WILDLIFE.

Prehistory makes clear that our ancestors continuously conceptualized their relations with the myriad forms of plants and animals with whom their existence was interwoven. These ancient musings, more mythological than scientific, were the first sustained efforts to comprehend the order of nature. The noun wildlife has been in use no more than 125 years. But the swirl of ideas around wildlife, however inchoate, is nearly as old as the human species.

Reconstructions of the conceptual dimensions of wildlife prior to the advent of agriculture are based on carvings, paintings, burial, and other material artifacts as well as the study of contemporaneous indigenous cultures living outside the cocoon of industrial civilization. While generalization remains provisional, the Paleolithic era of hunting and gathering was marked by notions of plants and especially animals as totems and dual presences. As totems the other species taught their two-legged kin the ways of the world: survival more than anything else. As dual presences the others encouraged the notion that all creatures were shape-shifters, bound up in the ongoing cyclical process of life in relationships based on reciprocity rather than dominion. The "economy of nature" (itself a modern term) was conceptualized as sacramental, based on the myth of the eternal return.

The New Stone Age (c. 15,000–10,000 b.p.) slowly but inexorably overturned the established notion of one creation binding all creatures together. The cultivation of cereal grasses and domestication of animals led to a binary categorization of the wild and tame. The wild encompassed the plants and animals not under human control. Unwanted plants intruding upon fields became weeds. Population blooms of insects that ravaged the fields became plagues. Animals that preyed on livestock became predators.

The tame included the lands and domesticated species under the control of civilization. Domestication entails selection for characteristics that, however desirable for human purposes, would in many cases be lethal in a natural environment. Cereal grasses were valued because their seeds were retained in the head so that they could be harvested. Domesticated cattle were valued because they were docile and amenable to herding.

As permanent settlement spread, lingering memories of a time before agriculture when humans were intimately entwined with the others were expressed in sources such as the Gilgamesh epic and the Old Testament. Psalm 104 praises the glory of a creator god and the intricacy of the living creation. Even as the psalmist sang, there was a dawning realization that humankind was not a good steward: "I brought you into a fruitful land, to enjoy its fruit and the goodness of it; but when you entered upon it you defiled my land, and made the home I gave you an abomination" (Jeremiah 2:7).

Changing Conceptions of Wildlife in Darwin's Century

Nineteenth-century evolutionary theory and the discovery of Paleolithic archeological materials established three fundamental ideas. First, that biophysical evolution existed on a temporal scale far beyond conventional schemes of history and culture. Second, the human species itself had a natural history that, however poorly understood, clearly linked the "Descent of Man," as Charles Darwin put it, with an ancient and continuing evolutionary stream. And third, evolutionary theory made clear that the domestication of plants and animals was little more than tinkering with natural history for human purposes, especially economic ones.

While the nineteenth century did not overturn the modern notion that humankind was the master and possessor of nature, a somewhat chastened estimate of our place in nature emerged. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) observed in 1838 that hunting and trapping had eliminated the mountain lion and black bear from most of New England. He challenged his coevals to reconsider the fate of a culture that was losing connection with wild places and creatures. Near the end of the century, John Muir (1838–1914) argued for the creation of national parks as refugia for wildlife and as places to nourish the human spirit. While protective legislation dates to the early 1600s (e.g., Bermuda's protection of the cahow and the green turtle), the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked the beginnings of systematic approach to the conservation of wildlife. Yellowstone (1872) was the first national park in America. Created primarily to protect unique geological features, Yellowstone's value for wildlife preservation soon became apparent. President Theodore Roosevelt's (1858–1919) and Gifford Pinchot's (1865–1946) efforts around the turn of the century were instrumental in legislative efforts to create a system of public lands that offered protection for wildlife. Progressive resource conservation found many allies, such as sport hunters, who reacted vigorously to the depredations of market hunting on wildlife. (Predators did not enjoy legislative protection until passage of the Endangered Species Act near the end of the twentieth century).

Wildlife in the Twentieth Century

The early-to mid-twentieth century was marked by an increased scientific understanding of wildlife and an increased willingness on the part of nations to protect it. The International Union for the Protection of Nature (now the World Conservation Union) was established in 1948 and gave birth shortly thereafter to the World Wildlife Fund. These and other global organizations, such as the United Nations, and conventions, such as the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972), were dedicated to protecting wildlife through a variety of strategies. These included moratoriums on trade in endangered species and the creation of reserves, such as those designated as World Natural Heritage Sites.

Despite such efforts, the continuing humanization of the planet made the long-term survival prospects for wildlife increasingly uncertain. As the twentieth century ended, the biological sciences conclusively established the reality of an anthropogenic mass extinction of terrestrial flora and fauna. Estimates of human-caused extinction rates ranged from a low of one hundred to a high of one thousand times greater than natural rates. Humankind's increasing population and subsequent levels of economic demand led to rapid development of the few remaining areas, such as Amazonia, that were primary habitats for wildlife. Patterns of human settlement in developed nations, including sprawl, urbanization, and the fragmentation of habitat, increasingly impacted remnant populations of wild plants and animals. Less direct impacts on wildlife were the consequence of the increase in global temperature, predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to increase by 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the twenty-first century. Given such dramatic increase, the possibility of retreat by heat sensitive species appeared doubtful.

Progress in scientific understanding was paralleled by ethical advance. The pioneering work of Thoreau and Muir was followed in the twentieth century by a variety of ecological ethics that charged humanity with obligations to conserve wild places and things, and to restore those species, such as the wolf, that had been thoughtlessly endangered. These ranged from the secular, such Aldo Leopold's (1887–1948) land ethic, A Sand County Almanac (1949), to the religious caring for creation movement that followed Lynn White, Jr.'s charge in a 1967 issue of Science magazine that Jews and Christians were to blame for ecological crisis.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1961), which focused on the consequences for avian species of the toxic chemicals used in a war against nature, marked the point where the environmental movement became a mass phenomenon. Membership in organizations dedicated to the conservation, preservation, and restoration of wildlife soared. As public interest increased in America, legislative action, such as the passage of the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), and the Endangered Species Act (1973), followed. Such laws, and similar ones passed in other nations, are the cornerstone of wildlife protection.

Wildlife in the New Millennium

As the twenty-first century begins, our ideas of wildlife are being transformed through the advance of the natural and human sciences. Humankind has engendered a mass extinction event and caused "the death of birth" (i.e., disrupted the processes of speciation), thus creating uncertain prospects for plants and animals, and ourselves, over the millennium. Three pivotal themes stand out.

Economically considered, the value of nature, including the plant and animal species (the total number of which are unknown to the nearest order of magnitude), has been calculated to exceed the value of the artifice of the human economy by two to one. Potential uses of great significance in medicine and agriculture alone give ample reason to work toward international solutions for the biodiversity crisis.

Humanistically considered, interdisciplinary inquiry has established a close connection between the extinction of experience and the extinction of wildlife. Cultural diversity goes hand in hand with biodiversity. The almost unchecked processes of globalization, legitimated under the banner of progress, and euphemistically termed cultural homogenization and assimilation, are rushing literally thousands of indigenous cultures, their languages, and the associated wild places and things to extinction.

Finally, humankind vitally needs the others in ways that we barely comprehend. Our natural history reveals that continual close interactions with the plants and animals are the norm. The small interval of time beginning with the Neolithic revolution and continuing to the present is a mere moment in that long history. There is increasing agreement across a variety of scientific communities that we ignore our continued need for and value of the others at great peril.

See also Biology ; Ecology ; Environment ; Nature .

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Max Oelschlaeger