by Jon Mooallem
5. THE LIFT
Daniel J. Cox’s video of the starving cubs is, as of this writing, still posted on his Web site, naturalexposures.com. It is worth watching. Thanks to him for sharing the video with me and for discussing such a sensitive subject.
Information about Manitoba’s Polar Bear Alert Program comes from Bob Windsor and Daryll Hedman at Conservation Manitoba and a video about the program produced by Polar Bears International.
The “Cold” episode of The Martha Stewart Show aired on the Hallmark Channel on December 6, 2010. It was quite good. The show is no longer on the air.
PART TWO: BUTTERFLIES
6. THE MIDDLE OF A HAIRCUT
While learning about the Lange’s metalmark, and butterflies more generally, I was lucky to find a number of preternaturally patient teachers. I was also lucky that these men and women usually happened to be a lot of fun to spend time with. I’m especially grateful to Jana Johnson, Louis Terrazas, Jerry Powell, Richard Arnold, Travis Longcore, and Liam O’Brien. Liam’s influence in particular extended far beyond the butterfly portion of the book, shaping my ideas about all conservation. His motto—“I just want to be part of a generation that tries”—may as well be the motto of this book.
Piecing together the history of Antioch Dunes, in this chapter and those later on, was not easy. Jerry Powell and Richard Arnold were incredibly helpful, in addition to being authorities on the Lange’s itself, and both looked over sections of the manuscript, pointing out mistakes and pushing me toward more precise descriptions. I also benefited from conversations with the late Alice Howard, a champion for native plants throughout California, who worked at the dunes alongside Arnold, and Chris Nagano and David Kelly at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Secondary sources I consulted include several revisions of Fish and Wildlife’s recovery plan for the Lange’s; the agency’s most recent “5-Year Review: Summary and Evaluation” for the three endangered species at the dunes, dated June 2008; “Taking Refuge,” by Matthew Bettelheim in the January 2005 issue of Bay Nature Magazine; Richard Arnold and Alice Howard, “The Antioch Dunes—Safe at Last?” Fremontia 8 (1980); Jerry Powell’s unpublished study, “Changes in the Insect Fauna of a Deteriorating Riverine Sand Dune Community During 50 Years of Human Exploitation”; Antioch by the Antioch Historical Society (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005); Looking Back: Tales of Old Antioch and Other Places by Earl Hohlmayer (Visalia: Jostens Printing and Publishing Division, 1991); and J. B. Roof, “In Memoriam: The Antioch Dunes,” The Four Seasons, December 3 (1969).
Basic info about the Lange’s metalmark, both here and in later chapters, comes largely from Richard A. Arnold and Jerry A. Powell, “Apodemia mormo langei,” in Ecological Studies of Six Endangered Butterflies (Lepidoptera, Lycaenidae: Island Biogeography, Patch Dynamics, and the Design of Habitat Preserves) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), a book adapted from Arnold’s dissertation.
7. SHIFTING BASELINES
Recently, Liam O’Brien built a Web site, sfbutterfly.com, a great resource for anyone who wants to learn more, and get excited about, the butterflies of the San Francisco Bay Area. I also learned about the region’s butterflies from Arthur Shapiro at the University of California at Davis, and an undated and unpublished article Shapiro sent me called “Urban Survivors: San Francisco Butterflies Today,” by H. V. Reinhard. The French lawyer I mention was named Pierre Joseph Michel Lorquin.
I learned more about Hans Hermann Behr, James Cottle, and the butterfly scene of turn-of-the-century San Francisco from stories in the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Call. These include “A Doctor’s Career,” Morning Call, October 1, 1893; “The Butterfly: Something About the Gaudy Ephemera,” by Charles Belknap, San Francisco Chronicle, November 2, 1890; and “By Day He Catches Burglars; By Night He Catches Bugs,” San Francisco Sunday Call, February 20, 1910. I also read Behr’s essay “Changes in the Fauna and Flora of California,” in the Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences (1888) and “Butterflies—Try and Get Them,” by Laurence Ilsley Hewes in the May 1936 issue of National Geographic. James Cottle’s memoir is called “On the Wing—a Retrospect,” and was published in The Pan Pacific Entomologist 4 (1928). Two histories by Robert Michael Pyle were also valuable: “Conservation of Lepidoptera in the United States,” Biological Conservation 9 (1976) and “A History of Lepidoptera Conservation, with Special Reference to Its Remingtonian Debt,” Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 49 (1995).
