President
Bush's policies are demonstrably anti-Nature. Compelling evidence
abounds, but it doesn't merit headlines because Nature-plants,
animals, forests, grasslands, etc.-cannot voice its concerns.
For protection, Nature must rely on public-spirited environmentalists,
people branded extremists by Newt Gingrich in the mid 1990s, and
thereafter too often marginalized by the media as a "special
interest group." How dispiriting when most Americans believe
so strongly in conservation.
In order to
get a firsthand account of current assaults on Nature, we went
into the field to interview a random sample of species, some warm-blooded,
some not.
High in the
Pacific Cascades, an agitated and clearly alarmed frog
told us that hundreds of species of his extended amphibian family-frogs,
toads, salamanders, newts-are in dramatic decline. He doesn't
know why. He quoted articles from learned scientific journals
like Science, Nature, and the American Scientist
and explained that because amphibians are especially vulnerable
to disease outbreaks, they are beacons for environmental degradation.
Maybe "planetary canaries" is the right expression,
but the frog was unaware of the story of the canary in the coal
mine.
A grizzly
bear in Montana's Rocky Mountain Front Range said he couldn't
fathom why the Bush Administration wants to take him off the endangered
species list-his best chance for survival. His forebears [sic]
lived on the Prairie when Lewis and Clark's expedition came through
200 years ago and now he and other grizzlies are trying to survive
in remote roadless areas of the high country, limited to less
than five percent of their previous home range. Adding to the
tension, he noted, is the President's plan to drill for oil and
gas in his backyard-the Rocky Mountain Front.
A bison
reflected sadly that she had lost her brother last year when he
wandered across the Yellowstone National Park boundary and was
executed on public land in Montana by government sharpshooters-a
kind of "ducks' on the pond" shoot-out. She reminded
us that bison know nothing of the boundaries drawn by humans,
the same species that shot them to extinction on the Great Plains.
In the Klamath
Basin of Oregon/California where Bush regulators have dewatered
a magnificent river and historic salmon run, a female salmon
watched thousands of her relatives go belly up last year when
the river's summer flow was diverted to irrigators. She had thought
the river was still theirs for it had been theirs
for thousands of years. She couldn't help herself in venting that
the current White House policy stinks more than her rotting relatives
ever could.
We caught
up with a regal bull elk in Yellowstone on a pristine winter
morning. Huffing and puffing and on the verge of collapse, he
haltingly told us about a joyriding group of snowmobiles that
had chased him through deep snow for nearly five miles-apparently
just for the sport of it. He said that he can handle a wolf pack
chase, but the snow machines simply never tired in coming after
him. "Relentless," he said. "These machines should
not be allowed in the National Park." The Bush people see
it differently.
In the world's
largest remaining temperate rainforest, the Tongass in Alaska,
two marbled murelets, which nest only in magnificent
ancient forests close to the coast, had just gotten wind of the
Bush decision to open their wilderness home territory to bulldozers
and chainsaws. They had thought that the Clinton "roadless
rule" would safeguard their home-a rare jewel in the planet's
vanishing temperate rainforest inventory. They could not under-
stand the wasteful, over-subsidized plunder by special interests
when these rainforests belong to all Americans.
In the Arctic
where global warming is fast changing the land and sea, we caught
up with an unusually thin polar bear. "Bad
times," he said. "The breakup of the entire polar ice
cap due to global warming has caused the seals to flee into the
open ocean and now it's damn hard to find a meal anymore."
On the Arctic
plain a caribou came by, heavy with calf, and asked why
President Bush wanted to invade the herd's calving grounds in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for only a six-month supply
of oil and gas to feed SUVs. She impishly, yet semi-seriously,
wondered what the White House reaction would be if she and 50,000
of the Arctic's Porcupine caribou herd decided to calve in Washington's
Walter Reed or New York's Bellevue Hospitals?
A couple of
hundred miles out in the Atlantic, a swordfish we interviewed
hit on a sarcastically positive yet troubling note. She had heard
that ingestion of mercury from polluting power plants could lead
to bans on eating swordfish! She figured that more mercury pollution,
as proposed by the Administration's "Clear Skies" policy,
might keep her off the dining table if people were warned not
to buy swordfish steaks. Her survival, she suggested, is dependent
upon the Bush Administration maintaining high levels of mercury
pollution.
To get the
bigger story of threats to the health of entire ecosystems, we
sat in on a "community" meeting of all species living
in the Colorado/Utah Rockies where the White House is promoting
oil and gas development. The birds sent out word of the
meeting; the carnivores organized the assemblage and kept
order; the ungulates nonchalantly listened in while grazing;
the prairie dogs, always alert for raptors,
took positions at their escape tunnels; and butterflies
and other insects milled about, occasionally making (involuntary)
avian dietary contributions. To the relief of other mammals, separate
space was set aside for skunks and porcupines.
The take-home
message from the meeting came through clearly: "Don't mess
with our ecosystem!" No one quoted Aldo Leopold's dictum
about "saving all the pieces (of an ecosystem)," but
they all understood their relationships with one another. A great
horned owl offered a concluding thought: "We
lose neighbors one by one over many seasons," he sadly opined.
"And as we do, we are all diminished..." The animals
departed in silence knowing that their survival is in the balance.
Only the buzzing of the pollinators intruded on the quietude
of the somber retreat.
We have put
the hundreds of responses of those interviewed into a database
for possible future use in preparing what Duke University's John
Terborgh has called a Requiem for Nature.
That requiem will almost certainly be needed unless our outrage
and advocacy impacts an Administration whose short-sighted assaults
will have consequences long after they leave office.
Theodore M.
Smith
Executive Director
September, 2004
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