North America abounds in wildlife — but why?

At the turn of the last century, many observers believed that species that we take for granted today would disappear forever. In this episode, we share a story about the way that wildlife conservation came to be practiced, the lives that it privileged, and the lives that it left out.

But despite any controversy, one aspect of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation (or "the NAM" for our purposes) is indisputable: its principles explain the landscape of laws and institutions in which North Americans enjoy nature today.

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You are listening to season four of Future Ecologies.

I guess we'll just start here. Mendel, have you ever hunted something wild for your own sustenance?

Do mushrooms count?

[Laughs]

They're easy to sneak up on.

It's very true. In this case, mushrooms don't count. I'm talking about wild animals.

I have never hunted a wild animal. At least not a mammal. I fished a couple times. But no, I haven't hunted land animals in that typical sense. I've never shot a gun at a living thing,

Right yeah.

Why do you ask?

I ask because you're a person who enjoys the outdoors.

Mhm

Harvests some wild food.

Sure, yeah.

But you've never picked up a firearm. And I think many people are like that. Until very recently, that was me too. And now I've taken up the crossbow. And I would say that I hunt, but I feel like to earn that distinction you have to have been successful at it at least once.

You're an aspiring hunter.

I'm an aspiring hunter. I walk around with the crossbow in the fall. So we've established that... you are not a hunter.

Nope.

So how about this: Have you ever heard of the Boone and Crockett club?

No.

Okay. What about the Lacey Act?

No. Should I have?

The Pittman Robertson act?

No.

How about those that duck stamps that you can buy that support conservation in the US?

That's a thing?

That's a thing.

I've never seen those. I'm in Canada. I would buy them if I could.

So then would it be fair to guess that you haven't heard of the North American model of wildlife conservation?

Not at all... the- the North American model of wildlife conservation,

The North American model of wildlife conservation.

That's a mouthful. Are we gonna say that a lot?

Should we call it the NAM for short? Okay. You haven't heard of the NAM?

No.

Well, apparently, the NAM is all the rage in hunting and wildlife management circles right now. And you're in luck, because I've had a long conversation with one of its key proponents.

Sure. My name is Shane Mahoney.

Shane literally co-wrote the book on the NAM.

and the CEO and president of Conservation Visions, based in St. John's, Newfoundland, the former head of wildlife research for the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, founder of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Science at Memorial University, And the head of sustainable development and science for the government of Newfoundland and Labrador before forming my own enterprise.

It practically goes without saying that Shane, like everybody that I've interviewed for this episode, loves wildlife.

I became a lover of animals from the time I could crawl, and I remain to this day — I can't tell you how much time I spent even today, looking at ducks in a small lake behind my home.

That's so sweet. So clearly, this Shane here loves animals.

That's true.

Loves the outdoors.

Absolutely.

And supports the North American model.

Sure

Whatever that is. What is the North American model? What are we talking about?

Well, first of all, the term is relatively new. And the term the North American model refers to the system of policies, laws, and institutions that are shared really, in a sense by Canada and the United States, that focus fundamentally on how wildlife is to be conserved in the two countries.

The NAM is many things. It's a set of principles for managing wildlife. And it also purports to be a historical account of the development of the conservation movement in the United States and Canada.

It's a historic reality in the sense that the institutions that have been created international treaties, the schools of science, the discipline of wildlife management itself, the state and provincial agencies, the legislation, you know, all of these things, I mean, they're real, they're not theoretical, they're not conceptual. They actually exist.

So the NAM is a set of principles. It's a it's a historical account. But I think more than anything else, it's a story. It's a story about who is responsible for rescuing wildlife from the brink of annihilation here in North America, and about how they did it. And it's a story that's told by people who care deeply about wildlife.

So why did you kick this thing off asking me if I've hunted anything? What does hunting have to do with this model?

That's what we're about to find out. On today's episode, we're going to ask: What is the NAM? Where did it come from? What are its proponents advocating for? And what impact is it having on how we relate to wildlife here in North America? And of course, we're going to speak to some folks who are challenging the NAM, and have their own ideas about how people could and should relate to wildlife. But whatever you may think of the NAM, you can't talk about how we manage many wild species that we live with on this continent without engaging with it. So from Future Ecologies, this is Model Citizens, part one: Fair Game,

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Penelakut, Hwlitsum, Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh and other Hul'qumi'num-speaking peoples, this is Future Ecologies — exploring the shape of our world through ecology, design and sound.

Okay, so to understand the NAM — that's the North American model... of...

Wildlife conservation.

Exactly. You have to understand that it's both a descriptive and prescriptive enterprise. So let's start with what it's attempting to describe — the story that it has to tell. And I'm gonna introduce you to the storyteller.

The term itself came from Dr. Valerius Geist

— that's such a good name!

— who's since passed.

Yeah, Valerius Geist, he was a Ukrainian-born Canadian scientist, who actually lived not very far from here on Vancouver Island. He passed away just this last summer before I was able to reach out to him for an interview. But I can say that he was a very well respected, and occasionally controversial wildlife biologist.

He coined that term because he was in a very intense debate at the time, going back 25 years now over what would be the likely negative outcomes of game ranching.

That book on mountain goats that I talked about in the Goatwalker series — A Beast the Color of Winter — that was him.

That was his!

Long story short, in the late 1980s, he becomes a vocal critic of the business practice of game ranching, which is keeping wild game animals for harvest of meat and other marketable parts.

