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A chapter discussing a definition for the work needed, the needs for change, education and training within the field and within agencies, the effects of the administrative structures, and the influence of "private knowledge."
I am substantially optimistic that people can achieve an environment in which they may attain their humanity. I believe that animals may be an important, if not an essential part, of such an environment. My optimism persists in the face of unprecedented abundance, influence, and rate of occurrence of environment problems. I justify such optimism by evidence and belief that there now exist means to eliminate and to solve most of the problems. When processes are seen and new ideas emerge, they have a power of their own to yank specific solutions from the fertile pools of discussion among experts and from the unfettered imaginations of non-specialists. They have power to generate action to achieve an environment fit for all beasts, human or otherwise.
My objective within this book is to suggest a rationally valid approach to the management of the total forest environment, not just of the faunal resource there. I wish to communicate what it means to have an optimal wildland system. Only by probing weaknesses, protecting strengths, pointing to needs, and showing some solutions in this realm of management can change occur. I am critical of certain aspects of past work, not out of malice but concern. The words for causing change may produce pain, but the alternative, it seems to me, is that people will continue to suboptimize the forest faunal resource, and thus the total natural environment.
From my experiences with students and men and women of the wildlife profession, I know there exists an iceberg-like source of energy, creativity, and untapped intellectual ability. I have been impressed by their enthusiasm and dedication to wildlife. They sensitively feel and know the animal resource is good and thus worth their life commitment. I have seen the scars and the peculiar intellectual gait of this dedicated group which has been caused by years of scrimping, using bailing wire, making-do, overcoming the marsh and forest, managing the paper mountains within public agencies, and meeting the disappointments of the ravages of politics as well as of bad seasons. To develop a viable forest faunal resource management system will take more than dedication, scars, areas, and organization. It will take expertise; a new concept of faunal system management; a peculiar frame-of-reference called a systems approach; the vigorous application of the approach at all levels; a new image (partially resulting from the above); and reallocating budgets.
Once, in a speech before a regional group of wildlifers, I poked a critical finger at the "old-timers." I said they would fight the proposed changes to a systems approach in wildlife resource management, would bull their necks and, no-matter-what, keep on doing things "the good old way." One such person, to whom I shall be forever grateful, came up after the meeting and whispered, "Don't you sell us old-timers short; we want change in this outfit. We need it, but you'll have to show us the way and prove it's better. From what you've said today, I'm with you. Tell us more." Such statements have provided me encouragement and have given me confidence that excellent faunal resource management that is possible is also probable.
I remember when the T-formation changed football, but most of the players did pretty much what they had before - blocked, got blocked, and got kicked. The game was revolutionized by an idea, a new formation. The systems approach is like the T-formation. It is no longer new, just to faunal resource management. By delaying recognizing or using it, the discoveries and refinements of over 50 years are now available. When adopted, it, like the T-formation, will change things. It will require that the players be smart as well as strong. It can change the entire game, i.e., faunal resource management. I cannot give guarantees about the systems approach. Like any other activity, it can be practiced badly. There will surely be uncertainties. The old-timer had me trapped when he said, "...prove it's better." "Better" requires a comparison and this is impossible since it must be between what we know (history) and what we must discover (the future). The only escape from this trap is to admit uncertainty and go on "faith," or, more scientifically, to proceed with the knowledge of high probability of a successful outcome. This judgment about the probable success of taking a systems approach to faunal resource management is based largely on its rationality and its successful application in so many closely analogous situations and organizations, and its inherent feedback mechanisms, each one of which may cause improvement in the next instant.
I assume the reader is a person who reads regularly like a good doctor. I am optimistic enough to think that when the needs are great, when the reasons can be seen, when the social and professional environment encourages it, then managers of the forest faunal resource will become experts and find increasing joy in continued learning for the sake of that resource and people. Wildlifers are not, as the old joke goes, "farming half as good as they know how." I know that they can synthesize little packages of truly significant and useful management information. I also know that their files are full of data that, with better knowledge of sampling or with analytical help, could be converted into much needed, useful information. Hero-figures are needed - individuals and agencies to set standards of managerial excellence.
Within faunal resource management there is an opportunity for serious, scholarly, creative studies advancing from abstraction. These are as needed as are ideas and criticism. Inductive approaches are abundantly evident in the scientific journals; deductive patterns are needed. Strenuous, deductive work becomes meaningful only in a context of expressed social values and managerial objectives. An effort is made herein to elaborate how that work can begin and to provide encouragement for its continuance.
Forest faunal system management has hardly reached an old age. It is almost awash with the rising tide of new theory and perceptions. The academic attic gets more and more full, especially the one called "ecology," and it is excruciatingly difficult to keep its content tidy and trimmed to those fundamental items that justify the cost of retention. The problem becomes consistently more critical; "what must be left out?" There are no rational limits to forest faunal system management. The divergent philosophies among wildlifers make even definitions impossible. Without definition as a prime criterion, fundamentals are impossible to select. The fundamentals or principles that are exclusively those of wildlife management are very few. I suspect that it has no unique principles. Its principles are those of botany, physics, economics, forestry, genetics, ecology, behavioral psychology, education, surveying, computer science, operations research, etc., etc. Nevertheless there is a thing that can be called the faunal resource system of the forest that is recognizable and coherent.
Even a long-legged strong person can hardly jump the canyon that exists between definition and practice in wildlife management and in what some call faunal system management. The chasm is wide and the footing at the take-off point is soggy. Most wildlifers preparing to jump would lay down a definition based on Leopold's Game Management (1933). "Game management is the art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wild game for recreational use." Wildlife management is the past has been an art but to call it an art has been to escape from the pressures of moving it toward becoming more scientific. Clearly, wildlife management involves working with rare and endangered species, controlling rabid animal populations, reducing marauding predators, increasing songbird species richness, manipulating herds of big game in parks, and even managing shooting preserves. All of these activities would be excluded by literally interpreting "sustained crops of wild game" from Leopold's definition. There has been a wee change or two since the early '30's in natural resource management. That definition is so restrictive that neither half of the professional wildlifer's activities could be called wildlife management, nor could half of their colleagues be called wildlifers.
