Glad to Be American With Wilderness and Wildlife

Aldo Leopold :: This is a repost from 2010.


There is something vaguely ridiculous about European hunting with its dress-up clothes and potted birds.

Even some of the descriptions of terrier work can border on the absurd. Does every fox have to be described as a "lamb killer"? I suppose so in a country that has no coyote, wolf, bobcat, mountain lion, black bear, alligator, or grizzly! When your biggest game animal eats worms and bulbs, and your largest predator dines on mice, you may have to dress up your rationale for the hunt every bit as much you dress up yourself. Mere sport with dogs cannot do!

In America, of course, such a claim would be met with laughter. A red fox threatens your farm? A badger? Please! We have real predators from one end of this country to another. No need for tales of Beowulf here! A country full of bears and coyotes does not need to invent dragons.

To be clear, what makes America special is not some extra gene coursing through our blood. What makes American special is the land, and the fact that, unlike Europe, we have not killed off everything big enough to kill a cat.

No one ever said it better than Aldo Leopold who, back in 1925, wrote an essay called "Wilderness As a Form of Land Use," in which he reminded us of what we were (American), and warned us of what we might become (European):

The day is almost upon us when canoe travel will consist in paddling up the noisy wake of a motor launch and portaging through the back yard of a summer cottage. When that day comes canoe travel will be dead, and dead too will be a part of our Americanism. Joliet and LaSalle will be words in a book, Champlain will be a spot on a map, and canoes will be merely things of wood and canvas, with a connotation of white duck pants and bathing "beauties."

The time is almost upon us when a pack-train must wind it’s way up a graveled highway and turn it’s bell-mare in the pasture of a summer hotel. When that day comes, the pack-train will be dead, the diamond hitch will be merely rope, and Kit Carson and Jim Bridger will be names in a history lesson. And thenceforth the march of empire will be a matter of gasoline and four wheel brakes.

European outdoor recreation is largely devoid of the thing that wilderness areas would be the means of preserving in this country. Europeans do not camp, cook or pack in the woods for pleasure. They hunt and fish when they can afford to, but their hunting and fishing is merely hunting and fishing, staged in a set of ready-made hunting lodges, elaborate fare, and hired beaters. The whole thing carries the atmosphere of a picnic, rather than that of a pack trip. The test of skill is confined almost entirely to the act of killing, itself. Its value as a human experience is reduced accordingly.

There is a strong movement in this country to preserve the distinctive democracy of our field sports by preserving free hunting and fishing, as distinguished from the European condition of commercialized hunting and fishing privileges. Public shooting grounds and organized cooperative relations between sportsmen and landowners are the means proposed for keeping these sports within reach of the American of moderate means. Free hunting and fishing is a most worthy objective, but it deals with only one of the distinctive characteristics of American sport. The other characteristic is that our test of skill is primarily the act of living in the open, and only secondarily the act of killing game. It is to preserve this primary characteristic that public wilderness playgrounds are necessary."

Read the whole essay which I have linked to here [PDF].

Are we there yet? Is our land so gut-shot with people that we have lost the wild and become European?

Not quite.

The coyote population is growing, and so too is the population of mountain lion, wolf, black bear, grizzly, and alligator.

We are not yet European, thank God!

Yet we may get there if we do not do more to slow population growth, most of which is now fueled by unbridled legal and illegal immigration. We cannot take all of the world's displeased and dispossesed, and it's high time we stopped trying.

Above all, we need to remember that we need to fight to continue to preserve large blocks of wild lands, including wilderness.

Preserving wilderness and wild lands is about nothing less than preserving America's soul.

Save it now, or someday soon, it may be gone forever.
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Angeles Requiem from Tocho on Vimeo. The above video is not just amazing because the camere trap survived a forest fire, or because of what it else it got on tape (thanks Chaz!). It's amazing because it was all filmed by a single camera trap in Angeles National Forest just a 30-minute drive from downtown Los Angeles. Thiry minutes from downtown L.A.! This is still America as God intended, a country made by bear and lion, fire and rain, buffalo and deer. This land is your land. This land was made for you and me. .

How Much Land is Protected?

This post is recycled from 2005.

There are many different ways to look at how much land is protected in each county. I will start with the technical, but if you read to the end I promise you some pretty impressive data!

The technical: The World Conservation Union (IUCN) defines six management categories of protected areas in two groups.

Group One Lands are totally protected areas that are maintained in a natural state and are closed to extractive uses. They comprise Category I, Strict Nature Reserves/Wilderness Area; Category II, National Park; and Category III, National Monuments.

Group Two Lands are partially protected areas managed for specific uses such as recreation, or to provide optimum conditions for certain species or ecological communities. They comprise Category IV, Habitat/Species Management Areas; Category V, Protected Landscape/Seascapes; and Category VI, Managed resource Protected Areas.

The very easy-to-use "Nation Master" web site at www.NationMaster.com ranks countries by the percentage of land in "protected areas" and by the percentage of land that is still "wild" ("wildness").

On this web site "protected areas" seems to combine both Group One and Group Two IUCN land protection definitions -- a pretty good index of aesthetically, culturally or environmental important lands afforded a significant level of government protection.

The "Wildness" index on the Nation Master site, uses the percent of land in a given country with a "very low anthropogenic impact". In other words, this is land with very, very low population densities and not much evidence of human disturbance (often because it is desert or tundra). The "wildness" data is largely from Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network, with an overlay for human population densities (see footnote on the Nation Master web site).

Now for the really impressive numbers.
The growth in the acreage of formally protected lands in the U.S, Canada, and Mexico is very impressive.

Since 1970, North American acreage off limits to development rose from 247 million to 741 million acres — about 15 percent of the continent's land surface. Almost all of this is due to the naming of new wilderness, near-wilderness, and biological reserves.

On the international front, the same tremendous growth in protected lands we see in North America is also occurring overseas.

In 2004, the United Nations reported that there are now over 102,000 environmentally protected areas around the world totaling over 17 million square kilometers of land (another 1.8 million square kilometers is underwater).

To put it another way, about 11.5 per cent of the Earth's land surface - an area the size of South America - is now protected. For scale, and in comparison, the area of the world's protected areas is now far bigger than the land surface of India and China combined. It is also larger than all land in the world under permanent, arable, crops.

For North American bird lovers, the good news is that Central and South America have the highest percentage of land under protection at more than 25 percent each.

Is all of the protected land in impoverished parts of the world fully protected to eliminate all illegal logging and poaching? Of course not. But as countries climb the economic ladder, and as political and civil service systems in the developing world become more robust, things are likely to improve along this front. The good news is not that the job is done (we are pretty far from that!), but that the direct and velocity are far better than most of us have been lead to believe.
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The U.S. Now Has More Lions Than Africa

I tossed the latest copy of Earth Dog - Running Dog magazine into the truck on the way to work this morning, and was flipping through it at a traffic light when I opened it up to see the picture at left. Hey, I know that fellow!

And sure enough I do -- it's John B., who I see once a year at the only dog trial I go to, the JRTCA Nationals.

That's a 200-pound stock-predating Mountain Lion John hunted in Arizona a few years back (subscribe to Earth Dog - Running Dog magazine if you want to read the full story).

John's Mountain Lion got me to thinking about the rise of Cougar populations here in the U.S.

As regular readers might recall, a Mountain Lion was recently shot in Chicago, and roadkills in Iowa prove they have gotten that far east as well.

Rumors of Mountain Lions in Appalachia remain (as yet) unfounded, but it is agreed by all that it is only a matter of time before they come here. With over over 2 million acres of contiguous National Forest in Virginia and West Virginia alone, and plenty of deer, they will not want for food or space!

On a hunch, I did a little research and confirmed what I suspected: there are now more lions in the United States than there are all in all of Africa.

Now granted that Puma concolor and Panthera leo are a different genus of big cat, but a Mountain Lion is no small animal; it is, in fact, the fourth largest big cat in the world.

Right now there are more than 30,000 Mountain Lions in the U.S., and their numbers are slowly growing despite the fact that hunting these large animals is legal (if controlled by permit) in 10 of the 11 western states where they reside.

All in all, about 3,500 Mountain Lions a year are shot by U.S. hunters, and another 800 or so are killed by vehicle impacts.

A slow steady increase in Mountain Lions is excellent news, and the kind of thing we can live with provided the populations are allowed to expand in the right direction (i.e on public lands) and away from farms, ranches and suburbs.

The return of the Mountain Lion (along with the concurrent rise in bear, wolf, coyote, turkey, eagle, hawk, osprey, deer, elk, and beaver populations) is proof-positive that the American way of science-based wildlife management has been a roaring success.

This is not to say, of course, that there will never be human-wildlife conflicts. There always will be with large meat-eating predators.

Problem lions, wolves and bears will always have to be shot, but regulated hunting and culling of these animals does no long-term harm provided the slaughter is not indiscriminate and the wild habitat they require is preserved as large unbroken blocks of land.

