TRANSACTIONS

of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Volume 87 • 1999

TRANSACTIONS

of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Volume 87 • 1999

Editor William J. Urbrock

Department of Religious Studies
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Oshkosh, Wisconsin 54901

Managing Editor Patricia Allen Duyfhuizen
Department of English
University of Wisconsin Eau Claire
Eau Claire, Wisconsin 54702-4004

Transactions welcomes articles that explore features of the State
of Wisconsin and its people. Articles written by Wisconsin
authors on topics other than Wisconsin sciences, arts and letters
are occasionally published. Manuscripts and queries should be
addressed to the editor.

Submission requirements: Submit three copies of the manu¬
script, double-spaced, to the editor. Abstracts are suggested for
science/technical articles. The style of the text and references
may follow that of scholarly writing in the author’s field. Please
prepare figures with reduction in mind.

© 1999 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters
All rights reserved

ISSN 0084-0505

For information on membership in the Academy,
call (608) 263-1692.

Contents

TRANSACTIONS

Volume 87 • 1 999

From the Editor v

Part One: Aldo Leopold Commemorative Articles

A Sense of Place 1

Nina Leopold Bradley

The years the Leopold family had at their Sand County farm, The Shack, were a slow
sensitizing of people to land. “A Sense of Place” is the story of those years.

<cThe Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and the Essay 5

J. Baird Callicott

A comparison of the text of the speech Aldo Leopold gave at the dedication of the
Wisconsin Arboretum and Wildlife Refuge in Madison on June 17,1 934, and the very
different published version thereof reveals that Leopold conceived of ecological
restoration at the Arboretum and other properties primarily as a benchmark of land
health serving the more general goal of ecological rehabilitation everywhere.

Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship 23

Susan Flader

Aldo Leopold was profoundly conscious of the American democratic tradition within
which he was working, and he thought hard throughout his career about the meanings
and implications of environmental citizenship.

Part Two: Other Current Articles

Relationships between Herbaceous Vegetation and Environmental
Factors along a Restored Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone 37

Craig Annen and Jonathan Lyon

Ecological analysis of restored communities linked with soil analyses provides
additional insights on plant-soil dynamics.

‘Pulp Fiction Edna Ferher’s Come and Get It and Ecofeminism 51

Ellen Argyros

Some elements of Ferber’s novel Come and Get It (a vivid portrait of the logging
industry in the early days of Wisconsin) suggest that Ferber can be identified as a kind
of proto-ecofeminist (ex. her linking lumber baron Barney Glasgow’s “rape” of the
land with his desire to seduce his friend’s granddaughter). Finally, however, Ferber’s
sympathies are not so much with those who share her gender or stance towards the
environment as with those who share her values about the moral benefits of hard work.

Hi

Timing of Spawning and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout
in a Central Wisconsin Stream 63

Ed L. Avery and Kent Niermeyer

The spawning period and timing of fry emergence for wild brown trout was
documented in a central Wisconsin stream to provide insights into potential wading-
related fry mortalities resulting from a proposed early spring catch-and-release trout
fishing season.

Detections of Red-Shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus)

Using High Volume Tape-Recorded Broadcasts 73

Terry Balding

A greater volume (130 db) conspecific tape-recorded broadcast may result in more
red-shouldered hawk detections than with the volume attainable from a conventional
portable tape player.

A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen ,

Green Lake County , Wisconsin 79

Thomas L. Eddy

Mitchell Glen supports a climax forest “island” that occupies a narrow post-glacial
gorge along a dolomitic escarpment three miles southeast of Green Lake in east
central Wisconsin. The glen’s shaded cliffs with cold-air drainage and springs at the
base of the gorge render a moist, cool microclimate that sustains certain species more
typical of northern Wisconsin.

Measuring the Degree of Variation in Wisconsin Pyganodon grandis 105

Joan Jass and Jeanette Glenn

Analysis of freshwater bivalve shell traits revealed a high degree of intraspecific
variation and regional differences correlating with the state’s major ecological
regions.

Fisheries Management in the Great Lakes:

The Evolution of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission 1 1 1

Jeffrey J. Ripp

This paper provides an institutional analysis of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission,
describing how the Commission has expanded beyond its original study-and- advise
mandate to become an important institution for coordinating Great lakes fishery
management.

IV

From the Editor

You know you re from Wisconsin if. . .

. . . you define summer as three months of bad sledding.

. . . you have experienced frostbite and sunburn on the same
weekend.

. . . you have more miles on your snowblower than your car.

. . . your Fourth of July picnic was moved indoors due to frost.

. . . you define swimming season as Labor Day weekend.

. . . you design Halloween costumes to fit over snowsuits.

. . . you decided to have a picnic this summer because it fell
on a weekend.

Sound familiar? While this group of one-liners was for¬
warded to me by a friend in Texas, Wisconsinites are used
to sharing similar sentiments with each other about Wiscon¬
sin weather, especially its frequent long hard winters. Let’s
face it: the weather in Wisconsin is a source of endless fasci¬
nation (and, at times, frustration) to residents and visitors
alike.

There are, of course, many positive sides to the Wiscon¬
sin weather story. From my own weather experiences over
just this past year I can bring to mind scintillating star shows
in the unobstructed winter skies above Door County; a frost-
swathed mid-March morning in Oshkosh when every tree
and bush sparkled and tinkled like a swaying crystal chan¬
delier in the dawning sunlight; balmy evenings in late spring
and early summer when the scent of lilacs graced my walks
around our neighborhood; a cool, drizzly day that turned a
hike along the Wisconsin River at the Dells into a sort of
walk through an Impressionist painting; hot, hot days in
mid-July that called out a profusion of wildflowers, especially
the roadside chicory and fields of Queen-Anne’s-lace, purple
knotweed (a.k.a. knapweed or star thistle), and coneflowers;
sunny days at the Cedarburg Bog in Saukville and at the
Whitefish Dunes State Park along Lake Michigan; and a pic¬
ture-postcard summer day at the beginning of August when
white clouds flung carelessly across a deep blue sky seemed
to gently chide the carefully patterned green and gold farm
fields of southwestern Wisconsin between Platteville and
Madison. You know you re from Wisconsin if. . . you've ever
enjoyed days like these.

v

I was reminded of what a special place
Wisconsin is by the fourteen school teach¬
ers from twelve other states (from as nearby
as Illinois and Michigan and as far away as
Hawaii, North Carolina, and Massachusetts)
who spent a month studying with me on the
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh campus
from mid-June to mid-July. While they en¬
joyed engaging in intellectual pursuits dur¬
ing our National Endowment for the Hu¬
manities seminar, they literally reveled in our
trips together around some of the eastern
parts of the state. Their visits to beautiful
Crescent Beach at Algoma; Summer Fest in
Milwaukee; an evening pops concert at But¬
termilk Park in Fond du Lac; State Street,
the Wisconsin State Capitol, and the Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin campus in Madison;
the International Crane Foundation, with its
marvelous restored prairie, in Baraboo; and
various places around Green Lake, the Fox
Cities, and Oshkosh, invariably resulted in
praises for the people, places, flora and
fauna, geology, and — yes! — even the
weather of Wisconsin. You know you ve vis¬
ited Wisconsin if . . . you have memories to
treasure like these.

This issue of Transactions features articles
we have grouped into two sections, each of
which showcases Wisconsin and its natural
and human environments.

The three featured contributions to the
opening section of Transactions pay tribute
to one of Wisconsin’s (and the nation’s) pio¬
neer conservationists, Aldo Leopold. Many
have observed 1999 as a sort of Leopold
Year, marking as it does the fiftieth anniver¬
sary of the publication of Leopold’s classic,
A Sand County Almanac. The Wisconsin
Academy has joined wholeheartedly in the
commemoration. The Academy’s 129th
Annual Conference at Stevens Point in April
featured a day-long plenary session on “Aldo
Leopold and Conservation on Private

Lands.” In October the Academy sponsored
a national conference in Madison dedicated
to “Building on Leopold’s Legacy: Conser¬
vation for a New Century.” Honorary co¬
chairs for this conference were Nina Leopold
Bradley of the Aldo Leopold Foundation
and Gaylord Nelson, former U.S. Senator
and now counselor for the Wilderness Soci¬
ety, which Leopold helped found in 1935.
An entire issue of our sister publication, The
Wisconsin Academy Review, also was devoted
to Leopold and his legacy.

The three articles on Leopold are revised
versions of lectures originally presented as
part of an extended Aldo Leopold Lecture
Series sponsored by the University of Wis¬
consin Arboretum in Madison last year. An¬
drew Hipp deserves special thanks for his
efforts in helping make these lectures avail¬
able to Transactions. We are especially de¬
lighted that Nina Leopold Bradley con¬
sented to let us include her homage to her
father, including her reminiscences of life at
the now famous Leopold family “Shack.”
Also of great interest are the contributions
of J. Baird Callicott and Susan Flader. The
former presents an incisive analysis of the
important speech Leopold delivered at the
dedication of the Wisconsin Arboretum and
Wildlife Refuge and the extensively revised
version he subsequently published in Parks
and Recreation magazine. The latter offers us
valuable insights into the meanings and im¬
plications of environmental citizenship, as
suggested by Leopold’s work and writings.
You know you re from Wisconsin (certainly in
spirit!) if . . . you share some way in the wil¬
derness vision of Aldo Leopold.

In the second section of articles, Ellen
Argyros takes a fresh look from an
ecofeminist perspective at Come and Get It,
a novel by one of Wisconsin’s most
celebrated writers, Edna Ferber. Other
articles in this section concentrate on

vi

Wisconsin’s natural resources. Craig Annen
and Jonathan Lyon present a study of the
Curtis Prairie restoration project at the
University of Wisconsin Arboretum, while
Thomas Eddy documents the vascular flora
of Mitchell Glen in Green Lake County.
Terry Balding takes readers to another part
of Wisconsin with his study of red¬
shouldered hawk detections along the lower
Chippewa River. Waterways of Wisconsin
and its neighbors provide the focus for the
other three studies presented in this section:
Ed Avery’s research on brown trout in
Emmons Creek in central Wisconsin; the
analyses by Joan Jass and Jeanette Glenn of
museum specimens of a freshwater bivalve
mollusk abundant throughout Wisconsin;
and Jeffrey Ripp’s historical review of the

evolution of the Great Lakes Fisheries
Commission.

I hope all readers of this issue of Trans¬
actions will find the contents both challeng¬
ing and enlightening. Dare we forecast a
“warm and sunny” reading experience? Ah,
but as my son will remind me when next he
ventures a mid-winter visit from Atlanta to
Oshkosh:

You know you re from Wisconsin if. . .

. . . the snow on your roof in September weighs
more than you do.

. . . you ve taken your kids trick-or-treating in
a blizzard.

. . . driving is better in the winter because the
potholes get filled with snow.

Bill Urbrock

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters was
chartered by the State Legislature on March 16, 1870, as a
membership organization serving the people of Wisconsin. Its
mission is to encourage investigation in the sciences, arts and
letters and to disseminate information and share knowledge.

Nina Leopold Bradley

A Sense of Place

Today I speak to you of my own experience, my own deep
attachment to a particular place. This attachment hap¬
pened over time, with my family, on a sand farm along the
Wisconsin River — land that was neither grand nor dramatic,
but mundane, humbled, and degraded. It seems to have hap¬
pened by slow accrual, like the growth of a coral reef. I dwell
in this place and am finally a part of this place.

Recently I came across a splendid little book by Deborah
Tall, who inspired me with the following statement: “How does
land evoke our love? Surely not just driving through scenery or
landscape , treating nature as a prop.”

This makes me think of a quip in The New Yorker not long
ago, recording two secretaries in conversation after their drive-
through vacations. It went something like this:

“But you get so tired with nothing but scenery all the time.”
“Yes, but you get even more tired and bored without any scenery.”
“Well, I guess. But I like it better when there’s mostly landscape
and not so much scenery.”

“Well, I guess. But then most of the scenery was gone when we
were there. There were just mountains and things.”

It seems all too often we hurry through “scenery,” without
any attempt to engage the land. This may be the price we pay
for our mobility and rootlessness.

On our sand farm along the Wisconsin River I was able to
get inside the scenery and the landscape. I became a living part
of a living place. As we worked with family, friends, and neigh¬
bors to restore health to the abused land, we were experienc¬
ing the slow sensitizing of people to land. We learned how to
look, how to dwell, and how to think about land. This was
sick land but rich country for the growth of perception.

No one knew better than my father, Aldo Leopold, the joy
of wild, unspoiled land. His love of wilderness was passionate
and enduring. He had spent immense energy in protecting wil¬
derness and trying to understand its dramatic complexity. He

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realized that wilderness was important in
part so that we might retain the capacity to
compare unspoiled land with lands more in¬
tensively altered by human economic activ¬
ity. My father’s rationale for wilderness pro¬
tection was not just recreational or scenic,
but scientific, biological, political, economic,
and deeply aesthetic. He wrote, “. . . the raw
wilderness gives definition and meaning to
the human enterprise . . . the ability to see
the cultural value of wilderness boils down,
in the last analysis, to a question of intellec¬
tual humility.”

In the 1930s Aldo visited the Rio Gavilan
in northern Mexico. This river still ran clear
between mossy, tree-lined banks. Fires
burned periodically without any apparent
damage, and deer thrived in the midst of
their natural predators, wolves and moun¬
tain lions. “It is here,” Leopold reflected
years later, “I first realized . . . that all my
life I had seen only sick land . . . here was a
biota still in perfect aboriginal health.” In
Song of the Gavilan he wrote:

This song of the waters is audible to every
ear, but there is other music in these hills,
by no means audible to all. To hear even a
few notes of it you must first live here for a
long time, and you must know the speech of
hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when
the campfire is low and the Pleiades have
climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen
for a wolf to howl, and think hard of every¬
thing you have seen and tried to understand.
Then you may hear it — a vast pulsing har¬
mony — its score inscribed on a thousand
hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants
and animals, its rhythms spanning the sec¬
ond and the centuries.

Here, the vital new idea for my father was
the concept of biotic health. In this essay
Aldo grasped the idea of the land commu¬

nity and the need for a deeper understand¬
ing of the functioning of land as an interre¬
lated, indivisible whole. Through his intel¬
lectual struggle to better understand the
system as a whole, there evolved within him
a continuing love and respect for land — a
deepening spirituality. He would now in¬
spire others along the same route.

The ecological integrity of the Gavilan
was put into perspective when my father vis¬
ited the slick, clean forests of Germany in
1933 — spruce trees in straight lines, the for¬
est floor devoid of vegetation. Litter piled up
on the forest floor as a dry, sterile blanket
which smothered all natural undergrowth,
even moss.

Leopold came to realize that what was
lacking in the German forests was wildness —
not wilderness per se — but a lack of bio¬
diversity. He wrote of Germany,

The forest landscape is deprived of a certain
exuberance which arises from a rich variety
of plants fighting with each other for a place
in the sun. It is almost as if the geological
clock had been set back to those dim ages
when there were only pines and ferns. I never
realized before that the melodies of nature are
music only when played against the under¬
tones of evolutionary history. In the German
forest one now hears only a dismal fugue!

My father’s experience in the German
landscape deepened his appreciation of eco¬
logical integrity — his conviction of a rela¬
tionship between ecological diversity and the
stability of the land organism.

And so it was an extraordinary event
when Aldo Leopold purchased his Wiscon¬
sin farm. Here, the frontier story had come
full circle from wilderness to farm land to
waste. Here was the perfect metaphor for
“sick land.”

In A Sand County Almanac he wrote, “My

2

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BRADLEY: A Sense of Place

own farm was selected for its lack of good¬
ness and its lack of highway; indeed my
whole neighborhood lies in a backwash of
the River Progress.”

Gross understatement! The sandy soils,
outwash from the glacier, had produced one
or two crops of corn — perhaps a crop of
buckwheat or rye before the soils were ex¬
hausted. Any timber had been cut. The
corned out fields were coming up in sand
burrs and quack grass. Sand burrs in our
socks were effective reminders.

There was little left to support a farm
family. The previous owner had finally given
up and moved to California, the farm house
having burned to the ground. The only re¬
maining structure was an old chicken coop,
waist deep in chicken and cow manure.

What could be more of a challenge for a
bunch of teenagers than repairing the
chicken coop. Weekend after weekend, the
Leopold family worked to make the chicken
coop more habitable— cleaning out manure,
constructing a fireplace, attaching a bunk
house, a new roof, drilling a small sand-
point well, and many other items contrib¬
uting to comfort.

The “Shack” became a family enterprise
to which each member contributed: cutting
and splitting wood, building bird houses for
martins, screech owls, and bluebirds.

In my father’s quiet way we finally were
led to understand his direction: what did this
land look like before white man took it away
from the Indians. Reconstruction of the na¬
tive landscape became our aim. We now re¬
alize this was one of the earliest attempts at
ecological restoration.

From April to October scarcely a week¬
end went by that someone did not plant or
transplant something — butterfly weed,
tamarack, wahoo and oak, penstemon and
puccoon. Spring vacation became the prin¬
cipal planting season. Each year we planted

some 3,000 native pines on the land. We
planted them with shovels so sharp they sang
and hummed in our wrists as they sliced the
earth. We planted a mosaic of conifers, hard¬
woods, and prairie to restore health and
beauty to the community.

In winter we banded resident birds. We
recorded daily, weekly, seasonal events on
the land — tracks of animals in the snow, ar¬
rival of migratory geese, courtship of wood¬
cock, etc. Here in reality Father’s statement
rang true — “Keeping records enhances the
pleasure of the search, and the chance of
finding order and meaning in these events.”

It was our mother whose enthusiasm sus¬
tained the project. Mother worked as hard
as anyone, planting, weeding, whatever the
enterprise. She was “chief sawyer” as the
gang cut good oak to cook our grub and
warm our Shack.

With Mother’s Spanish background she
taught us Spanish songs, and each evening
the guitar concert filled the old shack until
weariness forced us to our bunks.

In years of drought, our struggling
plantings did not survive. We learned that
“sun, wind and rain” and the thrust of life
would truly determine the outcome of all
our investment in the place.

Here in the sand counties, Aldo Leopold
initiated a different relationship with the land,
at once more personal and more universal.
From his own direct participation in the res¬
toration of the land he was to come to a
deeper appreciation of the ecological, ethi¬
cal, and aesthetic understanding of land. He
gained a new sense of belonging to some¬
thing greater than himself, a continuity with
all life through time. At the same time he
was finding new dimensions to his sense of
place — so, too, did his family members, col¬
leagues in this venture.

What happened involved the senses, the
memory, the history of family. It came from

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working on the land in all weathers, suffer¬
ing from catastrophes, enjoying its mornings
or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the
very investment of labor and feelings.

By his own actions my father instilled in
his children a love and respect for the land
community and its ecological functioning.

I now read with new perspective my
father’s statement: “There are two things
that interest me — the relationship of people
to each other and the relationship of people
to land.”

Family weekends at our sand county farm
turned out to be a place where my father put
these two concepts into practice — the rela¬
tionship of our family members to each
other and their relationship to this piece of
land. These two interests became more a way
of life than simply interests. New values were
developing somewhere within us.

At the Shack, we all became participants
in the drama of the land’s inner workings.
In the very process of restoration — of plant¬
ing, of successes and failures, of animals and
birds responding to changes — we grew in¬
creasingly to appreciate and admire the
interconnectedness of living systems.

As we transformed the land, it trans¬
formed us. This must be how a sense of place
is nurtured. My father once wrote that res¬
toration can be a ritual of self renewal. And
so it was. As we worked together, there came
love and respect for each other and for the
land community.

One of the principal achievements of A
Sand County Almanac is the recasting of our
notion of natural beauty, away from the con¬
ventionally “scenic” to the more subtle sense
that comes with ecological and evolutionary
awareness.

Through my father, my family, and this
experience I have learned to love this land.
This place has taught me how to look and
how to live, and so at last to sing its poetry.

Nina Leopold Bradley lives on the Leopold
Memorial Reserve and is a director of the Aldo
Leopold Foundation. She is a plant ecologist pres¬
ently working on prairie restoration and continu¬
ing the study of phenology started by her father
in the 1930s. Address: Aldo Leopold Founda¬
tion, Inc., El 29 19 Levee Road, Baraboo, WL
53913.

4

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J. Baird Callicott

“The Arboretum and the University”:
The Speech and The Essay

The dedication ceremony of the University of Wisconsin
Arboretum and Wildlife Refuge occurred on June 17,
1934. Aldo Leopold had joined the faculty the previous year
as the nation’s first professor of game management, and had
been involved, as such, in the conception and design of the
Arboretum (Meine 1988). He was among those who spoke on
this occasion.

According to William R. Jordan III (personal communica¬
tion), long a member of the Arboretum staff and founding
editor of Restoration and Management Notes, in his speech
Leopold was the first person to clearly articulate the concept
of ecological restoration and provide a rationale for it. Once
more, Leopold earns the metonyms of pioneer and prophet
that so frequently accompany his name. Apparently, he is the
seminal figure in ecological restoration as he is in ecosystem-
management forestry, conservation biology, and environmental
ethics.

Here is the key passage: “Our idea in a nutshell is to recon¬
struct, primarily for the use of the University, a sample of origi¬
nal Wisconsin— a sample of what Dane County looked like
when our ancestors first arrived here during the 1840s.” Be¬
fore this central and summary statement, Leopold character¬
ized what most arboretums were about as “a collection of trees”
of one sort or another, some organized taxonomically, others —
those that were “more advanced” — organized “ecologically” as
“natural associations.” The restoration project at the Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin Arboretum was then unique and (perhaps
now as well as then) represented the most advanced concept
of what an arboretum might be.

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Leopold followed this clear articulation
of ecological restoration with a lyrical de¬
scription of “what our state was like before
we took it away from the Indians” and how
different the Lake-Wingra environs were
then from what his audience beheld in
1934. His description was organized hydro-
logically. He first described the “oak-open¬
ings” on the uplands; next the tamarack for¬
est on the Wingra marsh, “undergrown with
sphagnum moss and orchids”; then the
“wild rice bed” on the lakeshore; and finally
the lake itself, once a haven for waterfowl,
but by 1934 spoiled as a habitat for its erst¬
while avifauna and native fishes by, in all
probability, the introduction of carp. This
could all be ascertained from the “em¬
balmed” pollen grains preserved in the
marsh peat, he noted.

Next Leopold turned to the question
“why dig up these ecological graves?” And
answered that the ecological changes befall¬
ing the area, while the concomitants of the
laudable utilitarian conversion of aboriginal
Wisconsin to fair farms and productive for¬
ests, portended disutilities for the future:
“the erosion of topsoil which followed too
much wheat and too many cattle”; fires
which “burned up the peat beds in our
drained marshes”; exotic insect pests, such
as white-pine blister rust and white-oak
June-beetles “from the four corners of the
earth” — all will at a minimum “reduce our
standard of living” and may even “threaten
the actual physical existence of . . . the
present social structure.” To us Leopold may
seem to have been not only a prophet, but,
more particularly, a Jeremiah, predicting a
plague of locusts and thistles, a prophesy that
has not come true — not yet anyway. The
little island of ecological healing represented
by the Arboretum notwithstanding, the eco¬
logical changes Leopold reviews and laments
have, if anything, accelerated by many or¬

ders of magnitude since 1934. Yet here we
are today enjoying, for the moment at least,
an unprecedented standard of living and a
social structure that remains more or less in¬
tact. But remember, this was 1934. Dust
Bowl. Depression. Bolshevism entrenched in
Russia. Fascism gathering force in Germany.
The future did not look at all either certain
or bright.

Just as he had reduced the concept of eco¬
logical restoration to a “nutshell,” so he re¬
duced the rationale for it to a nutshell at the
end of his remarks. He said: “This, in a nut¬
shell, is the function of the Arboretum: a re¬
constructed sample of old Wisconsin to serve
as a bench mark, a starting point, in the long
and laborious job of building a permanent
and mutually beneficial relationship between
civilized men and a civilized landscape.”

