Radical Environmentalists: Radical in Whose Mind?

In just about every other speech he makes, former Senator Rick Santorum, when he’s not proselytizing and driving his religious myths into the electoral process and attempting to erase the distinct line between church and state, cries foul at the “radical environmentalists” who fight and question what the oil, gas and coal companies are doing to our environment. He sneers as he utters the phrase “radical environmentalists” with the same intensity as when he decries Satan’s attack on, and infiltration of, America and American values. He conveniently forgets/ignores/ disregards/conceals the fact that he was a spokesman and defacto lobbyist for the coal industry after his failed attempt at reelection to the Senate in 2006. An online article published by Mother Jones  discusses how, after his defeat, Rick Santorum received $142,500 for fronting for Consol Energy, one of the largest coal mining companies in the country, which Santorum depicted as a local Pennsylvania mining concern. During his tenure in the Senate, Santorum also received more than $73,800 in donations from Consol at the same time the coal company lobbied Congress “on pollution limits, mine reclamation, worker health benefits, and tax policy” and the industry spent millions on its fictitious “clean coal” campaign. Paul Blumenthal’s Huffington Post piece, posted January 5, 2012, links Santorum, while still in office, to disgraced Republican Congressman Tom Delay, convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and the Republican/Christian fundamentalist, anti-environmental lobbying efforts of the K Street Project.

Santorum never mentions any of these connections when he sneers his “radical environmentalist” taunts before his like-minded audiences.  After all, he is just a company man defending his livelihood.

Radical environmentalist is one of those skeletal, value-loaded phrases, without much meat attached to it. It reeks of panic and phobia. It also echoes the labels (and threats) put on a radical environmentalist from the 1960s who, in her book Silent Spring, identified the dangers of saturating our ecosystems and food chains with persistent insecticides. Chemical company executives, using scare tactics, claimed that Rachel Carson, a reserved marine biologist, wished to return to times of crops lost to great insect plagues resulting in national and worldwide famine. They referred to her as a fanatic in the cult of the balance of nature. Some (many) birds, fish, beneficial insects, and other wildlife species were poisoned and brought to the edge of extinction by disrupted reproductive cycles and pitiful chemical-induced birth defects. Entire ecosystems were in danger of destruction, but the millions of pounds of DDT applied to farmlands and forests and ultimately our lakes and rivers, in the name of national interest put fortunes into the pockets of chemical companies.

When did the American public hand over rights to the environment to corporations? Never is when. If Rachel Carson hadn’t spoken out how many species would be gone now and how many more waterways would be poisoned beyond reclamation? How many cancers? How many birth defects? Ask the chemical companies that ridiculed her findings in the face of repeated scientific conclusions.

Today’s “radical environmentalists” fight, among other things, Rick Santorums’s unfounded, anti-environmental, ant-science scare-tactic claims that environmentalists are destroying “clean coal” jobs and endangering our national interest, not to mention his paycheck. Sound familiar?

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a  hardcover version at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and the University of Michigan Press, www.press.umich.edu which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book, log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.

The Sandhill Crane: Tastes Like Pork

Double-crested cormorants faced the challenge of becoming “overabundant.” Their numbers were so low for so long that more than one human generation grew up never seeing large gatherings of cormorants, either at their northern breeding grounds or favorite southern wintering quarters. When cormorant numbers rebounded after DDT was finally banned in 1972, fishermen, politicians and even bird watchers were astonished at their numbers. And for some, even though cormorant populations were probably still below their historic highs, the bird’s large flocks were seen as “out of control” and the birds were eating too many fish. So they, meaning catfish farmers, fishermen, and government technicians, shot them – by the tens of thousands. The remains of the birds were usually composted onsite or elsewhere since the meat is inedible. A cruel, terrible waste of food chain energy and biomass.

Now it is the Sandhill Crane, Grus canadensis, that comes under the gun as an “out-of-control” species. After decades of conservation efforts in many locations to protect thinning numbers of rare sandhill cranes, threatened due to overhunting in the 1930s, conventional wisdom now turns to lethal measures to control a perceived overabundance. The evolutionary line of cranes goes back about 10 million years, with distinct sandhill crane ancestors appearing about 2.5 million years ago. Like cormorants, there are several subspecies of sandhills, but unlike cormorants some are rare or endangered.

Sandhill cranes, typically do not deal with fish in their diets, so they’re not in competition with fishermen or fish farmers. The cranes are basically opportunistic herbivores, living off whatever plants or seeds are available, so they can manage to find food in drier upland areas as well as shallow wetlands. Sandhill cranes dine on wild berries, seeds of many kinds, and when the possibility presents itself, small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates such as snails and insects. What actually brings them into conflict with man, farmers in particular, is their decided taste for cultivated foods such as corn and wheat. Sandhills frequently target recently planted corn and wheat fields, much like cormorants raid the densely stocked catfish ponds in the South in search of an easy meal.

To protect their fields, farmers in Wisconsin are requesting the creation of legal hunting seasons for sandhill cranes. More than a dozen states, with more in the offing, have established seasons, bag limits and takes for this once rare bird. Unlike cormorants, however, the flesh of sandhill cranes is edible and is reported by hunters to taste much like pork chops, so the birds are not merely killed, but also consumed.

Regardless of whether the carcasses are destined for the compost or the dinner table, it seems, at best, inefficient to spend decades reviving a rare, threatened species only to turn around and put it in hunters’ sights. What is really ignored here is the questioning of why the birds feed at agricultural sites rather than at open upland ranges or food-rich shallow wetlands. The one-word answer is habitat. Every day more and more open land is taken out of the natural food chain and converted from prairie or open range or upland habitat or wetland to real estate – development or reclamation projects, leaving wildlife without a natural home, driving it into conflict with humans.