A definition of faunal system management is needed to establish a theoretical base and allow rational analysis of the field. It is the first and final decision-criterion in a field created by humans and not a physical reality (like a tree).
Faunal resource system management is making decisions and taking actions for changing the structure, dynamics, and relations of wild faunal and floral populations, their spaces, and people to achieve specific human objectives by means of the wild life1 resource.2 This definition has functional utility and measurable criteria of performance. Little more of the science-art conflict needs to remain . The choice is no longer one of "either/or," "science or art" but "both," with the strongest, most rapid evolution as possible begin encouraged as possible toward management as "making decisions." All that is good is not limited to the scientific. The wildlife manager is a professional, in the sense of a medical doctor, one who has mastered the complexities of an entire system and its pathology and who can predict the consequences of treatments. He or she primarily diagnoses and prescribes. The analogy gets cumbersome but comparisons of doctor-manager, patient-ecosystem, pathology-problems, medication-treatment are clear. The doctor rarely gives shots, takes temperatures, tends hospital beds, or does lab analyses. The doctor rarely does research. The doctor can and does do all of these but, as does the general practitioner, finds his or her greatest efficiency and highest use of his or her potential as a decision-maker. Just so should be the manager of the faunal resource.
Wildlife managers are most productive as one of the "heads" with whom and for whom many "hands" and technology works. They utilize their educational investment and experience to the fullest, leaving to others, including machines, those things they do best. The reader should not play argumentative word-games about ivory-tower biologists or claim that I attempt to drive a wedge between resource people, or that I am elitist. The wildlife resources of the forests deserve more than a few hours a week of intensive thought. The resource deserves full commitment by well educated, continually-learning professionals. The other 40-hours-plus a week are now overspent in checking fence, clipping browse, looking at forest clearings, riding patrol, or writing quarterly reports. The problems are with who is a wildlifer, with those with an official employment designation as such, and with how they spend their time. I think it inexcusable that wildlifers have gained nicknames of "tractor driver," "gopher choker," and "coot counter." There is truth in these names, though, that reflects the image of a doer and not a thinker. The real faunal resource manager is the rational doer, aware of the limitations of a trap because he or she has used them, but one who will turn over trapping to a trained native. The professional wildlifer, the manager of the forest faunal system, should be a planner, information identifier, diagnostician, prescriber, synthesizer, analyzer, and controller. These activities are decision-making activities. They are the realm of those who take seriously the concept of management. Management is gathering, organizing, and directing human effort, materials, and resources to control the forces and to use the energy and materials of people and nature for human benefit.
There are others also participating in wildlife management. (Analogously, many take part in the field of medicine.) The woodland pond-blaster or wood-duck nest box builder is taking part in "wildlife management." In this role, he or she is not the decision-maker but more, in the land-health analogy, like the nurse who takes blood-pressure. The responsibility of the well-educated wildlife manager is focused on the task of rational, sophisticated decision-making. Once this role is seen, truly significant strides can be taken in forest faunal system management.
Wildlifers are manipulators, changers, movers, and shapers. Wildlifers are responsible for changing habitats, wild animals and plant populations, and human behavior. They change: structure - the stuff with which they work, dynamics - the rates of change (even to a zero rate, i.e., no change), and relations - not just the idea that one event follows another, not simple cause-and-effect phenomena, but the complex idea that the result of two events simultaneously may have unusual or profound results or that results may be greater or less than the sum of the single events.
Faunal system management is like a three-legged milking stool. The three legs are basic components; populations, habitat (or faunal space), and people which are to be manipulated to achieve the specific objectives of people. Over or under emphasis on any one produces a faulty structure.
I see no way of responsibly isolating game from wildlife or wildlife from the other forest fauna. (See the footnote.) Wildlife includes those species called game. Game includes a minority of the total species but these currently have a high public value. The shift in values or interpretation of the values attached to wildlife is occurring rapidly, i.e., more and more people value a wide variety of species; fewer value animals as game.
"Fauna" means animals. It may be too inclusive a word embracing the range of amoeba, mites, moths, and moose. It includes birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, crustaceans, mollusks, insects, and arthropods. Perhaps it is indistinguishable by some from "forest zoology," but zoology is restricted the "the study of..." and herein the emphasis is clearly not on studying but on designing and manipulating faunal systems of the forest. Management is for the entire faunal resource, not just game, and it will include decreasing populations (starlings and rabid raccoons), increasing them (whopping cranes and snowy owls), and stabilizing many others (forest elk and eastern black bears).
The final aspect of the definition is philosophical, a special value judgment. Although the results of management in many cases may be the same, the purpose of management can make a difference. The concept of a resource has an intrinsic human component. Management intrinsically has an objective. The best of all possible alternative objectives appears to me to be "wild life for people." This view is opposed by those who hold a philosophy of "wildlife-for-the-sake-of-wildlife," and those who advocate that wildlife and natural communities have natural or intrinsic rights." The definition presented can encompass both points of view, providing the wildlife-for-wildlife oriented people an appropriate role in public decision-making processes, recognizing benefits they derive from doing things for wildlife and from perpetuating all species. However, a wildlife-for-the-sake-of-wildlife philosophy allows no measure of success other then "non-extinction" and "more activities." It provides no objective criteria for attaining objectives. For other people advocating "intrinsic rights" of animals, I seek the source of knowledge and grounds for these rights, and simultaneously acknowledge that there is absolutely no role for managers, and no realistic possibility for faunal resource use of any type within forests, within their philosophy of nature.
The definition of wildlife management used herein may replace the one held by some and it may augment others. It is the basis for developing an optimum system of forest faunal resource management.