Keeping... like in fences?

Yes, it's sort of the terrestrial equivalent of salmon farming, right?

Aha.

And Valerius Geist identified a lot of problems with this system that would eventually become major issues such as like the potential for disease transmission.

Right, as we know with fish farms.

Yep. And altering the genetics of wild populations.

As we know with fish farms.

Yeah. But he also argued that the very act of privatizing wildlife — keeping wild animals for private profit — threatened the foundation of North American wildlife conservation.

So in that very intense debate, he said, we have a system in North America that is at risk. He believed that that system had done a remarkable job in the last 150 years of recovering wildlife. And in that he was absolutely historically correct.

It's funny, I have kind of another interpretation of how wildlife has happened in North America. And it's not... it doesn't seem quite as optimistic. What system is he talking about? How have we recovered so much wildlife?

Very few people involved in the conservation movement in Canada and the United States, at any level, have any real idea of how depleted wildlife was from about 1880 to 1920, for example. They have no idea that almost every species that we see as common today — that we look upon as a primarily a food source, for example such as elk or deer or wild turkeys, or waterfowl, things of this nature — that almost all of them would have been on an endangered species list if we'd had it.

So many listeners will be familiar with the wide-eyed descriptions of unbelievably large wildlife populations that were made by early European explorers and colonists here in North America,

Right.

Universally every single one of them was astounded by the amount of wildlife that they saw. Now, you have to put that up against where they were coming from. If you came from the bowels of London, England, believe me and you saw the expanses of Canada and the United States and the wildlife and beauty that were here. I mean, it must have been like, you know, reaching another planet, essentially, for people. But what happened, of course, is that they did take hold this idea in the European mind, that this was limitless.

I want to talk for a minute about this, like this abundance of wildlife that people saw. This is an interesting piece of the story that the storytellers of the NAM are telling. Which is that, you know, many people attribute this abundance of wildlife in North America, that European colonists were amazed by right? Many historians now attribute this abundance of wildlife to the sustainable lifeways and conservation practices of Indigenous peoples here in North America, which we'll discuss later in this episode. But some, including influential anthropologist William Denevan, have also pointed out that these wildlife populations almost certainly experienced significant increases at the time, due to introduced European diseases and their effects on Indigenous peoples.

Oh! These folks are alleging that, like after contact, the European impact on Indigenous hunters effectively allowed wildlife populations to explode in a way that they hadn't been as populous immediately before.

Precisely.

Wild.

The destruction that then went on decimated human populations that had existed here for maybe 30,000 years, certainly back 15, 16, 17,000 years. And that led to an increase in the abundance of wildlife at that time.

Huh... that's not a....

Not an idea that's commonly discussed.

Yeah.

It is in line with recent research that has suggested that many areas in North America that had been maintained as open ecosystems by Indigenous peoples reforested, after diseases swept through those communities. And that that reforestation had a huge impact on global climate. Either way, there's no disputing that there were incredibly robust populations of wildlife across the continent in the decades and centuries following first contact. But by the time the civil war comes to an end, many, if not most of these populations are in sharp decline.

It's hard to believe that it could happen at the scale it did with the speed with which it did. I mean, the passenger pigeon and the bison are two of the best examples. Massive populations of animals! The passenger pigeon being probably the most numerous bird on the planet, probably the most numerous that ever existed, as far as we know. And yet, within a period of a few decades, essentially, by virtue of human intervention, and also ecological processes, they were eliminated.

Famously, there were flocks of passenger pigeons that literally blotted out the light of the sky for hours, I think, as they flew overhead.

Yeah.

And somehow, we managed to hunt them to extinction in not a very long time.

Right. So you use the word hunt there. I mean, the causes for most of these declines, in hindsight, are pretty clear, right? Land conversion, and habitat loss were factors. And for the bison, of course, there was a calculated

— right

— and successful effort to destroy them as a food source for Indigenous peoples.

Right, it was an intentional campaign of starvation.

Yes. But in so many cases, Americans and Canadians simply killed and ate too many of these animals at the time. And it's kind of hard for most of us to imagine today. But in essence, anyone with a rifle or a trap could go out into the woods, and kill or harvest as many animals as they wanted. And they could eat as much as they could eat. And then they could sell the meat or the furs or the feathers, to booming markets in wildlife products across North America and Europe. And so as a result, so many iconic species of wildlife are hunted to near or complete oblivion, including, of course, well known examples like the passenger pigeon, but also sea otters, Right. And beavers.

Uh huh

And deer!

Wow!

And other species that we think of as common today.

And so we had circumstances — even in the American Northeast, where white tails abounded, and where to this day they abound — where you know, you would have a major report in a newspaper would be the fact that a track of a white tailed deer was spotted, or children would be taken out of school to actually see it.

Oh my god. Can you imagine like, deer watching tours, like we have whale watching boats now?

Right?

That's wild.

Or like, kids, we got to take the day off of school, there's a deer in the neighborhood.

You don't want to miss this opportunity!

I know. We're laughing now, because they're so abundant, but can you imagine?

That's really trippy.

So this is where the story of the NAM starts. And the entire history of the development of the modern conservation movement and the institutions that have been created to support it in North America. It's too long and complex to tell here today. But the specific story that the NAM is focused on is actually a much smaller piece of this larger story. And it centers around a key historical figure. Your friend and mine: Theodore Roosevelt.

