Who Is the Man? Who is the Dog?

Who is this Man? Who is this dog?

And what does any of it have to do with hunting and fishing?

Answer: That's Teddy Roosevelt, one of three honorary terriermen on Mount Rushmore (Who are the other two?)

The dog is Skip, a mutt terrier cross (or feist) owned by legendary bear hunter John Goff. Goff gave Teddy the dog after Skip charged a bear, much to Teddy's delight.

As I note in a previous post entitled Rat Terrier Origins:

In 1905 Goff was hired as a bear hunting guide by President Theodore Roosevelt. During the trip Roosevelt was enchanted by the boisterous bravery of a small black and tan terrier that joined the bear-hunting fray. The dog was named "Skip," and for the remainder of the trip he managed to find himself in Roosevelt's lap or on his saddle.

Goff gave the terrier to Roosevelt at the end of his stay, and Roosevelt brought the dog back to the White House where it found work chasing rats in the basement and served as progenitor of the breed we know today as the American Rat Terrier.

Skip died the year before Roosevelt left the White House and was buried on the back lawn. The dog was so loved, however, that when Roosevelt left he had the dog exhumed and the body reinterred at Sagamore Hill, the family's New York estate.

I give a more detailed accounting of Skip and another terrier called Jack, noting the differences between the two and showing pictures of them each at the White House, in a longer post on Teddie Roosevelt's Terriers. Links are also given in this post to contemporaneous Roosevelt correspondence which showed that Skip was Archie's dog just as Jack Was Kermit's.

The importance of Teddy Roosevelt in the history of American hunting and fishing is not due to his legendary prowess in the field, or the fact that that this man left the Presidency to go on a year-long hunting trip in Africa. No, the importance of Roosevelt is in the fact that he helped establish America's land ethic (one later strengthened by Aldo Leopold) and did it by simply drawing boundaries on a map in order to create 150 new national forest areas in 21 states, four national game preserves, 51 federal bird sanctuaries, and 18 national monuments. No other President, before or since, has done as much to protect the heart and soul of America as Teddy Roosevelt did. For the back story here, read the post entitled Shooting Out the Land.

So who are the other honorary terriermen on Mount Rushmore? Read about one of them here >> Feists: From Washington to Lincoln to Faulkner. Yes, here at Terrierman, we give a hat tip to Old Abe if for no other reason than he wrote a long poem about bear hunting with terriers.

The other honorary terrierman on Mount Rushmore, of course, is George Washington, who helped win a war and forge a nation by a small kindness to a dog and its owner. I write a bit about that in the post entitled America's Founding Terrier.

Bottom Line: All that is great and good about this nation is connected to hunting with terriers. Let us never forget that!
.

From Pearl Harbor to a Robot Economy

Pearl Harbor, USS Virginia

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, but if you ask a dozen people why Japan bombed Pearl Harbor back in 1941, not one will give you a complete answer.

Here's the short story: Too many people.

The entire War in the Pacific was initiated by overpopulation.

There is no "beginning" to this story, but suffice it to say that Japan was a very isolated country up until the late 19th Century. With the arrival of western influence, Japan began to change and demand for "western" goods such as steel and oil, skyrocketed.

So too did population.

In 1870, Japan's population was estimated to be 33 million. By 1900 it was about 45 million, and by 1930 it was over 64 million. An island nation, Japan's economy and social systems were beginning to show real stress by the second decade of the 20th Century. A key issue was lack of farm land.

Large rural families needed more land to support new families, but new land was simply not available. At the same time, rising urbanization created a new and rapidly growing demand for oil, coal, iron and steel -- commodities Japan had very little of.

Looking across a short stretch of ocean, the Japanese saw a vast amount of farm land and raw resources in northern China. In 1931 Japan invaded that region -- Manchuria -- in order to satisfy their "shortage" of resources which, in reality, was a "longage" of human population.

Japan's invasion of Manchuria led to a U.S. threat of an oil blockade of the island nation. This threat of an oil blockade led to the Japanese "first strike" at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

World War II is a long story, but the short version is that we won.  Japan had to give up its land grabs in Manchuria, Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere.

After the defeat of Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur encouraged the development of new laws in Japan, including laws to allow women to vote and to hold elective office. In addition, he encouraged the amendment of Japan's pre-World War II pro-natalist law so that it now legalized abortion (which remained illegal in the U.S. until 1973).

