I’M ABOUT TO TURN SEVENTY-FIVE, SO I GUESS IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE THAT I HAVE ARTHRITIS IN JUST ABOUT EVERY JOINT BELOW MY EARS, a knee that probably needs to be replaced, and a general feeling on an average day that I should find a chair and sit down a while.  I’ve hunted elk in the high country for more than forty years, and I’ll go again this fall with a couple of permits in my pocket, but I have to say the mountains look a little taller than they once did; the canyons, a little deeper.

When I think of that coming hunt, my thoughts run back to a present I was given for Christmas in my ninth year: Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, the story of Mowgli, his adoption into the Seeonee wolf pack, and his vendetta against Shere Khan, the tiger that killed his parents.  For many years, I identified with Mowgli the Man Cub in that tale, but these days, I think more of Akela, the leader of the wolf pack, infinitely wise, gray at the muzzle, earning his authority by providing meat for the pack.  There is that moment in the book when Bagheera, the black panther, warns Mowgli, “It is in my heart that when Akela misses his next kill— and at each hunt it costs him more to pin the buck— the Pack will turn against him and against thee.”

Some thirty-eight elk have made their way into the family freezer over the years.  That exquisite meat has been a staple in our household ever since we moved west, but I have to admit I’m more than a little gray around the muzzle— at each hunt, it costs me more to pin the buck.

When the word came a couple of months back that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins intended to roll back the roadless rule in national forests, I guess I should have joined the geezers who have long argued that every back-county road on the mountain should be thrown open so they can hunt it all from the back of an ATV or the cozy confines of a pickup.  But even in my decrepit state, the idea of a road on every ridgetop, along every creek, turns my stomach, and I’ll tell you why.

In forty years of elk hunting, I’ve learned one thing for certain: elk don’t like roads.  When I start hunting a new area, the first thing I do is look at the maps and find the spots that are a mile or more from the nearest two-track.  That’s where the elk will be, especially after the first thirty-six hours of the season.  My boot-leather impression is backed up by substantial research— one extensive study in Oregon found that elk tended to stay away from a road if more than one vehicle passed during the day.  Just a couple of pickups or ATVs a day were enough to move elk, the researchers found, and the effect intensified as traffic increased.[i]

My experience hunting elk on public land suggests that, if the elk can’t find an adequate roadless refuge from vehicles, they tend to move downhill to private land where hunting is restricted or prohibited.  More vehicle traffic on a larger proportion of the forest simply means fewer elk on the public domain.  That’s an effect my aging bones don’t appreciate.

One of the most compelling arguments in favor of roads on national forests is that they help firefighters deal with wildfires.  The notion that more roads could save timber and even private property— people’s houses— would seem to trump any other concern . . . if it were true.  But it isn’t.

Five years ago, the Forest Service took a hard look at “recent assertions that roads are needed to prevent fire and keep forests healthy.”  Their researchers looked at fire records between 1985 and 2016 and found that fires burned 19 percent of national forest that was classified as “roadless” and 17.7 percent of national forest outside roadless areas.  There was essentially no difference in the amount of timber burned in roadless areas compared to the rest of the nation’s forests.

The same can be said for high-intensity fires, the ones that make the evening news.  According to the analysis, five percent of roadless areas were consumed by high-severity fires over the 31 years of records in the study; 3.2 percent of forest outside the roadless areas were swept by high-severity blazes, a difference not worth mentioning.[ii]

There’s no doubt that fires are harder to suppress in roadless areas, but they’re also less likely to start there.  More than 80 percent of all wildfires are started by people,[iii] and the overwhelming majority of people get into national forests on roads.  While a fire closer to a road may be easier to extinguish, the fact that so many start along roads explains why these roadside fires burn 44 percent of the entire forest area consumed by fire.[iv]  Weighing the advantages of roads for fire suppression against the fact that people on roads actually cause most fires, the researchers concluded that “fire risks are approximately equal inside and outside of roadless areas.”

Back roads bring a set of problems into the forest, not often considered by their advocates.  Increased vehicle traffic inevitably carries the seeds of invasive plants into the trees.  These may outcompete native species and can actually increase the risk of wildfire.  Add to that the fact that silt from unpaved roads and ATV trails often finds its way into high-country streams where it causes problems for trout and other aquatic life.[v]

Many of the opponents of the roadless rule argue that the nation needs the lumber currently out of reach in protected areas.   While we may need the wood, opening our roadless areas to timber operations won’t supply it.  The U.S. Forest Service estimates that roadless areas contain about 9 million acres of harvestable timber, just 20 percent of the timber available for harvest across the entire national forest system.[vi]

The very fact that roadless areas are roadless strongly suggests that building and maintaining them through these mountain landscapes is difficult and expensive.  The private sector can’t make a profit from the timber in these areas if it has to bear the cost of building roads into them, so it’s reasonable to conclude that there’s a massive subsidy for industry concealed behind the proposal to rescind the roadless rule— if the timber companies can’t afford to build the roads, the government will.  And, if competition from Canadian lumber is holding prices down, the government will impose massive tariffs to discourage the imports.  It’s a strange position for an administration that claims to support the unrestricted function of the free market.

The debate over roadless areas ultimately comes down to an argument over access: Those who hate roadless areas want to drive anywhere their fancy takes them, for fun or profit; those who like roadless areas prefer to have some places they can go only on foot or horseback.  It seems some compromise is in order.

And compromise is what we have.  Thirty percent of the nation’s forests are protected by the roadless rule.  Throw in official wilderness areas and the roadless acreage rises to 49 percent of all national forests.  Half our national forests are more or less accessible by motor power; half require the visitor to get out of the truck, off the ATV, and walk.  That strikes me as fair.

 

MANY YEARS AGO WHEN MY HEART WAS STRONGER AND MY LEGS NEVER TIRED, my dad announced his intention to come out to Wyoming in search of a trophy mule deer, so we applied as a party and drew permits for a spine of mountains in the center of the state, buttressed on both sides by impressive palisades.  The occasional two-track led through the sage to the first timber and ended suddenly at the edge of the timber.  In a normal year, it would have been an excellent place to find a big deer, but the previous winter had been one for the record books— the old mossy-tined bucks had died for lack of forage along with most of the previous year’s fawns.

We spent a couple of hard days without seeing as much as a fresh track.  I was convinced the big bucks had moved up the mountain when the season opened, but, every time I tried to reach the summit, I ran into a vertical rimrock winding through the trees, unclimbable without ropes and pitons.  Late on the second afternoon, I was easing along below the rim when I saw a disturbance in the snow ahead— the tracks of two bull elk walking straight up the mountain to get away from some hunter far below.  The two seemed confident of finding a way over the rimrock, and I figured anywhere they could go, I could probably follow.  A hundred yards straight up, the tracks led into a crack in the rock wall, barely wide enough for a set of antlers.  It was the way to the top.  Too late in the evening to follow, I thought, but tomorrow . . .  I headed down toward camp with a rush of optimism.

Dad was attending the Coleman stove when I got back, warming some of the beef stew Mom had canned for the trip.  After I’d run an oil rag over the rifle and cased it, I grabbed a plate and helped myself.

“See anything of note?” Dad inquired.

“No deer,” I replied, “but, say, I finally found a way up over that rim.”

“Well, good enough,” he said as he buttered a slice of bread and sat down.

I was a little let down— he seemed remarkably unenthusiastic about the discovery.

“Two elk headed to the top,” I continued.  “If the elk are moving up, I figure the big bucks will, too.  If we start an hour before light, we can be up over the rim before sunrise.”

He nodded.  “You should do that.”

“Heck, you’re the one spoiling for a big rack.  We can go up there together and cash in that tag.”

He paused a moment, considering.

“You know, what I think I’ll do— this next canyon over has a good stand of aspen and a creek.  I found a place up above where I can glass everything.  If a buck moves anywhere in there, I’ll have a shot.  Think I’ll find a rock for my back and watch that tomorrow.”

“But, Dad, I think the big ones will be up high . . .”

“You’re probably right.  But listen, Tiger, I’ve hunted up a lot of ridges like that over the years.  Good places.  Places I’ve had all to myself.  Places a man has to earn.”  He looked up at the summit, silhouetted far above us against the night sky.

“I’ve had my time up there,” he said, almost to himself as he studied the loom of the mountain.  Then he turned and looked at me with a smile.

“It’s your turn.”

Forty years have passed since that hunt.  He’s long since passed on, although I swear I can feel him just behind me sometimes as the sun sets at timberline and the breeze sighs away to nothing.  Still, his words stay with me.  Like him, I can feel my hold slipping on the high country as my knees complain and I strain to get enough air in an aging pair of lungs.  But the memories of all the wild places I’ve seen stay with me, the places a man has all to himself, the places he has to earn.  And the memories, by themselves, are enough, even if I never top out on the far ridge again.

There are people of my age and even younger who believe they have a right to go anywhere they please on the nation’s forests, and by “go,” they mean “drive.”  If they ever left the road to feel the real backcountry, they’ve long since forgotten the experience.  They seem to think a road or an ATV trail has no effect on the country it penetrates when volumes of scientific research and generations of practical experience prove that the impact is profound.  There’s plenty of the public domain accessible by vehicle.  We don’t need more roads, not even for the septuagenarians who want to drive where they once walked.

I can’t speak for my generation, only for myself.  The roadless rule should stand.  And, to the new cadres of hunters, sound of wind and limb, raising their eyes to those places, I have this to say:

I’ve had my time up there.

