Pleistocene Overkill" (Martin and Wright 1967). The idea here is that as humans spread across the two continents they first preyed upon the large vertebrates--mammoths, ground sloths, giant bison, etc.--that were unusually vulnerable to human predation and wiped them out. When these large herbivores disappeared, their natural predators, such as sabertoothed tigers, became extinct as well. Because large abundant animals (such as mammoths) alter plant communities by their destructive grazing practices, their disappearance also caused a major shift in the plant communities (e.g., from prairie to forest) resulting in the extinction of many smaller species that we dependent on the habitats maintained by the large grazers.

The above scenario of Pleistocene Overkill is controversial among scientists, although it does fit with some of the limited data available, such as the finding of remains of mammoths and giant sloths butchered by humans and the general (but by no means complete) coincidence of wide-spread extinction coincident with the spread of humans. One problem with the hypothesis is that major climatic changes were occurring at the same time, so the invasion of humans into the Americas may have occurred when wide-spread extinction was occurring naturally. It is possible that the large mammals that became extinct were confined to very limited ranges as the result of climatic change and so were exceptionally vulnerable to human predation as a result. No matter what the final word becomes on the Pleistocene Overkill Hypothesis, it still illustrates a widely accepted fact: even "primitive" humans were capable of having major effects on their environment.

One major, well-documented effect of such peoples was the burning of grasslands and forests, often deliberately, which kept them open and provided habitat for favored food animals such as bison and deer. In the absence of fire, many regions of prairie are invaded by trees and turn into forest. Even more drastic alterations of the landscape occurred when groups of the now-Native Americans settled into permanent communities associated with the development of agriculture or fisheries. Such communities supported large numbers of people who cleared large tracts of land for agriculture. Where civilizations developed, such as in the Ohio Valley (Mound Builders) or Central America (Mayan), human activity cleared or altered forests in large regions. In confined locations, such as the Hawaiian Islands, clearing of forests and hunting by the native peoples drove many species of animals to extinction; in continental areas it is likely that the populations of many species were greatly depleted, but few extinctions occurred.

When the first Europeans arrived in North America and pushed their settlements into the interior, they were often impressed with the abundance of wildlife. The threat posed by Native Americans to European settlement was generally exaggerated, often because their populations were low. When Daniel Boone brought colonists over the Cumberland Gap to settle the Ohio Valley, he brought them into a wilderness of large trees, teeming with deer and bear. Two hundred years earlier, however, this same valley had been largely cleared for farms, tended by a dense population of Native Americans. The cause of the disappearance of so many Native Americans was disease. Smallpox, measles, and other diseases carried by the early explorers, from Columbus onward, apparently swept through the continents decimating Native American populations which had no resistance to them. Likewise, Cortez' conquest of Mexico was greatly assisted by the decimation of the Aztec population by a measles epidemic. Thus the first impact of Europeans on wildlife in the Americas was probably to increase wildlife populations through the tremendous and tragic reduction of the numbers of indigenous peoples.

1.3.2 Era of Abundance (1500-1849).

The richness and abundance of wildlife, especially edible wildlife, during the first 3.5 centuries of colonization and settlement in North America was from all accounts, awe-inspiring. Passenger pigeons flew overhead in endless thundering flocks; salmon choked the rivers, to be pitch-forked out as fertilizer; huge herds of bison, antelope, and elk roamed the prairies; whales and seals yielded endless shiploads of oil to burn in lamps. As a result, Americans assumed the supply of such creatures was virtually infinite, a bounty to be harvested at any time for human use. Local depletions of wildlife were noted, but there was always more wildlife over the next range of hills. Some towns and states in this era did try to impose hunting seasons on selected animals to give the game an opportunity to reproduce, but such laws were rarely enforced. More common was the payment of bounties on predators, such as the bounties of one penny each given for wolves by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. This was an era of local extinctions where forests were cleared and streams were dammed, but mainly it established the attitudes that led to the uninhibited destruction of wildlife and wildlife habitat in the next Era.

While North America was being set up for explosive environmental change, the roots of Western environmentalism were being quietly established on island colonies around the world (Grove 1992). Islands are minature, isolated worlds so the effects of environmental degradation, such as the cutting of forests and the extinction of species, were very obvious to the physician-naturalists who joined the colonies. They convinced the governments of the islands to set aside forest reserves as ways of reducing erosion (with such side effects as the filling in of harbors) and of intercepting rain, which provided the water needed for crops. In 1764, the British set up the first forest reserves on Tobago, while in 1769, the French established forest protection laws for Mauritius. The British later applied the lessons learned on the islands to establishing forest protection laws on a much larger scale India and South Africa (Grove 1992). The end of this era was marked by the publication of Kosmos by the highly regarded German geographer Alexander von Humboldt. This treatise was important because it was ecological in concept, showing how humans were closely connected to the natural world, not apart from it as the dominant western religions generally advocated. In developing his ideas, von Humboldt was one of the first western scientists to draw heavily on the holoistic thinking found in Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

