Bookshelf: Nature's Wars

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Nature's Wars
Jim Sterba

For 400 years, European explorers, traders, and settlers plundered North American wildlife and forests in an escalating rampage that culminated in the late 19th century “era of extermination.” By 1900, upwards of thirty million deer had been reduced to less than 500,000, ten million wild turkeys were down to 30,000, many wild animal and bird populations were isolated remnants or threatened with extinction, and worry mounted that our country was running out of trees.

Then, in the 20th century, an incredible turnaround took place. Today, it is quite likely that more people live in closer proximity to more wild animals, birds and trees in America than anywhere on the planet at any time in history. This should be wonderful news -- unless, perhaps, you are one of 4,000 drivers who will hit a deer today, your child’s soccer field is carpeted with goose droppings, coyotes are killing your pets, the neighbor’s cat has turned your bird feeder into a fast-food outlet, wild turkeys have eaten your newly-planted seed corn, beavers have flooded your driveway, or bears are looting your garbage cans. Nature Wars tells the story of how a wildlife comeback miracle became such a mess.

Trees had already begun to reclaim abandoned farm land in the 19th century, the start of the largest reforestation in the Americas since the Mayan collapse. In the 20th century, conservationists outlawed commercial hunting, created wildlife refuges, transplanted isolated species to restored habitats, and slowly nursed many wild populations back to health. Then, after the Second World War, something happened that conservationists hadn’t foreseen: sprawl. People moved first into suburbs on urban edges, and then kept moving out across the landscape. By 2000, a majority of Americans lived neither in cities or country but in that vast in-between called sprawl, which attracted a surprising number of wild species, too. The result was a mix of people, trees, and wildlife that should have been a nature-lover’s dream come true. It was, and it wasn’t. Many people couldn’t cope.

The trouble was that baby boomers and their offspring had increasingly withdrawn from the natural world. They spent most of their time indoors, got anthropomorphized versions of wild nature from films and TV, and were encouraged to treat pets like children and wild animals like pets. They discarded their grandparents’ hard-won knowledge of the working landscape and forgot obligations of responsible stewardship. Their Earth Day instincts told them to save creatures and trees. But as wild species multiplied and trouble with them grew, they faced a new reality: too much of a good thing. Conflicts erupted over how to deal with it. People divided into species partisans, staged demonstrations, went to court, and raised and spent fortunes to save geese, beavers, cats, coyotes, bears, deer and other creatures from people who wanted to harm or kill them. A growing chorus of environmentalists and wildlife biologists, meanwhile, argued that ecosystems needed protection from some of the very creatures that species partisans sought to save, and that means responsibly managing local landscapes for all their inhabitants, including people.