Why did MacArthur and the Occupation Forces turn Japan's old "pro-natalist" law into a "pro-choice" law?

Basically, because they understood the causal origins of World War II in the Pacific.

Japan's overpopulation (or over-shoot of its resource base) was seen as a core issue of geo-political consequence. Slowing Japan's rapid population growth rate was, therefore, at the top of both the national and the global agenda. As one Japanese web site (written in semi-fractured English) notes: "How to popularize family planning became the No.1 policy in health care of postwar Japan ..."

With the end of WWII Japan switched from being a pro-natalist country to being a country that was interested in slowing population growth.

After the death and carnage of World War II, no one in Japan needed too much encouragement to consider voluntary family planning as an alternative worthy of consideration and support.

How did fertility fall so quickly in Japan? The mechanics were simple and effective, if not particularly modern or enlightened: Condoms and abortion. To this day, these are the primary birth control options available to Japanese women. Though Japan is on the cutting edge of electronics, they are in the Dark Ages when it comes to contraception. Low-dose oral contraceptives, medicated IUDs, injectables and implants were still not legal in Japan as of 2004, and the diaphragm is no longer produced there due to lack of demand. High-dosage pills and the copper IUD were only approved in Japan in 1999.

Despite the lack of contraceptive options, the Japanese saw rapid and amazing reductions in fertility after 1945. While the rest of the world experienced a Baby Boom, Japan saws its total fertility rate (TFR) fall from over four to two in the space of just 15 years -- a phenomenal rate of reduction even by today's standards.

One factor driving fertility reduction was later age at marriage. Another factor -- too often overlooked -- was crippling poverty after the War. Japan in the late 1940s and 1950s was a miserable place, and few people could afford to have the large families they did prior to World War II.

The real driver of fertility reduction in Japan, however, was a desire for peace and prosperity. While prior to WWII large families had been seen as a source of prestige and economic growth, afterwards they were seen as destructive to the long-term peace and economic self-sufficiency of the nation.

Japan's new small-family ethic was fueled by both central government and local Government commitment to the goal of slowing pre-war rates of human population growth. A system of midwives, nurses, family planning clinics and doctors was put in place and it took root with assistance from the Family Planning Federation of Japan (FPFJ) and the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA).

While very wide, Japan's family planning program was not very deep. Despite a post-war interest in reducing the number of births, Japan has never really subscribed to what we in the U.S. think of as a "comprehensive" family planning program. Sex education in schools was (and still is) poor, and access to a full range of modern contraceptive choices was (and still is) very limited. In the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, the only "modern" contraceptive option was the condom. Though effective most of the time, the condom is not a perfect contraceptive vehicle. To be precise, condoms have a per-use failure rate of about 3%, which means even with "perfect use" the contraceptive device fails about 3 times a year on average (yep, 100 times a year is "average" according to the people that count these things).

In actuality, of course, we do not live in a perfect world with perfect and consistent humans. Due to inconsistent product usage (i.e. situational nonuse) the "real world" pregnancy rate for couples using only condoms is somewhere between 10 to 15 percent (numbers vary depending on the study).

Bottom line: There were (and are) quite a lot of abortions in Japan.

In 1996 the pre-World War II law was further amended and it is now called the "Mother's Body Protection Law" and remains the principle family planning law of Japan.

Today, Japan's total fertility rate is 1.4, one of the lowest in the world.

While Japan's fertility rate fell rapidly after WWII, and reached below-replacement levels by 1970, the nation's absolute population continued to grow. A population that had topped 64 million by 1930 was over 83 million by 1950, was over 103 million by 1970, and was over 123 million by 1990.

The good news is that Japan's population has very nearly topped out. The bad news is that it took 45 years AFTER it hit replacement level fertility (and then went far below it) to achieve this goal. And this is in a country with essentially zero immigration.

Today, across the world, the effect of Japan's post-World War II population growth is felt in the form of massive factory-like fishing fleets that prowl the world's oceans to feed that nation.

In the Southern U.S., massive chip mills pulp our forests to supply pulp for Japanese paper and wood-strand mills.

Forests in Burma, Indonesia, and Vietnam are being chainsawed to supply plywood. Around the world chainsaws and oil derricks crank out product going to a nation that had already "overshot" its resource base by 1931 -- and whose population has doubled since then.