There are two distinct lobes of meat in
this nutshell. Examine the latter first: “a mu¬
tually beneficial relationship between
civilized men and a civilized landscape.”
This is one of several formulations that
Leopold struck to crystallize his novel phi¬
losophy of conservation.

At the turn of the century two philoso¬
phies of conservation had taken shape (Hays
1939, Fox 1981). The more venerable, go¬
ing back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry David Thoreau, came to be called
“preservation.” Its most forceful and influ¬
ential champion was John Muir. Its standard
or norm and its sanctum sanctorum was wil¬
derness, “in contrast with those areas where
man and his own works dominate the land¬
scape ... an area where the earth and its
community of life are untrammeled by man,
where man is a visitor who does not re¬
main” — to quote the eventual Wilderness
Act of 1964 (Anonymous 1998: 121). The
other philosophy — call it conservation
proper — was summed up, at the turn of the
century, as the “wise use” of “natural re-

6

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CALLICOTT : “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

sources.55 Its most forceful and influential
champion was Gifford Pinchot, the first
Chief of the United States Department of
Agriculture Forest Service, by which Leo¬
pold was first employed. Pinchot’s (1947:
325-26) conservation motto was straightfor¬
wardly utilitarian and anthropocentric: “the
greatest good of the greatest number [of
people, it went without saying] for the long¬
est time.”

Leopold and another maverick ranger,
Arthur Carhart, had first proposed a system
of wilderness preserves under the auspices of
the Service on the national forests (Meine
1988). Thus we tend to think of Leopold
as having begun his career in forestry firmly
in the Pinchot camp. Then, gradually he
became enlightened by his study of ecology
and his experience on the ground in the arid
Southwest, especially in regard to range
management (Leopold 1924). The intercon¬
nection among “natural resources,” Leopold
slowly but steadily came to realize, frustrates
their separate utilitarian exploitation and
management for maximum sustained yield.
Ultimately, therefore, he left the ecologically
unenlightened Pinchot conservationist camp
and came over to the Muir preservationist
camp. His resignation from the Forest Ser¬
vice in 1928 formalized and finalized this
conversion.

But that's not the correct interpretation
of what happened. Leopold’s push for wil¬
derness preservation in the mid- 1920s was
expressed in terms of Pinchovian wise use,
not Muirian Transcendentalism (Leopold
1925). The principal use of wilderness was
recreation, which of course for Leopold
mainly meant big game hunting. And for
some regions of the country — -too rugged to
log, too remote to graze, too arid or too nu¬
trient-poor to plow — wilderness recreation
was their highest use. Leopold did reject spe-
cies-by-species, commodity-oriented re¬

source management, but not in the context
of his wilderness advocacy. In any case, by
the time he had become a university profes¬
sor he had evolved a new paradigm of con¬
servation that lay between the Pinchovian
and Muirian extremes. Leopold’s new idea
of conservation was a human harmony with
nature, as he expressed it with characteristic
grace and simplicity in the Almanac (Leo¬
pold 1949). Not hands-off Muirian nature
preservation. Not efficient Pinchovian re¬
source exploitation. Not a compromise be¬
tween the two: islands of wilderness — the
bigger and more numerous the better — sur¬
rounded by intensively, albeit efficiently,
exploited but ecologically degraded tree
plantations, grain plantations, cattle pasture
and feedlots, suburban and urban sprawl.
Rather a mutually beneficial relation be¬
tween people and land; a symbiosis; a mix¬
ture of beauty and utility in the same place
(Leopold 1939, 199U 1999 a).

Now examine the other lobe of meat in
the nutshell rationale for ecological restora¬
tion, the function of the Arboretum. It will
be a reconstructed sample of old Wisconsin,
to serve as a bench mark, a starting point,
in the long and laborious job of building a
permanent and mutually beneficial relation¬
ship between civilized men and a civilized
landscape. After having come to his novel
philosophy of conservation, incidentally,
Leopold was justifying wilderness preserva¬
tion in exactly the same terms. “A science
of land health,” he wrote, “needs, first of all,
a base datum of normality, a picture of how
healthy land maintains itself as an organism.

. . . The most perfect norm is wilderness”
(Leopold 1941: 3). Less perfect, perhaps, but
just as important is an ecologically restored
landscape. Doubtless there is intrinsic value
in a reconstructed sample of old Wisconsin
as there is in a big Western wilderness pre¬
serve. In Leopold’s rapturous description of

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the presettlement environs of Lake Wingra,
there is a palpable nostalgia and affection.
But that is not the only rationale for the Ar¬
boretum restoration project, nor is it the ra¬
tionale that Leopold explicitly states. Rather,
if we are to forge our own symbiosis with
the land upon which we now live, we need
a bench mark of land health. We found the
land in a state of good health. We have eco¬
logically transformed it and thereby compro¬
mised its health. We cannot and will not
everywhere try to take it back to what it was,
try to restore it to a previous state. “Ameri¬
cans shall look forward not backward,”
Leopold says expressly. Americans are civi¬
lized and their landscape shall be civilized.
But can it not also be healthy? Can there not
also be a mutually beneficial relationship
between civilized men and a civilized land¬
scape? At the conclusion of this article I re¬
turn to Leopold’s concept of land health
and, more particularly, its ecological and
ethical foundations.

Implicit in the possibility of a future sym¬
biosis between civilized European-Americans
and the civilized landscape upon which it is
erected is the conviction that the previous
tenants of the Upper Midwest had estab¬
lished their own mutually beneficial relation¬
ship with the place that would later be called
Wisconsin. If they could do it, maybe we
could do it. In The Story of My Boyhood and
Youth , John Muir (1913: 32) exclaims “Oh
that glorious Wisconsin wilderness!” To the
contrary, Leopold knew that Wisconsin was
not in a wilderness condition in 1 849 when
Muir first beheld it, for Leopold acknowl¬
edges that “we took it away from the Indi¬
ans.” Moreover, though not mentioned in
Leopold’s talk, present at the dedication,
dressed in full ceremonial regalia, and giv¬
ing a speech of his own, was a Winnebago
Chief, Yellow Thunder, a living reminder
that old Wisconsin was not a place where,

until the 1 840s, man was a visitor who did
not remain (Meine 1988).

Four months later, Leopold’s address at
the dedication ceremony of the University
of Wisconsin Arboretum and Wildlife Ref¬
uge was published in the October issue of
Parks and Recreation. Or was it? Leopold had
so thoroughly revised the text of his speech
that only a few phrases remained from the
original to indicate that the published essay
had evolved from it — and in so short a pe¬
riod of time, given manuscript preparation,
typesetting, proofreading, and the other
time-consuming steps from the pencil, with
which Leopold composed, to the printing
press. One memorable fragment stands
out: In the speech Leopold wrote: “This task
[preserving an environment fit to support
citizens] is of a complexity far beyond what
I can here take time to explain. I will ask
you to accept my word that it is a long and
difficult job. To perform it, a University
must have, for the daily use of its faculty and
students, a living exhibit of what Wiscon¬
sin was, what it is, and what it expects to
become.” In the essay we read, “If civiliza¬
tion consists of cooperation with plants, ani¬
mals, soil, and men, then a university which
attempts to define that cooperation must
have, for the use of its faculty and students,
places that show what the land was, what it
is, and what it ought to be.” Hard on the
heels of this remark is a disparaging men¬
tion of what an arboretum normally is, “a
‘collection’ of imported trees,” which also
echoes the speech. Finally, in the next and
last paragraph of the essay, the whole of
which is shorter than the speech, Leopold
condensed his invidious comparison of the
present ecological condition with that pre¬
vailing in the past, emphasizing the corro¬
sive combination of wetland draining and
burning. But his eye to the past remains, in
the essay as in the speech, in service of his

8

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CALLICOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

eye on the future. “At what stage in the ret¬
rogression from forest to meadow is the
marsh of greatest use to the animal commu¬
nity? How is that desirable stage to be at¬
tained and maintained? What is the role of
drainage? These questions are of national
importance. They determine the future hab¬
itability of the earth, materially and spiritu¬
ally. . . . The scientist does not know the an¬
swer — he has been too busy inventing
machines. The time has come for science to
busy itself with the earth itself. The first step
is to reconstruct a sample of what we had
to start with. That, in a nutshell, is the Ar¬
boretum.”

So here is a mystery: Why didn’t Leopold
just mail the text of his speech to Parks and
Recreation for publication? Why did he so
thoroughly rework it? Adding to the mys¬
tery is the fact that the essay purports to be
the text of a speech. In it he writes “This
Arboretum ...” as if he were actually stand¬
ing in it as he spoke. A line or two afterward
he writes “I am here to say . . .” a locution
more appropriate to a speech than to an es¬
say. Most unambiguously misleading he
writes “Take the grass marsh here under our
view . . . .” Let me hasten to say that I do
not accuse Leopold of dishonesty. Rather, it
is a most revealing example of his artistry.
By way of comparison, I am convinced that
“Thinking Like a Mountain,” Sand County's
second most famous and oft-quoted essay,
is fictional. Neither Susan Flader (1974) nor
Curt Meine (1988), Leopold’s biographers,
could find a record of such a signal event as
it purportedly recalls in Leopold’s correspon¬
dence or journals. “Thinking Like a Moun¬
tain” was written in response to a criticism
by Albert Hochbaum, who was reading and
critiquing drafts of the book that was to be¬
come the Almanac (Ribbens 1987). Hoch¬
baum had complained that Leopold came
off as elitist and superior and reminded him

that he had once been as ecologically blind
as those he criticized (Ribbens 1987). In
support of that observation Hochbaum
pointed out that Leopold had had a hand
in the extirpation of wolves from the South¬
western game fields (Ribbens 1987). Leo¬
pold might enable his readers more to iden¬
tify with the author, Hochbaum suggested,
if the author found his lessons in his own
mistakes (Ribbens 1987). Leopold re¬
sponded with “Thinking Like a Mountain,”
an environmental transmogrification, as it
seems to me, of the story of Saint Paul’s con¬
version on the road to Damascus. The old
she-wolf, silently asks, in effect, why
persecutest thou me?, with that bewitching
green fire in her dying eyes. That in all prob¬
ability the event did not actually happen
does not in the least diminish the truth of
the essay. It fits like the keystone in one of
the twentieth century’s greatest works of lit¬
erature and one of the greatest works of lit¬
erary natural history of all time.

So part of the solution to our present mys¬
tery is the author’s need to transform his text
from an oral to a written work of art. The
speech is far less aggressive. At one point in
the speech Leopold almost apologetically is¬
sues a disclaimer. “Now this is not a tirade
against careless farming, lumbering, or trans¬
portation,” he says to his audience that might
well include farmers, lumbermen, teamsters,
and engineers. But in the essay he openly ad¬
mits to being “indignant about something.”
The artist also seems to have felt a need to
scale up from the municipal, regional, and
state level to the continental and even global
level for a national publication; hence the
Wisconsin landscape is less the central sub¬
ject, than an example used to illustrate the
more general plight of land and the current
human maladaptation to the earth.

The most startling change Leopold made
in transforming the Arboretum speech into

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the Arboretum essay is not in voice or in
adaptation to audience, but in substance.
He added a philosophical, one might even
say, eco-metaphysical theme that is com¬
pletely absent in the speech — and he put it
at the very beginning. Leopold wished his
national readership to imagine that this is
how he opened his address to the company
assembled at the dedication of the Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin Arboretum and Wild Life
Refuge:

For twenty centuries and longer, all civi¬
lized thought has rested upon one basic
premise: that it is the destiny of man to ex¬
ploit and enslave the earth.

The biblical injunction to “go forth and
multiply” is but one of many dogmas which im¬
ply this attitude of philosophical imperialism.

During the past few decades, however, a
new science called ecology has been unobtru¬
sively spreading a film of doubt over this
heretofore unchallenged “world view.” Ecol¬
ogy tells us that no animal — not even man —
can be regarded as independent of his envi¬
ronment. Plants, animals, men, and soil are
a community of interdependent parts, an or¬
ganism. No organism can survive the deca¬
dence of a member. Mr. Babbitt is no more
a separate entity than is his left arm, or a
single cell of his biceps. Neither are those ag¬
gregations of men and earth which we call
Madison, or Wisconsin, or America. It may
flatter our ego to be called the sons of man,
but it would be nearer the truth to call our¬
selves the brothers of our fields and forests.

The incredible engines wherewith we now
hasten our world-conquest have, of course,
not heard of these ecological quibblings; nei¬
ther perhaps have the incredible engineers.
These engines are double-edged swords. They
can be used for ecological cooperation. They
are being used for ecological destruction on
a scale almost geological in magnitude. . . .

Pretty strong stuff. And bold. The only
mention of ecology in the Arboretum speech
is adjectival, first used to characterize the way
the more “advanced institutions arrange their
tree collection,” viz., as “ecological group¬
ings,” and then to characterize the Arbore¬
tum project as digging up “ecological graves.”
In the Arboretum essay ecology is character¬
ized as more than just a new science. It is a
new world view pregnant with ethical import.

But what ecology? Evidently the ecology
of Frederic Clements, the dean of that
emerging new science in the early twentieth
century, who boldly represented plant for¬
mations as superorganisms. The Clement-
sian paradigm in ecology cast doubt not just
on the Judeo-Christian view of nature as cre¬
ated for man’s use, it also cast doubt on the
prevailing mechanistic world view of classi¬
cal physics, which informed engineering.
The Judeo-Christian dogma that it is man’s
God-given right to have dominion over and
subdue the earth and “the mechanistic con¬
ception of the earth” in Newtonian physics
combined to create the “iron-heel” mental¬
ity that Leopold twice goes on to condemn
in the Arboretum essay. A decade earlier (in
an essay that he never got around to pub¬
lishing in his lifetime, but that was finally
published more than fifty years after it was
written), Leopold (1979) had more fully
contrasted the organismic ecological world
view with the biblical and mechanical world
views, allied in their “anthropomorphism”
as he called it.

Now back to the theme with which I be¬
gan: Leopold’s articulation of the nature of
and a rationale for ecological restoration in
his Arboretum speech. Supplementing the
speech with the essay it is evident that the
prophet and pioneer of ecological restoration
was informed by the Clementsian paradigm
in ecology, with one major and crucial dif¬
ference, as I shall explain directly.

10

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CALLICOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

According to Clements (1905, 1916),
each region of the world, which he called a
“biome,” had a characteristic plant “forma¬
tion55 that he called the “climax” because it
was determined by the climate-— which he
supposed to be stable and unchanging.
Climate consists of two principal gradients,
moisture and temperature. In North Ameri¬
ca, for example, the moisture gradient runs,
low to high, from the Sierra rain shadow
eastward to the Atlantic; in the dry South¬
west, a formation dominated by saguaro
cactus is the climax; a little farther east the
climax is short-grass steppe; still farther east,
it’s long-grass prairie; from the Mississippi
valley on eastward, it’s forests. Similarly the
temperature gradient determines forest
types from southern oak-hickory hard¬
woods to northern spruce-fir softwoods.
Elevation complicates this picture, and it
does demonstrably in the Southwest where
Leopold first worked. Going upslope is like
going north, and, in the U.S., like going
east: the micro-climate is cooler and wetter
at higher elevations.

In any case, from time to time the cli¬
max formation in a biome experiences cata¬
strophic external disturbances— volcanic
eruption, wild fire, flood, wind storm.
There follows a series of plant formations
until the climax formation is reestablished.
Clements called this process “succession.”

Moreover, he viewed this process as a
kind of organismic development, an ontog¬
eny. It was the climax “sere” (successional
stage) that he believed to be a highly inte¬
grated superorganism. Ecology is the study
of its anatomy, physiology, and metabolism.

Clements5 study area was the Nebraska
prairie just at the time it was being settled
by European-American agriculturists. To
him they represented an alien and external
disturbance that not only destroyed the cli¬
max formation but that also disrupted and

forestalled the process of succession back to
climax.

It is just here, I think, that Leopold parts
company with Clements. Human beings
too, in Leopold’s view, are members of
ecological superorganisms. Sinclair Lewis’s
Babbitt, no less than Yellow Thunder, is
but one cell of the superorganism in which
he lives, moves, and has his being. Human
beings and human ecological impacts are
not metaphysically set apart from nature, as
our biblical Western philosophical tradi¬
tions often interpret them to be. Nor is
Homo sapiens a physically alien species,
invading Earth from another planet. Hence
the ecological effects of human activities are
not by definition sullying. Just like the
activities of other species, human activities
can be ecologically benign as well as
malignant, functional as well as dysfunc¬
tional, harmonious as well as disruptive.
Our “engines . . . can be used for ecological
cooperation,” Leopold writes, even though
at present “they are being used for ecolo¬
gical destruction on a scale that is almost
geological in magnitude.”

Ecological restoration, as we have come
to know it, I submit, rests, implicitly, on
the orthodox Clementsian paradigm in
ecology, not the Leopoldian alternative (Jor¬
dan et al. 1987). The putatively “objective”
norm for conventional ecological restora¬
tion is the humanly undisturbed climax for¬
mation for a given biome. Supposedly, that
was the condition it was in just prior to hu¬
man “settlement” by the “white man,” i.e.,
by Homo sapiens of European descent and
cultural habits. Granted, the Indians were
here already, but they were too few and
their cultures were too primitive to have
much ecological effect. Or so restorationist
orthodoxy would have us think. In addition
to destroying the climax and disrupting the
process of succession, the white man

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

brought with him a range of “exotic” spe¬
cies; that is, species that had evolved, natu¬
rally or artificially, elsewhere. Some of
these — for example, wheat, cattle and
sheep — were his domesticated cultivars.
Others — such as carp and Johnson grass —
were neither domesticated, that is, artifi¬
cially selected, nor cultivated, but were, nev¬
ertheless, deliberately introduced. Still
others — such as the Norway rat — were in¬
advertently introduced. Hence, in addition
to “pre-settlement” ecological conditions,
native species also became a norm for eco¬
logical restoration and exotic species a tar¬
get for eradication.

Contemporary biogeography, ecology,
and anthropology have rendered these
straightforward norms for ecological resto¬
ration problematic (Pickett and Ostfeld
1995):

• The climate has not been stable during
the Holocene; hence forests, grasslands,
and deserts have slowly wandered around
(Davis 1986).

• Local disturbance has been frequent, and
not exceptional, and once a patch within
a biome has been disturbed, succession
does not follow a lock-step order through
a series of intermediate formations back
to the original climax (Pickett and White
1985).

• Further, the reductive “individualistic”
paradigm in ecology, first advocated by
Henry Gleason (1926), has eclipsed
Clementsian holism; plant formations
are not now regarded as highly integrated
superorganisms, or even as typological
biotic communities that come and go as
units, but as stochastic aggregates of spe¬
cies populations that are adapted to simi¬
lar climatic and edaphic gradients (Sim-
berloff 1980).

• Because species are constantly dispersing

to new areas and disappearing from their
former haunts, mixing and matching, hit
or miss, catch as catch can, the sharp dis¬
tinction between native and exotic spe¬
cies is blurred (Peretti 1998).

• And, lastly, the impact of Homo sapiens
has been significant and ubiquitous
throughout the Holocene. Geographers
and anthropologists now estimate the
indigenous population of the Western
Hemisphere on the eve of European
discovery to be ten to twenty times as
great as the geographers and anthropo¬
logists contemporary with Clements
estimated it to be (Denevan 1992). In
1492 the biomes of North and South
America were as much an artifact as
those in Europe at the same time — just
a different kind of artifact. The oak
openings which Leopold eulogizes were
created and maintained by Indian-set
fires, as John Curtis (1959) — he of the
Arboretum’s Curtis Prairie — notes in his
wonderful book, The Vegetation of
Wisconsin. In 1492 the only sizable land
mass in a “pristine” condition was
Antarctica. Then, one of the largest cities
in the world, Kahokia, lay only some 600
kilometers and change east of the area in
which Clements did his research at the
turn of the last century, and only some
500 kilometers south of Lake Wingra
(Doolittle 1992). Between the European
“discovery” of America and “settlement”
Old World diseases reduced the Indian
population by ninety or ninty-five per
cent — a demographic debacle of unpre¬
cedented proportions (Denevan 1992).
So it was easy for twentieth-century
ecologists to ignore the impact of the
indigenes of the Western Hemisphere, as
Clements did. But to their credit Leo¬
pold and Curtis did not, at least not in
Wisconsin.

12

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CALLiCOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

As a target for restoration, the condition
of a given patch when the white man first
laid eyes on it is therefore but a snapshot in
the ever-changing, ubiquitously human-im¬
pacted biogeography of an area. Ecological
restoration may learn to live with that, in
which case it might be compared to archi¬
tectural and automotive restoration. Some
people have a quaint fondness for structures
built in an architectural style at some arbi¬
trarily selected particular time in the past —
the Victorian era, for example — and are will¬
ing to spend considerable time and energy
restoring them. Other people have a quaint
fondness for particular old cars — 1957
Chevrolets, for example — and are willing to
spend considerable time and energy restor¬
ing them. Likewise, we environmentalists
have a quaint fondness for “pre-settlement”
oak savannas and long-grass prairies and are
willing to spend considerable time and ef¬
fort restoring them. I think that Aldo
Leopold would confess to being something
of an ecological antiquarian himself — with¬
out apology. Just as some people buy an old
Victorian house and restore it to its former
condition as a hobby, Leopold bought an
old worn-out farm and attempted to restore
the land to its condition prior to its being
farmed. (The analogy is not perfect, but it’s
close enough.)

Such a concession, however, would rob
ecological restoration of its moral high
ground. We environmentalists believe that
the time and energy of ecological restora-
tionists should be subsidized by the general
public — in the case of the Arboretum res¬
toration project, through the agency of the
University — because it is both the right and
the necessary thing to do. Ecological resto¬
ration is more than a matter of personal
taste, we feel, it is also a matter of imper¬
sonal environmental ethics. But why?
Leopold may not be as scientifically up-to-

date as we are now, nearly sixty-five years
later. Even prophets do not always see un¬
erringly into the future, especially into the
twists and turns of a science so fickle as ecol¬
ogy. But he is unfailingly wise.

Remember, his rationale for ecological res¬
toration is not stated in terms of the supe¬
rior value of the previous ecological condi¬
tion over the present one because the former
is “pristine” or “virgin” and the latter is an¬
thropogenic, as Thoreau and Muir before
him had done. As noted, contrary to
Clements as well as to Muir, he viewed hu¬
man beings — Lewis’s Babbitt as well as Yel¬
low Thunder — as a part of nature. His own
antiquarian affections aside, the objective
value of the past ecological condition is as a
point of reference, a bench mark, for a once
and future condition of what Leopold
(1991*, 1991 by 1999 a, 1999b) elsewhere
called “land health.” Ecological restoration,
sensu stricto , the restoration of a past ecologi¬
cal condition, is a point of reference for a
more general program that we might call eco¬
logical rehabilitation (Callicott et al. 1999).
What was good and right about the Wiscon¬
sin that the Indians lived in, took their liv¬
ing from, and actively managed? It was nei¬
ther pristine nor virgin; the Indians were
members of the same species, Homo sapiens ,
as their European-American successors; they
lived on the land; and not without signifi¬
cant ecological impact. The difference was
that under the aegis of the Indians, old Wis¬
consin was ecologically functional. Prior to
European settlement, the Wisconsin biota re¬
cruited, retained, and recycled nutrients from
the parent materials. It stabilized the top soil
that it had built up. It percolated and modu¬
lated the flow of surface waters. It was com¬
posed of a diverse assemblage of plants,
which provided habitat for a diverse commu¬
nity of animals, related in tangled food webs,
woven of lengthy food chains, topped off by

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long-lived, large-bodied carnivores (Leopold

1991*, 1991 b, 1999*, 1999b). What Leo¬
pold envisioned, indeed what he conceived
the task of conservation to be, is the creation
of a similar ecological condition in the fu¬
ture, but one that would necessarily involve
different species of plants and animals than
that which the Indians had adapted to their
economy — just as it would involve a differ¬
ent stock of Homo sapiens. He characterized
it as a civilized landscape for civilized men.

