2.1 INTRODUCTION

In France and Spain there are caves with walls covered with some of the most ancient paintings known: beautifully executed portraits of bison, deer, salmon and other animals upon which the Cro-Magnon people depended for their living. As we look at these works, we realize that there was more to our ancestors' relationship with animals than simply hunting and eating them. People dressed in animal skins and horns are shown dancing while the animals they imitate look on. Clearly, they felt connected to these animals in a spiritual sense in a way we have a hard time even imagining. They knew the habits and seasonal movements their prey intimately and realized their own survival depended upon their prey behaving in a predictable fashion. Presumably the paintings were part of rituals designed to connect the people to their prey and insure that the prey would keep coming back.

Our perception of wildlife is vastly different from that of those ancient people who painted images in caves or carved designs on rocks. Indeed, the concept of "wildlife" is a recent one. In order to understand this word, first used in 1879, we must understand the historical roots of our relationship with animals. In this essay, we will explore briefly how the ideas and beliefs of cultures that came before ours have influenced our own ways of thinking about nature. We will then examine why there is a modern movement to reclaim the sense of awe and responsibility for animals and the natural world.

2.2 ANCIENT RECORDS OF ANIMALS

Hunting and gathering cultures around the world have left carvings and paintings of animals on rocks and in caves, demonstrating the universality of their mystic connections to these animals. The importance of animal symbols - and their indication of close contact with the natural world- were maintained when humans settled down and starting practicing agriculture. For example, in two of the earliest known (Neolithic) agricultural settlements, Catal Huyuk and Hacilar (in modern Turkey), the people drew animal symbols on the walls of their homes and shrines, incised them on pottery, and featured them in sculptures, clay figurines, and bas reliefs (Eisler 1987). Two of the most ubiquitous animals depicted were serpents and butterflies, symbols of change and metamorphosis. In many cultures, these two animals were associated with belief in a powerful goddess. Later archaeological finds portray this goddess as having the wings of a butterfly. The goddess was believed to change and be reborn, and these two animals symbolize this power of regeneration.

In addition, archaeologists working at the two sites found geometric patterns which seem to symbolize water, giant stone heads of bulls with enormous curved horns, stone sculptures with the faces of fish, and vases in the form of birds. Archaelogical sites in Romania have yielded hedgehogs made of terra-cotta and from Bulgaria Neolithic ritual vases in the form of does have been found. In western Slovakia, a dish found in a Neolithic cemetery contains a life-like snake slithering around its edge. In the three main centers in which agriculture originated (Asia Minor, Thailand, and Mexico), we find archaeological evidence that depicts similar motifs. In Anatolia (Turkey), the goddess is shown giving birth, accompanied by bulls and leopards. In Middle America, a similar goddess wears serpents in her skirt. In Southeast Asia, the motif of the serpent is found in a similar context. These people had made an important cultural step: they used motifs from the natural world, especially animals, to represent their most important beliefs. Unlike our modern world, however, these peoples did not perceive a separation between the sacred and the secular. In the prehistoric world and well into historic times, "religion was life, and life was religion" (Eisler, 1987), and wild animals were part of both.

2.3 TRANSFORMATION: 4300 B.C.E. TO 1320 B.C.E.

As agricultural settlements expanded, they developed cities and complex cultural systems that included the invention of writing. The ancient written records tell us that warlike herding people from the north and south (Gimbutas 1977) repeatedly invaded the settled, agricultural people of Asia, Europe, and northern Africa. These invaders brought with them a new belief system and a new animal, the horse. Major economic and social changes followed these invasions and the art of this period shows a changing perception of the natural world and of animal-human relationships. The animal motifs from the earlier cultures were almost always maintained, but their meanings were often changed. Snakes, for example, were no longer just fertility symbols. Pharaohs of Egypt wore representations of the cobra as a symbol that their right to rule came directly from the gods (Morris & Morris 1965). In ancient Greece, sacred serpents were seen as household guardians. The goddess Athena carried a shield emblazoned with a snake, symbolizing the divine protection she gave to Athens. At Delphi, Greece, the serpent was a symbol of prophecy, and Greek serpent containers have been found at widely scattered sites in Greece, Mesopotamia, and India.

Animals, nevertheless, remained an important part of ancient religions. In Greek mythology we are told over and over of the amorous adventures of Zeus, who frequently took animal form when abducting human beings with whom he was infatuated. Stories portrayed dolphins as the spirits of drowned sailors who had been resurrected by the gods. Virtually all of the classical societies used animals as totems: eagles of Rome, dragons of China, tigers of Southeast Asia, feathered serpent of Mexico, quetzal of Central America. Despite the pervasiveness of animals in religious symbolism, the people of these agrarian cultures probably no longer believed, as their ancestors had, that the animal and human halves of the world were equally important. Instead, the people who used animals as totems believed more and more in their own power to control events rather than being subject to the capricious whims of various deities.

If this attitude sounds familiar to all of us, it is in large part because we are inheritors of that long-ago series of invasions that transformed society. We have a vivid account of the history of one of the peoples who invaded the ancient Middle East. This account, found in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), documents an invasion which took place about 1500 B.C.E. In the account, we can see not only the conflict between the older and newer belief systems, but we can also see how the older animal symbols were appropriated for use. One clear example is, again, the treatment of the serpent as shown by the story of the evil serpent which talks to Eve in the Garden of Eden. As powerful as this serpent is, it is, unlike earlier representations of the serpent, a sinister creature. Like earlier invaders, the writers of the Bible refer repeatedly to the animals which they herded (goats, sheep, and horses). Animals that had been considered sacred in earlier non-herding cultures--pigs, for example--were proscribed. And it is abundantly clear that the people of the Bible believed that their destiny and their duty was to "subdue [the earth], and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." (Genesis 1:28). The religious belief systems which descended from the writers of the Bible--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--have preserved both these words and this attitude toward the natural world and animals as part of their holiest writings. Although the take-over of agrarian cultures by nomadic herders was drastic, the changes in the belief systems were not as sudden as we might expect. Older belief systems continued for well over three thousand years to exist side-by-side with the new.

2.4 THE CLASSICAL WORLD, THE CHRISTIAN WORLD

Despite the dramatic development of urban centers in civilizations around the world, life for the average person changed very slowly. During the classical and early Christian period, rural people lived very much as their ancestors had. From time to time, peasants were subjected to dislocation because of war, but survivors returned to the same land that their ancestors had farmed. Frequently they grew the same crops their ancestors had, and probably in the same manner. They lived in similar houses, and during the long winter nights they probably told similar stories. Some of those stories recounted the same myths their ancestors had known. Ancient customs, including belief in the mother goddess--whether she was called Hera or Mary--and ancient rituals and animal symbols persisted through the fourteenth century of the Christian Era with little change (Stone 1976).

