THE FUTURE OF THE WILD

BEACON PRESS

Contents

INTRODUCTION IX
PART I  THINKING BIG
CHAPTER 1  A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS................................................3
CHAPTER 2  DO BIG THINGS RUN THE WORLD?........................................23
CHAPTER 3  SAVE SOME OF EVERYTHING.............................................46
PART II  SCIENCE AND COMMUNITY
CHAPTER 4  CONSERVATION IN EXURBIA: FLORIDA AND CALIFORNIA.....................71
CHAPTER 5  APPOINTMENT IN SONORA...............................................88
CHAPTER 6  THE NATIVE HOME OF HOPE.............................................108
CHAPTER 7  SAVE ENOUGH TO LAST: FLORIDA AND THE EVERGLADES.....................141
PART III  YELLOWSTONE AND THE BEST HOPE OF EARTH
CHAPTER 8  BLIND MEN AND ELEPHANTS.............................................175
CHAPTER 9  GUARDING THE GOLDEN GOOSE...........................................207
CONCLUSION.....................................................................229
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................234
NOTES..........................................................................236
INDEX..........................................................................257

Chapter One

Without enough wilderness America will change. Democracy, with its myriad personalities and increasing sophistication, must be fibred and vitalized by regular contact with outdoor growths-animals, trees, sun warmth and free skies-or it will dwindle and pale. WALT WHITMAN

A breeding pair of northern spotted owls requires roughly five thousand acres of old-growth forest. Protecting several hundred pairs-a bare minimum if the owls are to survive more than a century or two-means protecting a million acres. Beginning in the late 1980s, conserving a creature that needs so much room forced the federal government, and by extension the general public, to confront for the first time the realities of conservation across an entire region of the country, including public and private land, old and new protected areas, and all the places where people live and work.

The task came with a steep price and high political stakes. Read in sequence, the plans for protecting the spotted owl capture the slow dawning of a new idea. The first generation of plans protected thousands of acres, the next protected hundreds of thousands, and the last plans proposed protecting millions of acres of forest. The plans focused initially on individual pairs of owls, and gradually widened their scope to include the landscapes of which owls are merely the most famous representatives. Other species, particularly a small seabird called a marbled murrelet and five species of salmon, entered the fray.

At this time, few policymakers or land managers saw the ideas of conservation biology as important to their work, if they paid them any heed at all. The science was then just a few years old, though it had been evolving for two decades. No one incorporated the emerging scientific principles into any management plan for a national park, forest, or wildlife refuge, or in any plan to bring endangered species back from the brink.

The consequence of that oversight became clear once the northern spotted owl took the stage as one of the most famous species in the country, if not the world. This owl makes an unlikely revolutionary: an attractive but far from imposing bird, it stands about a foot and a half tall, weighs around two pounds, and has dark brown feathers and white markings. Scientists know it as Strix occidentalis caurina, one of three subspecies of spotted owls, with close relatives in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and in the desert Southwest, extending into Mexico along the Sierra Madre.

But enough description. None of that begins to explain why anyone outside of a handful of specialists and the dedicated and occasionally obsessive community of birdwatchers has ever heard of this rather nondescript bird. The spotted owl traces its enormous fame not to beauty but rather to rarity and to choosiness over where to build a nest: almost exclusively in the oldest forests in the Pacific Northwest. Those two characteristics brought science, law, politics, and economics together and transformed the spotted owl into a fulcrum on which modern conservation has turned.

The spotted owl embodies not only changes in the way scientists answer questions about how to protect endangered species, but also changes in the way communities confront the challenges to their lifestyles and traditional economies. The ripples from the spotted owl controversy continue to spread more than a decade after the owl itself left the front pages. Today, conservation requires us to think about individual species like spotted owls, but also to think far bigger, big enough to conserve huge stretches of land, only parts of which will fall into the national parks and other protected areas that have long been the foundation of conservation efforts.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE LAW

In 1988, the Forest Service adopted a management plan for the spotted owl within its jurisdiction. Environmental and industry groups read the plan and immediately sued, claiming it violated a number of federal laws. In March 1989, a federal district court judge, William L. Dwyer, who would become the judicial equivalent of sugar in the gas tank for the timber industry, issued a temporary injunction halting 135 timber sales in spotted owl habitat. A month later, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced its intent to list the spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

In response to the growing controversy, the four major land management agencies of the federal government-the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service-created a committee of scientists under the direction of Jack Ward Thomas, then chief research biologist at the Forest Service, to develop a scientifically credible strategy for the conservation of the spotted owl. This panel, called the Interagency Scientific Committee, and another federal effort that followed from it a few years later, called the Federal Ecosystem Management Assessment Team, made conservation biology part of the debate over how to manage public land, and made clear to the general public that if we were serious about conserving species like the spotted owl, then we had to start working on far broader scales than ever before.

