Politicizing the Environmental Debate, 2000–2017 267
pigeon, the heath hen was a plentiful and con-
venient source of protein (a “poor man’s tur-
key”) in the 18th and early 19th centuries. By
the 1870s, however, the species had been hunted
completely off the mainland. Only a few dec-
ades later there were fewer than 100 left, all of
them hunkered down in a single flock residing
in Martha’s Vineyard. Not a bad place to conva-
lesce, unless you’re a small,genetically isolated,
nonmigratory bird population.
Unlike the passenger pigeon, the heath hen
had a few efforts to save it, including banning
hunting and creating a sanctuary in the Vine-
yard in the early 1900s. But the die had been cast.
Like Martha before him, Booming Ben—and the
heath hen along with him—vanished into the
evolutionary ether, most likely sometime in the
spring of 1932.
Although the public was slow to rally to the
conservation cause in the early 20th century, not
everyone greeted these losses with resignation.
One of the strongest voices agitating for wild-
life protection during these years was William T.
Hornaday, the rabble-rousing wildlife crusader
and founding director of the Bronx Zoo. Horna-
day challenged the complacency of an American
public unwilling to acknowledge the destructive
game it was playing with its wild animals. In his
conservationist manifesto,Our Vanishing Wild-
life (1913), he tried to convey a sense of the bio-
logical stakes when a species was pushed to the
brink of extinction.
“Let no one think for a moment,” he warned,
“that any vanishing species can at any time beFor a species that’s been dead for a century, the
passenger pigeon is having a pretty good year.
A flurry of new books,features, and a major
documentary has been roughly timed to com-
memorate the death of “Martha,” the last sur-
viving member of the species that drew her final
breath in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914.
It’s a kind of national elegy for a bird that no
one alive today remembers ever seeing, certainly
not in the wild, where it was last spotted around
the time shovels first broke ground on the New
York subway system.
The bird was a cheap and easily procured
source of meat in the 18th and 19th centuries
due to its astonishing abundance (once number-
ing in the billions) and its unfortunate tendency
to travel in massive flocks.Its fate was sealed by
the 1850s with the expansion of the railroad
and telegraph, which fueled an insatiable com-
mercial appetite and profitable pigeon market
by providing easy transport and rapid communi-
cation about the location of flocks. There were
precious few attempts to save the species in that
pre–Endangered Species Act era, and none that
made a difference.
Less than 20 years following Martha’s quiet
demise in Cincinnati, the sole surviving heath
hen(a close relative of the Greater Prairie-
chicken) made its last appearance in southeast-
ern Massachusetts. Nicknamed “Booming Ben“
for the bird’s distinctive vocalizations during
its extravagant mating ritual, he was a relic of
a population that was once common from New
England to northern Virginia. Like the passenger
Document 179: Ben Minteer on Extinct Species and De-extinction
In the future it may be possible to re-engineer extinct species and let them loose in the wild. Conservationists
and preservationists, however, make the case that not only does the extinction of a species affect the ecosystem
within which it once lived, so that it can never really be reintroduced into its former habitat, but also that such
technological intervention interferes with human respect for nature. Emerging technologies will have enormous
impact on how humans interact with nature, and we need to be cautious before unleashing some of these
technologies, especially biotechnologies.
Ben Minteer, an environmental ethicist at Arizona State University, focuses on the relationships between
humans, other species, and wildlands in a rapidly changing world.