Most of the information we have from the classical and early Christian period says very little about the average lives of ordinary rural people. Urban people--in Rome, for example--had little contact with the natural world, and their writings and art reflect that. Peasants were not literate and produced no works of art that have been preserved. The oral tradition, on the other hand, was preserved in written form as early as the second century of the Christian Era in books called bestiaries. Bestiaries were illustrated reference works, somewhat like encyclopedias, which contained information on animals--both real and mythological (Doetsch, 1983). Though bestiaries were most popular during the Middle Ages, the form goes back to Greek writers in Egypt. Scholars sometimes attempted to collect all known information about animals. They also included folk tales, myths, fables such as those recorded by Aesop and misinformation gleaned from the writings of Aristotle and others. Illustrations in some of the later bestiaries were often exquisite: letters were illuminated, paintings were painstaking and detailed.

The most popular of the bestiaries were translated from Latin (the language of scholars) into everyday language. In the Middle Ages bestiaries were, after the Bible, the most widely read and disseminated written works in Europe. They combined information about the natural world, popular entertainment, and religious instruction:

Animal behavior was presented as a moral guide for people, much in the same way as Aesop did in his fables. Despite the persistence of old beliefs among the peasantry, bestiaries show that the perception of animals was changing, gradually incorporating Christian notions about good and evil. The tradition of the bestiary continues right up to the present: children's stories and poems are often accompanied by drawings of animals with human attributes, and encyclopedic books about animals are always popular.

Around 1200, the word "wilderness" was used for the first time in English. Ancient Anglo-Saxon had used the world "wild," but it appears to have mostly referred to non-domesticated animals. The new word "wilderness" referred to the abode of animals that were "wild" or non-domesticated. The new consciousness this word reflected, at least among the literate, was of a world in which wild animals and people were widely separated. People lived in towns and farmed adjacent areas. Such ordered, cultivated areas were right and proper. Wild places, on the other hand, were places where people did not belong; wild places were evil and frightening. Animals living in wilderness were frightening, too, and thought to be evil. People who ventured out into the wilderness were exceedingly brave explorers or perhaps crazy. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) is one of the archetypes of this period. He was notable for his easy acceptance of wild animals, which he referred to as his brothers and sisters. He attempted to convince wild animals to engage in more civilized behavior (such as not attacking people). His peers considered him crazy and the Church considered him a dangerous dissident, but the common people loved him for his espousal of the old beliefs about the natural world. A few years after his death, the Church bowed to popular pressure and canonized him.

Figure 1. Occasionally, medieval drawings of animals were humorous, as in this careful detail from the border of a French manuscript created about 1280. It shows two rabbits returning from a successful manhunt! (From Hutchison, 1978)

2.5 SECOND TRANSFORMATION: 1348-1750

In this 400-year period, a number of events occurred that resulted in the deaths of millions of people, profound changes in European society, and the development of attitudes towards nature that carry over to the present. From 1348 to 1350 there was a recurrence of the bubonic plague, the Black Death. Spread by rats and aggravated by poor sanitation and an increasing population, the plague swept through towns and rural communities, frequently killing off the most economically active members of communities. Peasant communities were left bereft of the labor necessary to farm the land where they lived. Vast tracts of land lay fallow; harvest rotted in the fields. Famine followed plague.

As the plague became less virulent in its effects, the surviving nobility began evicting peasants whose families had lived on the land for generations. These early evictions, call enclosures, were similar to those which happened hundreds of years later and were the impetus for the Industrial Revolution. The evictions of 1350-1380 touched off peasant revolts. Using the combined power of Church and State, the revolts were violently suppressed and their leaders killed. Peasant revolts in past centuries had been quickly suppressed in this way, and there was no reason to believe that suppression of the peasant revolts of the late fourteenth century would be any different.

The results of these revolts, in fact, turned out to be much more far-reaching. There were a number of reasons for this. First, the Church had become much less tolerant of secular and religious dissidents. Peasant leaders like Joan of Arc, although often executed as heretics, were considered to be saints by the common people. The Church hierarchy and secular authorities had to act before more purported saints caused more revolts. Second, around 1450, the printing press was invented. The printing press allowed large numbers of documents and books to be distributed in a (relatively) short period of time. In 1486, Malleus Malifacarum was published, which has been called the "bible of the witch-burners." It was the second book published (after the Bible) and it received wide distribution. In this book, the authors recommended that social dissidents and rebels be charged with witchcraft. The threatened ecclesiastical authorities, working with the secular power, were only too glad to find a solution for their problems. In the next 250 years, approximately nine million people--most of them women who had been community or religious leaders or who were traditional healers--were tortured and burned at the stake. One of the pieces of evidence that was most commonly used was consorting with animals or venturing into the wilderness (Daly 1978). This persecution enhanced fears of wild animals and wild places, encouraging environmental conquest. It also effectively eliminated much of the useful knowledge of the natural world that still existed.

Shakespeare (1564-1616) described the popular vision of witches in his day. In Macbeth, witches cast their spells on "a lonely heath," accompanied by animal familiars such as cats. The eerie, sinister mood of Shakespeare's scenes with witches and the haunting evil they and the natural world represent are enough to send shivers down our modern spines. Clearly no one who was not a witch--or insane--would think about inhabiting wild woods and heaths. In other works, Shakespeare and his contemporaries referred to witches as "mad," a word applied to social dissenters even in modern times.

This attitude toward animals and wild places is reflected in the oral tradition, stories which have come down to us as fairy tales. Although we may think of such tales as merely entertainment for children, they reflect attitudes from the late Middle Ages--a time in which the stories frightened both adults and children. Many fairy tales contain similar motifs: the evil witch (who often is the only person who seems truly at ease in the forest), the hero or heroine fleeing into the forest, and benevolent spirits which protect her or him once she or he has arrived in the forest. The forest is creepy, the animals one encounters are frightening and sometimes evil. The original story of "Little Red Riding Hood" includes another motif: the evil creature of the forest, who, if not contained, can wreak havoc on the lives of people. In the original story, the wolf follows Little Red Riding hood home, eats her grandmother, and rapes her. If you go into the forest and have anything to do with the evil animals that live there, the story seems to be telling us, you deserve what you get (Zipes 1986).

