government bureaucracies from the inside out. They shifted their focus from the state to the federal level and from hunting regulations to habitat protection. They also continued to argue that scientific evidence should guide the management of wildlife in national parks and other nature reserves. In the process, they outlined almost all of the key scientific concepts that would inspire the field of conservation biology decades later, and they described most of the management problems that would shape endangered species debates in the postwar era.2
By 1955 A. Starker Leopold, the eldest son of Aldo Leopold and a lifelong Berkeley circle member, could describe the “complicated legal machinery” of hunting and fishing codes, which had formed the “backbone” of fish and game conservation during the Progressive Era, as flawed and insufficient. In the years since, scientists and managers throughout the country had come to appreciate the role of “habitat as the transcendent force that, more than any other, determines the level of wild populations.” According to Leopold, the idea of habitat conservation had been slow to catch on, but change was under way. It was “now an accepted truism,” he concluded, “that maintenance of suitable habitat is the key to sustaining animal populations, and that [game] protection, though it is important, is not itself a substitute for habitat.”3
The story of wildlife conservation in California and the rest of the United States from the end of the Progressive Era, around 1916, to the beginning of the environmental era in 1964 is, in large part, about the emergence of habitat as a key concept in science and management. Agreement on the centrality of this concept did not, however, lead to a consensus about who should manage habitats, by what means, and for which species. Divergent ideas about the meaning and purpose of habitat conservation fractured scientific societies, split the profession of wildlife management, and led to a division of labor and philosophy among government bureaucracies.
Habitat conservation is a complex endeavor, and disagreements about its techniques and objectives continue to this day. Yet Leopold’s larger point remains: after World War II, habitat conservation became an overarching framework for wildlife management in the United States. After the passage of the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973, however, this framework was increasingly turned on its head. Whereas scientists and managers had initially conceived of habitat conservation as an approach to managing wildlife, environmental activists would come to see wildlife conservation as a way to protect habitat. Setting aside habitat—in the form of parks, wilderness areas, nature reserves, and myriad other land management designations—eventually became an end in itself.
“NATURAL AREAS” IN AMERICAN ECOLOGY
Some of the earliest habitat conservation initiatives in the United States began among ecologists who wanted to preserve natural areas for scientific research. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the field of ecology in the United States was searching for a mission and a clientele that would demonstrate its social relevance and promote its growth and development. The first ecologists set out to address the unintended consequences of westward expansion, population growth, resource extraction, and agricultural development. Several of the discipline’s leaders worked in the Midwest and the Great Plains, where these changes had been particularly dramatic. They believed that the landscape transformations of the nineteenth century had thrown dynamic but orderly communities of plants and animals into disarray. Understanding how North America’s pre-Columbian landscapes functioned thus became a key aspect of their work to reestablish an equilibrium in the balance of nature.4
But the ecologists had two problems. First, they needed a set of objectives and a repertoire of methodologies that would distinguish their discipline. These would have to combine the broad, integrative perspective of field-based natural history observation with the scientific rigor and control of laboratory-based experimentation. It was not immediately clear what this new approach would look like, and ecology’s pioneering figures struggled to define their discipline’s best practices. Second, the ecologists were being outcompeted by specialists in the related resource management fields. New disciplines such as forestry, agricultural entomology, fisheries biology, and range management were already building their professional reputations, specializing in particular economic sectors, developing methods to investigate pressing problems, and winning the allegiance of patrons in government and industry.5
Two of ecology’s founders in the United States, Charles C. Adams and Victor E. Shelford, offered a solution to these problems (see figure 9). They argued that ecologists should move beyond the customary zoological approach of collecting and analyzing biological specimens to a new focus, the study of “natural areas.” They also believed that their fledgling professional organization, the Ecological Society of America—founded in 1915, just a year before the National Park Service—should advocate for the establishment of nature reserves to facilitate this research. According to Adams, it was not enough to preserve skins and bones in dusty museums. It was ecologists’ scientific duty to protect at least some areas where researchers could study “unified assemblages” of animals interacting under normal conditions in their primeval habitats and original associations. “The animal remains themselves are only a very incomplete record,” Adams wrote in 1913. “Their activities and environments are an essential part of the animals and should also be preserved.” Shelford echoed this sentiment when he noted that “from a philosophical and practical standpoint, the unified assemblage of organisms is commonly more valuable than the isolated rare species.”6
FIGURE 9. Victor Shelford. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives.
The natural areas that Adams and Shelford wanted to create would serve several functions. They would provide classrooms for teaching, storehouses of native plants and animals, opportunities for scientific research, benchmarks for measuring changes in the surrounding landscapes, and demonstration sites for projects in wildlife management and ecological restoration. “We must know nature,” Shelford wrote, as a “whole, if we wish to treat the simplest everyday problem of our relations to animals intelligently and justly.” Natural areas would also enable ecologists to acquire a professional identity distinct from those of practitioners in other fields who worked in spaces dominated by farming, ranching, logging, or other resource industries. “A branch of biological science which obtains its inspiration in the natural order in original habitats,” Shelford concluded, “must depend upon the preservation of natural areas for the solution of many problems.”7
If ecologists were going to build a new discipline based on the study of natural areas, they had to move fast. “Ecology,” Adams wrote, “has developed only at a late stage in civilization, after much of the environment has undergone great changes, so that in order to study the original conditions, which are of such great historic and genetic significance, he must make long journeys, or invade swamps or sterile uplands which man has not yet been able to reduce to the average conditions best suited to his needs.” Wild places were being destroyed, degraded, simplified, and transformed before scientists had a chance to study them—a lesson Grinnell had learned all too well in California. “One can but wonder,” Adams continued, “if the naturalists of the future will commend our foresight in studying with such great diligence certain aspects of biology which might be very well delayed, while ephemeral and vanishing records are allowed to be obliterated without the least concern.” These records included not only species but also habitats and ecological relationships.8
Adams and Shelford had status in their young discipline, and they used their influence to promote an agenda of natural areas preservation. Both men had received their doctorates from the University of Chicago, and they were among the country’s first animal ecologists. In 1915 Shelford became the first president of the Ecological Society of America, and two years later he appointed himself head of a new Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions that oversaw the society’s most ambitious initiative. The committee sent out queries, conducted field surveys, and assembled
