Bracketing Braverman: Thinking and Acting for Wildlife Conservation after Nature

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Irus Braverman, Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (2012).

2 Irus Braverman, Wild Life: The Institution of Nature (2015) [hereinafter Wild Life].

3 Reflections on methodology can be found in Irus Braverman, Who's Afraid of Methodology?: Advocating a Reflective Turn in Legal Geography, in The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography 120 (Irus Braverman et al. eds., 2014).

4 The full list of those interviewed and of Braverman's participatory observations for the book appears in Wild Life, supra note 2, at 293–299.

5 Stuart Harrop, Climate Change, Conservation and the Place for Wild Animal Welfare in International Law, 23 J. Envtl. L. 441, 450–462 (2011); Diana Pritchard, John Fa, Sarah Oldfield, & Stuart Harrop, Bring the Captive Closer to the Wild: Redefining the Role of Ex Situ Conservation, 46 Oryx 18–23 (2011).

6 Wild Life, supra note 2, at 9. The clarion call was sounded in Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (1989).

7 Wild Life, supra note 2, at 11.

8 Id. at 4. The sites include, for example, gene banks, zoo breeding centers, conservation farms, conservation hatcheries, protected areas, wildlife refuges, and national parks. Id. at 17–18.

9 Id. at 13.

10 Id. at 9.

11 Id. at 5.

12 Id. at 3.

13 Id. at 16.

14 Richard Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law (2004); Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015); James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics Since 1964 (2012).

15 The corpus is on brilliant display in Dale Goble & Eric Freyfogle, Wildlife Law: Cases & Materials (2d ed. 2010).

16 Perhaps the clearest demonstration comes in the chapter of the book dealing with the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973, as amended, and the subsequent evolution of endangered species protection, which Braverman tracks through selected episodes of administrative agency and court interpretation of the statute. See Wild Life, supra note 2, at 153–175.

17 Robert Fischman, The National Wildlife Refuges: Coordinating a Conservation System through Law 34 (2003).

18 Id. at 35.

19 Id. at 39.

20 Robert Wilson, Seeking Refuge: Birds & Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway 79–90 (2010). The parallels here to the creation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of protected areas for wildlife in Africa are striking. See Rachelle Adam, Elephant Treaties: The Colonial Legacy of the Biodiversity Crisis 13–57 (2014).

21 Philip Garone, The Fall & Rise of the Wetlands of California's Great Central Valley 149 (2011).

22 Wild Life, supra note 2, at 5.

23 Garone, supra note 21, at 153–154.

24 Peter Alagona, After the Grizzly: Endangered Species & the Politics of Place in California 28 (2013) (noting the historical and scientific views that a naturalist, Charles Howard Shinn, published in Grizzly and Pioneer, 41(19) Century 130–131 (November 1890–April 1891)).

25 Alagona, supra note 24, at 37. See also Daniel Bottom, To Till the Water: A History of Ideas in Fisheries Conservation, in Pacific Salmon & Their Ecosystems 569–597 (Deanna Stouder, Peter Bisson, & Robert Naiman eds. 1997).

26 Alagona, supra note 24, at 51.

27 Id.

28 Id.

29 Id. at 49–50 (citing Joseph Grinnell, The Methods and Uses of a Research Museum, 77 Popular Sci. Monthly 163 (1910)).

30 Alagona, supra note 24, at 57.

31 Grinnell and the people he worked with came to be known as the Berkeley Circle. Tracing their influence on ecology and conservation, Alagona notes that, in 1962, Interior Secretary Stuart Udall appointed A. Starker Leopold, the son of Aldo Leopold and a person who took Grinnell's place as the most influential wildlife conservationist in California, to be chair of an advisory board appointed to assess the status of wildlife conservation in the national parks. The resulting Leopold Report, which the National Park Service adopted as official policy, was a “foundational document of the postwar conservation movement,” and largely revived and repackaged the insights the Berkeley Circle had developed at the beginning of the century. Id. at 93–94.

32 The origins of protected areas conservation, now vigorously sustained on a global basis by IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas, are traced in id. at 71–92.

33 An important aspect of the quickening of federal interest in the conservation of wildlife was the creation over time of funds of various sorts to acquire conservation habitat, which in many cases was then managed by state agencies. See Goble & Freyfogle, supra note 15, at 746–1029.

