Since the earliest settlement in the area, Plum Island and the salt marsh had been an important resource for farmers, fishermen, clam diggers, sportsmen, and market gunners. Every summer farmers made several cuttings of marsh grass for hay. It was an unusual business, as the marsh was wet and soft and often inundated at high tide. The hay was dried by piling it in tall, domed stacks atop cedar posts driven into the mud. These “staddles,” as the hay stands were called, rose above the marsh like thatched villages. Once dry, the hay was removed on flat-bottomed scows called “gundalows,” or by dragging it out behind horses wearing “bog shoes,” wooden saucers the size of dinner plates that were clamped to the horses’ hooves and allowed the animals to walk over the muck. Fish camps and hunting shacks also dotted the island and the fringes of the marsh.
In 1929 a small, private bird sanctuary was established near the marsh. In 1942 the FWS acquired this tract and a large surrounding parcel, more than 4,600 acres in all, including the southern three-fourths of Plum Island, for the creation of a permanent refuge. This further erosion of hunting opportunities went down hard. The local residents, notably sportsmen and those who kept shacks on the island, were bitterly opposed to the establishment of the Parker River Wildlife Refuge, as it was designated. Meant to help restore duck numbers—which had plummeted in the 1930s and ’40s—the refuge was seen as an unwarranted seizure of a natural asset that belonged to the people who used it.
The situation at Parker River demonstrated that the idea of natural resource conservation was still a long way from general acceptance. When Carson and Howe boarded the train to head north to begin work on Parker River: A National Wildlife Refuge, Conservation in Action 2, there’d been joking around the office that they should perhaps take disguises along, just in case. The Parker River assignment presented Carson with a challenge different from the one at Chincoteague. This time, in addition to capturing the natural majesty of the refuge, she had to make an argument for its existence—something that many people who lived near it didn’t want to hear. Carson and Howe arrived in Newburyport near the start of duck season, unwelcome emissaries from Washington.
Carson was drawn to the kinds of places ducks and other birds visited; she felt the same pull of the sea, sand, and marsh. Not surprisingly she fell in love with Plum Island. There were cottages and larger homes on the north end of the island, but inside the refuge to the south it was wild. The ocean, rising over a level bottom, broke in long, sweeping rollers against a beach so straight that, were it not for the haze of mist and blowing sand hovering above the surf, you could see down the entire length of the island. The sea was changeable, a bluest blue under the sun, and the color of unpolished steel beneath stormy skies. Standing at the water’s edge, Carson said, the loneliness of the Atlantic was palpable; there was nothing but water from there clear to Spain. Above the tide line the coarse sand rose up steeply to the dunes, which gave way to a tangle of craggy hills and deep wind-hollowed craters. In the looser sands grew bayberry and poison ivy and cranberries, and beyond this first carpet of greenery were thickets of shrubs and stunted trees that formed the spine of the island and harbored many animals, including pheasants and deer. On the inland side was the marsh. Nothing but water and grasses at high tide, it was a web of black, muddy clam flats when the water retreated.
Carson and Howe toured the island and marsh day after day, traveling with the refuge manager in a specially constructed “command car” that constantly threatened to roll over or bog down in the island’s sandy mazes. Carson quizzed the refuge manager closely and took copious notes. Howe marveled at Carson’s stamina, but it was taxing work and Carson confessed in a letter to Shirley Briggs that she thought she’d need to go off somewhere and hibernate when it was done. Carson said she was starved at the end of a long day in the field. They found a restaurant in Newburyport that served big steaks, and they ate there every night, sunburned and bruised and scratching at insect bites. Back at their hotel they shared whiskey from the flask Carson usually brought along for fieldwork. Howe hoped the weather, which had been dark and gloomy, would improve enough that she could try taking some color photographs to go along with the black-and-whites she had already shot. She wished for a telephoto lens, too, as the wading birds and ducks tended to stay out of range.
There were rumors in town that opponents of the refuge were planning acts of sabotage—and, in fact, Carson and Howe were shown some broken traps where ducks had been freed from a banding operation. The refuge manager assured them an animal had probably been responsible, but other members of the staff weren’t so sure. Some of them warned Carson that getting shot at was a possibility. In the end, the only violence Carson and Howe experienced was in town one day when a wayward football struck the rear end of the car they were riding in.
