in a clear pattern. During the nineteenth century, people considered fish and game valuable only to the extent that they served human economic, recreational, or aesthetic interests. Pests that detracted from these interests were to be controlled or eradicated. During the first half of the twentieth century, scientists and conservationists gradually regarded increasing numbers of species as beneficial and called for more protection. After World War II, the range of their concern grew even further, to include all native species and ecosystems. The process by which human societies extend moral standing to animals and other things is called ethical extensionism and is often associated with the work of the famed philosopher-conservationist Aldo Leopold.23
Though attractive, the story of ethical extensionism suffers from several problems, not least of which is its teleological portrayal of American environmental history as an inevitable march toward increasingly enlightened ideas. The actual story is much messier, fraught with political contestation, social conflict, and the complexities and contingencies that define the past. Ethical disputes about wild nature did reach a wider audience over time, but almost all of the major arguments for wildlife and endangered species conservation that exist today emerged within the first two decades of the twentieth century. What followed was not a slow expansion or adoption of new ideas but rather a series of struggles that redistributed political power and elevated old ideas to new positions in science, politics, and the law.24
No group was more active in forging these ideas during the Progressive Era than the Berkeley circle. As with its scientific work, the group’s contributions to conservation ethics resulted from the productive, although at times tense, partnerships between Grinnell and his protégés at the MVZ. Harold C. Bryant was one of Grinnell’s first students, and he specialized in natural history education. Grinnell and Bryant borrowed arguments for conservation that other scientists, government officials, wilderness preservationists, and animal welfare advocates had developed in previous decades. They expanded these from fish and game to encompass the more general category of wildlife. To appeal to diverse constituencies, they adapted and sharpened their arguments and used different approaches with different audiences to achieve the greatest political results. By 1916 Grinnell and Bryant had articulated and employed almost all of the major ethical arguments for wildlife conservation that exist today.
Like many Progressive Era naturalists and educators, Grinnell asserted that natural history study promoted healthful recreation and an informed citizenry. He joined with activists who called for more nature study in the public schools and more educational programs from state and federal agencies. One of the best ways to achieve these objectives was to install his students in influential positions. In 1914 Grinnell helped Bryant find two part-time jobs, one as the first director of education for the California Fish and Game Commission and another as a member of Yosemite National Park’s first cohort of interpretive naturalists, who gave campfire talks. These were new positions, but they came with considerable opportunities and support. Bryant soon emerged as the most prominent natural history educator not only in California but also, after 1916, in the new National Park Service. His career in the service continued until 1954, when he retired as the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, one of the organization’s most prestigious positions. NPS historians today remember Bryant as the founder of the service’s interpretive programs.25
To understand Grinnell and Bryant’s approach to ethics, it is necessary to understand their approach to politics. When they spoke and wrote about conservation, they often stressed the pragmatic utilitarian justification that had already gained widespread general support among conservationists and that they thought would persuade the largest number of people: wild animals should be conserved to promote the country’s economic well-being. This argument had two components. The first involved the animals’ monetary value. Hunters, trappers, traders, and merchants—including those who sold supplies to recreational sportsmen and tourists—lost future profits when they squandered resources in the short term that could have remained viable for the foreseeable future. Grinnell and Bryant argued for stronger regulation of animal harvests, as well as the creation of game farms that could produce waterfowl and fur-bearing mammals as crops while allowing wild populations to recover from overhunting.26 Both thus supported the regulated use of wildlife as an important aspect of utilitarian conservation.
The second component of the economic argument was the protection of “beneficial species” for pest control. The question of whether certain species were beneficial or injurious had particular salience during a time before modern chemical pesticides when many scientists believed that reckless agricultural development had disturbed the balance of nature. At the time, the federal government’s first fish and game agency, the Bureau of Biological Survey, was sponsoring research on the economic value of various species. Foster E.L. Beal, an economic ornithologist from the bureau, visited California three times between 1901 and 1906 and conducted studies on the agricultural relations of seventy bird species. He concluded that only four of these—the house finch, the scrub jay, Stellar’s jay, and the red-breasted sapsucker—were of “doubtful utility.” All of the state’s other common bird species benefited agriculture. “A reasonable way of viewing the relation of birds to the farmer,” Beal wrote, “is to consider birds as servants, employed to destroy weeds and insects. In return for this service they should be protected.”27
Grinnell and Bryant took Beal’s argument and ran with it. They soon began to see economic benefits in almost every normal function of almost every native species. According to Grinnell, more than 90 percent of California’s bird species qualified as “community assets.” Bats were “desirable citizens” for consuming insects, gophers tilled and fertilized the soil, and beavers created habitats for juvenile fish by plumbing rivers.28 As early as 1912, members of the Berkeley circle used the beneficial species argument to lobby for state protection of carnivorous mammals, which most people still considered pests. According to Grinnell and Bryant, predators helped to control undesirable rodent species and improve populations of game animals, such as deer, by culling the weakest members. By the 1920s, the Berkeley circle had emerged as a leading force in the nationwide effort to curtail predator control programs.
Grinnell and Bryant insisted that their arguments were utilitarian, not sentimental, but they viewed economic rationales at least in part as means to an end and sought to expand these arguments to incorporate noneconomic concerns. By 1913 Bryant was including not only fish and game but also nongame vertebrate species and even insects in his list of beneficial creatures. “Doubtless if our knowledge were not so limited,” he wrote, “we would be able to see a use for every living thing. As it is, we brand life as useful, neutral, or injurious because of its effect on ourselves or our environment.” According to him, this parsing of species had appreciable, damaging consequences: “Anything known to be useful is always assured protection, anything considered of no use is assured of speedy destruction. Hence, viewed from a utilitarian standpoint, there is a certain value in classifying life as injurious or beneficial.” When addressing friendly audiences, he often returned to the example of birds, which had a large constituency of advocates and a long tradition of aesthetic appreciation: “Somehow at this day and age the convincing value of a bird lies in its usefulness. . . . This point of view is exaggerated and the other real value,—the esthetic,—is left in the background; but we must meet the demands of the times.” Bryant understood the political value of a utilitarian argument, but his real convictions lay elsewhere.29
FIGURE 8. The “Monument to Game Conservation” appeared on the cover of the first issue of Western Wild Life Call, in 1913, to draw attention to extinct and endangered species.
If all wild animals had aesthetic value or even pure intrinsic value, then human-induced extinctions posed a special problem that transcended mere economics (see figure 8). Indeed, extinction was one area in which Grinnell and Bryant wrote about conservation issues as explicitly ethical challenges. “It is now generally recognized as ethically wrong,” Grinnell wrote in 1914, “to jeopardize the existence of any animal species.” Bryant tied together