34 Alagona, supra note 24, at 71 (quoting Charles Adams, Guide to the Study of Animal Ecology 24–27 (1913), and referencing Victor Shelford, The Preservation of Natural Biotic Communities, 14 Ecology 241 (1933)). Getting out into the field was not something, however, that people like Grinnell and his Berkeley Circle shied away from in their work. On the contrary, to make museum work useful for conservation, vigorous and sustained field work was essential. The proof of the pudding came in a project to mark MVZ's centenary, described in Alagona, supra note 24, at 51.

35 Preordination would be a product of ethical extensionism, which Alagona critiques. Id. at 52.

36 Some of the reverses came early, as when the construction of a reservoir was authorized in Yosemite National Park to supply San Francisco with water. See, e.g., Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness & the American Mind 161–181 (5th ed. 2014).

37 The whole messy business of how to conserve nature through some mix of public and private habitat conservation, how to draw less than ideal lines around governmentally designated protected areas, and how to pay for the resulting conservation is nicely captured in Susan Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917–1978 (1983).

38 Wild Life, supra note 2, at 11 (referencing Carrie Friese, Cloning Wild Life: Zoos, Captivity, and the Future of Endangered Animals 11 (2013)).

39 One attempt to measure whether nature reserves of various sorts are actually saving nature concluded, for example, that the small area dedicated to nature reserves on more productive soils at lower elevations suggests that the existing network of nature reserves can make only a highly compromised claim to be protecting a representative sample of the nation's biodiversity. See J. Michael Scott et al., Nature Reserves: Do They Capture the Full Range of America's Biological Diversity?, 114 Ecological Applications 999, 1003 (2001). In some cases, saving nature gained vitality but lost some measure of authenticity by taking on new forms, as when it came to be seen as an exercise in environmental or ecological restoration heavily dependent on local political support. See Rachael Salcido, The Success and Continued Challenges of the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area: A Grassroots Restoration, 39 Ecology L. Q. 1085, 1120–1123 (2012).

40 See, generally, e.g., William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature 69 (William Cronon ed. 1995); Jamie Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature (2015); Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (2011); Paul Wapner, Living through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism (2010).

41 George Perkins Marsh, Man & Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864).

42 Alternate responses would be to double down on saving whatever wild species and wild places arguably still exist and to re-wild in circumstances where there is some plausible prospect of restoring original conditions. See generally, e.g., After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans (Ben Minteer & Steven Pyne eds. 2015); Marc Bekoff, Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence (2014); Dave Foreman, Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century (2004); Caroline Fraser, Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (2009); Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth (George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, & Tom Butler eds., 2014); Protecting the Wild: Parks and Wilderness, the Foundation for Conservation (George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, & Tom Butler eds., 2015).

43 The Wilderness Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1131(c).

44 Purdy, supra note 14, at 2–3.

45 See supra note 42.

46 Wild Life, supra note 2, at 43.

47 Id. (citing Ursula Heise, Martian Ecologies and the Future of Nature, 57 Twentieth-Century Literature 447, 450–451 (2011)). See generally Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008).

48 Wild Life, supra note 2, at 43.

49 Id. at 11 (citing Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy 9–52 (2004)).

50 Id. at 46 (citing Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, & Robert Lalasz, Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility, 2 Breakthrough J. 36 (2011), available at http://thebreakthrough.org/images/main_image/Breakthrough_Journal_Issue_2.pdf).

51 Id. at 47–48.

52 Wild Life, supra note 2, at 224--232

53 Id. at 225.

54 Id. at 226.

55 Id.

56 Id. at 44 (quoting Jamie Lorimer & Clemens Driessen, Wild Experiments at the Oostvaardersplassen: Rethinking Environmentalism in the Anthropocene, 39 Trans. Inst. Brit. Geographers 169, 169 (2014)). But see Lorimer, supra note 40, at 9–11, 97–117 (repeating the phrase and substantially enlarging the discussion).

57 Wild Life, supra note 2, at 44.

58 Samuel P. Hays, Conservation & the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (1959).

59 Turner, supra note 14, at 380–394 (noting the reliance on natural resource economics, conservation biology, and policy expertise rather than grassroots constituencies); see generally Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith, Learning from Experience, Planning for the Future: Beyond the Parable (and Paradox?) of Environmentalists as Pin-Striped Pantheists, 13 Ecology L. Q. 715 (1986).

60 Wild Life, supra note 2, at 231.

61 Id. at 51–58.

62 Id. at 231.

63 Id.

64 Id. (emphasis added).

65 Id. at 231–232.

66 Id. at 33.

67 Id. at 234 n.19.

68 Id. at 237 n.48.

69 Purdy, supra note 14, at 279.