Another interesting story dating from the late Middle Ages is "Robin Hood." In this story, we are told that the hero "robs from the rich to give to the poor." The description of his activity as an outlaw harks back to the demands of the peasant rebels of the fourteenth century who were protesting the rich taking away their land. Many of them took refuge in the forest and became bandits. Even a member of the clergy (Friar Tuck) is included in Robin's band of outlaws. In this story, a more ambivalent attitude toward the forest and its denizens is shown. Though the wilderness is welcoming and sheltering for the heroes, few people venture out of the towns, even though the forest is close enough to be reached on foot, for the forest is a place of evil. Nevertheless, should one be wronged, the forest holds protective spirits--the outlaw band.

European manuscripts of the period, including bestiaries and Bibles, include decorative motifs of birds and insects, some mammals, and an occasional fish or lizard. Flowers, too, were favorites of illustrators. With the invention of the printing press, it became usual to illustrate books with black and white rather than individually hand-illustrated paintings (Hutchinson 1978). These manuscript illustrations were some of the first accurate illustrations from nature. They were predecessors of later European art, such as that of Dutch painters of the sixteenth century who specialized in engravings and paintings of flowers, insects, and fish as well in as bucolic scenes. Much of this work formed the basis for later scientific illustration and was used in natural histories hundreds of years later. Clearly, throughout the history of western civilization, there has been an ambivalent attitude towards nature, feared by many, appreciated by some.

2.6 NATURE: THE NATIVE AMERICAN VIEW

How does this ambivalent attitude of Europeans compare with the attitudes towards animals and the natural world among native peoples of the Americas at the time of contact? Making generalizations about the hundreds of distinct peoples who inhabited the Americas is a dangerous proposition. However, we can identify several strains of beliefs and we can use the words of the people of various regions to give some idea of the range of beliefs.

In Middle America (modern-day México and Central America), urban peoples of the great civilizations of the Valley of México, Yucatán, and Guatemala had belief systems that were, in many respects, similar to those of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. These Native Americans worshipped a variety of gods who were associated with many different animals and sometimes took animal form. The Lady of the Serpent Skirt (Coatlícue) and Serpent Woman (Cihuacóatl) are strikingly similar in attributes to the snake goddesses of ancient Europe. The god of rain and fertility, called Tlaloc by people of the Valley of México and Chac by the Maya of Yucatán, is shown with the quetzal bird, a symbol of rulership, spreading his wings over his head. In one painting, butterflies and people are shown running through the fields over which Tlaloc rules. This god is often portrayed as a jaguar (another symbol of rulership), a feathered snake, or as an owl. Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Snake or Shining Serpent (Figure 2), is a figure found as far south as Panama and as far north as central California. Pre-Aztec temples with huge carved representations of Quetzalcoatl can be seen just outside of Mexico City today, and archaeologists are continuing to try to unravel the story of Feathered Snake. The Aztec legend that their first settlement in the Valley of México was founded at the place where an eagle was sighted, perched on a tree devouring a snake, is believed to be a descendant of the original Feathered Snake tale. This legend is depicted today on the modern Mexican flag (Wolf 1964).

Figure 2. Quetzalcoatl, the Shining Serpent (from the pre-Hispanic Codex Borbonicus).

The people of Middle America recorded songs and prayers which contained petitions to protect animals. One of the more poignant is a song by Netzahualcoyotl, the ruler of Texcoco in the Valley of México from 1431-1472. He sings, "The sweet-voiced quetzal there, ruling the earth, has intoxicated my soul. . . I am like the quetzal bird . . .I sing sweet songs among the flowers." Later verses of his song lament the fall of México which he had seen in a vision: "The smoking stars gather against it; the one who cares for flowers is about to be destroyed."

In contrast to the urban people of Middle America, the native peoples of California lived in small, sometimes isolated villages. They depended upon their ability to hunt, fish, and gather the food they needed, unlike the inhabitants of the Valley of México who cultivated corn and beans. Their stories and songs reflect their way of life, and many of the stories list geographic features or places protagonists were supposed to have visited. They were keen observers of the world around them. The Yurok people, who lived along the Klamath River of northern California, tell the tale of a whale which got stuck in a small mountain lake. Its predicament, says the story, was due to the fact that "People must dance the World Renewal dances, bringing their feet down strong and hard on the earth. If they are careless about this, it tips up, and if it tips more than a very little, there are strange and terrible misplacements." Once, "the earth tipped so far that Downriver Ocean came over the [sand]bar, filling and overflowing the canyon, carrying its waters and its fish and other sea life far inland . . . . With prayers and dancing, balance was eventually restored and the ocean flowed back down the canyon and outside the bar" except for the whale, which was left stranded in a tiny lake (Kroeber 1971). Another story tells of a woman who dreams that one of the butterflies around her changes into a handsome young man. Abandoning her baby, the woman follows Butterfly Man to his home. Yet a third, originating in far northern California, tells of the origin of the loon, and why its cry sounds like an insane person, weeping in despair.

Stories and songs similar to those of Native Americans of California but reflecting local preoccupations are retold today by the descendants of native people of the Central Plains. Cheyenne story-teller Hyemeyohsts Storm (1972) retells the story of Jumping Mouse for modern audiences. In his search for the Sacred Lake, Jumping Mouse encounters various spirit guides, including a Wolf, a Buffalo, and a Frog. Along the way, Jumping Mouse must sacrifice his old beliefs and ways of doing things if he wishes to reach his heart's desire. Finally, bereft of this eyes (old habits), Jumping Mouse reaches the lake, is killed by a hawk, and is reborn as an eagle. Storm intersperses two types of oral history: legends, and the nineteenth century history of conflict between the people of the Great Plains and the European invaders.

Songs and prayers of Native Americans of the plains, of California, of the Pacific Northwest, and other areas of the Americas call upon animals for assistance. Among Plains people, such songs often described a vision in which an animal played a central role. In the nineteenth century, this song survived among the Ghost Dancers, who sang, "The Crow! I saw him when he flew down, /To the earth, to the earth,/He has renewed our life,/He has taken pity on us./I circle around/The boundaries of the earth,/Wearing long wing feathers,/As I fly" (Astrov 1962). A Kwakiutl prayer is recorded in which a man finds a dead orca (killer whale). He addresses the whale as "Great Supernatural One," and asks, "What has made you so unlucky? . . . I thought you could never be overcome." He prays that he will "inherit [the whale's] quality of obtaining easily all kinds of game and all kinds of fish . . . And also that you protect me." (Astrov 1962). An Omaha prayer introduces a newborn child to the cosmos; "Birds, great and small, that fly in the air,/Animals, great and small, that live in the forest,/Insects that creep among the grass and burrow in the ground,/Hear me!/Into your midst has come a new life" (Cronyn 1962).