While Japanese fertility declines have yet to translate into a smaller population size (I doubt Japan will ever return to a population small enough that it can actually live within the "carrying capacity" of the nation itself) a great deal of "Global Good" has come out of its lower fertility rates.

One bit of "good news" for Japan and the world was a tightening of labor markets that began to occur in Japan in the late 1970s as the low-fertility rates of the early 1950s moved their way up the population pyramid. As wages of entry-level workers began to rise in Japan due to labor market constraints, Japanese businesses began to export capital overseas in order to take advantage of lower-wage labor pools in developing countries (much as many U.S. businesses are doing today). Much of the "miracle" economic growth of South Korea was, in fact, abetted by Japanese money going overseas due to fertility declines in Japan that had begun 20 and 30 years earlier.

Japanese investment in Korea's economy, in turn, helped improve the status of women there and helped speed urbanization, which in turn helped to reduce fertility rates in that nation.

The same labor market constraints that drove some Japanese businesses to export capital in order to find cheaper labor drove other Japanese companies to automate. Today, Japanese industry has more robots and complex automation systems in place than any other country in the world -- one reason that both Japanese productivity and quality remain quite high.

Are there lessons here for the rest of the world? I think so.

Though far less pronounced than Japan's labor market contractions (due to a very long Baby Boom, higher domestic fertility, and high rates of international immigration here in the U.S.), U.S. capital movements to Mexico and other nations seem to be doing for these nations what Japan's money did for Korea (albeit at a slower rate due to increased diffusion of our capital over a larger area).

At the same time, the very same labor market forces that worked to push automation in Japan are doing the same here at home where timber, steel, and manufacturing plants are producing more products with less labor (and at higher quality) than ever before. Though we may not think factory automation has an environmental component, it most certainly does -- automated plants, as a rule, waste far less than their non-automated counterparts.

The big lesson, however, is that fertility decline is the START, not the end, of bringing the "runaway train" of population growth under control. Even after fertility has fallen to replacement levels, total population numbers continue to rise for decade after decade after decade.

For a country like the U.S., where the total base numbers are already very large, this is a very sobering thought.

In terms of absolute population size, the U.S. is already the third largest country in the world.

In terms of population growth rates we are not yet where Japan was in 1955 thanks to a combination of massive immigration and the highest fertility rates of any country in the industrialized world.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's middle-series projections, the U.S will add more people to its population in the next 50 years as currently live West of the Mississippi River -- and this is the middle-series (most likely) projection.

Our population growth will not end there, of course.

Once the Population Juggernaut starts to roll, it tends to roll a heck of a long way before it comes to a stop. This has been true for Japan (which had rapid and sustained fertility decline and no immigration) and it will be even truer for the U.S. (which has non-sustained fertility decline and high immigration). It will be even more true for countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that are still some distance away from achieving replacement levels of fertility.
.

• Related Links:
  ** The Real Threat to Hunting in America
  ** Drawing the Line at the Border for Wildlife's Sake
  .

A Wildlife Transmitter Beats an Arrow In the Neck

Re-posted from 2009.

Remember, when we were kids and people said the birds "flew south" for the winter?

Well, believe it or not, that was about all we knew for a lot of species.

Birds disappeared flying south in the Fall and came back, flying north, in the Spring. Where these birds went, exactly, and what they did when they got there, was a bit of a mystery.

Beginning in the 16th Century or so, some bird owners (pigeon fanciers and falconers mostly) began banding or ringing the legs of select birds to establish ownership.

The first record of a metal band attached to a bird's leg was in 1595, when one of Henry IV's banded Peregrine Falcons was lost in pursuit of a bustard in France. It showed up the next day in Malta, 900 miles away!

In the early 19th Century, the world began to get a glimpse into the scope of avian winter migrations, thanks to an arrow in the neck. Atlas Obscura tells the story:

Until the 19th century, the sudden annual disappearance of white storks each fall had been a profound mystery to European bird-watchers. Aristotle thought the storks went into hibernation with the other disappearing avian species, perhaps at the bottom of the sea. According to some fanciful accounts, “flocks of swallows were allegedly seen congregating in marshes until their accumulated weight bent the reeds into the water, submerging the birds, which apparently then settled down for a long winter’s nap.” A 1703 pamphlet titled “An Essay toward the Probable Solution of this Question: Whence come the Stork and the Turtledove, the Crane, and the Swallow, when they Know and Observe the Appointed Time of their Coming,” argued that the disappearing birds flew to the moon for the winter.



