Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway

Foreword: A Wilderness on Wings

vii Foreword: a wilderness on wings William cronon One of the deepest convictions that geographers bring to every subject they study has to do with scale, a concept they understand with far greater rigor and subtlety than those who have never had to grapple with the befuddling complexities of mapmaking. The rest of us more often than not rely on spatial common sense as we navigate our daily life. We typically imagine that the places we visit exist pretty unambiguously at a singular location that can easily be visited if only we are able to find our way to the fixed position on a map where that place resides. Unless we’re trying to estimate distances, we don’t think very much about those little rulers that declare how many inches on the map correspond with how many miles in the real world. And unless we’re lost or find ourselves wondering whether a map on which we’ve relied might somehow have led us astray, we don’t much worry about the accuracy with which maps represent places we take for granted as “real.” Yet even a moment’s reflection will suggest that the relationship between place and scale is far from straightforward, so much so that places can appear sharp or fuzzy or disappear altogether depending viii Foreword on the ways maps represent them. To demonstrate this phenomenon for yourself, try the following experiment. Visit a website like Google Maps or Mapquest to search for California’s Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, a place about which the historical geographer Robert Wilson has much to say in this thought-provoking book. You will initially see on your screen a drab polygon containing a few curving blue lines representing watercourses, a few gray lines representing roads, and not much else. It isn’t quite a blank spot on the map, but almost. If you press the button to request a satellite view, however, the image suddenly morphs into an astonishingly complex maze of curving greens and browns and blues. Even more strikingly, you can now see the surrounding grid of rectilinear roads and fields that explain why the place is called a refuge. It is an island in a vast landscape of agricultural fields. At first glance, the refuge has an organic look and feel, though on closer examination its lines and shapes display considerable evidence of human engineering. The scale of the map, and the choices you make about what it represents, radically alter what you do and do not see within the boundaries of this place. But the geographer’s essential insight is not that we see more details when the scale of a map is large than when it is small. It is rather that we see different details—and therefore different places. When your view of this wildlife refuge is zoomed in close enough to see its interior watercourses, you cannot see the state of California, even though the one exists within the other. This is because places are inherently nested inside each other, and their nested identities wax and wane depending on the scale of the map that represents them. If you zoom back far enough to see all of Colusa County, in which the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge is located, the refuge becomes little more than a brown blotch on your computer screen. If you pull back farther still to see the entire Sacramento River watershed, of which this place is such an important component, you can barely make out the refuge at all. Zoom back farther so you can progressively make out the places called “California” or the “Pacific Coast” or the “American West” or the “United States” or “North America” or the “Western Hemisphere,” and the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge disappears altogether. Different places, in other words, exist on different scales, and the consequences of this truth are far from trivial. Although there is a Foreword ix long tradition in the history of conservation of seeking to protect nature by creating parks and wilderness areas in relatively isolated, self-contained units, in fact natural systems themselves are almost never coterminous with the boundaries we draw around them. Yellowstone National Park, for instance, is among the largest, most intact, and best-loved wild places legally protected in the Lower 48 United States, yet it measures less than 3,500 square miles—roughly sixty miles on a side. Especially the animals who live...