As an American environmental historian, I have a stronger sense of how things have changed for wildlife over time than an average American, I suspect. However, there are times when I am confronted with data and can still be shocked. This happened recently and it’s prompting me, for The Wild Card this week, to mull over big numbers, the expanse of time, and imagination. Read on!

Taking Bearings is supported by readers. To support my research and writing, please subscribe and consider becoming a paid subscriber.

“The Air Permanently Fallow”

When I taught American environmental history, I confronted some common misconceptions. Many students vaguely understood that Americans did not recognize damage done to the living world until relatively recently, a byproduct mainly of the industrial revolution. They were somewhat surprised when they learned about restrictions on hunting or fishing that were implemented (if not enforced) just a few years after colonization began when colonists recognized undesirable scarcity.

In Rural Hours, the 1850 book that I wrote about last week, Susan Fenimore Cooper called the “reckless extermination of the game in the United States” unprecedented in world history. Not only that, Cooper lamented that the flocks of migrating birds passing over her valley in the mid-19th century were “nothing compared with the throngs that went and came” before Europeans arrived.

The decline in American wildlife started well before the industrial revolution transformed most corners of the continent.

I did not grow up paying close attention to bird life, so it is perhaps surprising that the first time I remember being flabbergasted by ecological bad news concerned birds.

Five years ago, a major study appeared that estimated the loss of birds in North America in the previous five decades with a staggering number. Since 1970, North America bird populations declined nearly 30%. In starker terms, there were three billion fewer birds when COVID-19 started than there were when Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act on January 1, 1970.

That number — 3,000,000,000 — astounded even those who studied it.

To be sure, some bird populations increased, such as waterfowl and raptors. But the overall trend showed unmistakable decline. I remember sitting with that weighty number, numbed by it.

It brings to mind a line from a favorite writer who tried unsuccessfully to conceive of a world without birds. “I suppose I could get by without the cats, or trade them for other interesting wanderers, maybe coyotes or foxes,” wrote Ivan Doig in Winter Brothers, “but a birdless world, the air permanently fallow, is unthinkable.”

Unmistakable and Unthinkable

There are other unthinkable worlds, too. News of more natural impoverishment crowded my inbox last week.

The World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London released their latest update to the Living Planet Index, a database they use to chart nearly 5,500 species across almost 35,000 local populations. The top line numbers in this recent update are discouraging. The species they track have declined 73% between 1970 and 2020.

The species are a selection across the globe, and the science involved in determining these numbers is not perfect, which leads some critics to emphasize some uncertainty rather than the clear trends.

The numbers tell a tragic story. Freshwater animals declined by 85%, terrestrial species fell by 69%, and marine populations dropped 56%. Latin America (including the Caribbean) faced the worst record, followed by Africa, then Asia and the Pacific. One reason that Europe and Central Asia were the least bad is because their wildlife populations faced a dire situation before 1970, the study’s starting point. They also offshore many environmentally deleterious activities.

The authors of the Living Planet Index fear an ecological unraveling, as emphasized in their executive summary. Thresholds are in danger of being crossed after which ecosystems would veer into irreversible directions. Habitat destruction and loss are the largest factors contributing to this decline, but energy and finance sectors also need wholesale change if we are to stall and reverse this trend.

One target the index authors point to for redirecting these trends comes out of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework from 2022 that identified a series of goals to reset global conservation. In part, that framework sets targets of 30% of global land, waters, and seas being conserved and 30% of degraded ecosystems being restored by 2030. This range is consistent with the Biden Administration’s approach, outlined in an Executive Order titled “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.”

The 30 x 30 approach sounds ambitious. But even that is likely insufficient to reverse the sort of trends scientists keep identifying.

Responding to Wounds with Imagination

In one of his most pathos-laden sentences, conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold said, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” The more we know, perhaps the less alone we are. However, those stark percentages of loss I shared above speak loudly of those wounds.

Ultimately, Leopold pushed for an ethical revolution that would change how humans understood and treated land. He claimed to “have no hope for conservation born of fear.” While I suppose that fear struggles to build a broad-based commitment for any political project, fear for the future of wildlife seems like an appropriate response to numbers and trends like these.

Are we doing enough now for the future? Scott Russell Sanders, one of my favorite essayists, wrote many years ago of the cascading regrets that pile up over time:

Every day we discover new reasons for regretting what our predecessors have done; after we are gone, our children will discover even more reasons to regret what we are doing now.

The devastating collapse of populations outlined in these reports roughly matches my lifetime, a time when global standards of living have risen dramatically and environmental protection has become enshrined in law. I have lived in boomtimes. This half-century has seen so many positive trends. Alongside them have unfolded disastrous ones. Thus, a knotty paradox exists.

To ensure our species moves toward justice, for all our members and for the non-human world with whom we share Earth, we must tap our imaginations and see more clearly.

The late Barry Lopez spoke to this need:

It is not possible to say anything definitive here, except perhaps that dramatic change in the near future seems to be in the offing, and if the species is to achieve its aspirations for justice, reduced suffering, and transcendent life, and if it is to prevent the triumph of machinery that it so clearly fears, an unprecedented level of imagination is required.

I hope we find the ways necessary to meet the moment.

Closing Words

Relevant Reruns

This week’s newsletter touches on many core themes in my newsletter archive, but perhaps this one about the Endangered Species Act at 50 years is most relevant. You can read a story I wrote last year about efforts to reintroduce grizzly bears in the North Cascades here. (On the more creative side, my essay, “War and Geese,” touches on some of these themes more personally.)

New Writing

Yesterday, my monthly interview for paid subscribers posted; upgrade and have a look. I was interviewed for a story about what is at stake for public lands with the election; you can read it here. My most recent entry at HistoryLink.org has appeared; click here to learn about efforts to recover salmon in Washington state over the last half-century, a fitting addition to this week’s newsletter.

As always, you can find my books, and books where some of my work is included, at my Bookshop affiliate page (where, if you order, I get a small benefit).

Taking Bearings Next Week

My newsletter will cycle around to The Classroom next week. Stay tuned!