In science fiction literature and physics thought experiments it’s common to postulate what happens when human subjects are locked in suspended animation and time goes on without them. When they awaken the world has changed and there is no place for them in the future. The return of nearly-extinct species sometimes falls into this type of scenario. There often comes a point when threatened wildlife species regain some of their original stature, attempt to re-colonize former territories and expand into new ones, but during the decades of their absence people forgot what they were, how plentiful their numbers had been, and their place in the ecosystem. In that future the returning wildlife has lost its claim to respectable habitat and moves into territory appropriated by humans in its absence, setting the stage once again for lethal control measures of “overabundant” species, even the ones that taste like pork.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a  hardcover version at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and the University of Michigan Press, www.press.umich.edu which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book, log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.  

Natural Cormorant Controls

One of the major issues I discuss in my book published by the University of Michigan Press, The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict, is the role the southern catfish industry played in the extraordinary recovery of cormorant populations following the species’ near annihilation due to DDT.

The ban of DDT in the United States in 1972 promised a better future for Phalacrocorax auritus, the double-crested cormorant. Every year thereafter the birds would face lower burdens of the persistent insecticides in their food, eggs, offspring, and environment. What effectively was a booster shot to the cormorant recovery was the virtually simultaneous depletion of predators such as Atlantic salmon and lake trout in the Great Lakes due to overfishing and pollution. As the predators disappeared, populations of both native and non-native forage fish species, preferred food of cormorants, bloomed entirely out of proportion. The birds’ higher reproductive success rates coupled with massive schools of prey there for the taking at their breeding grounds drove cormorant numbers toward previous historic highs. One of the remaining population-controlling factors was the food sources at the cormorant’s southern wintering grounds.

At about the same time commercial fisheries crashed on the Great Lakes, southern row-crop farmers turned to the channel catfish as an alternate or supplemental crop. Catfish farmers never anticipated the fantastic growth in cormorant numbers, so gave little thought to protecting the heavily stocked catfish ponds from wintering cormorants. Thousand, perhaps tens of thousands of double-crested cormorants, fed all winter on the millions of unguarded catfish offered up by the growers. With rich plentiful food at both ends of their migration, cormorant numbers surged further – some local populations doubling in three years. Soaring bird numbers brought increased conflicts with Great Lakes fishermen and southern catfish producers resulting in cruel culling programs legally and illegally killing and wounding thousands of wild, federally protected cormorants.

The issue of the catfish industry affecting cormorant numbers should be taken into account when considering future lethal measures in cormorant management. Many catfish farmers facing huge increases in the cost of corn/soy catfish feed products closed some or all of their production ponds. Some were drained, plowed over, and restored to corn and soybean production. Other ponds were converted to the raising of largemouth bass, cultivated in less densely populated ponds, making them more difficult targets for P. auritus to attack. In either case, fewer catfish were available to hungry wintering cormorants, reducing the number of fatted, healthy birds prepared for the arduous migration north. From 2002 to 2011 every southern catfish-producing state experienced large decreases in acreage dedicated to channel catfish cultivation; overall acreage for U.S. catfish production shrank by 49% in those nine years.

This decrease in U.S. catfish production does not at all relate to the continuing, if not increasing, popularity of catfish fillets as table fare. In the seafood game, domestic farm-raised channel catfish products rank sixth in the United States. The gap in the U.S. between lower catfish production and increased consumption has been filled by foreign imports – particularly Pangasius catfish, farm-raised on the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. If the term Pangasius catfish doesn’t ring a bell it’s because domestic catfish producers lobbied U.S. government agencies to prevent importers from calling this product “catfish.” In American stores it is marketed as Basa fish or bocourti, also two unfamiliar names.

On top of cormorant predation, high production costs, low market prices, and foreign competition, American catfish producers faced another opponent with uncontrollable parameters – nature and the epic floods of 2011. Catfish farms along the Mississippi River Delta faced storm-driven waters which flooded roads, reduced feed supplies, topped their catfish pond levies, released their fish stock into the wild, and in some cases flooded their buildings. The damages and loss of production are yet to be tabulated, but surely what it means is, temporarily at least, catfish farming and production will be reduced even further.

So, all in all, what does this have to do with brutal, bloody sanctioned cormorant kills? Double-crested cormorants have little taste for corn or soybeans. They’re not grain-eating crows or geese; cormorants eat fish and have a predilection for catfish, particularly the penned-up, farm-raised variety. Fewer ponds produce fewer catfish – less winter chow for cormorants. The birds will have to return to foraging the Mississippi River and its tributaries for wild bluegills, perch, and wild channel catfish. And the whole package taken together means fewer healthy cormorants producing fewer healthy offspring.

Since the availability of food is a major limiting force for the expansion or contraction of wildlife populations an alternative then to government contract technicians killing tens of thousands of wild birds might be to let nature simply take its course. The birds wintering in the delta migrate from the northeast and mid-west so anything that places limits on their numbers in the South will send fewer cormorants to their traditional northern breeding grounds and cormorant populations may find newer, reduced numbers, naturally. And maybe the rifles and shotguns can be put away – at least for a while.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a trade hardcover version at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and the University of Michigan Press, http://www.press.umich.edu/  which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability. 

For insights into the book log on to my Author Page at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild .