in the face of much political conflict, nature reserves established for these purposes are fulfilling their goals.
The results to date are mixed. Efforts to manage wild species inside legally bounded but ecologically porous nature reserves have always proved difficult. Endangered species managers increasingly rely on privately owned reserves that have more administrative flexibility than public lands do but whose permanence remains in question. Government agencies are suffering from unprecedented shortfalls in funding and resources, which have exacerbated conflicts over their land management priorities and raised the question of whether reserve administration is, in fact, less contentious than the regulation of take on nonreserve lands. Recent research suggests that wildlife-habitat relationships are more complicated and less understood than previously believed; some species that seemed relatively tolerant of human activities now appear to be much less so, while others once thought to require remote wilderness areas have found refuge in the most unlikely of built environments.14 Species declines that were once assumed to stem from a few limiting factors actually resulted from complex, multifarious, and synergistic forces. Global climate change threatens to transform all habitats, including those “protected” in nature reserves. And although habitat conservation has probably helped forestall many extinctions, it has not yet proved to be an effective tool for recovering endangered species to self-sustaining populations.
Many endangered species need more nature reserves, not fewer, if they are to persist in a world of rapid environmental change and mounting ecological problems. And despite major achievements in using nature reserves to maintain biodiversity in the United States, the protected areas paradigm does not offer a panacea for the problems facing endangered species and their keepers in the decades to come. But the time has also come to rethink the role of protected areas in a broader program of land, wildlife, and biodiversity conservation for the twenty-first century.
This book explores these issues through a history of endangered species and habitat conservation, with a focus on vertebrate wildlife, in and around California. Since 1967 the FWS and NOAA have listed around fifteen hundred types of plants and animals throughout the country as threatened or endangered. Every state now has listed species. Yet none offers a richer ecological context in which to study endangered species than California. This state has a greater diversity of plant and animal species than any other. It has the second-largest number of endangered species—more than three hundred as of 2012—after Hawaii (see map 1). It also has by far the largest number of species at risk of becoming endangered in the future, with at least 50 percent of its vertebrate fauna falling into this ominous category. The California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) estimates that seven vertebrate species or subspecies have gone extinct in the state since the gold rush. Several factors have contributed to these patterns, but habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, and a legacy of overhunting all rank near the top of the list.15
MAP 1. Species richness (combining both quantity and rarity) and endangerment in the contiguous United States. The numbers indicate species listed as threatened or endangered, per state. Richness data courtesy of Oxford University Press.
California’s human history also makes it an ideal place for a study of this type. The state experienced dramatic environmental changes during the nineteenth century, was home to some of the first park and forest conservation movements, and hosted several innovative early experiments in wildlife management. After World War II, it developed a vast network of research universities, an influential community of activists, and pioneering environmental policies that provided the basis for similar measures by other states and the federal government. Wildlife conservation initiatives began later in California than in the Northeast and Midwest, but the state eventually built the country’s largest wildlife management infrastructure. In the 1980s and 1990s, it became a hearth for the development of conservation biology, witnessed some of the country’s most infamous endangered species battles, and hosted novel experiments in policy and management, including the nation’s first habitat conservation plans (HCPs). California has spent far more on terrestrial and aquatic habitat conservation than any other state. In 1999 its legislators passed the Marine Life Protection Act, which launched a process for designating marine protected areas along the state’s 840-mile coastline and made it the national leader in marine habitat conservation. In American endangered species history, California has played an outsize role at once unique, representative, and influential.
This book recounts a series of stories told from the perspectives of scientists, conservationists, bureaucrats, farmers, ranchers, developers, and others who live and work in California. These characters most often deal with issues close to home, but they also travel and correspond and collaborate with colleagues around the state and the country. The species they discuss often cross boundaries too, and as a result this book frequently wanders beyond the state’s borders. By writing this history from the view—instead of at the scale—of California, I have attempted to give the state’s experience a broader context while maintaining my conviction that endangered species debates are best told as historical narratives about the politics of place.
The first part of the book, chapters 1 through 4, is organized chronologically and thematically and spans from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Chapter 1, from which the book takes its name, focuses on the epic tale of the rise and fall of the California grizzly, the state’s official mascot and a ubiquitous symbol from a formative time when residents were debating what kind of place California should become. Chapter 2 moves on to the Progressive Era and the state’s first wildlife conservation campaign, led by the zoologist Joseph Grinnell and his Berkeley circle of students and colleagues, who set out reform state fish and game laws and in the process laid the foundation for future endangered species and habitat conservation efforts in the state. Chapter 3 follows the Berkeley circle’s shift, in the decades that followed, from grassroots campaigning in state-level politics to working for bureaucratic reform and habitat conservation on the growing federal lands. Chapter 4 picks up in the postwar era, when diverse social forces converged to enable the passage of the ESA, a law that would have profound and unexpected consequences as it evolved from a species protection measure into a broader mandate for habitat conservation.
Part 2, chapters 5 through 8, presents four case studies of endangered species in California, including the events that resulted in their declines and listings, and the conservation debates, failures, and occasional successes that followed. The four species hail from different taxonomic groups and represent regions of California with different economic geographies, political dynamics, and endangered species–related conflicts. Chapter 5 considers the California condor controversy, which exposed an awkward split between wildlife managers and wilderness preservationists but eventually led to a philosophical consensus among conservation biologists that combined scientific management with habitat preservation. Chapter 6 follows the story of the desert tortoise, a species whose decline helped launch a new era of land management in the Mojave Desert but which has continued to suffer despite having vast areas set aside on its behalf. Chapter 7 introduces the San Joaquin kit fox, the flagship species of an industrialized agricultural landscape, whose history illustrates our still limited understanding of wildlife-habitat relationships. Chapter 8 turns to the delta smelt, an indicator species for the California Bay-Delta that became embroiled in a water war and whose predicament casts doubt not only on the protected areas approach to endangered species recovery but also on the very idea of habitat conservation as Americans have traditionally understood it.
The emergence of habitat as a key concept in environmental science, law, management, and politics is one of the great, untold stories in American conservation history. It is also essential for understanding contemporary endangered species debates. This book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on the importance and accomplishments of the protected areas paradigm while highlighting the limitations of nature reserves as a conservation strategy. It ends with a call for a broader vision that moves beyond an approach that served conservationists well in the past but has little chance of recovering endangered species in the future.
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