Author: todayinconservation

John Muir, the father of American conservation, loved the Yosemite Valley like no other place on earth.  He wrote, “How vividly my own first journey to Yosemite comes to mind.  It was bloom-time of the year over all the lowlands and ranges of the coast; the landscape was fairly drenched with sunshine, the larks were singing, and the hills so covered with flowers that they seemed to be painted….”  Those of us lucky enough to have visited Yosemite feel much like Muir.  And we owe the existence of Yosemite National Park largely to John Muir’s efforts.

            Yosemite was well known to California tourists by the time Muir arrived in 1868.  In fact, part of the area was already a park.  The lands belonged to the federal government, and in 1864, President Lincoln had signed a law that transferred Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees to the state of California for a park.  This law required that “the premises shall be held for public use, report, and recreation; shall be inalienable for all time.”  Although Yellowstone is officially the nation’s first “national park” (created in 1872), many people consider this action to be the inspirational spark for the national park idea.

            The park was created, but California did little to manage its use.  Quickly the Yosemite Valley became overrun with shabby hotels and other buildings, sheep grazing denuded the meadows, and timber harvest carried away the forest. 

            John Muir was not about to accept this travesty.  Muir formed a partnership with magazine publisher Robert Underwood Johnson with the goal of preserving the larger ecosystem surrounding the valley.  Protecting the whole was important, Muir argued, because “the branching canons and valleys of the basins of the streams that pour into Yosemite are as closely related to it as are the fingers to the palm of the hand—as the branches, foliage and flowers of a tree to the trunk.”  Muir wrote articles for Johnson’s magazine; Johnson lobbied his influential friends for political support.  They were almost immediately successful.  On October 1, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed the law that created Yosemite National Park

            There was still a problem, however.  California still controlled the Yosemite Valley, a geographic hole in the doughnut of the national park.  And that hole was an ecological disaster.  Mounting the same sort of campaign that he had done before, Muir was once again successful.  In 1906, Yosemite Valley was returned to federal ownership by California and became part of Yosemite National Park.  Today, the park stands as a unified ecosystem covering about 1200 square miles and is surrounded by national forests and other protected lands that help keep the magnificence of Yosemite intact.

            And people still love it.  Record visitation occurred in 2016, the National Park Service’s centennial year, when just over 5 million people went to Yosemite.  Yosemite ranks sixth in visitation among all national parks.

            Yosemite does have one sad chapter.  After an earthquake and fire destroyed most of San Francisco in 1906, the city proposed that a valley within Yosemite be dammed to make a reservoir to create a large and reliable water source.  John Muir again came to the park’s defense:  “Dam Hetch Hetchy!  As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”  Eventually Muir lost his argument, and the Hetch Hetchy Valley was dammed and flooded—and remains so to this day.

References:

Gisel, Bonnie.  A Short History of Yosemite National Park.  Sierra Club.  Available at:  https://content.sierraclub.org/grassrootsnetwork/sites/content.sierraclub.org.activistnetwork/files/teams/documents/A%20Brief%20History%20of%20Yosemite%20National%20Park%20by%20Bonnie%20Gisel.pdf.  Accessed July 18, 2019.

National Park Service.  Yosemite.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/yose/index.htm.  Accessed July 18, 2019.

Nielsen, Larry A.  2017.  Nature’s Allies—Eight Conservationists Who Changed Our World.  Island Press, 255 pages.

OhRanger.com  History of Yosemite.  Available at:             http://www.ohranger.com/yosemite/history-yosemite.  Accessed July 18, 2019.

Turns out that September 30 is a pretty dam important day!  Two major dam-related events occurred on this date, both relating to the availability of water and water-based energy.

            The first event, on September 30, 1882, didn’t make much of a splash then and is remembered even less today.  Dams had always been used for power, by building up a head of water behind the dam and directing water that fell over the top of the dam into a water wheel.  The water turned the wheel, which then turned grinding stones and other devices.  As time passed, these water mills got more complicated, with the wheel’s shaft attached to long axles that could power many tools, like saws and conveyor belts.

            But on this date in 1882, something special happened.  In Appleton, Wisconsin, the owner of a paper mill, H. J. Rogers, attached a dynamo (that’s a generator for electricity) to his water wheel and began producing electricity.  His small dam on the Fox River generated enough electricity to power his paper mill and the lights in his house.  Within a few years, similar electric generators were in use on small dams across the United States and soon throughout the world.  Most of these were short dams, only a few feet high, with a low capacity to generate electricity. 

            As the inventions of the industrial revolution began to allow bigger machines and structures to be built, dams got in on the action.  Dams got taller and longer; they were built with concrete and steel rather than dirt and wood; they contained large turbines that could generate massive amounts of electricity.  The U.S. government got into this business in a big way in 1902, when the Reclamation Act created the Bureau of Reclamation and authorized work across the American West to create dams, canals and other structures for irrigation, flood control, and hydro-electricity.

