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CRITICISM

RETHINKING Toward a less gloomy By James K. Boyce

little more than a hundred and what happened to the tells After her death, Martha was frozen yearsA ago, a bird named Martha, the us much about what happened—and in a 300-pound block of ice and last surviving passenger pigeon, died is still happening—­to us. shipped to the Smithsonian Institu- in the Cincinnati Zoo. Her death was Tourists came from near and far to tion, in Washington. Her internal or- remarkable in the annals of extinction see Martha after George’s death. The gans were removed and preserved in not only because we know its precise the museum’s “wet collections,” and her date—September 1, 1914—but also skin was stuffed and mounted for dis- because only decades earlier the pas- play. In 1977, when the Cincinnati Zoo senger pigeon had been the most opened a passenger-pigeon memorial, abundant bird on earth. Martha’s de- Martha was flown in for the dedication mise helped to transform American ceremony. She traveled first . beliefs about our relationship with na- The species at greatest risk for extinc- ture, and the bird became an icon in tion tend to be small, geographically the , which isolated populations: of the 140 docu- was emerging just as she died. mented bird since the six- Among the many billions of pas- teenth century, 133 were species found senger pigeons who predeceased only on islands. The passenger pigeon Martha was her cage mate, George, was different. Unlike, say, the black who died in 1910. The pair were mamo, which was endemic to the island named after Martha and George of Molokai in the Hawaiian archipelago Washington. In the century that and went extinct around the same time, separated the first First Lady from the the pigeon had a range that covered last passenger pigeon, the American most of the and economy went through a profound east of the Rockies, north of the Gulf transformation. The country’s popu- of , and south of Hudson Bay. lation increased more than tenfold, And its sheer numbers were almost and average income more than qua- aerial displays of passenger pigeons beyond belief. drupled. Only 6 percent of Ameri- had astonished their parents and The ornithologist Alexander Wil- cans lived in cities when Martha grandparents, but at the zoo they son, writing at the dawn of the nine- Washington died, in 1802. In 1914, found a pathetic creature with teenth century, described a the number was closer to 50 percent. “drooping wings, atremble with the crossing the Ohio River: The passenger pigeon’s extinction palsy of extreme old age,” in the was bound up with these changes, words of a reporter. To dissuade the A column, eight or ten miles in public from flinging sand at her to length, would appear from Ken- James K. Boyce teaches economics at the make her move, the zoo­keepers roped tucky . . . steering across to Indiana. University of Massachusetts, Amherst. off her cage. The leaders of this great body would

A portrait of Martha, the last passenger pigeon © Paul D. Stewart/Science Source CRITICISM 67 sometimes gradually vary their course, Wilson estimated the number of was just one flock; at any given time until it formed a large bend, of more pigeons in the flock using its density, several were likely to have existed than a mile in diameter, those behind breadth, speed, and the time it took on the continent, plus a scattering tracing the exact route of their prede- to pass overhead, and came up with of smaller groups and individuals. cessors. This would continue some- times long after both extremities were a count of 2,230,272,000. In A. W. Schorger, whose 1955 mono- beyond the reach of sight, so that the and People (2013), Mark Cocker, a graph on the passenger pigeon is the whole, with its glittery undulations, British naturalist, concludes that most exhaustive—­some might say marked a space on the face of the while this was probably an overesti- obsessive—­assemblage of information heavens resembling the windings of a mate, Wilson had undoubtedly seen about the species, reckoned that its to- vast and majestic river. “well over a billion birds.” And that tal population when Europeans first

68 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2015 Falling Bough, by Walton Ford. Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery, reached America was 3 to 5 billion. inspire not only awe but also dread. words about the approach of the mil- To put this number in perspective, the When a flock appeared in Columbus, lennium, and several dropped on current worldwide population of rock Ohio, in the spring of 1855, and blot- their knees and prayed.” doves—­what most people recognize as ted out the sun, “Children screamed The birds roosted and nested in pigeons—­is around 260 million. and ran for home,” according to an enormous colonies. The largest on re- The passenger pigeon is held in account published later in the cord, found in central in tender regard by environmentalists Columbus Dispatch. “Women gath- 1871, extended for 850 square miles. today, but it is worth pausing to ered their long skirts and hurried for As many as 300 birds would alight in imagine the birds in their heyday. the shelter of stores. Horses bolted. A a single tree, shattering trunks and The majestic rivers in the sky could few people mumbled frightened branches with an effect that was