On May 21, 1822, a stunning piece of evidence came to light, which suggested a less extra-terrestrial, if no less wondrous, solution to the quandary of the disappearing birds. A white stork, shot on the Bothmer Estate near Mecklenburg, was discovered with an 80 cm long Central African spear embedded in its neck. The stork had flown the entire migratory journey from its equatorial wintering grounds in this impaled state. The Arrow-Stork, or Pfeilstorch, can now be found, stuffed, in the Zoological Collection of the University of Rostock. It is not alone. Since 1822, some 25 separate cases of pfeilstorches have been recorded.

What happened next? Well, quite a lot.

The 19th Century was a period of explosive scientific discovery, and people began to move beyond simple banding to establish ownership, to banding as a method of tracking birds across time and space.

Among the first to step forward in the name of Science was John James Audubon, who attached small ringlets of silver wire to the legs of a brood of Phoebes near Philadelphia so he could firmly establish that birds raised in one area were the same ones who later returned to nest in that same area.

In 1899, Hans Mortensen, a Danish school teacher, took the idea of bird-banding one step farther, and began banding wild birds with metal rings that had his name and address on them. It was Mortensen that invented the system of bird banding we use today, though it should be said that it was the Smithsonian Institution, here in Washington, D.C., which really popularized bird-banding, and made it an avenue of mainstream scientific inquiry.

For about 100 years, bird banding was how we tracked bird migrations around the world, and to tell the truth, it was not that great a system.

In a world of billions of birds, only a small fraction-of-a-fraction were ever going to be banded, and most of these were ducks or geese which had an obvious economic value. Smaller birds of no obvious value were much less likely to get banded, and only those birds shot or netted ever had any hope of having their identifications seen, much less returned to the proper data-keeper.

The result: until only a decade or so ago, we still had a very imperfect knowledge of where birds went when they "flew south" for the winter, and we knew even less about where they stopped and fed along the way.

The good news is that in the 1990s, the process of electronic miniaturization progressed to the point that scientists could begin to put transmitters on really large birds like hawks and cranes, and data from those transmitters could be uploaded to satellites. Today, the science of miniaturization has progressed to the point that it's possible to put a transmitter on a hummingbird -- even a dragonfly -- although we still need an airplane or car to follow on behind the smallest of transmitters.

It is hard to overstate how important electronic tracking is to wildlife management and protection. A small story, however, might give a clue.

Three of the very first miniature electronic tracking transmitters capable of linking up to a satellite were attached to Swainson's hawks back in 1994. Within a few days, two of the transmitters conked out, but the transmitter on the third bird retained power and showed the hawk traveled from southern Canada down the American Midwest into Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and past Ecuador into the Pampas region of Venezuela.

Scientists quickly scurried off to see if they could locate the animal.

What they found in Argentina was both amazing and disturbing.

The amazing part was that Swainson's hawks, which are solitary hunters in North America, assembled into large communal flocks of as many as 7,000 birds on their winter hunting grounds.

The disturbing part was that in Argentina Swainson's hawks lived on swarms of locust-like grasshoppers, which were being systematically poisoned by organo-phosphate pesticides.

The bug spray, in turn, was killing off the Swainson's hawks in droves.

As they drove into the area where the hawk's signal had last been heard from, scientists were alarmed to find thousands of hawks already dead under their roosts.

To make a long story short, that year 25 percent of all the Swainson's hawks in the world were killed by pesticides in Argentina -- a phenomenon that would never have been known had it not been for wildlife tracking telemetry.

The good news is that by switching to different types of pesticides, Argentina's farmers were able to sharply reduce grasshopper infestations while doing little serious harm to wildlife --a "win-win" for all sides.

As you might suspect, the brave new world of wildlife transmitters is still giving us a lot of new information, and great stories as well.

For example, one of fifteen Black-tailed Godwits released in the Friesland area of the Netherlands in 2009 arrived in Senegal West Africa three days later. The distance of 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometres), was covered by the bird in two days of nonstop flying.

Today, scientists are able to track bird populations around the globe, and load this information into graphics-based data bases so the general public can follow these epic migrations.

And it's not just birds that migrate, is it?