It seems that the entire held of wildlife management, not just of the forest animal resources, may be heading for radical reform when more people, including (perhaps led by) the reader, see that the needs of people, through wildlife, are not being met and will rise to meet them. In a negative vein, reform will occur when an emerging new breed of wildlife school graduates and environmentally-astute graduates of other programs, perhaps as citizen-dropouts of the existing wildlife agencies, begin engaging the wildlife agencies from the outside with revolutionary questions, legal and political activism, and new enterprises. Such action can be taken as a threat for the future or the challenge of today. The "challenge of today" sounds puffed up. "What seems to be the problem?" can as easily be asked by the neophyte as by the manager dulled by "time in the trenches." The problems to be discussed are within the field of wildlife management itself. The detailed technical problems are easily listed. The list is long and each item complex. Solutions come in the remainder of the book; here the problems need to be recognized as personal.
The following paragraphs describe a day of a forest faunal resource system manager:
Bob mailed his report on the likely consequences of using pesticide on the forests in the region to the Commission before 8:00 a.m. and drove to Jane's office. Jane was a fisheries manager with whom Bob worked closely. Bob had the results of a computer analysis of the optimum harvest of elk that would provide many hours of hunting, allow the soil to stabilize, and prevent significant conflict with a protected bighorn sheep population in a ponderosa pine area. He wanted to check with Jane to see how last year's season influenced the silt deposited on the area of the salmon spawning beds. He had set a much longer and more intensive hunting season than in the past in order to reduce erosion being caused by elk. The sportsmen were worried and complained bitterly of the dangers of "over kill" but Bob was sure of his calculations and got the message across to the Commissioners. Jane was thankful for reduced silt and greater fish reproduction this year than last and encouraged Bob to stabilize the population at about the present level. The herd was too large to allow silt levels for a perfect spawning area but the present conditions seemed a fair trade-off between fish production and elk hunting.
Bob ordered supplies for a trip to a back-country critical winter range area and while he was in town, went to the TV station. There he had arranged to develop a news presentation for the peak of the hunting season on the ecological and recreational dimensions of the hunt. He needed only 3 more slides to accompany his text and other slides.
Just before lunch he went to the farm equipment company to get characteristics of tractors he was planning to buy to work several wildlife habitat areas, mow hunter trails developed also as food patches, and to contour-ditch an area developed near the city for maximum songbird species diversity.
He went home for lunch. There he read the proposal to build a dam on Goat Creek. He was to represent the Commission that night in a bold attack against the proposal. With the Commission's bio-economist, Fran, he was going to make an integrated economic argument, demonstrate the folly of the project first in basic monetary gains, then in terms of foregone benefits, and finally by using a complex set of consequences shown by a computer simulator run at the main office. They were likely to send the applicant back to the drawing boards - to work on another project. Bob worked an hour on capital improvement plans for a hunter camp site, finished two letters and enjoyed a big meal. He carefully studied the stock market section of the evening paper for the likely future land use changes in his region. Then came the hearing. It had been a good day.
The Need for Change
Unfortunately, the flurry of environmental activity of the early 1970s was not nationwide, nor was it a force in shaping an image of a desirable environment and the work needed to achieve it. It obviously resulted in many important changes and these can be quantified from the perspective of two decades. It will be evident that small groups of personally-offended or threatened people were the major real signs of action. The activity was a television-catalyzed unique conversion of several profound environmental crises, each touching the quality of the lives of thousands of people, and each touching the pocketbooks of just as many. Far worse natural resource events have occurred in the past, some now occur, but the situation was unique, and collectively several events became a part of the lives of millions of TV viewers. However, California and Louisiana coastal oil leaks, swamp filling airports, discoveries of DDT worldwide and its effects, and destroyed redwood forest environments were then (and are now) nothing more than flock-flights from the wind-gusted environmental scarecrow. Resource catastrophes are mere spectaculars in an age of megaspectaculars. Like song sparrows ignoring harmless cardboard hawks' silhouettes sailed at them by a researcher, the public has generally ignored the seemingly irrelevant threats. Yawning listeners were bored by the message; the messengers were too fanatical and unsophisticated to be real. Warnings or tales of abuse now get, with few exceptions, no more attention than a newspaper or television nod of "Oh, that's too bad."
The lack of public attention or interest is the result of a set of conflicting information and ignorance. On the other hand, the public has entered the magnetic field forces of space shots and computer advances. As if in the invisible grasp of great magnetism, they are at once willing to say science and technology can do anything; simultaneously they are forced to ask hard questions about simplistic concepts of heaven, now see that the nearest global resource has neither gold to be mined nor offers any exotic vacation real estate, and are suspect about the promises of an energy-rich future. The result has been a new pictorial awareness of the finiteness of Earth. The result has been to produce a philosophical human-environment detente. United with this recent philosophical stress and confusion is the philosophy of affluence. Coupled with experience with plastics and soybean foods, an ersatz philosophy has grown. Experience with "the Bomb" has diminished the time scale and resulted in a machts nichts philosophy. Grossly, the integrated public natural resource philosophy is: I don't think I can decide about resource problems; but if I did, I don't think it will matter for long. If it does, I'll let science find a substitute for my needs.
Conspicuous forest and faunal difficulties are like little spirals of smoke that break to the surface of a fire that burns slowly in peat under hundreds of acres of marsh. The magnitude of any resource problem, either in size or complexity, is impossible for the average resource professional to comprehend (much less the average citizen). Confronted with the prospects of large problems yet-hidden, or of conspicuous complex problems, the public often surrenders before apparently insurmountable odds. The shock effect of a tank looming at a soldier in a foxhole is like the effect of natural resource problems looming at the public. The results are confusion, apathy, depression, and even a reversion to "Let's get ours before it's too late."
