What I Am Reading: "Nature's Ghosts" by Mark V. Barrow, Jr.

               This book, subtitled “Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology,” was a history of the concept of extinction, and how humans have understood and reacted to it. It mostly focused on the United States.

               Humans have not grappled with extinction for a very long time, and there were many intellectual hurdles to overcome in the course to its acceptance as a reality and as a problem. The book opens with a perfect quote from Thomas Jefferson (who of course dabbled as a naturalist) proclaiming that “no instance can be produced of [nature] having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct.” In Jefferson’s time, understanding of the natural world was based on concepts such as the “balance of nature” and the “great chain of being,” whereby every animal was in its place as created by the deity, arranged in their hierarchy and with no possibility of a gap opening.

               Not only did this idea have to be overcome by early naturalists and preservationists (with the tide turned by Darwin and by increased fossil discoveries), but the American philosophical inclination toward industriousness had to be overcome as well. When the New World was being settled, one justification deployed by the colonists was that they were using land to its full potential, instead of allowing it to fester as a wilderness. This attitude, of course, led to permanent geographic transformation long before any opposition could be mounted, and many species were lost at the time. It wasn’t until the embrace of Romanticism as a reaction to the Enlightenment that an aesthetic and spiritual embrace of the natural world started to take hold (and now an obligatory acknowledgement of Emerson and Thoreau, who helped mightily to set the agenda).

               The book’s chapters trace the concept of extinction not in a perfectly chronological path, but by focusing on important aspects; some of which overlap in the timeline. After discussion of Jefferson’s discovery of fossils in the young country (Jefferson’s fulcrum of competition with the historical heritage of Europe), the next chapter is on how the concept of extinction was informed by records of island ecosystems; which were remote, unique, and particularly vulnerable to decimation at the hands of sailors and settlers. One such unique island ecosystem, in the Galapagos, was the catalyst for Darwin’s understanding of natural selection. An earlier island species helped lay the groundwork for the understanding of extinction: the dodo birds of Mauritius. Europe became acquainted with the species in the late 1500s, and it was extinct by the middle of the next century. It was recognized that the species had been wiped out by human activity, and the dodo serves as a metonym for extinction to this day. I find this example particularly interesting, as here a heavy historical burden is carried by the records of a few Dutch East India Company ships’ logs.

               Meanwhile, back in the United States, early conservation efforts coalesced around efforts to save bird species from extinction, leading to the creation of the Audubon society (among other organizations). Birds are an easy species to interact with, in an intellectual sense, and are distinct and diverse enough that any losses are highly noticeable. Efforts progressed from there to other “charismatic species,” such as the Bison. This campaign, in the decades after the Civil War, justified saving the species through an invocation of national pride. Later efforts to save the Bald Eagle and other birds of prey would require similar sentiments.

               It wasn’t until the invention (or conceptualization) of ecology that the prevention of extinction found its firmest justification. Previous efforts were driven mainly by bleeding-heart moral/philosophical motivations, with an (occasionally thin) veneer of utilitarianism relating to the importance of perpetuating a species so that they could continue to provide utilitarian services or economic gain. In many cases, the motivations and explicit justifications provided for conservation prior to ecology were explicitly racist or classist, and the conservation movement was largely driven by upper-class gentlemen who believed that they were the only people capable of appreciating the aesthetic beauty of animals.

               Fortunately, ecology provided the idea that all species were important to the balance of an ecosystem, and that it was important to study ecosystems in their entirety. The ecological focus for biology (roughly starting in the years after WW1) was a shift from the lab-based biology (study of cells, embryos, and so on) from the turn of the century, which itself was a shift from the focus on taxonomy prior to that. Early “preservation” efforts in fact often took the form of attempting to acquire a stuffed and mounted version of a species before it was too late, which (predictably in hindsight) exacerbated the issue at hand. The elimination of species, even purportedly harmful predators, could cause larger environmental problems that could rebound on humans negatively. The book covers the often-contentious expansion of preservation ideals to cover various predatory species. Preservation groups had a fraught relationship with farmers, and an often-cooperative relationship with sportsmen, who desired the perpetuation of their pastime. In the interwar years, when protections for predators were being argued, this coalition was strained.

               The book presents many interesting case studies of both efforts (successful and unsuccessful) to save individual species, and of political efforts to create legislation and treaties to protect endangered species on a nationwide, regional, and global scale. American efforts in protecting African species in the interwar period shifted to efforts in South America during WW2, as the hemisphere drew closer together in remove from the war and under Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. After the war, the advent of the threat of nuclear war led to a boom in environmental consciousness, and ecology took hold in the popular culture. Legislation, culminating in the Endangered Species Act of 1973, led to a robust federal role in the prevention of extinction, including initially-controversial captive breeding programs.  

               The book maintained a nice balance of political history, natural history, some simple biology, and of brief biographies of the (many) major participants. It was very readable, though I will note that variations on the phrase “haunted by the specter of extinction” appeared in every chapter.  However, it was the story of an important topic, and I was continually heartened when I went to Wikipedia to check on a species mentioned in the history and found that they were doing well.