Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  Rangers heavily armed against poachers, Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand, 1990

  Seub was a decent, honest, intelligent man with a passion for the wildlife of his country. In his first six months on the job he arrested more poachers than had ever been arrested before, working in the field alongside his forest guards. He introduced many new research projects in the sanctuary and proposed it as a World Heritage Site. But the same people in forestry who had urged Seub to take the job were the ones playing a double game, the ones who gave him no support for his efforts. The poachers threatened to kill him, and he began wearing a bulletproof vest. His anger increased and depression spilled over into despair. On September 1, 1990, Seub Nakasakthien put a bullet through his head.

  There are many eco-martyrs like Seub in the world today. They put themselves on the front lines for the preservation of wild things and wild places and they pay with their lives. They get jailed or killed, or, like Seub, they take their own lives in despair at the intransigence of corruption that defeats them.

  Despair is easy to feel in the wildlife wars. Dead animals—animals that have been eviscerated for their tusks or gallbladders or bones or horns or fur—lie immobile, witness to our communal failure as human beings. If all people had enough to eat, if we consumers were not so greedy, if we celebrated the glorious variety of all living things and understood how interconnected we all were…if, if, if.

  The contrast that is Thailand, that allows the snake to be skinned alive and the monk to look into the Tiger’s eyes, is the deep heart of Buddhism and what it means to be human.

  The Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh describes the dichotomy eloquently in his poem “Please Call Me by My True Names,” excerpted here. He was moved by the true story of a little girl who drowned herself after being raped by a sea pirate:

  Look deeply: I arrive in every second

  to be a bud on a spring branch,

  to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,

  learning to sing in my new nest,

  to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

  to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

  I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

  my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,

  and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

  I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,

  Who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,

  And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

  Please call me by my true names,

  So I can wake up,

  and so the door of my heart can be left open,

  the door of compassion.

  Alan struggled to understand the balance of life while on Dancing Woman Mountain. He is far more “awake” than most people I know. His life experiences are extensive and he rises above despair, never abandoning hope. Hope is the miracle that “arrives every second,” as Thich Nhat Hanh writes.

  Seub’s death was not in vain, nor forgotten. Nor did Alan’s work go unnoticed. The younger generation in Thailand began to take matters into their own hands and bring the government to account for the decimation of the forests, the land, and the animals, which rightly belong to all Thai people. Seub was their hero, his picture carried in their hearts and on placards.

  The royal family was moved by his death and martyrdom and allowed a statue of Seub to be placed in the park, the only statue erected in Thailand other than those of the royal family and religious figures. Corrupt officials were replaced and regulations in the parks began to be enforced. Conservation organizations around the world helped the young activists create fifty-one new national parks and wildlife sanctuaries between 1990 and 2000, bringing the total protected area to 16 percent of Thailand’s landmass. The Huai Kha Khaeng Sanctuary is the last stronghold of the Indochinese Tiger in Thailand, except for a few on the borders of Burma and Cambodia. The park has been expanded, and a year after Seub’s death it was designated a World Heritage Site.

  4

  Idaho

  We were all playing hooky for ten days. It was a real vacation for five of us and a busman’s holiday for the sixth. River rafting in the River of No Return Wilderness had been on our schedules for a year, and I was not going to miss out.

  My staff at the National Endowment for the Arts was nervous. Committee appropriations were coming up for the agency and a senator would be irritated if he couldn’t get the chairman on the phone. But I had been working overtime for eight months and this was a special vacation we had planned. I told my senior staff that I would return refreshed and ready to do battle once again, answering whatever questions Congress might have about controversial art and grants to our nation’s artists.

  Ed needed a break, too, from his grueling schedule as executive producer of television’s Law & Order. Alan was between trips to Burma, since 1989 changed to Myanmar, where he witnessed ongoing poaching of Rhinos, Tigers, Otters, reptiles, and birds—a veritable cornucopia of wildlife. He was waiting for government permission to travel north to chart a vast, less accessible wilderness.

  Alan was now married to Salisa, the beautiful geneticist we met at Dancing Woman Mountain. Dressed in a white and gold Thai embroidered gown, Salisa Sathapanawath was given away by my husband, her surrogate father, on the sloping lawn of our home in Putnam County, New York, on a sylvan summer afternoon in 1992. We had encouraged the alliance from the beginning, telling Alan that it would take an unflappable Asian woman to live with a man of so many moods. They moved into a beautiful house on a ridge high above rolling hills not far from us, so we could hang out together drinking martinis and talking shop on weekends. Salisa received her master’s degree from Mahidol University in Bangkok and got a job working in the lab at the Bronx Zoo under the renowned animal geneticist George Amato.

  Alan’s closest friend, Howard Quigley, a colleague from his University of Tennessee days, and his wife, Kathy, an Idaho veterinarian, made up the rest of our group. I was sure Howard and I were related—my birth name was also Quigley. Try as we might, however, we found no great-grandfathers in common, even though they all hailed from Ireland.

