Dale D. Goble, Paul Hirt, and Susan J. Kilgore | Dale D. Goble, Paul Hirt, and Susan J. KilGore on Environmental Cartoons | Environmental History, 10.4

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DALE D. GOBLE, PAUL HIRT, AND SUSAN J. KILGORE ON ENVIRONMENTAL CARTOONS

A political cartoon is worth looking at because it is enjoyable to stick pins into fools and villains or to watch others doing it.¹

Charles Press

POLITICAL CARTOONS OFFER an exaggerated, slanted, no-holds-barred form of social criticism. Through the often wicked use of humor—be it irony, hyperbole, farce, or blackest absurdity— good political cartoons can provide flashes of insight. Like bursts of lightning, a good cartoonist freezes and illuminates political moments and personalities, and in doing so reveals their essence.

Cartoon animals serve particularly well as markers of political change. Animals always have occupied a special place in human imagination, and as images they become embodiments of nature that easily absorb human characteristics. Cartoonists have populated their drawings with the American eagle, the British lion, and a host of now-unfamiliar animal symbols since the earliest American political cartoons, the broadsides of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.²

In the post-Civil War period, however, wild animals came to occupy a new role: No longer representations of nations or politicians, they were used to address the political and cultural contests at the heart of conservation. The first of the nine images that follow is the earliest example of this new role that we have found. It is an 1874 cartoon from Thomas Nast entitled "The Last Buffalo."³ As historical artifacts, cartoons frequently focus complex moral, political, and social connections into a simple image that dramatically reveals a defining moment in the evolution of a political issue. Together these nine cartoons tell a tale of growing scientific and moral complexity. As our understanding of the world developed from natural history through specialized sciences like biology to integrated sciences like ecology, the world has been revealed to be complexly interrelated. This ex-panding understanding of our species' place in the universe complicated our ethical relationship to the rest of creation/nature/ecosystem.

Thomas Nast, Harper's Weekly, June 6, 1874.

"Don't shoot, my good fellow! Here, take my 'robe,' save your ammunition, and let me go in peace."

The dark, gritty drawings that Thomas Nast published in Harper's Weekly in the 1870s and 1880s graphically captured the corruption of Boss Tweed and the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Although political corruption was his most common topic, Nast did produce at least one cartoon on an environmental theme. In 1874, he drew "the last buffalo" just as hide hunters began their rush to the Great Plains that resulted in near-extermination of the most abundant large mammal in North America. Nast's message is pointed: the unrestrained harvest would produce tragedy.⁴

Although his message is clear, Nast's perspective is not. The cartoon is a strange and not particularly humorous drawing: a buffalo shrugging off its hide to reveal an unnatural, anthropomorphic torso, like Jesus being stripped of his robe before the crucifixion. The warning in Nast's title might be read to say that ignorance and greed makes the hunters fools to have thought that nature was inexhaustible.⁵ But Nast, who was a master at drawing villains, provides no villain in the cartoon. The befuddled hunter is no bloated Boss Tweed with his diamond stickpin. He is just a regular guy, as surprised as we are by the buffalo's actions.

Nast's title also suggests that the failure to halt the rush to convert nature to private profit makes the public a fool or a villain. We now see the slaughter as a terrible loss, but the contemporaneous perspective was more contentious. On the one hand, there were those who sought to stem the killing. In 1874, Harper's Weekly called for an end to the "indiscriminate slaughter."⁶ On the other hand, at least some military officers advocated extinction as a goal: "Kill every buffalo you can," Colonel Richard Irving Dodge said, "every buffalo dead is an Indian gone."⁷

The cartoon also has an air of resignation. The title implies that, ten years before the end, it was already too late—extermination was unavoidable. Many Americans in the late nineteenth century shared such a fatalistic resignation that progress—foolishly, perhaps, but unavoidably—entailed environmental costs.⁸ In the post-Civil War United States, the demise of Nast's last buffalo was considered a regrettable result of modernization that was largely beyond human control. Economic progress was a process that followed social Darwinist laws of its own. It was, like the last buffalo it produced, natural and, as such, beyond human control. This naturalization of environmental degradation freed humans from moral responsibility for it. By the mid-1880s, the horizon-darkening herds of bison had been replaced with cattle in a rush to capture the grass. Teddy Roosevelt nostalgically wrote that the destruction of the buffalo demonstrated that "the frontier had come to an end; it had vanished."⁹

