After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
of rare or recently eradicated species required careful detective work. It also required the museum’s staff to cultivate a network of supporters and informants. Fieldworkers conducted oral histories, inquired about taxidermied trophies kept in private homes, and relied on locals for advice about when and where to search. In 1916, for example, Joseph Dixon issued a plea on behalf of the museum for information from “anyone who knows of the whereabouts of any parts of wolves killed in California, or who is conversant with facts relating to the past or present occurrence of the species within the state.” The MVZ finally acquired a California wolf specimen in 1922. Such efforts involved a sizable commitment of the museum’s limited resources, costly searches often failed to produce results, and the fieldworker might not even live to see the payoff. The value of these specimens “might not be realized,” Grinnell wrote, “until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved.” Yet he believed such work was crucial so that “the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west.”20
Preserving this record played a central role in Grinnell’s vision for the MVZ. But why would he—a man who had grown up with Indians, knew about California’s long human history, and studied the role of landscape change in vertebrate evolution—invoke a concept so apparently static and ahistorical as “original conditions”? Grinnell was not ignorant about history. He understood that no single date in the past represented the original state of nature in California and that the early twentieth century was an arbitrary moment at which to create an archive of the state’s fauna. But he was also typical of naturalists of his time in the way he interpreted environmental history. He believed that, with the exception of their use of fire, Indians had lived lightly on the land; it was the Europeans, particularly those who came after 1849, who made the most significant impacts. These ideas informed generations of thinking in American ecology and environmentalism even as scholars in other fields realized that they had drastically underestimated the importance of indigenous societies in shaping North American landscapes and ecosystems.
Despite these shortcomings, Grinnell’s approach had a remarkably contemporary objective. He knew that development would continue to transform California’s fauna, and he based his plan for the museum on the premise that future researchers would want to understand those transformations. He viewed the MVZ’s collections as baseline data for measuring change over time. This view has proved prescient. As part of the MVZ’s centenary celebration, in 2008, researchers began resurveying sites that Grinnell and his assistants had visited a hundred years earlier. Their goal was to use the museum’s data to track changes in the state’s ecosystems. The team’s first study, published in the journal Science, documented a five-hundred-meter average upward shift in the elevation ranges of fourteen small mammal species in and around Yosemite National Park.21 Over the course of a century, climate and environmental change had rearranged the Sierra Nevada’s biogeography and reshuffled its ecological communities. Grinnell studied change over time, and in his evolutionary research he explored the deep past. But when it came to baseline data, his interest was primarily in the history of the future—one that California’s human and nonhuman residents are experiencing today.
The MVZ flourished under Grinnell’s leadership. It developed special strengths in birds and mammals, and its geographic focus allowed it to achieve an unparalleled degree of detail in its collections. During its first five years, the museum catalogued nearly fifty thousand specimens. By 1937 C. Hart Merriam could praise it for having produced “a vastly more complete” record of fur-bearing mammals in California than existed for any other part of the world. Grinnell departed in 1939, but the museum’s collections developed further under the direction of his successors. By 1955 it had accumulated the third-largest collection of mammals in the country, even though most of its specimens came from a single state, and it had begun building large collections in new taxonomic areas, such as herpetology. By the 1980s, the MVZ’s collections, along with those of the state’s other major natural history museums, had established California’s status as a hot spot of global biological diversity.22
CONSERVATION ETHICS
Historians have often suggested that ethical arguments for wildlife conservation in the United States developed in a clear pattern. During the nineteenth century, people considered fish and game valuable only to the extent that they served human economic, recreational, or aesthetic interests. Pests that detracted from these interests were to be controlled or eradicated. During the first half of the twentieth century, scientists and conservationists gradually regarded increasing numbers of species as beneficial and called for more protection. After World War II, the range of their concern grew even further, to include all native species and ecosystems. The process by which human societies extend moral standing to animals and other things is called ethical extensionism and is often associated with the work of the famed philosopher-conservationist Aldo Leopold.23
Though attractive, the story of ethical extensionism suffers from several problems, not least of which is its teleological portrayal of American environmental history as an inevitable march toward increasingly enlightened ideas. The actual story is much messier, fraught with political contestation, social conflict, and the complexities and contingencies that define the past. Ethical disputes about wild nature did reach a wider audience over time, but almost all of the major arguments for wildlife and endangered species conservation that exist today emerged within the first two decades of the twentieth century. What followed was not a slow expansion or adoption of new ideas but rather a series of struggles that redistributed political power and elevated old ideas to new positions in science, politics, and the law.24
No group was more active in forging these ideas during the Progressive Era than the Berkeley circle. As with its scientific work, the group’s contributions to conservation ethics resulted from the productive, although at times tense, partnerships between Grinnell and his protégés at the MVZ. Harold C. Bryant was one of Grinnell’s first students, and he specialized in natural history education. Grinnell and Bryant borrowed arguments for conservation that other scientists, government officials, wilderness preservationists, and animal welfare advocates had developed in previous decades. They expanded these from fish and game to encompass the more general category of wildlife. To appeal to diverse constituencies, they adapted and sharpened their arguments and used different approaches with different audiences to achieve the greatest political results. By 1916 Grinnell and Bryant had articulated and employed almost all of the major ethical arguments for wildlife conservation that exist today.
Like many Progressive Era naturalists and educators, Grinnell asserted that natural history study promoted healthful recreation and an informed citizenry. He joined with activists who called for more nature study in the public schools and more educational programs from state and federal agencies. One of the best ways to achieve these objectives was to install his students in influential positions. In 1914 Grinnell helped Bryant find two part-time jobs, one as the first director of education for the California Fish and Game Commission and another as a member of Yosemite National Park’s first cohort of interpretive naturalists, who gave campfire talks. These were new positions, but they came with considerable opportunities and support. Bryant soon emerged as the most prominent natural history educator not only in California but also, after 1916, in the new National Park Service. His career in the service continued until 1954, when he retired as the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, one of the organization’s most prestigious positions. NPS historians today remember Bryant as the founder of the service’s interpretive programs.25
To understand Grinnell and Bryant’s approach to ethics, it is necessary to understand their approach to politics. When they spoke and wrote about conservation, they often stressed the pragmatic utilitarian justification that had already gained widespread general support among conservationists and that they thought would persuade the largest number of people: wild animals should be conserved to promote the country’s economic well-being. This argument had two components. The first involved the animals’ monetary value. Hunters, trappers, traders, and merchants—including those who sold supplies to recreational sportsmen and tourists—lost future profits when they squandered resources in the short term that could have remained viable for the foreseeable future. Grinnell and Bryant argued for stronger regulation of animal harvests, as well as the creation