The bench mark, the reference point would
be the ecological status quo ante as it was
when we took it away from the Indians. And
the Arboretum was to restore that condition
for that purpose. In a nutshell, the principal
objective reason for undertaking ecological
restoration at the Arboretum and elsewhere,
from Leopold’s point of view, was its service
of the more general, more important, and
more difficult goal of ecological rehabilita¬
tion everywhere.

1 4

TRANSACTIONS

CALLICOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

Appendix A: The Speech 1

What Is the University of Wisconsin Arboretum,
Wild Life Refuge, and Forest Experiment Preserve?

What Is an Arboretum! An arboretum
is ordinarily a place where the seri¬
ous-minded citizen can learn, by looking at
them, the difference between a white and a
black spruce, or see in person a Russian
olive, a tamarisk, or an Arizona cypress. That
is, it is a collection of trees.

Sometimes an arboretum also serves as an
outdoor library of horticultural varieties, i.e.,
a place where one can compare all the
apples, all the lilacs, all the roses.

Some advanced institutions arrange their
tree-collection as natural associations, rather
than as taxonomic groups. They present, for
example, a sample of the Douglas fir forest
of the Northwest, showing the hemlocks,
larches, and balsams which grow in associa¬
tion with Douglas fir, and also the ferns,
salmonberries, yews, and shrubs which grow
under it, and if possible the mosses and
herbs which grow under the shrubs. Such
exhibits are called “ecological groupings”
and represent “advanced thought” in arbo¬
retum management.

The Wisconsin Arboretum. We want to
have all these things, but they by no means
represent the main idea which we are trying
to express here. It is something new and dif¬
ferent. Perhaps we should not call the place
an arboretum at all. Whether our idea is a
worthy one, I will have to leave you to judge.
Our idea, in a nutshell, is to reconstruct,

primarily for the use of the University, a
sample of original Wisconsin— a sample of
what Dane County looked like when our
ancestors arrived here during the 1 840s.

Obviously, it will take 50 years to do this
thing. Obviously, too, it will be done for re¬
search rather than for amusement, and for
use by the University, rather than for use by
the town.

What I want to try and picture today is
why it is important to the future welfare of
our state to know what it was like before we
took it away from the Indians.

Rebuilding the Wisconsin Landscape.
First let me convince you that if you were
set down, blindfolded, in Nakoma in 1840,
you would not only fail to recognize the
place, but you might fail to realize you were
in Wisconsin at all.

This hill on which we stand was then an
“oak-opening.” Our grandparents describe,
sometimes with rapture, the beauty of these
open orchard-like stands of oaks, inter¬
spersed with copses of shrubs, and the pro¬
fusion of prairie grasses, and flowers which
grew between. But just what shrubs, grasses,
and flowers were they? We don’t know.
Why did they remain open, instead of grow¬
ing up to solid woods? Probably fire, but
we’re not sure. What oaks? Largely burr-oak,
but we are not sure. We do know this, that
the bluegrass which now covers half of our

1 Given by Aldo Leopold at the dedication of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum on
June 17, 1934. Printed by permission of the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

Volume 87 (1999)

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county was not present- — it came with the
white man — while the native grasses which
then grew here are now rare or even possi¬
bly extinct. The pheasants and possibly even
the quail which now inhabit Nakoma were
absent; instead the oak-openings were popu¬
lated with sharptailed grouse, then appropri¬
ately called “burr-oak grouse,” and now
found only a hundred miles to the north.
The wild turkey apparently did not occur.
The copses contained the ordinary partridge
or ruffed grouse. There were elk and deer-
elk horns have been pulled out of our local
marshes, and of deer we have ample records.

The Wingra Marsh, which we boast of as
largely “unspoiled,” we would not have rec¬
ognized in 1840. Those waving meadows of
grass, rushes, and dogwood were then largely
a tamarack forest, undergrown with sphag¬
num moss and orchids. We know this be¬
cause tamarack logs were encountered in
draining the golf course. The tamarack for¬
est has been gradually converted into grass¬
land by repeated burning, cutting, grazing,
and mowing — a process still plainly visible
in any of the tamarack relicts of the eastern
half of the county.

The deep layers of peat which comprise
this marsh are merely the closely packed re¬
mains of sphagnum plants which could not
decay because of the acid water in which
they were “pickled” through innumerable
generations. Professor Fassett of the Botany
Department takes his students there to ex¬
hume samples of this peat from various
depths, and in these samples he finds em¬
balmed the very pollen grains which fell or
were blown into the marsh from the plants
then growing in and around it. So perfectly
are these pollens preserved that their shape
and structure tell the kinds of plants which
grew, while the relative abundance of the
various kinds tells which plants were then
most common. The bog is, in short, a vast

historical library telling the story of the ar¬
boretum back to the Glacial Epoch, 10,000
years ago. Its volumes are still largely
untranslated, but it is easy to see why they
constitute a valuable educational and scien¬
tific asset.

Lake Wingra itself wears so different an
aspect that the early settler would not know
it now. Much of the shore was then a wild
rice bed. The water level fluctuated more,
but averaged higher. It was full of waterfowl,
whereas now the ducks show almost an aver¬
sion to it. Presumably the introduction of
carp contributed heavily to these changes,
but we do not know.

Why Study Original Wisconsin?
Granted, then, that we have radically
changed the aspect of land, what of it? It’s
still good to look at — -why worry? Why try
to discover the exact processes by which the
Wisconsin of 1840 became the Wisconsin
of 1930? Americans shall look forward, not
backward, so why dig up these ecological
graves?

Because we are just beginning to realize
that along with the intentional and neces¬
sary changes in the soil and its flora and
fauna, we have also induced unintentional
and unnecessary changes which threaten to
undermine the future capacity of the soil to
support our civilization.

In some places these changes will merely
reduce our standard of living— physical, in
the sense of a healthy agriculture; spiritual,
in the sense of needless spoliation of natu¬
ral beauty. In other places, these changes
threaten the actual physical existence of
even the present social structure. In some
cases, the damage is temporary, in others
permanent.

For example, the erosion of topsoil
which followed too much wheat and too
many cattle is carrying the best parts of
southwestern Wisconsin to the Gulf of

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CALLICOTT : “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

Mexico. It will take time, geological time,
to repair this loss.

The fires which followed lumbering have
probably cut by half, for at least a generation
or two, the capacity of northern Wisconsin
to support a self-sustaining population. Ev¬
erybody knows this, but few know that the
same fires have burned up many of the peat
beds in our drained marshes, and thus
threaten to turn land once too wet into a fu¬
ture sand-dune. Three marshes in Dane
County have been burning all summer.
When some old rattletrap of a building
catches fire we all rush to the rescue, but
when the compound interest of 10,000 years
of plants catches fire, our officials sit by with
folded hands while the average citizen’s depth
of understanding is reflected by the observa¬
tion that he dislikes the smell of peat smoke.

The new insects which modern transpor¬
tation continuously imports from the four
corners of the earth are a standing threat to
future agriculture. Our white pine — the
very backbone of our original economic
structure — now threatens to go down be¬
fore the blister rust, an imported disease. In
the offing stands the threat of June-beetles
(white grubs) making it imperative to cut
down all the white oaks in our pastures.
Granted we could shade our cows under tin
roofs — who would want to live in a Wis¬
consin of oakless pastures?

Now this is not a tirade against careless
farming, lumbering, or transportation. It is
rather an admission that the tools where¬

with we are building our civilization are so
powerful, and their use has such complex
and unexpected consequences, that we are
tearing down about as fast as we are build¬
ing up. It is an admission that science does
not yet know enough, or is not yet suffi¬
ciently listened to, to anticipate and prevent
this process of wreckage which attends our
supposedly advancing footsteps.

Research. The business of a University
has heretofore been conceived to be the
preparation of citizens to cope with their en¬
vironment. The University must now take
on the additional function of preserving an
environment fit to support citizens. This
task is of a complexity far beyond what I can
here take time to explain. I will ask you to
accept my word for the fact that it is a long
and difficult job. To perform it, a Univer¬
sity must have, for the daily use of its fac¬
ulty and students, a living exhibit of what
Wisconsin was, what it is, and what it ex¬
pects to become. Examples of what it is lie
on every hand. What it expects to become
may be exemplified on public forests, ref¬
uges, farms, and parks. What it was is to be
exemplified on the Arboretum, and I hope
on numerous areas created for the purpose.

This, in a nutshell, is the function of the
Arboretum: a reconstructed sample of old
Wisconsin, to serve as a bench mark, a start¬
ing point, in the long and laborious job of
building a permanent and mutually benefi¬
cial relationship between civilized men and
a civilized landscape.

1 7

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Appendix B: The Essay2

The Arboretum and the University (1934)

For twenty centuries and longer, all civi¬
lized thought has rested upon one basic
premise: that it is the destiny of man to ex¬
ploit and enslave the earth.

The biblical injunction to “go forth and
multiply” is merely one of many dogmas
which imply this attitude of philosophical
imperialism.

During the past few decades, however, a
new science called ecology has been unob¬
trusively spreading a film of doubt over this
heretofore unchallenged “world view.”
Ecology tells us that no animal — not even
man — can be regarded as independent of his
environment. Plants, animals, men, and soil
are a community of interdependent parts, an
organism. No organism can survive the
decadence of a member. Mr. Babbitt is no
more a separate entity than is his left arm,
or a single cell of his biceps. Neither are
those aggregations of men and earth which
we call Madison, or Wisconsin, or America.
It may flatter our ego to be called the sons
of man, but it would be nearer the truth to
call ourselves the brothers of our fields and
forests.

The incredible engines wherewith we
now hasten our world-conquest have, of
course, not heard of these ecological
quibblings; neither, perhaps, have the
incredible engineers. These engines are

double-edged swords. They can be used for
ecological cooperation. They are being used
for ecological destruction on a scale almost
geological in magnitude. In Wisconsin, for
example, the northern half of the state has
been rendered partially uninhabitable for the
next two generations by man-made fire,
while the southwestern quarter has been
deteriorated for the next century by man¬
made erosion. In central Wisconsin a single
fire in 1930 burned the soil off the better
part of two counties.

It can be stated as a sober fact that the
iron-heel attitude has already reduced by half
the ability of Wisconsin to support a
cooperative community of men, animals,
and plants during the next century. More¬
over, it has saddled us with a repair bill, the
magnitude of which we are just beginning
to appreciate.

If some foreign invader attempted such
loot, the whole nation would resist to the
last man and the last dollar. But as long as
we loot ourselves, we charge the indignity
to “rugged individualism,” and try to forget
it. But we cannot quite. There is a feeble
minority called conservationists, who are
indignant about something. They are just
beginning to realize that their task involved
the reorganization of society, rather than the
passage of some fish and game laws.

2From Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, The River of the Mother of God and Other
Esays by Aldo Leopold. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Copyright 1991. Re¬
printed by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press and the Aldo Leopold Founda¬
tion. The essay first appeared in Parks and Recreation, Vol. 18, No. 2, October 1934.

18

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CALLICOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

What has all this to do with the Arbore¬
tum? Simply this: If civilization consists of
cooperation with plants, animals, soil, and
men, then a university which attempts to
define that cooperation must have, for the
use of its faculty and students, places
which show what the land was, what it is,
and what it ought to be. This Arboretum
may be regarded as a place where, in the
course of time, we will build up an exhibit
of what was, as well as an exhibit of what
ought to be. It is with this dim vision of
its future destiny that we have dedicated
the greater part of the Arboretum to a
reconstruction of original Wisconsin,
rather than to a “collection” of imported
trees.

The iron-heel mentality is, of course,
indifferent to what Wisconsin was. This is
exactly the reason why the University cannot
be. I am here to say that the invention of a
harmonious relationship between men and
land is a more exacting task than the
invention of machines, and that its accom¬
plishment is impossible without a visual
knowledge of the land’s history. Take the
grass marsh here under our view: From the
recession of the glacier until the days of the
fur trade, it was a tamarack bog — stems and

stumps are still imbedded there. In its
successive layers of peat are embalmed both
the pollens which record the vegetation of
the bog and the surrounding countryside,
and also the bones of its animals. During
some drouth, man-caused fires burned off
the tamarack, which gave place first to grass
and brush, and then, under continual
burning and grazing, to straight grass. This
is the history and status of a thousand other
marshes. What will happen if the decom¬
posed surface peat is all burned off? At what
stage of the retrogression from forest to
meadow is the marsh of greatest use to the
animal community? How is that desirable
stage to be attained and maintained? What
is the role of drainage? These questions are
of national importance. They determine the
future habitability of the earth, materially
and spiritually. They are just as important
as whether to join the League of Nations —
it is only our iron-heel inheritance which
makes the comparison ludicrous. The
scientist does not know the answer — he has
been too busy inventing machines. The time
has come for science to busy itself with the
earth itself. The first step is to reconstruct a
sample of what we had to start with. That,
in a nutshell, is the Arboretum.

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Literature Cited

Anonymous. 1998. The Wilderness Act of
1964. Pp. 120-30 in J.B. Callicott and M.P.
Nelson, eds. The great new wilderness debate.
University of Georgia Press, Athens.
Callicott, J.B., L.B. Crowder, and K. Mumford.
1999. Current normative concepts in con¬
servation. Conservation Biology 13:22—33.
Clements, F.E. 1905. Research methods in ecol¬
ogy. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Clements, F.E. 1916. Plant succession: an
analysis of the development of vegetation.
Publication No. 242. Carnegie Institution,
Washington, D.C.

Curtis, J.T. 1939. The vegetation of Wisconsin.

University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Davis, M.B. 1986. Climatic instability, time
lags, and community disequilibrium. Pp.
269-84 in J. Daimond and T.J. Case, eds.
Community Ecology. Harper and Row, New
York.

Denevan, W.M. 1992. The pristine myth: the
landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals
of the Association of American Geographers 82:

369-85.

Doolittle, W.E. 1992. Agriculture in North
America on the eve of contact: a reassess¬
ment. Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 82: 386-401.

Flader, S.L. 1974. Thinking like a mountain:
Aldo Leopold and the evolution of an ecologi¬
cal attitude toward deer , wolves, and forests.
University of Missouri Press, Columbia.
Fox, S. 1981. John Muir and his legacy: the
american conservation movement. Little,
Brown and Company, Boston.

Gleason, H.A. 1926. The individualistic con¬
cept of the plant association. Bulletin of the
Torrey Botanical Club 53:1-20.

Jordan, W.R., III, M.E. Gilpin, J.D. Aber, eds.
1987. Restoration ecology: a synthetic approach
to ecological research. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, MA.

Leopold, A. 1924. Grass, brush, timber, and fire
in southern Arizona. Journal of Forestry
22(6):1— 10.

Leopold, A. 1925. Wilderness as a form of land
use. Journal of Land and Public Utility Eco¬
nomics 1:398-404.

Leopold, A. 1939. The farmer as a conserva¬
tionist. American Forests 45:294—99, 316,
323.

Leopold, A. 1941. Wilderness as a land labora¬
tory. Living Wilderness 6(July):3.

Leopold A. 1949. A sand county almanac, and
sketches here and there. Oxford University
Press, New York.

Leopold, A. 1979. Some fundamentals of con¬
servation in the southwest. Environmental
Ethics 1:131-41.

Leopold, A. 1991*z. Conservation: in whole or
in part? Pp. 310-19 in S.L. Flader and J.B.
Callicott, eds. The River of the Mother of God
and Other Essays. University of Wisconsin
Press, Madison.

Leopold, A. 1991 A Land pathology. Pp. 212-
17 in S.L. Flader and J.B. Callicott, eds. The
river of the Mother of God and other essays.
University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

Leopold, A. 1999*2. The land health concept
and conservation. Pp. 218-26 in J.B.
Callicott and E.T. Freyfogle, eds. For the
health of the land: previously unpublished es¬
says and other writings. Island Press, Wash¬
ington, D.C.

Leopold, A. 1999 A Biotic land use. Pp. 1 98 —
206 in J.B. Callicott and E.T. Freyfogle, eds.
For the health of the land: previously unpub¬
lished essays and other writings. Island Press,
Washington, D.C.

Meine, C. 1988. Aldo Leopold: his life and work.
University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

Muir, J. 1913. The story of my boyhood and
youth. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Peretti, J. 1998. Nativism and nature: rethink¬
ing biological invasion. Environmental Val-
ues 7:181-92.

20

TRANSACTIONS

CALLICOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

Pickett, S.T.A., and R.S. Ostfeld. 1995. The
shifting paradigm in ecology. Pp. 261-78 in
R.L. Knight and S.F. Bates, eds. A new cen¬
tury for natural resource management. Island
Press, Washington, D.C.

Pickett, S.T.A., and P.S. White. 1985. The ecol¬
ogy of natural disturbance and patch dynam¬
ics. Academic Press, New York.

Pinchot, G. 1947. Breaking new ground.
Harcourt, Brace, New York.

Ribbens, D. 1987. The making of A Sand
County Almanac. Pp. 91-109 in J.B. Calli-
cott, ed. Companion to A Sand County Al¬
manac. University of Wisconsin Press, Madi¬
son.

Simberloff, D. 1980. A succession of paradigms
in ecology: essentialism to materialism and
probabilism. Synthese 43: 3—39.

J. Baird Callicott is professor of philosophy and
religion studies at the University of North Texas.
He is editor or author of many works by or about
Aldo Leopold including The River of the Mother
of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (with
Susan L. Flader), For the Health of the
Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other
Writings by Aldo Leopold (with Eric T.
Freyfogle), Companion to A Sand County
Almanac: Interpretive and Critical Essays, In
Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environ¬
mental Philosophy, and Beyond the Land
Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philoso¬
phy. Address: Department of Philosophy , Univer¬
sity of North Texas, P.O. Box 310920, Denton,
TX 76203-0920. Email: callicott@unt.edu

Volume 87 (1999)

21

Susan Flader

Aldo Leopold

and Environmental Citizenship

In the outpouring of books and articles in recent years on
the meaning of citizenship, many of them lamenting the
weakening of civic bonds in America, there has been scant at¬
tention to the role of citizenship with respect to the environ¬
ment.1 Even among environmentalists, who realize that citi¬
zen action has been a hallmark of the “new environmental
movement” from the time of the first Earth Day (1970), there
is little appreciation of the extent to which our citizenry has
played a vital role in the shaping of American environmental
policy ever since the origins of the nation.2

As we seek the historical roots of our quest for environmen¬
tal quality and the means for sustaining it, it is worth ponder¬
ing the roles and responsibilities of citizens and the relation¬
ship between the citizenry and the state — in short, how
American democracy works. In this exploration, we may seek
insights from Aldo Leopold, who was profoundly conscious
of the American democratic tradition within which he was
working and who thought hard throughout his career about
the meanings and implications of environmental citizenship.

We have had in the United States a tradition of a limited
or weak state. It may not seem that way today when people
complain of a bloated federal bureaucracy, but relative to the
strong central states in the democracies of Western Europe and
certainly to authoritarian regimes, our government is decid¬
edly limited and our citizens have always had a healthy skepti¬
cism about most everything that government tries to do. In
this weak state we have traditionally had rather low legal ex¬
pectations of our citizens. Citizens are expected to obey the
law and pay taxes; even voting is optional. Yet we have had in
America a concomitantly vibrant tradition of voluntary citi¬
zen action.

The foremost interpreter of the era of the American
Revolution, Gordon Wood, has termed the phenomenon of

TRANSACTIONS Volume 87 (1999)

23

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

revolutionary citizen action “the people out
of doors.”3 He was likely not thinking
environmentally, but rather portraying
“people out of doors” as citizens acting
voluntarily outside of the formal channels
of government to shape the kind of com¬
munity they wanted. When we look back
at the controversies of the era, however, we
see citizens acting often on environmental
issues. Local groups organized, with some
success, to prevent new dams from blocking
the passage of salmon upstream, for exam¬
ple, seeking to protect their community’s
customary right to fish against interference
by new industrial mills.4

When we think of the origins of the na¬
tion, we tend to think of citizens struggling
for liberty, for the right of the individual to
pursue his own self-interest. This is a con¬
cept of American history that became ce¬
mented in our imaginations especially dur¬
ing the Cold War, when we were fighting
the menace of international Communism
and trying to picture America as everything
that the Soviet Union was not. Yet, histori¬
ans returning to the original documents of
the revolutionary era several decades ago be¬
gan to see in them some ideas that were at
first startling, because they were so at odds
with the usual interpretation. What they
found were people who thought of them¬
selves as citizens of a republic in which the
greatest virtue was civic consciousness, a
willingness to subordinate one’s own self-in¬
terest to the good of the community. “Civic
virtue,” they called it, or “civic republican¬
ism,” referring to the participatory civic val¬
ues of a republic like that of ancient Ath¬
ens.5 We tend to celebrate America as a
country grounded in individual rights, like
the freedoms of speech and of the press and
of assembly enshrined in the first article of
the Bill of Rights. But a case can be made
that these rights pertain to communities as

well as to individuals; they protect the op¬
portunity for ordinary citizens to organize
and communicate with each other outside
of the formal channels of government to
shape the environment of their communi¬
ties or the policies of their governments.6

The complex of republican values so per¬
vasive in revolutionary America was largely
overwhelmed, scholars are agreed, by demo¬
cratic egalitarianism, liberal individualism,
and capitalist development in the early nine¬
teenth century, ushering in the liberal demo¬
cratic state we celebrate today. But the tra¬
dition of civic organizing has persisted in
American history. It has not been mandated
by law; it has been voluntary. The tendency
of Americans to form voluntary groups —
’’associations,” Alexis de Tocqueville called
them7 — could be used to sustain traditional
community values; it could also be used to
protect economic self-interest. This tradition
of citizen action, especially in its “civic re¬
publican” strain, is the tradition out of
which much of our American conservation
movement grew. But it may also be the tra¬
dition from which several strands of what
we may think of today as anti-environmen¬
talism emerged — groups devoted to “wise
use,” property rights, and county su¬
premacy.8 Citizens organize for a variety of
purposes.

It must be noted that not everyone re¬
gards voluntary citizen action as key to the
shaping of society or environmental policy.
Many would argue that ours is a representa¬
tive democracy and that the shaping and ad¬
ministration of policy is the responsibility
of elected representatives and executive
agencies. Indeed, much of the administra¬
tive capacity of the modern American state
was developed in the Progressive Era at the
turn of the twentieth century, in large part
in response to environmental concerns. The
U.S. Forest Service, in which Aldo Leopold

24

TRANSACTIONS

FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

began his career, has been regarded by schol¬
ars as the quintessential example of a pro¬
gressive agency.9 Gifford Pinchot, the first
chief of the Forest Service, sought to place
technically trained experts — professional
foresters like Leopold — in government and
let them establish specific policies and man¬
age the resources. This was a model of gov¬
ernance that elevated the values of order, ef¬
ficiency, and control — values that may be
quite incompatible with democratic partici¬
pation. Pinchot once said, “The first duty
of the human race is to control the earth it
lives upon,” and I think Leopold himself
once may have believed that.10 From the
perspective of a later day, however, we may
note that the progressive model, in elevat¬
ing the virtues of professionalism and tech¬
nical expertise, tended to crowd out the citi¬
zenry and also their elected representatives,
the politicians.

Inasmuch as Aldo Leopold began his ca¬
reer as a professional in the employ of the
modern administrative state and is today re¬
garded as something of a prophet of the new
environmental consciousness, which elevates
the responsibilities of citizenship, we may
look to him for insights into the meanings
of environmental citizenship— into the role
of citizens in the modern state, the tension
between the rights of individuals and the
claims of the community, and the tension
also between professional resource manag¬
ers and citizen activists. We look first at
what Leopold had to say about citizenship
in A Sand County Almanac , the slender vol¬
ume of nature sketches and philosophical
essays that represents the distillation of his
mature thought, and then explore the evo¬
lution of his thinking during the course of
his career.