The differences between European and Native American attitudes towards animals is reflected in their respective regard for a bird native to both continents, the raven (Heinrich 1989). To Europeans, ravens were a symbol of death and evil, often associated with witchcraft. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the raven "croaks the evil entrance." As a consequence, ravens were persecuted and killed and they have been eradicated from many parts of Europe. They continued to be killed by Europeans in North America and only recently have they enjoyed some protection and appreciation for their beauty and intelligence. These qualities of ravens were almost universally recognized by Native Americans. Myths involving ravens are numerous, with Raven being either a creator, a prankster, or both (Heinrich 1989). Another animal that frequently occupied this role in Native American tales is the coyote, also an intelligent creature much reviled by Europeans.

2.7 TWO WORLDS MEETING: THE BIOLOGICAL SHOCK TROOPS

At the time of their first meeting, Europeans and Native Americans greeted each other on terms of relative equality. Native Americans had astronomical, mathematical, engineering, and agricultural skills which were at least the equal of those of medieval Europe. The calendar of Middle America was so complex that archaeologists are still studying it to discover its secrets. They built pyramids and other structures which were as large as the Great Pyramid of Egypt. They understood the effects of earthquakes and planned for them in their public and private structures. They fed dense urban populations on a diet of mixed proteins from corn, squash, and beans. They built roads that are only now being rediscovered, stretching over 124,000 miles and skirting the highest mountains in the New World. They had complex social systems and developed over 1,000 varieties of maize (corn) and over 900 varieties of potato, each adapted to a different microclimate. Varieties of maize have been found that could grow on as little as two inches of rain per year, and varieties of potato that could grow at 10,000 feet above sea level. The Aztecs of México subdued and exacted tribute from people as far away as the Atlantic Coast. The Incas had a standing army that was many times greater and better armed than that of Pizarro, the conqueror of Perú. We are told in both Spanish and Aztec chronicles that Moctezuma II welcomed Hernán Cortés and his little band of adventurers, invited them to his capital, and treated them as honored guests. Native people of what became the English colonies were friendly to their new neighbors, assisting them with food during the first several winters. The Arawak of Hispañola greeted Christopher Columbus with curiosity and immediately agreed to trade. From the arctic to Tierra del Fuego, the first response of native peoples to the Europeans was friendliness and curiosity. Why, then, did Native American cultures collapse shortly after contact? As the answer to this question is not superior military skills or superior cultural attributes such as agriculture or religion, the conquest of the Americas was the result of two factors: biology and economics. Because both these factors are closely tied with European and American attitudes toward and response to animals, we will consider them separately.

As early as 1493, Europeans carried animals in their ships from Europe to the newly discovered lands of the New World. These animals were unlike those few domesticated animals in the Americas. The Native Americans had, for all their agricultural prowess, not focused on the domestication of animals. In South America, the Incas used llamas as pack animals and herded rheas for meat. To the north, virtually the only domesticated animal was the dog, used for meat in México and as a pack animal in North America. The Europeans had "a distinct advantage in that they easily learned to harness animal energy in place of human energy. [They] arrived in America with strong horses to help men in battle as well as oxen to pull heavy carts laden with supplies and cow and goats to give protein-rich milk to marching armies . . . and later . . . settlers." (Weatherford 1988). In México, the horse, which allowed the Europeans to avoid direct hand-to-hand combat with Aztec warriors, gave Cortés the edge in conquering Tenochtitlán (Wolf 1964). The horse allowed rapid and efficient transportation and communication, only equalled by Incan runners of the pre-Conquest period.

Some animal introductions turned out to be beneficial to the native peoples. European honeybees had been more or less domesticated for thousands of years. They arrived very early in the Americas, brought by humans, but once there they thrived and spread on their own (Crosby 1986). Horses, too, were beneficial to the Native Americans who adopted them. They allowed big game hunting on the North American plains and allowed nomadic people to move large distances, following the herds of buffalo. The Plains Native American culture with which we are familiar dates from approximately 1700 when people who had followed a mixed horticultural and hunting existence on the eastern edge of the Great Plains adopted the introduced horse.

In many cases, however, European-introduced animals were not beneficial. Cattle overran and outcompeted native herbivores. The hoofs of sheep compacted the soil, killing fragile native vegetation or stunting its growth. Both animals passed on diseases to native herbivores, hastening their decline. Pigs, sheep, and cows, in the absence of fencing, frequently went wild, trampling and uprooting trees and Native American crops. Changes in the existing ecology of New England contributed to the eventual decline of such animals as deer and elk, animals upon which Native Americans had depended for at least part of their subsistence (Cronon 1983).

Of all the organisms Europeans brought to America, none were more harmful to Native Americans than Old World diseases (Cronon 1983). The Europeans brought with them smallpox, measles, diphtheria, trachoma, whooping cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague (carried by fleas, which were carried by European rats), malaria, typhoid fever, cholera, yellow fever, dengue fever, scarlet fever, amebic dysentery, influenza, and a number of worm infections (Figure 3). Native Americans had absolutely no antibodies to these diseases. To say that the effect of these illnesses on the population of the Americas was devastating would be an understatement. As early as 1493, the Arawak people of Hispañola began to be decimated by an unknown lung infection of European origin. For the four centuries following 1518, smallpox "played as essential a role in the advance of white imperialism overseas as gunpowder--perhaps a more important role, because the indigenes did turn the musket and then rifle against the intruders but smallpox very rarely fought on the side of the indigenes" (Crosby 1986). Most Europeans were immune to diseases like measles and smallpox as they had been exposed in childhood. But Native Americans were not. Smallpox exterminated one-third to one-half of the Arawak, a huge number of the Aztecs, a large proportion of the Incas (both in advance of the fight forces of Cortés and Pizarro). By the 1520s, smallpox was decimating peoples from the Great Lakes to the Argentine pampas. In the 1630s, smallpox erupted in Massachusetts. This first recorded epidemic in that area swept away whole towns, "in some not as much as one soul escaping destruction." Repeated outbreaks reduced the populations of the Huron and Iroquois confederacies by an estimated fifty percent in the 1630s and 1640s. In 1738, it destroyed half of the Cherokees; in 1759, nearly half of the Catawbas died from smallpox; in the first years of the nineteenth century, two-thirds of the Omaha died and half the population between the Missouri River and New Mexico; in 1837-8 almost every one of the Mandan and about half the people of the high plains died from the disease. In 1782 or 1783, thousands of people died in Puget Sound, although European explorers did not reach that area until ten years later. Suffice it to say that "the impact of smallpox (alone) on the indigenes of . . . the Americas was more deadly, more bewildering, more devastating than we, who live in a world from which the smallpox virus has been scientifically exterminated, can ever fully realize (Crosby 1986). Diseases such as malaria, borne by insects, wiped out whole populations in the Mississippi Valley. It has been estimated that by the end of the seventeenth century, between seventy and ninety percent of the population of the Americas had died of European-imported diseases.