There is abundant evidence for a conclusion that new direction is essential for natural resource management in the human system. Abysmal waste and misuses of resources - from soil ions to eagles - continues in spite of national and state conservation bureaucracies. There are now more people employed in providing services and advice for farmers than there are farmers. The magnitude of resource abuse from hunters, loggers, miners, or farmers is relatively insignificant in relation to the insidious and widespread influence, both real and potential, of the public resource manager and advisor to private land owners. Through recommendations, reports, legal devices, economic incentives, and on-the-ground supervision, the manager now exercises and has the power to accomplish profound resource manipulations. The resource abuse rates proceed as a function of people, resource consumption, and technology. The factor most often omitted from such a list is the number of publicly-employed managers. The rate is not reduced by, but follows, the increasing number of people involved in efforts expended on controlling abuse. The point must be clear: the workers are not increasing in response to the problem; the problem is increasing in spite of and in some cases because of the workers. There is evident need for overthrowing many, current, ill-oriented approaches to land-use and embarking upon new concepts and methodologies. These seem likely to be in utilizing a systems approach within an incentive-based entrepreneurial environment.
A root of the national and international land malaise is the size of the human population. Every new person is now a land pathogen, a "virus" of extreme virulence spreading its toxicants, consuming, and reproducing. Ehrlich successfully presented the "disease" report in his book The Population Bomb (1968). The population of people in the U.S. and the world is now too great to allow people to achieve their full humanity. The population growth rate must be stopped and eventually brought into balance with the death rate. Unless this is done, the concept of environmental quality and practicing land health is meaningless - sheer absurdity - dusting picture frames in a burning art gallery.
Conventional wildlife management (except pest control) in an over-crowded world is the most irrelevant of topics. Land is a concept of many resources and factors, the chief of which is people. People have power and dominance. To attempt to deal with land and wildlife and to ignore the dominant role of the human-factor is stupid. People cannot be passive in the environment; there is now no population level at which new additions of people do not cause additional consumption of and negative effects upon the environment. There are no viable alternative solutions to the population problem except an interactive system of solutions. The population problem must be attacked at all levels, by all people, each in their own way. It must begin with the faunal resource professional, at least his or her personal birth control activities. A sense of personal responsibility seems imperative. No simplistic approach can be used like "either this method or that is the answer." Crowe (1969:1103) and others have convincingly wiped from the slate the naive hope for political and technological solutions. Only a solution system in a simultaneous assault on the problem seems likely to work over time. There is an optimal combination of methods and level of activity that is right for each area of the world. The efforts for solution must be intensive or, by the time an optimal solution is defined and an allocation of manpower and money made, it will be too late. Anything not done sooner will be harder, more expensive, and less satisfactory to do later. As part of everyone's involvement in dealing with this problem, there can grow a new orientation - an orientation toward human benefit as the object of human labor and the density of people as a major controlling factor of the ecosystem, of individuals themselves, and of their values.
I am convinced that we already live in a sub-human environment. In it ecological ignorance is rampant, managerial timidity frightening, waste of limited funds abundant, injustices to the public and to the manager flagrant, and resource abuse intolerable. When the environment is finally sensed as being unsuitable for people to achieve their potential, then the need for a revolution in the care and treatment of the human environment may be sensed. Already there is need for causing, and in some cases, forcing needed changes. The total situation has now passed the point for suitable incremental improvements. Without revolutionary thought, action, and personal and agency leadership, the necessary changes will not occur. A glaring hiatus exists between profession and performance on the American wildlife scene, particularly the forest scene.
Business-as-usual in the natural resource fields has allowed the present environmental situation. Few public resource agents can point to great achievement of final goals. Major strides in bold new policy, legislative involvement, fearless enforcement, research initiatives, and confrontation with major economic and political power groups will have to be taken. Without revolutionary change in practice and in the resource-agency image we shall likely perish in a desert of our own making. People will eventually be blown by the winds of environmental boredom, hounded by the guilt of extinct plant and animal species, and exhausted from trying to cap the volcano-like eruptions of past land lunacy.
How to obtain the wisest use of resources is a phenomenal optimization problem that includes limited inputs, different value systems, objectives that are poorly seen (and poorly quantified), and the need for group decision under conditions of sizable future risks. The problem is grave; changes are needed.
Education and Training
One reason for the problems faced in faunal resource management is that the majority of wildlifers are men and women who cannot shake "the scouting habit." "I like to hunt and fish" is a conspicuous reason given for having chosen wildlife management as a line of work. The verb "to like" connotes a shallowness of motive, an unwillingness to engage in root questions, an initial weakness. Liking hunting or hiking is hardly representative of classical concepts of vocation. It is more representative of the lure of a fishhead over a trap pan to a bobcat. "Liking" is less than what is needed for people to start a life of hazardous field work, prolonged objective investigations, complex managerial maneuvers, constant study and reading, equally constant administrative and public harassment, and refined social engineering. The basic ingredients are lacking for a fearless, creative, diligent effort to meet people's needs through faunal resource management.