Carson began the second Conservation in Action pamphlet with a blunt challenge to anyone who opposed the Parker River Wildlife Refuge. She wrote that it was New England’s “most important contribution to the national effort to save the waterfowl of North America.” Millions of Americans, she said, had a stake in this effort—two million duck hunters and many more bird lovers for starters, but also everyone who understood that wildlife was an important part of America’s heritage that was threatened by the widespread loss of natural habitat to agriculture and other forms of development. The government meant to correct this situation and for that reason had now established some two hundred refuges for waterfowl across the country. Within this system of sanctuaries, none were so important as those located in the Atlantic flyway, the easternmost of the four main migratory routes connecting north and south across the United States. The reason, Carson explained vividly, was the concentration of birds that occurred along the Atlantic seaboard in places like the Parker River refuge:
A striking fact about the Atlantic flyway—a fact which dominates the conservation problem—is the extremely limited area of its winter range compared with the vast extent of its breeding grounds. The nesting area extends from Greenland across much of northern Canada; the wintering grounds are confined to a narrow strip of coastal marshes along the east coast of the United States. A map of the flyway looks like a huge, distorted funnel with a long slender stem. Imagine that for one half of the year all the contents of the funnel have to be contained within the stem and you can understand the compression of birds within their winter range.
Parker River was the only federal refuge managed mainly for waterfowl that was within the northern part of the Atlantic flyway. Carson explained that following the breeding season some migrating waterfowl stopped there as they came south along the seacoast, while others that nested farther inland often made their arrival on the coast near Parker River. Carson—who after visiting the refuge spent a few days at the Audubon Society in Boston researching this information—said these facts had come to light through bird-banding projects, although the importance of Parker River on “one of the great highways of bird migration” had been known for generations. Among ornithologists, Parker River was considered the single most critical sanctuary location anywhere on the East Coast. When the FWS acquired the property in 1942, development of the refuge had to wait because of the war. But there were already signs that ducks were coming back. In 1944 only about two thousand waterfowl were seen in the refuge. By 1946 the number had risen to fifteen thousand.
The most common waterfowl species at Parker River was the black duck, a close relative of the mallard and much prized by sportsmen. Its strong flight makes it a challenging target, and its diet of mostly plants makes it fine table fare. But black ducks were in crisis. After they weathered the droughts of the 1930s better than other ducks, black duck numbers began falling precipitously in the mid-1940s. In 1945 the black duck flight had been considered a “complete failure.” The reasons for the decline of black ducks were not completely known, Carson wrote, but among them were the drainage of wetlands by developers and a recent streak of bad weather during the nesting seasons in Canada.
Parker River
and other waterfowl refuges could replace some of the ducks’ lost breeding habitat. But the chief aim at Parker River was to provide a resting spot for migrating ducks. And this, Carson argued, was exactly why duck hunters should welcome the presence of the refuge. Although sportsmen could not shoot in the refuge, they could shoot near it. Having come to Newburyport in September, Carson had seen the situation for herself. Black ducks were present in the refuge throughout the year—a handful of local birds simply never went away—but it was in September and October, when the fall flight arrived from the north, that the area began to “get the feel of real black duck country.”
“As you drive out from the town to Plum Island,” Carson wrote, “you can see them gathering in the harbor, small black forms riding the outgoing tide, bobbing like boats at anchor. Today perhaps there are a thousand. Tomorrow morning there may be five thousand; next week as many more.”
Carson had learned more than just the lay of the land and the composition of the flora and fauna at Plum Island. She also demonstrated a thorough understanding of duck hunters and of duck hunting—and of the black duck, a “dabbling” species that feeds in shallow water. She explained that because hunting was still permitted in areas adjacent to the refuge, waterfowlers could actually anticipate better shooting than ever because ducks resting in the refuge would trade in and out of the protected area in greater numbers.
To make the refuge more productive as duck habitat while at the same time avoiding the infringements on the local economy that many in the area had feared, the refuge managers were approaching their mission in two ways. One was to make improvements in the marsh. The other was to leave some things as they were. Clamming and hay cutting were allowed to continue as before. Meanwhile, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson wrote, was increasing the production of duck forage by constructing a system of impoundments in which water levels could be controlled. These were drained in the summer and planted with assorted grasses and pond weeds that ducks feed on. In the fall, the impoundments were flooded for arriving ducks to set down on and feast on the plants. There was also a new series of artificial islands in the marsh, built from marsh sod, that gave the ducks a place to nest that was safe from the tidal flooding that occurred during the breeding season and was preferable to the thickets on Plum Island and their resident predators. Carson, herself a bird-watcher but no bird hunter, included an inventory of birding opportunities at the refuge that made it an “irresistible attraction.” It was almost possible to hear the chafe of corduroy and the clank of binoculars between the lines. There were more than three hundred bird species in the area, Carson reported, including some that were sufficiently uncommon that “the hope of surprising an ornithological rarity gives zest to often repeated visits.” Having been there in the fall and not in the summer, Carson made no mention of Plum Island’s most quarrelsome inhabitant: the greenhead. An aggressive blood-feeding horsefly whose bite is excruciating, greenheads in July and August make the island hazardous to human visitors almost everywhere except on the windswept beach.
