EXPLOITATION

"I will not rest until every last predator in New Mexico is dead." -Aldo Leopold as a Young Man



I just got out from my Wildlife Conservation class. The lecture was about the history of wildlife conservation. Conservation since white settlers came to America has been non-existent.

If you never said your goodbyes to the estimated 631 North American species that have gone extinct since 1641, here are some of the big ones you might want to lament.

Passenger Pigeon: This bird had the largest flocks of any bird, of all time. Now it is extinct, the last one died in captivity in 1914. The loss of this billions strong population had tremendous ecological impacts. Nutrient cycling, seed dispersal and predator influences must have changed dramatically. It is because they were hunted for food. In 1850, one New York merchant was selling 18,000 pigeons a day. Yum!

Bison: No one even wanted to use them for anything. They were killed and then left on the plains, sometimes their skulls were piled thirty feet high. In wildlife conservation there are two knids of control over populations, direct and indirect. Direct control is shooting animals. Indirect control is changing their habitat. While the extermination of the bison was in fact direct control of the animal itself, it was really indirect control of the population of Native Americans who depended on them.

Cod: When the first ships sailed to Newfoundland, they were rocked by the battering of millions of Cod. Now the fishing season on them has been closed since 1994 and they are slated for extinction. In Cape Cod, it was said you could walk across the water on the heads of the fish. No more. All the fisheries of Earth are decaying. I mean that in a mathematical sense. Exponential decay. Which means its slowing down now that most of the damage is done.

Whales: The main pattern of exploitation in Human history has been that big tasty animals are the first to die. This was certainly the case with whales. But as each whale died out, the next largest became the most profitable. So they killed that one too. Poor whales.

Predators: Grizzly Bears and wolves were ravaged and that story has been told many times. They have dissappeared from most of their range. Where ever there are people, predators die.

I'm glad Aldo Leopold changed his tune, and became the father of conservation. Hopefully one day his writings on the land ethic will be codified in law.

"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as the co-operations. You can regulate them--cautiously--but not abolish them." -Aldo Leoplold 1993