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The Wired Wilderness: Electronic Surveillance and Environmental Values in Wildlife Biology

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The Wired Wilderness: Electronic Surveillance and Environmental Values in Wildlife Biology The Wired Wilderness: Electronic Surveillance and Environmental Values in Wildlife Biology by Etienne Samuel Benson M.A., Psychology Stanford University, 2001 A.B., Cognitive Neuroscience Harvard College, 1999 Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology and Society in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology June 2008 © 2008 Etienne Samuel Benson. All Rights Reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author: ____________________________________________________________ History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society May 1, 2008 Certified by: ___________________________________________________________________ Harriet Ritvo Arthur J. Conner Professor of History Thesis Supervisor Certified by: ___________________________________________________________________ Meg Jacobs Associate Professor of History Thesis Committee Member Certified by: ___________________________________________________________________ Stefan Helmreich Associate Professor of Anthropology Thesis Committee Member 1 Accepted by: __________________________________________________________________ Stefan Helmreich Associate Professor of Anthropology Director of Graduate Studies, History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society Accepted by: __________________________________________________________________ David A. Mindell Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing Professor of Engineering Systems Director, Program in Science, Technology, and Society 2 The Wired Wilderness: Electronic Surveillance and Environmental Values in Wildlife Biology by Etienne Samuel Benson Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology and Society in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Abstract In the second half of the twentieth century, American wildlife biologists incorporated Cold War-era surveillance technologies into their practices in order to render wild animals and their habitats legible and manageable. One of the most important of these was wildlife radio- tracking, in which collars and tags containing miniature transmitters were used to locate individual animals in the field. In addition to producing new ecological insights, radio-tracking served as a site where relationships among scientists, animals, hunters, animal rights activists, environmentalists, and others involved in wildlife conservation could be embodied and contested. While scholars have tended to interpret surveillance technologies in terms of the extension of human control over nature and society, I show how technological, biological, and ecological factors made such control fragmentary and open to reappropriation. Wildlife radio- tracking created vulnerabilities as well as capabilities; it provided opportunities for connection as well as for control. I begin by showing how biologists in Minnesota and Illinois in the early 1960s used radio-tracking to establish intimate, technologically-mediated, situated relationships with game animals such as ruffed grouse, which they hoped would bolster their authority vis-á- vis recreational hunters. I then show how the technique was contested by environmentalists when biologists applied it to iconic “wilderness wildlife” such as grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park in the 1960s and 1970s. One way for biologists to render radio-tracking acceptable in the face of such opposition was to emphasize its continuity with traditional practices, as they did in a radio-tagging study of tigers in Nepal in the 1970s. Another way was to shift to less invasive techniques of remote sensing, such as the bioacoustic surveys of bowhead whales off Alaska's Arctic coast that were conducted in the 1980s after a proposal to radio-tag whales was rejected by marine mammalogists and Iñupiat whalers. Finally, wildlife biologists could reframe radio- tracking as a means for popular connection rather than expert control, as they did by broadcasting the locations of satellite-tagged albatrosses to schoolchildren, gamblers, and the general public via the Internet in the 1990s and early 2000s. Thesis Supervisor: Harriet Ritvo Title: Arthur J. Conner Professor of History 3 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful to my advisor and committee chair Harriet Ritvo and to readers Meg Jacobs and Stefan Helmreich for their engagement and encouragement over the course of this project. I am also grateful to the various funding agencies without whose support this project would have been impossible. Tuition and stipend funding were provided by the MIT Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society, the MIT Kenan Sahin Presidential Fellowship, the MIT Martin Family Fellowship for Sustainability, and Resources for the Future, whose Joseph K. Fisher Dissertation Fellowship helped me devote my final year to writing. Research and travel funding were provided by the HASTS Program, the MIT Center for International Studies, the MIT Kelly-Douglas Fund, the National Science Foundation's Science and Society Program, and the Society for the History of Technology's Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship. This project would also have been impossible without the help of librarians and archivists at the American Museum of Natural History, the Bibliotheque Centrale of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Paris), the Denver Public Library, the Department of Agriculture's National Wildlife Research Center (Fort Collins, CO), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's National Conservation Training Center (Shepherdstown, WV), the Ernst Mayr Library at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, MA), the Illinois Natural History Society (Champaign, IL), the Minnesota Historical Society (St. Paul), Montana State University (Bozeman), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge), the National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD, and Anchorage, AK), the National Marine Fisheries Service's Southwest Fisheries Science Center (La Jolla, CA) and National Marine Mammal Laboratory (Seattle, WA), the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center (Patuxent, MD), the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (La Jolla, CA), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), the Tuzzy Consortium Library (Barrow, AK), the University of Alaska-Anchorage, the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Montana-Missoula, the University of Minnesota, the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Wyoming, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, MA), and the Yellowstone National Park Heritage Research Center (Gardiner, MT). A number of people engaged in the work of wildlife biology and environmental surveillance generously shared their memories and perspectives on radio-tracking with me, some in brief conversations, some through email exchanges, and others through extended formal interviews. My thanks to Timothy Beaulieu, Jean Bourassa, Harry Brower, Jr., Marianna Childress and the staff of Collecte Localisation Satellites, William W. Cochran, Frederick C. Dean, Philippe Gaspar, Charlotte Girard, Bridget Kenward and the staff of Biotrack, Robert E. Kenward, Larry Kuechle and the staff of Advanced Telemetry Systems, Clarence Lehman and the staff of the Cedar Creek Natural History Area, Rexford D. Lord, L. David Mech, Christian Ortega, Arlo Raim, Philippe Roques, Daniel Rubenstein, Glen Sanderson, Beverly Sanderson, 5 and Laurie Sanderson, John Seidensticker, Donald B. Siniff, Michel Taillade, John R. Tester, and Dwain W. Warner. This project benefited from feedback on preliminary drafts that I received at various conferences and workshops, including the Workshop on the History of Environment, Animals, Technology, and Science at MIT (October 2004, Cambridge, MA), Research in Progress: Interdisciplinary Dialogs at MIT (April 2005, Cambridge, MA), Anthropology and Science: Interdisciplinary Approaches at the University of Manchester (June 2005, Manchester, UK), the Society for the History of Technology (November 2005, Minneapolis, MN), the Life Sciences/Environment Sciences Working Group at Harvard University's History of Science Department (April 2006, Cambridge, MA), the Workshop on Human-Animal Boundaries: Disciplinary and Spatial Perspectives at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government (November 2006, Cambridge, MA), the History of Science Society (November 2007, Crystal City, VA), and the American Society for Environmental History (March 2008, Boise, ID). I also received helpful feedback from the members of the Biogroop reading group at MIT (Stefan Helmreich, Rufus Helmreich, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth, and Sara Ann Wylie) and from the members of the spring 2006 HASTS writing seminar (Meg Jacobs, Vincent Lépinay, Lisa Messeri, and Mian Wang). The faculty, students, and staff of MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society provided a stimulating interdisciplinary environment in which to carry out this project. Among the faculty, I am especially grateful to Deborah Fitzgerald, David Jones, David Kaiser, Vincent Lépinay, and Leo Marx of the Science, Technology,
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