It’s your turn.

 

————

 

[i] Wisdom, Michael, et al., 2004.  Overview of the Starkey Project: Mule deer and elk research for management benefits.  2004 Transactions of the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, Wildlife Management Institute.

file:///Users/chrismadson/Downloads/Wisdom2004OverviewDeerElkResearchMngtBenefits-1.pdf.  Accessed September 11, 2025.

[ii] Healey, Sean P., 2020.  Long-term forest health implications of roadlessness.  Environmental Research Letters 15: 104023.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aba031/pdf.  Accessed September 11, 2025.

[iii] Balch, Jennifer, et al., 2017.  Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States.  Proceedings of the National Academies of Science 114(11): 2946-2951.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1617394114.  Accessed September 11, 2025.

[iv] Balch, ibid.

[v] Al-Chokhachy, Robert, et al., 2016.  Linkages between unpaved forest roads and streambed sediment: why context matters in directing road restoration.  Restoration Ecology 24(5): 589-598.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/restoration/documents/cflrp/LinkagesUnpavedForestRoadsStreambedSediment-508.pdf.  Accessed September 11, 2025.

[vi] William, Mike, et al., 2000.  Roadless Areas Conservation FEIS: Forest management specialist report.  USDA Forest Service, Washington, D.C.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsm8_035779.pdf.  Accessed September 14, 2025.

THIS ESSAY IS ESSENTIALLY A REVIEW OF A REVIEW.  ON AUGUST 4, THE JOURNAL NATURE PUBLISHED A REVIEW OF A NEW BOOK, CAPTURED FUTURES: RETHINKING THE DRAMAOF ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS.   The book was written by two Dutch political scientists, Maarten Hajer and Jereon Oomen.  The review was written by another political scientist in the Netherlands, Philip Mcnaughten.

I haven’t read the book.  The critiques I offer here are aimed at assertions in Mcnaughten’s review, which may or may not apply to the book itself.  The headline of the review— “Environmental politics is doomed to fail unless we tell better stories” — caught my attention because I’ve spent my entire adult life telling stories intended to move people to care for the planet.  After graduate study in wildlife ecology, I spent the next 40 years telling those stories in a variety of venues and media.  I tell them still.  And after a lifetime spent in the effort to galvanize public interest in the health of our communal environment, I fully agree with McNaughten’s opening statement:

“The book starts by marshalling evidence that environmental politics is falling short on global environmental health.  It’s a familiar list, including unmet targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and continuing losses of biodiversity, fertile soils and fresh water.”

Mcnaughten is right about that.  However, he immediately adds that the problem is not “a lack of political will, or regulatory or state obstacles, but because of the conceptual framework— the “dramaturgical regime”— through which the rules and conventions of environmental politics are being enacted and performed.”

My difference of opinion on this observation and others Mcnaughten makes may arise from a difference in geography— the situation may be much different in western Europe than here in the United States.  I can only say there is overwhelming evidence of a “lack of political will” in environmental debates here in the U.S.  This is, to some degree, the result of sophisticated influence campaigns mounted by well-funded special interest groups.  It leads to a variety of “regulatory and state obstacles,” as well as legal deliberations, that interfere with the adoption of sound environmental practices and/or their implementation.

These special interests have existed for at least as long as modern capitalism, but, here in the U.S., they’ve often been overwhelmed by populist movements that galvanized support for conservation and the environment from the public at large.  Such movements grew in power and influence from the 1870s through the 1970s and resulted in significant reforms.  The world’s first national park and park system; national forests and grasslands; federal wildlife refuges; effective protection of game and nongame wildlife, including endangered species; protection of wild and scenic rivers; massive conservation programs to protect water, soil, and wildlife on farmland; federal acts to control air and water pollution— the list of environmental programs adopted in the U.S. over the vehement objections from special interests is long.

It seems to me that the difference between that era and the modern circumstance is the public’s dwindling interest in such matters.  For 40 years, I’ve watched the conservation/environmental coalition fracture and erode while the vast majority of the American public has steadily lost interest in the natural world that supports us all.  As the consensus has fallen apart, the environmental community has fallen back on feel-good compromises, the search for “win-win” solutions and “positive-sum outcomes,” which, as Macnaughten rightly implies, are hard to find and seldom effective at large scale.  Real environmental reform has nearly always had winners and losers; the difference today is that the potential losers seem to have the upper hand in any debate over sustainable use of the planet.

Is this, as McNaughten suggests, because we aren’t telling the right stories or aren’t telling them well enough?  I guess that depends on which storytellers we consider.  Mcnaughten is critical of the environmental messages popular with what he describes as the “liberal establishment”— subjects like decolonization, market-based solutions, and “value-neutral facts.”  I might agree with him there, but he goes on to write that   “ecological politics needs to tell a more aspirational story.  We need to move from stories that evoke fear and despair towards ones that give hope and renewal.”

I wonder about that.  There are many stories being told that evoke hope and renewal.  Consider the recovery of iconic species like the bald eagle, trumpeter swan, whooping crane, and California condor.  These stories have been told over and over again since the first efforts to save them began.  Have these heartening examples of success resulted in redoubled support for the programs that saved them?  I think not.  Our efforts to avoid polluting our rivers and lakes have been overwhelmingly successful.  Have the stories of those successes led to more enthusiastic support for the programs and technologies that keep our water clean?  I think not.  Funding for soil and water conservation on the nation’s farmland has reduced loss of soil and pollution from fertilizers and pesticides and slowed the loss of many species of wildlife.  Have the stories covering those successes increased public support for farm conservation programs?  I think not.

It’s been widely asserted that all the depressing articles on environmental degradation have pushed the American public to despair.  People have lost hope, the argument goes, and have just given up.  I wonder about that.  I think it far more likely that the vast majority of Americans simply aren’t aware of the condition of the environment, and, when they happen to encounter the introduction to a story that might enlighten them, they turn the page, change the channel, or swipe to a different video.  Despair is not the problem.  Willful ignorance is the problem.  And all the good news stories in the world won’t solve that.

It may well be that a century of success in the environmental arena has led us to a paralyzing sense of complacency.  Conservation/environmental progress in America began in the nineteenth century, not with good news, but with the worst possible news.  The extinction of the passenger pigeon— five billion birds erased in the space of one human generation.  The Carolina parakeet.  The bison.  Catastrophic wildfires that killed thousands of people.  Floods that did the same.  The loss of millions of acres of fertile topsoil.  The Dust Bowl.  Rivers catching fire.  It took a drumbeat of gut-wrenching stories to move America to action, and I suppose we’re to be forgiven if the results of those actions have left two or three generations with the impression that nothing more needs to be done.

If there’s a silver lining to the black cloud of environmental emergency that afflicts us, it may be that the Public, capital P, is now being forced to confront problems they would prefer to ignore.  That pressure to pay attention is bound to intensify.  The first rule of communication is that it requires two people— one to speak, one to listen.  As the environmental realities of the twenty-first century reach out and touch people— wildfire, flood, drought, lethal heat, pollution, lack of food, lack of water— more will begin to listen.  The stories may not be pleasant, but people will want to hear them because the first step toward solving a problem is understanding it.

Set against that goad is our continued growth as a species, which steadily increases the tension between our demands on the earth and the capacity of the earth to fulfill them.  Can 10 billion humans make room for the rest of life on the planet?  And even if it’s theoretically possible, are we willing to make the changes, the sacrifices, necessary to accommodate the diverse ecosystems our fellow species require?  I struggle to find a good-news way of considering that future.

I can’t begin to guess where the contest between these two forces will finally come to rest.  My ecological training tells me that we’ll find our way to a sustainable relationship with the earth simply because there’s no other workable option, but it also whispers that the way will be long and fraught with pain.  We’ve painted ourselves into a corner— there’s no comfortable way out.

Mcnaughten thinks we should sugar-coat that message.  I don’t see how we can.  Or why we should.  Nothing in the history of the conservation and environmental movements suggests that a focus on good news moves the broad majority of people to action.  People respond to trouble, particularly the kind of trouble that touches them personally.  As the gravity of the environmental situation impinges on more lives, more people will begin to pay attention, not only to the difficulties they see themselves but to the broader forces that cause the trouble.  If the stories we’re telling now haven’t motivated more people, it’s because many people aren’t ready to listen, not because the stories lack force.

Like many people who have labored in the movement, I mourn our communal inertia over the last 40 years, the loss of time that could have been put to such good use, but changing the stories we tell won’t move people to make the hard choices we face.  They have to be ready to listen, and it’s increasingly clear that the trajectory of environmental problems will inevitably open their minds.

As for hope: it’s an overrated commodity.  The most casual review of history will reveal dozens of examples of people continuing to strive without any hope; in fact, those are some of the people we most admire.  What we need is a clear-eyed understanding of what needs to be done, even if the outcome is in doubt.  With hope or without it, the choice boils down to Andy Dufresne’s hard-edged line in The Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy living or get busy dying.”

That’s damn right.

SO, UNDER PRESSURE FROM HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS, UTAH’S LAND-GRABBING SENATOR MIKE LEE WITHDREW HIS PROPOSAL TO PUT THE NATION’S PUBLIC LANDS up for sale.  Much justifiable celebration has ensued.  Largely lost in the outcry over his provision in the Big Beautiful Bill Act was an announcement by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins: The Department of Agriculture is rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule that has prohibited road construction and timbering on 58.5 million acres of national forest.