Harry Lange recounted the day he caught Xerces in the Presidio in “Saying Goodbye,” by Mark Jerome Walters in the December 1998 edition of National Wildlife. Thanks to Ed Ross, the entomologist who was with Lange that day, for meeting with me. I also learned about Lange from Hannah J. Burrack, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, who’d interviewed many of his colleagues for a University of California, Davis, symposium in his honor, and from “Harry’s Just Wild About Battling Bugs,” by Art German in the Sacramento Bee, January 28, 1993.
The term “shifting baselines syndrome” originated in Daniel Pauly, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baselines Syndrome of Fisheries,” TREE 10 (1995). My other sources on the subject include Daniel Pauly et al., “Fishing Down Marine Food Webs,” Science 279 (1998); and Karen A. Bjorndal and Alan B. Bolten, “From Ghosts to Key Species: Restoring Sea Turtle Populations to Fulfill their Ecological Roles,” Marine Turtle Newsletter 100 (2003).
Peter J. Kahn Jr.’s writing on environmental generational amnesia is outright revelatory. See his book Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), and “Children’s Affiliations with Nature: Structure, Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia,” in Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural and Evolutionary Investigations, eds. Peter H. Kahn Jr. and Stephen R. Kellert (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 93–116.
To learn about rewilding, I read Josh Donlan, “Re-wilding North America,” Nature 436, August 18, 2005, and C. Josh Donlan et al., “Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Agenda for Twenty-First Century Conservation,” The American Naturalist 168 (2006). The letters from the public—“colossal asshat” and so forth—are quoted in C. Josh Donlan and Harry W. Greene, “NLIMBY: No Lions in My Backyard,” in Restoration and History: The Search for a Usable Environmental Past, ed. Marcus Hall (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 293–305.
8. OUR VANISHING WILDLIFE
Thanks to Dé Mackinnon, my mother-in-law, for sending me the newspaper clip about turtles causing trouble at JFK. I can’t cite the specific article, however, because, not realizing its significance at the time, I threw it out.
I read about sea turtles in Columbus’s time in Wilcove’s The Condor’s Shadow, 154, which relays the 660 million estimate. The subject is also covered in Bjorndal and Bolten’s “From Ghosts to Key Species” paper. I read about bears ruining Internet connections in “For Idaho and the Internet, Life in the Slow Lane,” by Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, September 13, 2011.
Other good accounts of early American wildlife can be found in Peter Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America (New York: Viking, 1959) and Jennifer Price’s essay collection Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Details about Martha’s posthumous flight to San Diego come from newspaper stories about the trip and from James Dean, at the Smithsonian, who I also thank for a fun behind-the-scenes tour.
Details about buffalo in this section come from Dehler’s “An American Crusader”; Barrow’s Nature’s Ghosts, 113–20, which does a good job of framing Hornaday’s effort in the context of other conservation; and William Temple Hornaday’s own book-length report, The Extermination of the American Bison, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1889 and reprinted by the Smithsonian Press in 2002. The account of buffalo charging into a moving train is in Richard Irving Dodge, The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants (New York City: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), 121–22. The “rat
e of extermination” quote comes from “A Mighty Herd Has Gone,” Washington Post, April 15, 1889.
Gregory Dehler’s dissertation on Hornaday, “An American Crusader,” was the key source for me as I tried to understand the man’s life and work. In addition, I read Hornaday’s The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations (New York: Scribners, 1922); Thirty Years War for Wild Life: Gains and Losses in the Thankless Task (New York: Scribners, 1931); and Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation, cited previously. I also drew from Hornaday’s speech, “Last Call for Game Salvage,” published in Proceedings of the North American Wildlife Conference Called by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1936).
The truth is—if it’s not already obvious—that I got a little obsessed with Hornaday. I spent many hours reading old newspaper stories about him, primarily in the New York Times and Washington Post. His complaints about litter at the zoo, for example, were published as “Director of Zoo Makes Protest,” New York Times, May 28, 1908, and he remembered “Dohong,” the philosophizing orangutan, in “Dr. William T. Hornaday, King Among Beasts, Tells of the Great Animals He Has Known,” Washington Post, November 22, 1908. Hornaday’s chart, in which the beaver scores 100 for “Original Thought,” was published in The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals, 41.