CRITICISM 69 likened to that of a tornado or hurri- lost species: the mastodon and the As Elizabeth Kolbert recounts in cane. The clearings the pigeons creat- mammoth. By 1812, when he pub- The Sixth Extinction (2014), Cuvier’s ed were soon populated by species that lished a landmark four-volume trea- discovery of extinction opened the did not thrive in dense forest. The fuel tise on fossil , he and others door to Darwin’s discovery of evolu- buildup from broken limbs increased had identified forty-­nine vanished tion. If old species could disappear, the intensity of fires. Pigeon excre- species, including a cave , a pyg- maybe new species could emerge. Dar- ment altered the nutrient balance of my hippopotamus, and a pterodactyl. win’s theory of put the soil. The birds’ heavy consump- Cuvier’s discovery touched off a the two processes together. In Kolbert’s tion of red- is believed to revolution in our understanding of words, “Extinction and were have tilted the composition of eastern nature that is still, in some ways, in- to each other the warp and weft of forests in favor of white . In these complete. In the years that followed life’s fabric.” But Darwin, like Lyell, be- respects, the passenger pigeon was a his treatise, debate raged over the lieved that the process of extinction

, which helped shape causes of extinction. Cuvier believed was so gradual as to be practically im- the of east- that extinctions were the result of perceptible. The idea that a mass ex- ern . planetary catastrophes, a view com- tinction could happen in our own patible with the Bible’s great deluge. time, and that we could cause it, re- e now know that 99.9 percent Within a few decades, however, an al- quired a mental leap that Wof all species that ever existed are ex- ternative view propounded by the even Darwin wouldn’t take. tinct. But until the end of the eigh- Scottish geologist Charles Lyell had teenth century, the idea that any spe- won the day. Lyell argued that extinc- he birds that most of us eat today cies had gone extinct was almost tion happened gradually, over millen- Tare chickens—lots­ of them—­and tur- unknown. Nature was seen as a steady nia, not in cataclysmic spasms. It keys, with the occasional , quail, state, an unchanging tableau, not a pro- would not be until 1980, when a study or pheasant thrown in. So it is some- cess. Thomas Jefferson, whose passions connected the extinction of the dino- thing of a shock to remember that, not included natural history, put it this way: saurs to the impact of an asteroid, so long ago, Americans were happy to that the possibility of abrupt mass ex- eat just about anything with wings. An Such is the economy of nature that tinction was again taken seriously. 1867 inventory of available in the no instance can be produced of her Scientists now recognize that both game markets of New York City and having permitted any one race of her mass and gradual extinctions have oc- featured not only wild turkeys, animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great curred. Mass extinctions get more partridges, and but also robins, work so weak as to be broken. press: five of them are known to have great blue herons, sandpipers, meadow­ happened so far, and some say we are larks, blue jays, and snow buntings. The discovery of extinction is gen- now embarking on a sixth, with hu- In season, passenger pigeons were erally credited to Georges Cuvier, mans playing the part of the asteroid. especially plentiful. Alexander Wil- who taught at the Museum of Natu- Yet scientists have calculated that the son reported they were sometimes ral History in Paris and, in his spare Big Five together account for only eaten for breakfast, lunch, and din- time, studied the ancient bones in its 4 percent of the extinctions that have ner. The pigeon potpie—­sometimes collection. In 1796, Cuvier delivered taken place over the past 600 million garnished with pigeon feet stuck in a public lecture in which he an- years. The rest occurred in the ab- the middle—­was common fare in co- nounced that he had identified two sence of a global cataclysm. lonial America. Passenger pigeons Left: A group of pigeons, including several passenger pigeons, that lived in captivity in the aviary of C. O. Whitman, professor of zoology at the University of Chicago, 1896. Photograph by J. G. Hubbard. Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society. Right: Passenger 70 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2015 Pigeon Net, by James Pattison Cockburn. Courtesy Library and Archives Canada were preserved for out-of-­season con- clean up; others spoiled in transit. As cient to weather any losses to weasels, sumption by being salted, pickled in many as 10 million pigeons may have , , and other predators. apple cider, smoked to make jerky, or died at the Petoskey nesting altogether. Since the pigeons moved frequently, sealed in casks with molten fat. Scientists now recognize that, in ad- predator populations in any one place According to Schorger, the birds dition to island species, another type of could never grow to the point that were “a boon to the poor”: in 1754, a is especially vulnerable to ex- they posed an existential threat. half dozen sold in New York for a tinction: those with dense colonies that But in the hunters of the nineteenth penny, a sum equivalent to thirty attract intensive human ex- century, the passenger pigeon encoun- cents today. In times of surplus, they ploitation