A golden trout from French Creek in the French Canyon. Located within the John Muir Wilderness in California. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In 1978, I was just beginning my career with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). I worked in the southern Sierra Nevada range as the Assistant Forest Manager at Mountain Home State Forest. The federally managed 1.2 million acre Sequoia National Forest surrounded the 4800-acre state forest. On most of the state forest’s eastern boundary Mountain Home abutted the newly designated Golden Trout Wilderness.
Our neighbor, the United States Forest Service, was struggling to transform the Golden Trout Wilderness Area from primitive to pristine.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 required that the GTWA would be “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man.” Well, many thought that man had pretty well trammeled the area. Quite a few high country lakes and streams had been “coffee can stocked” with rainbow, brook, and brown trout. The native golden trout had crossed with many of the rainbow (golden trout is a sub-species of rainbow) to produce a hybrid trout that looked just like a golden until you drilled down to the chromosomal level.
The question was, then, how to make the wilderness into wilderness, to resemble a time before man changed it. Drumroll please…
The answer was to destroy the fish population, using the poisonous insecticide rotenone, to “save” it.
The strategy was and is to “chemically treat the headwaters of drainages with rotenone above fish barriers to remove non-native trout species that compete or hybridize with native trout,” a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service brochure [PDF here] notes, “After that, native trout are reintroduced to the reclaimed habitats.” Many of the high country lakes were left sterile since the agency experts decided that was their natural state before European or Indian contact.
Some of the Forest Service’s people thought that was a crazy idea, saying, “If it looks like a golden trout, why not call it a golden trout?” After all, golden trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss aguabonita) is a sub-species of rainbow trout (O. mykiss).
But, why destroy a vibrant fish population? In her book, Rambunctious Garden, Emma Marris explains, “For many conservationists, restoration to a pre-human or a pre-European baseline is seen as healing a wounded or sick nature. For others, it is an ethical duty. We broke it; therefore we must fix it.” The pre-human or pre-European state thus becomes “the one correct state.”
The irony, of course, is that pristine areas are illusions; people have to work hard to make them to look how people think “pristine” ought to look. Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, along with his two co-authors, argues that the great lengths we go to “removing unwanted species while supporting more desirable species,” such as drilling wells to provide wildlife with water and manipulating the land through “fire management that mixes control with prescribed burns,” we “create parks that are no less human constructions than Disneyland.”
So, oddly, the more natural we want a place to look, the more human management it needs.
Further Reading:
- Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility
- The Art of Managing Nature
- California Golden Trout Does Not Warrant Listing Under the Endangered Species Act Pacific Southwest Region – US Fish & Wildlife Service
Interesting. They have just promoted the area I live in as ‘the best place in Ireland to go wild”. The promotion was done in large part through Erris Beo (Erris Alive) which is funded in part by Shell Ireland. You know Shell, I’m sure. They do oil and gas. The do it here in Erris, as it happens, not altogether uncontroversially. Anyhow, this is a genuinely beautiful area. It’s had human inhabitants for at least the last 5000 years (there are remains of old stone walls under the bog). Human impact, though, has always been pretty tempered by the appalling weather. That, and famines, and social engineering, and colonisation, and so on. So although people have lived here, it’s only very recently that the human impact has been really felt. So anyhow, there’s a beach close to where I live, very beautiful, very wild place. There’s the remains of an old abbey there, and various myths are attached to it. Now, they’ve just put two portaloos at the edge of the abbey wall. This, and the road they bulldozed down to the sea, and signs pointing you around a walk (a very nice walk) and a life belt, are the human interventions here. I’m not at all sure they have ‘improved’ the place.
Thank you for sharing that, Lucy. Obviously, sometimes we humans do it right and sometimes we don’t. You might be interested in this paper about ecosystems: http://www.esa.org/history/Awards/papers/ONeill_RV_MA.pdf
[…] Managing That Wild Natural Look […]
[…] Managing That Wild Natural Look […]
Interesting post, reminds me of a story permaculture teacher David Holmgren told from New Zealand: the Southern Alps had been completely denuded from native vegetation- opening a niche that was aggressively colonized by the “exotic invasive” Douglas Fir (from your neck of the woods as it were). The management “solution” ? to fly over in helicopters and spray them. Apparently toxic chemicals and nothing growing at all was preferable to something deemed “foreign”. A good example of how distorted and dysfunctional a lot of environmental thinking has become.
Great story, Graham.
I was in New Zealand in 2005, on a tour designed for foresters to learn about their “forest ecology, biodiversity, conservation policy, the forest economy, and intensive plantation management.” (See New Zealand, Part 1)
One of our guides, a fellow by the name of Jeff Tombleson, told us that they were having difficulty getting Forest Stewardship certifications for their plantations because Monterey Pine wasn’t native to New Zealand. Of course the biodiversity under the plantations was much higher than the pasture lands that it had been prior to the planting of the Radiata pine. (See New Zealand Forestry and California Dreaming) But, that didn’t seem to matter.
What an odd world we live in.
My last job was a Forest Manager at Boggs Mountain State Forest. BMSF has quite a lot of Douglas-fir.
Why is it that agriculture, using species not native to the region, is tolerated, even eulogized as uplifting Arcadia, yet tree plantations are derided as artificial monocultural monstrosities? I am confused by the rationale.