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Book Review
| In the Absence of Predators: Conservation and Controversy on the Kaibab Plateau. By Christian C. Young. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 269 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $49.95.
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| During the 1920s, the population of deer on the Kaibab Plateau, in northern Arizona, skyrocketed and then crashed just as abruptly. According to Aldo Leopold and generations of scientists and conservationists who followed him, these events were the result of misguided wildlife management policies that aimed to maintain artificially high numbers of deer for sport hunters and tourists by eliminating the herd's natural predators. What resulted was an overgrazed, denuded landscape in which thousands of animals perished as a result of their own "too-muchness." By the 1950s, the Kaibab case had become one of the best known parables in all of ecology. And the lessons gleaned from it—that predators play a crucial role in maintaining healthy ecosystems and that naive human tinkering can upset nature's balance with a host of unintended consequences—had risen to the level of scientific gospel. |
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However, in the 1970s, a new generation of ecologists questioned the veracity of the Kaibab story based on a lack of supporting data. No reliable estimates of the deer population through time had ever been recorded, domestic cattle were conspicuously absent from the tale although they probably competed with deer for available forage, and the cumulative effects of sport hunters and hired government predator eliminators remained unknown. In addition, the extent to which the range actually became degraded was never quantified, the effects of random climatic events had not been addressed, and no one ever had proven convincingly that predators originally limited the herd to begin with. The story was eventually discredited and it no longer appears in lectures or textbooks. What actually happened on the Kaibab Plateau in the 1920s? |
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In his new book, In the Absence of Predators: Conservation and Controversy on the Kaibab Plateau, Christian C. Young uses the Kaibab case to examine the production and use of ecological knowledge, the emergence of scientific dogma, and the ways in which "science and human society interacted with nature" (p.6) in early twentieth-century American society. According to Young, the Kaibab story was characterized by uncertainty, controversy, interagency strife, and a persistent faith that science alone could solve problems in wildlife management. Game officials, besieged by a host of interest groups with their own competing agendas, frequently turned to biologists for unbiased management recommendations. The scientists responded not with objective diagnoses but with new theories, concepts, and research questions. The Kaibab experience never provided any definitive answers regarding the role of predators in game management, yet the Kaibab myth endured for decades, framing a wide range of subsequent wildlife debates. |
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As a read, In the Absence of Predators is a bit dry, sometimes overemphasizing minute details at the expense of critical analysis. However, Young does succeed in his primary goal of showing how a science that is poorly suited to provide specific directives for action in the real world still can generate a compelling and consequential narrative. At least for a time, such stories may achieve the status of "scientific truth." "We continue to embrace the stories that explain the principles of nature," Young writes, "because just as scientists love to tell them, we love the simplicity these stories have to offer" (p. 215). Although what actually happened to the deer of northern Arizona in the 1920s remains somewhat of a mystery, the Kaibab case makes it exceedingly clear that today environmental historians and historians of science still have much to learn from each other about the interactions between nature and society. As a result, this volume will be of distinct interest to both. |
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Reviewed by Peter S. Alagona, a doctoral student in environmental history and the history of science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He previously worked as a lecturer in geography at the University of California at Santa Barbara and teaches in UCSB's Wildlands Studies Program. His dissertation research is on the history of the idea of biodiversity. |
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