On a Farther Shore (15 page)

The secretary of the interior was specifically charged with ensuring that there be no further disturbance to “timber, mineral deposits,
natural curiosities, or wonders” within the park, which were instead to be maintained “in their natural condition.” Congress, mainly concerned with protecting hot springs and geysers from opportunistic developers, mentioned in passing that there should be no “wanton destruction” of wildlife in what was to be called Yellowstone National Park. But within a decade a few hundred bison, remnants of the herds from the grassland plains to the east, were being harbored within the park’s boundaries and Congress tightened wildlife protection measures at Yellowstone.

The federal government had also been brought into the business of conserving natural resources in California, where in 1864 the U.S. government ceded control of the Yosemite Valley to the state of California with the stipulation that it be preserved in a natural state. In the early 1900s, Yosemite was returned to the federal government and incorporated into a surrounding national park.
In the interim a group of students and professors at the University of California, whose interest in the region went beyond wildlife, established a conservation group they called the Sierra Club, the purpose of which was “preserving the forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” They enlisted the great naturalist and explorer John Muir as the club’s first president.

In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt established the U.S. Forest Service, an agency within the Department of Agriculture whose business was to oversee the country’s rapidly expanding forest reserves.
In a span of just four years, Roosevelt increased federal holdings of forest land from 63 million acres to more than 150 million. Field managers were needed to take charge of the government’s sudden investment in this natural wealth, and among the best and brightest of the young recruits was a recent graduate of the forestry program at Yale University, twenty-two-year-old Aldo Leopold.
In the summer of 1909, Leopold reported for duty at his first Forest Service posting, the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory. Arizona was not yet a state, and the Apache National Forest was so rugged and remote that there were no roads through it.

Though inexperienced—he bungled an initial three-month backcountry reconnaissance assignment—Leopold took to his work enthusiastically and in the coming years was promoted to several positions in the district.
In 1915, worried about the vanishing game in the region, Leopold wrote a short treatise on the importance of conserving wildlife called the
Game and Fish Handbook
. At the time, the conservation movement had split between two opposing theories of proper resource management. On one side were the utilitarians, who believed that through “wise use” nature could be managed so as to maximize its productiveness, whether that meant planting and harvesting forests, or enforcing hunting laws and stocking game. On the other end of the argument were the preservationists, inspired by John Muir and the Sierra Club, who thought the only way to truly conserve wild lands and wildlife was to leave them alone—to set certain areas off to the side, permanently protected from human alteration.
Like other recruits to the Forest Service, Leopold started out as a utilitarian. But he came to see that neither approach to conservation was perfect and that what was needed was a balance between wise use and preservation.
In 1921, Leopold published a paper in the
Journal of Forestry
titled “The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreation Policy.” In so doing he introduced a new word into the vocabulary of conservation
and offered a definition: “By ‘wilderness’ I mean a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two-weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”

Leopold was not the first to appreciate the attraction of the wilderness.
It had long been the subject of philosophical inquiry—Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant both wrote essays arguing that people should not fear but rather adore the “beautiful and sublime” essence of nature, and
eighteenth-century primitivists believed that the more civilized people became the less happy they were. The American wilderness had been irresistible to men such as Daniel Boone, whose “long hunts” out across the frontier had lasted years at a time, and
Henry David Thoreau, who professed a preference for wilderness over the city—though he wasn’t entirely consistent on this point. The “wilderness” around Concord, Massachusetts, and at Walden Pond suited him,
but when Thoreau traveled into the remote forests of northern Maine he was badly frightened by the “deep and intricate wilderness” that he thought could be endured only by men more like animals than other men. Such profound wilderness, he said, was “savage and dreary.”

And yet it was that fearsomeness that made the wilderness so appealing to others—and all the more so as it disappeared. Theodore Roosevelt thought that an America without an untamed frontier was a country bereft of the thing that had given it a national character.
Wilderness, Roosevelt said, was needed to sustain among the citizenry “that vigorous manliness” he believed to be the most essential virtue—and that was at risk as the country became more settled. When Roosevelt helped organize the Boone and Crockett Club in 1888, it was as much for the purpose of self-improvement as it was about promoting a shared passion for big-game hunting in the wilderness.

As more people came to live in larger, denser cities, the allure of wilderness increased. By the early twentieth century, the experience of wild places was seen as a restorative for agitated minds and city-bound souls—
as it was thought to be by George Babbitt, the overfed, overstressed businessman in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 satirical novel,
Babbitt
. After escaping to Maine on a fishing trip with a friend, Babbitt comes home thinking himself a changed man. He felt “converted to serenity” and was convinced he could stop worrying about his business affairs and instead have more “interests,” such as the theater and reading. Babbitt had, in fact, made only the most superficial contact with nature on his Maine sojourn, spending more time in the lodge playing cards and smoking cigars than he did fishing. But Lewis’s point was that we
believe
in the healing powers of the natural world—whether we really experience it or not.