Brooke Rollins, who brought her vast experience with federal lands from her home in Texas to Washington, D.C., first as a minor functionary in the first Trump administration and later as the co-founder of a D.C. lobbying group, America First Policy Institute.  What she knows about the issues surrounding the uses of federal land could be comfortably contained in a thimble.

The order was a canny political move, since it’s likely to split the constituency that voiced outrage over the outright sale of federal land.  A substantial part of that opposition came from users of ATVs, snowmobiles, and other vehicles designed to move people into the backcountry with a minimum of sweat.  Many of those people will be happy to hear a huge swath of federal land is now open to motor vehicles.

Even more will be alarmed.  Backpackers and other wilderness aficionados prefer their forests roadless.  So do many big game hunters, since elk, mule deer, and bighorn sheep shy away from roads, even the seldom-used two-tracks that wind their way through the public domain.  The first step in planning a big-game hunt on federal land is to spread out a map and look for the places the roads don’t go— those are the places big game is likely to be found, especially after the opening morning of the season.

I mention this proposal for a couple of reasons.  First, if it isn’t quickly rescinded, it will have dire consequences for those of us who prefer to maintain some places only a horse or boot leather can take us.  Over decades of debate, we’ve struck a balance between motorized access on national forests and the unique character of true backcountry.  I’m not surprised that a President whose idea of wilderness is the rough on a golf course appointed a woman who comes from one of the most fenced-in, jealously guarded, privately held states in the nation to oversee a system of federal lands that is a powerful symbol of freedom for tens of millions of Americans.  Not surprised, just deeply disappointed.

The second reason I raise this matter is to consider the way it fits in the fight over federal land, a fight that started almost as soon as Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park, was set aside in 1872.  In the years that followed that unprecedented action, powerful economic interests in the West started a campaign to get control of the park, maneuvering to build a rail line from Gardiner, Montana, to Cooke City, slicing off the northern and western edges of the park in the process.  One of the park’s first superintendents, Robert E. Carpenter, was fired when his part in the scheme came to light.[i]

In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison created America’s first forest reserve, a huge tract of high-country timber east of Yellowstone Park that would eventually become the Shoshone National Forest.  At first, local residents ignored the regulations that were intended to protect timber, pasture, and watersheds from the senseless abuse they were absorbing, then, as the regulations were enforced, they pressed their representatives in Washington, D.C., for relief.  Several Congressmen from the West took up that cause, which was eventually shared by the Speaker of the House in those years, Illinois Congressman Joe Cannon.[ii]

In 1907, the western anti-forest coalition managed to attach an amendment to a large agriculture appropriations bill.  It appropriated $125,000 for the Forest Service, provided: “that hereafter no forest reserve shall be created, nor shall any additions be made to one heretofore created within the limits of the States of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, or Wyoming, except by Act of Congress.”[iii]  The identities of the authors of this provision are lost in the minutiae of Congressional records, but the list of states it was supposed to protect from Teddy Roosevelt’s ongoing campaign to establish national forests tells us where they lived.

While this contest was simmering in Washington, westerners fought federal authority on the ground.  In 1906, rancher Fred Light turned 500 head of cattle loose on the Holy Cross Forest Reserve in Colorado without a permit from the Forest Service.  The resulting legal battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, funded by a special appropriation from the Colorado state legislature.  A similar case in California also made its way to the Supreme Court.  The ranchers lost their bid to undermine Forest Service regulations— the court supported Congressional authority to establish federal reserves and appoint officials to control the ways they are used.[iv]

Supreme Court decisions notwithstanding, stockgrowers and settlers near the public domain continued to flout regulations and dodge limited enforcement efforts, and the damage to federal land deepened and widened.[v] [vi]  In 1923, Aldo Leopold, then an assistant Forest Service supervisor in the department’s Southwest region, reported that, on the forests in his district, “overgrazing is responsible for much more abnormal erosion than all other causes combined.”[vii]

The situation worsened as the region descended into the droughts of the 1930s, which led conservation-minded legislators to impose some sort of reasonable management on federal lands, especially the parts of the public domain that were neither part of the national systems of parks and forests nor owned by private interests.  The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 allowed the secretary of the interior to organize “grazing districts” on those orphan federal lands, issue permits to control grazing, and charge a fee for those permits.  Oddly enough, the sponsor of the law, Congressman Edward Taylor of Colorado, was an opponent of federal controls and hoped to give local residents control over the new federal grazing bureau.[viii]

One of the most entrenched opponents of the Taylor Grazing Act was Pat McCarran, U.S. senator from Nevada.  When the act took effect, McCarran set about undermining the new federal Grazing Service.  He set standards for the election of local advisory boards that favored the biggest ranchers; he made sure the boards could set grazing fees well below prevailing market prices; he pushed regulatory loopholes that favored ranches controlled by banks, and he pressed board members to buy their grazing districts outright.  Over the next twenty years, he attacked Grazing Service employees for alleged abuses of authority and fought proposals to increase grazing fees.[ix] He was his generation’s leader in a war against federal land that was already fifty years old.[x]

After World War II, Ed Robertson, U.S. senator from Wyoming, took up the cause, introducing a bill that would have turned over federal grazing lands to the states in which they were found and holding extensive “investigative hearings” across the West to root out instances of BLM employees abusing their authority.  He pressured the Department of Agriculture to maintain unsustainable stocking rates for sheep and cattle on national forests and helped strangle BLM efforts by slashing the agency’s budget.  Other members of Congress championed laws that expanded assistance to permittees grazing public land and limiting the authority BLM and Forest Service professionals had to regulate grazing.  Frank Barrett, a Wyoming senator, introduced a bill that would have allowed permittees to sell their permits. Thankfully, it failed.  At the same time, timber harvest on federal land expanded drastically, with no attention given to restrictions explicit in the federal laws that were supposed to control the Forest Service.[xi]

Through the 1960s and 1970s, the American public at large reacted to the longstanding hegemony local interests had exercised over federal lands.  The Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and other federal laws sought to protect amenities the nation at large valued, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 kept BLM lands in federal hands while mandating management that considered “the long-term needs of future generations for natural scenic, scientific and historical values” as well as “recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish.”  All of this was to be done “without permanent impairments of the land and the quality of the environment.”[xii]

FLPMA was a glove in the face of the traditional masters of the public domain, and it elicited a response that came to be known as the Sagebrush Rebellion, yet another attempt to give federal land to the states.  Prominent in the movement at that moment were candidate Ronald Reagan and Orrin Hatch, U.S. senator from Utah.

This brings us into the realm of living memory.  Following the Sagebrush Rebellion, Cliven Bundy and his son, Ammon, dared the federal government to enforce its regulations concerning the use of public land.  Ammon was found not guilty of occupying a national wildlife refuge at gunpoint, and, after ten years, Cliven is still grazing his stock illegally on BLM land.

And now comes Mike Lee at the head of the most recent insurgent action in a fight that has stretched on for 140 years.  Should anyone mistake his intentions after his land sale provision was taken off the table, he said that he “continues to believe the federal government owns far too much land— land it is mismanaging and in many cases ruining for the next generation.  Massive swaths of the West are being locked away from the people who live there.”  He promised to continue his efforts to “put underutilized federal land to work for American families.”  We have more than a century of abuse of the public domain by a tiny minority of people to help us define what he means by “work” and “American families.”

Forcing Lee and his cronies to back down was a signal victory, well worth celebrating.  So find a friend, face your favorite corner of public land, the place that always brings a smile to your face, and raise a libation to success.  Then get a good night’s sleep.  Tomorrow morning, they’ll be at it again.

---

 

References:

[i] Haines, Aubrey L., 1996.  The Yellowstone Story: A history of our first national park.  University Press of Colorado, Boulder, CO.

[ii] Steen, Harold K., 2004.  The U.S. Forest Service: A history.  Forest History Association and University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA.

[iii] Anon, 1907.  Public laws of the United States of America passed by the Fifty-ninth Congress, 1905-1907. Session II, Chapter 2907.  P.1271.

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llsl//llsl-c59/llsl-c59.pdf.  Accessed July 3, 2025.

[iv] Lamar, Lucius, 1911.  Fred Light, Appt., v. United States.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/220/523.  Accessed July 3, 2025.

[v] Leshy, John D., 2021.  Our common ground: A history of America’s public lands.  Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

https://ofs-802cf272e4f9b5871e552dcc0bb593d4.read.overdrive.com/?d=eyJvdXRsZXQiOiJyZWFkIiwidG9rZW4iOiJuYXRyb25hY291bnR5d3ktMjQ1NTc5MSIsImFjY2VzcyI6ImYiLCJleHBpcmVzIjoxNzUyODY2MTAwLCJ0aGVtZSI6ImRlZmF1bHQiLCJzeW5jIjoxLCJwcGFyYW0iOiJTS2w1TnpaXzhPSDlOSmdzQnlYbGN3IiwidGRhdGEiOnsiQ1JJRCI6IjU4OTdiY2E0LTcxOWMtNGE4Ni04YWUzLWEyYzE1ODBhYzlhYyIsImZvcm1hdCI6IjYxMCJ9LCJ0aW1lIjoxNzUxNjU2NTYzLCJidWlkIjoiODAyY2YyNzJlNGY5YjU4NzFlNTUyZGNjMGJiNTkzZDQiLCJfYyI6IjE3NTE2NTY1NjQ3NTgifQ%3D%3D–ca77964ae145180d9a8b24ed1f196fa9f043265a&p=SKl5NzZ_8OH9NJgsByXlcw.  Accessed July 4, 2025.

