We're Winning

In 1971 the Corps of Engineers completed what it called "improvements" to Florida's Kissimmee River—that is, converting this winding, flower-shrouded waterway to a straight, shadeless gutter, excising its life and magic, even the magic of its name, which became "C-38." In the spring of 2001, when Audubon sent me to report on the restoration of the river and its wetlands, I met young environmentalists who were dispirited because only 22 of the river's 56 miles were being put back in the original channel.

So I told them how I felt in 1977 when Gray's Sporting Journal sent me to Arkansas to report on "the Big Ditch," the grandest river gutterization project the Corps had ever undertaken. Two hundred and thirty-two miles of the Cache River system were to be forced into a riprapped ditch. Almost a quarter-million acres of swamps and bottomland hardwoods were to be drained and planted to surplus soybeans, thereby eliminating the continent's most important wintering area for mallards and one of its top breeding areas for wood ducks. With local environmental activists I inspected the seven miles of the project already completed, sinking to my knees in mud, climbing spoil banks where icebergs of wet dirt calved into a chocolate sea. With all the money and jobs at stake, with all the rich, powerful agribusiness moguls hissing into the ears of politicians, stopping the Corps seemed hopeless. But it wasn't. The demise of the Big Ditch forced the federal government permanently out of the business of gutterizing major rivers.

Today property rights zealots—funded by and fronting for the extractive industry—are making noise and getting listened to. Of the countless despicable people I've encountered in 34 years of environmental muckraking, they leave all others in the dust. But they are to the 21st century what mosquitoes are to spring. We didn't have them in the 1970s, because environmentalists lacked the political power to inconvenience industry.

If you doubt this, consider the kinds of environmental issues seriously debated back then. For instance, in the May 1974 Massachusetts Wildlife, I reported on a 400-foot-high dam planned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Arizona Power Authority. It would have flooded "54 miles of gorge"—the gorge being the Grand Canyon. Now imagine how bureaucrats proposing such a project in 2004 would be doing after the Catherine Schmitts of America got finished with them.

Readers of the July 1975 Audubon were relieved to learn that the Energy Research and Development Authority, after spending $750,000, had shelved its Pacer H-Bomb program, whereby two large hydrogen bombs would be detonated daily (730 per year) in a salt cavity filled with water—the better to produce steam for generating electricity—in Texas, Louisiana, or Mississippi.

In May 1971 Audubon readers were invited to send in for a pamphlet so that they might better oppose bounties (some on gray wolves) that were still being paid in 30 states. Even in the late 1980s, when I became an adviser to the Wolf Fund—the group that did more than any other private entity to get wolves back into Yellowstone National Park—wolf recovery seemed hopeless. According to Montana Congressman Ron Marlenee, wolves were "cockroaches in your attic." Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson announced that "wolves chase women in Russia." Montana Senator Conrad Burns assured the public that "there'll be a dead child within a year." Idaho Senator Steve Symms warned schoolchildren that wolves "pose a real danger to humans."

But one evening, late in the winter of 1995, I turned on the 11:00 p.m. news and saw a friend—a biologist, an environmental activist, an Earth Day product, and the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Mollie Beattie was toting a caged wolf, making good on her promise to personally return the last missing ecological part to our dearest and oldest national park.

I envy young environmentalists of the 21st century, but I feel bad for them, too. They don't know what it feels like to win big against seemingly impossible odds. When I started out, America and the world were environmentally lawless. There was no Endangered Species Act, no Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, no Clean Water Act, no Clean Air Act, no National Environmental Policy Act, no National Forest Management Act. In 1970 I remember standing on the steps of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife field headquarters and arguing with a colleague, Joe, about the banning of DDT. "It will never happen," he told me. When DDT was banned two years later, he said, "It won't make any difference."

For a while it didn't. The March 1976 Audubon reported "considerable gloomy speculation" about the plight of endangered bald eagles in the Lower 48—more birds dying than hatching, fewer than a thousand nesting pairs. Today there are an estimated 7,000 nesting pairs. The September 1975 Audubon reported that 300 brown pelicans transplanted from Florida to Louisiana—"the Pelican State"—had died from lethal doses of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons. Today Louisiana has more than 13,000 nesting pairs. In 1972 I was assigned by the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife to write an article on the peregrine falcon in the East—a history piece, because the species had been extirpated from the region. By 1999 peregrines had fully recovered, and they were removed from the Endangered Species List.

The hopelessness I felt about DDT in 1970 was nothing compared with what Rachel Carson felt when she started her campaign against this World War II hero. Writing a book about DDT seemed impossible; she was a nature writer, not an investigative reporter. Barely had she taken pen to paper when she was assailed by arthritis, flu, intestinal virus, sinus infections, staph infections, ulcers, phlebitis, and breast cancer. She didn't get discouraged; she got mad. Her ulcers, she told her editor, "might have waited till the book was done." Radiation treatments were "a serious diversion of time." She found the phlebitis that prevented her from walking "quite trying""not for herself but for "poor Roger," her adopted son.