In the last analysis the Dust Bowl amounted to a failure on the part of farmers to adapt to the arid ecological conditions present on the southern plains. When Roosevelt stepped in with federal money for relief and rehabilitation, he caused farmers to think, correctly as it turned out, that the government would intervene in future droughts, giving them an incentive to stay put. Roosevelt thus divided up the potential threat of environmental tragedy in this region and proceeded to share it with taxpayers all across the nation. The risk of drought was divorced from the place in which it occurred, spread out for each and every American to bear, Uncle Sam defusing the harmful effects of natural calamity by shunting their costs elsewhere. It amounted to one huge exercise in risk sharing, one monstrous gift from the North and South to the West. Without it, life on the plains as we know it today would be impossible.
CONCLUSION
What does the history of this unforgiving land have to teach us? First, it provides a new appreciation for the hardships faced by the Indians as they were driven (during the first half of the nineteenth century) across the Mississippi River to make way for cotton plantations. The South’s lush landscape assured all human beings relative freedom from hunger; its mild climate virtually guaranteed that no one would freeze to death. When the U.S. government removed the Indians from the South to the West, however, they forced them into an arid region full of volatile weather where survival could no longer be taken for granted.
The second lesson is this: To engage in economic specialization in a place subject to such extreme weather is a risky enterprise. Specializing in cotton farming was one thing in the warm and bountiful South. Pursuing buffaloes or raising wheat in the arid West, where drought could descend at the worst possible moment and where no spring fish runs existed to fall back on, was something yet again. As a general rule, a culture’s ability to respond and adapt to environmental change is inversely proportional to the degree to which it specializes. The more single-minded in pursuit of one activity, be it buffalo hunting or wheat farming, the less likely it is to be able to cope with sudden shifts in weather and their consequences on the ground. Only the U.S. government’s willingness to absorb and redistribute the risks of life out on the plains has allowed American farmers the liberty to rely solely on wheat. Take away the subsidies and relief aid and let the Kansas farmer bear the full weight of living in this arid land, and suddenly what now seems like rugged individualism becomes revealed as daredevilry in disguise.
9
CONSERVATION RECONSIDERED
One of the ranchers who watched the blizzard of 1887 wipe out his herd of cattle was Theodore Roosevelt. In the early 1880s, Roosevelt, a New Yorker, built a ranch in North Dakota’s Badlands, stocked it with animals, and hired two cowboys to oversee his venture. In the spring of 1887, he headed west to check on the status of his 85,000-dollar investment, arriving in the Little Missouri valley only to find that death had beaten him there. He saw cattle carcasses—23 in just a single little spot—and found his once glorious herd reduced to just “a skinny sorry-looking crew.” The ground itself was in no better shape. “The land was a mere barren waste; not a green thing could be seen; the dead grass eaten off till the country looked as if it had been shaved with a razor.”1
In the fall of 1887, Roosevelt returned once again to the Badlands, this time on a hunting trip. Not much had improved since his last visit. The region’s prairie grass had lost the battle with ranchers, ever eager to stock the range with more animals than it could reasonably have been expected to bear. The remaining grass fell victim to desperate cattle seeking whatever little forage they could find in the wake of the death-dealing blizzard of 1887. An eerie silence spread out over the land. Four years earlier, on a visit to this spot, Roosevelt found few, if any, buffalo. In 1885, he lamented the loss of wild sheep and antelope. In 1886, he worried about the disappearance of migratory birds. By 1887, then, the Badlands must have offered a melancholy sight, and Roosevelt proposed to do something about it. He returned to New York to invite 12 of his animal-loving friends over for a meal and in January 1888 they established the Boone & Crockett Club, named in honor of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, legendary frontiersmen whom Roosevelt worshipped. The club was one of the first organizations in this country dedicated to saving big-game animals. And it was the work of a man who would go on to become president of the United States, a man whose name has become synonymous with the American conservation movement.2
The story generally told about conservation goes something like this. President Roosevelt, an avid outdoor enthusiast, believed the government needed to intervene to save the nation’s forests, streams, and other natural resources from rapacious loggers, ranchers, and market hunters alike. To carry out this mission, Roosevelt named Gifford Pinchot to head the newly formed U.S. Forest Service in 1905. Pinchot and his colleagues in the conservation movement, many drawn from fields such as forestry, geology, and hydrology, felt that a rational plan for organizing the nation’s use of its natural resources was in order. Business leaders, driven by unrestrained competition for timber, water, and grass, they held, would have to cede authority to expert government planners, with their scientific background, who would see to the most efficient use of the country’s natural wealth. Roosevelt, Pinchot, and other conservationists thus were not interested so much in preserving nature untouched as in standing guard to make sure it was used in the wisest, most efficient way possible.3
Opposing the “efficient use” brand of conservation, in this story, were the preservationists, the most famous of whom was John Muir. Born in 1838 in Dunbar, Scotland, and brought by his parents to Wisconsin when he was 11, Muir, who experienced a devout upbringing, would go on to found what was by all rights his own religion. It was based on the idea that we are “all God’s people”—“we” referring not just to human beings but to foxes, bears, plants, indeed, all elements of the natural world. Humans had no more right to exist than other species of life did. Often touted as the founder of the environmental movement, Muir strongly disagreed with Pinchot and the practical philosophy that informed his view of conservation. He proposed instead that wilderness areas enriched human life, existing as sacred refuges, antidotes to the stresses of modern society. “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings,” he once remarked. Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, felt government had a moral responsibility to preserve nature, not simply to use it wisely in the name of industry. He urged the nation’s political leaders to lock away America’s wilderness areas and throw the key as far from business as humanly possible, though he came to modify that stance as he was increasingly drawn into the practical world of politics.4
In the early years of the twentieth century, these two philosophies—utilitarianism versus preservationism—collided in the beautiful Hetch Hetchy valley in California’s Sierra Nevada. In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and fire in 1906, the city of San Francisco to the south proposed a dam to bring water to the growing metropolis, flooding the valley in the process. Pinchot supported the project on practical grounds. He faced off against the preservation-minded John Muir, who lost the battle. The dam was built and the valley inundated, as human impulse trumped natural beauty.