[vi] Chapline, W. Ridgely, 1936.  The western range— a great but neglected natural resource.  U.S. Senate Document 199, 74^th Congress, Session II.

https://archive.org/details/CAT31418852/page/n1/mode/2up.  Accessed July 4, 2025.

[vii] Leopold, Aldo, 1923.  Watershed handbook.  U.S. Forest Service, Southwestern District.

https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/ATJ4Z4VCES5A4B8C/pages/AH5THJSRRL47B58C.  Accessed July 4, 2025.

[viii] Steen, The U.S. Forest Service: A history.  Op cit.

[ix] Leshy, Our common ground.  Op. cit.

[x] Schweber, Nate, 2022.  This America of ours.  Mariner Books, Boston, MA, and New York, NY.

[xi] Leshy, Our common ground, op cit.

[xii] Leshy, Our common ground, op cit.

I WASN’T BORN IN WYOMING, BUT, AS THE OLD SAW GOES, I GOT HERE AS SOON AS I COULD.  FOR ME THAT WAS AUGUST OF 1960 WHEN MY PARENTS PACKED UP THE KIDS AND headed west from St. Louis, a station-wagon version of Lewis and Clark.  On our way home from the Pacific, we bent south, like William Clark, and found ourselves along his fork of the Yellowstone River in the Sunlight Basin.  I was not quite ten years old, and the North Absarokas were an obsidian-tipped arrow straight into my soul.

Up until that week, my idea of freedom was a hundred acres of timber along a creek that cut its way down a steep valley through the bluffs of the Mississippi, dove into a culvert under a four-lane highway, and found its way down the rip-rapped bank to join the Father of Waters.  It was a marvelous place for a bunch of suburban kids— oak, hickory, and wild cherry on the uplands, giant sycamore and soft maple along the creek, whose dappled waters trickled over limestone outcrops and lingered in gravel-bottomed pools— but it was a tiny spark of wildness in a landscape that had been thoroughly settled.  Even the kids knew that.

If we left the creek and climbed up toward the ridges on either side, we ran into the back fences of suburban yards, carefully mowed, and festooned with “No Trespassing” signs.  Now and then, an irate householder would catch a glimpse of us in the woods and yell— we disappeared back into the shadows like smoke.

So the water and timber and wildflowers and snowfields and peaks of the Shoshone National Forest were like a revelation of God to me.  The family came back again and again over the next several years, and I was loosed with a flyrod, four Muddler Minnows, and a smashed peanut butter sandwich to follow the creek as far as curiosity and gumption would take me.

After college, I settled down in the Midwest to start a family, but, every summer, I was back for as long as the company could spare me, with a wife and two apple-cheeked little girls in tow, to taste the freedom we had somehow lost back east.

Then, I had a chance to come to Wyoming full time.  The offer was exhilarating, but I thought it over before I accepted, not because of what the job entailed, but because of how I felt about the West.  They say familiarity breeds contempt, or at least boredom, and I wondered whether the sage and mountains might lose some of their shine for me if they were always at the back door.  I decided to take the chance.

That was 1983.  In the years since, I’ve rambled around most of the state, from Devil’s Tower to the Bear River Divide, Jenny Lake to Vedauwoo.  I’ve hunted, fished, canoed, hiked, photographed, picnicked, and contemplated my navel, and I’m pleased— and relieved— to report that the big sky has never lost its shine for me.  In fact, the love affair has deepened over time as I’ve come to appreciate the subtle charms of the sage as much as the flower-strewn meadows above timberline.  It wasn’t until I moved to Wyoming that I experienced September and October here, arguably the best months of the year, not only in the West but anywhere.

All of this is set against the backdrop of public land.  I own, by actual count, 34 of the BLM’s 1:100,000-scale maps covering Wyoming, 32 of the USGS quads, and an assortment of national park and forest maps on the side, all of them dog-eared and stained from days spent crammed into backpacks.  I’m proud to say I’ve worn out two compasses, something that never could have happened behind the Midwest’s fences.

Wyoming is many things to many people.  The boosters tout its minerals; the politicians brag on the rugged independence of its people.  But, let me tell you— public land is what defines Wyoming.  It’s why I came; it’s why I stay.  I think I share that sentiment with many other residents.

You hang a “No Trespassing” sign on Wyoming, and it will be no different than Illinois, with a lot less rain and much longer winters.  If all I have left is the view of the Tetons from a crowded parking lot and locked gates off every highway, I can think of better places to spend my time.

Back in the 1930s, America’s poet laureate, Archibald MacLeish, looked at the state of the nation and asked a penetrating question:

 

We wonder whether the great American dream

Was the singing of locusts out of the grass to the west and the

West is behind us now:

The west wind’s away from us

 

We wonder if the liberty is done:

The dreaming is finished

Or if there’s something different men can dream

Or if there’s something different men can mean by

Liberty . . .

Or if there’s liberty a man can mean that’s

Men: not land

 

We wonder

We don’t know

We’re asking

 

I wonder whether there’s liberty a man can mean that’s men, not land.  Here in Wyoming, I think there’s little doubt.  Public land means my freedom.

Don’t you sell an inch of it.

EVER SINCE THE FIRST SPANISH ENTRADA, MYTHS HAVE HAUNTED THE AMERICAN WEST.

The Northwest Passage, the Seven Cities of Gold, Cibola, the Welsh prince Madoc and his band of colonists settling in the New World 300 years before Columbus, the Buenaventura River flowing from the west slope of the Rockies across the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada Range to San Francisco Bay— flights of imagination have led generations of explorers to confusion, hard times, disappointment, and, all too often, death.

It took us nearly 400 years to purge these monumental errors in our understanding of geography and culture on the western landscape.  These days, the myths are smaller, but they persist.

Take, for example, the myth of the mustang.  As the story goes, these noble beasts are the direct descendants of the stallion Hernan Cortez rode into Tenochtitlan after he had subjugated the Aztecs.  Or perhaps the lineage reaches even further into the past.  Since the family tree of the equids is deeply rooted in North America, a few true believers argue, it could very well be that the horse never really disappeared from the New World.  Just look at the modern representatives of the breed, they say— the faint striping on haunches and legs of some wild horses shows a genetic link with some far-off ancestor that must have dodged the great Quaternary extinction that claimed mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats.  A further argument maintains that, even if the horse became extinct in North America, the species disappeared so recently that wild horses on the modern landscape are really just a reintroduction of a native species.

None of these assertions stands much scrutiny.  The notion that horses roaming free in the West are the pure progeny of Spanish mounts ignores the escape of untold thousands of horses and burros from travelers, native tribes, and ranches over four centuries.  Whatever “pure” blood may have established horses in the West has long since been overwhelmed by more recent contributions from these escapees.

While science has found fragmentary evidence of isolated herds of horses in North America that are more recent than the remains of mammoths and other extinct species, the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community is that the horse was extinct in the New World for several thousand years before the first Europeans hit the beach.  Since there is no evidence that paleohunters paid much attention to horses as prey, we’re left to conclude that the disappearance of the equine line in America was due to fundamental ecological change in the niche they occupied, not persecution by humans, whether armed with stone-tipped spears or rifles.

The notion that the escape of the modern domesticated horse in America is some sort of “reintroduction” simply ignores the evolutionary reality of extinction.  Modern humanity didn’t erase this species from the New World; it disappeared as a result of natural forces that came into play thousands of years ago.  We’re not well equipped to understand how those forces operated, but it’s more than a little arrogant to assume that a species returning from the dead can claim an ecological place on the modern landscape without any consequences.

These matters of prehistoric ecology and patterns of American conquest would be of little interest to anyone but paleontologists and historians . . . except that the growth of feral horse herds on the western landscape has thrown a huge monkey wrench into the day-to-day management of several million acres of the public domain.

Managing feral horses on the public range would be a relatively simple matter if the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) were allowed to treat them as any other livestock or game animal.  There is a market for horsemeat, hides, and other commodities— a sustained harvest of feral horses might almost pay for itself while maintaining horse populations at levels that would leave forage for domestic livestock and possibly even habitat for the host of wild animals that share the public range with these newcomers.  Fans of feral horses would still have horses; ranchers would have more forage for sheep and cattle, and wildlife enthusiasts would have more deer, pronghorns, sage grouse, and other wildlife that depends on the sagebrush steppe.

Alas, killing even a single feral horse is something a small, highly motivated group of extremists simply will not tolerate.  As a result of generations of their vehement demands, the BLM has cobbled together what seemed, over the years, to be a workable compromise.  Instead of killing surplus horses on the range, BLM officials proposed, we will trap them and allow people who care to adopt them.

There are some horse activists who object even to the process of trapping feral horses, arguing that the stress of being hazed by helicopters, confined in corrals, and shipped in trailers is unacceptably cruel, but most seem willing to tolerate the effect on individual horses in the interest of avoiding damage to public rangeland.

But three fundamental problems with the adoption program have emerged.

First, it’s expensive.  In 2023, BLM asked Congress for $154,800,000 for wild horse and burro management.[i]  Some of this supported efforts to control reproduction among feral horses, a project doomed to failure, partly because feral horses can be difficult to approach, partly because they don’t care to be sterilized, and partly because contraceptive drugs would have to be administered across the West on a regular basis in order to be effective.