At the time of contact, neither Europeans nor Americans possessed a scientific understanding of disease. Diseases were believed to be caused by the Gods, by evil humors, by bad air. During the sixteenth century, Europe experienced one major epidemic after another; typhus, smallpox, bubonic plague, and influenza killed thousands. The Spanish conquerors were familiar with epidemic diseases and even though they certainly noticed that many Native Americans died, such death "must have been a rather more familiar sight to them than it would be to the modern observer." (Wolf 1964). Eyewitness accounts by Europeans of the effects of epidemics on Native Americans are moving, but many made such comments as, "For the natives, they are neere all dead of small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess." (John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, May 1634). A French explorer noted, "Touching these savages, there is a thing that I cannot omit to remark to you. It is that it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples." (Crosby 1986). To the Puritans, the epidemics were a sign of God's providence, "in sweeping away great multitudes of the native . . . that he might make room for us there." Depopulation of Native American villages made it easier for Europeans to justify taking native lands. The wiping out of whole towns and the abandonment of fields effectively extinguished any possible title Native Americans had to their homeland. In addition, in the absence of hunting and agriculture by the native peoples, wildlife populations apparently rebounded, providing seemingly inexhaustible bounty which was ripe for exploitation.

Figure 3. Aztec smallpox victims in the sixteenth century. From Historia De Las Cosas de Nueva Espana, Volume 4, Book 12, Lam. cliii, plate 114. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

2.8 ECONOMICS AND IDEOLOGY

"Important as organisms like smallpox, the horse, and the pig were in their direct impact on American ecosystems, their full effect becomes visible only when they are treated as integral elements in a complex system of environmental and cultural relationships." (Cronon 1983). One of these relationships was the early development of a capitalist economy in Europe and the European settlers' connection to it. As a result of their need to repay ship owners who provided transportation and supplies to settlements, European settlers began to look around their new environment to find natural products that they could ship to Europe and sell. These products included salted fish, furs, timber, and masts for ships or any product which was scarce in Europe. The critical component of the trade was that the commodity had to be, or at least be perceived to be, free for the taking in the New World. Seeing landscapes not as integrated wholes but as collections of individual commodities meant something very important: members of an ecosystem were seen as isolated and extractable units. European settlers looked at the wilderness around them and saw furbearing animals that could be hunted and their pelts shipped to Europe for sale. They saw trees as sources of wood for building. There is little evidence in the early writings of the settlers that they perceived the interrelationships among plants and animals in their new environment.

Early European descriptions of the New World emphasized the incredible abundance of plant and animal life "which, when compared to Europe, left more than one visitor dumbfounded." (Cronon 1983). Fish, birds, mammals--Europeans were astounded by the sheer number and variety of fish available. They were left speechless by the flights of passenger pigeons and measured their numbers in the "millions and millions." They were struck by the absence of domesticated animals. Accustomed to a firewood shortage in England (Parliament began to ban the cutting of timber as early as 1543), settlers were delighted by the variety and abundance of the forests. They described "good timber," turkeys as "no bad commodity," and "most usefull and most beneficiall" deer.

When European settlers came into contact with Native Americans, three factors, all of them related in some way to their perception of animals, allowed them to justify taking native lands. First, as we have seen, they perceived the environments of the New World not as integrated ecosystems but as collections of commodities. These commodities, in incredible abundance, were apparently free for the taking. Second, settlers in most parts of what became the United States did not perceive that the native people who lived on the land were using the land properly. They did not "own" the land in the European sense. The agricultural peoples practiced shifting agriculture, clearing a field then moving on when the field began to lose its fertility. European farmers, on the other hand, were accustomed to a system in which a person would farm the same piece of land "in perpetuity," regardless of the health or fertility of the soil. Settlers saw Native Americans, whom they described as "lazy," as people who engaged "only" in hunting and fishing. Such activities, in Europe, were leisure activities, not integral parts of a cycle of the seasons as they were for most of the Native Americans. It was much easier to justify taking land from people who were lazy, who didn't after all own the land, who were not living up to the Biblical commandment to subdue the earth. Third, as we have seen, European diseases devastated native peoples. In the wake of this depopulation and social chaos, taking unoccupied Native American land seemed not only justifiable but legal.

Finally, Europeans perceived land and animals not only as commodities but as private property. Whereas in most hunting and gathering societies, the animal belongs to the one who kills it, in European society wildlife and hunting had been reserved for the owners of land and wildlife. When Native Americans "sold" land to Europeans, they perceived themselves as merely sharing the use of the land. Europeans perceived themselves as buying the land and everything on it, regardless of the way the land might be used. These ideological and economic differences caused conflict repeatedly and still do to a certain extent. This can be seen in the history of beaver trapping (2.9) and the history of bison killing (2.10).

2.9 THE BEAVER TRADE

The beaver trade was stimulated by the need of the European colonies to find a commodity that would repay the debts they owed to European merchants. European settlers and traders were quite aware that they were not as efficient as native hunters, so they hired native people to do the hunting for them. As "lazy" as Native Americans were, Europeans admitted that they were superb hunters. Traditionally, hunting peoples had traded with agricultural peoples on the southern coast of New England, exchanging maize (corn) for pelts. Europeans inserted themselves into the traditional network, initially using "wampum" (shell beads) as currency. However, the context was very different: traditional Native American trade had been based on a complex network of kinship and friendship and had primarily been local from village to village. The new trans-Atlantic fur trade stretched over long distances. However, as a result of disease, traditional kinship groups were beginning to break down and the original networks of trade were weakened.