For some, the profligate waste of a laissez-faire society was an unacceptably high and unnecessary price to pay for progress. Within two decades, Progressive era reformers had transformed the political discourse, arguing that an activist government employing scientific management of natural resources could prevent the waste that Nast's last buffalo symbolized; valuable wildlife, the reformers contended, could be conserved for long-term, sustainable use. Seeking to avoid the fate of the bison and the passenger pigeon, Progressive conservationists sought to restrict market hunting, particularly of waterfowl and plume-bearing species such as egrets.¹⁰ When this failed to stem population declines, reformers turned their attention to regulating sport hunting, condemning "game hogs" such as the "ardent sportsman" from Louisiana who commented, "The birds [snipe] were such migrants, and only in the country for a short time, I had no mercy on them, and killed all I could, for a snipe once missed might never be seen again."¹¹ The first cartoon below by Ding Darling takes an acerbic look at such "sportsmen."¹²

Darling was not only a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, but also Chief of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, a predecessor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. His concern for wildlife conservation is apparent in this 1916 cartoon picturing a horde of well-dressed sportsmen overrunning a peaceful farm, blasting away at everything that moves. The threat is the same as in Nast's cartoon—the excessive, uncontrolled killing of wildlife. The problem, however, has shifted from market hunting to sports hunting and the setting has changed from the frontier to the rural family farm.

Darling shared Nast's concern with extinction, but his view of the hunters is far more critical than Nast's. These hunters are wildly irresponsible in their pursuit of "game"—trespassing on private property, drinking, shooting around the house, even killing farm animals. The hyperbolic imagery in Darling's exaggerated scene evokes more indignation than resignation, more humor than tragedy; Americans were not yet down to the "last duck" in 1916. Darling was also a Progressive who believed that extinction was not inevitable, that environmental problems could be solved through education, self-restraint, and enlightened regulation.

Although Darling skewered the hunters, he did not explicitly offer a solution in this cartoon. The date of the cartoon, however, provides the needed context. It was published the day after Great Britain (acting for Canada) ratified the convention between the United States and Great Britain for the Protection of Migratory Birds.¹³ The convention, and the subsequently adopted Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, were central to the Progressives' wildlife protection agenda.¹⁴

Ding Darling, 1916. Courtesy of the Darling Foundation.

Darling's concern with extinction is also the focus of a second and later cartoon that graphically poses two alternatives—extinction vs. game management—in two starkly different scenarios for the same landscape. The cartoon introduces a new perspective: the growing realization of the importance of wildlife habitat. The condition of the land, rather than the actions of hunters, is the focus—a focus that reflected the influence of the emerging science of ecology with its emphasis on the complex interrelationships between land, plants, and wildlife.¹⁵ Darling's cartoon reflects the recognition that regulating hunters is often insufficient by itself to reverse wildlife decline.

Ding Darling, ca. 1930. Courtesy of the Darling Foundation.

With its blasted trees and denuded landscape, Darling's portrayal of the extinction alternative would have resonated with the generation that witnessed the horrors of trench warfare. The battered duck would have brought to mind images of soldiers trudging home missing limbs and hobbling on crutches. In this way, the cartoon visually links humans and ducks as trudging toward extinction. While the demise of Nast's last buffalo had no effect on our species, the denuded landscape of Darling's anthropomorphic ducks does affect us. It is our habitat too—and we are equally at risk if it is destroyed.

But the cartoon is, nevertheless, hopeful. Unlike the resignation that pervaded the Darwinist decades, the Progressives believed that government should intervene to promote democratically determined goals. The ultimate solution to environmental degradation—for Ding Darling as for wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold—was the creation of a new ethic that acknowledged our species' place in the moral community of life that inhabited any parcel of land.¹⁶ For Progressives, that solution could be facilitated by government action. We have a choice. It is not too late. We can conserve wildlife (and ourselves) by restoring the habitat required for survival. Furthermore, choosing wildlife management over extinction does not prevent using the land for other, economic purposes. Although the foreground of the two panels is starkly different, the farm in the background remains unchanged. If anything, the farmer in the second panel appears to have a bit of bounce in his step unlike the weary, despondent farmer above him. The Progressive faith in multiple-use and sustained-yield offered something for everyone: We could have both family farms and wildlife habitat with just a bit of planning. We would not be forced to make hard choices.