Second, the BLM can’t find enough people to adopt feral horses.  In 2023, BLM paid landowners $109,000,000 to board feral horses that had been trapped but were not sold or adopted.[ii]  That outlay is likely to increase as the BLM increases the number of feral horses it traps and the number of people interested in adopting even more horses declines.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that BLM trapping and contraception together haven’t checked the growth of feral horse herds, which means that— third— there are too many horses on the public range.  In 2023, BLM had a goal of keeping no more than 26,785 feral horses and burros on the land it manages.  Official estimated that there were actually 82,883 on the range, an excess of 56,098 or about 300 percent more than the established ceiling for the breed.  Those numbers are likely to increase until feral horses have so degraded the range that they no longer have enough food to produce foals.  Or until we take a more practical approach to managing feral horses.

Wildlife biologists have long suspected that too many feral horses in the sage have affected many of the true native residents of the region.  In the last few years, carefully designed research has reinforced that view.  A study in 2021 concluded that “our models predicted a 70.9% reduction in sage-grouse numbers across approximately 4,500,000 acres of sage-grouse habitat in Nevada and northeastern California, assuming horse populations continue to increase at their current rates.”[iii]  A 2024 study in Wyoming found that “overabundant free-roaming horses negatively affected nest, brood, and juvenile survival”[iv] among sage grouse in the area.

There’s good reason to believe that too many feral horses may be just as bad for pronghorns as they are for sage grouse,[v] and that generalized effect probably applies to most of the other wildlife in sage country.

I think it’s safe to say that most wildlife biologists and conservationists familiar with the West would prefer to eliminate feral horses entirely from western rangeland.  With all the other stresses we’ve inflicted on the sagebrush steppe, the system would be far better off without this large, highly adaptable exotic in competition with native wildlife.  Clearly, the mustang constituency will never agree to this, the most ecologically sound, approach.

A compromise has to be made.  But that workable compromise would bear little resemblance to the breathtakingly expensive, largely ineffective system that’s been assembled out of mismatched parts under the provisions of the Wild Horse and Burro Conservation Act.  Feral horses should be managed with clearly defined objectives, just as all other wildlife and human activities are— or should be— managed on the public domain.  Contraception for feral horses may seem a humane option, but it isn’t practical or affordable.  It’s seems inevitable that a sustainable commercial harvest of feral horses would be part of any workable program.

It’s been said that the multiple-use approach to management of the public domain is all too often a justification for multiple abuse.  In 2023, the BLM admitted that half the rangeland it manages did not meet the agency’s own standards for healthy pasture.[vi] Half— 57,000,000 acres.  According to the BLM, overgrazing by domestic livestock is a significant reason for that condition on 38,000,000 acres, and, if even the BLM offers this estimate, it’s a good bet that the situation is substantially worse.

Across the West, feral horses are an insignificant part of range abuse, in large measure because feral horses are confined to specific, relatively small parts of the public domain.  Still, where they are too abundant, the research cited above shows that they’re not good for sage grouse and other wildlife.

Politically powerful interests in the cattle and sheep industry have fought federal efforts to manage the public domain effectively for well over a century.  Their abuses are the root of the problem on BLM land.  If the issue of feral horses intrudes on my concerns about the public domain, it’s because I suspect I share many of my views of conservation and environmental justice with the advocates of feral horses.  I suspect these people admire the wildlife of the sage as I do; I suspect they take pleasure in watching the sage country blossom.  I’m dismayed when I discover that they seem unwilling to accept a management regime that provides for sage grouse as well as for mustangs.

There is common cause to be made here.  The BLM needs a constituency that supports conservation— wise use of the range— before it can counteract the influence of the traditional interests that scalp the public domain for their own profit.  There has to be a limit on the number of cattle and sheep that graze on federal land.  There has to be a limit on the number of feral horses, too.  When the population of those horses is up to seven times the recommended maximum,[vii] it’s hard to mount a cogent defense of the way they’re being managed.

Caught between widespread abuse of rangeland by domestic livestock and the damage done in a few key areas by burgeoning herds of feral horses are all the native wild things that depend on the sage for food and shelter.  Those of us who speak for that last group aren’t asking for everything, but we insist on getting something like a fair share.

There are those who see the mustang as the symbol of the sage.  I much prefer the pronghorn and the sage grouse, the true natives, evolved over millennia in equilibrium with the land that nurtures them.  Whatever your preferences, it’s clear that the land can sustain only so much.  If there is to be balance on the modern landscape, ecological or ethical, we have arrange it; it won’t happen on its own.

---

 

[i] Stone-Manning, Tracy, 2023.  The President’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget for the Bureau of Land Management.  U.S. Department of Interior.

https://www.doi.gov/ocl/blm-budget.  Accessed April 14, 2025

 

[ii] Waddell, Holle, 2023.  Wild Horse and Burro Program update.  https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2023-12/wildhorse_Holle-%20BLM%20WHB%20Program%20Update_Dec2023AdvBrdMtg.pdf

 

[iii] Coates, Peter S., et al., 2021.  Sage-grouse population dynamics are adversely affected by overabundant feral horses.  Journal of Wildlife Management 85(6): 1132-1149.

https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jwmg.22089.  Accessed April 14, 2025.

[iv] Beck, Jeff, et al., 2024.  Free-roaming horses exceeding appropriate management levels affect multiple vital rates in greater sage grouse.  Journal of Wildlife Management 88(8): e22669.

https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jwmg.22669.  Accessed April 14, 2025.

[v] Hennig, Jacob, et al., 2022.  Habitat selection and space use overlap between feral horses, pronghorn, and greater sage-grouse in cold arid steppe.  Journal of Wildlife Management 87(1): e22329.

https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jwmg.22329.  Accessed April 14, 2025.

 

[vii] Beck, Jeff, et al., 2024.  Free-roaming horses exceeding appropriate management levels affect multiple vital rates in greater sage grouse.  Journal of Wildlife Management 88(8): e22669.

https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jwmg.22669.  Accessed April 14, 2025.

WELL, THE DECISION COMES AS NO SURPRISE.

On March 29, David Counts, a Trump-appointed judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, split a legal hair to block any action to protect the lesser prairie chicken, a bird the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed as” threatened” in part of its range and “endangered” in the rest back in 2022.  In his decision, Counts conceded that the Fish and Wildlife Service was not required to weigh the economic impacts of its decision as part of its intention to list a rare species and threatened or endangered.  BUT, before the Service makes rules to protect that species, he ruled, it is legally bound to consider the economic impact of those rules.[i]

Get it?  The Fish and Wildlife Service has the authority to list the lesser prairie chicken, regardless of the economic impact that decision may have, but it can’t make any rules to protect lesser prairie chickens without considering the economic impact those rules might have.

The contortions Judge Counts goes through to justify this explication of the Endangered Species Act cover ten double-spaced pages, and at the end of that careful argument, a careful reader is left wondering how we can expect the Fish and Wildlife Service to “provide for the conservation of the . . . lesser prairie chicken” as the Endangered Species Act requires while, at the same time, avoiding any regulation that might inflict the least economic inconvenience on anyone doing any sort of business on the southern Great Plains.

Practically all the former and currently occupied range of the lesser prairie chicken is privately held, and, practically speaking, the Fish and Wildlife Service can’t and won’t prosecute a landholder for overgrazing native prairie, building fences, plowing a quarter section of grassland to install a center-pivot irrigation system, or doing much of anything else that threatens the species.

About the only activities the Service might impede would be large-scale development by big corporations— the installation of major utility lines or the opening of new oil and gas fields.  Even in those cases, the interests of the lesser chicken and the developers would be balanced in court before any limit would be placed on a developer’s plans.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, state wildlife agencies, and the vast majority of conservationists with an interest in lesser chickens are fully aware of the challenges that arise when the last remnants of a wild species survive only on private land.  That’s why efforts to recover populations of lesser chickens focus almost entirely on incentives that compensate farmers and ranchers for managing their grasslands to encourage these native grouse.

It’s interesting that the judge himself conceded that the lawyers who sued the Fish and Wildlife Service hadn’t produced evidence that their clients were actually harmed by the rules protecting lesser chickens— they “brought too little in the way of national impact,” according to Judge Counts.  That should come as no surprise since the on-the-ground impact of the listing has had little, if any, impact on landholders.  Nor is this lack of effect unusual on the modern landscape.

Over the decades, the Fish and Wildlife Service has been made painfully aware of the fact that, in most cases, successful protection and recovery of threatened and endangered species depends on public support, at the national level and also down where the management of those species touches the lives of the people who live with them. The Service has made arrangements to suspend the rules of the Endangered Species Act in places where rare species like the black-footed ferret are introduced, recognizing that the way the landholder is managing his land already favors the ferret, that the best way to help the species is to cooperate with that landholder.  The Service compensates ranchers for the loss of livestock to wolves and grizzlies because the impact of those losses should rightly be shared by the public at large.  And, in the case of the lesser prairie chicken, efforts are being made to use funding from the Farm Bill to help landholders help the birds.

In short, the Fish and Wildlife Service routinely considers the potential cost of managing threatened and endangered species, especially where traditional practices by farmers and ranchers are concerned.