  The twin-engine plane flew for an hour from the town of McCall over the Bitterroot Wilderness, the largest contiguous forest tract in the lower forty-eight states and protected forever by the visionary U.S. senator Frank Church, for whom a good portion of the wilderness is named. Our trip was a busman’s holiday for Howard because he had long been studying Cougars in the Bitterroot as a project of the Hornocker Wildlife Institute. It didn’t matter; he was happy to be trading cat scat for white water in one of the most beautiful wild places in America.

  The plane bounced down on a grassy oasis surrounded by trees near the Selway River, and the director himself, Maurice Hornocker, stood waiting to greet us in front of a remote outpost of the institute. Maurice and George Schaller are the éminences grises of field biology today. Like George, Maurice traveled widely to study large mammals: Leopards in the Far East and Africa, Jaguars in Central and South America, and Siberian Tigers with Howard, who once gave me a plaster paw print of this largest of all the wild cats. It is the size of a dinner plate. Maurice is perhaps most famous for his work in the Americas on Canadian Lynx, Bobcats, Ocelots, and Cougars (also with Howard), and on Grizzly Bears, Wolverines, River Otters, and Badgers. He never leaves home without his camera and is as well known for his stunning animal photography as he is for his science.

  He welcomed us into the low-slung log ranch house, decorated cozily with western blankets, pine furniture, and well-stocked bookshelves. The river burbled outside and yellow and black Townsend’s Warblers flitted among the conifers. Deep in that forest in late June 1994 the tension of Washington, D.C., left me as quickly as water pops off a hot stove.

  The oil lamp burned low at the dinner table as conversation about endangered species continued well past dessert. I looked across at Dr. Hornocker, movie-star handsome in the flickering
light, and admired how he kept his positive outlook in the face of so much bad news. His wry sense of humor must have disarmed many a foe and won many a friend in his time. He considered the local people he’d worked with in Siberia or the Amazon equals, with as much innate knowledge of the land and animals as any college degree might confer, and he decried the academic world, which demanded published papers and peer review before research was taken seriously. A naturalist such as the legendary Aldo Leopold would be given no quarter today. “Science asks you to publish three ways to determine it’s dark outside,” Maurice quipped.

  Left to right: Howard Quigley, Alan Rabinowitz, Ed Sherin, and Maurice Hornocker

  Congress demanded similar credentials, and its reluctance to fund wildlife programs was of concern to all of us as we left the table and fell into our beds. I was having my own battles with Congress at the time as chairman of the arts endowment. The NEA, targeted by conservatives because of controversial grants, was the legacy I inherited when I took on the job. I made it my business to visit all fifty states to let the American people know what the NEA was doing for them in their district; I also met as many in Congress as possible. I was a staunch defender of freedom of expression and to the chagrin of the White House found myself in the newspapers more than any of us liked. The pressure was great from all sides: from artists who didn’t think I was defending their work enough, to congressmen on both sides of the aisle who felt I had gone too far in defending those same artists, to the top brass in the executive office who didn’t want me to embarrass the president. I had been paddling upstream for quite a while and welcomed this respite. A cool mountain breeze entered the dark room as we nestled under Hudson blankets and drifted off. I slept more soundly than I had in years. No phones, no roads, no people but us.

  I dreamed of Sacajawea. The fourteen-year-old Shoshone girl, married to a French trapper, had endeared herself to Lewis and Clark through the Bitterroot Mountains trek on the expedition of 1804–06. She proved to be calm and resourceful in the face of crises, far more worthy than her husband, whom they had hired as their guide. Her baby was born in 1805, and she simply strapped him on her back and continued the tortuous climb through the crusty pinnacled peaks.

  The Shoshone Indians had a three-thousand-year history in the area. Warring tribes pushed them higher into the mountains, where they survived on pine nuts, the occasional Bighorn Sheep, and the Buffalo meat they dried on the Great Plains in the summer. Like most hunter-gatherers, they considered Mother Earth the source of all life and sustenance. She was to be respected and honored for the living things she provided. Human beings were only one among many and could take what they needed but must use what they took, as the wolf did the antelope, the eagle the salmon, and the bear the berries of the fields. The animals were accorded respect for the different attributes each had—the Coyote for its wiliness, the Cougar for its stealth. Everything had its own spirit, including the rocks, the rivers, and the tiniest insects.

  This thinking changed as Native Americans began to be displaced by western expansion and the white man, with his ethic of dominance over the land and its creatures, and the concept of private property ownership. The most prevalent grazing animal on earth, the American Bison, or Buffalo, became scarce in the 1870s. The U.S. Army was responsible for slaughtering the most Bison, helping ranchers expand their cattle ranges and starving Indians in order to force them onto reservations. And warrior tribes like the Comanche killed as many as 280,000 Bison in one year to trade the skins, meat, bone, and horns.

  The most plentiful large mammal in the world, which Plains Indians depended on for food and clothing, and which they revered as a spirit animal, was almost gone. Now the Indians had guns; buffalo jumps that herded the animals over cliffs gave way to bullets that dropped them where they browsed. Cowboys shot them by the hundreds to feed railroad workers, and also accompanied tourists and European royalty as they shot a Bison of their own for trophy.