The faith in scientific management for multiple uses also is central to a cartoon drawn by an unknown artist for a 1936 plea in Nature Magazine that federal dams include fish passage facilities. The cartoon's anthropomorphic salmon ascend a stairway over a dam to continue on their upstream migration to spawn. The caption—"If dams could have fishways, there would be no objection to them"—continues the theme that choices need not be hard, that dams and salmon can indeed coexist with a little forethought and effort. This cartoon appeared during construction of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, which was designed and built without fish ladders. The Columbia River salmon fishery, which was once the largest in the world, had been in decline for three decades and fish advocates had fought to have effective fish ladders included in every dam built on a salmon stream. When Grand Coulee's gates were closed, it blocked salmon runs on one-third of the river basin.

The image is comical, but artistically and biologically naïve. Time has demonstrated that getting upstream to spawn is only one of many problems dams pose to migrating salmon.¹⁷ In the 1930s, however, fish managers were obsessed with promoting fish ladders to facilitate upstream migration—despite the history of failure of fish passage on Eastern rivers such as the Merrimack.¹⁸ The cartoon captures the period's belief in our ability to engineer greater abundance. In addition to fish ladders, for example, resource managers constructed hatcheries to replace lost natural runs—with no greater success in halting the decline of the Pacific salmon fishery.¹⁹ The cartoonist's sunny optimism—like that of the fish managers—again raises questions of when ignorance becomes willful in the face of competing (economic) objectives.

The success of the Progressive conservation movement in embodying its scientific-management ideology in a variety of federal and state statutes produced a tempered hopefulness that crept into wildlife cartoons in the first half of the twentieth century. This mood changed after World War II. Although wildlife populations continued to decline, there were new, more pressing threats: nuclear annihilation, fallout from atomic bomb testing, fears of a "silent spring," and the ubiquitous urban evils of overcrowding and pollution. The cartoonist Herblock's menacing nuclear bomb with its threat of annihilation or his later noir cartoons depicting pollution and urban blight captured the mood of the 1950s.²⁰

From William L. Finley, "Are Salmon Being Sold Down the River?" Nature Magazine (August 1936), 107–9.

An environmental movement sprouted from the rootstock of the conservation movement, spurred in part by scientists like Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, and Paul Ehrlich who published modern versions of biblical jeremiads (Silent Spring [1962], Science and Survival [1966], The Population Bomb [1968]). In response to the growing consensus that the environment needed protection, the federal government enacted a series of statutes that fundamentally transformed environmental and natural resource law. These statutes significantly advanced Progressive policies of regulation and scientific management. Among the more than a dozen statutes designed to conserve wildlife that Congress enacted in the 1960s and 1970s were three that increasingly nationalized the protection of wildlife species at risk of extinction. The culmination of this push was the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

This new environmental awareness profoundly altered the subject matter and the message of cartoons in the 1960s and 1970s. Political cartoonists who tackled environmental subjects in these decades rarely displayed much faith in our ability to extricate ourselves from the mess we had made. Consequently, many of the cartoons, like their predecessors in the nineteenth century, were tragic rather than funny.

The cartoon by Pat Oliphant reflects these new concerns. In a smaller world "where everything is related to everything else" (to use Barry Commoner's famous phrase), purchasing decisions in the United States affected species on the other side of the world.²¹ Recognition of the importance of the U.S. market had led to the enactment of the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969 (ESCA) the year before Oliphant's cartoon was published. The statute sought to protect species in danger of "worldwide extinction" by restricting the import and sale of listed species or their body parts.²² Tigers were one of these globally endangered species.