Ooh! Good old Teddy.

So if you went to elementary school in the United States, or apparently in Canada, since you know who I'm talking about...

Mostly just through, like, pop culture osmosis.

Yeah.

I did not go to elementary school in the United States.

Well, if you had, you might have learned how Theodore Roosevelt was the great conservationist president. He was a Hunter.

A hunter extraordinaire!

A birder, a naturalist, and President United States from 1901 to 1909. And during that time, he establishes the US Forest Service, and presides over a major expansion of federal protected lands, including national parks and national monuments, national forests, bird and game reserves. But in the world of the NAM, his most important contribution happens more than a decade before he becomes president: In 1887, when he founds an organization called... the Boone and Crockett club.

Oh! Okay. Named after?

Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.

Those guys...

Who are basically like the mythic and somewhat problematic archetypes of American frontiersman.

Right.

So already, it's kind of a nostalgic idea. They're harkening back to an earlier era of like the open American frontier, when the manly men of the time could go out and kind of, you know...

Put animals on their heads and row down rivers.

Whatever you're picturing, that's probably what they were thinking too.

When Roosevelt called the first meeting in his New York home of the Boone and Crockett club — wealthy hunters, these were the socialites, these were the wealthy people — and told all those wealthy people, you're here for two reasons. One is, we're going to say wildlife. And the second is you've done well by this country, so therefore, you're going to give something back.

So how would they save wildlife? By essentially replacing the unregulated market and subsistence hunting that was happening in North America at the time, with a system of regulated hunting based on a kind of Americanized, more egalitarian version of the European ideals of fair chase and sportsmanship.

What do you mean by fair chase? What... what is that?

You're probably more familiar with it than you think. The term "fair chase" is actually a registered trademark of the Boone and Crockett Club, which still exists, by the way. And it basically means that the only ethical way to hunt an animal is if that animal has a reasonable ability to escape the hunter. Right? If it has a sporting chance. And the idea actually dates back to the European aristocracy. But it's been popularized in America by the Boone and Crockett club, and especially by this one incident that involves Roosevelt refusing to shoot a bear that had been tied to a tree, because of course, it just wouldn't have been sporting. And that's, of course, where teddy bear comes from.

Wow!

Unfortunately, that bear was actually like put out of its misery, just not by Roosevelt. Anyway...

He got to take the moral high ground.

He took the moral high ground and made a point out of it. And it became kind of like almost a piece of propaganda, right, that went out there into the world to kind of provide an example of what the Boone and Crockett club and its members were advocating for. As you might have guessed, while this was about giving wildlife a chance, it was also about pride, and a certain conception of masculinity.

It was also about the idea that post the American Revolution, and the American Civil War, that, you know, Americans were getting soft. They were no longer the people of the small farm and the frontier, and they had to recover that or else America would become weak. Outdoor engagement and hunting in particular, those kinds of things were, in quotation marks, "manly" kinds of things to do.

So these ideas around sportsmanship are at the center of the Boone and Crockett Club's agenda to save wildlife.

But out of that idea that we would do away with the commercial killing and sale of wildlife. And we would return it to a personal utilization kind of model. That was the core. And out of that his various systems, and institutions, and regulations, international agreements — they all came out of this.

So wait — you're not allowed to sell hunted meat after this? You can't commodify hunted game?

Have you ever bought hunted meat from a supermarket?

I guess not. Interesting.

Yeah. And that's part of what comes out of this. And just a few examples of the legislation that proponents of the NAM associated with this history. There's the Lacey Act of 1900.

Whatever that means...

Which prohibits trade in illegal wildlife parts.

Okay.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which protects migratory birds between the US and Canada. The Pittman Robertson act of 1937 that provides funding to improve wildlife habitat based on an excise tax on firearms and ammunition.

[Stammers] They're using taxation on firearms to protect wildlife?

That's right.

Interesting.

And of course, it was the US Congress that passes all of this legislation. But it was the well connected members of the Boone and Crockett club that were directly or indirectly involved in basically transforming their ideas into law. People like Roosevelt, of course, but also like George Bird Grinnell and Gifford Pinchot, and William Sherman, and Aldo Leopold.

I know one of those names.

They're all big names in wildlife conservation.

Oh I'm showing my whole butt.

And they were all members of the Boone and Crockett club.

Wow.

And some of them are members of the Bee which of course we talked about in season two.

The Bee! Ian McTaggart Cowen.

That comes a little later. Anyway...

We remember the big names. We remember the Roosevelts and Pinchots and the Grinnells, and people of that nature. But of course there were countless, countless unknowns who were passionate to play roles that history has not so much recorded.

It's an important point that Shane is making here. These folks who are very well known but who you do not know — nd that's totally fair — were important figures in the conservation movement in the US and Canada. But the story that the NAM tells is less concerned with other branches of that movement. For example, the more protectionist, hands-off approach to conservation that people associate with John Muir and the Sierra Club.

Right.

But it also doesn't include minorities or women, despite their role in, for example, ending the widespread use of bird feathers in fashion for the sale in hats, right? That was a women's led movement.

Right.

Like, if you look at the turn of the century women's fashion, it's beavers and feathers and wildlife, essentially, right, like lots of wildlife parts in use.

I don't know if you've ever heard the sarcastic retort, like "what am I a milliner?"