            The U.S. built many large dams during the first half of the 20^th Century, but the crowning masterpiece was Hoover Dam, dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt on—you guessed it—September 30, in the year 1935.  Hoover Dam was then and is still now considered a monumentt to the ingenuity, hard work and undaunted optimism of the American spirit.

            Hoover Dam impounds the Colorado River along the Nevada-Arizona border, a few miles southeast of Las Vegas.  Enterprising businessmen had tried to tame the Colorado River many times, primarily to supply irrigation water to southern California’s sprawling farmlands.  Their attempts to build earthen dams, levees and canals always ended in disaster as the powerful and unpredictable Colorado River triumphed over their amateurish engineering.  Taming the Colorado River would require the full force of the U.S. government and much bigger thinking than had been used before.

            So, in 1928, Congress authorized funding for the Boulder Canyon Project, the largest dam ever built up to that time.  A site was found in Black Canyon on the Colorado, where nearly vertical rock walls rose over 800 feet from the river.  Construction began in 1931 on the gargantuan project.  First, massive tunnels were blasted into the canyon walls so the Colorado River could be re-directed around the dam site during construction.  The four tunnels were 56 feet in diameter, running in total more than three miles through the hard rock.  The rock from inside the tunnels was then used to make a temporary dam (called a coffer dam) on the river high enough that all the water could be diverted through the tunnels, leaving a dry river bottom.

            Then workers at the dam site began to remove loose materials from the shear canyon walls.  Suspended from ropes, the workers—many of whom were Native Americans—picked, drilled and blasted their way down the canyon walls.  Only then, two years into the project, could the actual dam construction begin.  Massive amounts of concrete were transported in huge buckets from the cliff tops to the river bottom.  Slowly—very slowly, so the concrete could cool without cracking—the dam took shape, rising to the huge arched shape we so proudly recognize today as Hoover Dam.

            The story of building the dam could fill a book (actually, it has filled many books), but let’s end with a few facts about the project.  About 21,000 workers labored on the dam, and nearly 100 of them lost their lives in the process.  The amount of concrete used could have paved a road from San Francisco to New York City.  The dam, which was the largest in the world when it was completed in the summer of 1935, is 726 feet high and 1,244 feet long.  It provides irrigation water for about 2 million acres of California’s agricultural lands.  The dam runs 17 turbines that provide electricity for 1.3 million homes.  It impounds Lake Mead, one of the world’s largest reservoirs.

            Ten thousand people crowded around the dam on September 30, 1935, in 102-degree temperatures, to listen as President Roosevelt dedicated the dam. 

            “This morning,” he said, “I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind. …We know that, as an unregulated river, the Colorado added little of value to the region this dam serves.  When in flood the river was a threatening torrent.  In the dry months of the year it shrank to a trickling stream….That is why I have the right once more to congratulate you who have built Boulder Dam and on behalf of the Nation to say to you, ‘Well done.’”

            Opinions about dams in the U.S. have changed a great deal since then, but the triumph of human capabilities and the positive values that come from the effective management of water can hardly be questioned.  Let’s just  hope that those capabilities become even more effective when we acknowledge that rivers, even if not tamed by humans, have enormous value to the regions through which they flow.

References:

Bureau of Reclamation.  Hoover Dam.  Available at:  https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/index.html.  Accessed July 16, 2019.

Encyclopedia Britannica.  Hoover Dam.  Available at:  https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hoover-Dam.  Accessed July 16, 2019.

History.com.  Hoover Dam.  Available at:  https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/hoover-dam.  Accessed July 16, 2019. 

National Park Service.  Reading 3:  Excerpts from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Speech at the Dedication of Boulder Dam, Sept. 30, 1935.  Available at:   https://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/140HooverDam/140facts3.htm.  Accessed July 16, 2019.

National Park Service.  5.  The Origins of Hydroelectric Power.  Available at: https://www.nps.gov/articles/5-the-origins-of-hydroelectric-power.htm.  Accessed July 16, 2019.

I’m cheating a bit with today’s entry.  Technically, in 2019, National Public Lands Day will be celebrated on September 28.   However, it doesn’t always fall on this date.  National Public Lands Day occurs on the fourth Saturday in September.  That is the 28^th in 2019.

            The date moves around in order to accomplish the purpose of National Public Lands Day (NPLD).  Volunteers from around the United States pitch in on the fourth Saturday (when most people aren’t working or in school) to maintain and improve our great public lands.  It’s a fine strategy—for the September 22 version in 2018, more than 113,000 volunteers spent nearly half a million hours at 1,176 sites doing $11 million of work! 

            NPLD began in 1994, as a project of the National Environmental Education Foundation.  That foundation was chartered by the U.S. Congress to work with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to “make the environment more accessible, relatable, relevant, and connected to the daily lives of all Americans.  The organization has many programs, but National Public Lands Day is one of their most successful.  NPLD has become the single largest day of volunteer activity in America’s public parks in the year.