As we page through A Sand County Al¬
manac, we meet our first citizen in the very
first essay, “January Thaw”:

The mouse is a sober citizen who knows that
grass grows in order that mice may store it
as underground haystacks, and that snow falls
in order that mice may build subways from
stack to stack: supply, demand, and transport
all neatly organized.11

The mouse is what kind of citizen? — an
ordinary citizen who goes about his own
business and pursues his own interests. We
have many such in our communities.

Skipping perhaps a few citizens, we come
to “Pines Above the Snow”: “Each species
of pine,” Leopold tells us, “has its own con¬
stitution, which prescribes a term of office
for needles appropriate to its way of life.”
He continues with his analogy between hu¬
man constitutions and the regimen of vari¬
ous pine trees, the white pine retaining its
needles for a year and a half, red and
jackpines for two and a half years. “Incom¬
ing needles take office in June, and outgo¬
ing needles write farewell addresses in Oc¬
tober.”12 These pines are going about their
own business, but they are also meeting the
legal requirements of citizenship, acting ac¬
cording to their constitutions, even taking
office in a perfunctory way.

Next we meet the thick-billed parrots of
Chihuahua, who “wheel and spiral, loudly
debating with each other the question . . .
whether this new day which creeps slowly
over the canyons is bluer and golder than
its predecessors, or less so.”13 They are de¬
bating the criteria of the good life, which
in Aristotelian thought is an activity of citi¬
zenship more fundamental even than that
of developing legal constitutions. The vote
being a draw, Leopold observes, they head
to the high mesas for breakfast.

In “Clandeboye,” the great prairie marsh
of Manitoba, we find the grebe, a species of
ancient evolutionary lineage impelled,
Leopold believes, by “pride of continuity.”

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His is the call that dominates and unifies the
marshland chorus: “Perhaps, by some imme¬
morial authority, he wields the baton for the
whole biota.”14 Here is the grebe as ethical
citizen, as a leader directing the chorus of
the marsh for the longterm betterment of
the whole community.

Not until the more philosophical essays
in the last section of the book do we meet
human citizens. In “Conservation Esthetic”
Leopold discusses the various components of
the recreational process, beginning with the
most basic motivation of trophy seeking,
common to hunters with both shotgun and
field glass as well as to most conservation¬
ists and even professionals. He goes on to
discuss other more highly evolved compo¬
nents of the recreational process, such as a
feeling of isolation in nature or the percep¬
tion of natural processes, and then reaches
what to him is the ultimate component, a
sense of husbandry. This component, he tells
us, “is unknown to the outdoorsman who
works for conservation with his vote rather
than with his hands. It is realized only when
some art of management is applied to land
by some person of perception.”15 So, to
Leopold, husbandry is the highest form of
citizenship: actually working with one’s
hands, participating actively to build or
maintain the land community.

Leopold expresses his concept of environ¬
mental citizenship most memorably in “The
Land Ethic”:

In short, a land ethic changes the role of
Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-
community to plain member and citizen of
it. It implies respect for his fellow-members,
and also respect for the community as such.16

Here Leopold offers us a concept of citi¬
zenship in a community larger even than
humankind; we are plain member and citi¬

zen of a community that embraces the land
and all the plants and animals that are a part
of it. The usual formula for conservation,
“Obey the law, vote right, join some orga¬
nizations, and practice what conservation is
profitable on your own land; the govern¬
ment will do the rest,” he tells us is too easy.
“It defines no right and wrong, assigns no
obligation.”17 Leopold’s formula implies per¬
sonal responsibility to participate actively as
an ordinary citizen in maintaining or restor¬
ing the health of the biotic community.

This review of A Sand County Almanac
suggests that Leopold’s mature concept of
environmental citizenship, with its empha¬
sis on obligation to the community, is simi¬
lar in some respects to the concept of civic
virtue in the republican ideology of the
American Revolution, though he conceives
the community much more broadly. But
one would not necessarily expect to find
these ideas early in his career, when he was
working for the U. S. Forest Service, mod¬
eled on a different conception of the rela¬
tionship between citizens and the state.

Aldo Leopold throughout his career was
a consummate professional, extremely effi¬
ciency-oriented during his years in the For¬
est Service and fascinated by the intricacies
of administrative procedures and standards.18
And yet we get a sense from one of his ear¬
liest publications that he was not wholly sat¬
isfied with the Forest Service model of gov¬
ernmental administration. Shortly after he
had become supervisor of the Carson Na¬
tional Forest in New Mexico at age 25, he
was stricken with an illness that nearly led
to his death and required more than a year
of recuperation. During this time he ad¬
dressed a letter “to the forest officers of the
Carson” reflecting on their responsibilities.
The problem that concerned him was how
to measure success in forest administration.
Was success simply a matter of efficiently

26

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FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

following prescribed policies and procedures,
or was there something else? “My measure,”
Leopold wrote, “is the effect on the forest. ”
Even at the start of his career he was con¬
cerned about the ends of administration,
what was happening to the land, not only
the procedures, or meansP

It was a preoccupation he would continue
to pursue into the early 1920s, when he was
chief of operations in charge of roads, trails,
fire control, personnel, and finance on
twenty million acres of national forests in the
Southwest. In order to improve the effi¬
ciency of administration while focussing at¬
tention on “the effect on the forest,” he de¬
veloped an intricate system of tally sheets for
a new system of forest inspection that would
enable foresters to diagnose local problems
and monitor the effectiveness of manage¬
ment solutions. Leopold regarded this elabo¬
rate system of inspection as one of his points
of greatest pride during his career in the
Southwest. And indeed, his lifelong fascina¬
tion with tracking the dynamics of change
and the efficacy of management for the to¬
tal biotic system, begun during his inspec¬
tion forays in the Southwest, would lead him
in our own day to be acknowledged as the
exemplar of the new philosophy of ecosys¬
tem management recently adopted by the
Forest Service and other land management
agencies.20

Clearly, Leopold was enlarging the re¬
sponsibilities of professional foresters by ex¬
tending the boundaries of the community of
concern to include the entire biota — soils,
waters, plants, and animals — as well as trees
and the economic interests of the people
who used them. But there was scant room
for ordinary citizens in Leopold’s model of
forest administration. Though he recognized
the difficulty of determining the objectives of
management — a problem that bedevils eco¬
system management today — he concluded

that these decisions should be made by “only
the highest authority.”21 Yet the essay in
which he dealt most directly with what he
called “standards of conservation” tails off in
mid-sentence and remained unpublished,
suggesting that Leopold may have realized
he was caught in an unresolved problem of
authority: who decides the objectives and on
what basis? A kind of ‘super-inspector’
would crop up in his writing from time to
time over the years, but I am not sure he was
ever really comfortable with this type of au¬
thority.22

Despite Leopold’s commitment to profes¬
sional expertise in forest administration, he
saw roles for citizens in related endeavors.
Indeed, when his illness prevented him from
resuming his post as a forest supervisor, he
began developing a new line of activity —
game management — in the Forest Service,
and in conjunction with this he traveled all
across Arizona and New Mexico organizing
game protective associations — citizen con¬
servation organizations — in local communi¬
ties and statewide. These associations of
sportsmen, ranchers, and townspeople
would work for non-political game wardens,
predator control, and refuges. They were
grassroots citizen-action groups in a long¬
standing American tradition.

Leopold addressed the subject of citizen¬
ship in a number of lectures early in his ca¬
reer, including one on “Home Gardens and
Citizenship” to students at the University
of New Mexico in 1917, just after the
American entry into World War I. A home
garden, he said, was one mark of a useful
citizen. Nobility is won by soiling your
hands with useful labor, by building some¬
thing. Leopold was always one for building
something. If your job doesn’t allow
enough play for creativity, he told the stu¬
dents, you can be creative by working the
ground, whereupon he went into a solilo-

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quy about how to raise spectacular toma¬
toes in your Albuquerque backyard. In a
world threatened with food shortage, what
right have we to hold idle some of the best
agricultural lands in our back yards? he
asked. Better to turn them into gardens and
learn to be good citizens.23

A year later he spoke to the women’s club
on “The Civic Life of Albuquerque.” Hav¬
ing left the Forest Service to become secre¬
tary of the Albuquerque Chamber of Com¬
merce, Leopold was now asking “What has
the 20th-century American city contributed
to human progress?” His answer was public
spirit. He defined it as “year-round patrio¬
tism in action; . . . intelligent unselfishness
in practice.” He tried to trace the idea his¬
torically, contrasting Confucius, whom he
saw as more interested in personal virtues
and family ties than in obligations to oth¬
ers, with Socrates, who knew that citizens
had a moral obligation to support and im¬
prove their government. But then he lost the
thread, explaining that “it would require a
better scholar than I am to even attempt to
trace the idea of public spirit through the era
of individualism and the political revolutions
of the 18th and 19th centuries.”24

From this we realize that the concept of
civic virtue, the republican ideology of the
American Revolution, had been lost to con¬
sciousness by 1918. Leopold was assuming
a revolutionary America dedicated to indi¬
vidualism; he had lost the thread of public
spirit, though he sensed it must have been
there somewhere. And in fact historians
would not rediscover it until the late 1960s,
twenty years after his death. But he went on
to define the “modern idea” — modern as of
1918 — of public spirit: “It means that a
democratic community and its citizens have
certain reciprocal rights and obligations.”
Not only rights, but obligations as well.
“The man who cheerfully and habitually

tries to meet this responsibility,” he says, “we
call public-spirited.”

Leopold went on to offer a critical assess¬
ment of the public spirit of Albuquerque,
confiding his dream that his own Chamber
of Commerce might serve as the “common
center” to organize the “democratic welter”
of professional societies, women’s groups,
religious, political, labor, and other volun¬
tary associations of citizens toward accom¬
plishment of common goals for the better¬
ment of Albuquerque. But he also admitted
to some frustration — businessmen unwilling
to welcome representation in the chamber by
labor and craft organizations, for example.

After little more than a year, Leopold left
the Chamber of Commerce to rejoin the
Forest Service. A few years later, still feeling
the effects of his experience in the chamber,
he delivered a scathing “Criticism of the
Booster Spirit” to an Albuquerque civic so¬
ciety in which he excoriated “the philosophy
of boost.” Boost was premised on growth by
unearned increment, rather than investment
in basic resources, especially the soil, he
charged. In his quest for fundamental im¬
provement in the resource base, he began
looking to enforced responsibility of land-
owners. In “Pioneers and Gullies,” for ex¬
ample, he described numerous valleys of the
Southwest torn out by erosion, and he pre¬
dicted, for the first time in print, that one
day proper land use would be a responsibil¬
ity of citizens: “The day will come when the
ownership of land will carry with it the ob¬
ligation to so use and protect it with respect
to erosion that it is not a menace to other
landowners and the public.”25

Leopold left the Southwest in 1924 to
accept a job in Madison, Wisconsin, as di¬
rector of the Forest Products Laboratory.
Though the laboratory’s focus on industrial
products after the tree was cut proved ulti¬
mately frustrating for one so committed to

28

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FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

the growing forest and he would leave after
only four years, he did manage to extract
from the experience a lesson for citizens. In
an article, “The Home Builder Conserves,”
he admonished people, before they casti¬
gated the “wasteful lumberman,” to think
about how their own arbitrary demands as
consumers and home builders cause waste.
The thinking citizen has power not only in
his vote but in his daily thoughts and ac¬
tions, and especially in his habits as a buyer
and user of wood. “Good citizenship is the
only effective patriotism,” he concluded,
“and patriotism requires less and less of mak¬
ing the eagle scream, but more and more of
making him think.” This theme of the re¬
sponsibility of the citizen as intelligent con¬
sumer is one Leopold would return to from
time to time, most notably during World
War II in “Land Use and Democracy.”26

Shortly after his move to Wisconsin,
Leopold became involved with the state
chapter of the Izaak Walton League of
America, which was the most vibrant citi¬
zen conservation organization in the 1920s.
He worked with the league to promote a
non-partisan conservation commission and
a forestry policy for Wisconsin. Still hewing
to his professional orientation as a forester,
however, he warned members to eschew the
tendency to actually write policy: “It is a
pretty safe rule to remember that while
groups of men can insist on and criticize
plans, only individuals can create them.”27
Leopold himself was a professional writer of
policies, as he demonstrated both in the For¬
est Service and after he left in 1 928 to con¬
duct game surveys and recommend conser¬
vation policies in the midwestern states,
when he drafted an “American Game
Policy” adopted by the American Game
Conference in 1930, and when he helped
write a “Twenty-Five Year Conservation
Plan” for his home state of Iowa in 1931.

Leopold was tremendously impressed by
the citizen commitment to conservation in
Iowa and genuinely proud of the plan for
integration of all aspects of conservation —
parks, forests, wildlife, fish, water quality,
soil conservation — that the team of nation¬
ally recognized experts wrote. Iowa was
clearly a leader among the states in conser¬
vation thought and practice in these years.
But buried in Leopold’s correspondence are
intimations of foreboding. He warned his
colleagues in Iowa that they needed to make
a special effort to educate the public about
what was in the plan, lest people buy into it
without personally engaging with it. He was
concerned especially about the protection-
minded women so active in the parks move¬
ment who might become upset if they were
suddenly to discover that the plan aimed to
produce game to shoot. “There is grave dan¬
ger,” he said, “that the conservationists will
blow it up before they even understand what
it is.”28

In 1933, shortly after he accepted a newly
created chair of game management at the
University of Wisconsin, Leopold proposed
to the dean of agriculture the development
of a conservation plan for Wisconsin farms
similar to the Iowa plan. The purpose, as in
Iowa, would be to get all the government
agencies working together to encourage
farmers and other landowners to care for
their lands in a more conservative way — or,
as he put it, to “integrate economic with es¬
thetic land use.” But the means would dif¬
fer. In Iowa the plan was produced by im¬
ported experts who did not participate in its
execution, an arrangement that clearly left
Leopold uneasy, whereas in Wisconsin he
proposed to “evolve” a plan “rather than to
write one out-of-hand.”29

Leopold’s emphasis on evolving a plan
from the grassroots was prophetic — not only
of the emerging emphasis on public involve-

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ment in resource planning in our own day
but of the situation in Iowa at the time. By
1935 the Iowa conservation plan disinte¬
grated, at least in Leopold’s view. After Iowa
merged all relevant agencies into a single de¬
partment, as recommended in the twenty-
five-year plan, the new Iowa Conservation
Commission bypassed the man whom to
Leopold was the obvious director, and most
of Leopold’s friends in fish and game re¬
signed or were fired. The issue apparently
had to do with the Iowa commission’s in¬
sistence on an immediate showing of quick
results by government through public works
rather than, as Leopold and his colleagues
preferred, a long-term emphasis on building
a new conservation consciousness in the citi¬
zenry, especially among landowners.30

In the wake of the Iowa debacle, Leopold
commented to a friend that the only state
conservation effort to survive was in Michi¬
gan, “strangely enough, by a process of in¬
ternal disharmony. I am tempted to draw
the conclusion that complete unanimity
within a state [such as in Iowa] is a symp¬
tom of approaching dissolution.”31 In other
correspondence and articles in the 1930s he
addressed the problem of factions within the
conservation community, especially the
shotgunners versus the field glass hunters,
arguing for tolerance, a capacity for self criti¬
cism, and an institutional structure within
which factions could argue out their con¬
flicts. “It is a question of applying the demo¬
cratic process to conservation,” he con¬
cluded.32

Leopold’s thoughts on democracy and
conservation were further stimulated by
travel in Germany in 1935, where he ob¬
served an elaborate system of law, public ad¬
ministration, ethics, and customs that was
“incredibly complete and internally harmo¬
nious.” Though he could observe no real dis¬
tinction between the government, acting hi¬

erarchically from the top down, and popu¬
lar acceptance from below, he recognized
that the German system, with its strong cen¬
tral governmental authority, was “manifestly
a surrender of individualism to the commu¬
nity.”33 While he could admire it in Ger¬
many (before he understood the connection
with the Nazi movement), he knew that it
wouldn’t work in America.

Leopold addressed the tension between
the claims of the community and the rights
of the individual in America in a number of
essays in the 1930s in which he dealt with
the role of government. How can we get
conservation? he often asked. And his an¬
swer: we can legislate it, we can buy it, or
we can build it. Government’s initial efforts
at conservation had been through laws pro¬
hibiting hunting, fishing, or cutting, a first
step but inadequate. The second step, aug¬
mented by the open money bags of the New
Deal, was to buy land for conservation, but
that could be carried only “as far as the tax¬
string on our leg will reach.” The solution
had to be found on private land.34

By the time he wrote “Land Pathology”
under the menacing clouds of the dust bowl
in 1935, he saw only two possible forces that
could effect change in private land use. One
was the development of institutional mecha¬
nisms for protecting the public interest in
private land — a quest he had been on for
over a decade, especially after his new chair
of game management was lodged in the Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin’s famed Department of
Agricultural Economics with its institutional
bent. The other was his new preoccupation
with “the revival of land esthetics in rural
culture.” Out of these forces he hoped might
eventually emerge what he was even then
beginning to term a “land ethic.”35 After his
friend Jay “Ding” Darling cautioned him
that his search for institutional controls
could lead to socialization of property,36

30

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FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

Leopold seemed increasingly to emphasize
development of a personal sense of obliga¬
tion to the land community, a sense of hus¬
bandry.

During these years of the depression
Leopold experimented with a form of citi¬
zen organization he hoped would encourage
a sense of husbandry. With farmers, sports¬
men, and his own wildlife students he es¬
tablished a series of cooperative ventures in¬
tended to apply conservation to land and
improve habitat for game. One of them, the
Coon Valley Erosion Project near LaCrosse,
Wisconsin, involved cooperation of local
landowners with government agencies in a
pathbreaking demonstration of erosion con¬
trol and integrated land use on a watershed
scale. But others functioned entirely outside
the formal channels of government, includ¬
ing the Riley Cooperative and the Faville
Grove Area within an easy drive of Madi¬
son. Leopold described these experiments in
community conservation as vertical rather
than horizontal planning, focusing a battery
of minds simultaneously on one spot. “It
may take a long time to cover the country
spot by spot,” he admitted, “but that is pref¬
erable to a smear.”37

As war clouds darkened the horizon and
called into question his earlier admiration for
Germany’s tightly regimented system of re¬
source administration, Leopold lectured to
his wildlife ecology students about “Ecology
and Politics,” presenting the case for an evo¬
lutionary mandate for individualism. Indi¬
vidual deviations from societal norms in land
management, like individual evolutionary
variations, he suggested, might enable cer¬
tain individuals to survive catastrophe even
when most members of a species were elimi¬
nated.38 This was an individualism not of
economic self-interest but of creative experi¬
mentation, in the sense of solutions gener¬
ated from the bottom up by individual citi¬

zens or communities rather than mandated
by government on all alike. It was in this
spirit that Leopold looked to the evolution
of a land ethic.

American entry into World War II fur¬
ther defined the issue: “We must prove that
democracy can use its land decently,”
Leopold argued in a seminal essay, “Land
Use and Democracy.” Here he called for
conservation from the bottom up instead of
from the top down. It had to begin with
“that combination of solicitude, foresight,
and skill which we call husbandry,” practiced
by landowners on their own land. But non¬
landowning citizens had responsibilities in
their roles as consumers as well. They could
refuse to buy “exploitation milk” from cows
pastured on steep slopes and insist on “hon¬
est boards” from properly managed forests.
There was an indispensable role for govern¬
ment as “tester of fact vs. fiction” or guard¬
ian of standards, Leopold acknowledged, but
farmers could scrutinize their own practices
through courageous use of their self-govern¬
ing Soil Conservation Districts, and there
were opportunities also for self-scrutiny by
industrial or citizen groups.39 More than half
a century later, the Forest Stewardship
Council’s independent third-party certifica¬
tion of forest products and other examples
of the movement for green production and
consumption standards would attest to the
validity of Leopold’s visionary argument.

Aldo Leopold’s ideas about the roles of
government and citizens in the shaping of
environmental policy were tested in the last
decade of his life as never before by his in¬
volvement in the traumatic deer debates of
the 1940s in Wisconsin. After being nearly
hunted to extirpation in the early decades of
the century, the state’s deer herd had in¬
creased to such an extent that by the early
1940s it needed to be reduced for the good
of both deer and forest, and Leopold sought

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to work with the Conservation Department
to build a case for an “any-deer” season, for
killing does as well as bucks. But the call for
reduction stirred disbelief and resentment
among both hunters and the general pub¬
lic, to whom conservation of deer was a good
thing. In response, the Conservation Com¬
mission organized a Citizens’ Deer Commit¬
tee, appointing Aldo Leopold as chairman.40

Leopold’s committee had a cross-section
of citizens, mostly from northern Wiscon¬
sin, most of them distrustful of the policy
he was urging on the department. For the
first meeting he prepared maps and charts
to provide an historical review of deer irrup¬
tions nationwide. But he was upstaged by
another member of the committee, Joyce
Larkin, editor of the Vilas County News Re¬
view. She didn’t think there were too many
deer, and she arrived at the meeting armed
with a printed booklet of history and local
opinion about the deer situation in Vilas
County. We don’t know how Leopold re¬
acted to Larkin that day, but we do know
that he decided to take the committee and
several newspaper reporters on a three-day
tour of deer yards, to let them discuss what
they were actually seeing on the ground.
Joyce Larkin, among others, was impressed.
She went back to Vilas, got the county board
to accept Leopold’s challenge to bring clash¬
ing interests together to look at the problems
locally, and came to a subsequent meeting
of the committee with a new report in fa¬
vor of an any-deer season.41

However successful Leopold proved at
changing attitudes among the members of
his Citizens’ Deer Committee by letting
them argue out their views with respect to
conditions in particular locales, the deer
problem proved too widespread and public
attitudes too entrenched for him to make
much headway in the state as a whole. A new
newspaper, Save Wisconsin s Deer, ridiculed

and castigated him in virtually every issue
and offered fuel to those who opposed his
reasoning. Yet he never gave up on his ef¬
fort to educate the citizenry, individually and
collectively. It is likely that the unremitting
stress of dealing with the deer issue in the
public arena during the 1940s helped send
Leopold to an early grave. But he had been
appointed to a six-year term on the Wiscon¬
sin Conservation Commission, and he be¬
lieved it was his responsibility as a citizen to

4?

serve.

During those years he took solace in the
exercise of another type of citizenship that
he had advocated since the days of his back¬
yard garden in Albuquerque: he practiced
husbandry as plain member and citizen of
the land community at the sand farm his
family called “the shack.” He expressed this
form of citizenship — citizenship as creative
individualism — perhaps most poignantly in
his essay, “Axe-in-Hand,” which includes a
definition of a conservationist that could as
easily be read as his definition of a citizen:

I have read many definitions of what is a con¬
servationist [citizen], and written not a few
myself, but I suspect that the best one is writ¬
ten not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a
matter of what a man thinks about while
chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A
conservationist [citizen] is one who is hum¬
bly aware that with each stroke he is writing
his signature on the face of his land. Signa¬
tures of course differ, whether written with
axe or pen, and this is as it should be.43

Endnotes

'See A Nation of Spectators: How Civic Disengage¬
ment Weakens America and What We Can Do
About It (Final Report of the National Com¬
mission on Civic Renewal, 1998); and Rob¬
ert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s

32

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FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

Declining Social Capital J Journal of Democ¬
racy 6:1 (January 1995), 65-78. Much of the
recent attention to citizenship in the United
States has been stimulated by scholarly writ¬
ing concerning the forging of civil society in
new democracies around the world, especially
since the fall of the Iron Curtain. See, for ex¬
ample, Andrew Arato, “Interpreting 1989,”
Social Research 60:3 (Fall 1993), 609-46;
Michael Bernhard, “Civil Society after the
First Transition: Dilemmas of Post-Commu¬
nist Democratization in Poland and Beyond,”
Communist and Post-Communist Studies 29
(1996): 309-30; Shu-Yun Ma, “The Chinese
Discourse on Civil Society,” The China Quar¬
terly 137 (1994); James Bohman, “Complex¬
ity, Pluralism, and the Constitutional State:
On Habermas’s Faktizitat und Geltungf Law
& Society Review, 28:4 (1994), 897-930; and
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere:
A Contribution to the Critique of Actually
Existing Democracy,” in Justice Interruptus:
Critical Reflections on the “ Postsocialist” Con¬
dition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 69-98.

