six hundred sites worthy of protection. Shelford’s committee published its study five years later as a 761-page tome, Naturalist’s Guide to the Americas.9
The Naturalist’s Guide was more than just an inventory. Its main objective was to locate natural areas and make them more accessible for scientific research, but it also offered a professional agenda for the discipline of ecology that included a broad critique of the traditional biological sciences. According to Shelford, research specialization in particular objects and organisms was impeding crucial integrative studies on “the entire life of natural areas.” Ecologists rejected not only narrow specialization but also “fads” and “crude ideas,” such as “the survival of the fittest.” These notions had given biologists in most other fields a myopic view of nature better suited to sterile laboratories than to the landscapes where organisms actually lived. When he described those landscapes, Shelford used environment and habitat as synonyms. He argued that there could be “no adequate knowledge of fitness to environment without knowledge of environment” and insisted that “knowledge of habitats can be organized into science.” By studying species in their natural habitats, Shelford and his colleagues hoped to transform scientists’ understanding of evolutionary biology.10
Over the next decade, Shelford continued to update the Naturalist’s Guide with additional assessments, reports, articles, and recommendations. These included a new framework for prioritizing and designing nature reserves. “First-class” sanctuaries would be “areas of natural vegetation containing as nearly as possible all the animal species known to have occurred in the areas within historical times.” Second- and third-class sanctuaries would encompass more modified landscapes, such as sites with altered vegetation and extinct or introduced species. All sanctuaries should have core natural areas that would remain unavailable for human uses other than scientific research. Core areas would be surrounded by buffer zones, which would provide additional habitat for the wide-ranging species that needed the most protection, particularly large carnivores.11
This focus on natural areas helped set ecology on a different path in the United States than in other parts of the world. In Britain, where the field had also taken root, ecologists were not nearly so interested in the types of places that American scientists and conservationists called wilderness. British ecologists, such as Arthur Tansley, regarded traditional land uses as components of the cultural landscape that were essential for the maintenance of many indigenous ecological communities. American ecologists came to view human land uses as disturbances—cattle grazing is a classic example. Yet for Tansley it was the removal of such activities that counted as the disturbance. Only when British ecologists traveled outside Europe to other regions of their empire did they adopt a more American-style approach, which embraced the idea of wilderness, dismissed customary indigenous practices, and provided a convenient scientistic justification for their seizure of lands and natural resources.12
During the 1910s and 1920s, Shelford’s work gained support in the Ecological Society of America, which adopted his sanctuary protection plan and became one of the first national organizations to work for habitat protection. Yet by the 1930s, support began to wane. Most ecologists still backed efforts to establish nature reserves, but the society’s membership, which had grown to 653 people by 1930, was shifting toward the view that a national scientific organization should remain apolitical. As early as 1933, members debated whether scientific societies should endorse land preservation efforts or leave this task to the country’s growing collection of activist conservation organizations. The society’s constitution prohibited lobbying on “nonscientific” issues, so part of the question was whether preservation work was sufficiently scientific. This was just the first of several struggles in the society over the proper relationship between science and activism.13
In 1937 Shelford threatened to leave the organization he had helped to found more than two decades earlier if it did not amend its constitution to permit his conservation projects. Seven years later he wrote a letter to Science complaining that the Ecological Society of America had made little progress in its preservation work. “With wartime and post-war pressure to destroy nature mounting,” he reflected, “it is well for those interested in its preservation for scientific purposes to look over the machinery by which some of it may possibly be saved.” Later that year he circulated a survey to the society’s members, and 85 percent of the respondents supported his committee’s efforts. The society’s governing board opposed the program, however, and in 1945 it blocked a petition to amend the constitution. The following year the board voted to abolish Shelford’s preservation committee.14
Shelford did not follow through on his threat to leave the society, but he did partner with sympathetic colleagues to establish a new organization to continue the work of the preservation committee. In 1946 he and more than a dozen other senior ecologists, including four past Ecological Society of America presidents, founded the Ecologists Union. It advocated for the protection of primitive areas in the national forests, passed resolutions against the transfer of federal lands to state and private control, and shifted its focus from Washington, DC, to regions with important natural areas. Once the union established its independence, the Ecological Society of America’s board endorsed its work as a scientifically grounded conservation organization. In 1950 the union changed its name to the Nature Conservancy (TNC). TNC would become one of the world’s largest conservation organizations, and from the beginning it has dedicated its efforts to protecting biodiversity and endangered species through habitat protection.15
The Ecological Society of America’s shift away from natural areas preservation had another effect: it helped to facilitate the emergence of wildlife management as a profession. Wildlife management coalesced in the 1920s and 1930s, combining features of forestry, ecology, natural history, and fish and game conservation and often focusing on the vast new public lands created by the New Deal. The first generation of wildlife managers believed that public officials should administer natural resources for the common good, but they held diverse opinions on what this meant in practice. Academic scientists, government officials, recreational hunters, conservation activists, and landowners and users, including farmers and ranchers, thus waged a series of struggles over the meaning and purpose of wildlife management that shaped the young profession and created a context for future conflicts about endangered species and habitat conservation. The most important of these battles was over predator control.
PREDATOR CONTROL
In the early twentieth century, most people viewed predators as varmints. This included animal welfare activists concerned about the plight of prey species, hunters worried about the loss of game, and ranchers anxious about the security of their livestock. It also included many scientists and government officials. In 1925 Edward A. Goldman, a prominent scientist from the Smithsonian Institution and the Bureau of Biological Survey, expressed a common sentiment when he wrote that “large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock and to game, no longer have a place in our advancing civilization.” Other prominent authors, such as Ernest Thompson Seton, expressed regret that large carnivores, such as the wolf and the grizzly, were disappearing from the North American landscape, but even Seton agreed that such extinctions were the inevitable price of progress.16
Beginning in the 1880s, the Bureau of Biological Survey, under the direction of C. Hart Merriam, published a series of reports on the economic effects of predators. Its early work took a relatively positive position compared to that of its later work, which focused on the damage that predators caused. Merriam, Albert K. Fisher, and other bureau officials emphasized the services predators provided, such as culling sick animals, consuming carrion, and devouring rodent pests. They even took positions on public policy. As early as 1886, Merriam publicly criticized a law passed the previous year in Pennsylvania, dubbed the Scalp Act, that issued a bounty of fifty cents on hawks, owls, weasels, and minks. Using a simple cost-benefit analysis, he calculated that in its first year the program had operated at a loss of more than $3.8 million. The same could be said, he believed, of similar programs in states throughout the country.17
Merriam’s moderate