            NPLD has a number of sponsoring groups, including the primary land-management agencies of the U.S. government and many state and local park programs.  The Bureau of Land Management is the most active, with 172 events in 2018, followed by the National Park Service and the US Army Corps of Engineers.  For two decades, the Toyota Corporation has been the lead private partner for the day’s activities.  Over that time, more than 50,000 Toyota volunteers have worked at more than 600 sites, contributing 193,000 hours.

            The participants in NPLD are many and varied.  In 2018, the most frequent kinds of participants were university students, public school groups, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and corporate groups.  The work is also varied—removing invasive plants, collecting trash, restoring degraded lands and waters, planting trees, building and repairing facilities, and maintaining trails.  NPLD activities also often include related outdoor recreation and environmental education events—you know, a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down!

            And here’s a little bonus for all of us:  Admission to all National Park Service parks, monuments and other sites is free on National Public Lands Day.  And if you do chose to join as a volunteer for NPLD, don’t worry about missing out—you’ll get a coupon good for a fee-free day of your choice.  So, grab your work gloves and get to a park!

References:

National Park Service.  National Public Lands Day.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/subjects/npscelebrates/public-lands-day.htm.  Accessed July 9, 2019.

NEEF.  About NEEF.  Available at:  https://www.neefusa.org/about-neef.  Accessed July 9, 2019.

NEEF.  2018.  Final Report—25^th Annual National Public Lands Day.  Available at:  https://www.neefusa.org/sites/default/files/assets/npld/2018/NPLD2018-FinalReport.pdf.  Accessed July 9, 2019.

So you don’t believe in Paul Bunyan or Sasquatch, here’s one you can believe in:  Johnny Appleseed was a real man who roamed around planting apple trees.  And many consider him one of our earliest and most ardent conservationists. But, there is a bit more to the story than just that.

            John Chapman, who would become known during his life and for all time as Johnny Appleseed, was born on September 26, 1774, near Boston, Massachusetts (died 1845).  When he was 18, he left home to venture into the wilderness—which, at the time, was Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.  He never took up a homestead, rather sleeping outdoors or in the barns of friendly farmers he met along his journeys.  He eventually began working as an orchardist, learning the trade that we would today call horticulture.

            The myth suggests that Chapman wandered haphazardly, planting applet trees at random, rather like a distracted flower girl dropping petals at a wedding.  In fact, he worked from an ingenious strategy.  In the early 1800s, the federal government was beginning to give grants of land to settlers who would tame the forests of the upper Midwest into cultivated land.  In order to gain title to the land, however, settlers had to prove their intention to remain there by planting 50 apple trees in three years—a sign of investment in the future.

            Chapman recognized that meeting this requirement would depend on a source of trees.  So, he set out ahead of the wave of settlers and planted apple-tree nurseries at what he thought were likely spots for settlement.  A few years later, when settlers arrived, he sold them the trees they needed from his orchard.  He did this over and over, mostly in Ohio and then Indiana, enjoying a steady stream of income that made him a wealthy man.  When he died, he purportedly owned 1200 acres of apple orchards across the region.

            He didn’t need all that money, however, because he was a devout Christian who purposely lived a life of poverty.  He never had a home, wore no shoes and the simplest of clothes (his favorite garment was an old seeds sack with holes cut for his head and arms), and ate no meat or animal products. When a farmer couldn’t afford to buy his trees, he gave them away with a promise from the farmer to pay him in the future.  He also served as a missionary, teaching his brand of religion to everyone he met.

            Chapman, apparently for religious reasons, also believed that trees should be grown from seeds, not grafting.  So, he gathered apple seeds from cider mills in Pennsylvania and hauled them westward to create his orchards.  Unfortunately, apple trees grown this way produce nasty little sour apples, inedible as raw fruit.  But, they made great cider—hard cider—that settlers used as their household drink because the available water was usually unhealthy.  So, Johnny Appleseed supplied not big juicy eating apples, but the raw materials for making alcohol.  Good old Johnny.

            So, where does the conservation come in?  According to the journal American Forests, “Chapman was a successful businessman, but he was also a conservationist and a true outdoorsman.”  National Geographic called him “an icon of the conservation movement” and another source named him an early ecologist.  Primarily, that praise comes from his planting of trees.  Planting trees is a true conservation activity, given that trees do so much for us, from providing apples, even sour ones, to absorbing greenhouse gases. 

            But his biggest claim as a conservationist, I think, comes from his dedication to preserving biodiversity.  He believed in the fundamental value of all living things, no matter if they were obviously useful or not.  He loved insects and, as they say, wouldn’t hurt a fly.  In fact, one night while watching insects become attracted to his fire and dying in the flames, he doused the fire and slept in the cold to avoid harming any more.  Once bitten by a rattlesnake, he reacted violently and killed the snake; for the rest of his life, he despaired of his intemperate action:  “Poor fellow, he only just touched me, when I, in the heat of my ungodly passion, put the heel of my scythe in him and went away.”  When he saw domestic animals, especially horses, being mistreated, he bought the animals and then paid a local agent to nourish them back to health.  He understood the values of many wild plants, a trait that earned him respect among Native American tribes he visited.

