It was Aldo Leopold who articulated what real wilderness was and proposed incorporating wilderness preservation into the management of natural resources as matter of policy. Beguiled by the hunting and fishing on the headwaters of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico, Leopold in 1924 helped establish the Gila Wilderness Area—the first protected tract of wilderness in the world. Leopold later left the Forest Service and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where as a consultant to the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute he continued doing survey work on game that further convinced him intelligent wildlife management could not be accomplished by hunting laws alone. More important, Leopold realized, was the protection of productive habitat that could sustain breeding, foraging, and migrating populations of game. In 1929, Leopold gave a series of lectures at the University of Wisconsin that would become the basis for his monumental and still influential book, Game Management. With its holistic approach to managing game by understanding and promoting a sustainable environment in which birds and animals could be hunted yet thrive, Game Management marked the true beginning of conservation biology and earned Leopold a professorship at the University of Wisconsin that he would hold for the rest of his life. In early 1934, Leopold was named to a three-man committee commissioned by the Bureau of Biological Survey and officially designated as the President’s Committee on Wild Life Restoration—though it soon came to be known as the Beck Committee.
For years, the federal government had been looking for ways to stabilize and restore dwindling waterfowl numbers and to bring order to a chaotic system of state-based game laws that regulated hunting. Drought, habitat loss, and overhunting had decimated duck and goose populations. In 1918, Congress approved the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, an agreement between the United States and Canada that outlawed the taking of migratory bird species, except for a handful of game birds for which there were to be orderly hunting seasons and strictly enforced bag limits. But as Leopold had pointed out in Game Management, in the absence of habitat improvement waterfowl numbers would continue their downward trend while hunting seasons and bag limits, already being steadily constrained, would also continue to shrink.
The so-called Beck Committee was formed at the behest of a man named Thomas Beck, who was the editor of Collier’s magazine, the president of a sportsmen’s group called More Game Birds, and a personal friend of President Franklin Roosevelt. Beck and Leopold were joined on the committee by Jay “Ding” Darling, a popular and well-known editorial cartoonist with the Des Moines Register who’d won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924, and whose passion for conservation often found its way into his cartoons. The committee’s job was to come up with a comprehensive wildlife conservation plan that would provide a framework for spending the $25 million the president had set aside for purchasing marginal agricultural land.
The deliberations turned contentious. Beck, whose main goal was to boost sagging waterfowl numbers, seemed preoccupied with the idea of setting up federal duck-rearing operations that he thought would do for migratory flyways what fish hatcheries had done for trout streams. Darling and Leopold were more interested in finding ways to improve waterfowl breeding habitats. After about a month, the committee submitted a plan that tilted toward land acquisition and restoration. Another month after that, Roosevelt named Darling—a conservative Republican—to replace the head of the Bureau of Biological Survey, who had abruptly resigned. Darling lasted only about a year and a half on the job, but in that time redirected the agency’s conservation efforts toward habitat improvement in the refuge system. Darling also instituted a requirement that waterfowl hunters buy an annual duck stamp. He drew the first one himself.
In 1935 Aldo Leopold became one of the founding members of the Wilderness Society, a lobbying organization whose efforts eventually contributed to the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, a law that set aside nine million untouched acres of America.
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Rachel Carson had been at work in the Interior building for only a couple of months when her group was transferred to offices rented for the FWS in Chicago. With the war under way, it seemed that official Washington was cramped for space. Carson, miserable about the move, reported there in August 1942. The relocation was mercifully short, and by May 1943, Carson was sent back to Washington with a $600 raise and shortly after arriving returned to the FWS offices at the Interior building. A year later, FWS created a new position—information specialist—and promoted Carson to it with another $600 a year raise. She now earned $3,800 annually. But while her career in government had been good to her, Carson longed for something different.
