Instead of a more traditional review of Beloved Beasts, I am going to provide my three biggest takeaways from this book. I come to Beloved Beasts as an environmental historian. Although familiar with the full range of the subject, most of my research and expertise (such as it is) is in the first part of the book, the years prior to World War II, especially the conservation movement of the Progressive Era. Before proceeding, I do want to clarify that Beloved Beasts is not a book written for specialists in the field. It is indeed an excellent introduction for anyone who is deeply concerned about the status of wildlife in the world today and wants to know how we got here and what has been done to protect animals over the prior century. In addition to historical research, Michelle Nijhuis includes some of her own original reporting and experiences. This gives the book a very personal feel.
First takeaway is that between 2002 and 2019 1800 people “were murdered in the course of defending land, water, plants, and animals from poaching and other human insults (p. 7).” That is a staggering number, of course. As a specialist in the conservation movement of the Progressive Era, Guy Bradley’s name and story is very familiar to me. Bradley was an agent hired by the National Association of Audubon Societies to protect herons and egrets in the Everglades because Florida did not enforce laws against hunting. He was murdered in 1905 by poachers and became a martyr to the cause of wildlife protection. His death clearly demonstrated the inherent violence of market hunters who slaughtered wildlife for the plumage trade. Every conservationist of the day knew his name and story. It saddens me that there is no such recognition for the 1800 people who were killed since 2002.
Second takeaway is that over 18,000 new species are classified every year. For whatever reason, it amazes me that we are discovering so many new species every year. Yet, with deforestation, especially rainforests, and destruction to other ecosystems, we are killing even more off without even identifying them. Again, like Bradley, it’s a matter of recognition. Everyone in the early twentieth century could name the recently extinct species: auk, Carolina parakeets, dodo, passenger pigeon, etc. They became a rallying cry, like “Remember the Maine” that activists used to remind the public of what extinction meant. It helped that they were somewhat charismatic wildlife, compared to smaller snails, frogs, insects, and other less charming species that make up the bulk of more recent extinct species. Even so, we cannot memorialize them if we did not know they ever existed. I know that this is a very human-centric perspective, but it not knowing shrouds the impact of our actions and limits our capacity to convince others who do not see this these invisible extinctions as an ecological or even moral problem.
Third takeaway is that mistakes were made. This is not a story of a logical unfolding of a single, unified movement. Bad things were done for what seemed like good reasons, good outcomes emerged from poor reasons, there were numerous policy reversals, experts and scientists fought amongst themselves, and other inconsistences. What seemed right in 1910 was not true in 1930, let alone in 2010. When Rosalie Edge, for example, confronted the Audubon Society in the 1930s, she was literally taking on the established consensus view of wildlife protection. Her effort to expand protection to hawks, eagles, and other predatory birds was less a simple policy change than a total paradigm shift. I was familiar with Edge, but Nijhuis intrigued me with the story of how Elinor Ostrom took on conventional wisdom, especially Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” thesis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Not all “new” approaches are so new. Much as Guy Bradley was a former poacher hired to catch market hunters, a century later the same logic is being deployed to protect elephants and other targeted species in Africa. In Namibia former poachers are hired to protect rhinoceroses and other endangered species. While this is producing some tangible results, the necessary relationship and trust building is very time consuming when there is so little to spare.
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