for the market. tered a predator that could not be sati- were fed to hogs. ated. The last passenger pigeon killed By the middle of the nineteenth ot everyone was oblivious to the in the wild is generally believed to century, railroads had connected the Nrisk of the passenger pigeon’s extinc- have been shot by a boy in Pike Coun- cities of the eastern seaboard to the tion. After witnessing the slaughter at a ty, Ohio, on March 24, 1900. The bird great nesting colonies of the Midwest. Kentucky roost in 1847, the French was stuffed by the wife of a retired sher- Word of the flocks’ locations spread traveler Bénédict-­Henry Révoil predict- iff (some say the sheriff shot it himself rapidly thanks to another new tech- ed that the passenger pigeon would and invented the boy as a cover story) nology, the telegraph, which allowed “simply end by disappearing from this and was named Buttons for the black professional market hunters, as well as continent” within a century. As Green- shoe buttons she used to cover the local amateurs, to converge on a site. berg remarks, Révoil turned out to be holes where the eyes had been. Today The most common way to kill pas- “overly optimistic by about fifty years.” Buttons is displayed at the Ohio Histo- senger pigeons was to shoot them. Be- To most Americans, however, the ry Center, in Columbus. Greenberg cause the birds clustered so densely, no passenger pigeon seemed ridiculous- uncovered evidence of a later specimen great skill was required to blast them ly abundant, and the suggestion shot in Indiana in 1902 that was de- from trees or out of the sky with a that it could disappear was prepos- stroyed when rain breached the roof of shotgun. Nets were widely used as terous. An 1857 Ohio State Senate the woodshed attic where it was stored. well. Trappers broadcast grain and de- committee report summed up the The extinction sparked a range of ployed captive “stool pigeons” to at- prevailing sentiment: emotions. Rewards were offered for tract the birds, enabling them to snare the discovery of survivors. “No better hundreds at once. Captured pigeons The passenger pigeon needs no pro- example of eternal hope, so charac- could be killed by crushing their skulls tection. Wonderfully prolific, having teristic of man, can be found,” between the thumb and forefinger, the vast forests of the North as its Schorger writes, “than the search for breeding grounds, traveling hundreds though, as Schorger notes, “It was dif- of miles in search of food, it is here a living wild passenger pigeon long ficult to continue this method without today, and elsewhere tomorrow, and after it had ceased to exist.” Federal fatigue when many birds were han- no ordinary destruction can lessen and state wildlife-­protection laws dled.” Some hunters used specially de- them or be missed from the myriads were passed, too late for the passenger signed pliers to break the birds’ necks. that are yearly produced. pigeon but in time to save animals Others used their teeth, as Joel Green- such as the American , another berg recounts in A Feathered River (The Ohio Historical Society ranked once-plentiful species that had been Across the Sky (2014). Here’s how he this as the fifth most embarrassing mo- pushed to the verge of extinction. describes Old Joe, a one-armed Civil ment in the state’s history; the top spot On a psychological level, people War veteran who netted pigeons near went to the Cuyahoga River, in Cleve- struggled with the knowledge that ex- Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878: land, bursting into flames in 1969.) tinction could happen so quickly, and When the passenger pigeon disap- that we could be the cause. It suggest- With one motion, he would grab a pi- peared from North America’s skies, ed a profoundly disquieting thought: geon by the leg and toss it into his many could not believe it was really if an apparently successful species like mouth head first, then chomp down extinct and claimed that the birds the passenger pigeon could go ex- on the skull: “What a sight! His face was smeared with blood from ear to had migrated to South America or tinct, couldn’t the same ear; his beard dripped gore; and his . Others accepted that the thing happen to us? clothes were covered with it.” birds were gone but suggested that they had succumbed to some myste- n 1947, the Wisconsin Society for Dead pigeons were packed in ice, rious disease. Henry Ford thought OrnithologyI erected a monument to about 400 to a barrel, for shipment by they had drowned in the Pacific the passenger pigeon in Wyalusing rail to urban markets. A million and a while attempting to to Asia. State Park, near the site of the great half were sent south and east from the In the end, it was the passenger pi- nesting of 1871, with this inscription: Petoskey nesting, which caused the geon’s very abundance that probably this species became extinct through price per barrel to fall below the cost sealed its fate. Roosting and nesting in the avarice and thought­less­ness of of shipping them. For every bird that close proximity and in vast colonies, man. Like most epitaphs, it’s a teaser. It made it to the dinner table, many the species exhibited the ecological hints at what happened but leaves a lot more were wasted. Vast numbers were survival strategy known as “predator unsaid. What was the relation between left where they fell for the hogs to satiation”: their numbers were suffi- “avarice” and “thoughtlessness”—­did

