Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This book was another random selection off of the new books shelf. I must say our local librarians often feature books that I might not have otherwise discovered but definitely wanted to read.
This book is specifically about the Endangered Species Act - its history, and its role specifically in California, my home state. Because of this, it talks about a number of species that I care about, and that have caused significant political upheaval in the last couple of decades.
One of the strengths of this book is that it is nuanced - it doesn’t oversimplify issues the way politicians do, and goes beyond media soundbites to the intertwined complexities of the web of nature, human development, and more.
The author has quite a resume - he is currently a professor at UCSB, and has worked as a park ranger, environmental consultant, writer, and editor. He has also worked with Harvard and Stanford. This book is clearly something he cares deeply about, and it is thoroughly researched, and indeed feels like an insider perspective on species preservation.
The book is divided into two sections of four chapters each (plus an introduction and epilogue), and is split roughly between a history of endangered species preservation and the ESA in the first half, and case studies of four key California species and the efforts to preserve them. Three of the four species live in my home county, and the fourth affects water rights here, so this book is very on point for where I live.
I’ll just dive in with some quotes rather than try to summarize it beyond that. The key idea from the start is that since the enactment of the ESA, the focus has largely been on habitat preservation - which is a good thing. But it isn’t always effective, and there are other methods that are necessary in some cases (the Condor, for example.) Likewise, “habitat” isn’t always an easy concept to define, particularly in cases like the Kit Fox, which has made Bakersfield part of its habitat.
But, more than anything, nothing is as simple as it first seems - particularly if you rely on political talking points.
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 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.
Here in California in particular, although this is beyond the scope of the book, the right wing has used environmentalism as a scapegoat to avoid having to examine the deeper systemic issues that are causing the problems they identify. Just as an example, the GOP claims that the cure for California’s housing crisis is to simply eliminate environmental review, bulldoze more farmland and undeveloped areas, and expand further into wildfire territory. Heaven forbid we actually looked at decades old zoning regulations that prevent density in our urban areas.
Another thing I appreciated about this book is that it understands that law and science go together - each has influenced the other, and how we talk about the environment owes as much to law as to science.
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.
Also perceptive in this book is the problems raised by these use conflicts. Often, a side effect of protection is an uncompensated loss to indigenous peoples, or to lower income people who depend on hunting for sustenance, for example. But this too is complicated.
A series of authors, led by William Cronon, have argued that the modern American idea of wilderness is based on a peculiar and problematic cultural history that fetishizes primeval nature over the places where most people live and obscures the diverse human values and activities that have helped produce all contemporary cultural landscapes. Numerous researchers in the interdisciplinary subfield of political ecology have adopted postcolonial and neoliberal development theories to show how, in economically poor but ecologically rich regions of the world, nature reserves have often served as a form of enclosure that privileges the environmental objectives of wealthy northern and western countries while making it more difficult for local people to access scarce natural resources. In response, conservationist biologists have defended their work and rethought their approaches. Nevertheless, scholarly debates about protected areas have often devolved into contests pitting ecological protection against social justice - a dichotomy that drastically oversimplifies the issues.
And then, there is the reason this book focuses on California. People outside our state tend to misunderstand it more often than not. For example, despite the fact that one in every eight Americans lives in California, we are seen as “the Real America versus California” - which is ludicrous on its face. Nobody is more American than Californians - we embody the melting pot, and everything from agriculture to nature preserves and all in between. California is far more than Los Angeles and San Francisco, and has a lot more nature than people imagine.
Every state now has listed species. Yet none offers a richer ecological context in which to study endangered species than California. This state has a greater diversity of plant and animal species than any other. It has the second-largest number of endangered species - more than three hundred as of 2012 - after Hawaii. It also has by far the largest number of species at risk of becoming endangered in the future, with at least 50 percent of its vertebrate fauna falling into this ominous category.
It is difficult to explain to non-natives just how species diverse California is. (There is a map in the book, and most of CA is at the top of the diversity chart.) For example, one of my favorite places in the world is Pinnacles National Park - and it has more than 400 species of bees just within its borders.
The opening chapter is all about the extinction of the Grizzly within California. The bear is literally on our state flag, and was a huge part of a certain part of our history. Scientists now believe the California population was its own subspecies - the Chaparral Bear - and now it is gone.