Sometime in early 1945, after William Beebe included two chapters of Under the Sea-Wind in an anthology of nature writing, Carson had written to her hero and told him she hoped they might meet sometime when she was in New York. Beebe wrote back that he’d be delighted. Apparently this meeting did not take place for several years, but in October 1945 Carson wrote to Beebe on a different matter. Might there be a job for her at the New York Zoological Society? Carson said she’d been thinking about this for months and that she had begun to doubt the wisdom of her current career path:
As you may remember, I have been with the Fish and Wildlife Service as a biologist and writer for nearly ten years. Currently, I have been in charge of informational matters related to the wartime fisheries program. This specific assignment will soon come to an end. While I am offered a reasonably attractive future with the Service, for some time I have felt disinclined to continue longer in a Government agency. Frankly, I don’t want my own thinking in regard to “living natural history” to become set in the molds which hard necessity sometimes imposes on Government conservationists! I cannot write about these things unless I can be sincere. So if a broader field is open I should certainly want to consider its possibilities.
Beebe wrote back to say he thought Carson would be a terrific addition to their staff and that he’d forwarded her inquiry to the president of the Zoological Society, Fairfield Osborn. Osborn answered that if Carson was truly “exceptional” they might be able to find a spot for her in the society’s education department. Beebe forwarded this response to Carson, but said that such a position would be too modest for her talents and advised her against pursuing the matter. Carson followed this advice but made similar inquiries at Reader’s Digest and the National Audubon Society—neither of which had a position to offer.
Meanwhile, she was impatient to get on with her writing and was always on the lookout for a likely subject. On November 12, 1944, Carson issued a press release reporting that an overwintering site for North American chimney swifts had been discovered in Peru. She promptly proposed an article on chimney swifts to Reader’s Digest, which turned it down. That same month she published a story on bats and echolocation called “The Bat Knew It First” in Collier’s. In April 1945, Carson’s report on the Marine Studios aquarium at Marineland in Florida ran in a London magazine called Transatlantic, which specialized in stories from America. It was a challenging piece, as Carson had never laid eyes on the place. She had to do all of her reporting by letter, and at the time Marine Studios was actually closed because of wartime gas rationing. Carson somehow managed to track down enough key people in Florida to get her questions answered and to write a descriptive account of the aquarium, which was famous for its dolphin shows and the underwater viewing ports in the main tank that allowed visitors to watch helmet divers feeding the captive fish.
A few months later, Carson found a place for the rejected chimney swift story, selling “Ace of Nature’s Aviators” to Coronet, which cut the piece extensively and paid Carson $55. In early 1946, Carson pitched a story about bird banding to a new magazine called Holiday, which had yet to bring out its first issue. Her first draft of the piece was a bloated 6,000 words long. She eventually cut it to 3,500 words—which Holiday accepted, paying her $500. Things were not always easy. Months before putting out an FWS press release about an outbreak of red tide on the Florida gulf coast, Ca
rson tried to sell an article about it over the course of a few weeks to Collier’s, Reader’s Digest, and Coronet. They all said no.
Carson was friendly with two women, both younger than she was, who’d recently come to work at Fish and Wildlife. Kay Howe and Shirley Briggs were both graphic designers, photographers, and illustrators. They worked on FWS publications and shared an office next to Carson’s. The three women were an island of femininity in the otherwise heavily masculine agency. Howe was pretty and had a sunny disposition; Briggs came off more sternly, though she bore a resemblance to Carson’s beloved college professor, Mary Scott Skinker. The three of them sometimes lunched together, and they made “illegal” tea in an office closet almost every day. Briggs found Carson outwardly ladylike and soft-spoken, but learned that she had firm opinions about government publications and could be “pungent” in private.
Everyone liked Carson. Friends called her “Ray.” Howe thought she seemed on the frail side—though she also noticed Carson’s surprising stamina in the field. One time Carson had to spend a week in her friends’ office when a group of FWS regional directors temporarily took over Carson’s space for a conference. Briggs, in a letter to her mother, reported that the three women spent part of their time together trying to figure out how to clean up Carson’s office when she got it back, as the men borrowing it smoked cigars constantly, dropping their ashes on the floor and “using strong language.”