No.

So like you ask somebody a question that they would have no expertise in, and the response is "what am I a milliner?" Because a milliner is a maker of women's hats. And they basically had to be generalists in everything, because everything was being stuck on to hats.

Oh, I see.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

That's interesting. That's interesting. And of course, the NAM isn't at all concerned with Indigenous people. We're going to come back to this later because it is obviously a huge problem. But in the meantime, I want to highlight what might be clear to listeners already, which is that this new conservation movement based on the shift from market and subsistence hunting to a sportsmanship kind of model, it was very successful in contributing to its central aim, which was to recover wildlife populations in North America.

Righ — we know deer, we have elk, we've got turkeys.

Right.

They're around.

Especially the population of... game species.

Oh, oh! I never thought about that! Yeah, the things that we like to hunt and eat, they're around. The things that we're less concerned with, not so much.

So the NAM is a big part of how that happens. Today, instead of whitetail deer being extremely uncommon, right, they're like, over-abundant in many places. And you can see the legacy of this movement in the legislation that we have, and in the institutions that we have, and in the explosion of NGOs that espouse these same kinds of values around wildlife.

And this was one of the great things that came out of it: the Ducks Unlimiteds of the world, etc, etc, etc. It spurred this kind of frenzy to identify yourself as being a member of an organization or an entity that was fighting for wildlife. And the amount of money that those organizations have collectively raised over a century, let's say now — some of them were born in the 1930s — is just absolutely mind boggling.

Uh... we have some top shelf names in this episode: Valerius Geist, Ducks Unlimited.

Are you not familiar with Ducks Unlimited?

No, I have no idea.

Really?

Yeah. Oh, okay. I live under a rock.

Ducks Unlimited is probably like the premier waterfowl conservation organization in North America. It exists in both Canada and the United States. And they do tons of work conserving wetlands and creating wetlands and restoring wetlands. Specifically, because they want to increase the populations of waterfowl.

For hunting explicitly?

I mean, yes and no, right? It's like, "yes and".

For the love of ducks.

Yeah.

But also...

And there are organizations like this everywhere. I mean, there's too many to count. And a local example is the BC Wildlife Federation.

Heard of them.

Of which I myself am a member. They provide hunting insurance, so that I can go out and walk around with my crossbow without getting anything. And I've worked a lot with their wetlands education program, which is how I actually got into restoration in the first place. Like why I do what I do now is partly because I took one of the BC Wildlife Federation's wetlands institute programs, like a decade ago. So I've had a relationship with organizations like this, that goes back a long time. They do fantastic work in restoring wetland habitat and educating the public. And they do it on behalf of a hunter and angler-based membership. So this model is still very much alive today in the US and Canada.

I feel like we've been kind of dancing around the whole thing, because you haven't actually told me what the model is. You've told me where it comes from, what it's doing. What is the model?

Right. So you know, 25 years ago, Valerius Geist, he's like "game ranching is a bad idea. It threatens the foundations of US conservation". To which you would ask "what are the foundations of US conservation?" And he's like, "Well, they go back to Theodore Roosevelt and these dudes. And you know that history comes forward to the present day." And this system is defined by what I believe are seven key principles.

Nice. We love lists of principles.

We do [laughs] Are you ready for this one?

Yeah.

Okay. So, seven key principles. Principle one: wildlife resources are a public trust. This means that wildlife shouldn't be privately owned, right?

Sure.

Instead, they are effectively owned and managed by the state on behalf of all of us.

So this was the idea that wildlife really wasn't owned by by anyone, but yet it was owned by everyone.

Wildlife as the Commons.

So that's principle one.

Okay. Principle two: markets for game are eliminated.

This means that dead wildlife products shouldn't be commodified. And it's why you can't just go to the store and buy parts of wild animals to eat, or to adorn your head with. Although, as the proponents of the NAM have noted, there is still a market in furs that kind of contravenes this principle.

Right. Uh, what's principle three?

Principle three is allocation of wildlife is by law. And this basically means that the state gets to decide who has access to wildlife, and the when, and the why and the how.

Uh, wait, what? It's publicly held for all of us... but only some of us part of the time?

Right, well, the state decides who and how. The state allocates the publicly held resource that is wildlife.

You know, there had to be a regulated system whereby people will be allowed access to wildlife

Principle four: wildlife can only be killed for a legitimate purpose. And this principle, as you might guess, hinges entirely on the definition of...

Legitimate!

You couldn't just go out and destroy it for any reason. You had to have some kind of legitimate use. And of course, one of the primary uses was for food. And that's why, of course, virtually all state and provincial agencies very quickly passed regulations once they came into existence, to say you couldn't leave your harvest in the field. If you took that animal's life, you had to make use of that animal.

But that use can't extend to just, like, taxidermy?

I guess that's arguable. Right. And I think there are still many people in many places who hunt primarily for that purpose. So the North American model, like these principles are sort of like the ideals. And the system as a whole generally reflects them. But it doesn't mean that in all circumstances, they are followed, as the proponents of the NAM would like them to be followed, if that makes sense.

Right. Like, just like you said, with the fur trade that it still exists.

Yeah. So there are exceptions, I think that are pretty easy to find that prove the rule to a certain extent, right. On to principle five.

Sure.