Although both cartoonists use the animal's hide as a metaphor, the difference between Oliphant's hunter and Nast's is striking. In contrast to Nast's hapless frontiersman, Oliphant's hunter is as fat as Boss Tweed. He is neither hunting to survive nor to make a living, but to present his gleeful—and equally fat—companion with a fashionable coat, a coat that results in the death of the tiger and in the waste of most of its hide. The tiger's death seems particularly tragic because it serves only to reinforce the shooter's narcissism and frivolousness.

Oliphant also acknowledges the growing moral complexity that comes with the realization that consumers are at the heart of many environmental problems. Oliphant's (and our) perspective is captured in the doubly ironic caption—"you shouldn't have!"—which, of course, means the opposite to Harvey's companion. The couple, whose corpulence and attire suggest foppish upper class snobs on safari, represent conspicuous consumption, and it is that consumption that the environmental movement identified as a key source of environmental stress. The cartoon lampoons not just the fur-coat hunter, but the whole of consumer society. As Pogo noted, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Mike Lane, Baltimore Sun, ca. 198, Courtesy Mike Lane.

Oliphant's cartoon includes an additional dose of irony. The dead tiger sprawls almost within reach of a "world wildlife preserve." Is the suggestion that "preserves" are unlikely to be of much use? Or does it merely increase the villainy of the hunter? Irony becomes an increasingly important characteristic of environmental cartoons in the latter decades of the twentieth century.

The social conflicts, political failures, and economic dislocations of the 1960s and 1970s—the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, the OPEC oil embargo—led to cynicism that often cast the government as the problem.²³ Industry-funded groups such as the "Sagebrush Rebels," who chafed at the new environmental regulations, capitalized on this growing distrust of government and launched a campaign to discredit federal environmental laws.²⁴ Ronald Reagan, a self-proclaimed Sagebrush Rebel, captured this mood. Appropriating the optimism of the Progressives to an anti-Progressive agenda, Reagan—perhaps most visibly through his Secretary of the Interior James Watt—rejected both science and moral complexity for a fundamentalist, unequivocal simplicity. God gave the earth to humans to use. With the appointment of Watt as secretary of the interior, contention replaced consensus, rhetoric on the environment became combative and divisive, and Watt became one of the most cartooned people in the United States.

Mike Lane's cartoon captures the person and the period: not only the bald head and coke-bottle glasses that were the iconic symbols of the secretary but also the intensely partisan politics that he inspired.²⁵ Lane's cartoon derides Watt's claim to be an environmentalist and his version of Christianity by contrasting him with St. Francis of Assisi. Watt's religious fundamentalism was a recurrent topic. For example, his comment to the Wall Street Journal that "[m]y responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns" was widely interpreted as a statement that he had a "divine mandate" that the public lands were to be "bulldozed, leveled, drilled, mined and leased down to the last holy square yard."²⁶

For St. Francis of Assisi, all creatures were the "brothers and sisters" of human beings; in their mirroring of God they were certainly members of the moral community. For Lane's Saint Francis Watt, only the human species were members of the moral community. The contrast is fundamental: Holding an oil-soaked bird and surrounded by skeletal animals, Watt is not only loving nature to death, he is loving death itself. Saint Francis Watt, the anti-Assisi, refusing to extend the moral community beyond humans, failed to recognize that our species is part of, rather than the purpose of, this world.

The ESA is also the sub-text for Jack Ohman's 1989 cartoon from the Portland Oregonian.²⁷ It is an artifact of the timber wars that took place in the Pacific Northwest during the spotted owl controversy. It offers a measure of the distance traveled in the more than a century since Nast's cartoon. Ohman echoes Nast's "last buffalo" with "the last tree in Oregon." But Ohman's owl does not meekly surrender and shrug off its feathers. Instead, it "adapts," carrying off what is presumably the last logger in Oregon.

Similarly, the threat to the owl also has shifted. As with Darling's second cartoon on the choice facing America, the problem is re-focused on habitat loss rather than hunting; the owl was irrelevant to the logger's motivation—and this was the problem. Ohman's denuded forest landscape recalls the first panel of Ding Darling's two-panel cartoon. But here as well Ohman's cartoon measures the distance traveled: Although his drawing brings at least a wry smile, it is a far darker landscape than the sunny optimism of Ding Darling's farmstead. The decision to conserve wildlife is no longer costless. The ESA required the preservation of critical habitat—including "working" landscapes like the one in Ohman's drawing.

