were the places where he conducted his research. In California’s mountains and rivers, he found evidence for the importance of migratory corridors and impediments to animal movement. In its valleys, he saw isolated centers of evolution that contained large numbers of endemic species. And in its fires and floods, he witnessed the unpredictable forces of landscape change that altered the availability of resources and rearranged animal populations. California was Grinnell’s mentor as well as his laboratory. Decades of fieldwork there taught him that one could not understand ecology and evolution without history and geography.
Building the kind of collection necessary to conduct this research required Grinnell to become an effective administrator. He maintained Alexander’s crucial support, secured funds for expeditions, established survey priorities, sought the advice of distant colleagues, and served as a mentor, counselor, disciplinarian, cheerleader, and occasional therapist to his assistants in the field. He could be pedantic and demanding, but he earned the universal admiration of his students and colleagues. He also became a scrupulous curator who spent much of his time on technical details. Which caliber gun should fieldworkers use to collect songbirds? Should museum staff skin bats or preserve them in formaldehyde? How much cornstarch would protect a badger skull from damage during shipment? Which brand of India ink was best for labeling specimens? What color paint should coat the walls of the MVZ? These questions may seem trivial, but Grinnell regarded every detail of museum administration as essential to his vision of a comprehensive research methodology.16
His primary goal was to develop a collection of biological specimens that would represent California’s diverse native fauna and enable researchers to answer basic biological questions about the evolutionary relationships between organisms and their environments. Yet by the time he began his work, hunting and habitat loss had already decimated many of the species he aimed to study. “Many species of vertebrate animals are disappearing; some are gone already,” he wrote. “All that the investigator of the future will have . . . will be the remains of these species preserved more or less faithfully, along with the data accompanying them, in the museums of the country.”17 Museum work was not only part of a research methodology but also a form of conservation. The two were inextricably linked.
Collecting specimens in California required Grinnell and his assistants to stay one step ahead of the forces of land use and environmental change. They scrambled to survey aquatic environments before the dredgers, dikers, dynamiters, and dam builders arrived. They raced to collect in undeveloped valleys just days before farmers cleared the vegetation and leveled the soil. They spent weeks searching remote mountains for once-common game birds and fur-bearing mammals that had been driven to the far corners of their ranges. And they mapped the spread of exotic species, such as the European starling and the English sparrow, that had colonized the landscape and were expanding their ranges.18
Grinnell and Alexander discussed these problems as early as 1907, and they based the MVZ’s early surveying priorities on the assumption that many native species would soon disappear. Before the museum even opened, Grinnell suggested to Alexander that its first official expedition should visit the Imperial Valley, in the flat, hot, low-elevation desert of southeastern California. The Imperial Valley had several endemic species, and Grinnell worried that some were about to go extinct. Water diversion from the Colorado River had enabled farmers to develop the valley for intensive agriculture. In 1905 one of the new irrigation canals ruptured, and for the next two years the Colorado River poured into the desiccated bed of an ancient lake. This deluge created California’s largest body of water, the Salton Sea, and produced a new landscape populated by new plants and new animals. Grinnell later wrote that he found “nothing attractive about collecting in a settled-up, level country,” such as the Imperial Valley. But he knew that “it ought to be done, and the longer we wait, the fewer ‘waste lots’ there will be” in which to find remaining populations of native species.19
Finding specimens of rare or recently eradicated species required careful detective work. It also required the museum’s staff to cultivate a network of supporters and informants. Fieldworkers conducted oral histories, inquired about taxidermied trophies kept in private homes, and relied on locals for advice about when and where to search. In 1916, for example, Joseph Dixon issued a plea on behalf of the museum for information from “anyone who knows of the whereabouts of any parts of wolves killed in California, or who is conversant with facts relating to the past or present occurrence of the species within the state.” The MVZ finally acquired a California wolf specimen in 1922. Such efforts involved a sizable commitment of the museum’s limited resources, costly searches often failed to produce results, and the fieldworker might not even live to see the payoff. The value of these specimens “might not be realized,” Grinnell wrote, “until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved.” Yet he believed such work was crucial so that “the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west.”20
Preserving this record played a central role in Grinnell’s vision for the MVZ. But why would he—a man who had grown up with Indians, knew about California’s long human history, and studied the role of landscape change in vertebrate evolution—invoke a concept so apparently static and ahistorical as “original conditions”? Grinnell was not ignorant about history. He understood that no single date in the past represented the original state of nature in California and that the early twentieth century was an arbitrary moment at which to create an archive of the state’s fauna. But he was also typical of naturalists of his time in the way he interpreted environmental history. He believed that, with the exception of their use of fire, Indians had lived lightly on the land; it was the Europeans, particularly those who came after 1849, who made the most significant impacts. These ideas informed generations of thinking in American ecology and environmentalism even as scholars in other fields realized that they had drastically underestimated the importance of indigenous societies in shaping North American landscapes and ecosystems.
Despite these shortcomings, Grinnell’s approach had a remarkably contemporary objective. He knew that development would continue to transform California’s fauna, and he based his plan for the museum on the premise that future researchers would want to understand those transformations. He viewed the MVZ’s collections as baseline data for measuring change over time. This view has proved prescient. As part of the MVZ’s centenary celebration, in 2008, researchers began resurveying sites that Grinnell and his assistants had visited a hundred years earlier. Their goal was to use the museum’s data to track changes in the state’s ecosystems. The team’s first study, published in the journal Science, documented a five-hundred-meter average upward shift in the elevation ranges of fourteen small mammal species in and around Yosemite National Park.21 Over the course of a century, climate and environmental change had rearranged the Sierra Nevada’s biogeography and reshuffled its ecological communities. Grinnell studied change over time, and in his evolutionary research he explored the deep past. But when it came to baseline data, his interest was primarily in the history of the future—one that California’s human and nonhuman residents are experiencing today.
The MVZ flourished under Grinnell’s leadership. It developed special strengths in birds and mammals, and its geographic focus allowed it to achieve an unparalleled degree of detail in its collections. During its first five years, the museum catalogued nearly fifty thousand specimens. By 1937 C. Hart Merriam could praise it for having produced “a vastly more complete” record of fur-bearing mammals in California than existed for any other part of the world. Grinnell departed in 1939, but the museum’s collections developed further under the direction of his successors. By 1955 it had accumulated the third-largest collection of mammals in the country, even though most of its specimens came from a single state, and it had begun building large collections in new taxonomic areas, such as herpetology. By the 1980s, the MVZ’s collections, along with those of the state’s other major natural history museums, had established California’s status as a hot spot of global biological diversity.22
CONSERVATION ETHICS
Historians have
