After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
recover from overhunting.26 Both thus supported the regulated use of wildlife as an important aspect of utilitarian conservation.
The second component of the economic argument was the protection of “beneficial species” for pest control. The question of whether certain species were beneficial or injurious had particular salience during a time before modern chemical pesticides when many scientists believed that reckless agricultural development had disturbed the balance of nature. At the time, the federal government’s first fish and game agency, the Bureau of Biological Survey, was sponsoring research on the economic value of various species. Foster E.L. Beal, an economic ornithologist from the bureau, visited California three times between 1901 and 1906 and conducted studies on the agricultural relations of seventy bird species. He concluded that only four of these—the house finch, the scrub jay, Stellar’s jay, and the red-breasted sapsucker—were of “doubtful utility.” All of the state’s other common bird species benefited agriculture. “A reasonable way of viewing the relation of birds to the farmer,” Beal wrote, “is to consider birds as servants, employed to destroy weeds and insects. In return for this service they should be protected.”27
Grinnell and Bryant took Beal’s argument and ran with it. They soon began to see economic benefits in almost every normal function of almost every native species. According to Grinnell, more than 90 percent of California’s bird species qualified as “community assets.” Bats were “desirable citizens” for consuming insects, gophers tilled and fertilized the soil, and beavers created habitats for juvenile fish by plumbing rivers.28 As early as 1912, members of the Berkeley circle used the beneficial species argument to lobby for state protection of carnivorous mammals, which most people still considered pests. According to Grinnell and Bryant, predators helped to control undesirable rodent species and improve populations of game animals, such as deer, by culling the weakest members. By the 1920s, the Berkeley circle had emerged as a leading force in the nationwide effort to curtail predator control programs.
Grinnell and Bryant insisted that their arguments were utilitarian, not sentimental, but they viewed economic rationales at least in part as means to an end and sought to expand these arguments to incorporate noneconomic concerns. By 1913 Bryant was including not only fish and game but also nongame vertebrate species and even insects in his list of beneficial creatures. “Doubtless if our knowledge were not so limited,” he wrote, “we would be able to see a use for every living thing. As it is, we brand life as useful, neutral, or injurious because of its effect on ourselves or our environment.” According to him, this parsing of species had appreciable, damaging consequences: “Anything known to be useful is always assured protection, anything considered of no use is assured of speedy destruction. Hence, viewed from a utilitarian standpoint, there is a certain value in classifying life as injurious or beneficial.” When addressing friendly audiences, he often returned to the example of birds, which had a large constituency of advocates and a long tradition of aesthetic appreciation: “Somehow at this day and age the convincing value of a bird lies in its usefulness. . . . This point of view is exaggerated and the other real value,—the esthetic,—is left in the background; but we must meet the demands of the times.” Bryant understood the political value of a utilitarian argument, but his real convictions lay elsewhere.29
FIGURE 8. The “Monument to Game Conservation” appeared on the cover of the first issue of Western Wild Life Call, in 1913, to draw attention to extinct and endangered species.
If all wild animals had aesthetic value or even pure intrinsic value, then human-induced extinctions posed a special problem that transcended mere economics (see figure 8). Indeed, extinction was one area in which Grinnell and Bryant wrote about conservation issues as explicitly ethical challenges. “It is now generally recognized as ethically wrong,” Grinnell wrote in 1914, “to jeopardize the existence of any animal species.” Bryant tied together economic and ethical arguments about extinction the following year when he wrote, “An extinct form of life can never be restored. In this ethical viewpoint we perhaps find the strongest argument of all. But add to this the economic viewpoint and we have an argument in favor of wild life conservation that defies every assailant.”30
Grinnell’s commitment to the aesthetic and intrinsic values of wild animals did not prevent him from killing them in large numbers. He was a prodigious collector who bagged thousands of animals during his lifetime and facilitated the slaughter of tens of thousands more. He offered his motives, his credentials, and the uses to which he put the remains as justification for this carnage. According to him, animals that were killed for food or profit only benefited a few people for a few days, but animals preserved in a museum would benefit society for centuries. He encouraged amateur naturalists to avoid collecting eggs and to watch birds with opera glasses instead of killing them. But he chastised professional naturalists who shot pictures when they should have been shooting guns and argued with animal welfare advocates who called hunting inhumane or questioned the need for further scientific collecting of rare species. In 1915 he published a manifesto on the subject, “Conserve the Collector,” which argued that future biological research would depend on scientists having open access to vertebrate specimens, even in protected parks and reserves.31
Grinnell also lectured Bryant on the subject. As part of his job at the California Division of Fish and Game, Bryant handled requests for permits to collect specimens of protected species. He balked when his friend and fellow Grinnell protégé, Loye Miller, requested a permit to collect a white-tailed kite. Miller was a respected young researcher who would go on to found the Department of Life Sciences at UCLA. When Grinnell heard about the delay, he intervened on Miller’s behalf. “I do not believe that the species is anywhere near the point of extermination,” he wrote in a letter to Bryant. “There cannot be less than 100 of the birds alive in the State. . . . Specimens of the species should be preserved for science; and they can be without, I believe, jeopardizing the existence of the species.”32
If the population of a charismatic raptor such as the white-tailed kite dropped to one hundred individuals in California today, scientists would consider it on the brink of a regional extinction and would call for a major mobilization of conservation resources. Yet Grinnell seemed almost blasé about the bird’s small population. The white-tailed kite has since rebounded in California, and today it is fairly common, but that outcome was by no means assured in 1915. Grinnell was correct in arguing that sport, market, and subsistence hunting, predator control, and habitat destruction were more important than scientific collecting in driving the decline of such species. Yet he must have known that with so few individuals the loss of even one could alter a population’s demographic trajectory and that small populations were especially at risk from scientific collecting. Grinnell was overconfident about the white-tailed kite’s status, but his mistake did not result from indifference to the species’s plight. Instead it stemmed from his stubborn support for science and his attribution of blame. “This wastage is not to be debited to the collector,” he insisted, “but to the average and very ignorant and numerous hunter.”33
By 1916 Grinnell and Bryant had articulated a multifaceted argument for the conservation of California’s native fauna. It combined economics with ethics, utilitarianism with aesthetics, and instrumentalism with a concept of intrinsic value. They argued that wildlife was important for science, education, recreation, tourism, agriculture, natural resources, and even something akin to our contemporary notion of ecological services—the idea that wild species and healthy ecosystems perform essential functions for society that would be costly and difficult to replace by artificial means. Grinnell and Bryant were not alone in developing these ideas; they were part of a large network of conservationists throughout the United States and beyond. Yet these conservationists were not all of the same mind regarding the vital issues of the day. Three key groups shaped wildlife conservation during the Progressive Era, and each had a distinctive view on the contentious topic of hunting regulation.
HUNTING AND THE POLITICS OF CONSERVATION
Debates about fish and game regulation involved a variety of economic, political, and ethical issues, as well as basic conceptions of social status and identity. Groups on all sides claimed to have the support of moderate