But who is the villain? Neither the owl nor the hapless working-class logger seems a villain. The logger is not portrayed as rapacious; in fact, his slumped resignation as he is carried off seems designed to elicit sympathy. As they fly off over a denuded landscape that suggests Dante's hell, the owl and logger form a rude crucifix—both are sacrificed for the sins of others; both face extinction. Given the scale of deforestation shown in the cartoon, Ohman does not literally have to show corporate executives or selfish elites or consumers to imply the larger market forces at work. Ohman makes his point even without directly presenting a villain. Willful ignorance in the service of greed is the modern version of villainy, the villainy of the accountant rather than the thief.

The ESA has produced a large number of political cartoons, and a small but significant number of these are "anti-environmental." These anti-environmental cartoons are the direct descendants of James Watt, whose confrontational, take-no-prisoners rhetoric fundamentally transformed political discourse. It is thus not surprising that the anti-environmentalist cartoonists often reflect Watt's sensibilities: Christian fundamentalism wedded to free-market libertarianism. One of the more talented cartoonists in this genre is Chuck Asay of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph.²⁸

Assay's 1995 cartoon has a clear villain: an abusive government. He pictures a bucolic homestead, its owners helpless in the face of state-mandated thievery. Like other property rights advocates, the cartoonist offers a constitutional analogy to make his case. Smiling Redcoats are transmogrified into a grinning wolf and other endangered species; the British government becomes the U.S. government. In both cases the small homeowner suffers depredations at the hands of an unfair, authoritarian government. The cartoon's tale reflects the growing conflict between economic libertarians and environmental protectionists, a conflict brought into sharper focus as people have been forced to make many choices that had seemed avoidable in earlier, more optimistic times.

As with other cartoons of this generation, Asay's drawing is humorous; irony is prominent. But while other cartoonists have increasingly reflected the moral and scientific complexity of conserving wildlife in an ever more crowded, industrialized world, Asay offers the equivalent of a soundbite. The despotic government seeks to destroy its citizens by forcing them to "quarter" endangered species—turning the ESA's prohibition against the destruction of habitat into the moral equivalent of a command to provide shelter and sustenance to imperial soldiers. The cartoon reflects the belief that the owner of land may do with it as s/he wants without any obligations either to society or to the rest of creation. Asay's cartoon offers a counterpoint to cartoons advocating environmental protection; it reflects the ubiquitous political struggle between those advocating unrestricted economic liberties and those advocating regulation and restraint.

Tom Toles's Noah mocks the homeowner in Chuck Asay's cartoon: Must we conserve species when their survival threatens economic growth? The cartoonist poses the dilemma of our time.²⁹ How do we reconcile the preservation of nature with increasing human population and consumption? While Toles offers no explicit answer, the story of Noah and the flood is evocative—and the ark is a recurrent metaphor for the conservation of all species, particularly those at risk of extinction.³⁰ Toles's cartoon reminds us that we are the ones who must decide which species get to come aboard the ark—an ark that represents our willingness to restrain ourselves, to compromise, to pay.

In Toles's cartoon we have the best of modern environmental cartooning. Irony and a wry, self-deprecating humor have replaced tragedy (Nast) and preachy hopefulness (Darling). In this, the environmental cartoons trace the trajectory of all political cartoons. Nast's cartoons on Boss Tweed seldom produce smiles. Noting this may, of course, be saying no more than that we prefer Toles to Nast because Toles is our contemporary and we—not surprisingly—share his humor. But it may also reflect a greater willingness to use humor as a political tool. Humor is often a weapon of the powerless: if you can't change something, you might as well laugh at it.