It was Aldo Leopold who articulated what real wilderness was and proposed incorporating wilderness preservation into the management
of natural resources as matter of policy. Beguiled by the hunting and fishing on the headwaters of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico,
Leopold in 1924 helped establish the Gila Wilderness Area—the first protected tract of wilderness in the world. Leopold later left the Forest Service and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where as a consultant to the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute he continued doing survey work on game that further convinced him intelligent wildlife management could not be accomplished by hunting laws alone. More important, Leopold realized, was the protection of productive habitat that could sustain breeding, foraging, and migrating populations of game.
In 1929, Leopold gave a series of lectures at the University of Wisconsin that would become the basis for his monumental and still influential book,
Game Management
. With its holistic approach to managing game by understanding and promoting a sustainable environment in which birds and animals could be hunted yet thrive,
Game Management
marked the true beginning of conservation biology and
earned Leopold a professorship at the University of Wisconsin that he would hold for the rest of his life.
In early 1934, Leopold was named to a three-man committee commissioned by the Bureau of Biological Survey and officially designated as the President’s Committee on Wild Life Restoration—though it soon came to be known as the Beck Committee.

For years, the federal government had been looking for ways to stabilize and restore dwindling waterfowl numbers and to bring order to a chaotic system of state-based game laws that regulated hunting. Drought, habitat loss, and overhunting had decimated duck and goose populations. In 1918, Congress approved the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, an agreement between the United States and Canada that outlawed the taking of migratory bird species, except for a handful of game birds for which there were to be orderly hunting seasons and strictly enforced bag limits. But as Leopold had pointed out in
Game Management
, in the absence of habitat improvement waterfowl numbers would continue their downward trend while hunting seasons
and bag limits, already being steadily constrained, would also continue to shrink.

The so-called Beck Committee was formed at the behest of a man named Thomas Beck, who was the editor of
Collier’s
magazine, the president of a sportsmen’s group called More Game Birds, and a personal friend of President Franklin Roosevelt. Beck and Leopold were joined on the committee by Jay “Ding” Darling, a popular and well-known editorial cartoonist with the
Des Moines Register
who’d won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924, and whose passion for conservation often found its way into his cartoons. The committee’s job was to come up with a comprehensive wildlife conservation plan that would provide a framework for spending the $25 million the president had set aside for purchasing marginal agricultural land.

The deliberations turned contentious. Beck, whose main goal was to boost sagging waterfowl numbers, seemed preoccupied with the idea of setting up federal duck-rearing operations that he thought would do for migratory flyways what fish hatcheries had done for trout streams. Darling and Leopold were more interested in finding ways to improve waterfowl breeding habitats. After about a month, the committee submitted a plan that tilted toward land acquisition and restoration.
Another month after that, Roosevelt named Darling—a conservative Republican—to replace the head of the Bureau of Biological Survey, who had abruptly resigned. Darling lasted only about a year and a half on the job, but in that time redirected the agency’s conservation efforts toward habitat improvement in the refuge system. Darling also instituted a requirement that waterfowl hunters buy an annual duck stamp. He drew the first one himself.

In 1935 Aldo Leopold became one of the founding members of the Wilderness Society, a lobbying organization whose efforts eventually contributed to the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, a law that set aside nine million untouched acres of America.

• • •

Rachel Carson had been at work in the Interior building for only a couple of months
when her group was transferred to offices rented for the FWS in Chicago. With the war under way, it seemed that official Washington was cramped for space. Carson, miserable about the move, reported there in August 1942.
The relocation was mercifully short, and by May 1943, Carson was sent back to Washington with a $600 raise and shortly after arriving returned to the FWS offices at the Interior building.
A year later, FWS created a new position—information specialist—and promoted Carson to it with another $600 a year raise. She now earned $3,800 annually. But while her career in government had been good to her, Carson longed for something different.

Sometime in early 1945,
after William Beebe included two chapters of
Under the Sea-Wind
in an anthology of nature writing, Carson had written to her hero and told him she hoped they might meet sometime when she was in New York.
Beebe wrote back that he’d be delighted. Apparently this meeting did not take place for several years, but in October 1945
Carson wrote to Beebe on a different matter. Might there be a job for her at the New York Zoological Society? Carson said she’d been thinking about this for months and that she had begun to doubt the wisdom of her current career path:

Beebe wrote back to say he thought Carson would be a terrific addition to their staff and that he’d forwarded her inquiry to the president of the Zoological Society, Fairfield Osborn.
Osborn answered that if Carson was truly “exceptional” they might be able to find a spot for her in the society’s education department. Beebe forwarded this response to Carson, but said that such a position would be too modest for her talents and advised her against pursuing the matter. Carson followed this advice but made similar inquiries at
Reader’s Digest
and the National Audubon Society—neither of which had a position to offer.

Meanwhile, she was impatient to get on with her writing and was always on the lookout for a likely subject.
On November 12, 1944, Carson issued a press release reporting that an overwintering site for North American chimney swifts had been discovered in Peru.
She promptly proposed an article on chimney swifts to
Reader’s Digest
, which turned it down.
That same month she published a story on bats and echolocation called “The Bat Knew It First” in
Collier’s
.
In April 1945, Carson’s report on the Marine Studios aquarium at Marineland in Florida ran in a London magazine called
Transatlantic
, which specialized in stories from America. It was a challenging piece, as Carson had never laid eyes on the place. She had to do all of her reporting by letter, and at the time Marine Studios was actually closed because of wartime gas rationing. Carson somehow managed to track down enough key people in Florida to get her questions answered and to write a descriptive account of the aquarium, which was famous for its dolphin shows and the underwater viewing ports in the main tank that allowed visitors to watch helmet divers feeding the captive fish.