I was fascinated to read the stories of attempts to capture one alive - plenty took place on Mt. Piños, which is a place I have a long history with. As a child, that was our summer camping spot (still is!), and I lived in my late teens on its northern slope. These days, it is difficult to imagine giant bears there - although there are plenty of smaller Black Bears.
Also interesting is the fact that these bears actually were more common in the coastal mountains than the Sierra Nevada. The town of Los Osos - near Morro Bay on the central coast - was named because it had a huge population of Grizzlies.
This chapter also contains a passage about the attempts to preserve declining game numbers (Grizzlies included) in the 19th century. Unsurprisingly, some pretty ugly American traditions reared their heads.
Opinions differed about what had caused the decline of valuable species. Some observers recognized that the causes were numerous and diverse: hunting, development, pollution, the introduction of exotic species, and other factors had transformed the state’s land and waterscapes and reduced the populations of many important fish and game species. Other commentators grasped for simpler and uglier answers. California had attracted immigrants from around the world who sought work in resource-based industries and provided convenient scapegoats for disgruntled whites who were only a generation or two from their own immigrant roots. Chinese and other East Asians often took the blame for over-fishing, while Italians and other southern Europeans received criticism for overhunting.
After these historical stories, the book turns to the roots of the conservationist movement. It is difficult to summarize this - there is a lot of detail, and a lot of names. Some of the books I have reviewed on this blog are mentioned along with their authors: E. O. Wilson and Aldo Leopold. The Berkeley Circle was particularly influential, and I found that history to be quite fascinating.
What is perhaps most remarkable about the Berkeley circle’s work during the Progressive Era is how much it anticipated future developments in conservation science and environmental ethics. This is not to say that the group’s members were somehow ahead of their time - they were very much creatures of it. Yet their story challenges, or at least complicates, the widespread belief that many features of contemporary conservation, including concern for nongame and uncharismatic endangered species, did not emerge until the second half of the twentieth century. By 1915 the Berkeley circle’s members had developed an intellectual foundation for what, over the next two decades, with the addition of a strong focus on habitat management, would develop into a comprehensive vision for wildlife science and conservation backed by almost every major ethical rationale that supports the work of conservation biologists today.
I also want to commend the author for including the many women who were involved in this effort. Annie Alexander gets quite a bit of attention, and rightfully so. In this connection, I also recommend The Girl Explorers by Jane Zanglein, which focuses on a plethora of women from this era who participated in exploration and science.
Chapter three is all about the legal landscape. I don’t have any pithy quotes to offer, but as a lawyer, I found the history to be quite interesting.
It is difficult to imagine now, in an era when the Republican party is engaged in a scorched earth (literally) assault on conservation and environmentalism, but back before I was born, Richard Nixon actually enacted a number of environmental laws - and they were bipartisan, uncontroversial at the time. Not only was the EPA established, but the ESA passed unanimously in the Senate. Imagine that happening today.
Between 1964 and 1980, Congress passed twenty-two major pieces of environmental legislation. These laws introduced regulatory schemes, as in the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act; resource management programs, as in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act; funding mechanisms, such as the Land and Water Conservation Fund; and administrative procedural mandates, as in the National Environmental Policy Act. Congressional action also resulted in the establishment of new federal agencies, including the Council on Environmental Quality, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
It is just astonishing - these have greatly contributed to the quality of life we enjoy, with far cleaner air and water, and more sustainable development. To see one party doing its best to demolish this progress and take us back to unconstrained pollution, exploitation, and destruction is so disheartening. The American Right is not conservative at all - just reactionary and obsessed with endless profits.
Related to this is a foundational belief about human existence as part of nature - a truth that seems so self-evident I cannot understand why so many refuse to believe it.
Unlike most environmental laws, it took an explicitly ethical approach to wild nature. The conference committee’s report on the bill called for “a certain humility” among humans who had become the “custodians” of the planet’s species and ecosystems. “Like it or not,” the authors concluded, “we are our brothers’ keepers, and we are also keepers of the rest of the house.”