2Susan L. Flader, “Citizenry and the State in the
Shaping of Environmental Policy,” Environ¬
mental Review 3: 1 (January 1998), 8-24.

3Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the Ameri¬
can Republic, 1776—1787 (New York: W.W.
Norton and Co., 1972), 319-28.

4See, for example, Gary Kulik, “Dams, Fish, and
Farmers: Defence of Public Rights in Eigh¬
teenth-Century Rhode Island,” in The Coun¬
tryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation ,
ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1985), 25-50.

5See Robert E. Shalhope, “Republicanism and
Early American Historiography,” William
and Mary Quarterly 39 ( 1 982):334 — 56; Joyce
Appleby, ed., “Special Issue: Republicanism
in the History and Historiography of the
United States,” American Quarterly 37
(1985); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of

the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1992).

6See Jack N. Rakove, “Parchment Barriers and
the Politics of Rights,” in A Culture of Rights:
The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and
Law — 1791 and 1991 , ed. Michael J. Lacey
and Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cam¬
bridge University Press, 1992), 103; and Wil¬
liam A. Galston, “Practical Philosophy and
the Bill of Rights: Perspectives on Some Con¬
temporary Issues,” ibid., 234.

7Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America ,
ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage,
1945), I:ch. 12, II:ch. 5.

8See Philip D. Brick and R. McGreggor Cawley,
eds., A Wolf in the Garden: The Land Rights
Movement and the New Environmental Debate
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield,
1996).

9See Stephen Skowronek, Building a New Ameri¬
can State: The Expansion of National Admin¬
istrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1982); and
Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel
of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation
Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1950).

10Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation
(Garden City, NY, 1910), IV:6. Compare
Leopold: “It is no prediction, but merely an
assertion that the idea of controlled environ¬
ment contains colors and brushes wherewith
society may some day paint a new and possi¬
bly a better picture of itself;” in “The Con¬
servation Ethic,” Journal of Forestry 31:6 (Oc¬
tober 1933), 634-43.

nAldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and
Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1949), 4.

12Ibid., 87.

13Ibid., 138.

14Ibid., 161.

15Ibid., 166-67, 175.

16Ibid., 204.

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17Ibid., 207-8.

18For details of Leopold’s biography see Curt
Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1988), and Susan L. Flader, Thinking Like a
Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of
an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves,
and Forests (1974; Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1994).

19“To the Forest Officers of the Carson,” The
Carson Pine Cone (July 1913), reprinted in
The River of the Mother of God and Other Es¬
says by Aldo Leopold, ed. Susan L. Flader and
J. Baird Callicott (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1991), 41-46 [hereafter
cited as River] .

20See Susan Flader, “Aldo Leopold and the Evo¬
lution of Ecosystem Management,” in Sus¬
tainable Ecological Systems: Implementing an
Ecological Approach to Land Management, ed.
W. Wallace Covington and Leonard F.
DeBano (USDA Forest Service General
Technical Report RM-247, 1994), 13-19.

21 “Standards of Conservation” (handwritten ms.,
c. 1922), General Files — Aldo Leopold, Se¬
ries 9/23/10-6, Box 16, University of Wis¬
consin Division of Archives [hereafter cited
as LP 6B6 (Leopold Papers, Series 6, Box
16)], reprinted in River, 82-85.

22See, for example, “Conservation Economics,”
Journal of Forestry 32:5 (May 1934), 537-44,
reprinted in River, 20 1 . For discussion of the
problem of authority as related to the rela¬
tionship between professionals and citizens
see Terry L. Cooper, “Citizenship and Pro¬
fessionalism in Public Administration,” Public
Administration Review 44 (March 1984),
143-149; and J. Douglas Wellman and
Terence J. Tipple, “Public Forestry and Di¬
rect Democracy,” The Environmental Profes¬
sional 12 (1990), 77-86.

23“Home Gardens and Citizenship,” 23 April
1917, 7pp. tps., LP 8B8.

24“The Civic Life of Albuquerque,” 27 Septem¬

ber 1918, 9pp tps., LP 8B8.

25“A Criticism of the Booster Spirit,” 6 Novem¬
ber 1923, 10pp tps speech to Ten Dons, LP
6B16, reprinted in River, 98-105; “Pioneers
and Gullies,” Sunset Magazine 52:5 (May
1924), 15-16 and 91-95, reprinted in River,
106—13. Leopold’s language on the obligation
of landowners was similar to that in a speech
he had written in December 1922 for the
New Mexico Association for Science, “Ero¬
sion as a Menace to the Social and Economic
Future of the Southwest.” The speech was
published many years later in Journal of For¬
estry 44:9 (Sept 1946), 627-33.

26“The Homebuilder Conserves,” American For¬
ests and Forest Life 34:413 (May 1928), 276-
78 and 297, reprinted in River , 143-47;
“Land-Use and Democracy,” Audubon Maga¬
zine 44:5 (Sept-Oct 1942), 259-65, reprinted
in River, 295-300.

27“Izaac Walton League and Its Relation to For¬
estry in Wisconsin,” [n.d., c. 1925], 10pp tps,
LP 6B16.

28Leopold to Claude V. Campbell, 15 October
1932, LP 3B5, and associated correspon¬
dence. See also Jacob L. Crane, Jr., and
George Wheeler Olcott, Report on the Lowa
Twenty-five Year Conservation Plan (Des
Moines: Meredith, 1933).

29“A Conservation Plan for Wisconsin Farms,”
23 October 1933, 6pp tps., LP 6B16.

30See Leopold to William Schuenke, 10 July
1935; I.T. Bode to Leopold, n.d. [c. July
1935]; and Leopold to I.T. Bode, 19 July
1935, all in LP 3B5. See also Rebecca
Conard, Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, Pre¬
serves, and Environmentalism (Iowa City: Uni¬
versity of Iowa Press, 1997), 120-36.

31Leopold to P.S. Lovejoy, 18 July 1935, P.S.
Lovejoy Papers, Michigan Historical Com¬
mission Archives, Lansing, RG63-12 B12F6.

32“A House Divided,” Wisconsin Sportsman (Oc¬
tober 1940), 5. See also “Game and Wild Life
Conservation,” The Condor 34:2 (Mar-Apr

34

TRANSACTIONS

FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

1932), 103-06, reprinted in River , 164-68.
For recent examples of local democratic par¬
ticipation in decisionmaking see Daniel
Kemnis, Community and the Politics of Place
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1991); and Mark Sagoff, “The View from
Quincy Library: Civic Engagement in Envi¬
ronmental Problem-Solving” (Working Paper
#16, The National Commission on Civic
Renewal).

33“Notes on Game Administration in Germany,”
American Wildlife 25:6 (Nov-Dec 1936), 85,
92-93.

34See, for example, “The Conservation Ethic,”
Journal of Forestry 31:6 (Oct 1933), 634-43
[River, 181—92]; “Conservation Economics,”
Journal of Forestry 32:5 (May 1934), 537-44
[River, 193-202]; “Conservation in the
World of Tomorrow,” lecture notes 29
March 1937, 5pp tps, LP 6B14; and “The
Farmer as a Conservationist,” American For¬
ests 45:6 (June 1939), 294-99, 316, 323
[River, 255-65].

35“Land Pathology,” 15 April 1935, 8pp tps, LP
6B16, reprinted in River, 212-17.

36J.N. Darling to Leopold, 20 November 1935,
LP 6B16.

37“Farmer-Sportsman Set-ups in the North Cen¬
tral Region,” Proceedings North American
Wildlife Conference, February 3-7, 1936 (Sen¬
ate Committee Print, 74th Cong., 2d sess.,
1936), 279-85. See also “Coon Valley: An
Adventure in Cooperative Conservation,”
American Forests 41:5 (May 1935), 205-208
[River, 218-23]; “Flelping Ourselves” (with
Reuben Paulson), Field and Stream 39:4 (Au¬
gust 1934), 32-33, 56 [River, 203-08]; and

“Flistory of the Riley Game Cooperative,
1 93 1-1939,” Journal of Wildlife Management
4:3 (July 1940), 291-302. For recent ex¬
amples of the burgeoning movement in com¬
munity conservation, see the special issue of
the Journal of Forestry 96:3 (March 1998) on
community forestry.

38“Ecology and Politics,” WLE 118 Introductory
Lecture, n.d. [c. 1941], 7pp tps, lp 6B16
[River, 281-89].

39“Land-Use and Democracy,” Audubon Maga¬
zine 44:5 (Sept-Oct 1942), 259-65 [River,
295-300].

40See Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain, 1 68—
260.

41Ibid., 183-93.

42Ibid., 194.

43 A Sand County Almanac, 68.

Susan Flader is professor of American western
and environmental history at the University of
Missouri- Colu m bia and has written or edited six
books and numerous articles, including Think¬
ing Like a Mountain (a biographical study of
Aldo Leopold) and The River of the Mother of
God ( essays by Aldo Leopold, edited with Baird
Callicott). She has served as president of the
American Society for Environmnental History
and the Missouri Parks Association and as a di¬
rector of the National Audubon Society, the
American Forestry Association, and the Forest
History Society. Address: Department of His¬
tory, University of Mis so u ri -Colum bia, 101
Read Hall, Columbia, MO 65211. Email:
fladers @m isso u ri. edu

Volume 87 (1999)

35

Craig Annen and Jonathan Lyon

Relationships between Herbaceous
Vegetation and Environmental
Factors along a Restored Prairie-Oak
Opening Ecotone

Abstract We studied a potential ecotone between a wet-mesic prairie and
an oak opening in a restored landscape in southern Wisconsin.
We described the relationships between herbaceous vegetation and
soil variables along the prairie-oak opening transition using twenty-
five 1-rn2 plots located on five 75 -m transects. We identified a
total of 46 herbaceous species and analyzed eight environmental
variables: seven soil variables and photo synthetic ally active radia¬
tion (PAR). We observed distinct soil gradients along the ecotone:
soil organic matter , total N, pH, P, Mg, and Ca levels all exhib¬
ited significant reductions when moving along the ecotone from
prairie to oak opening. PAR was weakly correlated with vegeta¬
tion patterns. Using cluster analysis and ordination techniques,
we identified few distinct herbaceous community types along the
transition, except for a unique assemblage dominated by reed ca¬
nary grass (Phalaris arundinacea L.). Our canonical correspondence
analysis ( CCA) results indicated strong correlations between her¬
baceous vegetation and soil N, pH, Ca, and Mg gradients. Her¬
baceous species richness and Shannon-Wiener diversity increased
moving from the prairie into the oak opening. Overall, our re¬
sults indicated that (1) distinct soil gradients exist at the site, (2)
soil gradients are correlated with herbaceous vegetation patterns
in the restored area, and (3) while P. arundinacea has a strong
influence on the composition of vegetation at the site, non- Phalaris-
dominated plots exhibited continuous rather than discrete ecotonal
properties. The potential importance of soil variables and soil gra¬
dients should be considered when studying the characteristics of
ecotones in restored habitats.

TRANSACTIONS Volume 87 (1999)

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E cotones are transition zones between
two or more distinct community types.
The role of ecotones (and ecoclines) in de¬
scribing and explaining spatial and tempo¬
ral vegetation patterns has received renewed
attention in recent years (Naiman and
Decamps 1990, Holland et al. 1991,
Hansen and di Castri 1992, Gosz 1993,
Risser 1993), although interest in the struc¬
ture and ecological impact of ecotones is by
no means new (Clements 1905, Leopold
1933, Weaver and Albertson 1956). Recent
ecotone research has been focused on
biodiversity (Pulliam 1988, Hansen and
Urban 1992, Leach and Givnish 1996), nu¬
trient and material flows between commu¬
nities (Johnston 1993, McClaran and
McPherson 1995), ecotones in landscapes
(Boren et al. 1997, Dyer and Baird 1997,
Sagers and Lyon 1997), and regulation and
response to large-scale climatic change
(Nielson 1993, Rusek 1993). Despite the
renewed interest in ecotones, characteriza¬
tion of vegetation in and across ecotones re¬
mains problematic (Auerbach and Shmida
1993, Jarvis 1995, Stohlgren et al. 1997).

Rates of spatial change in vegetation are
scale-dependent, and ecotones can be char¬
acterized over a wide range of spatial scales
(di Castri 1993, Gosz 1991, Crumley 1993).
Assigning boundary classifications can be
difficult at larger scales because of the ten¬
dency of small-scale differences to average
out at larger levels of observation (Allen and
Hoekstra 1992). Ecotone studies at the
population level encompass the spatial dis¬
tribution of individuals in a small habitat
and facilitates analysis at smaller scales
(Fahrig and Merriam 1985, Gosz 1993). In
both large and small scale ecotonal land¬
scapes, specific environmental variables can
strongly influence the distribution and abun¬
dance of vegetation and be correlated with
the spatial distribution of ecotones (Gosz

and Sharpe 1989, Risser 1990, van der
Maarel 1990, Neilson 1993). Grassland and
prairie vegetation, in particular, have been
shown to be sensitive to changes in soil nu¬
trient status and balance (W edin and Tilman
1996), and soil gradients have been shown
to have a strong influence on the composi¬
tion of prairie and savanna vegetation
(Curtis 1959, Anderson 1968, Jastrow 1987,
Zak et al. 1990, Leach 1994).

We studied a suspected ecotone between
a restored prairie community and a remnant
oak opening. The study was conducted in
the Curtis Prairie, a prairie restoration
project at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison Arboretum. The restoration effort
at the Curtis Prairie has been studied from
a variety of perspectives, including land use
history (Blewett and Cottam 1984), fire
(Anderson 1972, Peet et al. 1975), vegeta¬
tion dynamics (Cottam and Wilson 1966,
Blewett 1981), and organic matter incorpo¬
ration into soils (Nielsen and Hole 1963).
However, no studies have assessed potential
linkages between underlying soil gradients
and composition of vegetation along the re¬
stored prairie-oak opening ecotone. Our
overall objective was to determine how her¬
baceous vegetation was distributed in the
ecotonal region and if vegetation patterns
were correlated with soil variables and/or
photosynthetically active radiation (PAR).
Specifically, we wanted to determine:

(1) if and how the environmental vari¬
ables changed across the prairie-oak open¬
ing boundary;

(2) if the boundary between the two veg¬
etation zones was discrete or continuous;

(3) if any of the environmental variables
were correlated with vegetation compo¬
sition;

(4) if a plant diversity gradient existed be¬
tween the adjacent vegetation zones.

38

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ANNEN and LYON: Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone

Study Site

The 0.45-ha study site was located in the
northwestern portion of the Curtis Prairie,
a prairie restoration project within the Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.
Presettlement vegetation in the area con¬
sisted of an oak opening intermixed with
patches of tallgrass prairie (Curtis 1959,
Sachse 1965, Cottam and Wilson 1966,
Blewitt and Cottam 1984). The area was
settled and converted into farmland in the
1850s. By the 1920s, the agricultural fields
were abandoned, and the area was used as a
horse pasture. In 1932 the Arboretum ac¬
quired the land, and in 1935 the prairie res¬
toration project at Curtis Prairie was initi¬
ated. By 1948 the first prescribed burning
was conducted (Curtis and Partch 1948).
Current management of the Curtis Prairie
includes a two-year cycle of prescribed burn¬
ing; two-thirds of the prairie are burned one
year, and the remaining third is burned the
next (Anderson 1972). Occasional brushing
and mowing also have been used as manage¬
ment tools. A detailed history of the site is
provided by Blewitt and Cottam (1984).

Methods

Herbaceous Vegetation Sampling

Five 75-m transects were established at
intervals of 1 5 m running parallel across the
prairie-oak opening border. The transects
started at a small drainage channel running
southwest to northeast across the site (a
topographical low point). Position 1 was in
the prairie while position 5 was in the oak
opening. All transects were set up at an
azimuth of 310°. Sampling plots were
located at 15 m intervals along the transect.
Herbaceous vegetation was sampled using 1 -
m2 quadrat constructed from PVC pipe.
Vegetation samples were taken at each 15 m

interval along each of the five transects for
a total of 25 plots. The quadrat shape and
size are appropriate for this type of vege¬
tation (Brummer et al. 1994).

Herbaceous vegetation within each plot
was clipped at the base of the plant (plant-
soil interface) and separated according to
species. Nomenclature follows Gleason and
Cronquist (1991). The species samples were
then dried by placing them in a drying oven
at 65°C for 48 hours or until a constant
weight was obtained. Dry weight biomass
was determined for each species (g m'2) (Ap¬
pendix A). Photosynthetically active radia¬
tion (PAR) was measured on each plot us¬
ing a Li-Cor LI-192SA Quantum Sensor
(Lincoln, NE). Paired light measurements
were taken in full sunlight adjacent to the
study area, above the herbaceous canopy (ap¬
proximately 1.3 m) as a measure of light
interception by oak opening burr oaks
( Quercus macrocarpa Michx.), and at
approximately 8 cm above the ground sur¬
face beneath the herbaceous canopy.

Soils

A composite soil sample was taken from each
plot to a depth of approximately 1 0 cm from
three arbitrary locations within each plot.
Leaf litter was removed from the sample area
prior to soil collection. Soil samples were
stored in plastic bags and kept refrigerated
until analysis. Soils were analyzed at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Soil
Testing, Plant Analysis and Feed and For¬
age Analysis Laboratory in Madison, WI.
Soils were analyzed for pH, organic matter,
total N, available P, and exchangeable K, Ca,
and Mg.

Soil pH was measured using a glass elec¬
trode pH meter in a 1:1 w/v aqueous solu¬
tion following the methods of Corey and
Tanner (1961). Calcium was measured as
lime (CaOH2) using a glass electrode Ca

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

meter in a 1:1 w/v aqueous solution. Avail¬
able phosphorous was measured after the
methods of Bray and Kurtz (1945). Avail¬
able potassium was measured according to
the methods outlined in Wilde et al. (1979).
Percent organic matter (OM) was deter¬
mined following the methods of Schulte
(1980). Total nitrogen was measured using
the semi-micro Kjeldahl procedure (Brem-
ner and Mulvaney 1982)

Vegetation Analysis

Classification of herbaceous vegetation was
conducted using Cluster Analysis performed
by program PC-ORD (McCune and Mef-
ford 1995). To evaluate the variation in her¬
baceous vegetation and environmental vari¬
ables along the transects, analysis of variance
tests were performed using the general lin¬
ear model (GLM) procedure in Minitab 8.2
(Minitab 1991). Mean separations across
transect position groups were conducted us¬
ing Fisher’s test at P < 0.05. Species density
was defined at the total number of species
found in a sample plot and was used as an
estimate for species richness (Magurran
1988). Species diversity was determined us¬
ing the Shannon-Wiener diversity index, H’
.= -£ pi In pi, where pi is the proportion of
importance value of the ith species. These
values were based on dry-weight biomass.

To evaluate relationships between vegeta¬
tion and environmental variables, we per¬
formed multivariate analyses, namely
detrended correspondence analysis (DCA)
and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA)
ordinations on herbaceous species-environ¬
mental variable matrices. We conducted the
ordinations using the programs PC-ORD
(McCune and Mefford 1995) and
CANOCO 3.10 (ter Braak 1990). Herba¬
ceous species biomass was used in the plant
matrix as an indicator of plant abundance.
Plant dry weight biomass was used in all the

ordination and classification methods de¬
scribed. The DCA procedure used segment
detrending, nonlinear rescaling of axes, and
rare species downweighting (Hill and Gauch
1980). The CCA procedure involved linear
combination of variables for site scores, no
transformation of species abundance matri¬
ces, and the use of a Monte Carlo permuta¬
tion to test the significance of the first axis
eigenvalue (ter Braak 1990). In all CCA or¬
dinations performed, the Monte Carlo test
indicated that the eigenvalues for the first axis
were significant (P < 0.05). Given the influ¬
ence of noisy environmental data on CCA
(McCune 1997), CCA was used and inter¬
preted in the limited context of describing
plant community variation with respect to
the limited set of measured environmental
variables in the study. Soil and environmen¬
tal variables were transformed, when neces¬
sary, to meet the assumptions of normality.
Significance is reported at the alpha = 0.05
level, unless otherwise noted in the text.

Results

A total of 46 herbaceous species were found
on the study plots (Appendix A). Standing
crop, dry weight biomass on the plots ranged
from 69 to 21 17 g m'2 (mean = 533 g m'2).
A distinct biomass gradient was also ob¬
served along the prairie-oak opening transi¬
tion; mean plot biomass was 642 g mf2, 1046
g m'2, 437 g m'2, 307 g m'2, and 231 g m'2,
at transect positions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, re¬
spectively. Herbaceous species density on
plots ranged from 2 to 1 1 species (mean =
5.9). Note that the species density totals do
not include a limited number of spring
ephemeral species. A summary of the over¬
all fidelity of the herbaceous species encoun¬
tered in the study indicated that the major¬
ity of the species sampled were uncommon;
cumulative totals of species fidelity show that

40

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ANNEN and LYON: Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone

64.6% of the species were found on three
or fewer plots, 29.1% were found on from
four to eight plots, and the remaining 6.3%
were found on nine or more plots.

Soil Chemical Gradients

Table 1 provides a comparison of the means,
standard deviations, and ranges of the
environmental variables in the study. The
relatively wide ranges of environmental
variables depicted in Table 1 indicate the
existence of soil heterogeneity at the site.
Table 2 summarizes the correlations between
environmental variables in the study. Moving
from prairie towards the oak opening, seven
of the eight environmental variables under

examination were found to be negatively and
significantly correlated with distance along
the transects: pH (r = -0.81), organic matter
(r - -0.73), N (r = -0.73), P (r I -0.63), Ca
(r = -0.82), Mg (r = -0.88), and PAR above
the herbaceous canopy (r = -0.33) (Figure 1).
Table 2 shows that K was not significantly
correlated with distance or any of the
environmental variables measured. Further¬
more, PAR above the herbaceous canopy was
weakly correlated with all other environ¬
mental variables, and PAR beneath the
herbaceous canopy exhibited even weaker
correlations (Table 2). Table 2 also shows
that many of the soil nutrient variables were
strongly correlated.

Table 1. Means, standard deviations, and ranges (minimum and maximum) of environ¬
mental variables along a prairie-oak opening ecotone in the Curtis Prairie.

Variable a Mean Standard Range

Deviation

pH

6.6

0.7

5.3 -

7.5

Organic matter

5.3

1.2

2.6 -

7.1

N

0.23

0.06

0.11 -

0.34

P

24.6

6.8

13.0

35.5

K

0.34

0.07

0.23 -

0.48

Ca

5.5

1.7

2.8 -

7.7

Mg

4.0

1.4

1.9 -

6.2

PAR

76.1

34.5

8.6 -

97.6

Variables shown are in the following units: organic matter (OM) %; Total N %; available P (P) mg/I;
exhangeable K (K) cmol+kg-1; exhangeable Ca (Ca) cmol+kg'1; exhangeable Mg (Mg) cmol+kg'1;
photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) nmol s^m*2.

Table 2. Pearson correlation coefficients between variables measured in the study.

Variable a D

pH

OM

N

P

K

Ca

Mg

PAR

over

PAR

under

Distance (D)

-.81

-.73

-.75

-.63

.06

-.83

-.88

-.53

-.14

pH

-

.54

.68

.41

.10

.87

.89

.49

.20

OM

-

.92

.80

.19

.76

.76

.43

.14

Total N

-

.74

-.02

.46

.43

.40

.17

P

-

.08

.28

.67

.20

-.05

K

-

-.03

.01

.13

.11

Ca

-

.94

.46

.13

Mg

-

.43

.07

Variables shown are in the following units: distance (D) m; organic matter (OM) %; Total N %; available P (P)
mg/I; exhangeable K (K) cmol+kg*1; exhangeable Ca (Ca) cmol+kg*1; exhangeable Mg (Mg) cmol+kg*1;
photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) jimol s^m*2.