1.3.3 Era of Overexploitation (1850-1899)

This era was one in which the North American continent was transformed from a land mass with vast areas unsettled or even unexplored by Europeans to one with cities and farms scattered everywhere and held together by a spidery network of railroads, roads, and telegraph wires. It saw the sudden settlement of the West Coast (catalyzed by the discovery of gold in California), the Civil War, the disappearance of eastern forests, an enormous influx of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the vast expansion of industry and technology. As a side effect of all this human activity, wildlife populations plummeted from a combination of unchecked exploitation and environmental alteration. Some examples:

--The vast migratory herds of bison on the Great Plains were systematically slaughtered or died of cattle-borne diseases until only a few hundred individuals were left.

--The passenger pigeon, whose numbers were once reckoned to be in the billions, became extinct in the wild. Both adults and young were harvested commercially. The last bird died in captivity in 1914.

--Heron and egret populations were decimated by hunters shooting them in their breeding colonies for plumes for ladies hats.

--The ranges of large predators such as grizzly bears, mountain lions, and wolves became greatly reduced. Lions and wolves were virtually eliminated from eastern North America, as were grizzly bears from California.

--Whitetailed deer became extremely scarce in the eastern United States through a combination of habitat loss and overhunting.

--Runs of salmon and shad disappeared from many Eastern rivers, their runs blocked by mill dams or killed by factory wastes in combination with unlimited fishing.

The drastic decline of wildlife is not really surprising, considering the attitudes of most people living in this era. Nature was regarded as something that got in the way of civilization and "progress"; it had to be tamed and controlled. Thus popular nature books of the era were filled with drawings of animals doing nasty things to people or to each other: bears clawing hunters, eagles carrying off children, deer goring one another, landcrabs attacking goats (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Examples of illustrations of vertebrates from a 19th century book on natural history.

Despite this dismal picture, the Era of Overexploitation also contained roots of the modern conservation movement. In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species which further fueled the arguements that humans were part of nature, not separate from it, and that humans had a great impact on the natural world, including the extinction of species. Such ideas did not percolate readily into the consciousness of Americans but people in this era were becoming dimly aware that America was losing a major part of its heritage. Thus the first game wardens were hired, some states began requiring hunting licenses, fish and game commissions were established to find ways to improve hunting and fishing, and Yellowstone National Park was established. Even these efforts were based on a philosophy that humans could improve upon nature. Thus the new fish and game commissions often took as their major task the introduction of new species to replace native species. The largest railroad cars that existed in this era were those designed to carry fish back and forth across the continent. Striped bass and American shad were introduced to California from the East, with the cars bringing back rainbow trout and Pacific salmon. Carp from Europe were introduced everywhere and were considered to be so much better than native fishes that for a while pools beneath the Washington Monument in Washington D.C. were used to rear them.

1.3.4 Era of Protection (1900-1929)

Americans in this era were rather oblivious to the environmental deterioration that was occurring everywhere but some of them at least were outraged by the uncontrolled hunting that was eliminating populations of the more spectacular animals, from deer to herons. The era began with two significant events: the passage of the Lacey Act in 1900 and the accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency of the United States in 1901. The Lacey Act helped to eliminate market hunting for plumes from birds (by prohibiting interstate commerce in feathers) and was passed in part due to lobbying from newly formed Audubon societies. Roosevelt was an ardent hunter who had strong opinions about conservation. He created the first national wildlife refuge (which snowballed into the National Wildlife Refuge System), set aside large tracts of land (148 million acres!) as National Forest, created many national parks and monuments, and beefed up federal enforcement of wildlife laws. In 1913 and 1916 laws were passed that essentially made the hunting of most migratory birds except waterfowl illegal.

On the other hand, the basic attitude of the populace and resource managers was still that Nature could be improved upon in order to yield its products to humans in greater abundance. Thus introductions of species continued unabated and state and federal government initiated major programs in predator control. Lions, wolves, coyotes, and foxes were considered to be varmints to be shot, poisoned, and trapped in order to increase populations of game animals such as deer and elk and to reduce predation on livestock.

