When most people think of the conservation movement, they might think of environmentalists working to preserve endangered species like the spotted owl, orca, or sage grouse. The latest issue of High Country News is dedicated to a more comprehensive idea of conservation. The editor of this issue, Michelle Nijhuis, argues that conservation needs to consider more than just a single animal: the movement needs to look at entire ecosystems, and the people who are part of them. We talk to Nijhuis, and one of the writers featured in the new issue, Jaclyn Moyer.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. When people think of the conservation movement, they might think of environmentalists working to preserve specific endangered species, like the spotted owl or sage grouse or orca. The latest issue of High Country News is dedicated to a more comprehensive view of conservation. The writer Michelle Nijhuis was invited to be the editor of this issue. She argues that conservationists need to consider more than just a single animal, that the movement needs to look at entire ecosystems, as well as the people who are a part of them. Michelle Nijhuis joins us now, along with Jaclyn Moyer, who wrote an article for the issue about a conservation success story: the return to the Willamette Valley of a small butterfly called the Fender’s blue. Michelle Nijhuis and Jaclyn Moyer, welcome to think out loud.
Michelle Nijhuis: Hi Dave. It’s great to be here, thanks for having us.
Miller: Yeah thanks for joining us. So Michelle first, you named the issue “The Futures of Conservation.” What does it mean that it’s plural?
Nijhuis: We have been working on this issue for about a year, and it quickly became clear to us that there is no single solution to our conservation challenges. We didn’t know that before it became extremely clear to us as we started thinking about this issue. It’s about, as you say, not only protecting single species and their habitats, but protecting the relationships among the species. And the thing that gets forgotten most often is it’s about protecting the relationships between people and other species. And all of those goals are met in different ways in different places. And even when we’re talking about a single region, we were focused on the West, conservation solutions are going to be different in almost every place that you look at.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the breadth of the issues that you chose to include in this issue?
Nijhuis: Yeah. We were guided by a quote from conservationist Aldo Leopold, who was speaking almost a century ago during the Dust Bowl. He was usually a very kind man, a very soft spoken man in some ways. But in this particular speech, he was pretty caustic about conservationists. And he said they are just beginning to realize that their task is about the reorganization of society, and not the passage of some fish and game laws. And fish and game laws, which we would now call environmental laws or conservation laws, are of course so important. But we tried to focus on people who were doing that, working towards that reorganization of society, trying to reorganize the West on behalf of other species.
So the stories include, as you’ll hear from Jaclyn, one about the protection of a butterfly in Oregon and the ripple effects of that effort, to hunters and conservationists working together to protect eagles from lead poisoning, to what conservation can learn from science fiction published in the West. So we tried to give a sense of the range of solutions that were out there, knowing that we couldn’t cover every possibility. But tried to look at things that were working on a small scale, and might work on a larger scale.
Miller: Jaclyn Moyer, let’s go to you. For your article in this issue. You focused, as I mentioned briefly, on a small butterfly of native to the Willamette Valley called the Fender’s blue. Can you describe this butterfly, and tell us why you chose to focus on it?
Jaclyn Moyer: Sure. So the Fender’s blue butterfly, like you said, is endemic to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. It was first collected and described in 1929, and shortly thereafter appeared to vanish. It was believed to be extinct for almost five decades until 1989, when it was rediscovered. And then it was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2000, and over the course of the 20 years between then and now, it has more or less recovered. So it’s now slated to be down-listed, which is not common among insects. It would be only the second insect to ever make that kind of recovery that’s been listed on the Endangered Species Act.
So I had heard about this butterfly just living in Corvallis and being part of the Willamette Valley community. And I set out to write a story about the butterfly and its recovery process. And it really turned into a story that was really less about the butterfly itself and more about the many other species, humans included, which exist in relationship with the butterfly, and a story that I think really illuminates the depth of interconnection in ecosystems, and this web of relations that uphold the existence of any given species, in particular the Fender’s blue.
Miller: An expert on this particular butterfly told you that recovery takes three things: science, time, and partnerships. To me, the first two seem like they make sense. Without science, you won’t know what a particular species needs to survive or to thrive. And the time seems necessary because bouncing back is unlikely to happen overnight. But what are the partnerships that she was talking about?
Moyer: Yeah, that’s a great question. And that quote is in the piece, but it was kind of uncanny, almost every person I spoke with mentioned in the course of their interview “partnerships.” And most people were referring to the partnerships within human organizations and agencies. One big one in regards to the butterfly is between private landowners and state agencies, because public land in the Willamette Valley is vanishingly scarce. 96% of land is privately owned. So it’s really taken a huge collaboration between private landowners and federal and state agencies.
But also, there have been collaborations between nonprofits, research scientists. There is a collaboration involving incarcerated people in Oregon State Correctional Institute, in which they have grown Kincaid’s lupine seeds, which provide the host plants for the butterfly. So there’s been a breadth of different collaborations within human organizations.
And then also, as I think the story really illuminates, there is a set of partnerships going on between species that support the butterfly. I found over the course of the research that the human effort involved, and what was going on in the ecosystem, really started to mirror one another in regards to those collaborations that were really fundamental to the success of the species’ recovery.
