Escaping into Nature: The Making of a Sportsman-Conservationist and Environmental Historian

Introduction

1 Introduction T his is the story of how one person’s love of the natural world evolved into a career as an active conservationist and environmental historian. The individual relating the narrative is probably not what many today would consider a typical “nature lover,” for as an angler and hunter, I have been a hands-on, direct participant in the natural world my whole life. The traditions of the rod and the gun and the models of what I call “sportsmen-conservationists,” like George Bird Grinnell, Theodore Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold, have had a greater influence on me than those who demand that we humans, omnivorous predators though we may be, give up any desire we might possess to pursue and eat “game” wildlife, and remain instead simply onlookers of the nature around us. What I had learned as a sport (recreational) fisherman and hunter in a series of “special places,” retreats where I could escape the stresses of my life, prepared me intellectually for the ethical teachings of Aldo Leopold, the ecologist and philosopher whose writings I discovered as a college student in 1963. I have described some of my adventures in detail, because if I had not had my fishing and hunting experiences, I do not believe I would have been able to understand fully the meaning of Leopold’s “land ethic,” particularly that part of it that states: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Unlike many others who have read this famous passage from A Sand County Almanac (1949), I understood immediately that unless the target species is a threatened one, hunting did not conflict with Leopold’s prescribed code of behavior. In the case of some species, like invasive Eurasian starlings, or native white-tailed deer that have exceeded the carrying capacity of their habitat, the removal of individual animals Escaping into Nature 2 can actually improve “the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” In any event, it is not the individuals that should concern us, but the preservation, and restoration when possible, of whole ecosystems. While Aldo Leopold’s philosophy was pivotal in forming my worldview, it was the activism of George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt, who I discovered while researching my doctoral dissertation, that inspired me to leave the security of a tenured professorship and engage in full-time conservation work as executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society. How my commitment to the conservation of wildlife—the preservation and management of both game and nongame, and the habitats upon which it depends—evolved over time represents a large portion of this autobiography. Along with nature, a love of history has also been at the center of my life from early childhood. The two in fact are interrelated, because I have always felt cheated that I was not able to see the natural world in America before it had been transformed by Europeans and their descendants. I am aware, of course, that it was never “virginal,” because Native peoples had made their mark on the land long before Columbus arrived in the New World. Still, their destructive impact paled in comparison to what came later, particularly in the nineteenth century when the forces of unfettered capitalism and industrialization combined to wipe out perhaps the most abundant avian form of life ever to have lived on the planet, the passenger pigeon, and came precariously close to doing the same thing to the bison, whose numbers in 1492 may have been in the tens of millions. My desire to understand why and how this destruction of the continent’s wildlife took place, and who it was that began the movement to stop it, played a large role in my choice of a subject for a history doctoral dissertation, as well as in my later scholarship as an academic. My experiences on the way to becoming a teacher-scholar and environmental historian represent another large part of this book. Perhaps the biggest challenge I faced in recording my memories was deciding what to include and what to leave out. As the reader will discover, I have given a great deal of coverage to my childhood, probably more than is found in most autobiographies. More common, I think, is the approach of explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, who, at the beginning of his Under a Lucky Star: A Lifetime of Adventure (1943), wrote: “Of my early...