Although the beaver trade began in New England, similar trade networks existed later in all areas of North America where beaver were found from New England to the Pacific Coast. The trade in furs in the seventeenth century revolutionized Native American trading economies even as it built on the old forms of gift-giving and kinship networks. European traders created a regional economy from what had once been a local network as they shuttled between corn-growing Native Americans and settlers of southern New England, wampum producers along Long Island Sound, and Native Americans of the rural north who hunted. European trade goods such as metal kettles also figured in the trade. "Trade linked these groups with an abstract set of values measured in pelts, bushels of corn, fathoms of wampum, and price movements in sterling on London market." (Cronon 1983).

The definition of beaver pelts as a commodity, as something that could be removed from the environment with no consequences, had massive ecological and social repercussions in New England and throughout the beaver range. Earlier, Native Americans had had little incentive to kill more animals than they needed. They never accumulated animal skins beyond the need for personal use and perhaps a little barter. In many tribes, all of a person's possessions had to be moved many times a year as the village or family followed animals seasonally or settled down briefly to raise a corn crop. As the native people lacked draft animals, everything a family owned had to be carried on family members' backs (or, on the Plains, on a dog- or horse-drawn travois). Precolonial trade thus was inherently conservation-oriented. Commercialization of the traditional trade practices thus led to the disintegration of earlier, ecologically sound practices.

In New England, it was clear by 1640 that beaver numbers had declined. By 1650 the trade in Massachusetts was described by its founder, William Pynchon, as "of little worth." Nevertheless, from 1652 to 1658 Pynchon's son managed to procure 9,000 beaver pelts as well as hundreds of moose, otter, muskrat, fox, raccoon, mink, marten, and lynx skins. By the end of the seventeenth century, the beaver trade was dead in New England. The fur trade, with beaver as the main commodity, continued through the eighteenth century. As one area was trapped out, hunters and trappers moved farther inland, especially into the inhospitable interior of Canada. By the end of the eighteenth century, the fur trade was no longer profitable, in large part because beaver and other fur-bearing animals had become extremely scarce across North America.

The ecological consequences of the beaver trade went far beyond the extinction or decrease in the range of one or a few species. As beaver disappeared, eventually the ponds held behind their dams became full of silt and the dams collapsed. The rich soil that was exposed was prized by settlers for its agricultural and pasture potential. The destruction of beaver populations, in much the same way as the epidemics, opened up land for European settlers. Beaver trappers were followed as they moved further west by farmers who looked for the good land around beaver ponds. Another ecological consequence of the near extinction of the beaver was the collapse of some elk and wolf populations (Chase 1987). Elk, wolf, and beaver were often linked in a complex network. Wolves preyed on beaver or other small mammals. When wolves declined, beaver populations exploded, then crashed, as food became depleted. Elk are partially dependent upon beaver-created habitat and are, in addition, preyed upon by wolves. The near-extinction of beaver and the hunting of wolves for bounty helped to cause the decline of elk populations in such areas as Yellowstone Park.

By the time the beaver trade collapsed, many Native American communities were changed beyond recognition. Instead of producing most of the goods necessary for survival, they hunted and trapped fur-bearing animals and sold all of the pelts they acquired. They became dependent upon European trade goods such as blankets, fabrics, and food. By the 1660s with the beaver gone, the native peoples of New England turned to the one commodity they had left to sell, their land. Those few that had survived epidemics, loss of income and trade, and loss of land began to keep European livestock. In the north where the beaver trade continued, Native Americans began to accept European notions of animals as property. Territories used by particular bands became more fixed in an attempt to conserve and ration the beaver that were left.

It is ironic that today the combination of decline in the value of beaver pelts and the protection of beaver in many states has resulted in an explosion in many beaver populations, including some in urban areas. They become regarded as pests as they block culverts with dams, flooding roads and parks, and they burrow into levees, weaking them for flood control, and cut down newly planted trees that are part of home landscaping.

2.10 BISON AND MANIFEST DESTINY

By the end of the seventeenth century, the new United States had ceased to be centered in the colonies of the Atlantic Coast and the westward expansion of European settlers had begun. Many of them no longer used the theological rationale for appropriating (legally or otherwise) the land of peoples with whom they came in contact. Settlers, however, had clearly inherited a belief that they were divinely appointed users of the American earth and that this use was for the good of all "mankind." This is, in essence, no different from the Biblical injunction that unused land should go to those who would use it properly. Secular politicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries argued, much as the early European settlers had, that the native peoples had to give up their territory because they had no use for it except hunting, gathering, and fishing. Even agricultural tribes who held land in common such as the Cherokees of the southeast were not considered to be proper farmers.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were two schools of thought concerning the "wild lands" and "savages" of the Americas. The one school described native peoples as "noble savages." Its major proponents were Jean Jacques Rousseau and other European thinkers of the mid-eighteenth century. The "noble savage" was a "man of liberty" who was living in a "natural state." Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and other philosophers were impressed by the respectful individualism, equality, and democratic decision-making of such Native American Nations as the Iroquois Confederacy. They were equally struck by the lack of social class distinction based on ownership of private property. They began to believe that it was possible to live in social harmony and to reject the rule of a king. Many, like Thomas Paine, began working on plans to change the colonies and Europe itself by incorporating some of the Native American ideals into their own world. Today, although the notion of the "noble savage" is referred to scornfully by anthropologists and historians alike, we do owe many of our ideals to the Enlightenment thinkers, who owed theirs to the Native Americans whom they studied.

The second school of thought was amply articulated by General George A. Custer in the 1870s when he said that Native Americans were "a race incapable of being judged by the rules or laws applicable to any other known race of men." Native American people were compared to animals; they were believed to be genetically inferior to Europeans; their cultures were believed to be "savage." The word "wild" was often used to refer to native people, especially to those who refused to give up their way of life to partake of that of Europeans. As the early European settlers had justified the taking of Native American land by Biblical rationale, so these people justified the same action by comparing native people to animals and trivializing their culture. This came, by the middle of the nineteenth century, to be the dominant trend among both American political thinkers and average people who were taking part in the westward expansion. Accordingly, any action was justified, as long as it had the effect of removing "savages" from land which obviously belonged to Europeans. This included removing natural food supplies. The most blatant example of this was the destruction of the vast herds of bison (buffalo) by white hunters.

The descriptions of bison by early European explorers are reminiscent of the words of settlers who first came to New England and described the native wildlife. Millions of the creatures inhabited the area between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. George Catlin, the painter who familiarized Europeans on the East Coast with what they referred to as a "vast wilderness", commented in his journals that the herds he saw stretched as far as the horizon. No census was ever done of the buffalo herds, but they obviously numbered in the millions. The native peoples of the Great Plains began hunting buffalo intensively in the early eighteenth century, almost as soon as they had acquired the horse. They gave up their earlier more settled existence to follow the herds. By the time of European contact one hundred years later, their material culture was almost entirely dependent upon the buffalo. Though older religious and social institutions still existed, it is clear from the customs, songs, and kinship networks that the buffalo was the center of their lives. Everything from tents and shoes to glue was either derived from the buffalo or from smaller animals that were hunted in addition to it. Every part of the animal was used.

