12 INTRODUCTION
soil and aquifers to agribusiness, coral reefs to poison and dynamite fishing,
whales and dolphins to military sonar, seabirds to oil spills, pollinating bees to
pesticides and development, gorillas to charcoal barons, elephants tigers snow
leopards white rhinos hippos to poachers for bushmeat and fur and skins and
ivory, brilliant macaw parrots to illegal bird dealers, 38 million sharks a year
(“finned” then tossed back to drown) to shark-fin soup, animal and plant species
to plunder, to cosmetic, sartorial, culinary, medicinal, and aphrodisiac vanity,
and to corporate plus consumerist greed.
All this goes on apace. Turtles, migrating across oceans to lay eggs on the
beach where they were born, find a Club Med. On a Florida road between two
popular lakes, autos crush thousands of turtles a year. Leatherback tortoises,
weighing up to a ton, have existed 230 million years, since before the dinosaurs.
One of them, alive when Mozart was composing operas, died in 2006, as did
another that Darwin may have found in the Galápagos Islands. Now many die
from ingesting plastic bags that look like jellyfish.
Not only predator but endangered species, we have slowed some ruinous
trends: smog reduced, rivers cleansed, forests managed, habitats restored, Cali-
fornia condors literally snatched from extinction with one breeding pair, wolves
and grizzlies reintroduced, bison flourishing, mega-resorts stopped in Puerto
Rican wetlands. And public breakthroughs can occur: a crossover vote halt-
ing wanton exploitation, big business or a labor union seeing green, bicycles
everywhere, an acceptable SUV, wind turbine, leaf blower.
Yet ecologic zeal can backfire. Preserving Yosemite National Park meant
first evicting Ahwahnee and Miwok Indians, while Yellowstone got rid of Sho-
shone and Lakota. Arizona’s Black Mesa Mine, shut down for fouling the air,
draining the water table and thereby sacred springs, had also provided jobs for
Navajo and Hopi Indians. Cleansing the air may itself hasten global warming,
because pollution haze absorbs and scatters sunlight. Curtailing ranchers and
loggers drives them to sell land to developers. In Canada, the 1980s campaign
against slaughtering seals, beaver, and fox for fur coats and scarves left native
trappers strapped for a living. They had to turn their land and themselves over
to companies building gas pipelines through a pristine valley, flooding the land
for a hydroelectric plant, drilling for oil in teeming offshore waters.
Choices pitting nature against jobs, development, or recreation, choices aris-
ing every day as environmental awareness grows, can take nasty turns. Using
an 1872 law, mining interests buy national forest and federal wildland at $2.50
an acre, then while creating jobs they also sell lush terrain to developers at
eight-thousandfold profits. An Arizona ski resort pipes up wastewater to make
artificial snow on a peak long sacred to the Hopi. A coal-fired carbon-dioxide-