Wildlife are considered an international resource. Which means that one state shouldn't take unilateral action regarding wildlife that migrates across international boundaries, and what gives rise to international treaties like the ones for migratory birds. That one's pretty straightforward.

Sure.

Number six: science is the proper tool to discharge Wildlife Policy. And this basically means that Western science should determine wildlife management practices.

Woah. What was the alternative in their minds? Like, what other things guide policy according to these gentleman hunters?

Politics, business interests, right? So they wanted to make sure that whatever we did decide that the state should do in terms of allocating wildlife, it would be based on sound science.

But then that also, as you as you hint at, definitionally or implicitly excludes non-western, i.e. Indigenous ways of knowing.

Yes. Okay. The last principle, principle seven: democracy of hunting is standard. And this final principle is key.

There ought to be no class distinctions at all about having access to wildlife. That every citizen should have access to wildlife. And in a perfect world, of course, their access should be equal, and unimpeded.

So this is a key distinction between the American version of sportsmanship and the European one. To quote from the original paper on the topic of the NAM: "the European model allocated wildlife by land ownership and privilege, whereas in North America, all citizens in good standing can participate." That's the ideal anyway. And of course, privilege and land ownership continue to matter a lot in practice. So, taking a step back and looking at the principles as a whole. When I took my hunter education course, through the BC Wildlife Federation, I saw almost every single one of these principles kind of embedded in the curriculum as values. And the message of them together is that as direct, consumptive users of wildlife, hunters and anglers have a responsibility to provide for the conservation of wildlife and to maintain a kind of positive image of their various activities in the mind of the general public. So, that image of like the redneck hunter going out to drink some beers and shoot some animals...

It's uncouth.

Uncouth, and like the complete opposite of what they're trying to cultivate.

Right.

And I think that many hunters and anglers have embraced this as a key part of their identity of who they are — as stewards of wildlife.

So all of a sudden, wildlife and patriotism, wildlife and nationhood became connected in a way they weren't ever connected before. And that citizenship and wildlife conservation, in whatever way that resonated with you, was important. And if you worked in the opposite direction, you simply weren't a good citizen.

And the proponents of the NAM feel that these values have been key, or maybe the key to conserving wildlife in North America.

Was there a massive rescue of that wildlife by this system, which placed emphasis on individual harvest, and regulated harvest, and science, and so on and so forth? Of that there can be no question.

Or, as Geist writes in his book, "The North American model of wildlife conservation is one of the continent's great cultural achievements. However, its success depends on a functional democracy, an armed citizenry, and public acceptance of the idea of wildlife being a renewable resource for consumption." So what do you think about all of this? As somebody who cares deeply about the more-than-human world, but does not hunt, do you see yourself represented in this model?

Well, I've never been told that, you know, hunting is my god-given, Nation-state-given right, and that I have some collective share of this natural resource, which is renewable, and all I need to do is armed myself and, and get a license, and get insurance. I've never been told that. That's not something that was offered to me as an opportunity. It sounds to me like it is still a very exclusive club of people who really get to involve themselves with this.

I think a lot of people would react that way. I would say that even though I have lately, picked up a crossbow to participate in this sort of model of conservation, I don't really relate to the story that they're telling. Do you relate to this at all?

It's pretty bizarre to confront this idea of, quote, unquote, masculine ideal, and patriotic identity — like, things which I don't feel personally very in touch with myself — but how those concepts can be co-opted in the service of nature conservation, that's a really interesting thing to hear. And clearly enjoying the life on the land, in both just being present with it, and at some level consuming it in all those different ways, is an important vehicle to caring about it, and wanting to sustain it, and wanting it to thrive. But it also clearly limits the scope of what characters within that ecosystem you are really supporting, right? Those things that are closest to mind for food: deer, and ducks, turkeys, elk, and fish. And less so frogs and butterflies and bugs, and trees.

And I might add to that list: large carnivores.

Huh.

And we're gonna get into everything that's left out... after the break. We're back!

Hey.

I'm Adam.

Mendel.

And this is Future Ecologies. Today, we're talking about the North American model of wildlife conservation or...

The NAM.

Which purports to describe the principles behind the complex sets of laws and institutions and values that have defined the success of the conservation movement in North America. And now we're going to dig into some of the critiques of the NAM. And we're gonna get started by way of illustration. Have you ever encountered a Catamount?

Not as far as I know.

What about a mountain devil?

Uh...

Perhaps a swamp screamer?

I mean...

A ghost cat?

The way you're talking about these things makes me not so upset that I haven't... by those names, uh, no.

Me neither, to be honest. How about this: What's the difference between a cougar, a panther, a mountain lion, and a puma?

I know this. Straight nothing. Trick question.

They're all names for the same animal. You want to give the Latin?

Puma concolor.

That's right.

It's listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the animal with the most common names in the world. And we know that there's over 100.

Wait... all those creatures that you just mentioned, that was the same... those were Puma.

Those are all common names in various parts of the world for the Puma.

And it's, of course, because of their huge range. They range from southern Canada all the way through North America and through South America all the way to the tip. And so, of course crosses so many kinds of people and different cultures and languages historically. And of course, each of these cultures had their own name for the species. So there's there's so many names for them. But it's all one animal.

That's so wild.

Yeah. And this is Mark Elbroch

And my official capacity, I am the director of the Puma or Mountain Lion or Cougar program for Panthera.

We've got Valerius Geist, Ducks Unlimited, and Panthera

Yep.