Less than half of the students who enter the universities to embark on a 4 to 9 year wildlife management education have the slightest idea what their future work will entail! Their motivation is metaphysical, their goals ambiguously hidden in the Daniel Boone mystique. Their orientation is fallaciously biological in an increasingly ecological, economic, esthetic, and sociological field. A study of high school students showed they do not even know what foresters do! Students enter wildlife schools for which the single professional society, The Wildlife Society, has not initiated accreditation. They attend departments having from one to ten wildlife professors, some of whom have never had research published in a major resource journal or made a significant presentation before a wildlife scientific meeting. They take course loads varying from 160 to 216 quarter-credit hours, graduate unexamined with a grade achievement of "average," and are soaked up, slowly, by non-discriminating state or federal wildlife agencies. The employment examination usually consists of a civil service employee checking off the courses taken against a list of courses suggested 3 to 10 years previously by a committee of The Wildlife Society and adopted by a government board. The education for the medical doctor who must care for a singular human patient takes about 9 years; the education for the wildlifer (some of whom only get a Bachelor's degree) who must care for the "land patient" with its multiple species, environments, functions, taxonomy, management techniques, education, etc., takes about 4 1/2 years. Fortunately, some get Master's degrees (5 to 6 years). A few get Ph.D.'s in 9 years, but rarely do they actively practice on the land patient - to follow the analogy. Most western states require that their game wardens hold a bachelor of science degree in game management. The employment situation is a buyer's market. The salaries are low, the schools overcrowded with B.S. graduates without inclination toward further education or with grades too poor to qualify for graduate schools. Agencies do niot encourage or support continuing education. The university-trained person, unable to become a biologist, is employed as an enforcement agent and, armed with courses in biochemistry, physics, calculus, biology, ecology, and game management, is given a car, badge, and law violation ticket book, and ephemeral promises of opportunities to help co-employee biologists in "real" management problems. The turnover, and turnout, is great.
Lack of faculty numbers amid the extremely large number of important topics to be included in educational programs is unfortunate. Overemphasis on analytical, biological, and ecological courses is resulting in later resource abuse. The situation is like that of a health system in which some medical student graduated, having all A's in anatomy and physiology but having skipped the pharmacological and clinical courses. Students in some programs graduate with much "field experience." The dissatisfaction experienced by many agencies with graduates is not so much with the employees themselves but with their training not coinciding with the agency's over-inflated expectations (Murphy 1994). The university program of study emphasizes investigational and analytical techniques to the exclusion of synthetic, deductive management-decision-oriented instruction and laboratory work. (One or two courses does not deny this argument.) Not only is education at the undergraduate level ill-conceived for the purpose of its graduates, but the employing agencies perpetrate a catastrophic injustice on its employees. Some introduce them to their new jobs or provide training by having them ride around with an experienced agent for a few weeks. Not using the education of these people creatively is an atrocious waste. The new employee reacts, quits and creates a new social loss to the field of faunal resource management, themselves, and the agency. These disgruntled people prejudice the public against the professor, university, and field. There is little evidence of quality personnel management in the state or federal wildlife agencies. Few agencies have looked at retirement rates, turnover time, recruitment needs, educational needs, or probable internal "power plays" always associated with influx of new employees. Few have done computer simulations of these in relation to budget expectations or hypotheses.
Recently, one state agency employed a Master's degree graduate without requesting his transcript or even telephoning his wildlife instructors for their opinion of the graduate's capabilities! One federal agency in the same year employed a fisheries biologist to do big game forage surveys. One environmental impact analysis group employed an endocrinologist to do terrestrial ecology analysis. "Career ladders" were once designed and developed within the federal wildlife agencies. Massive agency changes in the 1980's and 1990's made such "ladders" irrelevant. In the face of unbelievable administrative resistance and continuing skepticism among field staff, a few modest programs of professional improvement have been initiated. In state wildlife agencies there is almost no "room at the top" and little incentive to move people to perform at advanced salary levels. Perhaps education could be sponsored for other reasons?! So-called merit salary raises are usually given for meritoriously living another year, little incentive for improvements. Professional re-tooling is commonplace in industries, businesses, and for professional men and women throughout society. The wildlife agencies have few employees seeking such education.
There exist unparalleled environmental needs that cannot be or will not be met by the sylvan hedonists that permeate the ranks of the wildlifers. Revolutions are always dangerous, socially unacceptable, and teeter on a point, the fall from which will be judged creative or destructive, depending entirely upon the results. The question of profound wildlife management change can no longer be whether, only when. Drastic changes are needed to protect the health of the faunal resource as well as to account for the legitimacy of the resource manipulators.
The current concept of the manager is a major change needed. The Daniel Boone mystique must be dispelled and "the backwoods squat" abolished as an unacceptable posture in a world running toward urbanization and secularization. Gradual is now a meaningless adjective for needed change; there is no more time in which to protect and to manage properly animals and their spaces. Radical and noticeably large changes must occur among faunal systems managers in order for them to build a new movement that has the power to change the human condition.
The modern wildlifer needs to be the scholarly activist, the systems-citizen. If the concept is impossible for personal attainment by all wildlifers, then it is a concept that at least needs to be supported and encouraged by the less able. Such wildlifers, like tree seeds, can be produced in abundance. Some will land in a salutary environment, others in a hostile environment. Production of such people and their ideas is thus not nearly as great a problem as is nurturing them or cultivating for them a favorable environment.
There are unfortunate connotations to the idea of faunal resource system management scholarship. Withdrawnness, impracticality, and gray-haired arrogance are common. Scholarship involves critical thought, a splendid intellectual rigor, in-depth involvement in the available literature, and learned discussion. Modern wildlifers are people willing to use the tools of logic, analogy, and metaphor to search for relations and concepts of unity. There are wildlifers who will willingly engage in mind-expanding experiences and exercises for the purposes of gaining perspective and insight. Obviously, scholars are not made by talking about them. However, there is need for a context, an intellectual environment that encourages and at least permits involvement in things that are idea-like. There exists, it seems to me, a predisposition against scholarly involvement, spawned by mechanistic and technological training, nurtured by pressures to be practical, and stifled by current wildlife meetings.
The alternative is the wildland scholar who focuses on objectives, and who restates the essential platitudes of wildlife resource management in fresh words. He or she will not suddenly appear, generated by perfunctory appeals to better teaching and improved universities. One does not surprisingly become a rigorous thinker, an articulator of wisdom, a bearer of insight and ideas. The scholar emerges by challenging books, by reading widely, by tasting what others have said, and by thinking ideas through, often to undesirable ends. No reaffirmation of the authority of the academic degree or agency position has any relevancy. Scholars seek people who will exercise the good question and answer with them. The scholar embraces history as the foundation of humans as planning animals and uses it as a major conceptual tool for introducing the rational into the oncoming future. The scholar tackles the scary topic, willingly looks under ideological rugs, and touches the untouchable tenet. The work is hard, the pains great, but the needs absolute. The longer the delay, the greater the problems become. To practice forest faunal resource system management as in the past will show the wildlifer to be scientifically and socially silly.
