Locust
Page 17
Serious outbreaks of two close relatives of the locust stifled whatever sigh of relief might have come with the demise of the Rocky Mountain locust. The migratory grasshopper, Melanoplus sanguinipes , and the redlegged grasshopper, Melanoplus femurrubrum, were waiting in the wings. With the curtain falling on the locust, these other grasshopper species rushed onto the stage. Minnesota’s Agricultural Experiment Station reported terrific infestations of the migratory grasshopper in the early 1890s, and farmers in western Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska battled grasshoppers at the turn of the century. In what seemed a weird act of insectan revenge, for the three years after Norman Criddle caught the last known Rocky Mountain locusts, farmers in Manitoba were inundated with grasshoppers.
Farmers in the Plains states barely had time to relish their scattered victories before the grasshoppers resurged in 1908 and persisted until 1912. And as grasshoppers were retreating in the United States, they were advancing again in western Canada, with a major outbreak lasting from 1912 to 1914. The two species that ravaged the farms of the Midwest were joined by others in Canada, including the two-striped grasshopper and the clearwinged grasshopper. Five years later, Kansans plowed thousands of miles of roadsides and fencerows to destroy grasshopper eggs. And when this campaign failed to control the outbreak, they applied nearly 7 million pounds of poison bait, including the “Criddle mixture,” to an area larger than the state of Delaware. Sporadic grasshopper damage was reported across the West throughout the 1920s.
Grasshoppers and drought devastated the Great Plains during the “Dirty Thirties,” and what the grasshoppers didn’t eat, the dust covered. In Missouri, the grasshopper damage from 1935 to 1938 was termed the “worst since 1874-76,” an allusion to the days of the Rocky Mountain locust. From 1938 to 1940 vast areas of the West were crawling with infestations of the migratory grasshopper. Some of these populations matured into locustlike swarms capable of traveling thirty miles or more a day. In the midst of this outbreak, New Mexico and Texas mobilized their National Guards to deliver poison bait to afflicted farmers and ranchers, echoing the role of the military as a means of provisioning agricultural communities sixty-five years earlier. Kansas alone lost $21 million worth of crops to the grasshoppers in a single year.
As damaging as these grasshopper infestations were, they paled in comparison to the psychological, sociological, political, and economic damage wrought by the Rocky Mountain locust. The grasshoppers were largely of local origin, and the swarms of migratory grasshoppers were only a pallid imitation of the cataclysmic inundations by the mighty locust. Because the intensity and scale of destruction by grasshoppers were more limited and the tools for pest management were better known (in large part as a result of the work of the U.S. Entomological Commission, as at least some of their methods were applicable to these insects), grasshopper infestations were less traumatic. Furthermore, agriculture was on a more stable footing, and established farms had a greater economic capacity to battle the grasshoppers and absorb losses than the homesteaders had just a few decades earlier. Finally, state and federal governments had developed rather sophisticated capacities for assessing and mobilizing resources during natural disasters. Although grasshoppers could not equal the locusts when it came to provoking fear and causing damage, there was enough similarity to exploit allusions to the old enemy in securing resources to battle the new foe.
The political motivation for the federal government to subsidize the control programs by providing poison bait harked back to the days of the Rocky Mountain locust. Some of the allusions were reminiscent in their language, crossing into biological hyperbole, such as the impassioned editorial in the Minneapolis Tribune:The grasshopper, numbered by billions, with an insatiable appetite, is crawling out of the sod of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana.
. . . Once he has wings he can mount thousands of feet into the air. He can fly with the winds hundreds of miles in all directions. He can come down in thick clouds on fields and strip them clean of vegetation in a few hours.
He can devour our billion-dollar crop, the first we have had in years. He can leave thousands of farmers without enough food for themselves and their livestock. Last year the Red Cross fed 40,000 farmers in the two Dakotas.
. . . This year the condition of the crops is excellent—either for the grasshoppers or the farmers. If we let the grasshoppers alone there will be no harvest, there will be more appeals to the Red Cross, more money asked from the Government, and stagnation throughout the Northwest.
A million and a half dollars will save our crop. A misinformed Congress neglected to make the necessary appropriation with which to buy poison bait. Congress can still remedy this disastrous mistake. Congress will do so if the Northwest will only speak its mind.
. . . If we do not take this precaution we have every prospect of bare fields, gaunt cattle, and pall of gloom over the land. Deserted farms, vacant stores, closed banks will greet the eye in every direction. And thousands of men and women, the backbone of our Government and the foundation of our institutions, will give way to despair.
Even the Secretary of Agriculture got into the act. Arthur Mastick Hyde was born in the midst of the Rocky Mountain locust’s grand finale and had served as the governor of Missouri. So perhaps Hyde can be forgiven for his letter to Congress in 1932 in which he allows his language to slip, referring to the notion that any control campaign should “poison the young locusts as they first emerge from the egg beds and before they have any opportunity to migrate from such areas in the fields.” Most of the rest of his letter refers to the insects as “grasshoppers” and suggests that it might be too late to act, but his use of the term locusts early in his message was surely a provocative linguistic tactic.