On every continent mammals, birds, fish and even insects migrate extraordinarily long distances.

It's not just Monarch butterflies that fly south for the winter for example -- it's a lot of dragonflies as well.

And it's not just herring and salmon that migrate out of oceans and up our rivers and streams -- it's perch and eels too. Out in the oceans, shark, tuna, whales, penguins, and sea turtles are swimming vast distances in never-ending seasonal circles, as they have for millions of years. On land we have long-distance migrations by caribou, bison, pronghorn antelope, elephant, wildebeest, and zebra.

How do the animals find their way? No one is quite sure.

No doubt there are a lot of factors that help guide them -- the position of the sun, wind, smell, temperature, sound, and visual landmarks, for starters. We know, for example, that when pigeons get closer to home, pigeons will actually follow roadways, same as you and I.

Migrations at night, when most birds fly really long distances, however, may be due to an internal magnetic compass that is hard-wired into the brain and working off of a bit of superoxide.

And it's not just birds that have this bit of electro-chemistry firing off in their brain -- bats do too.

And if bats (mammals) have electro-magnetic compasses in their brain, why not fish?

The main benefit of wildlife transmitters, of course, is that by tracking animals -- so many of which move about only at night -- we are better able to protect vital wildlife and ancient migration corridors.

That's a benefit for everyone -- the wildlife, hunters, and Mother Nature included.

On a more personal level, of course, the tremendous strides made in wildlife transmitters over the last two decades, have been an enormous benefit for those of us who engage in highly-skilled primitive hunting with dogs, hawks, falcons, and ferrets.

Yes, hawks and falcons are still lost rather routinely, but falconry transmitters and Yaggi locators offer some hope of recovery.

In the world of terriers and ferrets, the development of small low-frequency transmitters means long layups underground and long and dangerous digs are less frequent than they once were.

Even houndsmen and pet owners have benefited, thanks to tracking collars to serve their various needs.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Want to read another amazing bird migration story? Check out A Shearwater's Endless Summer from a March 2007 post to this blog.
.

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.
.

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.
.

Shooting Out the Land

Ranger McEntire of the Malheur National Forest (Eastern Oregon), Winter 1912 - 1913

A repost from this blog circa 2005

In 1887, 14 years before he became President, Theodore Roosevelt joined with a distinguished group of sporting Americans -- including George Bird Grinnell, William Tecumseh Sherman, John Lacey, and Gifford Pinchot -- to form the Boone and Crockett Club. The men who created the Boone and Crockett Club were all dedicated hunters. Grinnell was editor of Field and Stream magazine, a hunting and fishing journal, and as editor, he was shocked at the rapid depletion of America’s wildlife due to unregulated market hunting

Though by charter the Boone and Crockett Club numbered only 100 people, it was a very influential group. John Lacey eventually became a Member of Congress from Iowa and, in 1900, just before Roosevelt became President, he managed to get Congress to pass the Lacey Act which made it a federal crime to transport wild game across state lines if had been killed in violation of state laws — the first federal restriction on commercial market hunting in the United States.

Roosevelt, of course, became Vice President and then President upon the assassination of William McKinley. An avid sport hunter, Roosevelt was also an accomplish naturalist, and counted among his friends John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, and best-selling wildlife author John Burroughs.

It is hard to overstate the importance of hunting in Roosevelt’s life. Suffice it to say that he chose not to run for President after his second term so that he could go to Africa on a year-long safari, hunting big game and collecting specimens for the Smithsonian Institution.

During his presidency (1901 to 1911), Roosevelt more than tripled the National Forest system to 148 million acres (and made Gifford Pinchot the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service), oversaw the creation of 150 new national forest areas in 21 states, created four national game preserves, 51 federal bird sanctuaries, and established 18 national monuments. No president, before or since, has created such a sweeping public lands legacy.

In 1911, shortly after Roosevelt left office, Congress passed the Weeks Act to authorize the purchase of forest lands in the east. Much of this land later became part of the National Forest system in the eastern United States.

That same year the American Game Protective Association (AGPA) was founded and funded by gun and ammunition companies such as Winchester. This was the first sportsman-supported organization in the U.S. with a full-time professional staff, and it was later renamed the Wildlife Management Institute. In 1913, the shooting of migratory birds was regulated — the first step toward building back game bird populations deeply impacted by over-hunting.