The cartoons also have grown more sophisticated in their understanding of the environment and of the moral choices that conserving wildlife imposes. This doubtless reflects the fact that we are more knowledgeable about environmental problems. Perhaps we are also more willing to deal with complexity—though many people still crave simple stories with moral certitude. But political cartoonists generally can no longer satisfy their audiences (or themselves) with one-dimensional depictions of the fools and villains that trouble our world. The best modern cartoonists often highlight our stunning inconsistencies—Tom Toles's drawing of a billboard on a crowded freeway proclaiming "Honk if you Love the Environment." Or, they open our eyes to the consequences of our behavior by reversing the roles of wildlife and humans—such as Gary Larson's cartoon depicting two bears in hardhats overseeing construction of a pipeline emptying sewage into a human home; the caption reads: "Animal Waste Management."

Such cartoons remind us that Pogo was right.

Dale D. Goble, Schimke Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Idaho, is finishing the final editing of a collection of essays, entitled "The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Renewing the Conservation Promise," which is due out from Island Press this fall. Paul Hirt is associate professor of history at Arizona State University. He is writing a book on the history of electric power in the Pacific Northwest. Susan J. Kilgore is associate director of Washington State University's General Education Program, where she teaches world civilizations and American studies.

NOTES

^1. Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (East Brunswick, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1981), 11.

^2. An 1829 cartoon, for example, portrays the election campaign as a tug-of-war between Adams's turtle and Jackson's alligator of western democracy. Alan Nevins and Frank Weitenkampf, A Century of Political Cartoons: Caricature in the United States from 1800 to 1900 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944), 35. See, generally, Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan, The Ungentlemanly Act: A History of American Political Cartoons (New York: Macmillan Co., 1968); Syd Hoff, Editorial and Political Cartooning: From Earliest Times to the Present with over 700 Examples from the Works of the World's Greatest Cartoonists (New York: Stravon Educational Press, 1976).

^3. Thomas Nast (1840–1902) began his career as a caricaturist and illustrator with Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly. He gained national attention with his rather overblown cartoons in Harper's during the Civil War. Following the war, Nast dramatically simplified his style. His subsequent political cartoons were instrumental in destroying Boss Tweed and his ring in New York City. Between 1868 and 1892, Nast and fellow cartoonist Joseph Keppler of Punch achieved remarkable power over the country's political debate, often determining the campaign issues in presidential elections. Nast quarreled with the management of Harper's for refusing to print a number of his cartoons and was fired in 1885; he gradually drifted into obscurity, reportedly reduced to writing letters to editors informing them that he was still alive (Press, The Political Cartoon 46). Nast died in Guayaquil, Ecuador while serving as American Consul General. See Albert Bigelow Paine, Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures (New York: Macmillan, 1904); J. Chal Vinson, Thomas Nast: Political Cartoonist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967).

^4. This view was shared by Nast's contemporaries, such as William Hornaday, who argued that active human agents were the cause of the extermination. See William T. Hornaday, "The Extermination of the American Bison, with a Sketch of Its Discovery and Life History," in 1887 Report of the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 367, 464–529. More recent studies have concluded that ecological factors independent of humans played a significant role. See Dan Flores, "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850," Journal of American History 78 (1991):465; Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Elliott West, The Way West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

^5. "It will take a hundred years," one hide hunter told the New York Times in 1871, "to make them scarce." Quoted in Shannon Petersen, Acting for Endangered Species: The Statutory Ark (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 6. This has been a common human response: Our species ultimately could not affect nature, it was simply too fecund. See, for example, Thomas Ewbank, The World a Workshop; or, The Physical Relationship of Man to the Earth (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1855). See William H. Rodgers, Jr., "The Myth of Win-Win: Misdiagnosis in the Business of Reassembling Nature," Arizona Law Review 42 (2000): 297.

^6. "Slaughtered for the Hide," Harper's Weekly 18: 1022–23. The same year, Congress passed a statute to protect the species, only to have it vetoed by President Ulysses Grant. Petersen, Acting for Endangered Species: The Statutory Ark, 6–7.

^7. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, 155. In this sentiment, he was supported by Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano. See Isenberg, 151–52.