The real threat to animals like Mountain Lions is not regulated hunted; it is unregulated population growth which results in more roads, more water consumption, and more sprawl.

If we protect the habitat, the wildlife will generally take care of itself.

But to take care of the habitat, we have to control ourselves.

We cannot allow U.S. population growth (largely driven by immigration) to increase our numbers to the point that humans become like locusts on the land. If we plough and graze fence post to fence post, fragment the forests, drain the rivers and streams for irrigation, and put in roads every mile or two (with shopping centers in between), it is not just Mountain Lion we will lose; it is wild America as we know it and love it.

And, to put on a point on it, it will not take much human population growth in Arizona, where this mountain lion was shot, to wreck things forever.

As John McCain recently noted, Arizona is already so dry the trees have been known to chase the dogs!

So heads up; human population growth is what is killing off Africa's lions.

Now that we have a healthy Mountain Lion population in the American West, let's make sure we do not allow human population growth to kill off our lions as well.

Let's not worry about sustainable levels of hunting, while ignoring unsustainable rates of immigration.

Yet, as far as I can tell, that is exactly what every Mountain Lion and Cougar protection organization in America is now doing. Talk about missing the forest for the trees!

A repost from 2008.

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The Archeology of Hunting

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Humans have spent most of their time on earth hunting, and it is not entirely surprising that there is at least some archaeological evidence of the activity.

In North American before Columbus, there were no metal tools or horses. Hunting was done entirely on foot, and hides and meat were hauled off by humans and dogs pulling travois skids.

In some rare locations a very efficient form of hunting was accomplished by running bison herds off of cliffs or "Buffalo Jumps" -- a fact we know today only because of the enormous piles of bison bones at the base of these cliffs, and the related stone tools and campfires.

Archaeologists have discovered that drive lines were made to direct herds of bison to the jumps. The drive lines consisted of rows of rock piles known as "dead men," arranged like a wide funnel that started up to 8 miles away from the jump site. The funnel gradually narrowed toward the jump end. Hunters hiding behind the "dead men" rock piles would spring out and wave robes and shout in order to frighten the animals and keep them inside the funnel and headed in a stampede towards the jump where they would tumble down, breaking legs and necks as they fell.

In Europe, large Deer Parks were created during the Middle Ages as a way of setting off land for aristocratic hunters and managing sustainable game populations for food. The edges of these parks were often edged by massive earthwork moats and mounds which, in turn, were topped by wooden fences. The moats were on the inside and prevented the deer from getting a foothold or a run-up to the top of the mound which was constructed from the earth taken from the moat excavation. Many UK locations with "Park" in their name are, in fact, old Deer Parks and with careful observation in some locations, you can see parts of remnant ditches and mounds.

As with the ancient Buffalo Jumps, hunting in deer parks was accomplished by driving game through funnel fences to archers who were positioned on the ground or in tree stands.

In the 14th Century there were over 3,000 deer parks in England occupying around 650,000 acres of land (over 1,000 squre miles). These deer parks were managed for wild game and for wood. In the larger deer parks streams were dammed to make small lakes and ponds for fishing and ice making.

Most of the large deer parks fell into disrepair in late Medieval times as the feudal system collapsed under the weight of the Plague, and a new form of hunting -- coursing with horses and dogs -- was imported from France.

Another archaeological remnant of hunting to be found in Europe are rabbit warrens. The rabbit is not naive to the UK -- it was introduced (probably from Spain) by the Romans shortly after the First Century AD. Across the UK ancient artificial warrens can be found to this day. These warrens are called "pillow mounds" or buries and are flat topped, 10 to 20 metres long, 5 to 10 metres wide, and up to a metre high, sometimes surrounded by a shallow ditch. About 2,000 of these ancient buries survive in England, and in some of them artificial runs are covered with stone slabs. Some of the very largest artificial warrens had professional staff (a warrener) and buildings.


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Duck and Fish Ponds provide additional archaeological evidence of hunting and angling across the globe. Many of these ponds have artificial islands on them created as spots where ducks and geese can breed free of predators. While the waters of these ponds were stocked with fish, the ponds were often designed with "dog-leg" lagoons, or a narrows on one end, where ducks and geese could be driven and easily netted.

The United States is a very young nation, and much of the Western U.S. was nearly devoid of people only 150 years ago. That said, Americans are industrious and the construction of small ponds and large lakes for water storage and ice-making naturally led to increased still-water angling and duck hunting.

In short order, some people began construction of dams specifically to increase angling and hunting opportunities. One such dam was constructed on the South Fork River near Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The dam itself was a massive earthen affair constructed by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club which counted among its 66 wealthy Pittsburgh residents Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew W. Mellon, and Philander Knox.

At the time of its construction, the South Fork Dam was one of the largest in the world, but it was not well constructed. A flawed design was made worse when the Fishing and Hunting Club put screens across the safety spillway to prevent fish from washing over the dam during heavy rains. The spillway screens were constantly clogged with debris, but despite many warnings about the safety of the dam, the rich aristocrats who owned the hunting club continued on, business as usual.

On May 31, 1889, after a period of heavy rain, the dam finally gave way sending a 45-foot-tall wall of muddy water racing down the Conemaugh Valley. More than 2,209 lives were lost and 27,000 people were made homeless -- one of the greatest single losses of human life in the history of the United States.



Civilian Conservation Corps Tree Planters, 1939


The most notable period of U.S. construction for wildlife benefits began with the advent of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1936. The CCC was created as a Depression-era jobs program which eventually put millions of young men to work on reforestation, soil erosion, flood prevention, and trail construction projects across the United States..

The Corps was badly needed -- America had ruined scores of millions of acres of once-forested lands during the rip-rape-and-ruin robber baron era that lasted from 1850-1900.

Massive tracts of forest in our eastern mountains had been swept clean of trees, and streams were choked with silt. Wildlife had been shot out to the point that deer were nearly extinct, all beaver were gone, and ducks and geese were a rarity in areas where they had once been in dense numbers.

The Lacey act of 1907 and the Weeks Act of 1911 were important for protecting wildlife and conserving land, but wild America had been so severely hammered by unrestrained greed that it was to clear that it would take millions of hours of human labor and a lot of time to begin to set things right.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt started the ball rolling in 1934 with the appointment of Committee on Wild-Life Restoration whose mandate was to prepare a plan to restore America's dwindling wildlife populations. Among its members were the great wildlife manager Aldo Leopold, and cartoonist Ding Darling.

The Wild-Life Committee recommended far-reaching changes to improve habitat for waterfowl, upland game, mammals, and song birds, including the acquisition of millions of acres of additional sub-marginal lands for habitat improvement, and appropriations of $50 million to restore these lands to some semblance of their natural self.

It did not take a genius to see that the Wildlife Restoration Plan and the Civilian Conservation Corps were ideal partners, and under the tutelage of Darling -- a man who later went on to create the Federal Duck Stamp Program and found the National Wildlife Federation -- significant gains were made in record time.

By the end of 1942, national wildlife refuges, national forests, and other public lands across the U.S. had been improved by CCC workers who constructed dams, dikes and fish hatcheries, planted millions of trees to stabilize stream banks and cover over ruined land, and erected numerous buildings, fire towers, telephone lines and support facilities for camping grounds, and improved backcountry-access for hunters and hikers.

Civilian Conservation Corps construction projects remain a significant addition to our National Parks, National Forests and Wildlife Refuge System to this day, and are too-little heralded part of our American wildlife heritage.
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When "Death Squads for Cattle" Saved America

So how did the Dust Bowl end?

Three words: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

When FDR ran for president, he seemed an unlikely savior: a rich dilettante with a funny accent, a withered body, and cigarettes he smoked from a holder.

But Roosevelt had a message and a cause: the "forgotten man" — the broken farmer in the West, the apple vendor hawking his wares for a nickle in in Manhattan, the Chicago and St. Louis factory worker now hitting the rails looking for work.

Roosevelt knew what had broken America: unfettered greed and a herd mentality that made prices too low for farmers to make a living.

Unregulated banking had left depositors banging on doors to empty buildings. Flashy brochures had sold both deserts and swamps as perfect locations for homes and the result was that both lives and land had been ruined in the process. It was time for a cool head, and a little rational government organization and intervention.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt said he was the man for that job.

In November of 1932, FDR carried all but six states, and those he failed to carry were mostly small New England states that were not too hard hit by the Depression.

When FDR came through the door to the Oval Office, he faced a mountain of problems:  an economy in ruins, Mother Nature in full riot, and a government that seemed to be without rudder or clue.  Herbert Hoover, the Republican President who had fiddled while the Great Plains blew away, the stock market collapsed, jobs withered on the vine, banks collapsed, and home equity disappeared said, on his last day in office, "We have done all that we can do. There is nothing more to be done."

But of course, America was not defeated.  All the U.S. needed was a little common sense and a little clear-eyed governing.  Into the fray rolled a decisive Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man with bold ideas, clear plans, and a mandate to put them in motion.