This just keeps getting better and better.

We have the mission of conserving the world's wild cat species, and more importantly, the habitats in which they live.

And I got in touch with Mark, because he sent me his book almost exactly two years ago. It's called the Cougar Conundrum. It's actually where I heard about the NAM in the first place.

This must be the guy to tell us a little more about mountain lions.

You got it.

For folks who have any experience with housecats, you already know a lot about mountain lions. They're much the same in temperament, and in behavior, and expression. The big difference being that that mountain lions can take down prey that weigh 10 times as much as they do. Which is ,you know, both scary and inspiring.

I'm gonna lean more towards scary here. How much does a mountain lion weigh?

I don't know. I'd have to look it up. You want me to look it up?

Yeah, just to know like, what does that mean? What is 10 times a mountain lion?

They weigh anywhere between 64 and 220 pounds.

Why does it need that much power?

I think that's a common reaction.

People were passionate about mountain lions. They either hate them or they love them.

Part of the point of this book that Mark wrote is to introduce people to what we actually know about mountain lions. And to dispel these kinds of myths that persist around them. Mark has been studying mountain lions during a time when new technologies like GPS collars and motion triggered cameras have enabled scientists to learn a lot more about them than we previously knew.

And it's really changed how we perceive the animal more broadly, as we delve in with new tools to uncover what was previously the secret lives of mountain lions. Tell me more! What secrets has this revealed?

Well, for one, Mark would describe mountain lions as as not aggressive, right, as very cautious. And for good reason.

They're absolutely ruled by caution. They are one of the most cautious animals I've ever experienced or worked with. Over most of their range, they're not the top top top carnivore. They're what we call subordinate to other species. And it could be wolves, it could be brown bears, could be black bears, could be Jaguars. And I think that's really played into their personality — that they would always prefer an escape than a confrontation.

This caution might explain why neither you nor I have ever seen one. This is the whole thing with mountain lions: for an animal with a range that was essentially almost the entirety of both North and South America, they've been relentlessly hunted across this area for centuries, due in large part to the risks that they pose not not to us, but to our livestock. And they were basically entirely wiped out in central and eastern North America. In the West, they've fared much better, although their numbers are certainly reduced today compared to pre industrial times. And although the days of mountain lion bounties are gone, at least in most places, many animals are still killed when they come into conflict with us or with our livestock. For example, Mark studies mountain lions on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

And here, the leading cause of death for the mountain lions that we're following is legal state removal after a depredation occurs. Folks have a couple of goats, or a couple of alpacas, or some sheep, maybe 20.

And maybe these animals are kept in the backyard, which backs onto some forested land.

But what happens occasionally, when you live in a place like this, and you have animals like that is a mountain lion comes in and takes advantage of an easy to obtain meal. Especially if if the defences for these animals is minimal. And so the owner, many of them call the state agency, the wildlife agency and say, "Hey, a mountain lion just came in and killed my goat." And so the state generally comes and then they make a decision — with the landowner, but they can also make the decision on their own — to remove the mountain lion. And in general, that's the only option. It's a lethal removal. That means hunting it down and killing it.

And this is not uncommon across the remaining range of the mountain lion: they'll attack some livestock, and then the retribution is going to be swift and final. And just by way of example, Mark and I had to reschedule our interview several times because he was dealing with a situation just like this.

In this particular case, this week was a little bit crazy because it was like a soap opera of what happened and led to the various cats being killed.

To make a long story short, a local landowner spotted a female a mountain lion with two cubs next to their chicken coop. In this case, the chickens were actually really well defended. They were in a solid coop.

So the chickens were safe, they killed the cat anyway. It orphaned two kittens. These kittens then ended up killing alpacas this week on another property, and the state removed them. But why it was a curious case was that the property that they killed these alpacas on had had two other depredation incidents just in the last three, maybe four months. And so they'd already removed cats on this single property. Because the livestock owner was refusing to take actions to defend their livestock. They just said it was too much work. They didn't want to put them in at night, put them in an enclosure, have a roof over them. They just let them wander through this timbered property adjacent a huge chunk of woods.

Yeah I mean, why would you bother when you can just call the state and have them shoot your cats.

And I have absolutely supportive of removing an animal that is endangering livestock, or making people feel unsafe, or a threat to human populations. I mean, that's all fine with me. What I am not fine with is when owners of livestock take absolutely no responsibility for them. And assume that the only solution is after the fact that when they're killed, that they can just remove a cat from the environment.

This is a story that plays out in many places where our lives intersect with the lives of large predators. In this case, it's exacerbated by the perverse incentives that you just mentioned — that how can it be cheaper for the livestock owners to get the state to remove all of these animals than it is for them to just protect their livestock?

There is money available to call the state agency, public money will pay for the gas for that warden, their time to come to the house, pay for a hound handler to come in and chase that cat, pay for the time to shoot that cat, the bullets and the rifle, all the material. And yet there's no public money to help that very same community member build a fence.

Yeah, granted, that's a bad incentive. But let's bring this back to the North American model. What? How are these things connected?

Well, let's acknowledge first that NAM or no NAM, there has always been some conflict between human beings and large predators. And of course, both Mark and Shane agree that there are sometimes difficult choices to be made when conflicts do arise.

Who should dictate the level of risk that society is willing to assume?

