“It’s not our place to judge people in history. Our job as conservationists is to protect what we have and move forward.” – Stephanie Lessard-Pilon
It is difficult to swallow the history of how we have treated the natural world. The stories we hear seem outlandish, at least to me. There was once a period not too long ago where, as a society, we believed that there was no way we could ever have an impact on the environment. It was too vast, too full of gifts, too willing to give and too easy to take.
The most apt example of this is the passenger pigeon. Before the arrival of Europeans in America, the passenger pigeon was the single most abundant bird in the world. As numerous as swarms of locusts, they blotted out the sky by the billions, a migration across North America in a magnitude we can only imagine. Can you picture what that must have looked like? The sun disappearing behind a mass of shining grey and iridescent purple wings. The combined force of three billion birds.
The passenger pigeon lived in evolutionary harmony with the Native Peoples. The collection of seeds and berries by Native Americans helped keep passenger pigeon populations in check. When Europeans decimated Native American communities, passenger pigeon populations flourished. Until the settlers set their sights on the birds.
Passenger pigeons were downed by the tens, hundreds, thousands, millions. The little birds were hardly the size of a Cornish hen and yet they were a high-class delicacy. Imagine eating a morning dove. Hunters would fire punt guns, veritable cannons, into the endless colony of birds from trains. Taking pass after pass, mile after mile, the birds were slaughtered.
The thought was that, as humans, we could never be able to influence such a force of nature. Is it arrogance or an underestimation of our own abilities that leads us to such conclusions? Maybe a sort of denial to fuel human greed? Fear of acknowledging the extent of our own power? Either way, we were wrong.
Intense hunting of the passenger pigeon began in the early 1800s. By 1900 there was no wild population. In 1914, when the last passenger pigeon, Martha, died, she did so with the legacy of the most prolific bird in modern history.
Watching the last of a species die, knowing that no miracle of any science we ever master will bring it back. How do you reconcile that? No one alive today has ever seen a single passenger pigeon. We will never see the sky disappear under the thunderous roar of feathers. I think our lives hold a little less wonder for it.
Who is to blame, really? It is easy to get upset about the ‘slow pace’ of science. But as a society, we really had no widespread understanding 150 years ago that the environment could react to our actions. Education was low and greed was high. We cannot act on information which we do not have. The passenger pigeon was the first alarm in the United States. A wake-up call. And so much has changed since then. 150 years is not a long time and we have gone through revolutionary amounts of progress.
In response to the disappearance of the passenger pigeon, in 1900 the Lacey Act was passed. There are few laws, particularly in environmentalism, that maintain such relevance through time as the Lacey Act. It prohibited the trade of wildlife, plants or fish illegally taken or sold. It essentially single-handedly demolished the wildlife meat trade. There is a reason you don’t see squirrel or deer on your local restaurants’ menu. The law has since been used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to prevent the spread of invasive species and the exotic wildlife trade.
The Lacey Act was instrumental in wildlife protection. It has had great success in protecting our local wildlife. It saved white-tail deer from extinction in the U.S. It worked so well that the deer are now overpopulated in much of the northeast.
We should celebrate the Lacey Act and all the leaps and bounds we’ve made in conservation policy since then. Our Endangered Species Act (1973) is the only law of its kind in the world and extremely effective. We should be proud of what we have accomplished. It does not always have to be so doom and gloom. I want to emphasize that more than anything. It is easy to become impatient, but do not let that distract from the good we have achieved.
It is too late to save the passenger pigeon, but we know more now than we did before. Learn from our mistakes, but we must keep moving forward with compassion and awareness. It is not too late for elephants, the Shenandoah salamanders, the red wolves. So we keep moving forward.