In May 1990, the interagency committee proposed a plan for spotted owl management that would protect 5.3 million acres in large habitat conservation areas across seventeen national forests. The plan represented the most extensive application to date of the concepts of conservation biology to a real endangered species problem across a wide area. The committee report, widely known as the Thomas Report, put an important stamp of approval on a scientific approach to designing a system of conservation areas. The plan took another key step beyond simply protecting the woodland reserves. The land in between the reserves would have to be safe for the owls as well, and that meant no clear-cutting. No clear-cutting meant timber sales from the public forests would have to fall. Here science ran smack up against bred-in-the-bone traditions of the Forest Service, which saw providing trees for the sawmills-"getting out the cut" in agency lingo -as far and away its most important responsibility. The committee also broke with the common wisdom of the day by arguing that the preservation of the spotted owl was actually the wrong question; if we wanted to save the owl, Thomas and his colleagues said, we would have to expand our field of vision to include the old-growth forests that provided a home to the owls and thousands of other species, known and unknown.

In 1990, that amounted to a revelation, at least outside the still small community of conservation biologists. The timber industry, in stark contrast, envisioned a bizarre form of spotted owl conservation in which teams of biologists would capture pairs of owls and shuffle the birds around between patches of forest as the chain saws and bulldozers moved in behind them. Thus would spotted owls have become conservation refugees, adrift and homeless.

Science took a back seat to politics in the struggle over land use even after the Thomas Report, with all of its cutting-edge ideas. Report in hand, the Forest Service and its political bosses demonstrated the power of willful ignorance. The agency announced that some timber sales in spotted owl habitat fit the panel's guidelines and would proceed. Judge Dwyer thought otherwise. His ruling in a suit filed against the agency rang with tightly controlled judicial fury: "More is involved here than a simple failure by an agency to comply with its governing statute. The most recent violation of [the National Forest Management Act] exemplifies a deliberate and systematic refusal by the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service to comply with the laws protecting wildlife." The tongue-lashing continued: "The problem here has not been any shortcomings in the laws, but a simple refusal of administrative agencies to comply with them.... This invokes a public interest of the highest order: the interest in having government officials act in accordance with the law."

Congress and the land management agencies chose not to meet Judge Dwyer's challenge head on, but instead searched for creative ways around his ruling. They invoked the God Squad and the Gang of Four-the former a committee of agency heads, authorized under the Endangered Species Act, that can short-circuit protection of listed species if vital economic interests are at stake; the latter neither a cadre of Chinese communists nor a late 1970s punk band, but a group of scientists (including Thomas again) brought together for an independent assessment of federal forests in the Pacific Northwest. The Gang of Four (so named by a petulant timber industry spokesman likely hoping for a more malleable bunch) found that things were even worse than the original Thomas committee had surmised. Looking at more species than just the spotted owl, the scientists found that timber harvests would have to drop even further. The administration of the first President Bush simply ignored this inconvenient finding.

The Forest Service kept going before Judge Dwyer with new ploys to continue cutting as many trees as they wanted in spotted owl habitat, and His Honor kept tossing the agency out of his courtroom on its ear. The Forest Service's repeated forays into court became almost comical, despite serious issues of policy and science. "Boneheaded," pronounced the editorial page of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. "For bureaucratic intransigence and administrative ineptitude, it's hard to beat the U.S. Forest Service's record in handling the spotted-owl issue."

Finally, in the summer of 1992, Judge Dwyer issued a permanent injunction. He prohibited any timber sales in spotted owl habitat until the Forest Service fully complied with federal environmental law and developed a suitable plan to protect the owls. Loggers fumed about the injustice of it all, but the fundamental fact remained: the Forest Service could not cut a tree in spotted owl habitat until Judge Dwyer gave his approval, and he would not be easily swayed.