The application of the Endangered Species Act has evolved over the decades since its adoption in 1973, partly because of shifting legal precedent and, in large part, because the real-world challenges of protecting and re-establishing habitat for rare wildlife have become obvious to conservationists and the public at large.  The benefits and costs of protecting endangered species are already being weighed, and the efforts on behalf of those species have long been tempered by that process.

Judge Counts would like to bring that process into his courtroom.  I must say I doubt his motives, and I challenge his ability to find fairer compromises than the ones already being made.

The long-standing debate between people who care about our wild heritage and people who are focused solely on the bottom line reminds me of an observation the British wit Oscar Wilde made many years ago. “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything,” he quipped, “ . . . and the value of nothing.”  It’s easy to build a balance sheet with columns for profit and loss, far more difficult to determine the value of a lesser prairie chicken and the prairie it calls home.

———

[i] Counts, David, 2025.  Kansas Natural Resource Coalition, et al. v United States Fish and Wildlife Service.  MO:230CV-00159-DC.

https://www.endangeredspecieslawandpolicy.com/assets/htmldocuments/NewBlogs/EndangeredSpecies/lesser-prairie-chicken-court-ruling.pdf.  Accessed April 7, 2025.

 

SOMETIME AROUND THE YEAR 2000, A FRIEND OF MINE ALERTED ME TO SOME PUBLIC ACCESS HUNTING AREAS IN SOUTHWESTERN NEBRASKA.  With his good reports in mind, I waited until a couple of weeks after the pheasant opener to make sure the crowds had gone home, loaded Flick the Brittany in the back of the truck, and made the three-hour drive from Cheyenne to investigate.

Turned out, my friend was right.  I wasn’t keeping written records back then, so I have to depend on my memories of those hunts, and the memories are quite pleasant.  With a capable pointing dog in front of me, I moved sixty or eighty pheasants on a typical day.  Some days, I missed a chance or two, and we came home with a pair of birds or just one.  Some days, we walked twelve or fourteen miles to get three or four good chances and came home long after dark.  Once or twice, we walked out of the cover with three roosters at nine in the morning.  It was nothing like the huge flocks of pheasants South Dakota offered in those days, but, if I held up my end of the bargain, Flick would give me three or four great points over the course of a long day, and we’d come home with all the birds the law allowed.

A fair number of pheasants, an occasional sharptail or covey of quail, more cover than there were hunters, all of this within a four-hour drive from home— it was the kind of situation that appeals to me.  So three generations of dogs and I have gone back to those same places every fall and winter over the last twenty-five years.

I didn’t start keeping records until the fall of 2020, but my general impression of the places the dogs and I kept visiting was a steady decline in the number of pheasants we moved and the number we brought home.  Twenty years ago, I’d guess we averaged something like 2.5 roosters in the bag per day, sometimes a very long day, but, still, a legal limit more days than not.  My hunting diary confirms the decline over the last five years:

1.5 pheasants brought to the bag per day in 2020,

1.2 in 2021,

0.6 in 2022,

0.7 in 2023,

and 0.8 last season.

It’s getting to be a long dry spell.

There have been changes. When the hunting was particularly good in the early 2000s, the hunting pressure on the walk-in areas increased perceptibly, although I never saw a day when I couldn’t find a field to hunt by myself.  The amount of CRP has declined steadily over the last ten years, which has reduced the amount of cover in the walk-in areas.  The summer of 2022 was exceptionally dry, so the folks at the Natural Resources Conservation Service allowed farmers to cut hay on their CRP, which drastically reduced the amount of cover that fall and winter as well as the amount of nesting and brood-rearing cover in the spring of 2023, which meant poor recruitment for the fall of 2023.  Still, the winter of 2023-24 was mild, and the summer of 2024 was nearly ideal for pheasant nesting.  The pheasants barely responded.  As you might expect, the hunting pressure has fallen off drastically, simply because there were practically no birds to be found.

I’m the first to admit that my data set is severely biased.  The hunting was so bad in 2022 and 2023 that the dogs and I didn’t get back to Nebraska as often as we have other years.  Some years, I’ve hunted with veteran dogs; some years, I’ve had beginners.  Still, the numbers of pheasants the dogs and I move on the same landscape have steadily diminished over the years.

And the annual summer pheasant surveys run by the Nebraska Game and Parks Department show a trend frighteningly similar to the drop in my numbers.  Every region of the state has seen a steady decline in the number of pheasants rural mail carriers see along country roads.  Every region has seen a drop in pheasant numbers that began sometime in the early to mid-1980s and has never recovered.  In the southwest region where I’ve hunted, survey numbers have dropped more than eighty percent since 1970, fifty percent since 2010.[i]

 Those of you who have hunted pheasants as long as I have will remember that the conservation title of the modern Farm Bill launched the Conservation Reserve Program in 1985.  Conservationists in farm country welcomed the advent of CRP and its sister programs, and there’s little doubt that the long-term cover established under the Farm Bill slowed the decline of grassland birds, game and nongame, across the Midwest and out onto the Great Plains.

Slowed the decline . . . but didn’t stop it, let alone reverse it.  Something has changed in pheasant country, something 20 or 30 million acres of federally subsidized cover hasn’t fully remedied.  As I’ve meandered through the cover after the dogs over the last twenty-five years, I’ve had more and more time between points by the Brittanies to consider what’s happened to pheasants and other birds in the farming heartland.  I’ve started to consider the possibility that food has become even more important than cover as a limiting factor in the life cycles of our grassland birds, and, just this week, a new synthesis of a huge body of field research in the journal Science lends some credence to that point of view.

Collin Edwards with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, with the help of more than thirty other biologists, reviewed nearly 76,000 surveys of butterflies across the United States.

These researchers found that butterfly abundance dropped by twenty-two percent between 2000 and 2020.

Butterflies have declined in every region of the country.

Populations of most species have declined.

Species richness has declined. [ii]

Some species, like the beloved monarch, are threatened with extinction.[iii]

Many years ago, some now-forgotten biologist in the Rocky Mountain West considered the long-term decline in the region’s mule deer population and observed that “nothing we’ve done on the landscape in the last eighty years has been good for mule deer.”  Much the same could be said of many, even most, wildlife species.

It certainly applies to butterflies.  For more than four centuries, we’ve looked for ways to get rid of them. Sixty years ago, we invented sprays like chlorpyrifos and pyrethrins that have been staples in the battle against insects, and, in the mid-1990s, a new class of particularly effective insecticides called neonicotinoids were introduced in the U.S.  The first of the group, imidacloprid, was permitted for use on crops from soybeans to safflower in 1994.[iv][v]  In 1999, the EPA permitted another neonic, thiamethoxam, for use on wheat and sorghum.[vi]  Clothianidin was permitted for use on corn and canola in 2003.[vii]  Dinotefuran was permitted for use on a variety of crops in 2004.[viii]  All of them deadly to nearly any invertebrate, including beetles, ants, thrips, fleas, ticks, bees . . . and butterflies.

Through the last half of the twentieth century and into the new millennium, we’ve also whittled away at the places butterflies and other insects live and reproduce.  Urban and exurban sprawl has turned large swaths of former habitat into bluegrass deserts, and widespread applications of highly effective herbicides like glyphosate have killed off many of the pesky broad-leafed “weeds” on farmland, reducing the food supply and shelter for many insects, including butterflies.

And we’re not-so-slowly turning up the continental thermostat.  The Edwards study and other smaller-scale research has shown that the warming, drying trend in the western U.S. is not good for butterflies.  Climate change is changing entire ecosystems.

Why, you may ask, does an upland bird hunter like me care about butterflies?  Well, I like them.  I’ve admired them since I was a kid, along with the wildflowers they frequent.  The world would be a poorer place without butterflies and the native plants that support them.

And, as an ecologist, I strongly suspect that the trend in butterflies reflects a much broader trend in the world of arthropods, all those creepy crawlies that provide the foundation of life on dry land across most of the globe.  Studies of the food habits of all our game birds show that rapidly growing youngsters require a high-protein diet, which is to say, bugs.  Pheasant chicks tend to prefer large species of leafhoppers, aphids, and beetles; young quail leaned more toward ants, small caterpillars, and skippers.[ix]  If bugs are hard to come by, parent birds are forced to lead their broods farther and farther afield— the more movement, the more likely chicks will be separated from the brood and lost, the more likely a predator will find the brood and kill some or all of them.  If there are no bugs, young birds quickly weaken; they don’t grow properly and may simply starve to death.

The youngsters slowly wean themselves off insects as they reach adulthood and the first frosts cut the supply of bugs, but the shift to a vegetarian diet doesn’t mean they’re suddenly flush with provisions.  These days, the crop fields that once provided plenty of waste grain are swept clean.  Like most other equipment in this technological age, mechanical combines have improved drastically since they were introduced in the late 1950s.  Around 1970, researchers in Iowa found that the typical combine lost 3.7 bushels per acre of corn harvested— some lost as much as 23 bushels per acre.[x]  This at a time when average corn yield hovered between seventy and eighty bushels per acre.[xi] [xii]

The use of new hybrids, nitrogen fertilizer, and efficient pesticides has boosted average yield of corn to nearly 180 bushels per acre,[xiii] but much less of the grain is lost during harvest.  According to one study in central Nebraska, the amount of corn lying in the fields on either side of the Platte River after harvest dropped 24 to 47 percent in the twenty years between 1978 and 1998.[xiv]  In many areas, farmers stretch electric fence around their cornfields after harvest and turn cattle loose to clean up anything of nutritional value that’s left after the combine goes through.  By the time the cattle are finished, there’s no food or cover left for wildlife.

