From the Morgue
EJ culled environmental journalism's archives for the hot stories of the past 100 years. What is the legacy of each in the present cultural landscape?
100 YEARS AGO: PASSENGER PIGEONS
The Passenger Pigeon was more than a bird. It was an event.
When the massive flocks made their way across the country, people would peek out their windows, sit on rooftops with rifles or just cower inside as the multitudes darkened the sky.The Passenger Pigeon was once the most numerous bird species on earth, with numbers upwards of 5 billion.
Passenger Pigeons were gunned down with reckless abandon.The skies were so thick with them at some points that a rifle aimed blindly in the sky could bring down one, or even two birds.The phrase “stool pigeon”was coined by hunters who would capture a pigeon, nail its foot to a wooden stool and watch as its struggling brought the rest of the flock closer for the kill.
In one hunting competition, each hunter had to kill 30,000 birds to be considered for a prize.
The slaughter quickly took its toll.By 1896, only 250,000 pigeons remained in a single flock. In 1900, the last wild Passenger Pigeon was shot in Ohio, and the last captive pigeon died in 1914.
The Passenger Pigeon remains one of the few instances where the exact date of extinction is known.The irreversible tragedy invoked fear in society, giving it the realization of the permanent damage caused by unregulated harvest.
50 YEARS AGO: URBAN SPRAWL
The end of World War II brought an immense housing crunch; there weren’t enough open doors for returning soldiers and the families they were about to start.
William Levitt had the answer.He built “Island Trees,”which later became Levittown.It was America’s first suburb — rows of single-family, cookie-cutter houses built just outside New York City to accommodate a burgeoning population.
Levittown was a cultural phenomenon, doing away with the upper middle class standard of suburban living.Until the war, most who lived outside the city lived in custom-built homes, and they were appalled by the unfinished quality of the new suburbs. It was the right solution for the time, providing the “American dream” for families who depended on the city for their livelihood but didn’t want to live there. It was also the beginning of one of today’s hottest environmental topics : urban sprawl.
Combined with the increasing use of the automobile, the advent of suburbs kept cities expanding,making the city more important as a center of society. Wetlands, prairies and farm fields were plowed under to make room for the relentless expansion of suburbia. Governments are beginning to heed the warnings of extinction and habitat destruction, but land use solutions are few and far between.
20 YEARS AGO: SUPERFUND SITES
Superfund sounds like a promotion for an investment or a plot device for a spy movie.Maybe that’s what Congress intended when it created a fund controlled by the Environmental Protection Agency for investigating and cleaning up thousands of contaminated sites.
Begun in 1980, the Superfund project was a response to “citizen concern” for the multitude of contaminated sites produced by careless chemical dumping. The Times Beach Superfund site near Eureka,Mo.,was one of the largest and most publicized hazardous areas tackled by Superfund, an instigator for the legislation.The entire 500-acre area was evacuated and never resettled, though the Missouri Route 66 State Park now resides in the same area.
As of 2002, the Superfund program had investigated 44,700 potentially hazardous sites, and 74 percent of those have been made available for redevelopment. Though not a resounding success— more than half of the remaining sites were the most contaminated to start—it does show progress.
Superfund symbolized the realization that the environment could not be used without worry as a giant trash can.The EPA was not a mystical blue fairy that magically cured the dioxins and mercury deposits, but it took the initiative to ensure that the fairy wasn’t the only alternative.
10 YEARS AGO: THE SPOTTED OWL
In 1990, the northern spotted owl was declared “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Loggers in the Pacific Northwest were blamed for decimating the owl populations by cutting stands of old-growth forest.
The timber industry accused environmentalists of trying to put loggers out of business. Some estimates projected 28,000 lost jobs in the 1990s due to the owl’s listing. Environmentalists said the owls needed the oldest trees to survive, and at the rate forests were being cut, all the trees might be gone in 20 years.
In 1992,critical habitat was designated for the northern spotted owl,listing the types of land that were needed for the owl to recover.But it wasn’t until 1994 that any land was protected from logging.The Northwest Forest Plan ended the gridlock between the timber industry and environmentalists.The plan allowed timber sales from federal lands to resume,but at lower rates than the timber industry was used to.Roughly 80 percent of old-growth forests on 24.5 million acres of federal land would be protected.
The spotted owl population in the region continues to decline.By some estimates, there has been a 50 percent drop,prompting some to call for the owl to be listed as endangered.And competition for territory and food from the more aggressive barred owl may be forcing the spotted owl out of the forests.
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