First up was the Emergency Banking Bill which was signed into law just eight hours after it was introduced.  By the end of Roosevelt's first week in office, bank deposits exceeded withdrawals. A few months later, this bill was further strengthened by adding provisions that insured individual deposits up to ten thousand dollars.

Next up was saving the farm.  To do that, farming had to be profitable again.  As Roosevelt never tired of pointing out, America knew how to grow food.  In fact, American farmers were so damn good at it, that while farmers were producing record crops, they also saw an 80% decline in income due to over-production. What was needed was a stabilizing force on farm prices said Roosevelt. Just as a horse pulling a plow needed a bridle, so too did the Heavy Horse of capitalism. With a little restrain and a little guidance, that which could easily kill a farmer could be harnessed and made to serve him.

In the second year of FDR's first term, he sent government-sanctioned death squads to the Great Plains with a plan to buy and kill as many farm animals as possible.

The simple fact of the matter was that stock eradication was the only way forward for both farmer and animal.  Most of the cows and horses on the Great Plains could not be sold as they were now in such poor condition that no one on earth would buy then.

Overproduction of wheat, as well as too many cows and horses, had left the ground eroded and broken.  The wretched-looking cattle that still dotted the prairie were little more than bags of skin and bones outlined in ribs.  The horses were scabby with sores, their teeth shattered and their lips bleeding from gnawing on fence posts.  Cattle and horses alike had lungs that were packed with dust.

A bullet to the brain was not animal cruelty; it was blessed relief for animals that had no other hope.

Over the next year the U.S. Government bought eight million cattle and many horses in an effort to bring up stock prices so that farmers could feed their families.

The cattle the Government did buy up were often worthless. Nearly one in three were shot and tipped into a ditch to rot, their bodies too thin for even the starving locals to bone out for a single steak.

Land that had rippled with grass and run riot with millions of wild bison just 50 year earlier, was now broken and blowing away, much of it devoid of all vegetation and unable to support even a single domestic cow.

Along with payments to reduce farm stock, the Roosevelt Administration began making payments to get people to move out of really hard-hit areas.

Just as the Government and the railroads had once subsidized immigration to the U.S. and colonization of the Great Plains, they now paid for people to move away from Texas panhandle, eastern Colorado, Oklahoma and western Kansas. This was not land for potato farmers and get-rich-quick men. There was an over-shoot of people said the Government, and the way back to economic and land health was to reduce the number of humans as well as the number of cattle.

All of this was a massive help to turning things around, but the single greatest long-term force in ending the Dust Bowl and reshaping American agriculture came in the person of Hugh Bennett, someone most Americans have never heard of.

Hugh Bennett was an American original -- a big, friendly man who could shoe a horse, paint a barn, and fix a tractor, even as he spoke clearly and simply about his new theory to turn the land around.

What was wrong, said Bennett, was what we had done to the land, especially in the Plains.  The land had been fine for 2 million years as a cover of native grass for migrating buffalo, but we had got it ruined it in less than 50 by turning the grass "wrong side up" and putting too many domestic cattle out to graze in permanent pasture. 

Bennett thought it might be possible to turn things around, but it was going to be tough to pull it out of dive when things were going down so fast, and we were already so close to the ditch.

Bennett's radical plan was for the government to buy a million acres of land in the worst-hit sections of the of prairie states so that the land could be "haired over" with tough grass seeds imported from Africa.  A new grassland had to be made (or restored), and it had to be done at a scale that had never been done before. It might be too late, of course, but the only way forward was to try, and once it was accomplished, to let the land rest for perhaps decades... or even longer.

In places where the land was a little less ruined, Hugh Bennett thought better farm practices might be enough to turn things around:  contour plowing, winter ground cover, cover strips to hold the soil in place.

Bennett found a friend and believer in FDR. Roosevelt felt if the Plains could be saved, then Hugh Bennett was the man to do it.
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Black Sunday, 1935.

On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm in U.S. history hit the prairie states, pushing a tower of dirt more than two miles into the air, and moving 300,000 tons of topsoil towards the east coast. 

This was "Black Sunday" -- the day the wind moved more dirt in a single afternoon than was dug by an army of machines toiling for over seven years to build the Panama Canal.

On April 19, 1935, five days after Black Sunday, Hugh Bennett was in Room 333 of the Russell Senate Office Building (then simply called the Senate Office Building) pushing for land conservation. 

As Timothy Egan notes in The Worst Hard Time:

He began with the charts, the maps, the stories of what soil conservation could do, and a report on Black Sunday. The senators listened, expressions of boredom on the faces of some. An aide whispered into Big Hugh's ear. "It's coming."

Bennett told how he learned about terracing at an early age, about how the old ground on his daddy's place in North Carolina was held in place by a simple method that most country farmers learned when they were young. And did he mention—yes, again—that an inch of topsoil can blow away in an hour, but it takes a thousand years to restore it? Think about that equation. A senator who had been gazing out the window interrupted Bennett. "It's getting dark outside."

The senators went to the window. Early afternoon in mid-April, and it was getting dark. The sun over the Senate Office Building vanished. The air took on a copper hue as light filtered through the flurry of dust. For the second time in two years, soil from the southern plains fell on the capital. This time it seemed to take its cue from Hugh Bennett. The weather bureau said it had originated in No Man's Land. "This, gentlemen, is what I'm talking about," said Bennett. "There goes Oklahoma." Within a day, Bennett had his money and a permanent agency to restore and sustain the health of the soil. When Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act, it marked the first time any nation had created such a unit.

To force prices up enough for farmers to make a living, Roosevelt had the government buy surplus corn, beans, and flour, and distribute it to the needy.

Over six million pigs were slaughtered, and the meat given to relief organizations.

Crops were plowed into the ground — like slitting your wrist, to some farmers. In the South, when horses were first directed to the fields to rip out cotton, they balked. Next year, the government would ask cattlemen and wheat growers to reduce supply in return for cash. Hoover had been leery of meddling with the mechanics of the free market. Under Roosevelt, the government was the market. The Agricultural Adjustment Act created the framework, and the Civilian Conservation Corps drummed up the foot soldiers. They would try to stitch the land back together. Build dams, bridges. Restore forests. Keep water from running away. Build trails in the mountains, roads on the prairie, lakes and ponds.

In May, Roosevelt signed a bill giving two hundred million dollars to help farmers facing foreclosure. Now, before some nester's land could be taken to satisfy a bank loan, there was a place of last resort.

That summer, FDR launched the Second Hundred Days, signing into law the Social Security Act so that the crushing cycle of old age poverty that had bedeviled mankind since the beginning, might end.

Next up was the Works Progress Administration to fund the building of roads, schools, bridges and parks, and the National Labor Relations Act, which enshrined union rights in the workplace even as it outlawed wildcat strikes that could cripple the economy.

And what was the result?

Things turned around. Farm economies began to improve with incomes 50 percent higher, and crop prices up 66 percent since Herbert Hoover's last day in office.

Money flowed back into the banks. People slowly returned to work.

Roosevelt took credit, and the American people gave him credit, but the Supreme Court disagreed, stepping in to say that government control of the American farm economy was unconstitutional. The government could not be the market.

Sound familiar?

Of course, today we do have price supports and market-making for all kinds of agricultural products.

The Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers every year to leave over 30 million acres fallow -- land that supports fox, deer, quail, pheasant, sage grouse, and turkey, as well as scores of millions of song birds.

Social Security is the primary source of income for most Americans in retirement. If you are lucky enough to have gone to college, it's probably because your parents had a little money set aside now that they no longer had to provide economic sustenance to their parents (your grandparents) in old age.

The over one million acres of Dust Bowl land that the government bought from broken farmers in 1935 for $2.75 an acre, is now almost four million acres located in 20 publicly-owned National Grassland parks administered by the U.S. Forest Service.

And in the end, even the Republicans admitted it was all due to the good sense and steady hand of FDR.

When Kansas Governor Alf Landon, who had run against Roosevelt in 1936 saying he had no idea how to fix the Great Plains, was asked about the New Deal and its lasting effect on the country, he said it "saved our society."

And, of course he was right and the American people knew it. Alf Landon lost every state in 1936 except Maine and Vermont, winning the Electoral College by the largest margin ever, 523 to 8,

As for Hugh Bennett, the Big Man that Saved the Plains, he died in 1960 at the age of seventy-nine, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery just two miles from my house. On Saturday I may bike over to lay a flower on his grave; a great American not enough of us have ever been told about.
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Hugh Bennett at the first soil erosion research station in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

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The Missing Birds of Rock Creek Park

OvenBird

This was written in 2003 for a major environmental organization.

The decline of neotropical migrant song birds in the U.S. was first noticed by birders in Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park, a small federally-protected enclave nestled along a stream bed in Washington, D.C., just 15 miles from Fairfax County.

Breeding Bird Surveys from 1947 through the 1970s, revealed that the yellow-billed cuckoo and yellow-throated vireo -- as well as the northern parula, black-and-white warbler, Kentucky warbler, and hooded warbler -- were disappearing. Six other migrant song birds -- Eastern wood-pewees, Acadian flycatchers, wood thrushes, red-eyed vireos, ovenbirds, and scarlet tanagers -- had declined by more than 50 percent.