Carson was an avid bird-watcher. In the fall of 1945, she and Shirley Briggs joined a two-day Audubon Society excursion to Hawk Mountain in southeastern Pennsylvania. The “mountain” is only 1,506 feet in elevation, but the rocky outcroppings on its summit intercept the prevailing winds in such a way as to attract migrating eagles and hawks of all kinds. Once popular with hunters, Hawk Mountain was the first established refuge for raptors. During the fall flight, the great birds of prey flew by the mountaintop at close range, and they could be observed passing at eye level and sometimes even from above as they flew below the viewing area.
At the office, Carson’s work was only a sometime source of inspiration. Most of the press releases she wrote did not suggest magazine stories and were usually routine updates about commercial fish and shellfish production. Carson also edited a steady stream of technical reports for the annual Fishery Bulletin. One of these papers, “Biology of the Atlantic Mackerel (Scomber scombrus) of North America,” which concerned the fish’s early life history, must have been a bitter reminder that she’d already told this story herself, more artfully but to no greater notice.
This dreary work—there are only so many ways to report the sardine harvest—was occasionally interrupted by something that caused Carson to take notice. In August 1945, Carson wrote the first of three press releases on DDT that left an indelible impression with her. On August 10, Carson issued a short but alarming notice to the operators of fish processing plants about the potential hazards of using DDT in their facilities. Carson reported that preliminary experiments indicated that DDT was toxic to animals and to humans when ingested, and its use in facilities where it could contaminate food products “might have serious consequences.” Exactly what the fish processors were to do with this information was vague. Carson’s release only advised them to “consult experts” about using DDT.
A couple of weeks later, on August 22, 1945, the FWS issued a much broader warning about DDT, this time including details of the latest findings from the ongoing DDT experiments at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland. Carson didn’t write this release, but she read it with concern. The need to protect armed forces in Europe and the Pacific from insect-borne diseases during the war had been so urgent, the report said, that “its effects on other organisms had to be overlooked.” Now experiments showed that DDT killed birds and that even diluted amounts could be lethal to fish and other aquatic organisms. Still unknown was whether DDT was even more injurious to wildlife when it was used in the repeated applications that could be expected as the pesticide came into general use. Applying DDT to large areas or in concentrated amounts was, in light of the new evidence, considered “dangerous.” In a telling passage, the release said flatly that natural enemies such as birds, small mammals, amphibians, and other insects were considered the “the cheapest, safest, and one of the best means of controlling insect pests.” Replacing these with the unrestricted use of DDT “could conceivably do more damage than good.”
Nine months later, in May 1946, Carson put out a longer and more detailed release on concerns the agency had about DDT. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had compiled a new report intended to provide guidance for the safe use of DDT, though Carson’s announcement of this was in language that hinted there might not be any such thing as “safe.” The pesticide was likely to be injurious to wildlife, including commercially valuable species of fish and shellfish, unless it was applied only at “the lowest concentrations useful in insect control.” And even then, the best that might be hoped for was “minimal” harm to nontargeted species.
In the spring of 1946, Carson and Shirley Briggs were sent to the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, at the southern tip of Assateague Island on the Virginia coast, to begin work on the first in a series of ambitious pamphlets describing the natural histories of the federal refuges and explaining the work the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was doing in them. The series, titled Conservation in Action, was Carson’s idea. As usual, her thoughts were expansive and literary. Conservation in Action would become a classic in the ordinarily unimaginative world of public information—and the high point of Carson’s career as a government biologist and writer.
Over the course of several days, Carson and Briggs tramped and rode by car over the refuge and visited other areas by boat. Carson, as would be her habit on such expeditions, brought a copy of Under the Sea-Wind to give to the refuge manager. Chincoteague was a recent addition to the refuge system. The government had purchased its nine thousand acres, about one-third of Assateague Island, in 1942. The refuge, which looked across the narrow channel to Chincoteague Island, was established in 1945 as part of the FWS’s plan for a system of staging and resting areas for waterfowl and other birds migrating along the Atlantic flyway on the eastern seaboard. Carson wanted everyone, whether they were visiting the refuge or only reading about it, to have a sense of why it was there and what it looked like, and early in Chincoteague: A National Wildlife Refuge, Conservation in Action 1, she offered a graceful description:
Assateague is one of the barrier islands typical of the Middle Atlantic coast, never more than three miles from shore to shore, lying between Chincoteague Bay and the sea. Seen from the air, as the migrating waterfowl coming in from the north must see it, its eastern border is a wide ribbon of sand that curves around in a long arc at the southern end of the island to form a nearly enclosed harbor.