This, to me, is a core Christian value. The passage in Genesis did not give humans the right or the mandate to exploit nature, but to care for it. Unfortunately, the Evangelical tradition these days sees itself in the end times, so why not fuck the planet up as soon as possible? God will just give as a new one soon anyway. That’s beyond disgusting, and it is a significant reason that young people are leaving religion. Nothing like the older generations openly shitting the beds of young people to make them distrust you and your beliefs…
One particularly interesting idea in this chapter is that of the Habitat Conservation Plan - essentially a way to get approval for development by setting aside habitat elsewhere. This is a staple of environmental law these days, but it really got going in the 1990s. I note that in 1995, the largest HCP was created by none other than Bakersfield.
After all this history, the book looks at specific conservation experiences. The first is about my beloved California Condor. Regular readers of the blog know how much I love these goofy, ugly birds. They were also one reason I am a conservationist today: they were proof that extinctions weren’t just things that happened in the past.
The chapter opens with an excerpt of a Mary Oliver poem, which I have to quote in full.
Vultures
Like large dark
lazy
butterflies they sweep over
the glades looking
for death,
to eat it,
to make it vanish,
to make of it the miracle:
resurrection. No one
knows how many
they are who daily
minister so to the grassy
miles, no one
counts how many bodies
they discover
and descend to, demonstrating
each time the earth’s
appetite, the unending
waterfalls of change.
No one
moreover,
wants to ponder it,
how it will be
to feel the blood cool,
shapeliness dissolve.
Locked into
the blaze of our own bodies
we watch them
wheeling and drifting, we
honor them and we
loathe them,
however wise the doctrine,
however magnificent the cycles,
however ultimately sweet
the huddle of death to fuel
those powerful wings.
The story of the return of the Condors to the skies is a great one, and I won’t try to tell it better than the author. A key point is that habitat conservation was not sufficient to save the Condor. It required a host of other interventions including captive breeding and ongoing veterinarian care. Its continued survival will depend in part on the banning of lead ammunition, as the leading cause of Condor death remains lead poisoning.
The second featured animal is the Mojave Desert Tortoise. These live in the desert, obviously, but their evolutionary history is more complicated. The desert we have now is fairly recent. It used to be wetter, and that meant more oases, more native grasses, and better food supplies. Several factors led to the change. A natural change in the climate after the last ice age was one, but also, overgrazing diminished grasses, humans hunted the megafauna (particularly sloths in this area) to extinction before Europeans arrived, and climate change is now making the area even hotter and dryer.
This, unfortunately, has all combined to make the extensive habitat preservation (which is indeed impressive) of limited effectiveness in stopping the population decline. The book discusses all of the nuance around this, and it is worth a read.
The third animal featured is the San Joaquin Kit Fox. Mention that animal to anyone here in Bakersfield, and expect an unexpected response.
Much has been done to preserve habitat in the foothills, but that habitat is fragmented, and it is now believed that necessary genetic mixing is not happening like it should.
But.
Well, the thing is, the Kit Fox seems somewhat uninterested in sticking to its unspoiled habitat. Instead, it has decided that suburban Bakersfield is a fine place to live, and if you hang around here long enough, you will undoubtedly see one. There are several hundred foxes living here in Bakersfield.
In fact, a friend just posted a picture of one near her office this very morning.
Yes, they really are this adorable. And this fearless.
Kit foxes live different life-styles on rangelands than in cities. On the Carrizo Plain, they live in earthen dens, keep watch for predators, and hunt for kangaroo rats and Jerusalem crickets. In Bakersfield they scamper around relatively safe from coyotes, den in storm drains under freeway embankments, and rear their pups on plush green fairways.
True story: my wife lived with her grandparents in the local Del Webb planned senior neighborhood while she went to college. When we were dating, a lot of evenings were spent walking the fairways of the golf course after dark. I can neither confirm nor deny that we might have made out in one of the bathrooms a time or two. But those magical twilight hours were also when the Kit Foxes came out. We would see them all the time - they loved that golf course and still do.
The final animal is one that is in the news constantly it seems these days: the Delta Smelt. And the Smelt has become both a totem of wetland protection and an effigy of environmental overreach, depending on which political party you talk to. At stake is a portion of California’s most precious natural resource: water.
Trying to explain the history of California water wars to outsiders is an impossible task anyway, but it is doubly impossible when dealing with a right winger who thinks they know everything because they saw a Fox News report on it.
