Read an Excerpt
The Environmental Legacy of the UC Natural Reserve System
By Peggy L. Fiedler, Susan Gee Rumsey, Kathleen M. Wong UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95364-2
CHAPTER 1
ORIGINS OF THE UC NATURAL RESERVE SYSTEM
Kenneth S. Norris
In 1948, Ken Norris was a graduate student in the laboratory of zoologist Ray Cowles at the Los Angeles campus of the University of California. For his dissertation, he decided to study the heat-tolerant desert iguana (Dipsosaurus dorsalis) of the Coachella Valley. Norris spent weeks in the dunes at the edge of Palm Springs observing these reptiles in their natural habitat. The experience sparked a lifelong quest to secure wildlands for teaching and research. The following are excerpts from his last book, Mountain Time (2010), published posthumously.
* * *
At one point in the spring, I had noticed half a dozen lath stakes pounded into the shoulder of the road down by the green-banded telephone pole, with unintelligible black writing scrawled on them. I hope whoever it is doesn't clean away all the Dicoria bushes that the iguanas love so much, I thought, assuming that a road crew was at work. But the coming events were to be much worse than that!
On my next trip to the Coachella Desert, I was appalled to encounter a wide swath of planed-down desert—over half of my study area was vacant sand. Bulldozers had lumbered north off the road and flattened a long tract of hummock dunes. Creosote bushes lay in ragged, forlorn heaps on the bare sand. A large motor hotel soon sprang up on the cleared place. The Coachella Valley had begun its precipitous plunge into a world of golf courses, housing tracts, and condos. And it has not stopped yet.
When the bulldozers planed down that strip of dunes, my graduate research program was stopped cold. I was just beginning to know all the players out there in the dunes, their life patterns, their associates. It was no use continuing on that piece of desert. Soon traffic, pavement, visiting children, pets, and all the rest would rip apart the society of animals I had chosen to observe. How far into the dunes the effects would go was anybody's guess. I was dismayed, cast adrift.
The catastrophe of the desert iguana study plot shook loose in me a clear and somber vision of the future of wildland America. No question about it, the rapidly urbanizing United States would soon be a place where the natural land and its life would be embattled nearly everywhere.
As a graduate student, I listened many times to Doc Cowles's somber assessment of the future, especially about the disappearance of natural environments. He had watched, with obvious pain, as the wild places that supported his teaching and research disappeared. Several times, he had tried to convince the University to accept large tracts of wildland offered to him for these purposes; officialdom had always refused.
So when Doc Cowles retired in the early 1960s and I replaced him on the staff at UCLA, one of the very first things I tried to solve after substituting my junk for his in the office desk was this reluctance of the University about what seemed so obviously important to us. My conclusion was that there were nine UC campuses, and if the Regents approved a reserve for one, the other campuses would jump in, wanting their own lands.
So as a brand-new assistant professor with no obvious inhibitions about what was and was not possible—I had no idea—I decided that the solution was a statewide plan, one with limits that administrators could hang their budgetary hats on. Plan it all at once for the whole state, I thought. And so I began an effort that still engages me.
I started by going to my ichthyology mentor, Dr. Boyd Walker, who seemed to know the byzantine University ropes. Good choice.
Boyd said that, first and foremost, I needed a very senior, very august committee to steer the effort, and it must come from all campuses. High-level academics can be used to impress high-level administrators. Oh, good idea! I never would have thought of that.
Then we needed a local committee that could draw up plans for the consideration of the more celestial group. We had to lay out what we wanted, and why, and where. Good idea, Boyd. I never would have thought of that.
Then somebody had to do the spadework. That proved to be me.
And so we did those things, and I found, right away, that there were scientists and teachers throughout California who saw the same future as I and who wanted to help. In time, I found that these same concerns were shared by thoughtful people throughout the state—businessmen, ranchers, people locked in cities, old families who saw their land going away, politicians, and especially new-minted students.