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 1. Graphs show relationships between transect position and soil nutrient
levels. Transect position 1 corresponds to prairie and 5 corresponds to oak opening
in the Curtis Prairie. Bars represent one standard deviation.

Figure 1 is a composite graph of transect
position plotted versus measured soil levels of
total N, available P, exchangeable Ca, and
percent OM. Significant reductions in soil N
{P < o.OOl), Ca {P < 0.001), P (P = 0.030),
and OM (P = 0.002) were noted moving
from prairie (position 1) to oak opening (po¬
sition 5). The Mg results (not shown) were
highly similar to the Ca results. These results
indicate strong underlying soil gradients on
the study site moving across the prairie res¬
toration-oak opening transition zone.

Vegetation along the Transition

Cluster analysis identified six weak clusters
in the dataset. However, only a single dis¬

tinct herbaceous assemblage was found in
the study area. Reed canary grass ( Phalaris
arundinacea L.) dominated the plant assem¬
blages found in transect positions 1 and 2
along the ecotone. The DCA ordination re¬
sults (not shown) also indicated this pattern.
Figure 2 shows that positions 1 and 2 had
significantly lower DCA mean scores than
positions 3 to 3 (P < 0.001). No significant
differences in mean DCA scores were found
between positions 3, 4, and 3. However, the
standard deviation was highest for position
3. This latter result indicates the vegetation
at position 3 (between the prairie restoration
and oak opening) shows a high rate of spe¬
cies change at that location. The five remain-

42

TRANSACTIONS

ANNEN and LYON: Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone

Figure 2. A plot of DCA axis 1 scores (±1 SD) versus plot position along the five
study transects.

ing non-Phalaris-dominated clusters were
located in plots spread out along the three
remaining transect positions. No clear pat¬
terns of prairie versus oak opening vegeta¬
tion were found.

Vegetation-Environmental Relationships

Ordinations were used to detect relation¬
ships between vegetation and measured
environmental variables. Both DCA and
CCA were run, but because the two ordina¬
tions produced similar results, only the CCA
results are presented in detail. Figure 3 is a
summary CCA ordination showing plot or¬
dination on a biplot for the 23 vegetation
plots with eight environmental variables.
The first three axes of the CCA ordination
explained 33.2% of the variation in the spe¬
cies matrix. The three vectors shown in Fig¬
ure 3 correspond to the environmental vari¬

ables showing strong correlations with the
first CCA axis, namely Ca (r = -0.88), N (r
= -0.72), and pH (r = -0.71). Mg also ex¬
hibited a strong correlation (r = -0.78) as did
OM (r = -0.58); however, a vector for Mg
wasn’t included in Figure 3 because Mg re¬
sults were similar to those of Ca. The results
in Figure 3 parallel the results presented in
Table 2. The CCA correlations also closely
paralleled the correlations between environ¬
mental variables and the DCA ordination
axes. While CCA may be sensitive to noise
in environmental data (McCune 1997), the
results provide corroboration of the soil gra¬
dient analysis and the DCA results.

The distribution of plots in Figure 3 also
shows a separation of the plots dominated
by Phalaris , with all Phalaris- dominated
plots located exclusively on the left side of
the ordination. No clear segregation of plots

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 3. A CCA ordination biplot of 25 plots and 9 environmental variables. The
environmental variables with the strongest correlation with the vegetation matrix are
shown in the biplot.

was observed on the right half of the CCA
biplot, indicating more of a continuous dis¬
tribution than discrete gradation of herba¬
ceous assemblages in the non -Phalaris—
dominated plots.

Diversity Gradients

In addition to soil chemical gradients, a
herbaceous plant diversity gradient also was
found along the prairie-oak opening tran¬
sition. Plant diversity was calculated for each
transect position using both species richness
(S) and the Shannon-Weiner Diversity Index
(IT). The results in Table 3 show that both
species richness and Shannon-Weiner
diversity were positively correlated with
distance along the transition zone; as prairie
graded into oak opening, species richness and
diversity increased. Diversity estimates were

strongly correlated with Ca (r = -0.90), N (r
= -0.84), OM (r = -0.72), and pH (r =
-0.67). Interestingly, no significant relation¬
ships were found between any of the PAR
measurements and species diversity measures.

There was a strong negative correlation
between Phalaris and species richness (r =
-0.73) and diversity (r = -0.78) along the
ecotone transition. While the cause-effect
relationship between Phalaris and plant
diversity is beyond the scope of this study,
the results suggest that Phalaris dominance
reduces diversity.

Discussion

The term ecotone was first used by Clements
(1903) to describe the “tension zone” be¬
tween plant communities where the major

44

TRANSACTIONS

ANNEN and LYON: Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone

Table 3. Correlations between Shannon-
Weiner diversity (H’)t species density (S),
and distance and environmental variables.
Values represent Pearson’s correlation
coefficients (r).

Variable a

S

H’

Distance (D)

.60

.73

pH

-.44

-.67

OM

-.66

-.72

N

-.74

-.84

P

-.82

-.53

K

.12

.13

Ca

-.62

-.90

Mg

-.67

-.80

PAR

-.25

-.46

Variables shown are in the following units: dis¬
tance (D) m; organic matter (OM) %; Total N %;
available P (P) mg/I; exhangeable K (K) cmol+kg*1;
exhangeable Ca (Ca) cmol+kg'1; exhangeable Mg
(Mg) cmol+kg-1; photosynthetically active radia¬
tion (PAR) nmol s^nr2.

dominant species in adjacent communities
overlapped in their distribution. In recent
years, the term ecotone has been used inter¬
changeably with the terms “transition zone”
and ‘landscape boundary’ (van der Maarel
1990; Shugart 1990; Holland et al. 1991;
Hansen and di Castri 1992). The presence
of ecotones and their manifestation are in¬
fluenced by a host of factors, including
edaphic conditions, geomorphology, distur¬
bance, and climate (Risser 1990, van der
Maarel 1990, Gosz 1993).

The results of our study indicate distinct
ecotonal characteristics in both vegetation
and soil variables in the Curtis Prairie. The
herbaceous layer exhibited sharp ecotonal
boundaries only at the transition between
Phalaris- dominated communities and prai¬
rie-oak opening vegetation. Cluster analysis
and CCA ordinations showed little distinct
separation between plots on non -Phalaris-
dominated plots; herbaceous vegetation as¬
semblages were more continuous than dis¬
crete across the prairie-oak opening

transition. Our results also indicate that
there were both soil chemical and diversity
gradients along the prairie-oak opening eco¬
tone in the study area. Organic matter, pH,
P, Ca, Mg, and total N decreased along the
gradient from prairie to oak opening; plant
diversity increased from prairie to oak open¬
ing. Given the importance of total N and
available P to plant nutrition, the role and
influence of OM in prairie soil development,
and the impacts of Ca and Mg on plant dis¬
tribution in calcareous and dolomitic soils,
our results highlight the importance of soil
gradients along the prairie oak opening tran¬
sition in this study. However, the presence
of Phalaris at the site may have had a strong
influence on altering p re- Phalaris— invasion
vegetation and soil patterns.

Integrating vegetation analyses with en¬
vironmental and physiographic variables can
provide a more robust basis for classification
and characterization than vegetation analy¬
ses alone (Rowe 1984, Hix 1988, Palmer
1993). The soil gradient analysis and CCA
results indicate that herbaceous species were
influenced by soil gradients across the
ecotonal landscape. The correlations be¬
tween the soil variables and herbaceous spe¬
cies diversity indicate that plant diversity
may also be influenced by soil chemical gra¬
dients. In the oak opening portion of the
ecotone, lower nutrient availability may pro¬
mote greater diversity compared to that of
the prairie.

Ecotones may provide pathways for the
invasion of exotic plants that can disrupt
community dynamics (Risser 1990, Planty-
Tabacchi et al. 1996). An important factor
influencing the observed diversity patterns
in our results was that Phalaris had a nega¬
tive impact on herbaceous species diversity
on the study site. Phalaris was a dominant
species on the wetter soils on the prairie side
of the ecotone but was not found in the oak

Volume 87 (1999)

45

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

opening or the prairie-oak opening inter¬
face. Phalaris is an exotic species that grows
in dense clumps, outcompetes local flora,
and is highly resistant to flooding (Apfel-
baum and Sams 1987, Chonchou and
Fustec 1988). Seasonal flooding has oc¬
curred and continues to occur near and
around an overflow ditch within the study
area. Phalaris arundinacea was most domi¬
nant near the overflow ditch, and it follows
that the ditch is quite possibly the vector
by which seeds of P. arundinacea first en¬
tered the area.

Current management techniques (i.e.,
fire and selective brushing) may have influ¬
enced the ecotone under study. In addition,
light (PAR) may have a long-term impact
on the vegetation composition at the site
depending on phenology, available wave¬
lengths of light, and variation in herbaceous
canopy composition. While the influence of
these variables requires more investigation,

the results of the present study clearly dem¬
onstrate the potential influence of soil fac¬
tors on the composition and distribution of
herbaceous vegetation. We suggest that soil
variables and gradients should be considered
when studying characteristics of ecotones in
restored habitats.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Dr. Mark Leach
and the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Arboretum for access to the Curtis Prairie
site. Kevin Hollender and Melissa Slabich
provided a great deal of field assistance in
collecting data and in the preliminary analy¬
sis of that data. We would also like to thank
Dr. Robert Bohanan and an anonymous re¬
viewer for reviewing preliminary drafts of the
manuscript. This manuscript is submitted
through Edgewood College’s Environmen¬
tal Studies Program.

46

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ANNEN and LYON: Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone

Appendix A. A summary of all herbaceous species identified in the vegetation sampling.

Species

Total Biomass - g

Agrostis alba L.

21.3

Allium cernuum Roth.

11.7

Andropogon geradii V\tm.

798.5

Arctium minus Bernh.

1.0

Asclepias syriaca L.

0.5

Aster ericoides L.

3.8

Aster laevis L.

5.6

Aster lanceolatus Willd.

9.8

Aster novae-angliae L.

148.9

Aster oolentangiensis Riddell

1.9

Aster pilosus Willd.

21.0

Baptisia leucantha T.&G.

47.9

Blephilia ciliata (L.) Raf.

1.1

Brachelytrum sp.

52.2

Bromus inermis Leyss.

18.2

Carex sp.

17.9

Cirsium discolor ( Muhl.) Spreng.

3.3

Cornus racemosa Lam.

182.9

Euphorbia corol lata L.

2.1

Galium triflorum Michx.

0.4

Helianthus grosseserratus Martens

602.4

Hypericum perforatum L.

14.7

Lactuca canadensis L.

36.0

Lespedeza capitata Michx.

100.3

Liatris aspera (L.) Willd.

14.0

Ly copus americanus Muhl.

4.2

Monarda fistulosa L.

658.0

Oenothera biennis L.

33.3

Pastinaca sativa L.

26.3

Pedicularis canadensis L.

2.2

Phalaris arundinacea L.

142.6

Poa compress a L.

21.8

Poa pratensis L.

52.2

Polygonum pensylvanicum L.

85.2

Pycanthemum virginianum (L.) Durand & Jackson

6.4

Rosa sp.

3.3

Rubus occidental is L.

10.4

Rudbeckia hirta L.

0.3

Silphinium terebinthinaceum Jacq.

42.1

Solidago altissima L.

732.7

Solidago gigantea Ait.

14.3

Solidago nemoralis Ait.

856.8

Solidago ulmi folia Muhl.

0.2

Sorghastrum nutans L.

504.8

Toxicodendron radicans (L.) Ktze.

0.6

Unknown

2.4

Viola pedata L.

0.1

Vitis riparia Michx.

0.0

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

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Jonathan Lyon is assistant director of Commu¬
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50

TRANSACTIONS

Ellen Argyros

“Pulp Fiction”: Edna Ferber s
Come and Get It and Ecofeminism

dna Ferber’s novel Come and Get It is pulp fiction not so

1 1/much because of its dealings with sensational subjects or
its being printed on low-quality paper as because it is about
the making of pulp, the logging industry in Wisconsin in the
early half of the twentieth century, the empire-making of
Barney Glasgow. Granted, the book does contain some melo¬
dramatic elements: the lust of a sugar daddy for a sweet young
thing, the sudden deus ex machina when that sugar daddy dies
in a boating accident, the social-climbing tendencies of that
opportunistic young woman once the wealthy Barney Glasgow
dies and she can marry his son, heir to his fortune. Still, Come
and Get It is of interest not because of its melodrama but be¬
cause what it reveals about the status of women and the status
of the environment in Wisconsin around the turn of the cen¬
tury right up until before World War II. It is also is an im¬
pressive testimony to the “Wisconsin character,” as Ferber de¬
fines it. In her novel, Ferber rewards those who are
unpretentious, work hard, save their money yet do not become
seduced by the trappings of material success into becoming
what they are not. She is also extremely aware of the way in
which Midwesterners define themselves — sometimes defen¬
sively — against standards set in the east.

Given the recent interest in such local environmental issues
as what to do about the high concentration of PCBs in the
Fox River and in such national gender-political issues as the
sexual predation of our own president upon young women like
Monica Lewinsky, it would appear to be a timely moment in
which to examine the kinds of connections Ferber makes in
her novel between the treatment of the environment and the
treatment of women.

After giving an overview of Ferber’s life, I will provide a brief
plot synopsis for those unfamiliar with this relatively obscure
novel, address what kind of a feminist she is, and then go on

TRANSACTIONS Volume 87 (1999)

51

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

to argue that it is tempting to read Ferber
as a kind of proto-ecofeminist in some parts
of Come and Get It, even though her primary
sympathies are not so much with those who
share her gender or ideological stance to¬
wards the environment as with those who
share her values about the salubrious and
ethical benefits of hard work.

Edna Ferber’s Life

Edna Ferber is described by her biographer,
Julie Goldsmith Gilbert (Ferber’s great-
niece), as a “massive little woman” who may
have been physically tiny — she was only
5 ’2” — but was extremely strong-willed. The
Ferber in Gilbert’s biography could be
fiercely protective of those she loved, while
unsparingly savage towards those for whom
she felt contempt; there’s a kind of mascu¬
line swagger in Edna Ferber, according to
Gilbert’s presentation. Ferber had a great
deal of respect for the common worker, en¬
joyed being in the position of the sharply
observant onlooker, gave lavish meals, was
given to fits of outrage, had difficulty trust¬
ing others, and always wanted to be the one
who rejected first. Gilbert writes that
Ferber’s

life was antiseptic — absolutely no excesses
were allowed. She was a Middle Western
maiden lady who took care of her mother, her
family, and her typewriter. She recycled her¬
self with every book, and each seemed a tes¬
tament more to her own health and vigor
than to inspiration. With themes like Seattle,
Oklahoma, Alaska, New England, the West,
Texas — she had no time or penchant for per¬
sonal probing. There was too much to do.
Her ego was as mammoth as her scope, and
no man, vice, crisis, or illness was going to
deter her. An obsessive in the most produc¬
tive sense, a spinster in the most resolved

sense, a plain woman who kept herself in silk
purses, and an angry daughter who deter¬
minedly made her mother’s life roses. . .one
would assume that her bill of mental health
was immaculate. A presumption. Her com¬
plete devotion to her mother Julia bordered
on the incestuous. Her hatred of her sister
Fannie was at times close to being pathologi¬
cal. Her need and ability to ‘play God’ was
despotism at its worst. There were chinks in
her armor. Many. (Gilbert, 13)

Edna Ferber was born on August 13,
1883, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of Jewish
parents. According to Gilbert, Edna’s
mother had wanted a boy, whom she would
have named Edward. Instead, she had a sec¬
ond girl, and she named her Edna. Edna’s
father, Jacob, was a Hungarian; her mother,
Julia, was born in Milwaukee. Her father
was the owner of a general merchandise
store, first in Iowa, then in Appleton (on
College Avenue). Her older sister, Fanny,
and Edna had frictive relations for much of
their lives, perhaps because Fanny was the
more beautiful of the two, but there may
have been other reasons as well.

At 17, Ferber graduated from the Ryan
High School in Appleton. For her graduat¬
ing essay she wrote an account of the life of
the women workers in a local mill. The lo¬
cal editor of the Appleton Daily Crescent saw
it, recognized that it was good reporting, and
gave her a job in 1903 as a local reporter at
$3.00 a week — a huge salary for a young
woman in a small town. She then was gradu¬
ated from the Appleton paper to Milwau¬
kee, where she was also a reporter. While she
was earning a living as a reporter, she wrote
Dawn O’Hara, her first novel. It sold well.
While it was in the press and selling during
1911 and 1912, Ferber began publishing the
story of Emma McChesney, a travelling
saleswoman. The character appealed to the

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ARGYROS: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It and Ecofeminism

public, and Ferber’s success began to grow.
In 1913, the stories were collected under the
title Roast Beef Medium, and that book also
sold well. This was followed by Buttered Side
Down, another collection of short stories,
and more novels, Fanny Herself (1917),
Cheerful by Request (1918), The Girls ( 1 922) ,
Show Boat (1926), Giant (1952), Ice Palace
(1958), and others. She was a prolific writer,
with a total of twelve novels — including So
Big, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in
1924 — twelve short story collections, two
autobiographies, nine plays. Twenty five of
her properties sold to the films, although
“only” ten of her works were actually made
into motion pictures. She never married, and
she died in 1968 at the age of 83.

Come and Get It : Plot Synopsis

Come and Get It was published in 1935, just
before World War II struck in Europe and
Asia and at a time of labor strikes in the
United States. Porgy and Bess was opening
in New York at this time; the following year
Gone with the Wind was a best-seller, and
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times was re¬
leased.

In Come and Get It, Edna Ferber chroni¬
cles the rags to riches tale of the handsome
Barney Glasgow, who marries the boss’s
homely daughter in order to consolidate his
wealth and become one of the leading lum¬
ber barons in the state; after Barney’s death
about two thirds through the novel, she goes
on to describe his son’s inheritance and aug¬
mentation of the Glasgow fortune.

Barney Glasgow is orphaned at the age of
14 and taken under the wing of Swan
Bostrum. The young Barney proves a quick
study in how to fell a tree and how to make
himself indispensable to his boss. He discov¬
ers the various illicit but technically legal
ways of acquiring land with lumber on it.

Through clever bits of legal fraud, Barney
wins his way into his boss’ heart and busi¬
ness. He secures his career when he oppor¬
tunistically marries the boss’s “thin-lipped,
hook-nosed, bony” daughter, Emma Louise,
who is several years older than the dashing
Barney. Barney is not attracted to his wife,
nor does he like his calculating son Bernard,
although he is fond of his daughter Evelyn.
Evelyn, following in her father’s footsteps,
is in the process of marrying a person she
does not love simply because he is the son
of another lumber baron, and because she
feels that this is what she is expected to do.
The marriage is even more of a travesty be¬
cause she really loves and is loved by a hand¬
some Italian worker, whose love she sacri¬
fices in order to maintain her social standing.
Prior to his marriage to Emma Louise,
Barney and Swan both had been attracted
to a pretty young prostitute, Lotta Morgan.
Barney loves her, but Swan does the right
thing and marries her. Lotta remains mar¬
ried to Swan for ten years and then, after giv¬
ing birth to a little girl Karie, dies.

Then the plot skips ahead 35 years, and
we meet Karie’s daughter, Lotta Lindbeck
(Lotta II). At age 18, Lotta II is now a “rav¬
ishing beauty.” Barney never actually forces
himself sexually upon her, but he is infatu¬
ated with her, showers her with gifts, and re¬
gards her as his possession. He wishes to
marry her and feels that with all the millions
he has, it’s a shame that he remains married
to a homely woman whom he does not love.
He is therefore incensed to discover Lotta and
his son Bernie kissing at a party and to learn
of Bernie’s intention to marry her. The two
men fight and nearly kill one another. Barney
threatens to disown his son, whom his wife
hides. Then, when everyone in the family but
the son Bernie decide to go out on a boat,
the boat explodes. Bernie becomes heir to the
Glasgow fortune and marries Lotta.

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The rest of the novel follows the career
of Lotta Glasgow, who is shunned by the
wealthy women of Butte des Morts; in frus¬
tration she becomes an expatriate, travelling
in Europe and repudiating the life she once
lived in Butte des Morts. But her grandfa¬
ther Swan, the moral authority in the novel,
returns to Iron Ridge to resume his humble
life among the pine trees. Lotta’s mother
Karie, although she stays with her daughter
and helps her care for her grandchildren, re¬
mains as down to earth, unpretentious, and
seemingly uncorrupted by wealth as she ever
was. Lotta, of course, becomes a complete
social-climber and snob, flaunting her
newfound wealth. Against her will, her Eu¬
ropean-born children become intrigued by
their American origins. When their father
loses millions during the Great Depression
and has a nervous collapse, his wife reluc¬
tantly returns home with their grown chil¬
dren — who are excited about the paper mills
but who also want to travel across America
and learn about their native land.

The novel ends with Lotta and Karie and
the grandchildren helping to celebrate
Swan’s 85th birthday up in his tiny cabin
up north. The old man can still heft an axe,
and he cuts down a 100 year old pine tree
while his daughter Karie yells “Come and get
it!” to the gaping crowd.

Public Reception of the Novel and
Brief Critical Evaluation

The public’s initial response to Come and
Get It was anger. Specifically, Ferber’s treat¬
ment of Polish-American workers was per¬
ceived as pejorative, discriminatory. Gilbert
defends Ferber: “Ferber, always true to au¬
thentic ethnicity, had used the term ‘dumb
Polack girls’ in the context of the story. No
doubt, in her research of the territory, she
had heard it mentioned. To Polish-Ameri-

cans, it was unmentionable” (Gilbert 329).
Gilbert even received a letter of protest from
a congressman. Others complained that
Ferber had conducted her research for the
novel in a way that violated the etiquette of
the time. Gilbert writes:

When she went to Wisconsin to do research
for Come and Get It , she enlisted the help of
an executive of a large paper mill in Neenah
.... The executive gave her all she needed
to know. What he didn’t know was that he
unwittingly gave her himself to use as the
main character in her book .... What stung
him was not so much her portrayal of him,
but the fact that she never, after their long
sessions together, even wrote him a thank-you
note. And, as is often the case in tight-knit
societies, everyone knew about her rude con¬
duct. The whole town tsked. (330)

In my opinion, Come and Get It is not
Ferber’s best work. The characters seem a bit
two-dimensional: the dashing robber baron,
the dowager wife, the blond bombshell. The
plot plods along somewhat tediously until
Barney’s lust for the young Lotta develops;
then it suddenly erupts into melodrama,
only to have Barney’s family (with the ex¬
ception of his heir, Bernard) die in a rather
improbable plot contrivance.

Ferber herself recognized that this was not
a perfect novel. In her autobiography A Pe¬
culiar Treasure, she writes about how “in the
writing of the novel Come and Get It, [sic]
I was guilty of. . . [a] . . . stupid blunder. I
killed Barney Glasgow in the middle of that
book because he was dominating the story.
The book gave a gasp right there, and the
murder was doubled.” (223) 1 Ferber further
confesses that “Plot is something that doesn’t
interest me. Character I find absorbing. My
novels usually are character-strong and plot-
weak. I’d be sorry to have it the other way

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ARGYROS: Edna Ferber’s Come end Get It and Ecofeminism

round” (224). There is, of course, a rather
transparent and somewhat defensive false
dilemma implicit her assumption that a
writer will inevitably make mistakes in one
area, either in developing characters or in de¬
veloping plotlines.

Ecofemism Defined

Its failings notwithstanding, when I first read
this novel and in subsequent readings of it,
I was struck by the sorts of connections
Ferber invites us to make between Barney’s
ravaging of the land — with no intentions of
replenishing the lumber supply once it has
been depleted — and his desire to ravage his
best friend’s granddaughter, again, with little
thought about what the consequences of this
action would be on his friendship with
Swan, on his relationship with his children,
or on his relationships with the people of his
community. Vaguely remembering that
ecofeminists also draw connections between
the treatment of the land and the treatment
of women, I did some research into eco¬
feminism and then re-read the novel
through the lens provided by that ideologi¬
cal perspective.