            And for your next trivia contest, here’s one for you.  Yes, Johnny Appleseed did wear a tin pot for a hat.  He didn’t see any reason to own two things—a pot and a hat—when one could do both jobs just fine. 

References:

American Forests.  2014.  From businessman to folk legend:  Johnny Appleseed.  Loose Leaf, September 26, 2014.  Available at:  https://www.americanforests.org/blog/from-businessman-to-folk-legend-johnny-appleseed/.  Accessed July 6, 2019.

Birkhimer, Lily.  2012.  Johnny Appleseed:  Folk Hero.  Ohio Memory, September 28, 2012.  Available at:  https://ohiohistoryhost.org/ohiomemory/archives/849.  Accessed July 6, 2019.

Kettler, Sara.  2015.  7 Facts on Johnny Appleseed.  Biography, Mar 10, 2105.  Available at:  https://www.biography.com/news/johnny-appleseed-story-facts.  Accessed July 6, 2019.

National Geographic.  Sep 26, 1774 CE:  Happy Birthday, Johnny Appleseed.  National Geographic Resource Library.  Available at:  https://www.nationalgeographic.org/thisday/sep26/happy-birthday-johnny-appleseed/.  Accessed July 6, 2019.

For the fifth time in the history of the United Nations, a pope climbed the dais in the General Assembly chamber at UN headquarters in New York to address the world’s leaders.  This time, Pope Francis had a strong focus within an overall appeal for peace and love:  The earth’s environment must also receive the same care we give each other.

            Pope Francis was the inaugural speaker at the ceremony on September 25, 2015, when the UN General Assembly endorsed its new agenda for human development and environmental care.  The agenda, known as the Sustainable Development Goals, evolved from the Millennium Development Goals that operated from 200 to 2015.  The new agenda of 17 will govern the world’s philanthropy through 2030.

            Pope Frances was a compelling choice to introduce the new program.  As the world’s foremost spokesperson for ethics and morality, the pope’s messages carry extraordinary weight with not only the world’s Catholics, but for all people.  Moreover, Pope Francis has chosen to highlight the needs for conservation and environmental sustainability as no pope before him.  A native of Argentina, the pope chose Francis as his papal name because St. Francis of Assisi is his moral guide and inspiration. As Pope Francis stated, Francis of Assisi “is the patron saint of all who study and work in the area of ecology, and he is also much loved by non-Christians.  He was particularly concerned for God’s creation and for the poor and outcast.”

            Pope Francis made his commitment to conservation clear earlier in 2015, when he issued his Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si,’ subtitled On Care for Our Common Home.  The 144-page book is a comprehensive assessment of the state of the earth and a call for us to change our ways of living to embrace sustainability and care of the poor—as he calls them, “the excluded.”  He stated explicitly that he was writing to all humans, not just Catholics, by noting that “we need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.”

            Pope Francis’ address to the UN asserted that a “right of the environment” exists for two specific reasons.

“First, because we human beings are part of the environment, we live in communion with it, since the environment itself entails ethical limits which human activity must acknowledge and respect….Second, because every creature, particularly a living creature, has an intrinsic value, in its existence, its life, its beauty and its interdependence with other creatures.  We Christians, together with the other monotheistic religions, believe that the universe is the fruit of a loving decision by the Creator, who permits man respectfully to use creation for the good of his fellow men and for the glory of the Creator; he is not authorized to abuse it, much less to destroy it.  In all religions, the environment is a fundamental good.”

In both this address to the UN and his encyclical letter, Pope Francis went on to draw a fundamental relationship between caring for the environment and caring for the poor and downtrodden humans of the world.

“The misuse and destruction of the environment are also accompanied by a relentless process of exclusion. In effect, a selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity leads both to the misuse of available natural resources and to the exclusion of the weak and disadvantaged, either because they are differently abled (handicapped), or because they lack adequate information and technical expertise, or are incapable of decisive political action. Economic and social exclusion is a complete denial of human fraternity and a grave offense against human rights and the environment. The poorest are those who suffer most from such offenses, for three serious reasons: they are cast off by society, forced to live off what is discarded and suffer unjustly from the abuse of the environment.”

The pope is particularly concerned about climate change and those who deny it. 

“A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climactic system….most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides, and others) released mainly as a result of human activity…. Climate change…represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”

References:

Pope Francis.  2015.  Pope Francis’s speech to the UN in full.  The Guardian, 25 Sep 2019.  Available at:  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/25/pope-franciss-speech-to-the-un-in-full.  Accessed July 1, 2019.

Pope Francis.  2015.  The Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’.  On Care for Our Common Home.  Paulist Press, New York.  144 pages.