America’s hunters lead the charge for wildlife habitat protection and the regulation of hunting seasons, providing an intellectual and moral framework now known as “hook and bullet conservation”.

Hook and bullet conservation has produced truly astounding results in the U.S. over the course of the last 100 years. Despite a three-fold increase in the U.S. population since 1900, we now have more bear, cougar, buffalo, turkey, elk, geese, duck, fox, raccoon, possum, alligator, groundhog, bald eagle, pronghorn, wolf, coyote, bobcat, and deer than at any time in the last 100 years. Beaver, turkey and river otter have been reintroduced into areas where they were wiped out, and wolf, elk and cougar are beginning to return to the east.

All of this has been made possible because the land and the forest -- otherwise voiceless -- has a voting constituency among American hunters and anglers. Not all hunters and anglers are good sportsmen who understand the need for conservation, but all good sportsmen are conservationists who understand the value of habitat and self-restraint.
.

Tree Huggers Discover the Best Way to Go Green

Over at Tree Hugger they have discovered the obvious: The Best Way You Can Go Green: Have Fewer Children:

Forget changing your lightbulbs, driving a car with high fuel efficiency, adopting a vegetarian diet or even switching to green power. If you live in the United States and really want to reduce your carbon emission legacy, perhaps the single largest change you can make to your life is commit to have fewer children.

The story goes on to quote a LiveScience article entitled Save the Planet: Have Fewer Kids

For people who are looking for ways to reduce their "carbon footprint," here's one radical idea that could have a big long-term impact, some scientists say: Have fewer kids.

A study by statisticians at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environment-friendly practices people might employ during their entire lives - things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

"In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime," said study team member Paul Murtaugh. "Those are important issues and it's essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources."

Reproductive choices haven't gained as much attention in the consideration of human impact to the Earth, Murtaugh said. When an individual produces a child - and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future - the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime.

Under current conditions in the United States, for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent - about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is
responsible.

The impact doesn't only come through increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases - larger populations also generate more waste and tax water supplies.

Of course births are NOT the main driver of U.S. population growth. Immigration is, and this has been true since the beginning, as the graph, below makes clear.



As John Chamie at Yale Global Online notes,

Contrary to popular thought, the dominant force fueling America’s demographic growth is not natural increase, but immigration. This is because immigrants not only add their own numbers to the nation’s overall population, but also contribute a disproportionate number of births whose effects are compounded over time.

Next time some vegan spouts nonsense to you about how the world is going to hell in a hand cart because there are too many people eating cows and chickens, do what I do: Suggest they get themselves sterilized and that they support immigration reform.

If that sounds harsh, be advised that voluntary sterilization is the most common form of birth control in the world. And yes, I advocate men get the procedure as it's a simple in-and-out operation for us.

Also be advised, that 82% of U.S. population growth is due to immigration, and that this immigration is negating ALL other savings being made through conservation.

Bottom Line: Stop talking about what other people should be doing (you cannot do a damn thing about them), and take direct action on the one thing you actually control.
You say you are an environmentalist? Prove it! Stop at none ... or one ... or two. And support immigration control.

.

• Related Links:** The Real Threat to Hunting in America
  ** Population Growth and the Limits of Accommodation
  ** Drawing the Line at the Border for Wildlife's Sake
  ** How Many Americans?
  ** Dead Man's Curve
  ** The Fox Versus the Stork
  ** What Would You Give Up to Keep What You Have?
  ** When Population Growth Comes Homes to Roost
  ** National Security and Population Growth
  ** Field Guide to Contraception.
  .

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.
.

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.
.

Hugh Bennett at the first soil erosion research station in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

.

• Related Posts:
  ** Killing Bison to Kill Off the Native Population
  ** Enter Immigrants, Cattle, Wheat and Dust
  ** When Jack Rabbits Became Scapegoats
  ** Time Magazine Puts a Bird Dog on the Cover
  ** When "Death Squads for Cattle" Saved America
  .

When Jack Rabbits Became Scapegoats

Jack Rabbit Hunt, Mead, Kansas, about 1919



After killing off the bison in the 1860s and 70s, importing immigrants to take over the land, and then plowing up the land to feed the armies of World War I Europe, grain production soared for a few wet years, producing a crop glut so severe that by 1925 three years worth of bounty sat rotting on the ground in some areas. The grain storehouses were full and no one wanted any more wheat at any price. Only so much could be turned into booze -- the rest was left to rot.