At the time of initial contact, the East Coast European settlers had no real interest in settling in the Great Plains. Explorers such as Lewis and Clark and those few settlers who crossed the Plains on their way to Oregon, California, or the Southwest generally described the Plains as a "howling wilderness," which would be best to transverse as quickly as possible. In the 1830s and 1840s few Americans believed that the Native American people who lived on the plains were much of a problem. The critical events that changed this attitude were the discovery of gold in California in 1849 (and subsequent discovery of silver in Nevada and gold in Colorado) and the completion of the transcontinental railroad twenty years later. In order to exploit the new mineral commodities, it was necessary to get past the Plains and the peoples who lived there who had a (justifiable) reputation for exacting tolls from travelers. Although the United States got a peace treaty in 1851 in which most tribes agreed not to attack travelers, hostile encounters grew in numbers and travelers and traders continually complained. The army was not much help although it was in charge of administering trading posts along the routes.

Between 1851 and the final defeat of the Dakota in 1890, the United States government used three tactics to clear the Native Americans out of the way: Military attacks, which were only intermittently successful, (2) deliberate spread of epidemic disease to isolated groups of peoples (through infected clothes and blankets), and (3) the destruction of the bison herds. Particularly in the two decades following the Civil War, hunters literally killed buffalo by the millions. Sometimes carcasses were left to rot; sometimes the animals' tongues and hides were taken. Two to four million were killed each year during the 1870s. Twenty thousand hides were sold in St. Louis in one day. Even Yellowstone, created as a National Park in 1872, did not escape the slaughter. During the 1870s and early 1880s, buffalo were killed there by the thousands. Like other game animals, buffalo were killed and eaten by park employees. In 1882, to save money on beef, one of the first concessionaires in Yellowstone hired professional hunters to provide 20,000 pounds of elk, deer, mountain sheep, and buffalo meat. Only the intervention of the U.S. Cavalry in 1886 and its effort to stamp out poaching in the park saved buffalo and other large herbivores in the park (Chase, 1986).

By the early 1880s, Native American people could no longer find buffalo in the numbers required to sustain themselves. Many moved to the trading posts and took up a semi-sedentary way of life, thus putting themselves at greater risk for epidemic diseases. Like the people of the East Coast, with their livelihood gone, they became increasingly dependent upon imported American and European goods and foods. A few escaped to Canada where they continued to follow the diminishing buffalo herds, but, in desperation, many agreed to sign treaties ceding the majority of their land to the invaders in return for food and clothing. By 1890, not only were the buffalo virtually extinct south of the American-Canadian border, but disease and massacre had succeeded in decimating the people of the Great Plains and driving their cultures into collapse. All three policies--military, epidemics, and slaughter of the buffalo--had been deliberate. All three were justified by the type of rationale we have already discussed.

2.11 WALDEN POND AND BEYOND

Era of over-exploitation. The destruction of the buffalo herds, the slaughter of the beaver, the deculturation of the native people due to disease and military defeat had been deliberate. Because the acts were a logical extension both of the Biblical injunction to subdue the earth and of European racism, at the time these policies were in force few people raised their voices in protest. Yet, over the clamor of self-congratulation for having subdued the "remote, barren, rocky, bushy, wild-woody wilderness" into a "second England," a few individuals asked if this transformed environment was what people really wanted. Henry David Thoreau in 1855 sat down with his journal beside the local swimming hole in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, to consider the ways in which Concord had been altered by two centuries of European settlement and expansion. Following a 1633 account and comparing it to what he saw around him, he concluded that the changes had been drastic. In Walden he listed animals and trees which were no longer present in Concord in 1855, and then wrote:

Thoreau was not the first to comment on the changes in the environment he saw around him. Unfortunately, until the twentieth century, writers like Thoreau had little popular audience. The ideology and practice of manifest destiny was quite strong in all parts of the country. People homesteading on the plains, if they read Thoreau at all, would have referred to him as an East Coast dilettante who knew nothing of their struggles to survive in the wilderness.

Nevertheless, the ideas of the early conservationists like Thoreau began spreading among the eastern intelligentsia and political leaders. Concern grew, not only about the cutting of forests in the east, but also about the widespread killing of the buffalo and other herbivores and the cutting of forests in the west. Though many of these early conservationists believed that the "frontier" was a good thing, they also believed that it should be preserved. In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a law that designated over two million acres of forest as Yellowstone National Park, the nation's first. As we have noted above, there were no provisions in that early law to prevent the killing of animals within the park. After the U.S. Cavalry was brought in to stamp out poaching, the Army continued to administer the park until 1916 when the National Park Service was formed to administer the 16 national parks and 21 national monuments that existed by that time. In 1894 Congress passed a law that prohibited hunting in national parks.

Era of Protection. The period of the Theodore Roosevelt presidency is considered by many to be a golden age of conservation. Roosevelt, an ardent conservationist, tripled the size of forest reserves, created the U.S. Forest Service to manage and protect them, appointed conservationist Gifford Pinchot to head the Forest Service, and pushed Congress into passing legislation that withdrew 80 million acres of public land from exploitation for coal and 4 million acres from exploitation for oil. Roosevelt also used the 1906 Lacey Act to set aside several million acres of public land as national monuments and began the National Wildlife Refuge System in 1903.

At the same time that this ferment was going on in the United States, a nature writer from England began looking around for a new word to express the new consciousness of animals that lived in natural places. Richard Jefferies, writing in 1879, first used the word "wild-life" to describe the "wild" animals he observed in southern England. He may have picked up the word from German or Scandinavian colleagues, where interest in animals and conservation was intense. Nature writers in England and the United States followed this usage. By the early 1920s, the idea of animals in "wilderness" and the conservation of "wildlife" was firmly enshrined among the reformers. Many of the reformers, however, were very specific about their use of the word. Some still used the older term "varmint" to describe predators like wolves. This ambivalent attitude toward wild animals--that some are good and others should be slaughtered--was reflected in the practice of the new Park Service at Yellowstone National Park. In the 1910s and 1920s, the Park Service had a policy of deliberately eradicating wolves from Yellowstone, using the rationale that such extermination was not "hunting" and therefore did not violate the congressional ban. By 1926, when Congress intervened to stop the slaughter of wolves, Yellowstone wolves were extinct. Although the beneficial effects of predators like wolves have been well documented, our society has still not shaken off its heritage of considering them to be a threat to humans and livestock. As a result, the on-going (and successful) reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone has been highly controversial, even though they are one of the last major natural pieces missing from the Yellowstone ecosystem.