Altogether, Carson wrote four installments of the Conservation in Action series, and coauthored another that featured the Bear River Wildlife Refuge in Utah, a waterfowl sanctuary far away from Carson’s beloved seashore and, at sixty-five thousand acres, many times bigger than other refuges she had visited. The fifth in the series, Guarding Our Wildlife Resources, was longer and different from the others: It was not about a specific refuge. It was, rather, a summary assessment of the state of wildlife conservation in the United States. Carson structured it as a serial tragedy—a story of natural wealth repeatedly squandered, differing only in the details from one class of wildlife to another. From America’s earliest days, the pattern had been the same, whether it was beaver or ducks or salmon: What once seemed to be inexhaustible stocks had been depleted through over-harvest, by the destruction of natural habitat, and, all too frequently, because of an ignorance of the basic biology of many game species.
The good news, Carson wrote, was that for many species—even some such as the bison and the whooping crane that had come perilously close to extinction—there was a recovery under way, thanks to an awakening among the public and in Washington. There were now three hundred National Wildlife Refuges. Three and a half million acres were devoted to reestablishing waterfowl and other migratory species, and almost fifteen million refuge acres harbored large mammals such as elk, deer, and bison, all of which were on the increase. Part of that success, Carson explained, was owed to a growing awareness that wildlife problems could not be addressed in isolation—that every species, including humans, was dependent on and embedded in the web of interactions that connects all living things.
Taking a decidedly ecological tone, Carson wrote that wildlife conservation did not serve only the interests of species in distress—or the concerns of hunters or fishermen or nature enthusiasts—but was in service to the totality of existence: “For all the people, the preservation of wildlife and of wildlife habitat means also the preservation of the basic resources of the earth, which men, as well as animals, must have in order to live. Wildlife, water, forests, grasslands—all are parts of man’s essential environment; the conservation and effective use of one is impossible except as the others are also conserved.”
Guarding Our Wildlife Resources was published in 1948. In the spring of that year, Aldo Leopold learned that Oxford University Press had decided to publish a book he’d been working on for seven years called “Great Possessions.” The book was a collection of essays based on Leopold’s seasonal observations of nature near a shack he kept as a country retreat in a wooded area on the Wisconsin River north of Madison. The Shack—everyone called it that—was a converted chicken coop. For Leopold it was a good place to be close to the earth, to think, and to write. But for a time he had trouble getting anyone committed to “Great Possessions.” Four publishers had already turned it down before Oxford said yes. But Leopold died unexpectedly only a week after getting this good news. Oxford determined the book could still be published, though they didn’t like Leopold’s title and eventually came up with a different one. They called the book A Sand County Almanac.
In one of the book’s essays, Leopold proposed what he called the “land ethic,” a concept that, as he put it, “changes the role of Homo sapiens from a conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.” An important principle of the land ethic was that conservation should not be undertaken for purely economic ends. Leopold wrote that of the twenty-two thousand higher plants and animals found in Wisconsin, no more than 5 percent could be “sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use.” Even so, each of these organisms was part of a “biotic community,” the continuing stability of which depended upon their presence. When A Sand County Almanac was reissued in 1966 it was embraced by an environmental movement that had coalesced around the idea that nature was in charge of humanity and not the other way around. Leopold’s explanation of the land ethic was seen as prophetic: “A thing is right,” Leopold wrote, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
And so American conservation had evolved over a half century, from the first tentative efforts at increasing wildlife populations by creating sanctuaries and establishing game laws, to a more generalized plea for the preservation of natural assets in their totality. The management of game remained central to this debate—it drove federal policy, and the economic support of sportsmen enabled Leopold and others to study resource issues. Yet Leopold and Carson now argued that conservation could not be confined to a select segment of the natural world, but was of necessity about the preservation of the myriad interspecies relationships that make up what Leopold called “the biotic community.”
Leopold believed that conservation still had a long way to go because human beings tended to see the natural environment as a “commodity” that, if sufficiently restocked with animals to shoot and fish to catch, m
ight be thought of as “conserved.” This, he said, was not true. “When we see the land as a community to which we belong,” Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac, “we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Leopold realized that he was stepping beyond the limits of science in making this argument and that what he had written in A Sand County Almanac was an appreciation of the intangible features of nature: “That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.”
Carson and Leopold did not believe, as had the naturalists who had come centuries before them, that nature was the sacred and inviolate creation of God. On the contrary, it was human beings who left their marks upon the earth. But these were not necessarily permanent and need not be damaging. Humanity, they believed, is compelled to find a better way. The beauty of the conservation impulse—part of the “cultural harvest” as Leopold called it—is its optimism. If civilization overtaxed nature we have it in our power to restore it. And failing in this is to fail at protecting our own interests, since humanity is not apart from nature but of it. Essential to the idea of conservation was a belief that we could be the secular shepherds of the earth—gamekeepers for every living thing, ourselves included. In the fifth Conservation in Action booklet, Carson announced the “awakening of a vital conservation sentiment”—sentiment by its nature being among the most heartfelt and urgent of motivations.
On a Farther Shore Page 13