Within Congress, references to the locust plagues of fifty years earlier were even less subtle. Perhaps the most dramatic testimony was offered by Edward Thomas Taylor from Colorado. Serving in the House of Representatives for thirty-two years (no one from his own Democratic Party dared oppose him), Taylor carried great political weight in Congress. He authored the Taylor Grazing Act, which is the law that still governs livestock grazing on public lands. His personal tale, along with his enormous political will, undoubtedly influenced his fellow members of Congress in their decision to provide assistance in battling the grasshopper outbreak: “Mr. Speaker, like the gentleman from Texas, I had a sad personal experience with grasshoppers. When I was a small boy [Taylor was born in 1858] my parents located on the extreme frontier of northwestern Kansas, and for three years everything we planted was eaten by grasshoppers [almost certainly the Rocky Mountain locust]. We were compelled to practically walk out of that country, disheartened and completely bankrupt, so I know what this scourge is.”
To obscure matters even more, the migratory and redlegged grasshopper looks a lot like the Rocky Mountain locust. Although they don’t form the breathtaking swarms or reach the astounding densities, there can be a hundred or more per square yard, stretching across thousands of acres. In the early decades of the twentieth century, many agriculturalists assumed that the grasshopper infestations that devastated their crops were localized outbreaks of the locust. Even species utterly unlike the Rocky Mountain locust—at least to the eye of an entomologist—were confused with this species. In Minnesota, farmers were convinced that they were being overrun by the locust when the culprit was the Carolina grasshopper—a species that is dusty brown (rather than olive green), has jet-black hindwings (rather than colorless wings), and is twice the size of the Rocky Mountain locust. Utah farmers confused infestations of the clearwinged grasshopper, which does bear a very superficial resemblance to the Rocky Mountain locust, with their old nemesis.
Grasshopper problems—and federal subsidies for their control, rooted in the cultural memory of the locust plagues—have continued sporadically into the present. When I joined the entomology faculty at the University of Wyoming in 1986, grasshoppers were once again devastating western agriculture—and 20 million acres of i
nsecticide treatments did little to stem the tide. A grasshopper outbreak in 1998 encompassed 430 million acres of the West (an expanse ten times larger than New England or about the combined areas of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) and caused $500 million in damage. And the outbreak unfolding across the West at the turn of the twenty-first century once again released a flood of federal funds. So perhaps it is no wonder that people failed to note the passing of a locust, when its relatives were trying so valiantly, albeit less dramatically, to fill those big, empty shoes.
The social psychology of the news has changed little in the past century. Let’s say that this summer no hurricanes strike our shores. We wouldn’t expect a headline announcing, “Good News: No Killer Storms Yet.” Even if we went into early fall without a hurricane, it seems unlikely that their absence would galvanize the media. If there are no hurricanes with which to draw viewers and thereby sell advertising on the nightly news, surely there is an epidemic, a war, or a political scandal. Thus, it is hardly surprising that when locusts didn’t return to the farmlands of the Great Plains, the newspapers failed to proclaim the good news. The absence of locust swarms was noted in passing within a few agricultural reports. But even technical publications are reluctant to report what scientists refer to as negative results. Scientific journals don’t tend to publish papers that list a whole bunch of chemicals that won’t cause cancer, species that aren’t becoming extinct, or pests that aren’t outbreaking.
Even when the grasshoppers were newsworthy in their depredations, they had the cards stacked against them in terms of publicity. When the insects were booming, as in the early 1900s, rebellions, earthquakes, monopolies, and World War I became the crises du jour. In fact, grasshopper and locust outbreaks often correspond with other natural and economic disasters. These insects flourish during droughts. And crop failures may have precipitated, or at least exacerbated, economic depressions, especially during more agricultural times. Thus, reports of these insects were often moved aside for more compelling accounts of human suffering.
If hurricanes were to decline in frequency and severity, our National Weather Service would surely note the change. After all, we have a National Hurricane Center that employs a cadre of scientists to keep track of these storms, and they’d start getting nervous if we ran out of hurricanes. But with the collapse of the Rocky Mountain locust outbreak in the late 1870s, the coordinated national survey of the U.S. Entomological Commission dissolved as USDA entomologists turned their attention to other pests and the state entomologists returned to local problems. In short, it wasn’t anyone’s job to notice that the locusts weren’t still around. But this isn’t to say that various folks didn’t eventually catch on.
A Montana entomologist might have been the first to sound a note of suspicion in 1904, in reporting that he’d failed to collect a specimen in five years. In 1913, the Nebraska state entomologist added, “So far as our information goes, the true Rocky Mountain grasshopper did not occur anywhere in the state during the abnormal abundance of grasshoppers in the past four years.” At the same time, Melvin P. Somes, a rather peripatetic entomologist then working in Minnesota, became the first person to broach the possibility of extinction. He suggested that the Rocky Mountain locust, “is today apparently extinct, or practically so.”
