UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE OF BIRDS, GUANO, AND MAN: WILLIAM VOGT’S ROAD TO SURVIVAL A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By MAUREEN A. McCORMICK Norman, Oklahoma 2005 UMI Number: 3159283 UMI Microform 3159283 Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 © Copyright by Maureen A. McCormick 2005 All Rights Reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Research for this dissertation was made possible through grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9729903), from the Rockefeller Archives Center, from the Graduate College of the University of Oklahoma, and from the Graduate Student Senate of the University of Oklahoma. Alasdair and Richard Fraser-Darling kindly spoke with me about their father and allowed me to review family papers. Population-Environment Balance permitted me to view the papers of William Vogt that it held. Librarians at Smith College, Rice University, the Denver Public Library, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Scotland, UNESCO Archives, Yale University, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Central Florida, and West Melbourne Public Library provided invaluable assistance and filled numerous requests for interlibrary loans; I especially note the gracious aid provided in this regard by Cécile Thiéry of the World Conservation Union and Tom Rosenbaum at the Rockefeller Archives Center. Brevard Community College provided me with congenial colleagues, a quiet place to work, and students who inspire me. Graduate assistantships from the University of Oklahoma’s International Programs Center and Department of the History of Science, as well as the DeGolyer Presidential Fellowship supported the author during this project. Participation in the National Science Foundation’s Research and Training Grant entitled “Nature, History, and the Natural Historical Sciences” provided the intellectual and social milieu for examining population control within the context of wildlife conservation. iv The Dibner-sponsored seminars in the history of biology at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, “Putting Humans into Ecology, Ecology and Conservation Biology,” and “Human Genetics in the Twentieth Century: The Science and Politics of Human Heredity” introduced me to interdisciplinary scholarship as scientists and historians examined historical and contemporary scientific ideas and introduced me to my colleagues in the history of science. I wish to thank the faculty and staff of the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma for their unflagging support and kindness. Special thanks go to Gregg Mitman, who introduced me to William Vogt and Frank Fraser Darling, to Marilyn Ogilvie, who literally took me into her home, and to Hunter Crowther-Heyck, who was always willing to talk. To my family and friends I owe a debt of gratitude for accompanying me on this travail. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv TABLE OF CONTENTS vi ABSTRACT ix INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: A RURAL CITY BOY 13 A RURAL CITY BOY 17 FROM BIRD WATCHING TO ORNITHOLOGY 24 A SCOTTISH CASE IN POINT: FROM ANIMAL BEHAVIOR TO HUMAN BEHAVIOR 40 FRANK FRASER DARLING 40 DARLING AND THE RED DEER EXAMPLE 42 MUTUALITY AMONG THE PEOPLE OF THE WEST HIGHLANDS: CROFTING AGRICULTURE 46 WHAT THEN IS THE VALUE OF LAND AND OF WILDLIFE? 50 CONCLUSION 61 CHAPTER TWO: MANAGING GUANO MEANS MANAGING HUMANS 63 IMPORTANCE OF GUANO 68 BIRD LIFE 75 MANAGING THE GUANO ISLANDS 80 CONCLUSION 90 CHAPTER THREE: AN INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SERVANT 92 INTERNATIONAL CONSERVATION PRIOR TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR 95 MEXICAN NATURAL RESOURCES 102 POPULATION AND RESOURCES OF VENEZUELA, COSTA RICA AND EL SALVADOR 113 CONCLUSION 119 CHAPTER FOUR: WILLIAM VOGT’S ROAD TO SURVIVAL 121 ROAD TO SURVIVAL’S SUCCESS 123 ECOLOGICAL ROOTS 127 OUR PLUNDERED PLANET 137 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF POPULATION MANAGEMENT 144 KAIBAB MAN 145 HUXLEY’S GREBES 149 BIRTH CONTROL AND POPULATION CONTROL 153 CONCLUSION 158 CHAPTER FIVE: CONSERVATION AND POPULATION CONTROL 160 THE POPULATION QUESTION: FROM WILDLIFE TO FOREIGN DIPLOMACY 162 INTERNATIONAL CONSERVATION 168 UNESCO’S FOUNDING AND MISSION 169 WHAT KIND OF ISSUE IS NATURE PROTECTION? 