The Game Commissions and Administrators
Wildlifers have all been guilty of an ostrich mentality, hoping the problem of the administration of wildlife will go away. They naively expected that Dr. Ira Gabrielson's assertions that the commission was the best form of administration would make it so. Indeed, it has not been good. Game managers within the states have based management on a vast ignorance, illuminated by occasional flashes of tradition, legend, hearsay, assumption, guesswork, a little wildlife science, all coupled with much trial and error experience. Management has been a juggling act with unknown game productivity, uninventoried game habitat and food, unpredictable climate, unknown demands and expectations of resource users, inflexible management span of control, the known wants of a biased few, and a fixed budgetary allocation model such as: "Every county gets an equal share!"
Most people realize that a small hole in the bottom of the bucket is rarely seen from the outside. Only by looking from within can the pinpoint of light be seen. The following beams in the darkness are only a few of my observations.
The average hunter and visitor to the National Forest in summer and fall is completely unaware of this winter problem. And even those who read or hear about over-grazed winter ranges are incapable during the summer and fall of recognizing those signs of winter overuse which, to the cattlemen and range and game experts, stand out in glaring silhouette. And since in America it is the inalienable right of everyone who hunts or spends a few days each year vacationing in the woods to pass, unintentionally to be sure, as a game authority, the nation continues to manage its big game largely by "horse and buggy" methods.
The pain of this statement is that is was made in 1937! Its derivation was earlier than this (Hatch 1938:50). Identical statements are part of the annual rites of The Wildlife Society.
States are increasingly gaining directors of game and fish agencies that are trained wildlifers. One director ascended from 30 years as a used-car salesman. His atavistic agency, within a short time, had restored practices scrapped decades ago as useless. It is refreshing to be able to back-pat and be pleased to say that "we" do not live in a state like that! We usually do, and if we do not now, the probability is high that we or our children will move to one some day.
In a northeastern university, fear of financial reprisal shelved an exciting research design on the effects of a river log-run on muskrat populations. The study ended as a mundane muskrat life history. It seemed that a logging industry was a major supporter of the university.
What university wildlife researcher, limping along on pseudo-support from a state agency, can afford to risk outspoken criticism of state policy or even commissioner's regulations? Why are so few university professors across the nation engaged in such dialogue? Their silence or condescensions have been bought at both the state level (license fees, Federal Aid and non-game funds) and federal level (Division of Research, Division of Federal Aid, and others). Self-righteous wildlife graduate students criticize professors for not "becoming involved," but they are the first to bemoan lack of financial support for their graduate research. Everyone is wed to everyone.
I should have seen the handwriting on the wall when I wrote that paper on "Wildlife Management in the National Parks" for your class and when... three men I considered the best-Rangers-going all resigned within 18 months. I entered the Service with the same ideas as most Rangers; that I would be an integral part of a dynamic organization, performing rugged outdoor tasks, interpreting the area to the public, and helping to manage a great wildland resource. The truth is not quite so prosaic; I'm a member of just another stagnating arm of the Federal miasma. We don't manage anything, not even the Park visitor, and what we interpret is the location of the outhouse. I was even told that if I happened not to know the answer to a visitor's question, give an answer anyway, right or wrong, so as not to appear ignorant - this from a GS-14 supervisor! As for the outdoor side of the business, that's merely a come-on for prospective members. We're pencil pushers, spending 90% of our time either in the office or sitting in a pickup. As a result, I've lost almost 15 pound and gained 3 inches on my waist. Try something on your own and all the wrath of Headquarters is loosed on your head ... I had hoped that my experience ... was indicative of only this one park, a result of only a few poor administrators, but in questioning transferees from other areas I find the same story...
The situation at ________Refuge hasn't improved at all. The more I learned about the refuge system, the more I realize what sad shape it is in. The manager's big concern seems to be maintaining the grounds, which includes raking leaves, painting, trimming shrubbery, and cleaning the office. I realize these jobs are necessary, but I question the priority given them when there are so many obvious management and research jobs that should be done... Today the two of us spent the day building a hog trap in hopes of reducing our feral hog population. An alternative approach would have been to issue hog trapping permits as other refuges have done. This would have saved us many hours, which appears to be an irrelevant consideration...In sheer desperation, I went to the Regional office to talk to my two supervisors at my own expense and on leave. The manager made the appointment for me. [They were not there!] I was told to "hang in there" and keep raking leaves and digging post holes since this was the training process for the refuge manager. Ugh!
The future issue for the faunal resource manager is not one of work or dirty work, but of managing that most important resources in short supply, i.e., professional knowledge and experience.
The endangered species program of the Department of Interior has no fail-safe concept. I am convinced that the fate of the whooping crane lies tenuously in the hands of some secretary well down within the bowels of the Department, who, angered at a request to change some personal habit at his or her desk, might withhold or "misplace" a critical field order, fail to order critical supplies, or simply delay typing or sending an injunction against dredging operations that would destroy within one day the vitality of an essential feeding area. The loss of the whooping crane might generate $100 million to wildlife agencies who would successfully place the blame on under-financing. Misspending $2 to generate $100 million is not a viable option. Certainly the loss of those "stupid storks" is not acceptable. Great benefit is derived from them by the people of the U.S. and the world. To protect them, to provide for their special needs, to see that nothing further endangers them, to learn to propagate them, and to "do nothing", actively, in some areas, is successful management of this endangered bird.