Sengupta, Somini, and Jim Yardley.  2015.  Pope Francis Addresses U.N., Calling for Peace and Environmental Justice.  The New York Times, Sept. 25, 2015.  Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/world/europe/pope-francis-united-nations.html.  Accessed July 1, 2019.

Ask just about anyone to name a historical figure in forestry, and the name Gifford Pinchot is sure to pop up.  Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) is commonly called the father of American forestry—the first trained forester working in the U.S., the originator and first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, and the conservation mentor of Teddy Roosevelt. 

            Pinchot came from a wealthy family.  His father was a successful wallpaper merchant in New York City who built a summer home in 1886 on the banks of the Delaware River in Milford, Pennsylvania.  He called the estate Grey Towers, and for several decades the family spent their summers roaming the 102 acres of the estate.  Summers at Grey Towers taught Gifford Pinchot to love forests and to care deeply about the need for their conservation.

            Gifford wasn’t the only Pinchot interested in conservation—family members before and after him were also conservation leaders.  So, it came as no surprise that Pinchot’s son, Gifford Bryce Pinchot, donated Grey Towers and its accompanying lands to the U.S. Forest Service in 1963 to become a conservation center.

            The new center was called the Pinchot Center for  Conservation Studies (now shortened to just the Pinchot Center for Conservation).  The idea then, as now, was simple and direct, as reflected in the current mission statement:

“The mission of the Pinchot Institute is to strengthen forest conservation thought, policy, and action by developing innovative, practical, and broadly-supported solutions to conservation challenges and opportunities. We accomplish this through nonpartisan research, education, and technical assistance on key issues influencing the future of conservation and sustainable natural resource management.”

            The dedication ceremony occurred on September 24, 1963.  What should have been a sleepy little event attended by a few local politicians and conservation professionals became a national event when President John F. Kennedy agreed to deliver a commemoration address.  This was the first stop on an 11-state tour to promote conservation. At Grey Towers, an adoring crowd of more than 12,000 was on hand as Kennedy’s helicopter landed in a field a few hundred yards from the dedication site.  The president took the dais and began extolling the virtues of both Gifford Pinchot and conservation in general.

“Above all, [Pinchot] was a gifted, driving administrator, transforming a minor Federal bureau into a dynamic, purposeful agent of national policy…. In the space of a few short years, he made conservation an accepted virtue in the nation’s conscience.”

“But Pinchot’s contribution will be lost if we honor him only in memory….For our industrial economy and urbanization are pressing against the limits of our most fundaments needs:  pure water to drink, fresh air to breathe, open space to enjoy, and abundant access of energy to release man from menial toil.”

“The dispute is no longer one of principles or goals—it is now merely a question of pace and means.  And no one maintains that the obligation to use our resources efficiently and thoughtfully depends solely on the Federal Government….Conservation is the job of us all.”

            Kennedy wasn’t there long—70 minutes—and he lived only another two months.  But the Pinchot Institute has continued to prosper.  In collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service, the institute provides a prominent voice for rational, science-based management of the nation’s natural resources. 

References:

Dwyer, Dan.  1963.  The Day JFK Was Here.  Port Jervis Union-Gazette, September 24, 1963.  Available at:  https://fhsarchives.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/9241963-the-pinchot-institute-dedication-ceremony-the-day-jfk-was-here/.  Accessed June 25, 2019.

Kennedy, John F.  1963.  Remarks of the President at Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies, Milford, Pennsylvania, September 24, 1963.  Available at:  https://www.pinchot.org/about_pic/history.  Accessed June 25, 2019.

Pinchot Institute for Conservation.  History.  Available at:  https://www.pinchot.org/about_pic/history.  Accessed June 25, 2019.

It took an act of Congress and a Proclamation by President Ronald Reagan—but, on September 23, 1986, the United States got a national flower: the rose.  

            Actually, the country got a “national floral emblem,” but let’s agree that a rose by whatever bureaucratic name we choose is still the national flower.  It wasn’t easy, apparently.  Over decades, many legislators had argued hot and heavy for their favorite plant—dogwood, corn tassel, mountain laurel, columbine and more.  Senator Everett Dirksen, an Illinois Republican, was a loyal promoter of the marigold.  The marigold, said Dirksen in 1967, epitomizes America, “Its robustness reflects the hardihood and character of the generations who pioneered and built this land into a great nation.”

            Alas, all pretenders to the crown (of thorns, yuk, yuk) were defeated in 1986 when the entire Congress rallied behind the rose.  Not the red rose—which is an official symbol of England—but all roses.  President Reagan waxed eloquently about the virtues of the rose in his Proclamation No. 5574:

“The study of fossils reveals that the rose has existed in America for age upon age. We have always cultivated roses in our gardens. Our first President, George Washington, bred roses, and a variety he named after his mother is still grown today. The White House itself boasts a beautiful Rose Garden. We grow roses in all our fifty States. We find roses throughout our art, music, and literature. We decorate our celebrations and parades with roses. Most of all, we present roses to those we love, and we lavish them on our altars, our civil shrines, and the final resting places of our honored dead.”