Ecofeminism, I found, is a relatively re¬
cently coined term used to link the domi¬
nation of both land and women without re¬
gard for the feelings or desires of the women
or for the future productiveness of the land.
Literary ecofeminists explore the manifold
ways in which the exploitative treatment of
women reflects a similarly exploitative and
opportunistic treatment of the environment.
Marie Mies and Vandana Shiva in Eco¬
feminism describe the origins of eco¬
feminism, “which grew out of various social
movements of the late 1970s and early
1980s . . . The meltdown at Three Mile Is¬
land prompted large numbers of women in
the USA to come together in the first

ecofeminist conference — ‘Women and Life
on Earth: A Conference on Eco-Feminism
[sic ] in the Eighties’ — in March 1980, at
Amherst. At this conference the connections
between feminism, militarization, healing
and ecology were explored” (Mies and Shiva
13-14).

Gretchen Legler discusses what an
ecofeminist literary criticism might look like:
“Ecofeminist literary criticism is a hybrid
criticism . . . that gives literary and cultural
critics a special lens through which they can
investigate the ways nature is represented in
literature and the ways representations of
nature are linked with representations of
gender, race, class, and sexuality” (quoted in
Warren 227). According to Legler, “many
canonical authors still place nature ‘out
there’ as an ‘other.’ Many canonical authors
refine and entrench the notion of nature as
a sacred place where only solitary, single, and
chaste men go to cleanse their spirits and be
one with God” (quoted in Warren 229).
Legler suggests that “critiquing canonical
works through an ecofeminist lens might
include investigating the ways in which gen¬
der, race, and class are represented in and
inform the writings of these ‘fathers’ of
American nature writing”; she goes on to
suggest that ecofeminists might well study
the texts of such contemporary women writ¬
ers as Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Linda
Hasselstrom, Sue Hubbell, Alice Walker,
Leslie Silko, Diane Ackerman, and others in
order to study how their “postmodern pas¬
toral” is a vision “informed by ecological and
feminist theories, and . . . that images hu¬
man/nature relationships as ‘conversations’
between knowing subjects” (quoted in War¬
ren 229).

Putting it bluntly, Legler suggests that
ecofeminists today might take one of two
tacks: bashing the likes of Melville and
Hawthorne as perpetuators of a colonialist

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approach to nature or marveling at the sub¬
versive strategies of Silko and Dillard. Her
assumption seems to be that the nineteenth-
century male writers will inevitably “get it
wrong” in their representation of nature as
a feminine category to be transcended, while
the late twentieth-century female writers will
“get it right.” My approach is to ignore these
polarized positions and stake out a third pos¬
sibility in examining the work of a woman
writer for whom gender alone is not, as we
have seen, an easy means of identification
with others — for whom a hard work ethic
was a more important means of identifica¬
tion — in order to see where she fits into the
vast gulf between Melville and Dillard, in
order to investigate how her novel might be
read as a precursor to ecofeminist paradigms.

An Ecofeminist Reading
of Come and Get It

Let us return to Ferber’s novel. That Barney
Glasgow has a nakedly exploitative relation¬
ship to the land and to women is evident in
the very title of the novel Come and Get It,
the title of which may be read as a double
entendre, conflating the desires for (lumber¬
jack) food, (cheap) land, and (extramarital)
sex. In fact, at one point, Katie warns the
lovely Lotta to be suspicious about the ex¬
tent of Mr. Glasgow’s attentions to her. Her
exact words to Lotta — “A girl looks the way
you do men just think they can come along
and help themselves” (177) — underscore
this connection between appetite for food
and appetite for sex. Barney’s lust to wring
profit from the land and his lust to consum¬
mate his relationship with the lovely grand¬
daughter of his best friend are clearly
equated: he feels he is entitled to both, and
his sense of self-restraint towards Lotta is
slowly weakening at the point when he is
suddenly killed off in the narrative.

Moreover, although his son recognizes
the importance of replanting new trees for
future generations to harvest, Barney — in
his infinite stubbornness and shortsighted¬
ness — refuses to do so. Then again, he also
lacks the vision to see that his son’s plans
of inventing paper cups and paper towels
for bathrooms are viable economic ventures.
So Ferber suggests that Barney’s tense and
competitive relationship with his son pre¬
vents him from perceiving where his future
economic success lies. Barney’s son Bernie,
though not well-developed as a character,
represents a kind of progress over his father
in the sense that he is more rational, more
far-sighted, more genuinely devoted to his
wife, and also — interestingly — slightly more
androgynous. Bernie never needs to desire
a mistress because he is married to the most
desirable woman he knows, nor is he a
Lydgate character freighted with a gorgeous
but insipid wife who cannot understand his
ambitions. It is as if Ferber grudgingly re¬
wards him for being more restrained and
far-seeing than his father, even though she
is not as compelled by him as a character.

In addition to these larger plot contours
which indicate Ferber’s making a connection
between Barney’s unbridled desire to harvest
as many trees as possible and to possess
Lotta, there are at least four identifiable pas¬
sages from the text which become illumi¬
nated by an ecofeminist reading. In these
passages, Ferber covers a gamut of attitudes
towards women and the environment.
Women like the horse-faced Emma Louise
are identified as stifling agents of civilization;
their association is with smothering domes¬
tic interiors which drive Barney to seek the
freedom of the almost masculine northern
woods. At the same time, insofar as beauti¬
ful young women like Lotta are represented
as vulnerable, consumable commodities,
they are identified with those elements of

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ARGYROS: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It and Ecofeminism

nature which are, to Barney’s way of think¬
ing, “tailor-made” for raping: that is, the for¬
ests of pine trees which furnish Barney with
lumber. Women also furnish Barney with
cheap labor for his rag-paper mills, and they
satisfy male appetites — while suppressing
their own — in two ways: by feeding the lum¬
berjacks, as Barney’s mother does, and by
offering men like Barney fantasies of sexual
availability and a renewal of youthful vigor,
as Lotta does.

Consider the first passage, which occurs
relatively early in the novel:

If the thick, rich routine of the well-ordered
household and the feminine possessiveness of
Emma Louise and Evelyn threatened to
smother [Barney] completely, he escaped to
the northern woods whence he had come,
and in that pine-laden atmosphere found
healing. (12)

Here, manipulative women like Emma
Louise are identified as stifling agents of civi¬
lization, threatening to smother Barney, vir¬
tually forcing him into the healing arms of
his mistress, the great outdoors. This theme
of Barney’s need to escape is developed in
the novel: whenever Barney feels oppressed
by Emma Louise within the domestic sphere
of his home in Butte des Morts, he retreats
up north to Iron Ridge, a small camp de¬
void of the comforts of home but also mer¬
cifully devoid of the entrapments and social
restrictions imposed by the likes of Emma
Louise. Barney feels he can be himself, be
authentic, eat simple lumberjack fare, and
be bawdy while he is in Iron Ridge. Barney’s
retreats to Iron Ridge prefigure and fore¬
shadow his illicit desire to make Lotte
Lindberg his mistress.

In the second passage, Barney surveys the
“Polish and Bohemian” women working in
the rag-paper mill:

Barney had always hated the rag-paper mill
over at Grand Chute . . . The rag mill made
the finest grade of writing paper obtainable —
much superior in texture and quality to the
wood-pulp paper manufactured in this Butte
des Morts mill. Barney almost never visited
it, and only from necessity. He hated the rags
piled mountain high; he loathed the rag sort¬
ing room with its cloud of dust and lint
whirling up from the sorting bins over which
the girls bent. They wore pieces of gauze tied
across their faces, futilely, to shield mouths
and noses. They coughed, and their complex¬
ion was a curious clay gray. Polish and Bo¬
hemian, most of them, they lived the other
side of the tracks or over on the Flats. . .
Though the odors of the wood-pulp mill were
none too ambrosial Barney did not find them
offensive. Of the rag mill he said, “It stinks.”
He seemed to find something peculiarly ob¬
noxious in the smell of the acids that reduced
old rags to the least common denominator of
white pulp. Even the magic of the process by
which a pair of tattered overalls might be
transformed into a fragrant love-missive, or
an old shirt or pair of ragged muslin drawers
might, Cinderella-like, emerge as a delicately
tinted invitation to a ball, did not interest
Barney. He liked the process of the wood-
pulp mill. Great flat cars out in the yards,
loaded with fourteen-foot hemlock spruce,
balsam and jack pine, pungent, redolent of
the north. (35)

Although the rag paper mill “made the
finest grade of writing paper obtainable,”
Barney rarely visits it. Although the wood
pulp mill sends forth fumes every bit as
malodorous as those of the rag-paper mill,
it is only the latter’s fumes that Barney finds
offensive. Why the discrepancy between
Barney’s reaction to the rag-paper mill and
the wood pulp mill? Ferber suggests that on
some level Barney realizes that his female

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workers are suffering from their exposures
to the chemicals, and he can hardly stand
to witness their daily sacrifices of their
health for economic survival. Ferber also
suggests that perhaps there is something dis¬
tressingly “feminine” about the rags — a
scrounged, found, endlessly folded, and
molten set of materials that originate in do¬
mestic interiors and that are less “mascu¬
line” than the solid, imposing slabs of “four-
teen-foot hemlock spruce” found at the
wood pulp mills. Lest we miss Ferber’s
proto-ecofeminist critique, her narrator
even imagines how one might more posi¬
tively view the processing of the rags as a
kind of transformative, fairy-tale process by
which “an old shirt or pair of ragged mus¬
lin drawers might, Cinderella-like, emerge
as a delicately tinted invitation to a ball.”
That allusion to Cinderella underscores the
pathetic economic realities of the women
who work in Barney’s rag-paper mills and
the extent to which they perhaps fantasize
about the only possible means of escaping
their drudgery. Barney is not so much
oblivious to their plight as he is sub-con-
sciously shamed by it, hence, his avoidance
of the rag-paper mills.

Consider how Ferber rather heavy-
handedly underscores the theme of Barney’s
patriarchal power in this third passage:

[Barney] was a great grand duke riding to¬
ward his duchy — forests, streams, villages.
Fish, deer, birds. He liked to survey largely
his holdings — his mills, his lands, his crops,
his timber, his employees, their families,
keeping a firm possessive hand on all. A Goth
turned patriarch, but not yet ready to enjoy
the benefits of his ravishments. He never
looked on his vast possession as an empire,
though it was that. To him it was just so
many tons of this, acres of that, pounds or
square miles or cords of the other. A tree was

potential pulp to him, a river something on
which to float boats or drive logs. A hill was
a rise of ground which might conceal ore, a
free waterfall was unharnessed machine
power. (66)

Again, this passage most forcefully exem¬
plifies the extent to which we are invited to
see Barney as the dominating and dehuman¬
izing patriarch who equates his workers with
the stuff of nature — regarding them all in a
proprietary light as his possessions, as his
subjects, as fodder for his profit, regardless
of the short-sightedness of his schemes. The
allusion to the Goths, Teutonic peoples who
invaded and settled in parts of the Roman
Empire in the third to fifth centuries, estab¬
lishes Barney’s transition from invader to
settler to patriarch. “Ravishments” nicely
concretizes the connection Ferber wishes us
to draw between Barney’s actual rape of the
land and his unrealized desire to rape/seduce
young Lotta Lindbeck.

Finally, in the fourth passage, we are
treated to an image of woman as provider
of the food that she not only cannot enjoy
but that sickens her:

[Barney’s mother Nellie] did man’s work
. . . The great gross mounds of food which
daily she provided for the voracious men
sickened her. She ate nothing, finally, but
a crust of bread and cup after cup of scald¬
ing black tea. (84)

Woman is handmaiden to lumber mill
productivity though she is alienated from
her work; woman is untempted by the
highly desired fruits of her labor. That
Barney’s mother dies of consumption is one
of the more interesting ironies in the early
parts of this novel; it suggests that what kills
her is some self-destructive element as if she
has been starved for so long that her body

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ARGYROS: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It and Ecofeminism

begins to consume itself. Barney never con¬
sciously makes the connection between the
premature death of his own mother and the
short lifespans of the girls working in his rag-
paper mill over at Grand Chute — although
perhaps he makes it unconsciously, and this
is part of his aversion to the rag-paper mill —
but we as readers are encouraged to see that
he is unconsciously perpetuating a cycle in
which poor women are ground up and spit
out as they provide cheap labor and profits
for the likes of Barney Glasgow.

As in the fiction of her Victorian liter¬
ary predecessors (and I am thinking more
of Charlotte Bronte than of George Eliot
now), women are identified with the pro¬
vision of food for male appetites, but
Ferber, unlike her Victorian predecessors,
makes a critical distinction between the
older female “martyrs” and the younger,
more androgynous, more “selfish” females.
While the older women in the novel (like
Barney’s mother and then like Barney’s
wife) provide ample feasts for the menfolk,
they themselves abstain from eating much
at all. Barney’s wife Emma Louise, though
“by nature a stingy woman,” “set a lavish
table at Barney’s insistence” while “sipping
coffee and nibbling dry toast” (15). And,
as I just noted, Barney’s mother, a cook in
a lumberjack camp, slowly dies of consump¬
tion. But if one is tempted to conclude that
Ferber believes that female desire must al¬
ways be kept in check while male desire
runs rampant, one must qualify this gener¬
alization by noting that Ferber depicts
younger women like Evelyn and Lotta de¬
vouring, without restraint, both food and
fortunes. Both Evelyn and Lotta have
healthy appetites for food and sex — Evelyn
committing adultery with her Italian
worker on the eve of her wedding, and
Lotta doing whatever is necessary to con¬
solidate her social position.

Ferber’s Feminism

Just what kind of a feminist is Ferber? Ferber
is like George Eliot in being hard to assimi¬
late comfortably under the category of femi¬
nist. Both Eliot and Ferber led lives work¬
ing in a male-dominated profession, but if
one examines their novels, one finds that
they do not necessarily provide for their
heroines the same sort of pathbreaking bold¬
ness that they themselves enjoyed. If Eliot’s
female protagonists are systematically denied
the opportunities to fulfill themselves in
some sort of meaningful work (their very
paucity of options eliciting our sympathies),
Ferber’s female protagonists in Come and
Get It take upon themselves the full-time
’’work” of trying to manipulate wealthy and
powerful men. Unlike Eliot, who attempts
to penetrate the opacity of even the self-cen¬
tered Hetty Sorrels and Rosamond de
Vincys in her narrative worlds, Ferber invari¬
ably caricatures and condemns such female
characters who attempt to eschew hard work
by playing upon their feminine wiles; her
sympathies are always with the under-appre¬
ciated working class women (the nannies,
the waitresses) who serve such entitled
women. Class privilege, then, becomes the
dividing line across which Ferber’s sympa¬
thies cannot pass — unless, that is, the female
who inherits such privilege still takes solace
in the stabilizing effects of hard work.

Yet as I mentioned earlier, Ferber herself
was an unusually outspoken woman and
perhaps slightly ahead of her time, insofar
as she was able to succeed in a man’s world.
In one of her autobiographies, she writes: “If
men ever discover how tough women actu¬
ally are they’ll be scared to death. And if
women ever decide to throw away that
mask, wig and ruffled kimono and be them¬
selves, this will be another [female-domi¬
nated] monarchy — and perhaps it’s about

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time” (quoted in Gilbert 82). In Come and
Get It, she is somewhat interested in depict¬
ing power struggles between the sexes, and
she is sympathetic to smart women who are
deprived of the opportunity to make the best
use of their talents in the work force. For
example, at one point her narrator expresses
sympathy for Barney’s daughter Evelyn, who
is smart enough to run a paper mill but is
forced by social convention into marrying a
man she does not love: “Born out of her day
she could, ten years later, have run one of
her father’s mills; driven an ambulance in
France; started a career of her own choos¬
ing. And now Evelyn was to be married”
(21). Ferber also represents sympathetically
the hard-working, plain Karie Lindbeck be¬
cause Karie never loses her down-to-earth
self, even among the crowned heads of Eu¬
rope, and because Karie remains with her
social-climbing daughter despite the fact that
she “work[s] harder than any servant you
got, only I don’t get paid for it” (431).

Still, it is perhaps a bit wishful for us to
call Ferber a feminist or even a proto-femi¬
nist. While a woman writer like George Eliot
might be willing to soften her judgment to¬
wards those beautiful female characters who
end up doing great harm to themselves and
others, Ferber has little patience for those
beauties like Lotta who trade on their looks
in order to advance themselves up the so¬
cial ladder. Given the premium she puts on
the value of hard work, it is entirely under¬
standable that she resent those who need do
no work other than apply make-up and then
go out and seduce lumber barons. However,
one cannot help but wonder — politically in¬
correctly, of course — if her being the plain
sister of a beautiful woman might not have
played a role in Ferber’s scathing contempt
for the opportunistic blond bombshell Lotta.
Then again, Ferber never makes any effort
to represent sympathetically the bourgeois,

horse-faced wife of Barney Glasgow either.
Indeed, the narrator seems just as judgmen¬
tal of Emma Louise as Barney is: “It was in¬
credible that any woman — even a plain
woman of 36 who has been married years
before for her money, and knows it — could
be so utterly lacking in coquetry as to ap¬
pear before a man in such grim habiliments”
(10). Disappointingly, there are no moments
in the narrative when Ferber’s narrator at¬
tempts to enter into the consciousness of
Emma Louise, never attempts to imagine
what it might feel like to be a homely
woman married for one’s money. Perhaps
the topic was a little too close to home for
Ferber, who was — again, like George
Eliot — widely regarded as a plain, hard-fea¬
tured woman.

Conclusions

Would it be fair to call Ferber an early
ecofeminist? At times, she seems like one,
especially when she writes such lines as “A
tree was potential pulp to [Barney], a river
something on which to float boats or drive
logs. A hill was a rise of ground which might
conceal ore, a free waterfall was unharnessed
machine power” (66). Although he prides
himself on exercising great self-restraint
when he does not actually rape Lotta, Barney
is equally exploitative of both women and
nature: in Karie’s words, he thinks he can
“come along and help [himself]” to a por¬
tion of forest and Lotta. As I have also noted,
the title “Come and Get It” reflects not just
the call to meal time2 but Barney’s greed in
acquiring land cheap from the government
in order to rape it of its trees. And the “it”
in “Come and Get It” takes on clearly sexual
undertones when Barney contemplates the
seduction of Lotta.

In her developing of the character Barney
Glasgow as a power-hungry, dominating,

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ARGYROS: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It and Ecofeminism

greedy, ruthless, opportunistic, and wasteful
patriarch, Ferber certainly seems to be ad¬
vancing a proto-ecofeminist critique. Barney
is a patriarch tailor-made for an ecofeminist
critique, although, to be fair, he also pro¬
vides the novel with its most vital energies:
Ferber realized that as an artist she sacrificed
the aesthetic design of her novel when she
killed him prematurely.

However, and this is why I feel I must
qualify my stance by acknowledging that one
is only “tempted” to pronounce her a proto-
ecofeminist, Ferber never really sustains a
pro-woman or pro-environment stance for
very long. Perhaps for all her bravado and
swagger in her diaries and autobiography,
she sensed in this novel that she was engag¬
ing in a kind of cultural critique that was,
like Evelyn Glasgow, about fifty years ahead
of its time. I suspect she had some reserva¬
tions about making the truly scathing and
sustained challenge to patriarchal authority
that she could have made if she were, say,
Margaret Atwood.

Finally, the novel is not about progres¬
sive ideology so much as it is about the sus¬
taining quality of certain values, an ideo¬
logical stance of a more traditional sort.
Women and men who work hard and never
lose their appreciation for the moral value
of hard work fare best in this novel. Beau¬
tiful women who expect their looks to work
for them are ostracized and unhappy; suc¬
cessful men who have stopped working with
their hands die prematurely. The message
is clear: those who continue to work hard,
to endure privation, to avoid being seduced
by the trappings of material success into be¬
coming what they are not are those who
thrive and live to be 85- If there are seeds
of a proto-ecofeminist sensibility in the
work of Edna Ferber, they remain intact
and identifiable but in a largely dormant
state.

Endnotes

'Interestingly, in the movie version of the novel,
that mistake would not be repeated; director
Howard Hawkes insured that Barney would
remain alive at the end of the film, unpun¬
ished for his sins of lust and greed.

2At the end of Hawkes’ film based on the novel,
Barney sadly witnesses the elopement of Lotta
and his son, all the while banging tearfully
on a triangle and shouting “Come and get it!”
to the guests at his party. It is as if the old
man is forced to reconcile himself to his
newfound role as passive provider for the ap¬
petites of others when his own appetites (for
sex, for domination over Lotta) cannot be sat¬
isfied. The dinner triangle that he bangs also
visually reinforces the idea of a triangulated
state of affairs between (failed) father, (suc¬
cessful) son, and the love object (Lotta)
whom they both desire.

Works Cited

Dickinson, Rogers. Edna Ferber: A Biographical
Sketch with a Bibliography. New York:
Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925.

Ferber, Edna. A Kind of Magic. New York:
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963.

Ferber, Edna. A Peculiar Treasure. New York:
Doubleday, Dora &c Company, Inc., 1939.

Ferber, Edna. Come and Get It. Madison, Wis¬
consin: Prairie Oak Press, 1991.

Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism.
New Jersey: Zed Books, 1993.

Warren, Karen J., ed. Ecofeminism: Women , Cul¬
ture, Nature. Indiana: Indiana University
Press, 1997.

Ellen Argyros is an assistant professor of English
literature at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Val¬
ley. Her book, The Limits of Sympathy in George
Eliot’s Novels, is forthcoming in 1999 from Peter
Lang Press. She is also interested in representations
of maternal subjectivity in the works of George
Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Virginia Woolf, Toni
Morrison, and Louise Erdrich. Address: UW-Eox
Valley, P. O. Box 8002, Menasha WI 54952.

Volume 87 (1999)

61

Ed L. Avery and Kent Niermeyer

Timing of Spawning

and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

in a Central Wisconsin Stream

Abstract The spawning period and timing of peak fry emergence of brown

trout (Salmo trutta) were studied during 1995—96 in a 1.2-km
reach of a central Wisconsin trout stream. This information was
collected to help the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
determine if a potential for egg and pre-emergent fry mortality
from angler wading would exist if a special regulation early trout
fishing season (1 March to the first Saturday in May) was estab¬
lished in 1997.

Weekly reconnaissance of the study area was made to count and
identify new trout redds. Free-swimming fry counts were made
on a weekly basis in three 20-m subsections. The spawning pe¬
riod spanned 3.2 months (12 October 1995 through 19 January
1996) with peak activity (77% of all redds constructed) occur¬
ring between 28 October and 8 December. The median date of
spawning was 20 November. Emergence of brown trout fry be¬
gan the week of 15— 22 March 1996, peaked around 25 April,
and extended into early May. Residence of eggs and pre-emergent
fry in streambed gravels approximated five months equivalent to
636 Centigrade thermal units. A potential for trout egg and pre-
emergent fry mortalities due to angler wading would exist if an
early trout fishing season were implemented. Comparisons of the
1997 year-class strength of trout with long-term average year-class
strength in several Wisconsin trout streams did not, however, show
any effect of an early trout fishing season implemented in 1997.