CRITICISM 71 avarice overwhelm thought, or did the passenger pigeon could shake them under the cheery headline welcome thoughtlessness leave the door open to out of it—­­and invite them to embrace back. The public appears to like the avarice? What thought or thoughts, ex- prudent bio­technology as a Green tool idea of de-extinction, or at least to ac- actly, were missing? And did the blame instead of a menace in this century.” cept it as possible and hence probably lie with “man” or with particular men? According to inevitable, influenced perhaps by Juras- A recurrent theme in the narratives Magazine, Church wrote back within sic Park. The Times Magazine, citing a of American environmentalism is that three hours with “a detailed plan to Pew poll from 2010, noted that “belief people are bad. Humans, in this tell- return ‘a flock of millions to billions’ in de-­extinction trails belief in evolu- ing, are sinners, a cancerous growth on of passenger pigeons to the planet.” tion by only 10 percentage points.” the face of the planet. The traditional The plan proposed extracting DNA Restoring the passenger pigeon, or a goal of the environmental movement fragments from museum specimens of facsimile of it, could mark a turning has been to restore a baseline, a state passenger-­pigeon remains and com- point in the attitudes of environmen- of nature that existed before human bining these with DNA from the bird’s talists toward new biotechnologies, in defilement. But however well these closest living relative, the band-tailed part by challenging the people-are-bad people-­versus-­nature narratives served pigeon. Germ cells with the new ge- narrative. But de-­extinction perpetu- environmentalism over the past century, nome would be inserted into the ates another dubious tenet of environ- the time has come to dismantle them of band-tailed pigeons, and the result- mental ideology, one that coalesced a and erect a new intellectual scaffolding. ing chicks should produce offspring century ago: the idea that it’s always Just as the passenger pigeon’s demise that carry traits from both species. preferable to return to a bygone base- helped to shape twentieth-­century en- The progeny would then be crossed line. For better or worse, eco­systems vironmentalism, so might a new and through several generations to breed a change. A big question—the mam- unlikely effort to resurrect the species new species that, while not identical in the room—is what’s better and change environmental thought and to the original, would come pretty what’s worse. It’s not obvious that turn- practice in the coming century. In Feb- close. Brand and Phelan founded an ing back the clock is necessarily a good ruary 2012, an invitation-­only meeting outfit called Revive and Restore, with idea when the clock has kept ticking. was hosted at Harvard Medical School Phelan as its executive director, to In thinking about what we should by George Church, a pioneer of ge- translate the concept into reality. and should not do to create better eco- netic sequencing and the leader of the Not everyone is convinced that systems, history suggests that a certain synthetic-­biology team at Harvard’s this is a great idea. David Blockstein, degree of humility is in order. In 1872, a Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired a passenger-pigeon expert and senior Cincinnati businessman named An- Engineering. It was convened by Stew- scientist at the National Council for drew Erkenbrecher founded the Society art Brand, who heads the Long Now Science and the Environment, who for the Acclimatization of Birds, with Foundation in San Francisco, and his participated in the Harvard meeting, is the aim of importing nonnative bird wife, Ryan Phelan,­ the founder and among the skeptics. “Suppose you did species from Europe to combat a local former CEO of a genetic-­testing com- create a pseudo–­passenger pigeon. caterpillar infestation. (The next pany called DNA Direct. The meet- Then what?” he asks. “This was a bird he founded the Cincinnati Zoo, where ing’s purpose was to consider using that needed hundreds of thousands of Martha died.) Among the species Erken­ recent advances in genetic engineering other birds to survive. How do you get brecher introduced to Cincinnati was to bring back the passenger pigeon. there?” Blockstein also worries that ef- the common . Although his first The idea originally came from forts to revive extinct species could di- introductions did not survive, subse- Brand, who was the founding editor of vert scarce resources from efforts to quent starling releases successfully estab- the Whole Earth Catalog. In an email save that still exist, lished the species that Edward O. Wil- to Church and the Harvard biologist and that our commitment to saving son has called “a plague across America.” Edward O. Wilson, he wrote, “The them could be undermined if we come The worldwide starling population today death of the last passenger pigeon in to believe that extinction is something is estimated at 600 million, about one 1914 was an event that broke the pub- we can reverse when­ever we want. (It’s third of which are in the Western Hemi- lic’s heart and persuaded everyone that also much cheaper to keep a species sphere. If we bring back passenger pi- extinction is the core of humanity’s alive than it is to resurrect it.) geons in even greater numbers, it’s not relation with nature.” He asked Church, Others have been more receptive. In evident that this will be counted as a who had already raised the possibility March 2013 the National Geographic blessing a century from now. of bringing back the woolly mammoth, Society hosted a TEDx­ conference on Rather than pursue the hope that whether it would be possible to re- “de-­extinction” at its Washington head- we can reverse time and retrieve a create the passenger pigeon. Brand quarters that was convened by Revive happy ending, perhaps we need to seemed motivated less by the passen- and Restore. It featured discussions learn to admit it when we make terri- ger pigeon’s importance to the envi- about efforts to bring back the passen- ble mistakes, absorb their ronment than by its importance to ger pigeon, the woolly mammoth, the lessons, and move on. environmental ideology. “The environ- Tasmanian tiger, and other species. Two mental and conservation movements months later, magazine car- n the summer of 2007, the Na- have mired themselves in a tragic view ried a short interview with Ben Novak, tionalI Audubon Society issued a re- of life,” he explained. “The return of a researcher at Revive and Restore, port called “Common Birds in