I had this discussion with a former friend, who I later cut ties with after he said some appallingly racist stuff in connection with Breonna Taylor - I have a line, and this was way over it. But before that, I was already frustrated with his refusal to actually educate himself about issues that he was grossly ignorant about. He came from a Southern state, where water is relatively plentiful, and was ignorant about nearly everything he was so confident he knew. You know, the usual right-wing Duning Krueger stuff.
(Such as the fact that Los Angeles has its own government water utility, just like places all around the US including many red state areas.)
In this connection, repeating the talking points about how much of CA’s water allocation is for “environmental” use, was particularly problematic. Most of “environmental” water in CA is actually in Wild and Scenic Rivers in the northwestern part of the state - rivers which have never been a part of the water grid.
But, because Fox News and some loud GOP demagogues said that we could solve California’s chronic lack of irrigation water by just letting the smelt go extinct, he was sure it was true. It isn’t. Let’s take a look at a few of the factors. First, the Sacramento Delta is the largest estuary on the West Coast, covering some 700 square miles. It is an important wetland to far more species than the smelt.
Some water still flows all the way through the delta. But exactly how much freshwater reaches the ocean instead of being diverted upstream for urban or agricultural use has become the subject of an epic battle. And for good reason. Over the past 150 years, the delta has become the nexus of California’s water control and distribution infrastructure: a vast network of levees, canals, aqueducts, pipes, and pumping stations operated by the state and federal governments, local irrigation districts, and hundreds of private users. As much as 70 percent of the runoff that enters the delta, much of which has already flowed through farms and cities, is diverted again for further use, some of it as far south as Los Angeles. This intensively engineered and increasingly fragile system serves some twenty-five million people and five million acres of irrigated farmland.
But, there is a HUGE issue that the press tends to misunderstand and GOP demagogues intentionally ignore.
When this issue first hit the news, and the Republicans started screaming that environmentalists were “putting fish before people,” various studies had determined that actually, 75 percent of the restrictions weren’t even due to environmental concerns - they were due to a lack of sufficient precipitation.
Yes, California has cycles of drought and abundance - and these are now becoming more extreme on both ends due to climate change. But also, there is a human problem that has created an unsustainable situation.
For decades, water managers have been - to put it nicely - overly optimistic about water supplies.
Water managers were making rosy projections of future water supplies, which encouraged private investment and fueled even more demand; this lead to further promises and provided a rationale for additional projects to develop more supply. By 2008 surface water contracts on the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems totaled about 8.4 times the average streamflow. Only in extraordinarily wet years, when demand for long-distance deliveries declined anyway, did the CVP and the SWP have the capacity to meet their contractual obligations.
Let that sink in for a moment.
When you promise more than EIGHT TIMES the water you have on average, of course you won’t be able to deliver. And then of course customers will be pissed at you, and look for a scapegoat. Politicians will be more than happy to find one for you - or at least a scapefish.
But the underlying problem still remains: there isn’t enough water to satisfy the unrealistic promises.
You can’t fix that with any amount of environmental deregulation. The water just isn’t fucking THERE.
But you can get votes that way, and fool willfully ignorant people into believing you.
The thing is, the last thing the Delta needs is more deregulation. As things stand today, only New Orleans is at a greater risk for catastrophic flooding than Sacramento - California’s capital. But our levees can’t get funding, so it is only a matter of time before the Delta reconfigures itself, likely at the expense of not just farmland but of urban areas as well.
This issue is a reminder that, as Gregg Easterbrook once noted, if there were simple and easy solutions to seemingly intractable problems, someone would already have implemented them. Water - and by corollary, agriculture and people - is a “wicked” problem here in California - there is no solution to the fact that we have less water than we prefer to use. Sustainable use of water, particularly in an era of climate change, is going to require hard choices, multiple approaches - and in the end, everyone has to use less water.
As I noted earlier, a strength of this book is its nuance, and its refusal to accept pat answers. The author’s experience on multiple sides of these issues helps him explore the difficulties we know, and anticipate the need for flexibility as we learn more.
It’s a good book for anyone who cares about California wildlife, conservation, or just likes big bears.
***
My one complaint:
Why are publishers going with these smallish yet widely spaced sans serif fonts for so many books? They make the books harder to read, and cause headaches for those of us with farsightedness - despite our glasses. There is nothing wrong with the good old serif fonts that have proven easy and comfortable to read. There is no reason to fix what wasn’t broken.
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