            You might think the United States has a long list of national natural symbols, but that isn’t the case.  The Bald Eagle was selected as the national animal (not bird) in 1782, when it appeared on the Great Seal of the United States, but nothing new showed up until the rose in 1986.  And only two more have joined the list since then.  The oak—all species, just like the rose—was selected as the national tree in 2004, and the bison was named national mammal in 2016 (had to be the national mammal, because we already had a national animal).  But that is it.  Just four natural symbols of the United States.

            The individual states, however, have abandoned any sense of restraint.  States have official amphibians, bats, birds, butterflies, cacti, crustaceans, dinosaurs (!), dogs, fish, flowers, grasses, horses, insects, mammals, microbes, mushrooms, pets, plants, reptiles, seashells, and trees.  My home state of North Carolina has 5 official plants, including the Venus flytrap (native to the state), and 13 official animals.  I’m sure other states are even more profligate in offering prizes to their favorite species.

            Other countries are much like the U.S, however. in having a short list.  Canada named the beaver as their national animal in 1975, and the maple tree is their official “arboreal emblem”—big surprise there, eh?  They added an official horse in 2002, a Canadian breed “known for its great strength and endurance, resilience, intelligence and good temper (sounds like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to me). Mexico apparently hasn’t gotten to this task yet.  Australia has only the kangaroo as its official animal and the golden wattle (an acacia shrub) as official plant.  England’s official animal is the lion—interesting because it isn’t native to the country!  It also lists the red rose as an official flower and the oak as the official tree (copying the colonies, apparently).  They also have named fish’n’chips as their official meal, so perhaps we could redefine that as an official fish (cod) and official plant (potato).

References:

Government of Canada.  Official symbols of Canada.  Available at:  https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/official-symbols-canada.html#a7.  Accessed June 24, 2019.

National Rose Garden.  The National Flower.  Available at: http://nationalrosegarden.com/the-national-flower/.  Accessed June 24, 2019.

New York Times.  1986.  A National Flower:  Rose is Victor.  New York Times, Sept. 24, 1986.  Available at:  https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/24/us/a-national-flower-rose-is-victor.html.  Accessed June 24, 2019.

State Symbols USA.  The Mighty Oak Tree, National (U.S.) Tree.  Available at:  https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol-or-officially-designated-item/state-tree/mighty-oak-tree.  Accessed June 24, 2019.

One of the triumphs at the beginning of the modern environmental movement was the establishment of Assateague Island National Seashore.  The barriers islands of which Assateague is a part are so significant that in 1979 the United Nations designated the Assateague region as a World Biosphere Reserve (the Virginia Coast reserve).  However, it took a long time to get there.

            Assateague wasn’t even its own island until 1933.  Before then—at least in recent times—the stretch of land was part of a longer island that ran to the north all the way to Delaware.  But a major storm in 1933 cut a channel between the sound and the ocean. In order to make the sound accessible near Ocean City, the channel was widened, deepened and stabilized.  Assateague Island was born, and so far, we are doing what is necessary to keep it alive.

            The island itself is 37 miles long, the northern two-thirds in Maryland and the southern one-third in Virginia.  It is between 0.5 and 2.5 miles wide, and ocean water regularly washes over the island during storms and high seas.  Consequently, the island is moving slowly westward, retreating from the ocean and moving toward the mainland.  The island is also losing area at the northern end from erosion and gaining area at the southern end by accretion.  These barrier islands roam around a lot.

            That roaming tendency is what saved the Assateague area from the development that has swallowed up most of the Atlantic coastline.  The barrier beaches of the region have been used for centuries for fishing and hunting, but permanent communities were small and few.  The northern end of Assateague Island held several life-saving stations that eventually became part of the U.S. Coast Guard.  Various plans for developing Assateague Island into private tourist and residential areas have been attempted for at least a century, all of them ending in destruction by storms, waves and tides.

            Along with interest in development has come interest in preservation.  As soon as the island was formed, both federal and state agencies began considering it for public recreation and wildlife habitat.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge at the southern end in 1943 and Maryland created a state park at the northern end in 1956.  For decades the National Park Service sought to make the island an undeveloped natural ara, but was rebuffed by those interested in more intrusive tourist development.  Eventually, a coalition formed which allowed the National Park Service to acquire the entire island, but allow Maryland to keep its state park and the Fish and Wildlife Service to keep its wildlife refuge as separately managed units.  On September 21, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill that established Assateague.

            The decision was wise.  Assateague is a jewel in the national seashore crown, the largest natural area (just under 40,000 acres) between Cape May and Cape Hatteras.  It is home to more than 320 species of birds, with spectacular spring and fall waterfowl migrations stopping over at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.  The Delmarva Peninsula Fox Squirrel, an endangered species, is resident in the wildlife refuge. 