What was going on?


Evidence from Overseas

Domestic forest destruction was ruled out, as Rock Creek Park had suffered no substantial encroachment in decades.

An analysis of radar images, done in the early 1980s, however, showed only half as many birds were flying to the U.S. from Mexico's Yucatan as had been migrating just 20 years earlier. Clearly, some part of what was happening to "our" birds was happening overseas. Experts theorized that much of the song bird decline, now being documented across the U.S., was due to forest destruction in Central and South America.

In fact, forest destruction in Central America was proceeding at a very rapid pace, driven in no small part by truly sobering rates of human population growth. In the Peten region of Guatemala, for example, 77% of the original forest cover still existed as recently as 1977. By 1980, however, that number had fallen to 42% and by 1989 just 29 percent of the original forest cover was gone. Scientists now believe as little as 10% of the forest may be left by 2025.


Evidence from the U.S.

By the late 1990s, however, scientists began to realize that forest destruction in Central and South America did not tell all of the story. Analysis of migrant song bird populations at the national level showed that birds loss was not evenly distributed across the U.S.

While most migrant song birds are experiencing clear negative trends east of the Mississippi River, and along the thin coastal strip of the West Coast, neotropical migrants seem to be doing fairly well on large tracts of forested land in the West.

An overlay of neotropical migrant song bird decline and a map of federally protected lands, showed a fascinating pattern: migrant song birds were not in general decline in our national parks, our national forests, or on lands managed by the U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management. Migrant song birds were in general decline in the east and in the Midwest, however, where changing agricultural practices and increasing levels of forest fragmentation seemed to be having a real impact.

Scientists looking for clues to song bird loss in Rock Creek Park began to look at the forested areas immediately surrounding the suburbs of Washington, DC, and what they found was pretty startling. Between 1980 and 1995, Fairfax County saw 69 percent of its forests converted to homes and businesses.

While scientists had been puzzling over bird loss in Rock Creek Park, just 15 miles away, Fairfax County's forests had been vanishing under asphalt at an astonishing rate.

Scientists now recognize that these once-vibrant suburban forests were probably the principal "home" of many of the birds that had once been seen in Rock Creek Park. Rock Creek had merely served as way-station between larger forest blocks that once ringed the Washington, DC area.

As new roads and light rail systems continue to be built in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, more and more forests are falling to farms and more and more farms are falling to freeways and subdivisions.

Once large blocks of unbroken forest are being shattered into increasingly smaller fragments, allowing such meso-predators as crows, jays, raccoons, possums, feral cats and fox to prey on once-secure migrant song bird nests. In addition, increasingly fragmented forests have enabled the brown-headed cow bird to colonize areas they once would have found unattractive.

Cowbirds nest at the edge of forests and feed in farms fields and pastures. Though native to North America, the brown-headed cowbird was once confined to the forest edges of Midwestern prairies where they fed in grasslands grazed by roaming bison. Today, however, because of widespread forest fragmentation, parasitic cowbirds can be found all across the United States.

The brown-headed cowbird is a parasitic nester, which is to say it builds no nests of its own, but instead lays its eggs in the nests of other birds -- most frequently in the open, cup-shaped nests of neotropical migrants. A single cowbird may lay as many as 80 eggs in a breeding season - one or two eggs per songbird nest. Because cowbird chicks hatch earlier, and are much larger than the offspring of migrant songbirds, they are able to out compete songbird chicks for food, and often simply push them out of the nest altogether.

In the end, a single cowbird may prevent 20 to 30 warblers, finches and vireos from raising their young. If the bird species has a short nesting period, it may not be able to hatch out a second brood that year, in which case that species may fall off rapidly in that area over a relatively short period of time.


Yellow-throated Vireo


More Trouble Ahead?

While a great deal of population-driven environmental damage has already occurred in the suburbs of Virginia, more population growth lies ahead. Fairfax County's population continues to grow rapidly, most of it driven by a combination of internal domestic migration (military and government families coming to support a burgeoning government and high-tech corridor) and international migration.

Fairfax County may be a demographic "canary in a coal mine" signaling where the rest of America may be headed in terms of land use patterns and population growth. With U.S. population growing by more than 3 million people a year, and suburban sprawl gobbling up more than 500,000 acres of forest and farmland every year, the pace of habitat fragmentation is likely to increase rapidly in the years ahead.

Under the Census Bureau's middle-series projection, which assumes that current U.S. immigration and fertility levels will stay about the same, the population of the U.S. will increase by 120 million people over the course of the next 50 years. About 63 percent of this future population growth will be due to immigrants and the children of immigrants that have not yet arrived in the U.S. -- the remaining 37 percent of population growth will be driven by demographic momentum as current U.S. residents move to complete their families.

One hundred and twenty million people is a very large population to add to the U.S. over the course of the next 50 years. To put this number into perspective, this is a population equal to the current populations of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana combined.

In addition to sprawl directly driven by population growth, the U.S. can expect to see increased forest fragmentation due to more and more folks moving farther and farther out into the countryside, abetted by high-speed internet hookups, satellite television, and light rail systems feeding into an ever-expanding network of four, six and eight lane highways.

As Canadian real estate agent Ozzie Jurock noted in an article for The Vancouver Sun (June 30, 2001),

"People throughout North America are on the move. Population growth in smaller towns is exploding. Californians move to Oregon and Arizona, New Yorkers joke at the rain but moved to Washington. The ski resorts and lakes are teeming with 'former' city slickers clutching cash and the hope for the elusive 'better quality of life."

Even as population growth continues apace in the U.S., the population of Central America continues to grow. Over the course of the next 50 years, Central America and Mexico combined are expected to add 90 million people to their populations -- a 65% percent increase in population.


Why the Fairfax Bird Loss Story is Important

Bird population data are such a robust metric of general environmental health that in the United Kingdom they are used as an official indicator of environmental sustainability.

A broad decline in many wild bird populations in the Western Hemisphere may be an indication that a broad decline in environmental quality is occurring across much of the region.

In the case of neotropical song birds, population-driven habitat decline along the entire migration flyway -- including the United States -- has had a serious impact on U.S. song bird numbers. The decline of songbird species in the U.S. is a powerful reminder that population pressures beyond our borders really do "come home to roost" and that reducing the rates of population growth at home, and abroad, is a real and serious "back yard" environmental issue.

Ironically, even as many bird populations are in decline, the number of Americans interested in birds is on the rise. The National Survey on Recreation and the Environment found that over 71 million Americans are recreational birders, up 250 percent from 1982, making birding the fastest-growing outdoor activity in the U.S.


Black and White Warbler
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Court Upholds Roadless Rules

The roadless forest protection act rule has been upheld by the courts, which is news to my ears as I spent several years working full time on that bit of legislation, which is the largest lands protection initiative of my generation. John Burgman at the Outdoor Life blog notes:

For the origin of the rule, one must go back to the Clinton administration. In 2001, a ban was declared on timber harvests, road construction and road development in millions of acres of national forest to protect fragile wilderness habitat and to keep the forests remote and pristine for recreational use. The state of Wyoming and other groups protested the ban, saying it violated the 1964 Wilderness Act and hindered the mining and development of coal and other natural resources.
The Federal court didn't buy Wyoming's protests.

“Wyoming failed to demonstrate that the Forest Service’s promulgation of the Roadless Rule violated the Wilderness Act, NEPA, MUSYA, or NFMA,” the panel of judges wrote in their decision.

The original Clinton iteration was protested by the Bush administration following Clinton's final presidential term. This paved the way for individual states like Wyoming and other groups to follow suit. The debate eventually found its way to the high courts.

Had the ruling been overturned, 50 million acres of wilderness across the country would have been opened to various logging and road development projects, undoubtedly impacting animal species of all types.

“Today’s decision is among the most significant conservation victories in several decades. It reinforces the roadless rule as the cornerstone of protection for our national forests and preserves these landscapes for generations to come,” said Jane Danowitz, director of the Pew Environment Group’s public lands program.

This is the second roadless win in court.

You can read about the earlier win, and the more than 2 million public comments we delivered to the U.S. Forest Service, here.
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Where the Buffalo Roam -- Again

A repost from this blog, circa December 2004.

Thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, Gifford Pinchot, the American environmental movement, the Lacey Act, the Weeks Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Pittman-Roberts Act, the Conservations Reserve Program, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and the Duck Stamp Act (to name just a few), America's wildlife is coming back.

All of this legislation has been supported by hunters who understood the value of the land and the wildlife on it. Environmentalists and hunter-anglers have worked hand-in-hand to bring back the wild turkey, to protect bear habitat, to preserve salmon spawning streams, and to shelter riparian areas.

For the terrier enthusiast, the result is plain to see in the hedgerow and forest: a record number of red fox, raccoon, possum and groundhogs spreading out into historically new territory.