Often a different perspective on wildlife problems is information. Mr. W. A. Newlands, recipient of a Wildlife Conservation Fellowship, visited the U.S. in 1968 from Fordingbridge, England. He observed that the idealistic 18th century free-for-all hunting, established by the settlers fleeing persecution in Europe, was becoming unworkable in the 20th century. He praised public relations work that had submerged the typically competitive urges of Americans for a big bag and replaced them with a warm feeling of backwoodsmanship and delight in the equipment and techniques of hunting. He observed that the 20,000,000 U.S. hunters are largely city-based weekend shooters, with little personal interest in a particular piece of land or perpetuating a shootable population on it. He who manipulates the habitat fails to get the rewards; thus the game production incentives are low. He made other observations that state-subsidized schemes have not replaced the lost incentive. Game on farms near cities is akin to an "attractive nuisance" and considered by many to be a liability. The wide open spaces are increasingly posted. Even private game lands, due to very restrictive state and federal regulations, have extremely high costs per unit of harvest. Hunting quality declines as fear of being shot increases with crowding. Hunting tends to be polarized between that which is typical of public lands and that on private lands. Differences have been: between extensive and intensive management and between the lower and middle class and the upper class; between low and high amenities; between hunting as part of a "roughing it" experience and hunting as a particular sport with certain prized associated experiences. The wildlife agency has tended to ignore this polarization and to manage "game" generally to develop broad scale programs, and to work with the public or private owners of large amounts of land in order to influence "more acres." When only two extremes exist, then efforts to manage for "the average" are, as in the trend in game hunting, bound to be unsatisfactory. Program diversity, he observed, is a minimum need.
Within forests and elsewhere is a potential faunal resource of beauty, abundance, and diversity. It is capable of benefiting every citizen throughout their lives. Hunters have preempted the resource and game managers have assisted them. The sporting arms and ammunition manufacturers, associated industries and organizations pervade wildlife management. Not until 1994 were wildlife professionals first willing to support the cost of a national scientific meeting. The entire wildlife agency program of the states is underlain with so-called Pittman-Robertson (P-R) funds (Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration, 50 Stat. 917) which are taxes, earmarked exclusively for use in wildlife management by states which match these federal monies on a one to three basis. The amount provided has been over $1.5 billion after 50 years. States thus encourage people to hunt, people who buy arms and ammo, the taxes from which "buy" wildlife as targets, which increase demands, which promotes more fees (about $600 million a year), which match more taxes, which pays more state agents, who... and around it goes. The achievements of wildlife agencies and organizations have been substantial and worthwhile. Yet systems must be examined.
Public resources are needed to break the cycle within wildlife management. Wildlife administrators have been so diverted by "easy" money (licenses and P-R funds) that they have not vigorously sought tax money, alternative funding sources, or other means to achieve their objectives. Non-game funds have become available but they are a pittance and delude managers from seeking the resources to manage effectively the public or private-land faunal resource. The thought processes about funding sources among wildlifers are so atrophied that they often argue that their only responsibility is to produce or manage game.
It may be presumptuous to ask any agency, "What did we get for spending $600 million this year?" It's difficult even for experts to comprehend the output of a simple industry. It is much more difficult, probably impossible, for a citizen to comprehend outputs of a state or federal agency. Nevertheless, brash questions need to be asked. Are citizens getting their money's worth? The annual national agency controlled game management budget is about a billion dollars. It may be possible to mass-produce more animals and experiences for the money than is now produced. Of course, I do not advocate such practice. I do, however, advocate attention to scale, to efficiency, and to producing benefits - rather than spending budgets. Some wildlife agencies now find themselves in the position of almost every dollar being committed to salaries and no funds being available for seed, tractor tires, fertilizer, travel, or field equipment.
Private Knowledge
Nowhere else in a governmental system of well-conceived checks and balances are there so few checks as in the wildlife agency. Wildlifers, stumbling for professionalism, have "made it" in the one realm of private information - like the unchallenged statement of medical doctors and the sacred books of the priests. There is no uniform system for reporting game kills between states; no accountant to certify their authenticity. Some states report actual checked kill, others report an estimation based on a questionable graphical projection of kill from two estimated points, others make sophisticated mathematical estimates using computers. The picture is one of confusion and potential hoax and is fraught with the dangers of bureaucratic build-ups at the expense of the wildlife resource.
Within the scope of the information already presented, it should not be surprising that most wildlife agencies have poorly conceived objectives and ill-defined policy. No agency will admit this. Confronted, they usually drag out a sacred, functionless paragraph that would not stand the onslaught of an inferior class of university freshmen in a course in public administration . Without policy or objectives, there is no guiding principle, no view of the future. Imagine the role of a hard-nosed inspector from the governor's office going afield with a wildlife agency staff to audit expenditures, to determine if the extra benefits obtained justified the costs, and if agency objectives were well-stated and being fulfilled. The inspector's report based on the available objectives and policy would probably be "No species became extinct during the year, the employees all put in long hours, and all of the budgeted money was spent." Useless.
It is a rare faunal system manager who will renounce the comforts of the biological ghetto and in-group small talk and take seriously the task of speaking for change, demanding holistic environmental considerations surpassing agency responsibility, and asking the next impertinent basic question. Such rarity need not persist; there can grow a professional camaraderie that encourages and supports such actions. Governmental tendencies and active efforts to still dissent and to create an aura of unanimity cannot be tolerated when environments are abused by doing so and the health and satisfactions of generations of humans are endangered.
The wildlife manager tends to be timid. Some are in universities waiting for tenure which never seems to come. Others wait for retirement to say "what they really think," but at age 65 and with 40 years of tongue-holding practice, little can expected. An unsubstantiated fear of a poorly understood Hatch Act (restricting federal employees) reins in on the actions of many. If not the Act, there is always some other figment of the system for which a person can lay.
