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| ISBN-13: | 9781555917913 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Endangered
Biodiversity on the Brink
By Mitch Tobin
Fulcrum Publishing
Copyright © 2010 Mitch TobinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55591-791-3
CHAPTER 1
Saving 134
I walk inside the Phoenix Zoo's animal clinic and blinding sunshine turns to cool fluorescent light. When the heavy metal door slams behind me, it shuts out the Wurlitzer organ music coming from a nearby carousel. The smell of cotton candy is replaced by the odor of a hospital and the stench of a pet store.
I'm led into the operating room, where I find veterinarian Dean Rice giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a California condor. Rice puts his lips on a plastic tube protruding from the beak and tries to breathe life into bird 134. When Rice blows, he turns beet red, but the jet black condor is motionless. The bird's eyes are rolled up inside his head.
A surgical light bounces off the perspiration beading on Rice's balding head. He puts on a stethoscope and bends over to check 134's pulse. The bird's wingspan is more than nine feet and its body is bigger than any Thanksgiving turkey I've ever seen. It takes three of Rice's assistants to prop up 134 on the surgical table. While Rice searches for a heartbeat, one of his assistants holds 134's featherless head up high, revealing a gooseflesh neck arrayed with a rainbow of pinks, yellows, oranges, and purples. Then Rice resumes mouth-to-mouth.
A few hours earlier, a FedEx truck delivered 80 cubic centimeters of condor blood from the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park, where 134 hatched a decade ago. Brought into this world with the help of humans, 134 is once again in an emergency room of sorts, this time receiving a blood transfusion to save him from lead poisoning, the number one killer of condors. Somewhere near the Grand Canyon, 134 swallowed bullet fragments as he ripped decaying flesh from a dead animal, almost certainly a deer, elk, or coyote shot by a hunter on the forested North Rim. When a lead rifle bullet hits its quarry, the projectile typically explodes into scores of tiny pieces that contain enough poison to kill North America's largest bird.
As I snap photos of Rice doing mouth-to-mouth and scribble illegible notes in my reporter's pad, I'm reminded of another self-imposed assignment in an emergency room. I was the city hall reporter for the Tucson Citizen and desperate to break out of the rut of interminable public hearings animated with backslapping politicos, so I shadowed the crew of a city fire engine that had become one of the nation's busiest. There was some news value in the profile — Tucson's unrelenting growth was stressing its emergency medical system — but mostly I was trying to live out my childhood dream of being a firefighter. Back on Long Island, where I'd grown up, Jewish boys are supposed to become doctors, not paramedics.
Predictably, the shift I was observing was exceptionally quiet — the curse of the ride-along, I called it. But around 10pm, long after the photographer had bailed, a piercing tone sounded in the station and the call came in over the loudspeaker: pedestrian hit outside Lim Bong's Liquor. In a blur, they pushed me into the cab of Engine 8 and we were weaving through traffic on a divided highway at double the speed limit, blowing through stoplights with air horn blasts that pierced my ears and tickled my diaphragm. Arriving at the scene, the first thing I noticed was the compound fracture to the femur of an emaciated, gray-bearded homeless man. A paramedic said he couldn't find a pulse. In what seemed like seconds, the firefighters had a cervical collar strapped around the man's neck, an IV tube in his arm, and off we went to University Medical Center.
On the operating table, the homeless man was completely naked, the contours of his ribs visible beneath his bruised, ghostly white torso. My eyes were repeatedly drawn to the black holes of his dilated pupils. The firefighters told me it was time to leave. "This guy is CTD," one said. I asked for a translation. "Circling the drain," another firefighter replied before we climbed back in the truck for a much slower — and dead silent — ride back to Station 8.
Back in the firehouse, there was the same gallows humor I knew from newsrooms. It's an essential defense mechanism if you make your living off others' misfortune, like a condor does. For an environmental journalist, the death force that drives so much of our news coverage — "if it bleeds, it leads" — doesn't compare to what occupies a police reporter or combat correspondent. But it's there. A 300-year-old pine tree turns into a torch as a wildfire roars through. A dehydrated pronghorn lies down one last time beside a creosote bush that holds neither nutrition nor water. A condor starves as fragments of a lead bullet dissolve in its gut. As I'm watching Rice try to revive 134, I'm staring squarely at the ESA's reason for being: death, and not just the loss of a bird here and a fish there, but the permanent destruction of an entire species that somehow figured out how to make a living in a brutish world.
Starting with bacteria in the primordial soup, life on Earth unfolded over 3.8 billion years and branched out into millions of different species like the canopy of an ever-expanding tree. Plate tectonics, asteroid impacts, and natural fluctuations in the climate, some of them quite abrupt, sheared off large sections of this tree of life. Yet the boughs that remained radiated outward like leafy stems seeking sunlight as the survivors filled empty niches, developed specialized survival strategies, and evolved into entirely new species. Now, in a tick of the geologic clock, humans are pruning the tree of life like careless gardeners who could care less about the health of the plant.