Even species once pushed to the edge of extinction are now roaring back from the abyss -- alligators, bald eagles, beaver, Canada geese, wolves, and buffalo.

If the story of 19th Century America was about stripping the land and exterminating every species on it, the story of the 20th Century has been about bringing it all back.

Where the Buffalo Roam -- Again
San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 2001

________________

Brian Meirs first noticed it a few years ago. The game was coming back.

It was subtle in the beginning - a few more sharp-tailed grouse along the section roads than usual, more deer peering from the margins of the hayfields at night. Then people started noticing there were larger numbers of pronghorn antelope than had ever been seen, and they were hanging around closer to town.

"Even 10 years ago, you never heard of mountain lion or elk around here," said Meirs, a state game warden who works the vast plains and mesa country around Buffalo. "Now they're pretty common. There are even occasional wolf sightings. It's like the wildlife was back there in the shadows, waiting for a change."

The change has been building for decades. The western Great Plains contain the country's greatest demographic anomaly: Its human population is emptying out. The trend, the 2000 census shows, has really gained force over the past decade with the drying up of the ranching economy.

But as people move away, wildlife is starting to fill the vacuum. In an unexpected way, a vision of the Great Plains as a wild commons is taking hold.

"It's funny - Buffalo Commons is really happening," Meirs said, as he sat in his truck on the main drag of Buffalo, a thoroughfare framed by abandoned storefronts. "Not like people thought it would. But it's happening."

The concept of the Buffalo Commons was floated by New Jersey sociologists Frank and Deborah Popper in 1988. The Poppers observed that agriculture had failed miserably on the Great Plains, and noted that the region would probably be almost wholly depopulated save for a few cities by the mid-21st century.

The highest and best use for the area, the Poppers argued, was in its pristine state: A restored prairie cleared of fences and abandoned ranches, reseeded with native bunchgrasses, teeming with wildlife. And foremost among these resurgent animals would be the emblematic beast of the Plains: the buffalo. Back by the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands. Plains residents, both white and Native American, would earn their money through ecotourism and franchise hunting, not punching cows and growing dryland wheat.

Because the Poppers' proposal was predicated in part on federal buyouts of private property, it kicked off a howling storm of protest from the Great Plains agricultural community. Ranchers saw it as the most sinister possible example of a federal land grab. Resistance was so great that the idea died aborning.

But that didn't change the reality of Plains demographics - a reality best apprehended from the air.

Fly in a puddle jumper from Denver to Bismarck, N.D., and look down. There are great tracts of Badlands and rolling prairie, huge expanses of "pothole country" spangled with ponds and marshes, entire square miles of dryland wheat and irrigated alfalfa, serpentine brown rivers lined with cottonwoods, the occasional road. Very few ranches, and fewer towns. No cities. The West and East coasts, the intermountain West, the Southwest, the Gulf Coast and the Deep South - they're exploding with development. Even the industrial Northeast, long a laggard in population growth,
is gaining new people.

But not out here where the buffalo once roamed. Nearly three-quarters of Plains counties - 322 of 443 - have lost population since 1930. According to the 2000 census, 272 of 443 of the Plains counties have experienced population declines since 1990.

Demographers estimate that rural counties of the Dakotas could lose an additional third of their population in the next 20 years. From eastern New Mexico through the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, to large portions of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Montana, the story is the same.

The depopulation affecting the region is nothing more than the dying of a dream. Or a scheme, at least. At the turn of the century, the western Plains were considered the globe's most promising emerging breadbasket.

Cattle had thrived on the rich prairie bunchgrasses after the subjugation of the Plains Indians and the elimination of the buffalo.

Now, decided the pols in Washington, D.C., the rich black earth beneath the virgin sod would grow the nation's wheat.

The late 19th century and early 20th century were fairly wet on the prairie, reinforcing a popular idea of the time that "rain followed the plow." But years of drought followed, and homesteaders began washing out. The ruins of their farms are all over the Plains, ranging from abandoned dugout hovels to derelict three-story houses that are home to nothing but bats and owls.

"Agriculture around here is changing so fast you won't even recognize it in 10 years," said game warden Meirs as he sat in his truck listening to the wind whistle down Buffalo's main street. "The cattle and sheep are going by the wayside."

Buffalo Commons, it seems, is destined to occur - no matter what it's called, no matter who loves or hates it. But the forging of the Commons isn't a completely passive process.

True, the great federal investment envisioned by the Poppers didn't happen, nor is that likely. Given general public sentiment against extravagant government spending programs, it's inconceivable that Congress would loosen up the purse strings to fund the purchase of tens of millions of acres of bankrupt rangeland.

Instead, Buffalo Commons is becoming a private enterprise. And leading the movement is media mogul Ted Turner, who appears to have made the North American bison his private totem. Turner owns about 1.7 million acres divided among several ranches scattered across the Plains, and that figure is growing.

"I heard tell that Ted Turner wants to be able to ride all the way from Canada to Mexico on his own land," drawled one Nebraska rancher. "And the way he's going, it isn't going to be too long before he can do that." Turner looks for a certain kind of property: One that's in grass rather than croplands, with natural contours intact. He wants good biodiversity - country that supports substantial populations of wildlife of numerous species. And when he buys properties, he more or less follows the same formula: Tear out all the cross fencing and replant pastures with bunchgrasses and other native vegetation. Bring in the buffalo.

Turner believes that ranching can be profitable on the Plains - but not necessarily by raising cattle. He's promoting the sale of buffalo breeding stock and meat, luxury big game and bird hunts and ecotourism tours as the economic saviors of the region.

Unlike many celebrity landowners, Turner isn't gate-happy, and doesn't seem to mind rubberneckers as long as they don't stop to shoot his buffalo. And there are plenty of buffalo to see. Under a sky crowded with lowering gray cumulus, a couple of hundred of the shaggy beasts grazed near a roadside. About a mile away, on the same vast tract of rolling prairie, a similar number fed.

A Lakota hunter could have witnessed precisely this scene in this same place 150 years ago.

And buffalo aren't the only animals thriving on Turner's property. Big coveys of sharp-tailed grouse fly unhurriedly out of the way at the approach of a truck. White-tailed deer bolt from every coulee. Stop to watch scores of blue-winged teal bank and swoop around a pothole, and you catch the eerie, wild yapping of two coyotes singing in antiphony in the distance. Although he is operating on the most ambitious scale, Turner is by no means the only New Age buffalo rancher on the Plains. Many of Turner's compeers don't necessarily share his wildlife habitat goals. But the wildlife is nevertheless reaping the benefits of their bison husbandry.

Kirk Budd, the proprietor of Freshwater Ranch in Nebraska's Sand Hills, has lived the quintessential hardscrabble Plains life. He raised cattle until "they just about starved me out." He was a bush pilot in Canada for years, and was a crop duster until a pesticide accident almost killed him. Things, in short, were looking pretty grim for Budd. He was in danger of busting out, losing his ranch.

Then a few years ago, he bought some buffalo.

"They were cheap then," recalled Budd, crawling out from under an airplane he was repairing at his ranch. "About $400 for a cow. So I figured what the heck." Budd gradually expanded his herd, keeping the heifer calves, selling the bulls. He now owns several hundred buffalo on three ranches totaling 11,000 acres. Many are verging on coal black, and all are huge - much darker and far larger than Turner's brown-and-russet buffalo. His bred heifers sell for about $4,000.

Although Budd doesn't believe bison will utterly supplant cattle on the Plains, he feels buffalo ranching will continue to grow. "The National Buffalo Association says the country's herds are growing at 12 percent a year, but I know it's more than that. I know a lot of people in this business, and everyone is keeping all their heifers. I figure the real figure is more like 40 percent a year."

And compared with cattle, buffalo have been good to his land, Budd notes. Cattle like to wallow in water, tearing up creeks and ponds and trampling vegetation. But buffalo associate water with predators. They all go down at once to drink, then get out right away to higher ground. The creeks stay vegetated, and the water stays clean.

Indeed, the Freshwater Ranch looks markedly different from neighboring properties where cattle are grazed. The forage is in better condition, and the streams and ponds are far more vegetated. A creek that runs by the ranch house looks like prime trout water, and Budd confirms it is full of
large brown trout.

And the ranch burgeons with wildlife. "A lot of critters like being with buffalo," Budd said. "They evolved with them. Deer, elk, antelope, wild turkeys. We even have bighorn sheep on one of our ranches. You can ranch buffalo, maybe even tame some you raise from a bottle. But they're basically wildlife. And you can see that reflected in the condition of the range on any ranch where they're raised."

As bullish as he is on buffalo, Budd doesn't think much of Buffalo Commons. "That will never, never fly out here," he said. "As soon as you start talking big government involvement, people resist. Also, a lot of this land is still irrigated, particularly to the east of the Sand Hills. It's growing soybeans, wheat, corn and alfalfa. "As a general policy, I don't think you should take all that food land out of production for a wildlife park. That's just not good for the nation."