^8. In 1878, for example, the California Commissioners of Fisheries noted that: "one-half of the streams in this State to which salmon formerly resorted for spawning, have, for this purpose been destroyed by mining. As mining is the more important industry, of course, for this evil there is no remedy." See Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries of the State of California for the Years 1876 and 1877 (Sacramento: 1878), 5. Indeed, there were those who argued that the extermination of wildlife worked a positive good: "So far as game and hunting are concerned, the sooner our wild animals are extinct the better, for they serve to support a few individuals just on the borders of a savage state, whose labors in the family of many are more injurious than beneficial. It is not, therefore, so much to be regretted that our larger animals of the chase have disappeared. What comforts their fur and skins have provided, can be abundantly supplied by animals already domesticated, at far less expense, both of time and money, and are not subject to the drawback, the deterioration of morals." From Ebeneezer Emmons, Commissioners on the Zoological and Botanical Survey, A Report on the Quadrupeds of Massachusetts Published Agreeably to an Order of the Legislature (Cambridge: Folsom, Wells, & Thurston, 1840), quoted in James A. Tober, Who Owns the Wildlife? (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 9.

^9. Theodore Roosevelt, The Wilderness Hunter (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1893), 12–13.

^10. Mark V. Barrow, Jr., A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Carl W. Buchheister and Frank Graham, Jr., "From the Swamps and Back: A Concise and Candid History of the Audubon Movement, Audubon, January 1973, 4; Robin Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Thomas R. Dunlap, "Sport Hunting and Conservation, 1880–1920," Environmental History 12 (1988): 51, 56.

^11. John C. Phillips, Migratory Bird Protection in North America (American Committee for International Wild Life Protection, Special Pub. No. 4, 1934), 7.

^12. J. N (Jay Norwood) "Ding" Darling (1876–1962) was the son of a Congregational minister born in a village in northern Michigan. He worked for the Des Moines Register and the New York Tribune, twice winning the Pulitzer Prize for cartoons in 1923 and 1943. In 1901, Darling had caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt with a cartoon supporting the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service and the two became fast friends. In addition to cartooning, Darling also founded the National Wildlife Federation and advocated for game management throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. Though a lifelong Republican, he served in Franklin Roosevelt's administration on the Committee for Wild Life Restoration (with Aldo Leopold) and, for eighteen months, was chief of the U.S. Biological Survey. See Jay Norwood Darling, J.N. "Ding" Darling's Conservation and Wildlife Cartoons (Key Biscayne, Fla.: J. N. "Ding" Darling Foundation, 2002); David L. Lent, Ding: The Life of Jay Norwood Darling (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979); and J. N. "Ding" Darling Foundation, http://www.dingdarling.org (visited August 2, 2005).

^13. Statutes at Large 39:1702. The United States had ratified the Convention in late August.

^14. Act of July 3, 1918, chapter 128, Statutes at Large 40:755 (currently codified as amended at 16 U.S.C.'' 703–704). See Kurkpatrick Dorsey, The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); and Dale D. Goble, "Protection of At-Risk Species," in The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Conserving Biodiversity in Human-Dominated Landscapes, ed. J. Michael Scott, Dale D. Goble, and Frank W. Davis (Covelo, Calif.: Island Press, forthcoming).

^15. See Thomas R. Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife: Ecology and the American Mind, 1850–1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

^16. Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic," in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 201.

^17. For a summary of dam-induced changes, see Dale D. Goble, "Introduction to the Symposium on Legal Structures for Managing the Pacific Northwest Salmon and Steelhead: The Biological and Historical Context," Idaho Law Review, 22 (1986): 417.

^18. See, for example, Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

^19. Gary K. Meffe, "Techno-Arrogance and Halfway Technologies: Salmon Hatcheries on the Pacific Coast of North America," Conservation Biology, 6 (1992): 351; see generally David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Dale D. Goble, "Salmon in the Columbia: From Abundance to Extinction," in Northwest Lands and Peoples: Readings in Environmental History, ed. Dale D. Goble and Paul W. Hirt (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 229; and Matthew Evenden, Fish Versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chs. 2–4.

^20. Herbert Block, Herblock's Here and Now (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).