Back from the beach the sand mounts into low dunes, and the hills of sand are little by little bound and restrained by the beach grasses and the low, succulent, sand-loving dune plants. As the vegetation increases, the dunes fall away into salt marshes, bordering the bay. Like islands standing out of the low marsh areas are the patches of firmer, higher ground, forested with pine and oak and carpeted with thickets of myrtle, bayberry, sumac, rose, and catbrier. Scattered through the marshes are ponds and potholes filled with wigeongrass and bordered with bulrushes and other good food for ducks and geese. This is waterfowl country. This is the kind of country the ducks knew in the old days, before the white man’s civilization disturbed the face of the land. This is the kind of country that is rapidly disappearing except where it is preserved in wildlife sanctuaries.
Because Chincoteague was primarily a rest stop for many migrant species, its assemblage of wildlife was ever-changing. In cataloging the many birds that visited the refuge over the course of the year, Carson paid close attention to these seasonal shifts. Owing to its proximity to the sea, Chincoteague enjoyed mild winters, and some thirty thousand ducks—mostly black ducks, but also pintail, wigeon, ma
llard, teal, and others—stayed in the refuge through the cold time of the year, while another ten thousand or so sea ducks puttered in the ocean waiting for spring. These were joined by migrants arriving from the south in March, a month of transformation leading to April, when the shorebirds came in. Through spring and into summer, bird numbers fell, reaching their lowest point in midsummer, which Carson described as “the ebb between the flood tides of migration.” Carson also wrote about oyster cultivation and clamming and about the special relationship between the refuge and its most famous inhabitants—the wild ponies of Chincoteague. No one knew how the ponies came to live there, but they were shaggy and rugged-looking as would befit animals that, as Carson put it, “live most of their lives within sight or sound of the surf.” These small, sturdy, feral horses no longer lived on Chincoteague Island itself, but instead grazed within the refuge boundaries on Assateague Island by permit. Once a year the ponies were rounded up and made to swim over to Chincoteague Island at low tide, where they were corralled and the herd was culled in an annual pony auction. In the fall of 1946, while the first Conservation in Action pamphlet was still in production, Carson, this time accompanied by Kay Howe, was sent out again to start work on the next installment in the series.
The Merrimack River rises in New Hampshire and flows south to Lowell, Massachusetts, where it bends to the east and runs to the Atlantic Ocean. As the river nears the coast it comes to a series of small islands in the main channel. Just below these, on the south bank, stands a town, uncommonly charming even by New England standards, called Newburyport. The village is old but well preserved. Settled by English immigrants in 1635, it became a thriving port and ship-building center in colonial times. Its narrow streets are lined with Federalist-period houses and overlooked by the gleaming white steeple of the Church of the First Religious Society. In the heart of the town, at the confluence of three broader avenues, is Market Square, a commercial district flanked by rows of handsome three-story brick buildings that were built after a fire destroyed several blocks of the downtown area in 1811. At the end of the long waterfront by the river, the houses change over to shingle-sided saltboxes and ramshackle cottages as the Merrimack widens into a broad estuary. Two miles farther east at the river’s mouth is the tip of Plum Island, a narrow wall of beach and high dunes that stretches along the coastline for eight miles to the south. Plum Island is separated from the mainland by a sound at its southern extremity and by a vast salt marsh closer to Newburyport on its northern end. The marsh, one of the most diverse and productive ecosystems on the Atlantic seaboard, is fed by the tides and by the Parker River, much smaller than the Merrimack, which comes into it from the west.
On a Farther Shore Page 12