The author of a 1917 bulletin from the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station took a rather more cautious stand, noting, “The Rocky Mountain locust, with its long wings and wonderful power of flight, is a thing of the past. Like the buffalo, another inhabitant of the same region, his millions have dwindled almost to extinction. We still see the buffalo in our parks and museums, but a Rocky Mountain locust would be a greater curiosity today than a buffalo.” The writer maintained that he’d kept a sharp lookout for this species in all his travels in the West since 1900 and had not seen a single one.
In the same year, Norman Criddle—unaware that he was likely the last human to see the Rocky Mountain locust—was also struggling to comprehend the locust’s vanishing act. He’d received a government appointment and funds for a laboratory a few years earlier, and he was quickly making his mark in the field of entomology. He wrote:There is somewhat of a mystery surrounding this insect at the present time which may, indeed, never be solved. We know that its breeding grounds once extended over a very wide area, much of this having been classed as permanent by Riley and others who investigated the plague at that time.
By now, Criddle hadn’t seen a locust for fifteen years, and it was starting to look as if Riley’s Permanent Zone was incredibly ephemeral.
Cognitive dissonance—the utter disbelief that a creature so abundant, so absolutely dominant on a continental scale could actually be gone—became the prevailing mind-set. The USDA reflected this uncertainty in its noncommittal position in 1927. The agency simply stated that the Rocky Mountain locust had “ceased to be a pest of any great importance.” In our hypothetical scenario involving hurricanes, the National Weather Service might similarly hedge its statements: “Tropical storms of hurricane intensity have, for some time, ceased to be significant weather events.” But government scientists were not the only ones reluctant to declare that events of such staggering proportions as locust plagues were safely relegated to history. Even in 1931, more than forty years after the last encounter with a locust swarm in his state, William W. Henderson, an entomologist from Utah, couldn’t bring himself to believe that this species was gone. He maintained that the disappearance was more a matter of muddled science than an ecological reality: “What has become of the old-time Rocky Mountain locust causing clouds in the sky several miles wide, 10 or 12 miles long, and thick enough to hide the sun? It is probably extant, if it were possible to solve the confusion associated with it.”
Norman Criddle died in 1933, still uncertain as to the fate of the Rocky Mountain locust. However, his inability to come to terms with the disappearance of this creature was echoed in expressions of ambivalence that prevailed into the 1950s. USDA scientists cautiously noted that there had been “no recurrence of the tremendous, devastating flights of the last century.” The foremost experts felt compelled to leave open the possibility that the Rocky Mountain locust was still lurking in a remote corner of the West. And such became the standard view in science.
From the turn of the last century to the turn of the present one, entomologists gradually accepted that the Rocky Mountain locust was not coming back. Today, they now openly and flatly assert that locust swarms are a thing of the past. If pushed, some might concede that a few individuals of the Rocky Mountain locust could be hiding out somewhere like an aging gang of bandits. But as a force of nature this species is a washed-up has-been with no possibility of returning to its former glory.
The history of the last 120 years leaves no doubt that the Rocky Mountain locust—at least, the ecological manifestation of this creature—is gone. The caveat here reveals a profound intuition about what is “real” in the natural world. It is as if the swarm or even the process of swarming, rather than the individual locusts within the swarm, constituted this remarkable species. This insight is counter to the material terms in which we usually conceive of the world. For example, we typically define a species as a bunch of individuals with the capacity to successfully interbreed. But this definition presumes the metaphysical truth of materialism. It equates being real with being made of matter, and the Rocky Mountain locust challenges this perception.
Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter, were the basis for reality. What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tallgrass prairie can be “saved” or even “restored.” Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills, and the living ebb and flow of the tallgrass prairies died with the plowing of the Gre
at Plains. What if we suggested that a thing is what it does? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was an immense, aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale.
If we choose to describe the locust as a process, there is no doubt that this species was extinct in the late 1800s. That is, its ecological role and biological activities ceased well before its last corporeal manifestation disappeared. This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate ever again in a way that we can recognize as being “them,” we understand that they are gone even before they are dead.
There is no question that the Rocky Mountain locust as a dynamic phenomenon disappeared a century ago. But biological existence is far more often transformed than destroyed. How many of us could see a gorgeous flitting butterfly and then identify the drab caterpillar from which it metamorphosed, or pass by the sandstone formations of the desert Southwest and recognize them as the resurrected seafloor of the Cretaceous? Although swarms of locusts no longer descend on our towns and farms, could the Rocky Mountain locust itself—the material entity—still exist, but in a form that we don’t readily recognize?
When Charles Riley witnessed clouds of locusts and Norman Criddle held the last known specimens, these eminent scientists did not imagine that the locust had a great secret. They knew that some insects could metamorphose from larva, to pupa, to adult. The other insects, including the grasshoppers, become gradually larger without any radical changes in form. A newly hatched grasshopper looks very much like a miniature version of the adult. It lacks wings, but most people would, with a bit of magnification, immediately recognize it as a “baby grasshopper.” Locusts, however, represent an entirely different capacity to change their form. This ability to transform their identity confused biologists for nearly 200 years—and cast our understanding of the Rocky Mountain locust’s identity and fate into disarray for much of the twentieth century.