There will always probably be a little bit of conflict. But if we were to change as a culture to accommodate living with these large carnivores, including mountain lions, we could reduce the risks of that conflict so much that we barely even think about it.

And so the reason that we're talking to Mark here about mountain lions is because he thinks that one of the big barriers to the kind of changes that he wants to see is the NAM. And I want to discuss those intersections here. So the first one is cultural, and the second one is financial. So the cultural side relates to the history of the NAM that we've been discussing. The whole movement proudly proclaims its origins to be with these prominent gentleman hunters at the turn of the last century.

So that's exactly the era that sort of shaped the principles of the North American model today. And you know, born of that Teddy Roosevelt era, where carnivores were seen as enemies.

So the Teddy Roosevelts of the world they, they often had a fairly dim view of these large predators. In his own words, Roosevelt described mountain lions, somewhat paradoxically, as, quote, very cowardly, and yet bloodthirsty and ferocious.

That's a classic war enemy propaganda, right, like both conniving and evil and like, slimy and not... not deserving of life.

Yeah, absolutely. And part of the reason for that is that at the time, these hunters felt that large predators were competing for their game, which was scarce!

And this enters the fray at the same time that this idea of Leopold's and others of wildlife management starts to surface: the idea that we can manage, we can manipulate, we can be deliberate in where we want populations to go. But we also went through a period of vast ignorance with regard to the role of carnivores. We had really no idea.

This is before it was widely understood how critical large predators are to the health of ecosystems.

Without these large carnivores that really connect things and ensure that energy and nutrients are really moving in as many ways as possible and across as diverse set of pathways as possible. You're going to see that system become just like an empty shell. It looks beautiful, but it is not the system that can support resilience and health over the long term.

What Mark is saying here feels kind of like common knowledge to us now, right? But at the time, you know, 100 years ago, they just didn't know this stuff. And even though we kind of understand this now, that understanding has been slow to filter into policy and practice.

But you know, it took us so long to understand that these carnivores played a role. And they were neither villains nor competitors. They were the most like us. They were out there chasing, pursuing, capturing, and killing other living things, and consuming them.

So while the model has had huge benefits for game species, the results have been more mixed for large predators. The NAM has benefited them: significant areas of habitat for large predators have been protected as a byproduct of protecting land for game species.

And they have more prey available to them.

Sure. But the negative attitudes towards these large predators have persisted in both our cultural values and in our policy. Mark says that large predators are still treated like a threat to the game animals that the NAM was created to recover, and also to the domestic livestock that our society tends to value in kind of the same way that we value wild game species.

The actual model itself emphasizes the need to have abundant game populations over a priority for healthy ecosystems.

So that's the cultural aspect.

Right, but you mentioned that there's also a financial aspect to this, how does that come in?

Of course it is. It's always about the money. So, there is this aspect about the funding models that we have set up to support conservation, and about which constituencies our land management institutions have been set up to serve. One result of the development of the NAM at an institutional level, is that hunters and anglers provide a ton of funding — and for many US state wildlife agencies, the majority of the funding — through taxes on their gear, and through hunting licenses, and through their membership in organizations

In the United States, where if you buy certain pieces of equipment associated with hunting or angling, there's tax on that. And a portion of that goes to each state has raised billions and billions of dollars for wildlife conservation in that country.

And this fact is held up by proponents of the NAM as a huge success usually. It's true that hunters and anglers bear a disproportionate amount of the burden for funding these institutions. Just for example, sports hunters made up only about 6% of the population of the United States in 2011, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. And by the way that 6% was 89% male and 94% white. What this means in practice is that many state agencies that are supposed to be managing and allocating wildlife democratically — on behalf of the population as a whole — Mark says that they've become very responsive to this particular constituency.

And of course, it also directs the money. So it blocks money from going to certain conservation initiatives, or certain priorities for species. And it redirects it to very specific agendas and objectives that, of course, support that larger North American model.

By the way, Shane is quite aware that this is an issue.

They didn't tax backpacks, they didn't tax hiking shoes, they taxed those people: the hunters, and the anglers eventually, hunters first. And so all of a sudden that money went into — primarily into — game species. It wasn't that the hunters demanded that, by the way, the ammunition manufacturers and so on and so forth, demanded that. Because the people who were using their products were the hunters and anglers, and therefore they want their money spent on hunting and angling.

So there's some path dependency here: we started taxing hunters and anglers, and so the institutions that we've created have sort of turned around to try to benefit hunters and anglers. Which creates a really weird situations sometimes. For example, there's a relatively small group of sports hunters who specialize in using hounds to chase down and hunt mountain lions. And Mark says that state agencies are, you know, so receptive to hunters in general, that it's these folks who hunt mountain lions, who are the most effective advocates for them within the system.

Weird. That's a little surprising at first, but it's also just a mirror for what the North American model was doing before, right? Like there's this thing that we like to kill. Let's have more of it, please. And let's advocate for that. So... it feels kind of perverse, but it makes sense that the folks who are hunting these predators are also the ones saying that, hey, we want to make our game here as sustainable as we possibly can.

Absolutely. For better and worse in the United States, at least, there's the system of wildlife management that privileges consumptive users, and game species. And that's kind of that is the model of the NAM. It's working there.

Yeah.

It just means that it might not be working for everybody or anybody else. And Mark argues that the proponents of the NAM are exacerbating these inequities, because the story that they're telling can give the kind of false impression that it's hunting that saved wildlife in North America, when in reality, it was the regulation and curtailment of hunting.