172 IUPN 175 VOGT AND IUPN: SCIENCE, CONSERVATION, AND POPULATION 179 PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA 185 vii A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA 189 INTERNATIONAL PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION (IPPF) 191 CONCLUSION 202 CONCLUSION 204 APPENDIX A. LIST OF COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES THAT ADOPTED ROAD TO SURVIVAL AS A TEXT 213 BIBLIOGRAPHY 214 viii ABSTRACT William Vogt’s best-selling and influential neo-Malthusian text Road to Survival articulated the conservation sensibility of his day and was literally read around the world. Vogt (1902-1968) came to his conclusions about land-use and population control through ecological research, confirming that conservation approach of natural resources would come by managing human behavior, rather than by directing the behavior of non-human organisms. Human behavior had indeed crossed into the realm of the natural sciences in so far as conservation was concerned. Specifically, Vogt urged humans to adopt population control to circumscribe land use. Vogt was one of a group of ecologists who claimed that humans must adapt to their environment, albeit an environment they were capable of altering; Frank Fraser Darling, Julian Huxley, and Fairfield Osborn joined him. Vogt called for population control to become part of United States foreign policy, as would happen in the 1960s. He assigns ecologists to the role of expert policy advisor in a democratic society; he wants individuals to voluntarily choose to limit family size but is prepared to demand coercion. Vogt’s work has long been seen as an early example of a land-use sensibility associated with the modern environmental movement; in reality it reflects an intermediate stage between Progressive Era conservation and the late twentieth- century environmental concerns for quality of life. Finally, Vogt’s ideas have real life consequences. He was influential in the origins of what is now the World Conservation Union, which in its earliest stages as the International Union for the ix Protection of Nature recommended The Road to Survival and he was national director of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the leading voice for birth control in the United States. x INTRODUCTION A favorable distribution of births is a critically necessary step to the survival of a civilization of high quality. William Vogt1 Conservation implies restraint either from without or from within. William Vogt2 William Vogt (1902-1968), author of the influential neo-Malthusian text Road to Survival (1948), articulated the conservation sensibility of his day in this best- selling book that was literally read around the world. Among those influenced by this book was a young Paul Ehrlich who would go on to write the better-known and equally Malthusian Population Bomb (1968) that gave voice to the modern environmental movement’s position on population.3 It is as Ehrlich’s forerunner that Vogt is most readily classified. Vogt’s ideas, expressed in bold and even outrageous language, were in fact grounded in the wildlife ecology of the day, which led him to emphasize scientific management of natural resources that must at times accede to nature’s prevailing forces. Vogt is a historical actor of interest to historians of ecology and environmentalism. He represents an under-appreciated period of environmental 1 “A Population Policy for the United States Directed to Both Environmental and Genetic Improvement,” Box 2:2 William Vogt Papers in the Conservation Collection of the Denver Public Library, hereafter cited as Vogt Papers, DPL. 2 Hoyes Lloyd and William Vogt, “Pan-American Conservation,” Transactions of the Eleventh North American Wildlife Conference, edited by Ethel M. Quee (Washington DC: American Wildlife Institute, 1946), 7. 3 Allan Chase, Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 382. 1 history that segues between Progressivism’s emphasis upon rational use and the post- war’s focus upon resources important to the quality of human life (e.g., air and water). In the first chapter I introduce the reader to the young William Vogt, a man who survived a crippling bout of polio and recovered to the extent that he climbed the Olympic Whiteface Mountain. His bird watching avocation led to an ornithological education and an early conservation campaign in the 1930s against marshland drainage intended to eradicate mosquitoes. It was the unforeseen consequences to wildlife to changes that at first glance seemed solely beneficial that stimulated Vogt to investigate the ultimate penalty and catapulted him into national and international prominence in the 1940s. In the second chapter I demonstrate the shift in Vogt’s thinking from the need to conserve wildlife for aesthetic reasons to an understanding of wildlife as a natural resource and its role within human political economies. This shift can be seen while Vogt is the ornithologist for the Compañia Administradora del Guano, a semi-public body charged with managing Perú’s critical natural resource. Vogt recognized that optimizing environmental