Wild by Design

The Rise of Ecological Restoration

Laura J. Martin

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674275836
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

An environmental historian delves into the history, science, and philosophy of a paradoxical pursuit: the century-old quest to design natural places and create wild species. Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology.Restoration has been a touchstone of US environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a "third way." Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature's own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be.In Wild by Design, restoration's past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

PART I Reservations, 1900–1945

1 Uncle Sam’s Reservations

It was William Temple Hornaday’s interest in dead animals that led him to work with live ones. When Hornaday was pursuing taxidermy at Iowa State Agricultural College in the 1870s, natural history museums were proliferating across the United States—government-sponsored institutions like the Smithsonian Institution as well as “dime museums” like P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York.¹ Hornaday would found the Society of American Taxidermists in 1880 with the goal of elevating the craft “to a permanent and acknowledged position among the fine arts.” American museums were, in his view, “storehouses of monstrosities”; at the time it was possible to purchase such taxidermized displays as a toad ice-skating, two squirrels playing euchre, and a kitten hauling a cart of corn to a model gristmill. Throughout his career, Hornaday would promote lifelike, naturalistic taxidermy displays.² When designing exhibits, he sought animal specimens with the largest bones, the healthiest coats. This prioritization of an idealized “wild” species form would guide his later bison restoration work.

Increasingly recognized as a skilled and serious taxidermist, Hornaday was appointed chief taxidermist of the newly established National Museum in Washington, DC, in 1882. Inventorying the museum’s holdings, he found only two “sadly dilapidated” bison hides and a mixture of skulls and bones.³ Convinced that market hunters would soon exterminate the bison, Hornaday wanted to acquire specimens for the museum and, through taxidermy, make them accessible to the public and thus render them “comparatively immortal.”⁴ His primary concern was not the continued existence of the species but, rather, maintaining scientists’ access to quality specimens. In his 1891 handbook, Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting, Hornaday quipped, “If you really must kill all the large mammalia from off the face of the earth, do at least preserve the heads.”⁵

1.1 Bison skulls piled at the glueworks in Rougeville, Michigan, c. 1892. Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

Hornaday’s doubts about the future of the species were well founded. In the decade after the Civil War, American settlers killed millions of bison. Some hunted for sport, others for profit, and some hunted because they believed that exterminating bison would force Native Americans into the burgeoning reservation system. Various technological changes hastened this violent colonial work, including the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the production of large-bore rifles. With new methods for tanning bison hide, bison were processed at an industrial scale into blankets, furniture, military uniforms, and machine belts. Bison belts drove water-powered mills, and bison bones were harvested to make glue, fertilizer, and refined sugar.⁶

The killing of bison to erode Indian sovereignty, while not an official national policy, was nevertheless an explicit plan. After the Civil War, the primary aim of the Department of the Interior was to transform lands expropriated from Indigenous nations and Mexico into land available to white settlers.⁷ In this context, bison were considered an impediment to an America owned and governed by cattle-rearing settlers of northern European descent. When General William Tecumseh Sherman assumed command of the Military Division of the Missouri in 1866, he instructed settlers to kill bison indiscriminately. Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano maintained in an 1872 report that destroying bison would aid “our efforts to confine the Indians to smaller areas, and compel them to abandon their nomadic customs.”⁸

Only at this juncture did politicians and naturalists begin to debate the nation’s practice of bison slaughter. Congressman Richard McCormick of Arizona argued to the House of Representatives in 1872 that bison extermination had failed to “quiet the Indians”; it had only made them, in his words, “more restless and dissatisfied.”⁹ Others maintained that bison should be protected because bison meat had become an important food source for white settlers. Henry Bergh, who had recently founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, circulated letters from advocates that described the bison as “a noble and harmless animal,” “timid” and “defenseless,” one in need of protection from “wicked and wonton waste.”¹⁰ A Santa Fe newspaper article read on the congressional floor in 1874 argued that “there is quite as much reason why the Government should protect the buffaloes as the Indians.”¹¹ Such concerns signaled a change in settler attitudes toward bison and other large game species. They did not, however, signal a rejection of Indian subjugation. Rather, early attempts to restore bison were as much a part of the settler project as the bison’s initial destruction. In a series of events that has been too often overlooked, Indian reservations were converted into the nation’s first wildlife reservations.

The campaign to eradicate bison was so successful that, by 1880, the number of bison in the United States had been reduced from tens of millions to fewer than one thousand. When Hornaday and two assistants embarked for Montana on a bison specimen collecting expedition in May 1886, they did not find herds of bison, but rather thousands of skeletons, bleached by the sun, strewn across the landscape. Their party managed to capture only one calf, which they brought with them back to Washington, DC. Hornaday named it Sandy. Fortunately for Hornaday, a second expedition later that year yielded better results. On that trip his party killed or purchased a total of twenty-five bison skins, sixteen skeletons, fifty-one skulls, and two bison fetuses. “I am really ashamed to confess it,” Hornaday later reflected, “but we have been guilty of killing buffalo in the year of our Lord 1886.”¹²