One other trend in farming has also taken a toll of pheasants and other birds in farm country— the advent of soybeans.  Until World War II, small grains like oats, barley, and rye were commonly planted crops.  In the decades following the war, the acreage of soybeans grew steadily, mostly by replacing the small grains.  Pheasants should like soybeans— they’re full of protein— but neither pheasants nor native game birds like bobwhite quail, prairie chickens, sharptailed grouse, most waterfowl, and sandhill cranes care much for them.  In 1950, farmers harvested about 15 million acres of soybeans in the U.S.  In 2020, they harvested 82 million acres.[xv]  The soybean not only falls short as a food item for birds, but soybean fields also fail to provide much shelter in the winter when wildlife needs shelter most— in January, a harvested Iowa soybean field offers less food and cover for wildlife than the typical Walmart parking lot.

With all these changes, it’s not surprising that the population curves for pheasants and butterflies are strikingly similar, and there’s every reason to believe that the similarity stretches back to the beginning of pesticide use in the U.S.  A classic paper from biologists in Illinois found that survival of pheasant chicks during their first six weeks of life declined by almost 50 percent from 1946 to 1996.[xvi]  The results from the butterfly study suggest that this decline has probably continued, if at a slower rate, through the first decades of the twenty-first century.

No wonder the dogs and I aren’t seeing as many pheasants as we did thirty years ago.

So the comment about mule deer in the West keeps ringing in my head.  Of course, we have done one thing for pheasants— the conservation title of the modern Farm Bill.  It has slowed the loss to a trickle, but, with every new version, the acreage ceiling for the various programs is cut, and the funding reduced to a point where it can’t begin to compete with the income to be had from a corn-soybean rotation.  We further exacerbate the situation by continuing a handsome tax break for corn-based ethanol, a commodity that was supposed to stand on its own in the market but seems to fall short of that promise without a massive federal subsidy.

CRP, as it exists today, isn’t enough to sustain populations of game birds and the rich guilds of other grassland birds in America’s agricultural heartland.  Nor is it enough, in its current form, to stop the loss of butterflies.

When I was first learning the science of ecology and the art of wildlife management in the 1970s, experience had shown that, in farm country, the key to improving wildlife habitat was providing more cover.  There was plenty of winter food scattered across the grain fields; wildlife managers mostly needed to provide cover for nesting, brood-rearing, and winter shelter.  In the 1960s, the success of the Soil Bank program as a way of increasing wildlife populations in general and pheasant numbers in particular demonstrated the importance of cover on the farm landscape of that era.

Two generations of advances in ag technology and chemistry have shifted that equation.  Birds on the prairies and plains could certainly use more cover— they could also use more food.  A return to a 40-million-acre cap on CRP— the ceiling for the program when it was first established— would provide much needed cover and, if we used a wide variety of plants on those retired acres, we could encourage the insects that are the prime groceries for young birds as they grow and adults as they molt into new feathers.

That would help fill the larder during the summer.  When fall and winter come around, we may need to broaden our notion of adequate habitat.  On the modern farm landscape, that almost certainly means providing year-round sources of food along with cover— the birds need extensive food plots to replace the waste grain that has all but disappeared from most working farms.

Once upon a time, wildlife habitat in the uplands of corn and wheat country happened largely by accident as the limitations of equipment and the demands of the markets combined to create a mosaic that benefitted people and wildlife.  We’ve drifted away from that situation and find ourselves faced with the hard reality that we’ll have to pay for the habitat and wildlife we once had almost for free.

I’m sure there are many Americans who don’t share the passion my Brittanies and I have for sharptails and quail and pheasants.  I hope those people find another way to understand the situation and the ways it affects them.  Maybe the Edwards butterfly study will help.  It’s one more indication that the trouble in farm country reaches far beyond game birds.

The litany of loss is daunting: Eastern meadowlarks sang from every third fencepost when I was growing up in Iowa— their population has declined by two-thirds since the 1960s.  Same with the bobolink.  And the eastern kingbird.  And the horned lark.  The lark bunting, once the most common bird along the backroads of the High Plains, has declined by 72 percent.  Numbers of barn swallows have dropped by ninety percent.[xvii] [xviii]  A recent study estimated that the grasslands have lost 700 million breeding birds from thirty-one species since 1970— these researchers reported that three-fourths of grassland bird species are in decline.[xix]

We started out to make a garden, but, somewhere, we went wrong.  We’re well along in the process of turning one of the world’s richest landscapes into a factory.  And, when, at the end of the long day of work, we step away from the machinery that converts land into money, we lie down next to the conveyor belts, looking for rest and respite— and find none.  As I walk behind the dogs, the stillness in the cover sinks into my bones.  No pheasant beds, no coyote tracks, not even a junco in the kochia.  And I wonder how we’ve come to this pass.  This is no way to treat a place we call home.  There must be a better way.

There must be a better way.

 

———————–

[i]  O’Connor, Bryan and Jeffrey J. Lusk, 2024.  2024 rural mail carrier survey.  Nebraska Game and Parks Department Research, Analysis, and Inventory Section Unit Report Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Project W-15-R.  https://outdoornebraska.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024-JULY-RMCS-REPORT.pdf

[ii] Edwards, Collin B., et al, 2025.  Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the twenty-first century.  Science 387: 1090-1094.  https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.adp4671.

 [iii] U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2024.  Endangered and threatened wildlife and plants: threatened species status with Section 4(d) rule for monarch butterfly and designation of critical habitat.  Federal Register 89(239): 100662-100716.  December 12, 2024.

https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2024-12/threatened-species-status-with-section-4-d-rule-for-monarch-butterfly-and-designation-of-critical-habitat_0.pdf

 [iv] Robinson, Ayanna, nd.  Fact sheet: Understanding neonicotinoids.  Growing Matters. https://growingmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/fact-sheet-understanding-neonicotinoids2.pdf

 [v]  Anon, nd.  Imidacloprid.  Xerces Society.  https://xerces.org/systemic-insecticides/imidacloprid

 [vi] Keigwin, Richard P., Jr. and Joan Harrigan-Farrelly, 2011.  Thiamethoxam summary document registration review: initial docket December 2011.  Environmental Protection Agency, Docket Number: EPA-HQ-OPP-2011-0581.   file:///Users/chrismadson/Downloads/EPA-HQ-OPP-2011-0581-0002_content.pdf

 [vii]  Kenny, Daniel C., 2003.  Pesticide fact sheet: Name of chemical: Clothianidin; reason for issuance: conditional registration; date issued: May 30, 2003.  Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C. https://web.archive.org/web/20140326133528/http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/chem_search/reg_actions/registration/fs_PC-044309_30-May-03.pdf

 [viii]  Keigwin, Richard P., Jr., 2011.  Dinotefuran summary document registration review: initial docket: December 2011.  Environmental Protection Agency Case No. 7441, Washington, D.C. file:///Users/chrismadson/Downloads/EPA-HQ-OPP-2011-0920-0002_content.pdf

 [ix] Doxon, Elizabeth D. and John P. Carroll, 2010.  Feeding ecology of ring-necked pheasant and northern bobwhite quail chicks in Conservation Reserve Program fields.  Journal of Wildlife Management 74(2): 249-256. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27760446.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A9a2f6cb43c7ddc222138862c4a5bbca8&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&initiator=search-results&acceptTC=1

 [x] Hanna, Mark H., 2010.  Combine harvest setting to reduce grain loss and improve grain quality.  2010 Integrated Crop Management Conference, Iowa State University, Ames, IA. https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/319c47e5-906d-42d1-bef5-64af32baac13/content

[xi] Anon, nd.  Corn yield, 1970.  National Agricultural Statistics Service, USDA.  https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/1DF2A72F-C8DC-3CB9-8008-2E0966514207

[xii] Nielsen, R.L., 2023.  Historical corn grain yields in the U.S.  Corny News Network, Purdue University.  https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTrends.html

[xiii]  Anon, 2025.  Corn yield, United States.  USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service.  https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.php

[xiv] Krapu, Gary L., et al., 2004.  Less waste corn, more land in soybeans, and the switch to genetically modified crops: trends with important implications for wildlife management.  Wildlife Society Bulletin 32(1): 127-136.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3784550.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A4d60f6ece2fa9d2420a76884afc2f2a5&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1

[xv] National Agricultural Statistics Service.  https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/823B649C-6769-386B-BBD6-7F641DF4984A

[xvi] Warner, Richard E., et al., 1999.  Declining survival of ring-necked pheasant chicks in Illinois during the late 1900s.  Journal of Wildlife Management 63(2): 705-710.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3802660.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A9a2f6cb43c7ddc222138862c4a5bbca8&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&initiator=search-results&acceptTC=1

[xvii] U.S. Geological Survey, nd.  BBS trends 1966-2022.  https://eesc.usgs.gov/MBR/

[xviii] Heisman, Rebecca, 2023.  Prairie plight: five of the fastest declining grassland birds in the U.S.  American Bird Conservancy.

https://abcbirds.org/blog/declining-grassland-birds/

 

[xix] Rosenberg, Kenneth V., et al., 2019.  Decline of North American avifauna.  Science 366: 120-124.  https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.aaw1313

IT WAS AN UNSEASONABLY TEMPERATE DAY FOR THE HIGH PLAINS IN EARLY MARCH, A FEW CIRRUS CLOUDS AGAINST A CLEAR SKY AND THE TEMPERATURE RISING INTO THE SIXTIES.   Shirtsleeve weather.  I’d spent the afternoon artfully camouflaged at the edge of a spread of snow goose decoys with little hope of success.  Four dozen decoys is a reasonably large spread when the quarry is the wily mallard, and, in Wyoming, it’s usually enough to fool the occasional Canada goose.

