Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife

Introduction: Knowing the Wild

introduction Knowing the Wild Many Americans in the second half of the twentieth century were fascinated with wild animals. They watched wildlife films and television shows, visited zoos, aquariums, and amusement parks with performing wild animals, donated money to organizations working to “save” baby seals, whales, pandas, tigers, and other charismatic creatures, and gave their support to politicians who promised to protect wild animals and their habitats, sometimes even at the cost of economic growth. They valued national parks and wilderness areas as much for the bears, wolves, elk, and other animals inhabiting them as for their scenic vistas or dramatic geological formations, and they fell in love with the raptors and other once-threatened species that began recolonizing urban areas once legal protections were in place. Conservationists and scientists learned to frame their concerns about habitat loss, pollution, and climate change in terms of the threats they posed to wild animals, recognizing that reports of the possible sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker or the image of a polar bear on the edge of a melting ice floe were often more effective ways of stimulating action than statistics about annual rates of deforestation or rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This fascination with and concern for wild animals supported a boom in 2 Wired Wilderness wildlife research. Even as the proportion of Americans who hunted wild animals for pleasure or profit shrank, undermining the constituency that had largely supported wildlife research and conservation from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, new sources of support grew. The federal environmental legislation passed in the years around the first Earth Day in 1970—especially the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973—evinced a widespread suspicion toward narratives of modernity and progress, but it also enthroned science and technology as the most promising means of mitigating the effect on wild animals of growing human populations and levels of consumption. Scientists , after all, had often been the first to sound the alarm about vanishing wildlife, and their knowledge and expertise seemed indispensible to the project of allowing a diversity of living things and habitats to coexist with humanity.1 This faith in and support for science stimulated a search for more effective ways of studying often-elusive wild animals in their natural habitats. Often this search was framed in terms of what the environmental historian Gregg Mitman has called a “transcendent vision” of nature, which would make it possible to restore a lost, Edenic nature. Of these techniques, none had such a dramatic impact on the everyday practice of wildlife biologists or inspired so many encomiums to the potential for technology to “save nature” as wildlife radio tracking or radiotelemetry. Originating around 1960 at the unlikely intersection of wildlife management and military surveillance technologies, the use of miniaturized radio tags and collars to keep track of individual animals became virtually a sine qua non of wildlife research by the 1980s, dominating the pages of professional publications such as the Journal of Wildlife Management and serving as a symbol of modern wildlife conservation for observers of the field. One historian writing in the late 1980s described “the wolf with the radio collar, providing data for scientists to use in reestablishing the primitive ecosystems of North America,” as “the perfect symbol of our efforts to come to terms with our knowledge of nature’s order, our power over it, and our need to preserve our mythic past.” Another, a historian of big game hunting in the British Empire, described the radio tagging of a rhinoceros in Nepal as “the perfect symbol for the replacement of the hunting by the conservation ethos, imperial power by post-colonial environmental concerns.” Wedding Americans’ fascination with the wild to their equally fervent enthusiasm for technology, the rise of radio tracking as the privileged mode of knowing wild animals seems both ironic and inevitable.2 Such is the story that can be read in the existing histories of modern wildlife Knowing the Wild 3 conservation and in the accounts of leading conservationists and wildlife biologists . There is another, less well-known story, however, that can only be pieced together from archival sources, oral histories, and scattered news reports. This alternative story reveals fractures within the seemingly perfect, if ironic, marriage of Americans’ interest in wildlife and in science and technology. Through these fractures...