After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
a few minutes, sure enough, the receiver’s faint, intermittent chirps merged into a loud, continuous buzz. According to the receiver, I was standing practically on top of a fifteen-inch-long adult desert tortoise with a plastic and metal radio glued to its back. I had heard that desert tortoises were masters of disguise, but this was absurd. Here I was, just feet from the Mojave’s most famous endangered species, and I couldn’t find it. All I could see in front of me, when I turned away from the graders and bulldozers next door, was miles and miles of desert.
I did eventually find the tortoise, with Peggy’s help—it was lying as still as a rock, and looking like one too, against the gravelly desert floor—a couple meters away, in the shadow of a creosote bush. I had nearly stepped on the poor critter.
On the way home that evening, after the temperature began to drop and my pride started to heal, I realized that even though I had missed the tortoise, I had stumbled upon an invaluable insight. Studying an endangered species is only partly about surveying populations, tracking movements, and documenting behaviors. It is also an exercise in comprehending the politics of land use and natural resource management, the laws that structure our relationships with nonhuman beings, and the drivers of regional economic and environmental change. Perhaps most important, it is as much about the places where endangered species live as it is about the species themselves. Don’t get me wrong: many people care deeply about wildlife and the threats of species extinction and biodiversity loss. But endangered species are by definition rare, and, like the inconspicuous desert tortoise, most remain unseen except by highly trained experts. It was clear to me that the conservation efforts I had witnessed earlier that day were part of a much larger scientific, legal, and bureaucratic project, which was as much about protecting the Mojave—fencing off at least some of those vast desert miles—as it was about conserving the tortoises that lived there (see figure 1).1
FIGURE 1. Street sign in the Mojave National Preserve near Cima, California. Courtesy of Christopher Woodcock.
These observations are not new. Since the 1970s, dozens of endangered species conservation conflicts have captured national media attention. Many commentators have noted that in such struggles, the species in question often serve as proxies for much larger debates involving the politics of place, which I define as an ongoing cultural conversation about who should have access to and control over lands and natural resources. Seen in this way, endangered species debates are about not only the conservation of biological diversity but also the allocation of scarce public goods, the appropriate level of government intervention in a market economy, the distribution of legal authority among state and federal bureaucracies, the proper role of scientific expertise in democratic institutions, and divergent visions for the political and economic futures of communities and even entire regions. Endangered species have become surrogates for environmentalists who use them to pursue broader political agendas—such as preventing development, establishing nature reserves, or reducing carbon emissions—and scapegoats for those who oppose further regulation or stand to lose from changes in government policies. When it comes to endangered species, one person’s totem is another’s effigy.
It is one thing to identify a proxy debate but a more complex matter to explain that debate’s antecedents, origins, development, and peculiar political framings. How did the United States develop a political system capable of producing and sustaining debates in which endangered species serve as proxies for broader cultural conflicts with such far-reaching social and economic consequences?
In the pages that follow, I argue that the endangered species debates that have rocked American environmental politics since the 1970s are the product of a more than century-long history in which scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as inextricable from the ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived. Endangered species advocates adopted the concept of habitat to describe these circumstances and relationships, and over time habitat conservation became a central tenet of wildlife management. The word habitat has many contexts and meanings. This book shows how habitat became the concept that connects endangered species to contested places and how this connection has allowed people to use those species as proxies for a host of broader social conflicts. It describes how a particular version of habitat conservation—the “protected natural area”—became the dominant paradigm for endangered species management in the United States. Finally, it suggests that although the protected areas paradigm probably helped prevent many extinctions in the twentieth century, this approach has encountered a range of problems and paradoxes in the twenty-first century, jeopardizing the survival of myriad threatened and endangered species.2
Readers who have studied endangered species issues will notice that this thesis differs from most other accounts, which identify the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) as the source of so many subsequent conservation conflicts. The ESA, which calls for the protection of all plant and animal species, as well as vertebrate subspecies and distinct populations, no matter the cost, passed Congress with nearly unanimous support in 1973. By the end of that decade, however, it had become perhaps the country’s most controversial environmental law. Today the ESA remains not only one of the most formidable and comprehensive U.S. environmental statutes but also the most ambitious biodiversity conservation measure ever enacted by any country.3
The ESA plays a central role in this book, but I consider it part of a much longer story. Concern about extinctions dates back to at least the 1880s in the United States, and ambitious species and habitat conservation efforts began during the first half of the twentieth century, decades before the ESA’s passage. The ESA is important here not because it was unique or unprecedented but because it continued two long-term trends: increasing the government protection of imperiled species, and elevating habitat to the status of a key concept in environmental science, law, management, and politics. Indeed, one of the reasons the ESA has become so powerful and controversial is that after its passage it evolved—through a series of legislative amendments, court decisions, and administrative rules—from a species protection law into a habitat protection law far stronger than almost anyone could have anticipated.4
There is another important reason why the ESA became such a powerful and controversial law. During the 1970s and 1980s, at the same time that environmental law was beginning to mature as a legal subfield, conservation biology was becoming established as an interdisciplinary scientific profession in academia, government, and nongovernmental organizations. In its early years, conservation biology focused mainly on developing theories and models to guide the selection and design of nature reserves for the conservation of habitat and biodiversity. Practitioners in these two fields still complain about the gulf that separates science from law, which they believe hampers effective policy and management. With a little historical perspective, however, it becomes clear that the two fields emerged and grew together, informing and shaping each other along the way. This reciprocal process, known as coproduction, creates what science studies scholars call hybrid concepts. Today it is impossible to provide a complete definition of either habitat or endangered species without referring to both science and the law and the relations between them.5
This book also takes a different perspective than most other endangered species research on the subject of federalism, which remains at the heart of many environmental debates. Historians often note that over the past two centuries, the United States government has extended its authority to new regions, peoples, and resources, in the process growing in size and increasing the range of its powers. Although this has occurred in many ways and in many areas, few topics seem to represent the theme of federal expansion better than wildlife. Before the twentieth century, the states retained nearly complete authority over the fish and game within their boundaries. Beginning in 1900, however, Congress passed a series of laws that increased federal involvement in wildlife management. To many observers, the ESA, which is essentially a receivership program that authorizes the federal government to step in and act on behalf of species that have suffered under state authority, represents the culmination of a process through which the U.S. government gradually expanded its influence over wildlife and natural resources, often at the expense of states’ rights and local control.6
A closer look reveals a more