What to do? Why plant more land of course! If the price of wheat fell from $2 to $1 a bushel, then the only way to make the same amount of money as last year was to plant twice as much land. And so that's what people did, ripping up all the sod and all the land they could in the prairie states.  Life was hard, but there was still an export market for wheat to Europe.

Then in the summer of 1929, the Russian wheat embargo to Europe, which had started with World War I, and which had driven the export wheat economy in the United States, was lifted, further glutting the international market. At about the same time, the land speculation boom in Florida collapsed, and so too did the U.S. Stock market on October 29.

Over the course of the next three weeks in November of 1929, the stock market lost 40 percent of its value; more than thirty-five billion dollars in shareholder equity, a sum 11 times larger than the federal budget at that time.

What followed next was a general fiscal panic that quickly grew worse. It turned out that in thousands of local banks across the country, absent any regulation at all, local businessmen had taken people's savings and invested it in stocks or speculative local land deals. When panicked people came knocking for their money, there was no money to be had, and so banks closed overnight. Without federal regulation or bank insurance, what could anyone do?

The price of oil crashed soon after, falling from $1.30 a barrel to twenty cents and eventually to a dime. Across the entire nation, the bubble burst and the price of everything -- real estate in Florida, oil in Texas, wheat in Kansas, and stocks on Wall Street -- took a dive to the basement. The economy was in shambles.

Then, when the rain stopped, and the winds started blowing, large parts of the Great Plains that had been ripped open for wheat production, turned into massive dust clouds instead. Dust settled over everything, killing cattle and horses, burying fence posts and blowing east as far as New York City and Washington, and as far north as Chicago.

Both nature and the economy were now wildly out of swing. A plague of grasshoppers came out of Utah and Colorado, destroying crops.  Spiders and centipedes seemed to followed the dust.

With the ground dry and blowing, the economy in shreds, and people dead broke, unemployed and starting to go hungry, someone noticed the large numbers of Jack Rabbits about and decided they were too much competition for the few horses and cattle that remained. What to do? Why round them up and club them to death, of course.

And so jack rabbit roundups, which has begun in California in the 1890s, moved to places like Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas.  Massive funnel-shaped pens were created, and hundreds of men, women and children drove the rabbits across the prairie to their death.

As Timothy Egan notes in The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl:

Rabbits had the run of the land, crowding fields, yards, streets. They were an easy source of food, but they also took away food, gnawing en masse in places where some farmers still hoped to raise a crop. People saw the rabbits as a scourge, a perpetual motion of mastication, indifferent to the human alterations that were blowing away.


Rabbit drive in the Antelope Valley, California, 1910.

"BIG RABBIT DRIVE SUNDAY—BRING CLUBS"

 

In the pages of the Texan, John McCarty thought it was time to get rid of the big-eared menaces. People gathered in a fenced field at the edge of Dalhart, about two thousand folks armed with baseball bats and clubs. The atmosphere was festive, many people drinking corn whiskey from jugs. At last, they were about to do something, striking a blow against this run of freakish nature. They spread to the edge of the fenced section, forming a perimeter, then moved toward the center, herding rabbits inward to a staked enclosure.

As the human noose tightened, rabbits hopped around madly, sniffing the air, stumbling over each other. The clubs smashed heads. The bats crushed rib cages. Blood splattered, teeth were knocked out, hair was matted and reddened. The rabbits panicked, screamed. It took most of an afternoon to crush several thousand rabbits. Their bodies were left in a bloodied heap at the center of the field. Somebody strung up a few hundred of them and took a picture.

 

The rabbit drives caught on and became a weekly event in some places. In a single square mile section, people could kill up to six thousand rabbits in an afternoon. It seemed a shame to let all those dead rabbits go to waste when so many people were hungry in the cities. After one drive, in Hooker, Oklahoma, people shipped off two thousand rabbits as surplus meat. But it was hard to keep the meat from spoiling, and the logistics of butchering them proved too much. The rabbits were left to buzzards and insects or shoveled into pits and buried.

Jack Rabbit Hunt Near Hoxie, Kansas, ~1910. Click to enlarge and read sign.