Returning to Washington after the second expedition, Hornaday worked on mounting six of the best specimens—including Sandy, who survived on the national mall for only two months—in a mahogany and glass case. While preparing the National Museum’s bison exhibit, he befriended a civil service commissioner who stopped by regularly to view its progress, Theodore Roosevelt, a connection that would prove key to later restoration efforts. The following year, Hornaday published The Extermination of the American Bison, in which he estimated that there were only 456 bison left in the United States: 256 in private herds and 200 within the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. In keeping with many of his contemporaries, Hornaday did not question this outcome; he viewed the decline of bison as an “absolutely inevitable” step in the colonization of North America, writing, “From the Great Slave Lake to the Rio Grande the home of the buffalo was everywhere overrun by the man with a gun; and, as has ever been the case, the wild creatures were gradually swept away, the largest and most conspicuous forms being the first to go.”¹³

It was around this time that Hornaday became interested in assembling what he called a “living zoological collection,” a step toward his eventual involvement in bison restoration, but not yet a break with the idea that white settlement condemned certain species—and societies—to extinction. In the fall of 1887, he and George Goode, then secretary of the Smithsonian, organized what zoology student Harvey Brown called “a little tryout zoo” on the Smithsonian grounds.¹⁴ The first zoological parks in the United States had opened in the decade prior. Based on a European model, these institutions were meant to educate the public, foster civic pride, and demonstrate America’s global reach.¹⁵ Perhaps because today we think of zoological parks as mostly “domesticated” places, historians have tended to study them separately from the history of in situ conservation and restoration, but the two histories are closely entwined. Hornaday became the first curator of the newly established Department of Living Animals, a position he held until 1890. Now, in addition to mounting and stuffing skins, Hornaday would be responsible for caring for living animals. By the spring of 1888, the collection had grown from fifteen to 172 animals, including four bison contributed by a rancher in Nebraska. Between two thousand and three thousand people viewed the collection each day.¹⁶

1.2 A group of schoolchildren viewing a bison behind the United States National Museum in Washington, DC, 1899. Smithsonian Institution Archives

As it turns out, Hornaday’s tenure at the Department of Living Animals was short-lived. Hornaday helped plan for an expanded National Zoo at Rock Creek, but he resigned from the National Museum after disagreements with the incoming Smithsonian secretary Samuel Langley. Hornaday spent the following six years working in real estate and writing a novel about an American man who escaped urban life by taking refuge among headhunters in Borneo. Then, in January 1896, he received a letter from Henry Fairfield Osborn, chairman of the New York Zoological Society’s executive committee, inquiring whether he would be interested in directing the New York Zoological Park (today the Bronx Zoo).¹⁷ From this position Hornaday would become involved in founding the American Bison Society, the first game restoration organization in the United States.

Upon moving to New York City in 1890, Hornaday joined the Boone and Crockett Club, an elite men’s hunting club founded by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell in 1887 to promote “manly sport with the rifle” and “exploration in the wild and unknown.” The club’s first meeting, a dinner for twelve wealthy and well-connected white men, was at Roosevelt’s sister’s home on Madison Avenue. The club was not purely social, however. In keeping with their interest in hunting, Boone and Crockett Club members worked with other game conservationists—as I will call them in order to distinguish them from restorationists—to reform state and federal hunting laws. Indeed the list of Boone and Crockett Club members will be familiar to students of the American conservation movement: besides Roosevelt and Hornaday, it includes Albert Bierstadt, Madison Grant, Clarence King, and, later, Gifford Pinchot and Aldo Leopold.¹⁸ Wildlife conservationists sought to restrict the length of hunting seasons and the number of animals that hunters could kill; to outlaw certain hunting methods, especially those used by nonwhite hunters; to ban the sale or transport of game; and to establish state game commissions.

The Boone and Crockett Club was in many ways a typical early conservation organization; it was situated in a city center, gender segregated, and white. Responding to the growing concern that modern urban environments produced effeminate and degraded men, Boone and Crockett Club members put forth a vision of American masculinity that prized physical activity and revered frontier life. Meanwhile, the woman-led National Association of Audubon Societies and the Wild Flower Preservation Society (founded in 1901) endeavored to convince women to stop purchasing clothing decorated with feathers and wildflowers, respectively, by appealing to notions of proper femininity. By the 1890s approximately five million birds per year were killed in the United States for their plumes, and women’s conservation groups decried declines in dogwoods, gentians, laurels, and other species used for centerpieces and Christmas decorations.¹⁹ “Weddings, by the way,” botanist Elizabeth Britton wrote in 1913, “are a new menace to our native plants.”²⁰

Despite their different formulations of how to care for wild species (and which species to care for), men’s and women’s conservation clubs shared the goal of restricting the environmental access of nonwhites. Between 1880 and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, approximately twenty-five million people immigrated to the United States, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe. The so-call...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Cultivating Wildness
• Part I: Reservations, 1900–1945
• Part II: Recovery, 1945–1970
• Part III: Regulation, 1970–2010
• Epilogue: Designing the Future
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index