Just a few months after Judge Dwyer issued his injunction, some residents of the Applegate Valley in southwest Oregon saw the ruling as an opportunity. Environmental activist Jack Shipley reasoned that no one could fight over timber sales anymore, since there wouldn't be any more timber sales. So he invited some of his environmentalist friends to a potluck dinner. No smug victory celebration, the guest list also included the owners of local sawmills, as well as federal land managers. Shipley wanted them all to start thinking together about the whole watershed in which they lived. Not many people had considered things at this scale before.

A new organization called the Applegate Partnership emerged from the dinner at Shipley's house. The partnership adopted as an operating principle the slogan "Practice Trust-Them Is Us." Members even sported buttons with the word they with a red slash through it. Hokey, perhaps, but with a message: sawyers, activists, and agencies were in this together. The Applegate Partnership did not change the world, but it opened the door to collaboration between often conflicting segments of the valley's community and the federal government. Shipley and the others discovered they could work together, and they could begin to change the way government agencies made decisions.

* * *

Even where there are many diverse interests, as in the Applegate Valley, communities that have maintained or revitalized their social capital can still find common ground. In the United States, unfortunately, political trends can obscure the very existence of that common ground. Politicians have narrowed their perspectives at the same time that scientists have expanded theirs, with a single-minded focus on local control over land. This approach, usually associated with notions of states' rights or the county-supremacy movement-which makes the absurd claim that the federal government cannot enforce federal laws on federal land-represents the latest attempt to circumvent the major environmental laws. Opponents have been unable to weaken those laws substantially despite years of legal attacks and endless, overheated rhetoric, so they try an end run by turning decisions over to the states. Conservationists rightly worry that the end run might actually work, and thus usually oppose most efforts to shift control of natural resources to rural communities.

The conservationists' fear has deep roots in politics and passion; efforts to wrest control over the land from government have long reflected nothing other than a desire to exploit public resources for private gain. In the United States, this chutzpah goes back to 1872 and the creation of Yellowstone National Park, the point at which the federal government stopped trying to give all public land to the states (by and large, the states didn't want what was left in public hands by the mid-nineteenth century, because it was too dry and difficult to farm) and decided to keep some instead. The battle over who gets to use public land and for what purpose was joined and it has raged ever since, though more passionately at some times than others. In 1947, for example, the public land question became a national debate, largely thanks to the journalist and historian Bernard DeVoto. From his seat in the "Easy Chair" column in Harper's Magazine, DeVoto led a public campaign against the effort by ranchers and other private interests to seize control of western public land in the United States. The cry from the West, DeVoto said, was "get out and give us more money."

That cry has had remarkable staying power. Federal control over public land is as settled as a constitutional principle can be, but that did not prevent the outbreak of the Sagebrush Rebellion of the early 1980s. The rebels, who at one time counted President Ronald Reagan among their number, said they wanted to transfer federal land to the states. But the rebellion-really more of a fad-faded away quickly when it became clear that not even the rebels themselves truly believed their slogans. They did not want the government to hand over the land, they wanted the government to give them control of the land but not responsibility for it, and they wanted an increase in the fat subsidies they enjoyed for grazing their sheep and cows on the public range. Get out and give us more money.

The Sagebrush Rebellion gradually morphed into a more sinister form, the Wise Use movement. It is neither wise nor a movement. Movement suggests progress, but the Wise Users want at the very least to freeze the status quo, and preferably to move law and policy back to the early twentieth century, when private property and the interests of industry ruled the day. The groups at the forefront of the campaign, with warm and fuzzy names like the National Wetlands Coalition and the Marine Preservation Association, claim to be grassroots organizations, but for the most part they are wholly owned subsidiaries of mining companies and agribusinesses. Still, their message about returning power to the powerless certainly resonates with rural communities, a fact that conservationists ignore at their peril.

With these foes, no wonder the conservation movement clings to an adversarial approach that has indeed won many battles and will remain a vital tool for ensuring compliance with the law. But confronting industry and the Wise Use movement is not nearly sufficient, and, worse, it may blind conservationists to the real opportunities. In the United States, few rural economies still rely exclusively on logging, mining, and agriculture. Instead, their economic future depends on attracting diverse businesses and skilled workers. More and more often, that attraction rests on an intact environment, a basic component of creating communities where people want to live and raise their families. This fundamental shift, combined with the fresh insights of conservation science, offers an opportunity to heal the rift between rural communities and conservation.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from THE FUTURE OF THE WILD by JONATHAN S. ADAMS Copyright © 2006 by Jonathan S. Adams. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---