1.3.5 Era of Game Management (1930-1965)

This era began in 1930 because that was the year the Report of the Committee on North American Game Policy was issued. The committee, chaired by Aldo Leopold, made strong recommendations for better research and management of game animals. In 1933, Leopold published his book Game Management, which is often used as the milestone heralding the birth of wildlife biology as a profession. The focus in this era was on improving wildlife and fish populations to satisfy the increasing demand for recreational hunting and fishing. State and federal agencies dealing with wildlife and fisheries were strengthened and new sources of funding such as duck stamps were found. Excise taxes on guns and ammunition (Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937) and on fishing tackle and boats (Dingell-Johnson Act of 1950) provided reliable sources of funds for research and management of wildlife and fisheries, respectively. Although there was a great deal of money spent on habitat management and restoration, such as the acquisition of wetlands for waterfowl refuges, a prevailing point of view was that much of the recreational demand could be satisfied by raising fish and game under artificial conditions. The animals so produced were then released into areas where hunting and fishing pressure was intense. Thus many states financed large game farms to produce pheasants, ducks, and quail for hunters. Even more extensive were the fish hatcheries, especially for producing trout and salmon. These were often created in exchange for fisheries lost when dams cut off access to upstream spawning areas or flooded streams. It was optimistically assumed that humans could produce more and better fish in hatcheries than natural environments could produce.

Throughout this era there was a gradually growing awareness that creatures other than game animals also needed protection. National Parks became more restrictive in how they could be used and the Wilderness Act of 1964 allowed the creation of wilderness areas on U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands. The growing awareness found its philosophical justification in Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949) which in beautiful prose outlined the need for environmental ethics and the maintenance of intact ecosystems. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1957) jolted the public into seeing that the benefits being brought by pesticides and other chemicals were having terrible side effects, most prominently the loss of many species of birds and mammals.

1.3.6 Era of Environmental Management (1966-1979)

This brief era was a transitional one in which the public, biologists, and other scientists started clamoring for more environmental protection and the politicians reluctantly began to acquiesce to the demands. It began in 1966 because the first (but toothless) federal Endangered Species Act was passed then, an act that was strengthened in 1969 and again in 1973, but weakened in 1978. This was the period in which the National Environmental Quality Act (NEQA) was passed in 1969 that requires environmental impact statements for new projects. In 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established. Public sentiment was expressed in the extraordinary outpouring of concern seen on Earth Day 1972. Environmental groups grew rapidly. Enrollments in environmental programs at universities skyrocketed and states began to pass laws similar to the federal NEQA legislation. Even California, with conservative Ronald Reagan as governor, passed a strong California Environmental Policy Act and an endangered species act similar to the federal act.

The prevailing feeling in this era seemed to be that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the environment. Environmental problems could be solved with proper management that balanced ecological and economic interests. The extinction of a few stream fish species, such as the snail darter, was a small price to pay for the power generated by new dams and, in any case, the reservoirs behind the dams would support large new sport fisheries. The effects of water pollution could be taken care of by reducing discharges or using pesticides that degraded more quickly. The increasingly polluted air of the cities could be cleaned up by people driving slightly smaller cars and by building power plants out in the desert. This was also the era, however, when the United States defoliated huge areas of forest in Vietnam with Agent Orange as part of its military strategy.

1.3.7 Era of Conservation Biology (1980 - ?)

The present era is considered to have begun in 1980 because that was when the book Conservation Biology: an Evolutionary-Ecological Perspective, edited by Michael Soule and Bruce Wilcox, came out. This book gave a major push to the development of Conservation Biology as a distinct field, a science devoted to finding ways to preserve the diversity of life on Earth. 1980 is also the year the Alaska National Interest Lands Act passed which set aside (more or less) 101 million acres of Alaska as National Park, National Monument, or National Wildlife Refuge. This was done in recognition that the wilds of Alaska, one of the most pristine areas of the world, were on the verge of being spoiled by mining, settlement, and overexploitation of wildlife. In contrast, 1980 was also the year Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States with a profoundly anti-environmental philosophy. The initial years of this era, therefore, were ones of weakened environmental agencies, confrontational politics on environmental issues, and avoidance of developing serious solutions to major problems such as acid rain.

Despite the attempts to undermine progress made in solving environmental problems, major progress has been made. Scientists and, increasingly, the public are realizing that we are in an environmental crisis of global proportions. Human populations are still climbing at an exponential rate (Figure 1.3), the atmosphere is warming, both tropical and temperate rainforests are being cut at alarming rates, and serious pollution is much more prevalent than admitted previously. From the perspective of wildlife this means species are being lost almost on a daily basis. Recognition of these problems, however, means that we can find solutions to them, although most solutions require enormous economic sacrifices, especially on the part of the comfortable citizens of North America and Western Europe.

The essays that follow discuss many of these problems and their origins as well as solutions. If we find solutions, this era will deserve the name Era of Biological Conservation. If we do not, it will have to be called the Era of Massive Global Extinction.

Figure 1.3. Human population growth as projected through 2011. Human population growth has been likened to a cancer on the body of Earth. It is growing exponentially, leaping to new locations, and threatening to destroy the health of the organism. Conservation biology has been likened to Cancer Biology because they are both "synthetic, multidisciplinary sciences" that are attempting to solve a crisis with multiple causes (Soule, 1985). Ideally both should use holistic approaches to achieve sustained health.

REFERENCES