The historian Frank Graham describes Hornaday as being written out of the history of the environmental movement in Man’s Dominion (New York: M. Evans & Company, 1971), 207. Hornaday’s unpublished memoir, which I quote from, is titled Eighty Fascinating Years, and part of the William Temple Hornaday Papers at the Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, New York. Details about his funeral were pulled from Dehler’s dissertation and “Notables Attend Hornaday Rites,” in the March 10, 1937, edition of the New York Times.
Much later, when I was done writing about Hornaday but still often found myself fishing through newspaper archives for stories about him anyway, I found one called “Dead Curator Calls Upon Live Ones to Preserve Bison Family He Slew,” by Paul Sampson in the Washington Post, July 23, 1957. The article explains that the Smithsonian had recently dismantled Hornaday’s taxidermy buffalo group—the one he assembled after his hunt in Montana. Workmen discovered a rusty metal box buried in the exhibit’s fake ground. Inside the box was a note that Hornaday had written to his successors at the museum. “When I am dust and ashes I beg you to protect these specimens from deterioration and destruction,” it said.
For estimates of the number of insect species, and their ecological contributions, I relied on Scott Hoffman Black and D. Mace Vaughan, “Endangered Insects,” in Vincent H. Resh and Ring T. Cardé, eds., The Encyclopedia of Insects, volume 2 (San Diego: Academic Press, 2009), 320–24. To learn about the modern history of insect conservation—or the lack of insect conservation—I read “The Danger of Deception: Do Endangered Species Have a Chance?” Scott Hoffman Black’s written testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Natural Resources Oversight Hearing, May 21, 2008, and the two historical studies, cited previously, by Robert Michael Pyle.
My discussion of the Hutcheson Memorial Forest and the assumption that “what nature needs most is for people to leave it alone” owes a great debt to Holly Doremus’s brilliant paper “The Endangered Species Act: Static Law Meets Dynamic World,” in the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 32 (2010). Fortunately, I met Holly when I was just starting this book; it was exciting, and encouraging, to discover that she was asking a lot of the same questions and already had a few very compelling answers. I’m also grateful to her for lending a critical eye to several sections of the manuscript.
Additional information about the Hutcheson Memorial Forest is drawn from Daniel Botkin, “Adjusting Law to Nature’s Discordant Harmonies,” Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum 7 (1996): 29–31; and “The Woods of Home,” by Lincoln Barnett in the November 8, 1954, issue of Life magazine. Thanks also to Gordon Pratt, the lepidopterist who told me, “We can’t just throw up a fence and think everything’s going to go back to how it used to be”—for helping me better understand the butterfly’s recovery.
To reconstruct the story of Humphrey the Whale, I spoke with Bernie Krause, who wrote about the rescue in his book Into a Wild Sanctuary: A Life in Music and Natural Sound (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1998), 107–28; Jean Takekawa of the Fish and Wildlife Service; and Wendy Tokuda, a CBS television reporter who covered the rescue. I benefited especially from a long interview with Diana Reiss, who writes about Humphrey in The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 1–22.
I also read coverage of the whale rescue in the Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek, and New York Times. Coverage by ABC News and Nightline was available on YouTube. The Great Whale Rescue: An American Folk Epic (New York: Pharos Books, 1986), by Tom Tiede with Jack Findleton, gives a valuable firsthand account. Findleton described his “sensitive feelings” in “Hooked on Rescue: Emotions of U.S. Rode With Whale,” by Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1985.
The Fish and Wildlife Service detailed damage done by crowds to Antioch Dunes in the refuge’s 1985 annual narrative.
9. WITHOUT CHANGE, THERE WOULD BE NO BUTTERFLIES
Thanks, again, to Jana Johnson at the Butterfly Project at Moorpark College, and to her students, for letting me throw questions at them while we all stared at butterflies.