The problem with this portrayal, as it is rendered, for instance, in most American history textbooks, is that conservation, in both its guises, is primarily viewed as a battle over ideas about nature. Little is said about the effect of conservation measures—such as the establishment of national parks, forests, and wildlife preserves—on the ecosystems that were the target of this important reform impulse. And yet, to consider policies aimed at conserving nature without exploring what happened on the ground—to the natural world (and the people who depended on it for food)—is like teaching the Civil War without mentioning the outcome. Perhaps nature succumbed at Hetch Hetchy, but elsewhere the results of conservation policy were far more complicated. Oftentimes the West’s plants, trees, and animals simply thumbed their noses at the supposed experts sent
to manage them. Conservationists found themselves unable to fully grasp the complexity of ecological forces and erroneously took steps that caused nature to strike back with devastating wildfires and game explosions.
ROOSEVELT AND MUIR
Shown here posing at Yosemite National Park in 1903, these two key figures in the conservation movement disagreed over the best approach to achieving peace with nature, with Theodore Roosevelt embracing a utilitarian stance and John Muir a more spiritually oriented approach. (Yosemite Museum, Yosemite National Park)
Another problem with the conventional story is that it tends to mask the fact that both strains of conservation thinking—Pinchot’s and Muir’s—sought to bend nature to conform to the desires of humankind. Both, in other words, contained strong doses of anthropocentrism, not just the utilitarian variety. Even more important, both visions of how to go about conserving nature favored some groups of people over others. As the federal government moved in to try its hand at managing the forests and range in the name of tourism, ranching, and logging, Indians and poor whites, who had depended on such lands for food, found their interests shoved to the side. Conservation for some meant fines and jail time, and empty bellies for others.
TAYLOR-MADE FORESTS
While the conservationists were off dreaming up ways of reining in laissez-faire capitalism, engineer Frederick Taylor was busy inventing a strategy for bringing efficiency to the workplace. Rarely spoken of in the same breath, the two developments ought to be. Taylorism tried to help employers streamline production by eliminating the chaos present on the shop floor, prevailing on workers to use the most efficient set of motions necessary to complete any given task, to yield before the expert and his stopwatch. Conservation, meanwhile, at least in the form that Pinchot espoused, tried to rid not the shop floor but the forests of the very same disorderly tendencies, seeking the most efficient way of producing not steel, but crops of timber and animals. Taylorism controlled workers, conservation controlled nature, and both relied on the principles of scientific management to do so. Frederick Taylor and Gifford Pinchot, in short, were cut from the same mold.