Thus we began. University President Clark Kerr liked the idea and knew just how to start. He designated seven natural lands that the University already held as the beginning nucleus of a reserve system. Then I asked my department for a spring's leave and a jeep to lay out the details of a statewide plan. With my sleeping bag and fishing rod and camping gear aboard, I visited every UC campus, asking the same questions of the field scientists on the staff: "What are your favorite wild places to teach and do research? Why?" And then we visited many of them.
A plan emerged that would encompass the ecological diversity of the state. We envisioned 44 reserves: some near each campus for local teaching; other big, multihabitat reserves to serve a given ecological zone of the state; still other smaller, single-habitat reserves designed to include the especially important habitat types. The NRS was the result. It now encompasses more than 100,000 acres in 33 reserves, many with facilities and staff, and is by far the most complete, most magnificent such system dedicated to higher education and research in the world. It is certainly the most important thing I ever attempted to do. I gave the idea a push, and the will and very diverse skills of literally hundreds of other people have built and sustained it.
EVOLUTION OF THE UC NATURAL RESERVES: AN INTRODUCTION
Peter S. Alagona
Peter S. Alagona is an assistant professor of history and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is interested in the history of land use, natural resource management, environmental politics, and ecological science in California and the West. His research projects include using the NRS as a case study to explore the role of biological field stations in modern American environmental history.
THE HISTORY OF THE UC NATURAL RESERVE SYSTEM
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientists in California lacked the extensive libraries, museum collections, and laboratory facilities typical of older and wealthier academic institutions in Europe and the American Northeast. What they did have was a vast and sparsely populated hinterland with mountains, deserts, grasslands, oceans, shorelines, waterways, and forests. California attracted scientists who stressed observation of the environment over experimentation and who looked to the landscape instead of the laboratory for their subjects of study (Smith 1987). This tradition of natural science scholarship fostered the creation of the California Academy of Sciences, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at UC Berkeley, and the largest network of university-affiliated wildland research sites in the world: the NRS.
The idea of the NRS first began with a professor of zoology named Joseph Grinnell, who had a vision for how to transform California's ecological bounty into a resource for scientists. As director of the MVZ since its establishment in 1908, Grinnell had done more than anyone else to promote research and education about wildlife in the West. Over three decades, he transformed the museum into the premier research center of its kind in western North America.
In 1937, near the end of his long career in science and conservation, Grinnell set out to create a new model institution for field research in the biological sciences. For this endeavor, Grinnell turned to the bucolic hardwood rangelands and chaparral-covered slopes of California's central Coast Ranges. There he hoped to create the University's first wildland site dedicated to teaching and research.
In founding a field station, Grinnell had a number of good examples to follow. The country's first biological field station, Woods Hole Marine Laboratory in Massachusetts, opened in 1888. By 1940, foundations and universities in the United States had established at least 48 field stations from New England to Arizona (Kohler 2002). Biological field stations proliferated during the Progressive Era (1885–1920) and then again during the New Deal (1933–38), both periods of scientific innovation and widespread public concern about natural resource degradation.
Grinnell's efforts to establish a UC field station were inspired, in part, by the increasing pace of development in California. From the beginning of his tenure at the MVZ, Grinnell had organized and led expeditions to survey the state's flora and fauna. He feared that many native species would disappear soon after the arrival of the ax and the plow (Star and Griesemer 1989). To find research sites protected from future development, Grinnell turned to the national parks. His work there inspired many important changes in National Park Service policies. But working in the parks required navigating political and bureaucratic obstacles at an agency with priorities that often superceded research and education. In the end, Grinnell felt that only a natural reserve owned by the University would provide the permanent protection necessary for long-term teaching, research, and monitoring of California's ecosystems.
These efforts to establish a UC field research station would be Grinnell's last work. In May 1939, the 62-year-old died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in Berkeley (Anonymous 1939). Just two weeks after his death, the UC Regents voted to accept Grinnell's proposal and established Hastings Natural History Reservation.