While Plains farmers resist government intervention, they do understand - and appreciate - government subsidies. Federal payouts have been part of America's ranching and farming culture for decades, and although they have diminished in recent years, they're still relied on to make ends meet. Since the mid-1980s, many of those subsidies have been paid to cattle ranchers to conserve wildlife habitat on their lands. In the Dakotas, almost 500,000 acres of upland and wetland habitat have been preserved under these conservation reserve programs, benefiting a variety of species, but particularly migratory waterfowl.

The coteau region - a vast, hilly stretch of glacially carved potholes and ponds in the Dakotas, eastern Montana, Saskatchewan and Alberta - is a duck factory, explained Scott McCleod, a biologist with the northern Plains regional office of Ducks Unlimited in Bismarck. Ducks Unlimited is a conservation organization composed of primarily hunters that preserve wetlands and grasslands prairie. So far, it has saved 8 million acres of habitat essential to waterfowl in the United States and Canada.

"Sixty to 70 percent of the continent's major duck species breed in the prairie pothole region," McCleod said. "During the winter and spring migrations, the potholes serve as critical resting and staging areas for the birds."

The historic temptation for farmers, McLeod said, has been to drain the potholes to increase tillable acreage and plow the grass for relatively profitable crops like wheat, corn and sunflowers. "That's why we like to work with cattle ranchers rather than farmers," said McCleod. "Ranchers are
interested in the same thing we are - preserving the grasslands."

The restoration under way is not necessarily a process that will proceed smoothly and steadily. Federal funds for conservation reserve programs could dry up; a prolonged recession could make the buying of megaranches by conservation-minded billionaires like Turner a thing of the past. But nothing, it seems, will change the bedrock reality of the western Plains: They are not well-suited for agriculture or year-round human habitation.

Native Americans knew how to live on them - by passing through, by following the buffalo that peregrinated from horizon to horizon. The record of permanent settlement on the Plains, on the other hand, has been dismal. One way or another, the Plains will devolve to their earlier condition: To a sea of grass, where people are the transient visitors, wildlife the enduring residents.

Bison are generally considered the emblematic animal of the Great Plains, and reintroduction efforts for the shaggy beasts are almost universally popular. But there's another keystone Plains species essential to grasslands restoration - and it's not nearly as esteemed as the buffalo. Prairie dogs were once the most common mammal in North America. In the late 19th century, about five billion prairie dogs of five species inhabited the Plains from Canada to Mexico. The vast majority were black-tailed prairie dogs, a stocky, buff-colored rodent that weighs between two to three pounds. Their vast towns comprised complete ecologies in their own right: One in Texas measured 100 miles wide, 250 miles long and contained an estimated 400 million dogs.

Prairie dogs shaped the Plains as much as the buffalo, and a considerable array of wild species depended on the rodents for shelter and food. The prairie dogs' various diggings provide
shelter for a great many animals: badgers, foxes, burrowing owls and a tremendous variety of reptiles, amphibians and insects.

The huge quantity of feces and urine produced by the dog towns was a gigantic fertilizing mechanism for the Plains. Today, prairie dogs only inhabit about 1 percent of their former range; the black-tailed prairie dog is a candidate for protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Their decline began shortly after cattlemen moved to the Plains. Seen as competitors with cattle for forage, the dogs were poisoned and shot out.

A coalition of environmentalists is agitating for a return of the dog. "Prairie dogs are decreasing in numbers across their range," said Jonathan Proctor, a program associate with the Predator Coalition Alliance in Bozeman, Mont. Proctor's group was able to secure a temporary ban on poisoning on federal lands through a petition to list black-tailed prairie dogs under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

But the dogs are still shot in large numbers, often for sport. Such activities are widely condoned by ranchers. "There's no shortage of prairie dogs," said South Dakota rancher Pat Clark, who said the animals compete with cattle for grass and endanger livestock with their burrows. "They're all over the place." But scattered families of prairie dogs are no indication of the general health of the five species, Proctor said. Despite the pressures facing prairie dogs, Proctor said he is guardedly optimistic about their future. Colorado recently banned sport hunting for black-tailed prairie dogs, and South Dakota and Montana are considering similar restrictions, said Proctor.

"Basically, they'll come back if we stop actively killing them," he said.

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People in Yosemite: A Time-lapse Perspective

People in Yosemite: A TimeLapse Study from Steven M. Bumgardner on Vimeo.

This is a time-lapse clip of people visiting Yosemite National Park.

More than 3.5 million people visit Yosemite each year, but most of them only spend time in seven square miles of the Valley, while ignoring the other 1,100 square miles of the Park. There is something wrong when you have to reserve your camping spot with Ticketron.
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American Jack Rabbit History

A repost from this blog circa February 2006.

A Jack Rabbit is not a rabbit -- it is a hare. The name comes from the fact that early settlers distinguished this animal from the various forms of cotton tail rabbits by comparing the ears of this hare to that of a jack ass. A "jack ass rabbit" became, in time, a "jack rabbit".

American jack rabbits come in two basic flavors -- white-tailed jack rabbits and black-tailed jack rabbits. There is also the snowshoe hare, but it is uncommon in the U.S. which is the southern terminus of its range.

Jack rabbits are so common in much of the drier parts of the American west that in most states the law says you can kill as many as you want, any way you want, on your own property.

Long gunners kill about 2 million jack rabbits in California every year, and the numbers are not in decline as a consequence. Kills by coursing dogs, such as greyhounds, are so rare they do not even register in the statistics.

Truth be told, it is hard to make a dent on jack rabbit populations because they are as prolific as .... well rabbits. Female jack rabbits breed for about half the year (January to July) and have 3 or 4 litters a year with three or four young on average. Gestation is 41 to 47 days, and the young are born alive and running, straight out of the box -- there is no den or nest.

The white-tailed jack rabbit is about 8 pounds and a bit larger than its black-tailed cousin. Fox eat almost no jack rabbits (too big and fast for a fox to catch), but coyotes take quite a few. The main enemy of the jack rabbit is tularemia -- an ugly little disease, and not a very nice way to die.

Jack rabbit hunts are an old tradition in the American West. Hunting them with dogs, however, is certainly less efficient and more sporting than the way it once was done!

The old-fashioned American jack rabbit hunts that occurred in the West were done with snow fencing that would stretch out for a mile or two in a large funnel. Rabbits would then be driven into the funnel and the rabbits would then be penned at the end of the funnel and clubbed to death.



The picture above is of an 1893 Fresno, California bunny roundup with snow fence used as a "boma" to corral the rabbits.


Some jack rabbits were eaten, but the real reason for the jack rabbit roundup was that 15 jack rabbits could supposedly eat about as much as a cow, and while there was a market for cattle hide and salted beef, there was no market for jack rabbit.

Jack rabbit roundups in the American west were not hunting -- they were a failed attempt at extermination.


1894 jack rabbit haul from Lamar, Colorado.


The first greyhound coursing clubs in the U.S. were a product of the massive rabbit drives pictured above. The healthiest rabbits taken in a jack rabbit drive were sold to coursing clubs (some are far away as Florida!). Today, the live rabbits that were once used in open fields, have been replaced with race tracks in which a mechanical bunny runs down an elevated track. In less formal "lure coursing" trials, a plastic bag is tied to a moving string run across a motor fly wheel and pulleys.


20,000 rabbits taken in one Fresno, Califonira Jack Rabbit roundup, 1893


Around the turn of the 20th Century, the federal government put most of the American West in control of the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, various Indian reservations, and the military. Federal protection of these environmentally marginal lands has meant that jack rabbits have been allowed to breed unfettered by cattlemen for about 100 years now. The cow at McDonald's is probably a feed-lot animal, not a free-range western cow competing head-to-head with jack rabbits. In short, the jack rabbit has never had it so good.

A few greyhounds are still used to course jack rabbits in the West, but they are not much of a threat to jack rabbit populations. The reason for that is pretty simple: A jack rabbit can hit speeds of 40-45 mph and turn on a dime. The few rabbits that are caught are easily replaced through natural reproduction.

In fact, getting chopped by a greyhound may be the best of all possible exits for a jack rabbit. The alternative death is not a hospital bed with a morphine drip and soft music in the background, but debilitating disease, vehicle impact, starvation, or being ripped apart by a coyote, owl, and/or the blast of a shotgun or a .22 rifle. In the litany of ways a rabbit can die, a chop by a practiced greyhound is a good way to go.
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Population Growth & the Limits of Accommodation

I have, at various times in my life, been a ghost -- the hand inside the sock puppet, the idea and knowledge and voice behind the person with good hair who reads the lines in a speech and gets promoted up the chain of command for giving it.

There are no complaints here, so long as the check clears.

That said, sometimes, long after a speech has been given and no one can quite remember who gave it, I like to dust off a piece and trot it out for the ideas that are in it.

The speech, below, was given to Western land managers in Wisconsin some 5 or 6 years back by someone I will not mention, and it details the complex relationship between U.S. population growth, regulation, and the environment.