72 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2015 Photographs by Keith Carter. In May, Carter traveled to the Galápagos Islands to document the ways that humans have affected the ecosystems of the archipelago This page: Tree ferns, Santa Cruz Island (top) and sea lion, Isabela Island (bottom) CRITICISM 73 ­Decline.” Analyzing­ four de- cades of population data, it warned of an “alarming de- of many of our most common and beloved birds.” The story received wide press coverage. “We somehow trusted that all the innocent little birds were here to stay,” an editorial in the New York Times lamented. “What they actually need to survive, it turns out, is a landscape that is less intensely human.” Few reporters or commenta- tors bothered to examine the raw data on which the Audu- bon report was based. Had they done so, they would have found that among 309 bird species for which statistically meaningful trends could be established, spe- cies that experienced large population increases outnum- bered, by an impressive margin, those showing large decreases. They might also have noticed that some of the birds in great- est decline are species that live in meadows, pastures, and early successional forests, that have dwindled over the past 150 years as forests, espe- cially in the northeastern states, reclaimed abandoned farmland. It turns out that birds like bob- whites, meadowlarks, and field sparrows would benefit from having a landscape that is a little more intensely human. When I visited Robert Askins, a Connecticut College ornithologist and the author of Restoring North America’s Birds (2000), he recalled the condition of bird populations at the close of the nineteenth century. The picture he painted was bleak. “After the passenger pigeon, the market hunters didn’t go into some other line of work,” he said. “They just moved on to other species. Back in 1900 you would have seen few waterbirds around here. No egrets. No sandpipers. Any that survived would have been so gun-shy that you wouldn’t know they were there.” Much has changed since then, and from the standpoint of wild

Marine iguana, Puerto Villamil, Isabela Island 74 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2015 Cow and tortoise, Isabela Island birds it’s not all bad. The Migra- tory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 banned the and sale of most bird species. Thanks to the growth of the domesticated poul- try industry, Americans eat more bird meat but a lot less wild fowl. In the middle of the century, when a new threat to birds emerged from DDT and similar pesticides, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped to inspire a ban on their use. Concerted and even heroic efforts were undertaken to restore populations of threatened species like the bald and the . This does not mean that ev- erything is hunky-dory. Climate change now threatens birds and all other living things. Birds may initially fare better than other species by virtue of their mobil- ity. (In New En­gland, where I live, southern species like the cardinal, the tufted titmouse, and the Carolina wren have be- come common residents.) But the ecosystems on which they rely for food cannot move as quickly. The environmental challenges we face today differ from those we faced a century ago. Our narratives must change, too. New technologies—­notably, energy technologies—­will be a necessary part of any solution. The quest to preserve or restore a baseline state of nature, al- ways a mirage, is slowly being abandoned; ecologists have begun to think in terms of maintaining valuable processes rather than trying to freeze the biological landscape. Humans are part of the web of life, and we can and some- times do have positive impacts on the rest of nature. The old people-are-bad,­ nature-is-good formula, which was so central to the environmentalism that was born when Martha died, is too glib, and too often counter­ productive. For when the choice before us is framed as humans versus nature, it turns out that most people, with however much regret, will choose humans. n

Small-billed ground finch, Baltra Island Tour group, Santa Cruz Island CRITICISM 75