            The island is also famous for its wild horses.  The most well known are the “wild ponies” in the Chincoteague area, which are now kept in pens and excess numbers are auctioned every summer.  But the more interesting horses are those in the northern half of the island (the two populations are isolated by a fence along the Virginia-Maryland border).  These are managed by the National Park Service and allowed to roam freely.  However, the population size is kept in check by inoculating horses with a vaccine that reduces successful pregnancies.

            The seashore is extremely popular with tourists, lying close to the Washington and Baltimore metropolitan areas.  About 2 million people visit annually, a number reached soon after the park’s creation and staying steady for half a century. 

References:

Mackintosh, Barry.  1982.  Assateague Island National Seashore—An Administrative History.  National Park Service.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/asis/learn/management/upload/asisadminhistory.pdf.  Accessed June 14, 2019.

New World Encyclopedia.  Assateague Island.  Available at:  https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Assateague_Island.  Accessed June 14, 2019.

OceanCity.com.  Assateague Island.  Available at:  https://www.oceancity.com/assateague/.  Accessed June 14, 2019.

U.S. National Park Service.  Assateague Island National Seashore.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/asis/learn/historyculture/history-and-culture.htm.  Accessed June 14, 2019.

A lobbyist once told me that all things are like pancakes—they all have two sides.  Today’s story is about a man who certainly had two sides, two very complex and very confusing sides.  The man is Grey Owl, one of Canada’s earliest conservationists, and an imposter on a grand scale.

            So, let me first tell you about Grey Owl, the conservationist.  Grey Owl—his name meant he-who-flies-by-night in the Ojibwa language (a bit of foreshadowing…), was half Native American and half Scotsman, but he chose to live as an Ojibwa Indian in northern Canada.  There he learned the ways of the wilderness, hunting and trapping to earn a living and survive, winter and summer, for decades. He met a Mohawk woman, named Anahareo, with whom he lived.  After Grey Owl had trapped a female beaver from its lodge, Anahareo convinced him to raise the two young beavers left behind.  Anahareo loved animals and hated the cruel trapping practices of the frontiersmen.

            Grey Owl was captivated by the young beavers and soon became concerned that beavers would become extinct from the heavy trapping that Canada was experiencing to feed an insatiable European market for beaver pelts.  He was consumed by the vision that the Canadian wilderness—and the Native People who lived sustainably in it—were doomed unless conservation replaced exploitation.  In his forties, Grey Owl began to write extensively about conservation, eventually publishing four books on the subject.  His writing was very popular and, in the 1930s, he was arguably Canada’s most famous author and conservationist, compared favorably to John Muir.  He lectured widely and produced conservation films.  He was especially popular in England, where one lecture tour pulled in a quarter million people. In 1936, he reflected on his work:

“Every word I write, every lecture I have given, or ever will give, were and are to be for the betterment of the Beaver people, all wild life, the Indians and halfbreeds, and for Canada, in whatever small way I may.”

            The Canadian government provided him housing and an area to raise beavers for release in Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan.  Some credit him with saving the beaver—the national animal of Canada—from extirpation.

            He died suddenly of pneumonia in 1938, and then the wheels started coming off the story of Grey Owl.  Journalists investigated the details of his life—and the truth emerged:  Grey Owl was an imposter.  He was not half Native American, he had not been born in Mexico. 

            His real name was Archibald Belaney, born on September 18, 1888, in Hastings, England.  His parents—one British and one American—left him to be raised by two maiden aunts in Hastings.  From his earliest days, however, he yearned to get away from the stifling society of Hastings and head to the wilderness. He told a young friend that he was going to go to Canada.  His friend asked, “To fight the Indians?” Belaney answered, “No, to become an Indian.” At 17, he made his escape, crossing the Atlantic and then disappearing into the forests of northern Canada. 

            He lived with the Ojibwa People, learning their language and ways.  He dyed his hair black and darkened his skin with henna dye.  He roamed among various tribes, eventually meeting Anahareo and becoming the committed conservationist that captured the Canadian conscience.

            Opinions about Belaney vary, of course.  Some see him as a charlatan who stole the Native Peoples’ voice.  Others see him as a mixture of good and bad.  Clive Webb, at the University of Sussex, proposed that we “separate some of his personal shortcomings from his great work as a conservationist.”  And Don Smith, of the University of Calgary, saw him this way:

“This is 1930s Canada, it seemed to have inexhaustible forest.  His personal life was a mess but he had insight, he had vision. This man had a message. Everybody’s green now. He was green when there was nothing to it. His message was ‘you belong to nature, it does not belong to you’.”

As the lobbyist said, there are two sides to every pancake.  You decide on which side of this man—the conservationist Grey Owl or the imposter Archibald Belaney—you’d like to pour your syrup.

References:

Brower, Kenneth.  1990.  Grey Owl.  The Atlantic online, January, 1990.  Available at:  https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/90jan/greyowl.htm.  Accessed June 10, 2019.

Howes, David, and Constance Classen.  Grey Owl, White Indian.  Canadian Icon.  Available at:  http://canadianicon.org/table-of-contents/grey-owl-white-indian/.  Accessed June 10, 2019.