Before Pinchot’s view of conservation rose to dominance, an ecologically informed group of foresters had tried to understand the forest on its own terms. Bernard Fernow, for example, one of the early scientific foresters, believed that forests did more than simply serve the economic needs of the American people. As interdependent entities, the woods, if managed properly, could help fend off floods and soil erosion. Forestland, he once wrote, played an important part “in the great economy of nature.” Early conservationists, concerned with the overall ecology of federal forestland, evinced an anti-industry stance, opposing the timber companies in their disastrous quest for short-term profits. Conservation, in other words, got off to a promising start.5
Eager to please the timber companies, however, Pinchot, who replaced Fernow as chief of the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Forestry in 1898, elevated economics over ecology. “The first principle of conservation is development,” he wrote in 1910, “the use of the natural resources now existing on this continent for the benefit of the people who live here now.” Pinchot felt that his first loyalty was to his own generation of Americans “and afterward the welfare of the generations to follow.” Like Fernow, he opposed the unrestrained destruction of the nation’s vast forest reserves. But unlike Fernow, he aimed to replace that approach with a scientifically grounded one that emphasized renewal of the resource as a way of serving economic—not ecological—ends.6
Pinchot had no intention then of simply putting the woods off limits to loggers. He was far too practical-minded for that. The forests existed to serve the economic demands of the nation, he believed, and to do that the lumber industry needed to cede authority to the experts at the Forest Service, who would tell them when it was time to cut a tree down. “The job,” as Pinchot put it, “was not to stop the axe, but to regulate its use.” Trees, in this view, were just like any other resource, human or natural. Frederick Taylor studied the behavior of workers in order to find the most efficient path to more production; Pinchot and his colleagues studied trees with the same end in mind. The woods could yield a constant source of timber if its trees were harvested at the proper time and then replanted, creating a second-growth forest even more manageable and in tune with the needs of the American economy than the original stands it replaced.7
At the outset, Pinchot galvanized the American public behind his forest initiative by calling their attention to an impending resource scarcity. By the turn of the century, the nation’s timber frontier was coming to a close, as lumbermen ventured to the Pacific Northwest, having already cleared vast portions of the Great Lakes states and South. In 1906, lumber consumption reached 46 billion board feet, a record that has yet to be broken. With prices rising, Pinchot and Roosevelt both raised the prospect of a wood shortage. “A timber famine in the future is inevitable,” Roosevelt declared in 1905. Clearly the nation’s original forest cover had decreased, from 850 million acres in the early seventeenth century to roughly 500 million acres by the dawn of the twentieth century. Famine or not, the context was ripe for intervention, a point Pinchot clearly sensed.8
“Forestry is handling trees so that one crop follows another,” Pinchot was fond of saying. What he meant, reduced to its essence, was that left to its own devices, nature was far too inefficient to serve the demands of a modern, industrial economy. Nothing irritated Pinchot and his fellow foresters more than the sight of an old-growth forest, filled with mature, dead, and diseased trees. Those old and disorderly forests needed to come down to make room for a new crop of timber. “To the extent to which the overripe timber on the national forests can not be cut and used while merchantable, public property is wasted,” intoned Henry Graves, who followed Pinchot as chief of the Forest Service. Like a worker prone to loafing and distraction, the forest too became the target of the efficiency experts.9
Anything that got in the way of a speedup in forest production—old growth, disease, insects, and fire—had to be extinguished. But what Pinchot and his disciples either failed to fully comprehend or chose to ignore was the complexity and, above all, the interdependency of the forest. The various elements that made up the woods—trees, plants, insects, and animals—functioned as a unit. Small changes could have enormous impact. A change to one element in the mix—removing a dead tree or ridding the forest of an insect—had consequences that ramified throughout an ecosystem, at times, ironically, even interfering with the business-oriented goals of the conservationists to boot. A species of moth, for instance, fed on the needles of Oregon’s Douglas fir trees, a sight that drove the Forest Service wild. But behind the scenes hundreds of different species of wasps, flies, spiders, and birds were eating the moths, providing the agency with a free extermination treatment. When federal foresters in Oregon’s Blue Mountains tried to eliminate the moths early in the twentieth century, the insect’s predators lost out and died too. The moths then bounced back with a vengeance to devour the trees once again.10
A dead tree, an obstruction in the eyes of an efficiency-minded forester, was a viable habitat from the perspective of an insect. Thus removing fallen trees eliminated a food source for thousands of carpenter ants, preventing them from carrying out their duties on the forest floor: decomposing dead wood and returning it to the soil. The Forest Service eventually wound up interfering with the cycle of death and decomposition on which the future health of the woods rested.11
Pinchot’s brand of conservation did even more damage when it came to the issue of fire. Fire had of course long been a major component of the West’s, indeed of North America’s, ecological mosaic, and early foresters remained fully aware of this fact. In much of the South as well as large parts of California, people set fire to the woods to reduce brush and encourage the growth of pasturage. In 1910, one timber man went so far as to call on the government to make burning mandatory in the Golden State. But it was not an auspicious ye
ar for incendiarism, not with fires in the northern Rockies raging out of control. The spring of 1910 was the driest month on record in the northwestern United States. That fact, combined with the buildup of slash, as logging increased and Indian burning of the land declined, led to one of the greatest wildfire disasters in American history. Conflagrations raged across the states of Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Oregon, sending smoke as far east as New England.
The fires left a legacy on government policy as enduring as the effect they had on the ground. Specifically, the 1910 fires worked to elevate the policy of fire suppression into a veritable religion at the Forest Service. Pinchot laid the intellectual groundwork for such a policy change. “I recall very well indeed,” he wrote in 1910, “how, in the early days of forest fires, they were considered simply and solely as acts of God, against which any opposition was hopeless and any attempt to control them not merely hopeless but childish. It was assumed that they came in the natural order of things, as inevitably as the seasons or the rising and setting of the sun. To-day we understand that forest fires are wholly within the control of men.”12
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