For more about the effects of conserving top predators, see James A. Estes et al., “Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth,” Science 333 (2011). I read about the net worth of bats in a March 31, 2011, press release from the U.S. Geological Survey, “Bats Worth Billions to Agriculture: Pest-control Services at Risk,” which summarized “Economic Importance of Bats in Agriculture,” by Justin G. Boyles et al., in Science 332 (2011).
Robert Michael Pyle writes about the “extinction of experience” in Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001), 140–53.
Information about Rudi Mattoni and the Palos Verdes blue comes from conversations with many people, especially, of course, Rudi himself. On the rediscovery of the Palos Verdes blue, also see “A Butterfly Flutters Back from the Brink,” by Marla Cone in the Los Angeles Times, March 30, 1994. The Palos Verdes blue’s initial, presumed, baseball-related demise is detailed in “Palos Verdes Blue Butterfly May Never Again Do Its Aerial Ballet,” by Ann Johnson in the April 7, 1985, Los Angeles Times. Also useful were “Mister Butterfly,” a profile of Rudi by Nick Green for the (Torrance, CA) Daily Breeze, September 27, 1999, and “The Importance of Farming Butterflies,” by Ashley Morton in the May 20, 1982, issue of New Scientist.
I never had a chance to see Defense Fuel Support Point, San Pedro, for myself but based my description in large part on Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich’s intriguing essay “Invertebrate Conservation at the Gates of Hell,” in Wings: Essays on Invertebrate Conservation, published by the Xerces Society, Spring 2008. I gathered details about the military’s role in conservation from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s report, “The State of the Birds 2011: Report on Public Lands and Waters.”
Jana wrote about her relationship to the Palos Verdes blue in the November 2007 issue of the inspirational magazine Guideposts, in an essay titled “Sanctuary.” Mattoni’s paper about the Sonoran blues at San Gabriel Wash is “An Unrecognized, Now Extinct, Los Angeles Area Butterfly (Lycaenidae),” Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera 4 (1989).
The city attorney of Colton, California, is quoted disparaging the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly as a “maggot” in “Rare Fly Buzzes Into Debate on Jobs,” by Sandra Stokley, the (Riverside, CA) Press-Enterprise, May 12, 1997. Mattoni is quoted disparaging politicians in “Developers Wish Rare Fly Would Buzz Off,” by William Booth, Washington Post, April 4, 1997.
Looking into the perceived, and actual, kinship between kids and animals, I read Kahn and Ke
llert’s Children and Nature; Kellert’s Value of Life; Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Gene Myers, The Significance of Children and Animals: Social Development and Our Connections to Other Species; and, most important, Gail F. Melson, Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Other details in this section are drawn from Alie H. Kidd and Robert M. Kidd, “Reactions of Infants and Toddlers to Live and Toy Animals,” Psychological Reports 61 (1987), and Maarten H. Jacobs, “Why Do We Like or Dislike Animals?” Human Dimensions of Wildlife 14 (2009). It was the Kidds, moreover, who affirmed that children who don’t care about animals are normal—a detail mentioned in Myers, Children and Animals, 177. (I am quoting Myers’s paraphrasing of their conclusion.) The footnote on children, fear, and biophilia draws on Judith H. Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians, “The Ecological World of Children,” in Kahn and Kellert’s Children and Nature. Research about animal dreams is summarized by Paul Shepard in The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996), 74–76.
The surveys of children by Stephen Kellert and Miriam Westervelt were published by the Government Printing Office in 1983 as Children’s Attitudes, Knowledge, and Behavior Toward Animals. Kellert also describes this research in his book Value of Life, 44–47, which I quote from here as well.
The children’s book Humphrey the Lost Whale: A True Story was written by Wendy Tokuda and Richard Hall and illustrated by Hanako Wakiyama (Torrance: Heian International Publishing Company, 1986). The New York Times article that lays out the advantages of teddy bears as compared to dolls is “The Baby Doll of All Nations,” February 6, 1909.
10. THE SOUP STAGE
Information about Pokémon founder Satoshi Tajiri comes from what appears to be the only in-depth interview he’s ever done: a Q&A with Tim Larimer for Time Asia, published on November 22, 1999. Thanks to J. C. Smith at the Pokémon Company International for answering some questions via e-mail, and to my nephew Sam Goldblat for making me curious about Pokémon in the first place.