  The charismatic showman Buffalo Bill Cody killed a thousand all on his own. Forty million animals were reduced to one thousand by 1884. My grandfather Daniel Quigley was Buffalo Bill’s doctor in North Platte, Nebraska, where Cody lived with his family in a fine old Victorian house. The Wild West show rehearsed staged Buffalo hunts and Indian wars in North Platte before taking the famous show worldwide. My grandfather told us that Cody deeply regretted his part in the decimation of the Bison, and that he fully supported President Teddy Roosevelt and the New York Zoological Society in founding the American Bison Society. In 1901 the zoo’s director, William Hornaday, imported a small herd of Bison to a meadow near the Bronx. From this breeding group came almost all the subsequent Bison that repopulated the West, saving the species from extinction.

  This was the beginning of the conservation movement. Teddy Roosevelt, a renowned hunter, was our first and greatest conservation president. No other administration in U.S. history has placed conservation of the environment as a top priority for the federal government. Although TR believed in logging the forests, in damming the rivers, and in creating parks for people as much as for animals, and often disagreed with purist preservationist friends like John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club, Roosevelt’s record was extraordinary. He established five national parks, four game refuges, fifty-one bird reserves, and one hundred fifty national forests during his presidency.

  Conservation is an attitude, a spiritual belief, or a regulation, and for the first two hundred years of American settlement it didn’t exist. We were a rural society, a society that believed in taming the land and putting the plow to the earth. Wolves, Bears, Coyotes, and Cougars—anything big, competitive, or dangerous—were to be exterminated. Wolves were all but extinct in the lower forty-eight states by 1960, and Grizzlies in all but a few pockets. Coyotes became cleverer, managing to thrive despite mass poisoning, trapping, and shooting. Cougars, extirpated in the East except for the Florida Panther, hung on in the West despite efforts to eliminate them. Their secretive ways, their stealth, which the Shoshone saw as a holy inner spirit, kept them alive. The life of the hunter-gatherer, who depended on natural resources being available year after year and prayed to Mother Earth for bounty, was over, fallen to the cultivators of the earth who prayed to God for their crops to grow.

  In 1994 Maurice Hornocker still felt hopeful about the future of large mammals in North America. He said that as the United States urbanized in the mid-twentieth century, the desire to protect the wilderness and the creatures that lived in it began to grow. By 2014 fully 50 percent of the population lived in cities, and that number may increase to 80 percent by 2100. It is easy for those who don’t confront poisonous snakes or big cats on their city streets or in their backyards to take on the cause of conservation, but Maurice pointed out that there were changing attitudes among rural people as well. Some ranchers were promoting the health of the land through a balanced ecosystem that maintains apex predators like the Cougar. Maurice was excited about the reintroduction of Wolves to Yellowstone and elsewhere. The people of California made it illegal to hunt Cougars in 1990, despite incidents of mauling and killing of pets. Maurice believes there may be more Cougars in America today than at any time in their history. He felt there was much to be done but that it was all possible with social and political will. Social and political will—getting the support of the people and the politicians who can enact and enforce legislation—is the crux of the matter. There in Bitterroot Wilderness the solutions were clear. Getting there was another thing.

  On the river I was content not to paddle at all. I lay in the stern of the raft and gazed at the treetops and sky, watching the Osprey or the Harlequin Ducks, or the mammoth trout swishing in the eddies below. When the roar of the river increased and a flurry of white water tossed us about, I held on for dear life, sometimes flipping in the air like a child in a bouncy castle. At one point Ed and Alan, twelve feet ahead of me in the bow, became totally submerged as we raced down a waterfall, and then appeared again paddling like hell to bring us up ag
ain. Those minutes were exhilarating. Alan whooped with delight. I had never seen him so carefree and happy, his new bride by his side and surrounded by the love of friends.

  Most of the time we just drifted downstream, quiet in our own thoughts, connecting with nature. At night we camped under the stars and warmed our cold toes by the fire, gloriously content in this protected wilderness, the regulation of which was so strict we had to bag our feces and urine to take out.

  Howard’s work was to preserve habitat like this from ever being developed so that the Cougar, the Badger, the Black Bear, and the Golden Eagle still had the space they needed to survive. Alan was about to start his work in Burma assessing the Tiger population there and ways to keep it from extinction, and I was going back to a hostile Congress seeking to gut the NEA.

  Rafting the Selway River, Idaho, 1994

  See the flag? The raft is under the white water!

  The idyll on the river wound down. We felt good despite the uncertain future of our causes. We were burnished by the sun and blissfully satiated with the heady effects of the great outdoors. It took more than an hour on the single dirt road to reach a lone general store on the edge of the River of No Return Wilderness; a sign said, “Lowell, Idaho, population 23.” As I stepped from the van a woman hurried toward me from the store. “Are you Jane Alexander?” she said. “Call your office immediately.” End of idyll.