The Second Century

In Iowa, the Union Slough National Wildlife Refuge is restoring a tiny piece of the state to tallgrass prairie, a globally endangered ecosystem supporting 300 plant species per acre and critically important to vanishing grassland birds. The only way to do this is to cut down invading trees. But refuge manager George Maze and his staff are getting beaten up by tree lovers who accuse them of "playing God" and initiating "a scorched earth policy." Now schoolkids are sending the refuge e-mails, begging it to stop cutting trees. Americans perceive naturally treeless landscapes as somehow impoverished. They have it straight from the founder of Arbor Day, Julius Sterling Morton, who in 1870 called forth "a grand army of husbandmen ... to battle against the timberless prairies."

Ellicott Slough National Wildlife Refuge, part of the San Francisco Bay refuge complex, is razing America's biggest weed, the bluegum eucalyptus. The eucs are destroying the habitat of native birds, and choking and poisoning (with toxic drippings) oaks, blackberries, and other native vegetation that sustains endangered Santa Cruz long-toed salamanders. For this work, complex manager Marge Kolar reports that she and her people "got creamed." Eucs are trees, and all trees are "lovely." The public has it straight from Joyce Kilmer.

At Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, mute swans from Europe have destroyed vast beds of native bay grass and eliminated the state's only colonies of least terns and one of two colonies of black skimmers (both state-threatened). But all swans are "graceful." The public has it straight from Tchaikovsky. Locals feed mute swans, and four years ago they frightened the state into forbidding managers to kill them. Since then Maryland's mute swan population has doubled. Last December mute swan feeder-fancier Joyce M. Hill won her long legal battle against the Interior Department, thereby protecting this alien species under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, despite the fact that it doesn't migrate like native ducks, geese, and swans. Lethal control—and even a state hunting season that would at least let mutes share a little of the pressure placed on native waterfowl—is still possible legally. Not politically. "It's absurd to call them nonnative," Hill told me. "They've been here for years and years and years."

Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, near Florida's Kennedy Space Center, is infested with feral hogs. They consume vast quantities of sea-turtle eggs and the eggs and young of ground-nesting birds, plus grubs, tubers, and acorns; in the process, they tear up soil and native vegetation, clearing the way for exotics. For the past decade the refuge has enlisted trappers to catch and market the hogs for meat. About 3,000 are removed each year, indicating that the population isn't being reduced. Still, the animal-rights community wants them sterilized, not killed.

The refuge system's backlog of control work for invasive plants and animals is $150 million, and yet the agency doesn't spend a tenth of this annually. Moreover, for every year it delays, the cost of control doubles. "Cooling the Hotspots," a comprehensive new report by Audubon, has set the cost of invasive species to the American economy at $130 billion annually. Another cost: 14 million acres of wildlife habitat lost each year—an area equal to a seven-mile-wide swath from coast to coast. While there are ample vehicles in place to deal with exotics if Congress would cough up the funds, it's considering three important bills: the Noxious Weed Control Act, the Species Protection and Conservation of the Environment Act, and the Nutria Eradication and Control Act. Indicative of the scope of the disaster is that they're being sponsored by an alliance of heroes of the environment, like Representative Mark Udall (D-CO), and heroes of extractive industry, like Senator Larry Craig (R-ID).

Meanwhile, there's a $900 million backlog for maintenance and a $1.8 billion backlog for hiring. Buildings are falling apart, and most refuges don't even have a biologist. As horrible as this sounds, it's better than it has been. "Five years ago the maintenance backlog was growing by 20 percent a year," says Dan Ashe (Bill's son), who was chief of refuges when I interviewed him. "Last year it was stable. You can't go to a refuge now and not see the effects of the sustained investment. Audubon and the other members of the CORE [Cooperative Alliance for Refuge Enhancement] group have had a huge impact on our rising budget fortunes. In 1997 we had $178 million for operations and maintenance. For 2003 we got $368 million."

Mike Daulton, Audubon's assistant director of government relations, acknowledges that the Bush administration "has been pretty good about asking for money to run the refuge system." He explains that the system has bipartisan backing and offers the President a chance to fulfill one of his few environmental campaign promises.

Still, Daulton points out, refuges are in deplorable condition. I saw what he meant at Pelican Island, the showcase. There's not even a secure shed in which to store equipment. Recently an ATV was stolen. When jetskis flush birds or motorboats blast through manatee-protection zones, there's no law-enforcement officer to make the bust. The refuge's 2002 base funding of $300,000 required a $100,000 transfusion from the regional office just to cover salaries.

There are friends of the refuge system in the Bush administration, none truer than Interior's Craig Manson, assistant secretary for fish, wildlife, and parks. War veterans, seeking to emphasize history at the expense of wildlife, would have gotten Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge turned over to the Park Service had not Manson intervened. "People don't have enough contact with nature," he said. "We need to get them onto refuges. Otherwise we lose support for conservation values." Manson correctly answered "exotics" when I asked him to name the single most insidious threat to the refuge system. When I inquired if, in the face of ferocious public opposition, it was really necessary to kill such beloved creatures as mute swans, he said, "That's simply what has to be done."

But for every hand in the Bush administration reaching out to help refuges, another reaches out from higher up to slap it and the system down. For example, high-ranking Bush officials saw refuge chief Dan Ashe, a passionate defender of the system, as part of the reason there hasn't been drilling on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As one manager put it, "Dan wore a scarlet 'CE,' for Clinton Environmentalist." So in March, Ashe got disappeared to a corner where he is "revitalizing science."