The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict

14. Fortune, Timelines, and Their Intersections: When Worlds Collide

14  Fortune, Timelines, and Their Intersections When Worlds Collide always, sometimes, never. Three simple adverbs that describe the realm of all possibilities. Also the range of choices human beings make. Heady stuff, it’s true, but the phrases and philosophy do apply to what happened to the ecology of the Great Lakes and in the South’s “cat‹sh country.” A simple logic works here. Opportunity sometimes comes to those who prepare. Con›ict always comes to those who do not. The charter boat skippers and cat‹sh farmers never looked ahead to see what was coming their way. The idea of fortune is a phenomenon that invariably includes the words unpredictable and chance in its de‹nition, but it also calls up the phrase “chance favors the prepared mind,” attributed to Louis Pasteur, the biologist who solved the mysteries of anthrax and rabies and discovered how to make the milk we drink safe. Preparation in our case doesn’t mean the farmers and captains seeing into the future but suggests not turning a blind eye to other forces in the ecosystem that might affect how they do business. Not planning for future risks and likelihoods , ignoring the possibility of change, merely makes such people and their ideas reckless, which weakens their case for being thought of as the injured parties, requiring help from state and federal agencies. Con›icts, like those surrounding the cormorant, turned more com191 plex when ‹shermen and cat‹sh producers assumed that current circumstances would remain constant, unchanged, even as conditions changed before their eyes. Table 1 is a compilation of four separate timelines roughly tracing key events and trends for cormorants; the cat‹sh industry; treaties, regulations, and conservation issues; and the Great Lakes ‹sheries. The table tells linear stories through four series of “snapshots,” but nothing happens or exists on its own or is unaffected by other snapshots. These time sequences, like the conceptual “line” taught in geometry, extend both ways, reaching back into the past as well as continuing into the future. The table is merely a “segment” on that line connecting a number of points, but it is designed to illustrate some of the ecological relationships, intersections, con›icts, and collisions that affected the cormorant’s standing in people’s minds. A quick glance at the table reveals a number of trends and relationships . For example, 1885 shows a steep decline in some of the major ‹sh species in the Great Lakes, the killing of millions of wild birds, and the persecution of cormorants. Overall, there was little thought given at that time to the inherent value of wildlife other than its economic signi‹cance. The Weeks-McLean Act and the ‹rst version of the MBTA in 1913 and 1918 protected birds, but not cormorants, just as the cormorant began its modern colonization of the Great Lakes. In the 1960s, the stage was being set for cormorant con›icts as cormorant numbers crashed due to the effects of DDT, the ‹rst commercial cat‹sh ponds were built, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring exposed what was happening in the environment, and Paci‹c salmon were introduced into the Great Lakes in hopes of rejuvenating the ‹shery. The year 1972 was important in that it included both the US ban on DDT and the version of the MBTA that ‹nally protected the cormorant, permitting the huge expansion of its population. The visual presentation of these and other relationships puts them into a structured relationship . As a clari‹cation of how parts of a system ‹t together we can examine an interesting concept logicians and philosophers borrowed from the world of quantum physics: Werner Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty . In a simple form, outside the scope of subatomic particles, the principle says that an observer scrutinizing or surveying a system is no longer an outsider but has become an integral part of the system: the very act of observing something changes it. The idea extends to biolog192 • the double-crested cormorant table 1 Treaties Regulations, Catfish Conservation Great Lakes Cormorants Industry Issues Fisheries 1820s Canals allow invasive species access to lakes 1835 Sea lamprey found in Lake Ontario 1873 Alewives identified in Lake Ontario 1885 Cormorants Fashion feather Lake trout, unprotected trade in full sturgeon, from swing whitefish in prosecution Millions of birds steep decline and feather killed trade 1886 First Audubon Society founded in New York 1899 Last great commercial fish...