I post it here simply to illuminate the rather complex relationships that exists between population growth, economic growth, regulation, and agricultural policy.

The Limits of Accommodation
It's great to be here in Wisconsin, the home state of Aldo Leopold.

It is a true honor to be a stand-in for Senator Gaylord Nelson, the Father of Earth Day.

Senator Nelson was originally asked to speak about the environmental consequences of U.S. population growth for the American west.

I am going to speak on the same topic - a topic too often given short shrift in the environmental movement, but one that remains a core environmental issue.

My comments about population and the environment follow a pretty simple structure -- I am going to talk about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.

I am not going to give you answers - I am going to give you scenarios and choices and ask you to think about those choices.

Good people can -- and will -- choose different futures for America and for the west.

That is perfectly fine. I am not interested in the choice so much as the process. I want the process to be thought through. I want the issues to be hashed out and mulled over.

And above all, I want the answers to come from the American people - not politicians in Washington or stock traders on Wall Street.

As Wood Guthrie said so well, "this land is your land."

First, let me talk about where we have been.

Well, we've been on Earth.

I make this point not to be flip, but to say that the story of U.S. population growth closely parallels that of world population growth --- at least through the first half of the 20th Century.

Between 1930 and today, world population tripled from 2 billion to 6 billion people.

This is a phenomenal rate of population growth, and it has shaped every thing on this planet, from coastlines to mountaintops, from the jungles of the Amazon to the pack ice of the Arctic.

During the same period of time, the population of the U.S. also grew by leaps and bounds, soaring from 122 million people in 1930 to over 285 million today -- not quite a tripling, but far more than a mere doubling.

Between 1935 and 1965, the U.S. and the world shared a similar population and environment story.

As human populations burgeoned, massive amounts of toxins - from raw sewage to pesticides - were washed into fresh water streams and rivers.

Overgrazing of marginal lands resulted in rapid erosion and desertification on all continents.

Over-fishing, pollution, and coastal development resulted in the systematic depletion of fish stocks and the destruction of reef systems.

New roads were ripped into once pristine areas - from jungles to mountaintops.

As more and more humans spread into new areas of the world, once-natural eco-systems were transformed into human-focused profit centers.

This is the population-environment history of the world, and for a long time it was the history of the United States as well.

Beginning about 1965, however, something interesting began to happen -- the environmental history of the U.S. began to diverge from that of much of the rest of the world.

While population growth continued apace, both in the U.S. and the world, the environmental consequences of population growth seemed to slow here in the U.S.

In the last 30 years our water has actually gotten cleaner

Our air has gotten better.

Much of our most depleted wildlife stock actually recovered.

We have more forest in the U.S. today than we did in 1930.

How is this possible?

The short answer is law, government and urbanization -- the stuff too many pure population pundits never talk about.

In 1911, Congress passed the Weeks Act which resulted in the federal government buying back millions of acres of denuded mountain tops that had been ripped and robbed by timber and coal mining interests. This land is the backbone of the National Forest system we have in the Eastern U.S. today.

At the same time, large-scale farm mechanization and the railroads made marginal farmlands in the eastern U.S. less profitable. Millions of cleared acres were allowed to return to forest.

Even as forests began to regrow back East, a new environmental awareness began to take hold in the U.S.

Led by people like Senator Gaylord Nelson, the nascent environmental ethic that had begun with Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold, began to take off. By Earth Day 1970, environmentalism had become a mainstream political force - a widely shared common value uniting us across race, religion, political party, class, and geography.

This was a marvelous thing, and marvelous things came out of it. Thanks to the growth of the American environmental movement, new laws were implemented, including the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

The result was that our air and our water actually got cleaner.

The same divergence that was occurring in terms of forests and clean water and clean air also began to happen with wildlife.

Commercial hunting of wildlife was banned at the turn of the century and, with the passage of the Lacey Act, wildlife hammered to the edge of existence began to slowly recover.

This recovery process was greatly accelerated with the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, and with the rise of a professionally-trained corps of science-based land, water and wildlife managers.

The result of new law and good government was extraordinary: things began to turn around.

And what is more remarkable - or perhaps most remarkable - is that things began to turn around even though the population of the U.S. grew by leaps and bounds.

Consider this: Between 1970 and 2000 we added 100 million people to the population of the United States.

This is a LOT of people. One hundred million people is a population greater than ALL of the current populations of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Wisconsin COMBINED.

It is an extraordinary testament to America's environmental ethic and good government that between 1970 and 2000 we added 100 million people to the population of the U.S. and the water got cleaner ... and the air got cleaner.

Today we have more forests in the U.S. than we did in 1900 or 1930 or even 1970.

Today we have more protected land in the U.S. than we did in 1900, or 1930, or even in 1980.

Whale watching is a growth industry.

Today it is hard to imagine that populations of Canadian geese, whitetail deer, and beaver were once in critical danger. Today the issue for these creatures is control, not protection.

Wild turkey have rebounded too. Today there are more wild turkey in the U.S. than there were when Columbus landed.

The American Bison - almost extinct 100 years ago - is now so abundant the federal government will spend $10 million this year to manage down their numbers.

Elk populations have rebounded nicely too. A small elk herd was recently reintroduced into Kentucky -- where they were last seen in 1850.

Elk are not the only thing showing up in old haunts. Red wolves are back in North Carolina. And in Minnesota there are now over 2,500 gray wolves -- twice the target number the Fish and Wildlife Service hoped to achieve for that state when wolves were first protected back in the 1970s.

The alligator story today is not that they are endangered, but that they are eating the poodles of the retirees in South Florida.

The Bald Eagle may soon be off the endangered species list. The Peregrine Falcon already is.

Blue bird houses have helped restore the eastern blue bird. Wood duck nest boxes have brought back the wood duck.

All of this is great news. And it is great news that occurred despite the fact that we added 100 million people to the population of the U.S. in the last 30 years.

* * * * *

Please don't misunderstand me. I am NOT saying everything is fine with the environment.

We still have very serious environmental problems in the U.S. These include:

• Phenomenal - even alarming -- wetlands loss across the U.S.
  
  
• A coastal fisheries stock decimated by overfishing.
  
  
• Massive crown fires in our forests out West due to 40 years of Smokey-the-bear fire suppression that wreaked havoc on the natural fire cycles.
  
  
• Migrant bird species in decline over vast portions of the U.S.
  
  
• Many wildlife species are still teetering on the edge - the condor, the ocelot, the lynx, and the grizzly bear - to name just a few.

Having said that, the BIG environmental story of the last 30 years is that we have made a HUGE amount of progress right here at home thanks to the rise of environmental regulation and consciousness-raising over the last 30 or 40 years.

I am very proud to say Audubon was part of that effort - an effort you folks were instrumental in making happen as well.

I am amazed it was possible despite the addition of 100 million more people in the United States.

Population growth did not HELP the situation, but the fact that progress was made DESPITE rapid population growth is a remarkable story.

* * * * *

So that is where we have been.

Now let me tell you where we are.

Right now, in terms of population size, the U.S. is the third largest country in the world -- behind only China and India.

The U.S. has the fastest population growth rate of any industrialized country in the world. No country in Europe has a population growth rate as fast as the U.S., and neither does Japan or Canada or East Asia.

Right now, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about half of all U.S. population growth is due to immigration from overseas, and about half is due to native-born Baby Boomers moving to complete their own families.

Taken as a whole, the population growth rate of the U.S. is 1.1 percent. This may not sound like much - but it means our current population is on a trajectory to double in about 60 years.

To put it another way, our population growth rate right now is faster than that of China or Argentina, and it is about 10 times faster than the population growth rate of Western Europe.

Right now, we are adding about 3 million people a year to the population of the U.S. To put it another way, in terms of population growth, we are adding the population of Iowa every year.

Of course, U.S. population growth is not uniformly distributed.

Out West - where water is scarce and our last pristine wild lands can be found -- we find population growth rates that are truly sobering.

Nevada's population growth rate is now more than 4.3 percent a year - a population growth far faster than that found anywhere in the less-developed world . . . Faster than that of any country in Africa . . . Faster than that of any country in Asia . . . . Faster than that of any country in Latin America.

And Nevada is desert country.

So too is Arizona, which has an annual population growth rate of 2.8 percent -- the same as Pakistan's . . . the same as Tanzania's . . . the same as Honduras.

Colorado's population growth rate is 2.3 percent per year - a rate of population growth equal to that of Ghana and El Salvador . . . and faster than that of the Philippines.

Texas has an annual population growth of 1.89 percent per year - about equal to that of Mexico, and faster than that of Lebanon or Indonesia.

Of course, the U.S. is not a Third World country - we can pipe water in from vast distances, we can invest in low-flow shower heads and toilets, we can put in drip irrigation systems.

And - if push comes to shove - we can ban golf courses, swimming pools, and grassy front lawns.

In many communities and in many states these measures are already beginning to be put into place as communities find that local population growth has overshot the ability of the region to supply people, business and agriculture with all of their competing water needs.

Water is only part of the problem, of course.