Student confidence (or the confidence of wildlifers) in the intellectual integrity of the wildlife professor requires that there be no suspicion on their part that he (or she) is not expressing himself (or herself) fully or frankly. There can be no confidence if there is suspicion that teachers or agents are a repressed and intimidated class which dares not speak out with candor and courage. Failures in these areas have already created major image problems. They are typically responsible for a few units of measure of the generation gap. Youth demands action in those whom it esteems; it learns from such action.
The anonymity of the agency has pervasive influence. There are grave ills when an assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior with a Ph.D. in wildlife management must warn a Commerce subcommittee that continued use of DDT "should not be permitted where environmental contamination occurs" and then essentially "take it all back" by emphasizing his statements are not an official Department position. The agency has no face, all the better for political resiliency, long life, and budgetary blessing. However, its hold on the personhood of its members is excessive.
There are six major causes of professional timidity: (1) a peculiar theological and moral base, (2) inability to see the needs or benefits that may occur from taking certain risks, (3) a poorly developed concept of the sociological interactions that change brings, (4) underestimates of probabilities of taking action into sure success, (5) overestimation of the risks, and (6) a psychological set for inaction.
Activism starts with the individual and his or her personal concept of being. It is a profound coming-to-awareness of: I am self; I am! The primary goal of education can be taken to initiate the act of being, of the discovery of a meaningful existence. Personal discovery is difficult for, like happiness, the active search usually prevents discovery. The answer to the existential question - Who am l? - is the answer to the parallel but more powerful and surprisingly simpler question of: What am I about? What am I doing that is real? Activism leaps from both the affirmative: "I know who I am and can become," or the experimental: "I must do something in order to discover successes and failures to come to my full self-awareness." The activist is the rational-doer, the person willing to spend him or herself to achieve an optimal social and physical environment in which he or she can achieve his or her fullest humanity.
There are many types of activism embraced by the above concept. The range starts with the individual who sits alone, unorganized, unrecognized, unorthodox, and unterrified. Such a person generates the seminal idea, the objective judgment of the trend of things, or produces the air-cleaning burst of imagination that throws everything about into a new perspective. On the other extreme is the martyr. The common ingredients are fearlessness of action and an insistence on being an architect, not a victim, of the future.
Considering the thousands of members of The Wildlife Society, the voice of the wildlifer is quiet as a mouse's sneeze. Activism is minimal. The khaki-clad and booted wildlifer has lived the following situation so often it appears natural: "Well, ecologically this particular action would be proper, but in the present political situation it would perhaps be rash. So... "
Herewith is no argument for thicknecked rushes into disaster. There are rational strategies for action that first require answers to root questions such as:
The points at which most wildlifers have become inactive is when they have concluded: (1) the problem could not be solved, (2) the solution to the problem was out of their field, or (3) that the problems could not be circumvented. The examples are numerous: inability to explain the need for an either-sex deer season; unnecessary winter-feeding of big game; failure to stop disastrous high dams destroying fish runs, wilderness, and big game range; persistent expenditures of public funds for useless predator bounties; continued stocking of exotics and persistent use of game farm animals for stocking; failure to regulate livestock grazing on public game ranges; and failure to block utility encroachments on wildlife area. Rationalization into withdrawal and inaction by wildlifers is accompanied by a holier-than-thou attitude and an unwillingness to "compromise their conscience." Such compromise, the subjugation of someone's ethical ideals, cannot be avoided in any political action. All wildlife action is political, because it involves social-decision processes. Such compromise is just as necessary in the thin air of the professional ethical situation as in secular or religious situations (e.g., the church vis-a-vis the just war). Withdrawal or inaction involves even more ethical compromise than involvement.
I remember a critical paper that once completed circulation through the offices of a wildlife staff. Over coffee, the author lamented, "They didn't say boo!" The ironical paucity of wildlife critics and the spinelessness of reactors has resulted in a neoinvertebrate. I interviewed a dozen scholars in a major university asking if they would correct or "shoot down" a speaker in a large public scientific meeting if they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt he was a charlatan. Only one said he would! The very essence of the old scientific meeting was to provide dynamic feedback and to "keep the field clean." That function has disappeared in wildlife conferences. The innocuous discussion periods following presentation at conferences and regional meetings are evidence of the lack of critical questions or penetrating comments. There is hardly enough life left in the professional wildlife community for debate. There is no column to carry its angry letter if one were written, and the responses, if any, would be more like group therapy than counterattack.
It seems possible that wildlifers can build a movement that has the power to change the human condition. They need not reaffirm authority but they must invoke the kind of wisdom that will restore it. They must engage in iconoclastic question-asking. Their intellectual appetite must be voracious. Educated, liberated from the past and authority, dignified, confident, holistically aware, filled with a desire for accomplishment and professional excellence, they may spend themselves for the faunal resource and the people dependent upon it.
The picture of wildlife management is grisly, one of weakness, abuses, and potential natural resource hazards. Of course it is also one of great dedication by a few people fighting almost overwhelming resistance and low rewards. The weaknesses have been around for years. Wildlifers have learned to live with them, but there is now a new situation. The old reasons given for needing changes including laziness, inefficiency, and immorality, have lost their weight if not their validity. People can only achieve their humanity in a fit environment. Fauna are a part of that environment. In the new situation, such an environment will not happen. The environment must be designed, manipulated, and protected. The costs of cleaning it up and keeping it that way may enslave people; the costs for quality sport-hunting recreation even equal to that 20 years ago will be exorbitant; the costs and hazards of a badly functioning ecosystem are not yet measurable except in units of "too much"; the psychiatric impact of faunally-impoverished environments will be counted in personal, family, and social damage. Foregone opportunities for international faunal system development will be excessive. Unless action is taken now, these costs cannot be met, losses tolerated, or the hazards overcome. The situation can be changed and it must be. A wait-and-see strategy for change is now intolerable. There is a revolutionary imperative. Failure to comply will be failure to achieve an environment fit for fauna or folks.
Questions
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Last revision May 18, 2001.