Miller: So you just outlined both the sort of the important relationship between these butterflies, and this flower, Kincaid’s lupine. But also things like ants. What’s the symbiotic relationship between various ant species and these little blue butterflies?
Moyer: Yeah, that’s a really fascinating relationship. The Fender’s blue caterpillars are these tiny green caterpillars that are pretty defenseless creatures on their own. So they have developed this mutually beneficial relationship with ants. And there’s many species of ants involved. The caterpillar will call out to the ants, either by emitting a chemical scientists believe mimics an ant alarm pheromone, or they can make this shrill noise by moving their bodies in a certain way. And then the ants will heed these calls and find the caterpillars, and they will stand guard and protect the caterpillars against insect predators or parasites. And in return, the caterpillars have an organ that produces a sugary nectar which the ants eat.
Miller: I have to say that’s even better than what you included in the article. You didn’t mention the caterpillar ant alarm, the call for help. It’s a lovely detail.
Michelle Nijhuis, how does this butterfly’s story fit into the larger narrative or narratives that you wanted to explore in this issue?
Nijhuis: Jaclyn beautifully captures how partnerships at every level are essential to conservation, whether you’re talking about partnerships among species or partnerships among people. And I think that theme is very clear through the rest of the issue. It comes up in almost every story.
One of the other Oregon stories in the issue is about the High Desert Partnership. Many people may remember the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters back in 2016 by the Bundy Brothers and some of their political allies. And the residents of Harney County more or less stood united against that. The community was not as deeply split as many people expected. And a lot of people credit this ongoing collaboration that had started years before that takeover, and has continued since. And a lot of its activities are focused on conservation. Many people involved with it say “yes, sitting down, forming these partnerships with people that we previously distrusted or just didn’t know has helped us continue.” You may have the strongest laws in the world in place at the federal or state or local level, but those laws still need to be carried out on the ground, and they need to be carried out by human beings. So people need to be participating in the process of conservation, regardless of what boundaries have been set out or what laws have been passed.
Miller: But speaking of laws, I couldn’t help thinking about the spotted owl and the use of the Endangered Species Act to limit logging on federal lands to support spotted owl populations when I was reading your introduction, and in some of the other articles, only because it’s probably the most famous or infamous example in the northwest of the way conservation laws can become politicized and divisive. And it made me wonder about the possibility of some kind of counterfactual. Would there have been another way that old growth could have been protected that wouldn’t have led to such a backlash, that would have both protected owls or their habitat, and the people who relied on logging and lumber?
Nijhuis: It’s a great question, and I hesitate to get too deeply into the counterfactual. But in general, I think that the conservation movement has defaulted to top down solutions in many cases for understandable reasons, because the species they’re concerned with are facing extinction. There are emergencies that they’re trying to deal with quickly.
But top down solutions do tend to provoke a political backlash that often undercuts the goals that they’re trying to achieve. I think that is a systemic problem in the modern conservation movement, where people have defaulted to these top down solutions, and ignored or deprioritized the need to, as Aldo Leopold said, reorganize society, so that there’s more widespread recognition of what should really be an apolitical statement that we need our relationships with other species in order to survive. And then from there, we could as a society work more closely together to figure out how that’s achieved.
Miller: Jaclyn, one of the lessons that I drew from your article is that successful conservation doesn’t really look like a discrete action with a quick end point or even any end point. It seems more like ongoing intervention and work. What does that mean in terms of human actions and human policies?
Moyer: That’s a great question, and that’s certainly a shift in perspective that I had myself working on this story. I think in the case of the butterfly, it’s really clear that it’s not about removing people from the scene altogether. It’s more about rethinking and rebuilding the human relationship within the ecosystem. I think that’s been crucial for preserving the butterfly’s habitat, because it’s a habitat that relies upon disturbance, which historically came in the form of fire, and now a lot of those fires are being brought back.
I think in a lot of cases, learning from indigenous communities has been really pivotal to learning to rebuild those relationships and think about humans not as not as separate, but as part of the whole ecosystem.
Miller: And finally Jaclyn, at one point in your article you write “So what? In the face of an ecological crisis of such grand scale, it was hard to imagine what difference the survival of one small blue butterfly might make.” Have you come up with your own answer to your “so what” question?
Moyer: I think that that is an ongoing question. A lot of the people I spoke to for this article, I asked that same question more or less. And most people came around to saying something about how, in the face of climate change, our greatest hope is a diverse ecosystem. The more species we have, the more relationships are possible, the more resilience we have to face whatever upheavals and changes might come. And of course the way to get a diverse ecosystem is to care about each species. While the butterfly is just one small species, it is part of this greater network. As is seen in this story, the conservation of the butterfly really benefited and involved supporting all of these other species in which the butterflies really entangled with. So while the butterfly served as kind of this touchstone and incited a lot of the policies and conservation strategies that were put in place, it really benefited the whole prairie ecosystem.
Miller: Thank you both for joining us today. Jaclyn Moyer and Michelle Nijhuis, thank you.
Moyer / Nijhuis: [In unison] Thank you.
Miller: Jaclyn Moyer is a writer based in Corvallis. She wrote one of the articles for the special issue of High Country News, all devoted to new ways to think about conservation movements. Michelle Nijhuis was a guest editor for the issue. She’s also the author of the book “Beloved Beasts.”
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