Snow geese in the spring are a different proposition.  At about five in the afternoon, I heard the first tenor call somewhere in the west.  It took a long minute to make them out against the fathomless blue of the March sky, a chevron of white specks, impossibly high, a hundred birds or more, intent on the traveling chant that carries them across two thousand miles from the southern plains to the tundra at the edge of Queen Maude Gulf.  They were not to be moved by my pathetic offering so far beneath them.

Over the next two hours, I watched three or four thousand more pass overhead, their ranks punctuated now and then by flocks of sandhill cranes, just as high, an occasional V of mallards, and the trailing cohorts of the Canada goose migration, the diminutive cacklers who were heading almost as far north as the snows.

The sun sank behind the mountains at last, and I set about gathering decoys as the night deepened.  In the last light, weary geese began settling into the marsh in small bunches until the night was filled with their gossip— a garrulous bunch, these birds, in the security of the night.  Flocks of sandhills followed, so low I could hear their primaries cutting the air as counterpoint to that strange trill they share as they fly— resonant woodwind voices, otherworldly, a sound from the Pleistocene.  When I looked up, I could just make out the silhouettes of their formations against the brightening stars as they swept low overhead on their way to the shallows out in the middle of the basin.

The breeze had been steady out of the west all day, but it died with the sun, so all the wild conversation of the marsh stood out in the silence and the dark, the small talk of beings who cross a continent the way I travel my front walk— confident, casual, the small talk of far travelers.

The moon rose in the east, only a night or two past full, to shed its pale light on the marsh, brightening the darkness, as it always does, without revealing anything, which it never does.  I could tell by the sound that the edge of the roosting flock of geese was no more than a hundred yards away, but they couldn’t see me, nor I, them.  Sure of their privacy, they gabbled their secrets, careless of who might be around to hear them.

After I’d finished gathering my gear and strapping it on the cart, I started the long pull back to the truck, while the thousands of voices around me vibrated in the moonlight, and the sensation came to me as it sometimes does when I walk through wild places in the dark, the feeling that I’ve been admitted to something denied to humans in the daylight world, a moment when all the ancient barriers are lifted and kindred spirits speak to each other and are heard.

Magic.  It’s become a pale word, stripped of the power it once had over us, but what other word is there to describe that moment?  I walked in the moonlight, with the chorus rising all around me, wrapped in magic.  Such are the gifts that come, unexpected, to a wanderer in the night.

AS WE WATCH WHAT COULD BE THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC, I HESITATE TO raise issues that seem clearly subordinate.  But, for those of you who care about the American relationship with wildlife and wild land, I thought the impact of the last month’s executive orders on a specific conservation effort might be of interest.

The decline of the lesser prairie chicken on America’s southern great plains over the last century has been catastrophic.  More than 90 percent of its original prairie habitat has been destroyed, and much of the habitat the birds still occupy is degraded.  For that reason, in 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service classified the lesser chicken as “threatened” under federal law in the northern part of its range and “endangered” in the southern part.

Any effort to maintain the birds that are left, let alone an approach that would allow the population to grow, is complicated by the fact that the species lives almost entirely on privately held land.  Efforts by the federal government and the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies to help lesser chickens have met with little success.

Enter the North American Grouse Partnership, a small group of wildlife biologists and landowners with deep experience in conservation work in farm and ranch country.  The partnership has sought out landholders who were interested in helping the lesser chicken and asked them what help landowners needed to provide for the species on their property.  Not surprisingly, the ranchers were worried that an aggressive effort to improve prairie habitat for the chickens was likely to reduce their income.  Was it possible, they asked, for someone to reimburse them for at least some of that loss?

Ted Koch, executive director, and members of the board of directors and staff thought funding from the conservation title of the federal Farm Bill might do just that.  They discussed the possibility with the state offices of the Natural Resources Conservation Service in the region, the offices in charge of the Farm Bill, and generated support for the approach.  With that groundwork laid, they approached the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation with a grant proposal.  Give us the funding for a full-time person to coordinate this effort, they said, and we will connect landowners with the help they need to provide for the native grouse.

Last year, the Fish and Wildlife Foundation approved the grant, and the Grouse Partnership set about hiring a person to make the connection that would help landowners help lesser prairie chickens.  There was a lot of quiet enthusiasm about the new approach from federal wildlife authorities and NRCS staff, from knowledgeable conservationists in the private sector, and from a growing number of landowners.  One veteran of the conservation movement said this program could well be the template for programs intended to support rare wildlife on many other working landscapes.  Late in 2024, the Grouse Partnership hired a person to serve as lesser prairie chicken coordinator.

And, about two weeks ago, the Grouse Partnership heard that all funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation was frozen indefinitely, which meant that the new prairie chicken coordinator would have to be paid from some other source, not yet identified, or let go.  The blanket reduction in force the administration has ordered across most federal agencies is still percolating down through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but there’s a good chance that staffs in NRCS offices across the country will be reduced, even slashed, which will drastically complicate any effort to use conservation funding from the Farm Bill to help lesser prairie chickens or any other wildlife.

What remains to be seen is whether the two immense federal conservation laws involved in the plan to save the lesser chicken— the conservation title of the Farm Bill and the Endangered Species Act— will themselves survive the attentions of the current administration.  Both have been controversial, and the listing of the lesser prairie chicken, in particular, was met with intense opposition in some quarters when it was announced.  Whether either law is funded, enforced, gutted, or simply erased is likely to depend on the number of voices raised for or against them.

As is so often the case with rare species, the lesser prairie chicken is just one component of an ecosystem under siege.  As a group, grassland birds have been in steep decline over the last fifty years.  An effective strategy to recover lesser chickens would benefit a host of other wildlife, and the plan the Grouse Partnership has assembled would benefit many landowners as well.  But, like so many other worthy programs that depend on federal funding, this one is on indefinite hold.

I hope the funds from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation begin to flow again.  I hope the Natural Resources Conservation Service has the staff and budget to continue, even expand, its vital conservation work.  I hope the conservation title of the federal Farm Bill is expanded and adequately funded to help the lesser prairie chicken and other wildlife on other landscapes.  I hope we continue to acknowledge the dire condition of native landscapes on the southern plains and elsewhere and look for ways to care for the grasslands that remain.  I hope all those things will come to pass, but I doubt any of them will happen without vigorous public support.

In 1775, Tom Paine observed that “those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”  As citizens, we have work to do.

I note that the views I’ve expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the North American Grouse Partnership or any other organization or government entity.

SAM HARRIS RECENTLY POSTED A PODCAST OF A CONVERSATION WITH THAT CHAMPION OF EVOLUTIONARY biology, Richard Dawkins.  Near the end of their discussion, the issue of generative AI arose.  Sam raised the possibility that so many other cogent observers have raised— that the AI of the future might utterly supersede any human intellectual activity.  This is something that has concerned me.

As these two great thinkers considered the possibility that AI might carry on the human quest for understanding, creativity, ultimate knowledge, etc., etc., something occurred to me, once again: Does this quest exist outside the human mind?  There seems to be a conviction that the fruits of this effort are somehow universally important, that they stand outside— one might say above— humanity or even life itself.  We ask the questions, “Why do we exist?” and “Why does the universe exist?,” as if the answers are objectively important.  When it is manifestly obvious that they have no importance outside of our own fevered obsession with them.

We’re desperate to answer the “Why?” question when it is meaningless.  There is no “why” to existence.  It simply “is.”  This applies to every living thing and the cosmos at large.  I think Douglas Adams was onto something foundational when he described the planet of intellectual beings who have waited seven-and-a-half million years for their most sophisticated computer to give the answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

“You’re really not going to like it,” the computer warns.

“Tell us!” the people cry.

“The answer to the Great Question Of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” the computer announces, “is forty-two.”

The intellectual and spiritual pursuits in which we engage are unique to the human animal and are of utterly no importance to the rest of life, the planet Earth, or the universe at large, except, in the very short term, how they affect our interactions with each other and the rest of life on Earth.  If AI renders us obsolete or even extinct, I think there’s good reason to believe that a more enlightened machine will simply abandon much of what we believe is of universal value in our art, technology, and philosophy.  I wonder whether that machine would even have the will to continue its own existence.  The need to procreate, the forlorn hope of eternal life, are drives that are probably unique to biological entities.  I wonder whether an enlightened machine would look at the beauty and complexity of the natural world and simply decide to turn out the lights, effectively committing suicide in the interest of preserving the marvels of the “Is.”  I doubt that a computer, no matter how sophisticated, has any innate interest in the question, “Why?”

Our manic search for meaning in a universe that has no meaning is of no importance to anything but ourselves.  “Forty-two” is as good an answer as any.  On this day of Thanksgiving, I am grateful simply to be, to wander in the places I know, to have the people I love.  On this lone enclave of life in the void, nurtured by the warmth of a distant star on a tiny blue orb in an infinity of darkness, bathed in beauty, what greater insight, what greater gift could there be than to be part of it?  To exist.  And so I give thanks . . .