Onyanga-Omara, Jane.  2013.  Grey Owl:  Canada’s great conservationist and imposter.  BBC News, 19 September 2013.  Available at:  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-24127514.  Accessed June 10, 2019.

Smith, Donald B.  2015.  Archibald Belaney, Grey Owl.  The Canadian Encyclopedia.  Available at:  https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/archibald-belaney-grey-owl.  Accessed June 10, 2019.

When President Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he said to her, “So you are the lady who started all this.”  When Senator Abraham Ribicoff met Rachel Carson just before she gave testimony to his committee, he said the same to her.  Ribicoff was wholly correct—Rachel Carson had started what would become the modern environmental movement.

            Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, near Pittsburgh.  As a girl, she loved two things—nature and writing.  “I can remember no time,” she said, “when I wasn’t interested in the out-of-doors and the whole world of nature.” She began writing stories for magazines at an early age, and published her first paid contribution at age eleven.  She would later say that she had become a professional writer then.  It seemed inevitable, even then, that Carson would combine her two interests into one career.

            Carson’s mother taught her to be an independent thinker and observer, traits she carried throughout her life.  At college, she majored in biology, an unusual field for women at the time, and, even more unusually, went on to complete a Master’s degree in marine biology at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.  She fell in love with the sea the first time she saw it and never again lived or worked far from saltwater.  Except for short intervals, she and her mother lived together in a small ranch house in Silver Spring, Maryland, and later summered in a cottage on the Maine shoreline.

            Through her teacher and mentor in graduate school, Carson landed a temporary job with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (now the Fish and Wildlife Service) writing radio scripts about fisheries.  Her work was so exceptional—combining a solid scientific approach with a lyrical style—that she was hired permanently.  She became the first professional scientist hired in the history of the agency.  Eventually, she became head of the agency’s editorial office, effectively running a small in-house publishing enterprise.  She worked there for fifteen years.

            Carson also wrote independently while she worked for the government, authoring magazine articles to supplement her meager salary.  She published her first book about the sea, Under the Sea Wind, in November, 1941.  Critics loved it, but it sold few copies—the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a month later kidnapped the nation’s attention.  But, she persisted, publishing a second book about the sea, The Sea Around Us, in 1951.  This time, the book was hugely successful, landing at the top of the best-seller list for months.  A third book, The Edge of the Sea, followed in 1955, cementing Carson’s national reputation.

            As the 1950s came to a close, the U.S. was wildly prosperous, but larger worries, including the Cold War and nuclear annihilation, loomed like a storm cloud over the world.  One such worry was the effect that broadcast spraying of pesticides was having not only on the targeted insects, but also on beneficial insects, fish, birds, pets and even humans.  Carson’s influential friends tried to persuade her to take up this cause, but she wanted nothing to do with it.  Carson was a shy, private person who didn’t like the spotlight.  Even though her books were famous, she protected her privacy fiercely. 

            However, when she could find no one else to address the issue of pesticide spraying, Carson took the plunge to write “the poison book.”  She spent several years researching the topic, compiling obscure reports, corresponding with experts and connecting the threads among pesticides, wildlife mortality, and human health.  DDT was the primary target, but Carson also explored the impacts of other chemicals we now call “persistent organic pesticides.” She presented her conclusion—that large-scale aerial spraying of pesticides was poisoning the earth—in her 1962 book, Silent Spring. 

            Like her earlier books, Silent Spring was an instant success.  The public was won over by the logic and detail of her analyses—Silent Spring had more than 50 pages of references.  The book caused massive backlash from the chemical and agricultural industries, which cast Carson as a fear-monger without scientific credentials.  Moreover, they claimed, she was a childless spinster with no authority to speak about future generations.  A typical response claimed, “isn’t it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs?  As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be O.K.  She’s probably a peace-nut, too.”  And a communist.

            As we now know, Rachel Carson was largely correct in her conclusions (her assertions about human cancer were not accurate), and society rallied in support of her.  Silent Spring launched a decade of new laws and approaches to chemical use and environmental protection. The Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Environmental Policy Act, along with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, are all examples of her impact.  Rachel Carson has been recognized as one of the 100 most influential people of the 29^th Century, largely because of Silent Spring.  She was, indeed, the lady who started it all.

            Unfortunately, Rachel Carson didn’t live long enough to see most of these changes.  She died in early 1964, just before her 57^th birthday and only 18 months after Silent Spring appeared. Throughout her research and writing for the book, she was suffering from cancer that spread relentlessly through her body.  She dealt with her approaching death just as she had all aspects of her life—independently and observantly, logically and in a natural context.  She reflected on the life of the monarch butterfly and then on her own life:

“For the Monarch, that [life] cycle is measured in a known span of months.  For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know.  But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course, it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.”

References: Nielsen, Larry A.  2017.  Nature’s Allies—Eight Conservationists Who Changed Our World.  Island Press, Washington, DC.  255 pages