For nearly four decades, the ESA has sought to curb such unwise meddling, and the law is now akin to our emergency room for nature. In most cases, the ESA's administration never involves actual clinics and surgeries, as it does with the California condor. But our nation's biodiversity policy does share much in common with our practice of emergency medicine. Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to land in an ER knows it's not how you want to deliver healthcare to society at large. In ERs for both people and nature, overwhelmed personnel perform triage and force patients to endure long waits even if they are seriously injured. The services delivered are often astronomically expensive; in many cases, they would have been unnecessary had the patient received preventive care. If more people had health insurance, or if fewer homeless people were wandering the streets, our ERs would still be critical, but also a lot less crowded. Likewise, if we did a better job managing our land, water, and other natural resources, the ER that is the ESA would still be absolutely essential, but not nearly as busy.
Our nation's biodiversity policy is actually worse than our unenviable healthcare system: with endangered species, we put the bulk of the conservation burden on the ER and do little beyond its confines until the patient arrives there in critical condition. When a species is finally protected by the ESA, it's already in miserable shape. One study found that at the time of federal listing, a median of about 120 individual plants and 1,000 individual animals were left. For the biologists and land managers who care for endangered species, the threats are as grave and intractable as the ones facing the trauma surgeons in Tucson when the dying homeless man arrived. While I watched him expire, I didn't blame the firefighters, nurses, or doctors for failing to save him. And I wouldn't blame Dean Rice and the other vets if they couldn't revive condor 134. Assigned a nearly impossible task, these emergency workers do the best they can with the resources at hand.
It's also unfair to automatically blame the ESA if a species isn't recovering, especially when hardly any of the plants and animals shielded by the law have gone extinct. Since 1973, only eight of the nation's more than 1,300 listed species have vanished, a "success" rate of more than 99 percent. Without the ESA, scientists believe that hundreds of other species would have disappeared forever or been so decimated they would have been impossible to recover. But if the ESA is succeeding at preventing extinction, it is falling far short of its ultimate goal: recovery of species so they no longer need our help. Just 21 endangered species have recuperated sufficiently to the point where they could be delisted and discharged from nature's ER. So about 98 percent of the nation's endangered species, including the California condor, lie in between these extremes: saved from extinction but still not nursed back to health. Only 8 percent of listed species are improving, while one-third are stable and one-third are declining. The status of the other quarter is unknown, largely because of a lack of funding for monitoring.
No matter how hard we try, some species will forever be on life support because they are so rare, isolated, or vulnerable to change. A tiny pupfish found in a single desert spring will always be at risk of extinction. With other plants and animals, however, the lack of progress is simply due to insufficient spending. The Interior Department's annual expenditure on its endangered species program, roughly $150 million, is less than the military spends on a single F-22 fighter plane, just 0.005 percent of the federal budget, and only 50 cents per American per year. But money hasn't always been the issue, especially with charismatic species that the public finds fascinating, endearing, or otherwise appealing. With the California condor, more than $40 million has been spent on a species with about 300 remaining individuals. Compare the expenditures made on behalf of condor 134 with the resources devoted to the homeless guy hit outside Lim Bong's Liquor, and the bird might come out ahead. More often, the fundamental problem confronting endangered species is a lack of habitat and a shortage of political will to address the root causes of their endangerment. We let economics trump ecology, give lobbyists more say than biologists, and simply refuse to change policies and practices that push plants and animals toward the abyss.
* * *
It was miraculous that 134 — and his fellow condors — had made it this far. Thousands of years before Leif Erikkson and Christopher Columbus landed in North America, the California condor population was already in decline. We know that condors once soared across a large share of the continent because their fossilized remains have been found as far east as Florida and as far north as New York. In the Pleistocene Epoch, which began about 2 million years ago and ended as the ice age glaciers receded around 12,000 years ago, North American condors were at their height and could feast on a smorgasbord of behemoths that are no longer with us. Saber-toothed cats with half-foot-long fangs, carnivorous bears that were 10 feet tall, and wolves double the size of their modern-day descendents chased down sloths standing six feet tall, mastodons weighing six tons, and herds of camels indigenous to the New World. If you made your living off carrion, it was like an all-you-can-eat buffet. But by the end of the last ice age, not long after humans first entered the Western Hemisphere via the Bering Land Bridge, all of these creatures — the Pleistocene megafauna — had vanished forever. As the condor's food sources declined, so did its numbers and geographic range, leading some scientists to label the surviving birds "ice age relicts."
The changing climate surely had some role in diminishing the wildlife that the condor depended on because new weather patterns rearranged the mosaic of vegetation cloaking the landscape. There is also strong evidence that overhunting by the first North American peoples played a decisive role in the extinction of many animals. This "blitzkrieg hypothesis," first proposed in 1967 by University of Arizona paleoecologist Paul Martin, is chilling: bands of Stone Age hunters armed with little more than spears, arrows, and human cunning eliminated most of the hemisphere's largest land animals. Martin and others argued it was no coincidence that most of the Pleistocene megafauna had made it through the rise and fall of previous ice ages, only to disappear in the most recent flipping of the climate when humans arrived. The people who colonized the New World moved from northwest to southeast in North America, as did the string of extinctions. Martin and colleagues calculated that if a band of 100 Paleo-Indians on the eastern Canadian plains moved south 20 miles every year, killed a dozen animals per person, and doubled their population every two decades, it would only take three centuries for the first North Americans to kill more than 90 million 1,000-pound animals and reach modern-day Mexico.
