The Individual vs. the Species

I recently read an amazing book: American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West, by Nate Blakeslee. It tells the story of the release of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, and it follows “characters” in a novelistic style: the wolves themselves, the elk hunters who hate the wolves, the politicians, and the various employees of U.S. Fish & Wildlife who have to balance the science, the wildlife, and the politics. It’s a fascinating read - just the kind of book I would love to write. 

One of the tensions described in the book exists between those who see wolves as a species and those who see wolves as individuals. It is easy to fall in love with the individual wolves as Blakeslee describes their struggles to survive, find mates, protect their young, hunt and feed, and maintain their territory. A wolf life is a hard life, and you can’t help but admire an individual who is particularly good at the game or overcomes enormous obstacles to come out on top. When a hunter kills Oh-Six, a magnificent wolf with an online following from around the world, her loss destroys the pack altogether. Oh-Six’s fans are so enraged that they come together to turn the local anti-wolf political tide.

Wolves chasing bull elk in Yellowstone.
Photo by Doug Smith, Public Domain.

For hunters and many FWS employees, however, the emphasis is on the species. As long as the species is healthy and has sufficient numbers to survive, the loss of individuals cannot matter. Hunters have played a role in maintaining the health of many species, either by promoting habitat or culling overpopulated numbers. To them, the presence of too many wolves lowers the number of elk drastically, meaning that hunters cannot enjoy hunting as many did before. And before you start dismissing these hunters as nothing better than the trophy hunter who killed Cecil the Lion a couple of years ago, remember that many hunters are subsistence hunters, providing meat to their families that would otherwise be unaffordable or because they believe that meat from the factory farming system is unhealthy.

I started reading another book a couple of years ago about scientists trying to figure out bird migration and nest-building patterns among migrating songbirds. They would wreak havoc on individual birds in order to understand the species better. For example, they would kill or relocate males to assess how and when other males would move into their territory. I was so upset that I couldn’t continue reading. I kept thinking: what do those individual birds care about the species? You’re ruining their lives! I feel the same when I hear about efforts to keep nearly-extinct species extant by caging them and raising them in captivity so that maybe they can be released into the wild someday. If we could ask these individuals whether they wish to sacrifice themselves as individuals to save their species, what would they say? And yet how can we sit by and not do everything possible to keep species from going extinct?

Laos Cattle Keeping, photo by ILRI Stevie Mann.
CC NY-BC-SA 2.0

All of this seems to boil down to what “use” we see animals serving. And culture matters here. Those of us who are taught to see animals primarily as pets or as objects to be viewed at a zoo may be more likely to anthropomorphize them, or give them the human qualities that allow us to see them as individuals. Those whose cultural context shapes them to see animals as populations to be studied or managed are able to look at the woods rather than the trees. And then there are those people in the world who live closely with animals as part of their livelihood; they seem able to take both views at once. They have to distance themselves from the animals as individuals in order to herd, transport, or kill and butcher them. And yet, living so closely with them, they come to notice and admire their individual traits and tendencies, what many would insist are their “personalities.”

Who is right? Which attitude is best for the short- and long-term wellbeing of wildlife? It’s hard to say. Maybe we need the combination of perspectives, and the push and pull of debate, to reverse the harm we have done to the world’s wildlife. And Blakeslee's book offers a poignant reminder: we must also try to understand one another and the human experiences that we bring to the debate.

Driving My Dad, Part 1

In the last several years of his life, my father and I loved to go on car rides together. I would drive while he would point out landmarks: a creek where people used to be baptized, the location of one of the peach sheds that marked Arkansas’s long ago past as a major peach producer, a hillside thick with cedar trees indicating the presence of limestone. He knew so much about the history and the topography of southwest Arkansas, and I always learned a lot.

These car rides harkened back to many such car rides with him when I was a little girl. I loved to ride in the car, snooze on and off, and stare out the window and daydream as he told me long and (to my child’s mind) boring stories about his work life or a civil engineer’s view on the merits of asphalt versus concrete roadways. (I’ll never forget one car ride adventure, when I was around eight or nine years old. We stopped at a gas station, and I asked if I could have some money to buy some candy. “Sure,” he said and gave me a dollar. A week or so later he asked, “Where’s that dollar you owe me?” A child of the Depression for sure!)

In later years, there was something that frustrated him more and more on our rides together. He would see a brushy fencerow, or a stand of scraggly trees along the side of the road, or a weedy pasture, and shake his head in disgust. “Who would let that go to waste like that? I hate to see it!” he would complain fiercely. “I just don't know why a person or a government would allow that to happen.” That would lead into a discussion, again a civil engineer’s view of the world: rivers are meant to produce power, fields are meant to nurture crops or feed animals or grow pine trees for the local paper mills, and roadsides are meant to look neat and clean and tidy, showcasing good management of shared public property.

I look at those same scraggly places and see sources of food and cover for wildlife, fields that could grow grasses to sustain the breeding of the many grassland bird species now in rapid decline, and roadsides of bee-covered wildflowers and weeds. “But Daddy, what about the wildlife?” I would ask, knowing how much he loved birds and wildlife, too. He would grunt or answer noncommittally and move on to the next topic. I got the message: wildlife shouldn’t get in the way of progress.

Dad’s point of view made me think of centuries of rugged people in America logging forests, diverting waterways, building canals and bridges, and mowing lawns. They saw the land as something to be put to use and managed, something that would help them survive or make them grow rich. And the land and water have given us much. I’ve written previously about how we’ve also developed a preference for mowed yards and careful landscaping, a containment of nature. But it seems to me that we’re realizing now the importance of the scraggly, the unmanaged, the wild.

A few days ago I returned from spending a month in China, where I observed the manifestations of a cultural and historical context that has viewed nature as something to be organized, managed, and brought into harmony. More on that in Part 2. Hint: this photo of a tree-planting project shows neat, weed-free rows of one species of tree, with the same precisely-measured distance between each individual. I think Dad would approve!