As we were recently reminded with the energy crisis in California and the controversy over drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge -- and in every twist and turn of Middle East politics -- the U.S. is an oil-importing nation.

The good news is that conservation has done great things in the U.S. in the last 30 years. Our refrigerators, air conditioners and home heating systems are far more efficient that they were just 30 years ago. Our cars get twice as many miles per gallon as they used to.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that U.S. population growth has entirely negated these oil-conservation measures.

Remember those 100 million people that we added to the population of the U.S. between 1970 and 2000?

Those 100 million people are equal to ALL of the population of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho ... ALL the states west of the Mississippi River COMBINED.

Now think about this: ALL of the cars driven in those states - and all of the homes heated and cooled in those states - represent the oil draw down of just 30 years of U.S. population growth.

Everything the current population of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River consumes, pollutes and builds -- now and into the future and forever - is equal to just the last 30 years of U.S. population growth.

The resource consumption and environmental damage caused by the population growth of the last 30 years is not a one-lifetime phenomenon. It will last for the lifetime of the kids and the grandkids of these 100 million new people. The human impact will NEVER stop. And the impact is huge - it is all of the land, water and resource use of the entire population of the U.S. now living west of the Mississippi River.

* * * * *

So that is where we are.

Now, let me talk about where we are going.

The first point I want to make is that we are going to have more population growth.

The question ahead - at least for the next 50 years or so - is not whether we are going to have population growth, but how much of it there is going to be.

The U.S. Census Bureau puts out three scenarios for the year 2050. The high and the low are outer-boundary possibilities, and the middle scenario is the "least likely to be wildly off the mark."

The Census Bureau's LOW scenario is that over the next 50 years the U.S. will add 35 million people -- or a population equal to that of all of California today. To do that, will require an 80 percent cut in net immigration to the U.S. and a pretty steep drop in the U.S. birth rates.

The Census Bureau's MIDDLE scenario for 2050 is that we will add 125 million people to the population of the U.S. in the next 50 years - a population greater than the entire population of the U.S. west of Mississippi River today. For this to occur, we would have to hold immigration at current rates, and keep birth rates from rising any further.

The Census Bureau's HIGH scenario for 2050 is that the population of the U.S. will nearly double. For this to occur, immigration would have to be allowed to double and then triple (what it has done in the last 50 years) and U.S. fertility rates would have to rise to the levels they were in 1967.

Obviously, adding 270 million new Americans to our population would have global resource implications, not just national, as we are the third largest nation in the world in terms of population and far-and-away the heaviest users of natural resources.

The Census Bureau's middle-series projection is probably closest to what we can expect.

It's basically a status-quo projection, and it would result in the addition of 125 million more people to the population of the U.S. over the next 50 years.

Let me remind you how many people 125 million people is. That's a population equal to ALL of the current population of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Wisconsin COMBINED ... plus the populations of Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi thrown in for good measure.

* * * * *

OK, those are the numbers.

Now, here's a question: Can the U.S. handle the addition of this many people?

Of course it can!

The U.S. can handle 40 million more people.

It can handle 125 million more people.

It can handle 270 million more people.

The question is not whether the United States can handle this population growth -- but at what price.
What are the limits of accommodation?

You see, if we chose a population of 125 million or 200 million more people, other choices flow naturally from that choice.

As John Muir once observed, "if you pull on any one thing in nature, you will find it is connected to everything else." That is certainly true for population.

With the addition of 125 million more people, we may have to turn increasingly large sections of wild forest into tree farms devoid of most wildlife in order to meet our rapidly growing paper, pulp and wood needs.

With the addition of 125 million more people we may have to discourage sprawl by removing or limiting home-ownership tax incentives for those living outside of major urban beltways.

With the addition of 125 million more people - many of them in the arid West - we may have to ban swimming pools and golf courses and lawns . . . and mandate low-flow everything.

With the addition of 270 million more people, we may not be able to export food to the developing world.

I am not trying to be apocalyptic. I am trying to be honest.

If you chose one thing - continued rates of relatively rapid population growth - you may also be choosing something else as well.

* * * * *

Now, let me be a Devils' Advocate.

I started this talk by noting that we managed to accommodate the LAST 125 million people that we added to the U.S. population. While we lost our wetlands, mismanaged much of our western forests, and hammered our coastal fishing stocks, we also had some huge victories at the level of forest regrowth, clean water, clean air, wildlife reintroduction and wilderness protection.

Why can't we do that again?

Why can't we add ANOTHER 125 million people to the population of the U.S. and STILL have everything work out fine?

Perhaps we can.

In truth, no one knows.

In 20 years we may be flying around in solar-catalyst-enabled hydrogen-fueled cars.

In 20 years we may be growing twice as much food in half as much space.

In 20 years we may find a boundless clean-energy source that enables us to desalinate the ocean and pump it to Arizona for a fraction of a penny a gallon, enabling us to put golf courses and swimming pools in the desert without any perceivable harm to aquifers, streams or rivers.

I doubt that this will happen, but it COULD happen. Who knows?

Even if all that happens, however, I think we have questions to face because some things are NOT going to happen again.

We are not going to be able to make progress by enacting obvious legislative remedies like we did in the 1970s. All of the "easy picking" stuff has been picked. We've already taken most of the slack out of the rope.

Nor are we going to be able to create more political muscle to pull that rope. We are not going to create a new environmental movement in the U.S. We already have a pretty big environmental movement in the U.S. right now -- so big, that the Atlantic magazine notes that "everyone is an environmentalist now."

Let me tell you something else that is not going to happen: We're not going to get more wild western land.

Has anyone been to Yosemite or Zion National Park, or the Grand Canyon recently? God isn't making any more places like those. In Yosemite and Zion and the Grand Canyon we already have to park our cars and ride buses to see the natural wonders.

In National Parks and National Forests across the country we ALREADY have to reserve camping spots parks on line -- as if we were going to a rock concert.

What will it be like with 125 million more people?

How about birds? The birds in the Rocky Mountain west are in pretty good shape because there are still so many large blocks of unbroken forest. If we add 125 million more people to the U.S., however, we can expect to see increasing forest fragmentation due to roads, fires, and private developments. The relationship between forest fragmentation and bird loss is clear. If you fragment the forests you WILL have dramatic declines in many of the songbird species so many of us know and love. Is that OK? And what if some bird species - like the sage grouse - go extinct all together. Is that OK?

And how about fire? This is a hot topic right now - no pun intended. We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars right now to put out fires we might once have let burn. But we can't let them burn now, because there are million dollar homes up there on those timbered ridgelines. We have to suppress the fire to save the real estate. And the more real estate development there is, the more fire suppression we will have to do, and the bigger the fuels accumulation in the woods. Is that an expensive and unnatural cycle that we can live with? (Note: we can log, but the Federal Government LOSES a huge amount of money on logging every year. The more logging, the more money lost).

Anyone here hunt or fish?

Across vast sections of the American West the Mule Deer population is in rapid decline due to increased roading of once wild lands. At the same time our best trout and salmon streams are not only getting fished harder by more anglers, they are suffering from increased siltation due to more roads.

Anyone here believe that adding 125 million more people to the population of the U.S. will help either situation?

In fact, does anyone here believe that adding 100 or 200 million more people to the population of the U.S. will help improve ANY environmental issue we face today?

It's a Socratic question - a rhetorical question.

* * * * *

Now, you may have noticed I have not told you WHAT to think.

I have NOT told you that America will keel over with 100 million more people -- or even 200 million more people.

In fact, I think the PEOPLE will do fine.

I'm not so sure about the wildlife, however.

I'm not so sure about our last great wild places.

I have given you the Census Bureau's possible population scenarios - I have not made them up, I have only spelled them out.

I have NOT told you which one to pick ... only to think about the choices that each scenario may force us into -- as land managers, as environmentalists, as citizens, and as mother and fathers interested in passing on the essence of the American West to our children and grandchildren to come.

I have asked you, in short, to choose your future.

I do not live in the Western part of the U.S., and I am not going to tell you what choices to make. Different people have different values and may have different answers.

I would like to close with the words of Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer, one of the founders of the "EnLibris" platform that seeks to have the western states decide their own future for themselves.

Governor Geringer's writes in his guidebook on conserving Wyoming's open
lands:

"Today, the primary human impact on Western land has shifted from resource development to urban development and subdivisions that can reduce and fragment agricultural land and open spaces.

"Fragmented lands may cause progressive irreversible deterioration to the wildlife, natural resources, economic diversity and culture that define the West.

"Without the scenic views, agricultural land and wildlife habitat that open spaces provide, quality of life in Wyoming will decline.

"Rapid growth has created housing booms in the Rocky Mountain states,diminishing our neighbors' most fertile agricultural land, wildlife habitat and open lands. Strip malls destroy grain fields; housing subdivisions replace meadows. It's like paving the pastures of paradise ..."

* * * *

"It's like paving the pastures of paradise. "

I leave it to each and every one of you to decide if that is a good thing, or not.

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