Other continents provided support for the blitzkrieg hypothesis. About 50,000 years ago, there were more than 150 genera of animals larger than 100 pounds; by 10,000 years ago, at least 97 were gone. On Australia, a similar and earlier extinction event had claimed nearly 90 percent of the megafauna. This lent credence to the theory that large animals living outside Africa and Eurasia were doomed since they lacked the skills and instincts needed to flee human predators, while Old World species had been coexisting with people for millennia. In North America, it was the large animals endemic to the New World — musk ox, 300-pound beavers, and the mighty glyptodont, a relative of the armadillo as big as a Volkswagen Beetle — that suffered the worst fate. Other prey species that migrated with humans across the Bering Land Bridge, such as the moose, fared better.
Besides hunting the Pleistocene megafauna, the first humans in the New World altered habitat for countless species. They set fires to clear vegetation for crops and steer game toward their stomachs. They modified the flows of streams for irrigation. Yet in much of North America, the effects were relatively minor. It was not until the past century or two that the impacts expanded exponentially, heralding the onset of a new age: the Anthropocene Epoch, in which the human species is modifying all of creation. There is no consensus on when this new epoch began. Many scholars argue it was at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, some say it began thousands of years ago, and others dismiss the notion entirely. But scientists do agree we are now in the midst of the most profound transformation of the natural world since the waning days of the last ice age, when condors were picking apart the remains of the last woolly mammoths.
Besides reducing the condor's food supply, the first North Americans posed a direct threat to the birds. Indigenous people honored both California and Andean condors by sacrificing them in funeral rites and stealing eggs from their nests, foreshadowing the thefts that early ornithologists would later commit to enrich museum collections. By the 1800s, Anglo settlers would only find condors in a narrow band along the Pacific Coast, from British Columbia to Baja California. The birds may have held on in coastal areas because they could consume beached whales and seals as an alternative to the declining herds of deer, elk, and bison.
By the mid-19th century, the remnant population of condors was also in trouble. The 1848 discovery of gold in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada spurred a mass migration to condor country. Prospectors soon discovered that the birds' strong, hollow quills made perfect containers for gold dust. More than a century before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the first Earth Day, settlers in awe of the condors' dimensions brandished guns, not binoculars, upon seeing the birds. In ensuing decades, condors also suffered collateral damage when they ate carcasses that ranchers and predator-control agents had laced with strychnine, arsenic, and other poisons in a quest to kill wolves, bears, coyotes, and mountain lions. By the mid-20th century, the world's California condor population had been reduced to only a few dozen in a 5-million-acre wishbone-shaped area northwest of Los Angeles — a range that a single condor could cover in a day or two.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Endangered by Mitch Tobin. Copyright © 2010 Mitch Tobin. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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What People are Saying About This
"Little in Mitch Tobin's deeply reported book about the landmark legislation is pat or predictable... This kind of deep, resource-intensive reporting is itself an endangered species." - Utne Reader
"Tobin - with meticulously researched reportage and a hands-on approach - reminds readers that the American Southwest is the real ground zero in the ongoing battle to better manage and protect the nation's precious wildlife." -Pasatiempo
“On the surface, Endangered is a comprehensive environmental history of the American Southwest (Arizona and New Mexico, and pieces of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Texas). But this is really just the background through which Tobin cleverly weaves his tale of the ESA and the various fault lines it has created in both the political and the natural worlds.” -Tucson Weekly
“. . . the author pulls the Endangered Species Act out of the political catfight that often impedes its enforcement and sheds light on the act's intricacies, using science and a keen human element as his great illuminators . . . His engaging portraits of the movers and shakers on both ends of the political spectrum reveal some surprising results in the biodiversity blame game . . .”-Santa Fe New Mexican
“Mitch Tobin takes us to the edge of life. Mass extinction is now our way of death and unless we heed this clear-eyed book with vivid examples from the Southwest, well, we’re going to be home alone.” -Charles Bowden, author of Down by the River and Murder City
"In Endangered: Biodiversity on the Brink, Mitch Tobin examines the messy battles that surround the Endangered Species Act. Endangered is dense yet engaging, and it is at its best when Tobin draws in his experiences as a journalist. Tobin repeatedly shows how competing interests over endangered species are embroiled in battles that extend beyond environmental issues, and reveals how the individuals involved do not fit readymade typecasts. For anyone with even a faint interest in the Southwest, Endangered is highly recommended." -Steven Kwan, Arizona Daily Wildcat
"Tobin - with meticulously researched reportage and a hands-on-approach - reminds readers that the American Southwest is the real ground zero in the ongoing battle to better manage and protect the nation's previous wildlife." -Pasatiempo