• Related Post:
  ** American Jack Rabbit History
  ** Killing Bison to Kill Off the Native Population
  ** Enter Immigrants, Cattle, Wheat and Dust
  ** When Jack Rabbits Became Scapegoats
  ** Time Magazine Puts a Bird Dog on the Cover
  ** When "Death Squads for Cattle" Saved America

Enter Immigrants, Cattle, Wheat and Dust

Oklahoma sod house of the type my grandfather was born in, 1900.

The U.S. Government and the railroads, having systematically wiped out the buffalo in order to decimate and weaken the Native American populations on the Great Plains, now moved to import people from Europe, especially Germans living on the Russian steppes who were used to the kind of flat, arid lands that the Plains offered.

As Timothy Egan notes in his excellent book, The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl:

Without them [the German Russians], it is possible that wheat never would have been planted on the dry side of the plains. For when they boarded ships for America, the Germans from Russia carried with them seeds of turkey red -- a hard winter wheat -- and incidental thistle sewn into the pockets of their vests. It meant survival, an heirloom packet worth more than currency.

.. Turkey red, short-stemmed and resistant to cold and drought, took so well to the land beyond the ninety-eighth meridian that agronomists were forced to rethink the predominant view that the Great American Desert was unsuited for agriculture. In Russia, it was the crop that allowed the Germans to move out of the valleys and onto the higher, drier farming ground of the steppe. The thistle came by accident, but it grew so fast it soon owned the West. In the Old World, thistle was called perekati-pole, which meant "roll-across-the-field." In America, it was known as tumbleweed.

... [N]o group of people took a more dramatic leap in lifestyle or prosperity, in such a short time, than wheat farmers on the Great Plains. In less than ten years, they went from subsistence living to small business-class wealth, from working a few hard acres with horses and hand tools to being masters of wheat estates, directing harvests with wondrous new machines, at a profit margin in some cases that was ten times the cost of production.

In 1910, the price of wheat stood at eighty cents a bushel, good enough for anyone who had outwitted a few dry years to make enough money to get through another year and even put something away. Five years later, with world grain supplies pinched by the Great War, the price had more than doubled.

Mules pull a combine, 1920 American plains.

Farmers increased production by 50 percent. When the Turkish navy blocked the Dardenelles, they did a favor for dryland wheat farmers that no one could have imagined. Europe had relied on Russia for export grain. With Russian shipments blocked, the United States stepped in, and issued a proclamation to the plains: plant more wheat to win the war. And for the first time, the government guaranteed the price, at two dollars a bushel, through the war, backed by the wartime food administrator, a multimillionaire public servant named Herbert Hoover. Wheat was no longer a staple of a small family farmer but a commodity with a price guarantee and a global market.

In 1917, about forty-five million acres of wheat were harvested nationwide. In 1919, over seventy-five million acres were put into production — up nearly 70 percent.

When the native sod of the Great Plains was in place, it did not matter if people looked twice at a piece of ground. Wind blew twenty, thirty, forty miles an hour, as always. Droughts came and went. Prairie fires, many of them started deliberately by Indians or cowboys trying to scare nesters off, took a great gulp of grass in a few days. Hailstorms pounded the land. Blue northers froze it so hard it was like broken glass to walk on.

Through all of the seasonal tempests, man was inconsequential. As long as the weave of grass was stitched to the land, the prairie would flourish in dry years and wet. The grass could look brown and dead, but beneath the surface, the roots held the soil in place; it was alive and dormant. The short grass, buffalo and blue grama, had evolved as the perfect fit for the sandy loam of the arid zone. It could hold moisture a foot or more below ground level even during summer droughts, when hot winds robbed the surface of all water-bearing life. In turn, the grass nurtured pin-tailed grouse, prairie chickens, cranes, jackrabbits, snakes, and other creatures that got their water from foraging on the native turf.

Through the driest years, the web of life held. When a farmer tore out the sod and then walked away, leaving the land naked, however, that barren patch posed a threat to neighbors. It could not revert to grass, because the roots were gone. It was empty, dead, and transient.

Texas Duststorm, 1935.

.

• Related Posts:
  ** Killing Bison to Kill Off the Native Population
  ** Enter Immigrants, Cattle, Wheat and Dust
  ** When Jack Rabbits Became Scapegoats
  ** Time Magazine Puts a Bird Dog on the Cover
  ** When "Death Squads for Cattle" Saved America