^21. Pat Oliphant (1935- ) was born in Adelaide, Australia. He moved to the United States in 1964 and won a Pulitzer Prize two years later; he has also received two Reuben Awards and a Best Editorial Cartoonist Award from the National Cartoonist Society, the Thomas Nast Award in Germany, and the Premio Satira Politica in Italy. In 1998, the Library of Congress acquired sixty of his works and staged a special exhibition in the Library's Great Hall. He "weds two great traditions in political cartooning: the subtle and detailed artistry of the British tradition with the more blunt, spare style that persist in America." "Oliphant's Anthem: Pat Oliphant at the Library of Congress," http://www.loc.gov/exhibit/oliphant. See also "Pat Oliphant," PJStar.com, http://www.pjstar.com/services/news/editorial/cartoonists/oliphant.html (visited 2 August 2005). This is "the first law of ecology." Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971), 29.

^22. The ESCA called for an international convention that produced the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), which was in turn a factor in the enactment of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). Goble, "The Protection of At-Risk Species."

^23. Hal Rothman, The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States Since 1945 (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1988).

^24. The Sagebrush Rebels' main focus was on federal statues that addressed the management of federally owned lands located primarily in the American West and Alaska. The most important of the statutes the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) and National Forest Management Act (NFMA) restructured management of Bureau of Land Management and National Forest Service lands and triggered substantial opposition from traditional users of these lands: ranchers and timber and mining corporations. With ranchers as spokesman and with corporate funding, the Sagebrush Rebels changed the rhetoric of the environmental debate. R. McGreggor Cawley, Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Donald Snow, "The Pristine Silence of Leaving It All Alone," A Wolf in the Garden: The Land Rights Movement and the New Environmental Debate, eds. Philip D. Brick & R. McGreggor Cawley (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 27, 28–29.

^25. Mike Lane is the editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun. He is also an anomaly: someone without a biography on the world wide web.

^26. Colman McCarthy, "James Watt & the Puritan Ethic," Washington Post, 24 May 1981. See also Elizabeth Drew, "A Reporter at Large: Secretary Watt," The New Yorker, 4 May 1981: 104.

^27. Jack Ohman (1960- ) became the youngest cartoonist to be syndicated nationally when he was still in college. He has worked for the Minnesota Daily, The Columbus Dispatch, and The Detroit Free Press; he has been at The Oregonian since 1983. He also has published eight book and received several awards, including the Overseas Press Club award, the Mark of Excellence Award, Sigma Delta Chi, and the Exceptional Merit Award. "Jack Ohman," Tribune Media Services, http://www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/byline.jsp?custid=67&bylineid=140 (visited August 3, 2005); "Jack Ohman," ComicsPage.com, http://www.comicspage.com/ohman/ohman_about.html (visited 3 August 2005).

^28. Asay has written that he cartoons because "he sees the political arena as just a staging area for the monumental battle between good and evil raging in the country—the fight for the very soul of the nation." Quoted in "4th Annual Prayer Breakfast for Life to Feature Chuck Asay, Editorial Cartoonist," Concept, November, 2002, http://www.ncrtl.org/images/concept/nov02.pdf (visited 3 August 2005). He has won a "Best of the West" award for cartooning and two H.L. Mencken awards. http://www.cnsnews.com/about/staffbios.asp (visited 3 August 2005).

^29. Tom Toles (1952- ) began drawing cartoons for the Buffalo Courier-Express in 1973; he stayed with the newspaper until it closed in 1982, when he moved to the Buffalo News. In 2002, he replaced Herblock at the Washington Post. In 1990, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; he has also received recognition as editorial cartoonist of the year from Editor & Publisher, the John Fischetti Award, the Press Association's Mencken Award, and a Global Media Award for his environmental cartoons. His trademark is the small figure located in the lower right corner of each cartoon who can be counted on for a wry comment. http://www.ucomics.com/tomtoles/bio.phtml (visited 3 August 2005); see also Molly Sinclair McCartney, "Tom Toles: Tempered by Time," Poynteronline, http://www.poynter.org/conent/content_view.asp?id=7196.

^30. See, for example. Janet Browne, The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Lee Durrell, State of the Ark (Garden City: Doubleday, 1986); Norman Myers, The Sinking Ark: A New Look at the Problem of Disappearing Species (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979); Petersen, Acting for Endangered Species: The Statutory Ark; and Dale Peterson, The Deluge and the Ark: A Journey into Primate Worlds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).

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