The conservation movement in the United States continued to grow in the early part of the twentieth century. Some individuals like John Muir realized that mere preservation of wilderness areas was not enough. He helped found the Sierra Club in 1892 in an attempt to get ordinary people involved in and educated about wilderness. Why, Muir asked in his writings, is there such a dichotomy between lifeless cities and untrammeled wilderness? Can city people care about wilderness they might never see? Muir thought they could. The Sierra Club advocated the establishment of Yosemite National Park in John Muir's beloved Sierra Nevada mountains. It attempted to preserve not only the Yosemite Valley itself but also the high country surrounding the valley and the neighboring (and equally beautiful) Hetch-Hetchy Valley. Though Muir and the Sierra Club succeeded in protecting the former, they lost the latter. Hetch-Hetchy is now a reservoir owned by the City of San Francisco that supplies power and water to the city.

A number of other conservation organizations were also formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Audubon Society, founded in 1886, focused on bird conservation and began a campaign to stop the killing of egrets for plumes to adorn women's hats. Society was instrumental in the passage of a law in 1900 that banned interstate traffic in illegally killed wildlife.

Era of Game Management. In 1935, two remarkable men, Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall, worked together to found the Wilderness Society. The Society was founded as an activist group which was committed to education and to action and advocating in favor of wilderness. Bob Marshall committed his own money and hours of his time to assess the environmental problems caused by the road-building projects of the New Deal. As a result of the Society's work, legislation was passed in the 1960s and 1970s designating roadless areas and wilderness areas separate from national parks. The Society was also involved along with many other conservation groups in lobbying for passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Aldo Leopold, founder of the University of Wisconsin's Department of Wildlife Management, was the philosophical leader of the Wilderness Society. He declared that the Society would promote a new attitude, "an intelligent humility toward man's place in nature." His Essay from Round River articulated for the first time the idea that all parts of an ecosystem play important roles, and that no organism should be removed from an ecosystem. "The first rule of tinkering," he wrote, "is to keep all the parts." In his classic Sand County Almanac, Leopold says that "there are those who can live without wild things and those who cannot . . . These essays are the delights and the dilemmas of one who cannot." He describes for the first time in American conservation, drawing upon the ideas of Thoreau and others, a land ethic: "Perhaps a shift in values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free." Leopold, who grew up as a hunter, saw that shift happen in his own thinking. He describes a dying wolf and later comments, "To be trained as an ecologist is to live alone in a world of wounds."

Between 1940 and 1960, there were very few new developments in conservation. In 1946, the Bureau of Land Management was formed to administer federal grazing lands and federal lands that had potential for mineral and oil exploration. However, there was much controversy around public lands. The opposition to conservation was led by the timber industry in the Northwest and cattle ranchers in the West. We have discussed the belief of early settlers in New England that land should be viewed as a collection of commodities. Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" was not only in direct conflict with this earlier mode of thinking, it was also in conflict with the descendants of those early settlers--those who wished to exploit public lands for the commodities (oil, minerals, pasture, timber) they represented. As we shall see, precisely the same conflict is going on today.

In 1962, Rachel Carson, a biologist, published Silent Spring. The title echoed Aldo Leopold's worried question from Sand County Almanac as he watched the decreasing numbers of wild birds, "What if there was no more goose music?" Carson documented the use of pesticides and other chemicals and the pollution of air and water. She showed that the pesticide DDT could not only kill birds but also concentrate in the food chain. If we keep using pesticides, if we keep polluting our world, Carson asked, will we finish the job the first European settlers began? Some day will there be no more birds singing in the spring? Her words and Leopold's were prophetic. Research on this question has shown that not only are we exterminating wildlife, but we are also turning the oceans into toxic dumps and may be endangering our own survival on this planet by dumping toxic chemicals into the air and into the upper atmosphere. Today, over thirty-five years after Rachel Carson first wrote her book, her "silent spring" may still come to pass. Migratory bird populations, though largely protected from the most egregious pesticides in the United States, are killed by those same pesticides in Latin America. Their winter habitats are also being destroyed. Meanwhile, back in the developed world, subtle new pesticides, with subtle new effects are being used.

Era of Environmenal Management. Between 1965 and 1980, over two dozen pieces of legislation were passed on the federal level and many times that number on state and local levels to protect wildlife and wildlife habitat. This legislation included the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and others that seek to decrease pollution. Other legislation such as the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act attempted to regulate land use and to set aside pieces of land that are free from development. Wildlife conservation was addressed in the federal Endangered Species Act as well as in similar legislation on the state level. All of this legislation was a direct result of the education and activism in local communities that began to take place in the early 1960s, in large part from the stimulus of Rachel Carson's book.

We have labelled the present era the "Era of Conservation Biology" on the optomistic assumption that our increased awareness of the environmental problems of the world coupled with our increased knowledge of ecology will allow us to solve those problems. The question for YOU is: can we in fact create the

major changes in public attitudes it will take to change our present direction in global use and abuse. Is this even desireable? Do the words of Henry Beston, written in 1928, still resonate or do they represent an old-fashioned attitude, irrelevant in the modern world:

REFERENCES

Beston, A. 1928. The Outermost House. Holt, Reinhart & Winston, New York.

Carson, R. 1962. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, New York.

Chase, A. 1986. Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York.

Cronon, W. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. Hill and Wang, New York.

Cronyn, G. W. (ed.). 1962. American Indian Poetry: An Anthology of Songs and Chants. Liveright, New York.

Crosby, A. W. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Heinrich, B. 1989. Ravens in Winter. Sunset Books, New York. 379 pp.

Hutchinson, G. E. 1978. Zoological iconography in the West after A.D. 1200. American Scientist 66:675-684.

Leopold, A. 1966. Sand County Almanac/Round River: Essays in Conservation. Sierra Club, New York.

Snyder, G. 1990. The Practice of the Wild. North Point Press, San Francisco

Weatherford, J. M. 1988. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. Crown Publishers, New York.

White, T. H., 1954. The Book of Beasts, Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century. B. B. Putnam's Sons, N.Y. 296 pp.