It keeps putting out these ideas that I think are problematic for, for many reasons. But like, for instance, that hunting is essentially required to do conservation; that hunters are the people who are the greatest conservationists. And what I think that narrative does that hinders my work, is it creates a dichotomy and keeps emphasizing the division between hunters and non-hunters. And whenever you create that dichotomy, and emphasize it, you now have opposition. And it's only through collaboration that we're going to see real progress and conservation and a real work towards coexistence of large carnivores and people.

So how do we dissolve that dichotomy?

That's the question. And, you know, Mark isn't the only person that thinks this. Shane is also very sensitive to these critiques of the model. He very much wants to see a greater diversity of people contributing financially to conservation, and also getting a seat at the sort of table of wildlife management, right? He acknowledges that hunters are only part of the picture. So as always, it's a little bit complicated. You could argue that Valerius Geist and Shane Mahoney and the other proponents of the NAM, if you read their work, it has this kind of triumphal narrative around hunters and anglers and consumptive users that I think can be alienating to other constituencies. At the same time, you know, you sit down and talk to Shane in person, it's a different story. He's looking at the global scale,

We have a million species that are currently endangered on this planet. And right now, at least, we don't have nearly enough money to deal with it. So I like to start with the big picture problems, and say that, I'd like to have more people concerned, and a lot more money devoted, and a lot less imperiled on this planet than we currently have. And I believe that there's plenty of money in the world to solve the conservation problems. It would take a tiny fraction of global GDP — a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction — to put us on a road to recovery everywhere. But because too few people care, we won't get that money.

Here's the paradox of what Shane is saying. I think that part of the danger of a model of conservation that celebrates consumptive users above other people that like to engage with the more than human world, is that there just aren't enough consumptive users to support all have those needs of all of those different species during this biodiversity crisis that we're in. Even in the most rural areas, consumptive users are almost never a majority of the population. Meanwhile, more and more people are getting into non-consumptive outdoor activities like hiking and photography and birdwatching, right?

Tax the binoculars.

Well, that's just the point!

Tax the hiking boots.

There have been attempts in the United States to tax outdoor gear in the same way that firearms are taxed to support conservation. But so far, the corporations that make these products have been effective in basically torpedoing these efforts. So it hasn't happened yet. But there is public support for legislation like this. And we might see it happen in our lifetimes. But even if that happens, you know, it might help shore up the NAM financially, maybe even shifts policy within state agencies, right, it might solve some of these problems if more people are contributing. But there's kind of a deeper question here about the NAM, which is: is this really a model that we want to embrace? Is this a story that we want to keep telling ourselves?

There are things within the current what they're calling the North American model that are well worth keeping. You know, that wildlife are publicly owned in the sense that you know, everybody's invested, but there are other parts of it that just should be thrown out completely or altered. And for me, what I would hope a new approach would emphasize would be that the priority is habitat for ecosystem health and biodiversity. It is not abundant game populations. It is a focus on healthy, integrated human wildlife communities. And I think any approach moving forward needs to recognize that humans are part of the ecosystem, that we aren't separate. And that healthy human communities are connected to those ecosystems they live adjacent to or within or intermixed with, and that conservation needs to have that at its core.

Shane says that he maintains an open mind to new approaches like this.

A lot of the writings that are coming out challenging the model, if you will, or recommending change are very reasonable. I believe sustainable use of wildlife can be a major incentive for people to conserve nature, I do believe that. But I am totally fine with exploring worldviews in which it is not the case — if the evidence indicates that we can, in the long term, sustain wildlife populations, and secondly, maintain human cultural diversity.

So while the arguments around the NAM and around wildlife management can get really, really heated, my impression from speaking to Shane and Mark is that there actually are a lot of shared values and goals here.

The world is not black and white. We can find allies for the conservation of species in so many places, and that it's through breaking down the divisions and sort of obstacles — if we can break those down and recognize there are allies across the aisle, that we could really see all sorts of new opportunities for how we might coexist with large carnivores, and yet still have healthy human communities.

Personally, I've found that the seven principles that the NAM articulates are actually really helpful and understanding the institutions that we currently have for conservation, and how they developed — why they exist the way that they do. On the other hand, I do think that there are flaws in the story that the NAM is telling. It leaves a lot out. And I think it's inadequate as a proposal for the future of wildlife conservation.

So how are we going to fix the story?

Well, in part two of this mini-series on the NAM, we're going to take a look at a part of North America where folks are practicing and articulating a completely different mode for human-wildlife relationality. And we're going to address some even more fundamental issues with the NAM. Namely, how science is used within the model and the almost complete erasure of indigenous peoples from it.

Hell yeah.

So next time we continue this conversation.

We'll see you then. Future Ecologies is an independent production, made possible by our supporters on Patreon. For citations and a transcript of this episode, visit us at futureecologies.net

This episode was produced by myself Adam Huggins

And me, Mendel Skulski. It featured the voices of Shane Mahoney and Mark Elbroch. And with music by Thumbug, Museum of No Art, and Sunfish Moon Light.

Special thanks to Mark Elbroch. Julian Fisher, Amanda Hall, And to the Sitka foundation for supporting our fourth season. We're also on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The handle is always futureecologies.

Okay.

See you in part two.