After World War II, the University's tremendous growth catapulted it into a position of international prominence in many areas of scientific research. The future of natural history, however, remained uncertain. By 1950, natural historians and other field biologists, who had experienced so much success in the previous decades, were being marginalized at research universities by laboratory-based physical and biomedical sciences. Traditional, field-based disciplines such as zoology and botany lost members, funding, and support. By all accounts, the 1950s and 1960s represented a low point for natural history throughout the United States.
The University of California was no exception to this trend. The MVZ and Hastings Natural History Reservation came under growing scrutiny from critics who viewed these institutions as antiquated. Suggestions were made to sell Hastings or convert it into an agricultural experiment station. But Grinnell had worked hard to gain the support of Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the University from 1930 to 1958. Sproul remained steadfast in his support for Hastings after Grinnell's death. "The University of California is engaged in an infinite variety of investigations aimed at the extension of human knowledge," Sproul wrote about Hastings in 1956, "but I don't know of any other which proceeds so steadily and surely with such quiet conviction and persistent effectiveness" (Sproul 1956).
When Clark Kerr succeeded Sproul as University president in 1958, Kerr continued the tradition of supporting campus reserves. It helped that Hastings generated its own operating budget through its endowment and external grants. The following year, Kerr increased the University's commitment to the idea of field stations when he endorsed the establishment of two more natural reserves: Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center, near the town of Palm Desert in the Coachella Valley, and Box Springs Reserve, near the brand-new UC Riverside campus. These additions to UC lands marked a crucial departure from the standard model at other research universities, which had at most one terrestrial and one marine station. The acquisition of three total reserves suggested the possibility of a much larger endeavor at the University of California (Herring 2000).
It did not take long for the wisdom of these decisions to become apparent. The birth of the modern environmental movement in the early 1960s was a response to public anxiety over the nation's smoggy skies, polluted waterways, and use of chemicals such as DDT. Meanwhile, California was preparing to implement its historic Master Plan for Higher Education (1960), which aimed to make college accessible for millions of future students. To realize this goal, the state embarked on the most ambitious college and university development plan ever conceived. It was at this fortuitous moment that forces within the UC system emerged to argue for the preservation of natural lands by the University.
In 1963, Kenneth S. Norris, then an assistant professor at UCLA, suggested forming a UCLA Natural Study Area for University Teaching and Research. This relatively modest proposal was to be the precursor to a university-wide program of natural reserves. On June 4, 1963, Norris wrote to President Kerr, requesting that he establish an all=university committee to develop and recommend policies concerning natural land holdings and acquisitions with the UC system:
A large number of University of California staff members rely upon natural areas for teaching or research purposes, or both. Included are botanists, zoologists, geologists, meteorologists, archaeologists, geographers, and others. In fact, many staff members find the study of natural animal and plant populations essential to their research efforts.
The explosive growth of California's human population is destroying natural terrain at an alarming rate, and once destroyed, it cannot be reconstituted. The University needs to plan carefully both for present staff use and for the future, with regard to these natural areas. California is completely unique in the diversity of natural terrain within its borders, and this diversity is now a strong asset for teaching, graduate, and staff research. We need to protect these advantages by careful planning.
Norris's correspondence indicates that this request was the result of a year and a half of discussion and correspondence with staff members from UC campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Santa Barbara, Riverside, and Los Angeles.
Norris enlisted several senior UC faculty members to campaign for a university-wide reserve system. This distinguished group included Norris's mentor, zoologist Raymond Cowles, and botanist Mildred Mathias, both of UCLA; botanist G. Ledyard Stebbins of UC Davis; and zoologist A. Starker Leopold of UC Berkeley. It also included several energetic young scholars, particularly Leopold's former student Wilbur Mayhew of UC Riverside. Their common goal was to consolidate the University's existing field stations into a single system and expand that system into a statewide network of natural reserves that would capture representative samples of California's extraordinary natural diversity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Environmental Legacy of the UC Natural Reserve System by Peggy L. Fiedler, Susan Gee Rumsey, Kathleen M. Wong. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