In 1995, controversy among members of Wisconsin Trout
Unlimited chapters, other nonaffiliated trout anglers, and
the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was
initiated by a DNR proposal for a special regulation early trout

TRANSACTIONS Volume 87 (1999)

63

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

fishing season that would open on 1 March
1997 and extend to the first Saturday in
May when the regular trout fishing season
started. The proposed “early season” would
apply statewide to inland streams and would
be limited to catch-and-release only with ar¬
tificial lures and barbless hooks. The DNR’s
proposal was made to fulfill a commitment
to the angling public to replace a previous
(1975-94) early trout fishing season in eight
to ten southwestern counties. That early sea¬
son was closed due to strong local resent¬
ment of excessive use of the resource by an¬
glers from outside this small region of the
state. Proponents of the new “early season”
argued that it would provide additional rec¬
reation for anglers, disperse angling pressure
over the entire state, not increase annual
harvest, and cause little damage to trout
populations. Opposing opinion, however,
centered around a study done in Montana
that revealed high mortality to brown trout,
rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), and
cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki) eggs
and pre-emergent fry caused by anglers wad¬
ing on trout redds (Roberts 1988, Roberts
and White 1992). This Montana study sug¬
gested a linkage between wading-induced
egg and fry mortalities in Nelson Spring
Creek, a tributary to the Yellowstone River,
and reduced adult populations of cutthroat
trout in the Yellowstone River.

Unlike cutthroat trout, which is spring¬
spawning, the two trout species most
common in Wisconsin are brook trout
(Saivelinus fontinalis) and brown trout, both
of which spawn in the fall. Because most fry
of brook trout and brown trout are free-
swimming in Wisconsin when the regular
fishing season opens in May, egg and fry
mortalities due to anglers wading on redds
had not been an issue. However, the
proposed early trout fishing season posed a
potential for such wading-related mortalities

that would be at least partially dependent
upon timing of fry emergence from stream-
bed gravels.

A search of the scientific literature on egg
incubation-fry emergence periods of fluvial
brook trout and brown trout in Wisconsin
yielded few papers. Miller (1970) quantified
the fry emergence period of brook trout in
Lawrence Creek in central Wisconsin, and
Hausle and Coble (1976) contributed ad¬
ditional observations on the incubation pe¬
riod of brook trout eggs in both natural and
artificially constructed redds in Lawrence
Creek. Avery (1980) reported observations
on brown trout spawning and fry emergence
during 1976— 78 in Trout Creek in south¬
ern Wisconsin. The objective of the present
study was to quantify the duration and peak
spawning of brown trout as well as the tim¬
ing of fry emergence in Emmons Creek in
central Wisconsin. This information would
help the DNR assess potential egg and fry
mortality for brown trout from angler wad¬
ing in the southern half of Wisconsin, where
brown trout are the dominant species and
where most angling would occur during the
proposed early season because of milder
weather and ice-free stream conditions.

Study Area

Emmons Creek is typical of many high
quality trout streams in central Wisconsin.
It originates from 6.5-ha Fountain Lake in
Portage County and flows east-northeast 9.7
km before entering the 293-ha Chain O’
Lakes in Waupaca County. Numerous
springs augment the flow of Emmons Creek
throughout its entire length. Gravel sub¬
strates are common and provide ample
spawning habitat for a wild resident brown
trout population that averages 1,740 fish/
km (Avery and Hunt 1981). Sand is the
dominant substrate. More than half the

64

TRANSACTIONS

AVERY and NIERMEYER: Tinning of Spawning and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

Figure 1. Emmons Creek study area.

stream is in state ownership (public fishing
and hunting areas), and little livestock graz¬
ing or row-crop agriculture occurs in the
watershed. Streamflow is very stable, aver¬
aging 0.62 m3/s. Gradient approximates 2.8
m/km. Stream temperatures rarely exceed
18.5°C, alkalinity ranges from 161-186 mg/
1 CaC03, and pH ranges from 7. 9-8. 2
(Avery and Hunt 1981). Aquatic vegetation
is sparse, and the water remains clear except
for brief periods following extended heavy
rainfall events. The food base for brown
trout consists primarily of aquatic and ter¬
restrial invertebrates. Instream habitat is
good with undercut banks and woody de¬
bris providing important instream cover. In
addition to the resident stream population,

wild brown trout in the Chain O’ Lakes as¬
cend Emmons Creek in the fall to spawn.
A 1.2-km reach of Emmons Creek was se¬
lected for study in the upper half of the wa¬
tershed immediately below the Stratton
Lake Road bridge (Figure 1).

Materials and Methods
Trout Spawning Period

Weekly reconnaissance of the 1 .2-km study
area was made between 3 October 1993
and 26 January 1996 to count brown trout
redds and determine the spawning period.
Each redd identified was numbered con¬
secutively, and the date was recorded. Dis¬
tance from the “pit” of each redd (Reiser

Volume 87 (1999)

65

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

and Wesche 1977) was triangulated (mea¬
sured) to two numbered wooden stakes
driven into the nearest streambank. The
two stakes were placed parallel to the
streamflow and separated by 3. 0-4. 5 m.
Frequently, from three to six redds were tri¬
angulated to the same two stakes. Triangu¬
lation of individual redds prevented re¬
counting of previous redds on subsequent
visits to the stream and helped determine
the occurrence and amount of redd super¬
imposition.

Egg Incubation and Fry Emergence Period

In late January 1996, 20-m stream segments
were selected in the upper, middle, and
lower reaches of the 1.2-km study area in
which trout fry could be visually counted
along both stream margins. Stream seg¬
ments were selected below concentrations
of trout redds that had been constructed
throughout the entire spawning period. Fry
counts were made weekly between 8 Feb¬
ruary and 23 April. We carefully entered the
stream below each study segment and
waded slowly up the middle of either the
right or left half of the stream, tallying all
fry seen within the study segment. Fry were
counted in water depths less than 30 cm.
This generally excluded the stream thalweg
due to its greater depth, higher water ve¬
locities, and attendant poor fry visibility.
We exited the stream above the study seg¬
ment, returned to the lower end, and re¬
peated the procedure in the other half of
the stream. All fry counts were made be¬
tween 1 1:00 and 13:30 hours with the aid
of polarized sunglasses. Fry counts were dis¬
continued with the 25 April count because
on 3 May fry sought cover so quickly at my
approach that an accurate count was impos¬
sible.

Stream margins of two of the three 20-
m segments were electrofished using a bat¬

tery-powered, pulsed, dc back-pack electro¬
fishing unit on 15 March 1996 to verify the
presence or absence of fry. Similar to the
fry counts, electrofishing was conducted in
water depths less than 30 cm and excluded
the thalweg. Stream margins of all three 20-
m segments were electrofished on 1 9 April
1996 to compare numbers of fry captured
with numbers of fry counted.

On 19 April 1996, five redds constructed
during the first half of the spawning season
were excavated to observe the degree of egg
and pre-emergent fry development and to
correlate development with the date of redd
construction and counts of free-swimming
fry. Three additional redds, constructed
during the six-week peak spawning period,
were excavated on 26 April, and five redds,
constructed near the end of the peak spawn¬
ing period, were excavated on 3 May for the
same purposes. A piece of window screen
attached to a wooden frame hinged verti¬
cally in the middle (effective height and
width, 105 x 125 cm) was held downstream
from the redds to catch eggs and fry dis¬
lodged as the redds were dug up with a
shovel. Eggs and pre-emergent fry impinged
on the screen were removed either manu¬
ally with forceps or orally with a plastic suc¬
tion tube (9.0 mm inside diameter), placed
in a container, and counted.

Water temperature was recorded near the
lower end of the study area from 29 Sep¬
tember 1995 through 17 May 1996 using
a RTM 2000 thermograph (Ryan Instru¬
ments, Inc., Redmond, Washington) pro¬
grammed to record hourly. Mean daily wa¬
ter temperatures (MDT) were computed
from the hourly readings. Incubation and
hatching periods are expressed in terms of
both time and accumulative Centigrade
thermal units. Centigrade thermal units
were calculated as the sum of mean daily
water temperatures above 0°C.

66

TRANSACTIONS

AVERY and NIERMEYER: Timing of Spawning and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

Results

The Spawning Period

The spawning period for brown trout in
Emmons Creek covered approximately 3.2
months, beginning 12 October 1993 and
ending 19 January 1996 (Figure 2; Table
1). During this period, 162 trout redds were
constructed in the study area. Peak spawn¬
ing activity occurred during the six-week
period of 28 October through 8 December
1995 when 77% (124) of the identified
redds were constructed. The median date
of spawning (i.e., the date on which 50%
of the redds had been constructed) was 20
November. Spawning began when MDTs
dropped below 12.7°C and increased sub¬
stantially in early November when MDTs
dropped below 9.0°C. Mean daily water
temperatures during the peak spawning pe¬
riod declined from 8.8°C to 0.6°C.

Approximately 27% (44) of trout redds
were at least partially superimposed upon
redds constructed from one to six weeks
prior (Table 1). Of the superimposed redds,
48% (21) occurred on redds constructed
the previous week. Some of the latter redds
may have been incomplete when first ob¬
served, i.e., part of a multiple-pit spawning
site constructed by the same female (Hawke
1978, DeVries 1997), rather than new
redds constructed by totally different fish.
Peak superimposition, 33 of 44 superim¬
posed redds, occurred during the six-week
peak spawning period.

Egg Incubation and Fry Emergence Period

Emergence of brown trout fry from gravel
substrates began in mid- to late-March
1996 and peaked during late April (Table
2). Fry were first observed along the stream
margins in two of the three reference

Figure 2. Chronology of brown trout spawning in Emmons Creek, fall/winter 1995-96.

Volume 87 (1999)

67

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Table 1 . Weekly brown trout redd counts, range of mean daily water temperatures (MDT),
and accumulative Centigrade thermal units (TU) in Emmons Creek from 10/12/95 through
1/26/96 (superimposed redds in parentheses).

Date

Number of

New Redds

Accumulative
Redd Total

MDT Range Accumulative

C TU’s

1995

10/12

1

1

9.8-12.7

29a

10/20

1

2

8.2-10.6

107

10/27

6(1)

8

7.5- 9.0

164

11/03

15(1)

23

4.8- 8.8

212

11/10

18(6)

41

2.9- 6.2

244

11/16

23 (7)

64

3.2- 4.9

267

11/22

22 (6)

86

1.6- 5.1

291

11/30

21 (4)

107

1.7- 4.4

313

12/08

25 (9)

132

0.6- 5.0

338

12/15

7(2)

139

0.0- 3.3

346

12/21

6(3)

145

1.7- 3.8

363

12/28

7(3)

152

0.9- 3.9

380

1996

1/05

7(2)

159

1.4- 4.6

403

1/12

2

161

1.3- 4.8

423

1/19

1

162

1. 1-5.0

451

1/25

0

162

1.0- 4.2

468

a Computed from 10/10/95.

Table 2. Weekly brown trout fry counts, range of mean daily water temperatures (MDT),

and accumulative Centigrade thermal units (TU) in Emmons Creek from 2/02/96 through

5/03/96 (fry

captured with electrofishing gear in parentheses).

Brown Trout Fry Counted

Station Number

MDT Range

ACC.

Date

1 2

3 Total

c

TU'S

1996

2/02

0 0

0

0

0.1- 2.4

4 77a

2/08

0 0

0

0

0.2- 5.7

493

2/15

0 0

0

0

2.9- 5.7

525

2/22

0 0

0

0

2.4- 5.6

554

2/29

0 0

0

0

2.4- 5.8

585

3/08

0 0

0

0

1.7- 4.2

607

3/15

0 0(0)

0(0) (

D(0)

3.4- 6.9

646

3/22

8 0

3

11

4.9- 6.0

684

3/29

8 1

1

10

2.7- 6.3

718

4/05

6 0

4

10

5.0- 6.9

759

4/12

5 0

3

8

5.9- 9.7

809

4/19 18(34) 9(19)

19(47) 46

(100)

6.0-11.6

866

4/25

27 15

16

58

9.5-10.7

927

5/03

Fry Not Counted

Continued from Table 1.

68

TRANSACTIONS

AVERY and NIERMEYER: Timing of Spawning and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

stations on 22 March. The week before, fry
were neither observed nor captured with
electrofishing gear. Fry observed in late
March tended to hold their position along
the shallow stream margins at the careful
approach of an observer.

On 19 April 1996, 46 fry (0.8 fry/m of
stream) were observed in the three stations
and represented a four- to six-fold increase
from fry numbers observed during each of
the four previous weekly counts (Table 2).
Electrofishing also captured 19—47 fry per
station and provided a conservative estimate
that only 47% of the fry present were be¬
ing counted. Numbers of fry counted in the
three stations peaked at 58 (1.0 fry/m of
stream) on 25 April. Many fry observed on
25 April were extremely wary and quickly
found cover when they detected the ob¬
server.

Eleven of thirteen trout redds con¬
structed before (two redds) or during
(eleven redds) the six-week peak spawning
period (28 October to 8 December 1995)
and excavated on or after 19 April 1996
contained primarily dead eggs or fry, cor¬
roborating the emergence of most live fry
during the last two weeks of April (Table
3.) The two remaining redds (numbers 12
and 13 in Table 3) were excavated on 3
May 1996 and contained primarily live,
pre-emergent fry. Since 30 redds (19% of
the total) were constructed subsequent to
the peak spawning period (Table 1), fry
from these late redds probably emerged
even later in May. Peak spawning and peak
fry emergence approximated 22 November
1995 and 25 April 1996, respectively; there¬
fore, residence of eggs and pre-emergent fry
in streambed gravels approximated five
months or an equivalent of 636 Centigrade
thermal units (Tables 1 and 2).

Discussion

The spawning period and peak spawning
activity of brown trout in Emmons Creek
were similar to those observed for brown
trout in Trout Creek located in southern
Wisconsin but much later than in Minne¬
sota, Michigan, and Ontario streams. Avery
(1980) observed brown trout spawning in
Trout Creek between 19 October and 12
January during 1976-77 and 1977-78, with
peak spawning activity occurring in Novem¬
ber through mid-December. Sorensen et al.
(1995) observed brown trout spawning in
Valley Creek, Minnesota, between 12 Oc¬
tober and 22 November 1990-92. During
1976-78, Anderson (1983) observed brown
trout spawning from the first week of Oc¬
tober through November in six other Min¬
nesota streams with peak spawning occur¬
ring between 13 October and 14 November.
The spawning season approximated 1 5 Oc¬
tober to 10 November in a Lower Michi¬
gan stream during 1969-71 (Hansen 1975),
while Witzel and MacCrimmon (1983) ob¬
served brown trout spawning between 8
October and 19 November in five south¬
western Ontario streams during 1977-78.

Although peak emergence of brown
trout fry occurred in late April 1996 in
Emmons Creek, peak emergence of brown
trout fry in Trout Creek occurred four to
six weeks earlier in late February through
March 1976-78 (Avery 1980). Mean
weekly temperatures in Trout Creek aver¬
aged 2.2°C warmer in December 1975
through early January 1976 than for the
same period in 1995-96 in Emmons Creek.
Thus, while brown trout spawn about the
same time in central and southern Wiscon¬
sin, warmer water temperatures in southern
Wisconsin generally contribute to earlier

Volume 87 (1999)

69

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Table 3. Brown trout eggs and pre-emergent fry observed in 13 redds excavated in
Emmons Creek on 19 and 26 April and 3 May 1996 (TU = accumulative Centigrade
thermal unit; DE = dead eggs; D = dead; L = live; S = sac; F = fry).

Redd

Date

Date

Days in

Accumulative

Eggs/Fry

Number

Observed

Excavated

Streambed a

TU’sa

Present

1 & 2b

10/20/95

4/19/96

185

798

130 DE

10/27/95

178

730

3

11/10/95

4/19/96

164

638

45 DE

4 DSF
17 LSF

4

11/16/95

4/19/96

158

611

79 DE

8 DSF
15 LF

5

11/30/95

4/19/96

145

564

108 E

6

11/10/95

4/26/96

171

708

46 DE

6 DF

6 LF

7

11/16/95

4/26/96

165

681

30 DE

16 DSF

2 LSF

2 LF

8

12/08/95

4/26/96

144

610

260 DE

3 DSF

4 LSF

9

12/08/95

5/03/06

151

670

16 DE

10

12/08/95

5/03/96

151

670

6 DEC

11

12/08/95

5/03/96

151

670

1 DEC

12

12/08/05

5/03/96

151

670

6 DE

1 DF

8 LF

13

12/08/05

5/03/96

151

670

5 DE

1 DF
8 LF

a Computed from 10/10/95, two days prior to the date the first redd was observed.
b Redd number 2 was superimposed on redd number 1 .
c Thousands of white sucker eggs present.

emergence of brown trout fry than in simi¬
lar high-quality trout streams in central
Wisconsin.

In relation to the proposed early trout
fishing season opening 1 March in Wiscon¬
sin, the majority of brown trout eggs and
pre-emergent fry will still be in the gravel
when the fishing season opens. Although
brook trout spawn one to three weeks ear¬
lier than brown trout (Witzel and Mac-
Crimmon 1983, Sorensen et al. 1993) and
in central Wisconsin emerge from instream
gravels three to four weeks earlier than

brown trout (Miller 1970), some eggs and
pre-emergent brook trout fry will also be in
the gravel when the early fishing season
opens. This study clearly suggests that an¬
glers wading in Wisconsin trout streams dur¬
ing March and April could increase egg and
fry mortalities by walking on trout redds.
Whether or not such wading mortality oc¬
curs, and to what extent such additional
mortality (if it occurs) will express itself at
the population level, will be directly related
to the wading activity of anglers and the re¬
cruitment dynamics of trout in each stream.

70

TRANSACTIONS

AVERY and NIERMEYER: Timing of Spawning and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

Tentative Management Conclusions

The special regulation early trout fishing sea¬
son proposed by the DNR in 1995 was ap¬
proved by the Natural Resources Board in
May 1996 and took effect beginning 1
March 1997. As approved, the early season
has a “sunset clause” after three years, at
which time DNR fisheries staff will review
the pros and cons of the season and recom¬
mend changes if any are determined to be
needed. Comparisons of the fall 1997 year
class strength in several central and south¬
ern Wisconsin trout streams with the long¬
term average year class strength in the same
streams failed to show any detectable effect
of the early trout fishing season on year class
strength (L. Claggett, personal communica¬
tion 1998).

Acknowledgments

Grateful appreciation is extended to Law¬
rence Claggett, Wisconsin DNR Coldwater
Fisheries Ecologist; DuWayne F. Gebken,
Wisconsin DNR Aquatic Ecological Systems
Section Chief; Robert L. Hunt, retired
Wisconsin DNR Cold Water Research
Group Leader; Michael Bozek, Assistant
Leader Cooperative Fisheries Unit, Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin-Stevens Point; William
Thorn, Minnesota DNR; and Bruce C.
Roberts, Beaverhead-Deerlodge National
Forest-Wisdom, Montana, for technical
review of manuscript drafts. Funding for this
study was provided through the Federal Aid
in Sport Fish Restoration program and by the
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Literature Cited

Anderson, D.W. 1983. Factors affecting
brown trout reproduction in southeastern
Minnesota streams. Minnesota Depart¬

ment of Natural Resources. Investiga¬
tional Report No. 376, St. Paul.

Avery, E.L. 1980. Factors influencing repro¬
duction of brown trout above and below
a flood water detention dam on Trout
Creek, Wisconsin. Wisconsin Depart¬
ment of Natural Resources. Research Re¬
port 106, Madison.

Avery, E.L., and R.L. Hunt. 1981. Popula¬
tion dynamics of wild brown trout and
associated sport fisheries in four central
Wisconsin streams. Wisconsin Depart¬
ment of Natural Resources. Technical
Bulletin 121, Madison.

DeVries, P. 1997. Riverine salmonid egg
burial depths; review of published data
and implications for scour studies. Cana¬
dian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sci¬
ence 54:1685-98.

Hansen, E.A. 1975. Some effects of ground-
water on brown trout redds. Transactions
of the American Fisheries Society
1 04(1): 1 00 — 1 0.

Hausle, D.A., and D.W. Coble. 1976. In¬
fluence of sand in redds on survival and
emergence of brook trout (Salvelinus
fontinalis). Transactions of the American
Fisheries Society 105(1): 5 7-63 .

Hawke, S.P. 1978. Stranded redds of quinnat
salmon in the Mathias River, South Island,
New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Ma¬
rine and Freshwater Research 12:1 67-7 1 .

Miller, J.M. 1970. An analysis of the distri¬
bution of young-of-the-year brook trout,
Salvelinus fontinalis (Mitchell), in Law¬
rence Creek, Wisconsin. Ph.D. thesis.
University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reiser, D.W., and T.A. Wesche. 1977. De¬
termination of physical and hydraulic
preferences of brown and brook trout in
the selection of spawning locations. Wa¬
ter Resources Series No. 64. Water Re¬
sources Research Institute, University of
Wyoming, Laramie.

Volume 87 (1999)

71

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Roberts, B.C. 1988. Potential influence of
recreational use on Neson Spring Creek,
Montana. Master’s thesis. Montana State
University, Bozeman.

Roberts, B.C., and R.G. White. 1992. Ef¬
fects of angler wading on survival of trout
eggs and pre-emergent fry. North Ameri¬
can Journal of Fisheries Management
12:450-59.

Sorensen, P.W., J.R. Cardwell, T. Essington,
and D.E. Weigel. 1995. Reproductive
interations between sympatric brook and
brown trout in a small Minnesota stream.
Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic
Science 52: 1958-65.

Witzel, L.D., and H.R. MacCrimmon. 1983.
Redd-site selection by brook trout and brown
trout in southwestern Ontario streams.
Transactions of the American Fisheries Society

112:760-71.

Ed L. Avery is an Advanced Research Scientist
with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Re¬
sources. He has published more than 25 peer-re¬
viewed and popular articles focusing on salmo-
nid research and the management of coldwater
ecosystems. Address: Department of Natural Re¬
sources, Rivers and Streams Research Station,
11084 Stratton Lake Road, Waupaca, Wiscon¬
sin 54981. Email: averye@dnr. state, wi. us

Kent Niermeyer is a Natural Resource Techni¬
cian 3 with the Wisconsin Department of
Natural Resources. He has spent the past 29
years assisting in salmonid research statewide.
Address: Department of Natural Resources,
Rivers and Streams Research Station, 11084
Stratton Lake Road, Waupaca, Wisconsin
54981. Email: niermk@dnr. state, wi. us

72.

TRANSACTIONS

Terry Balding

Detections of Red-Shouldered Hawks
(Buteo lineatus) Using High Volume
Tape-Recorded Broadcasts

Abstract Conspecific tape-recorded broadcasts (N - 196) were used from
1986 to 1989 to evoke 71 detections of the red-shouldered hawk
(Buteo lineatus). The objective of this study was to determine the
effect of decibel (db) level on detections. During 1987—1989 a
significantly greater number (P < 0.05) of red-shouldered hawk
detections occurred with a 130 db tape-recorded broadcast when
compared to 95 db broadcast. Results suggest that a 130 db tape-
recorded broadcast could be used to increase the number of detec¬
tions of red-shouldered hawks during the courtship and nesting
season.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (1987) recognizes the
red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) as a species of man¬
agement concern, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural
Resources (1991) lists the red-shouldered hawk as a threatened
species in Wisconsin. Therefore, it is important to learn more
about this species. One method would be to select a perma¬
nent survey route, use a tape-recorded broadcast to evoke de¬
tections, and then monitor the trend over a period of years.

The red-shouldered hawk in Wisconsin is often associated
with heavily wooded flood plain forests (Robbins 1991). In
this habitat it usually spends much of its time below the canopy
and does not voluntarily vocalize often; consequently it is typi¬
cally a difficult bird to locate. Johnson et al. (1981) suggested
that a broadcast could increase the chances of encountering
some species of birds when compared to conventional survey
techniques. Conspecific broadcasts have been shown to elicit
detections in the red-shouldered hawk (Fuller and Mosher
1981, Balding and Dibble 1984, Fuller and Mosher 1987,

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Johnson 1989, Mosher et al. 1990, McLeod
1996). Balding and Dibble (1984) reported
more detections to conspecific broadcasts
than heterospecific hawk broadcasts with
red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), broad¬
winged hawk (Buteo platypterus), and red¬
shouldered hawk. Great horned owl (Bubo
virginianus) broadcasts have also been used
effectively to produce red-shouldered hawk
detections (Iverson 1987, Devaul 1989,
Iverson and Fuller 1991, Mosher and Fuller
1996).

Most studies using broadcasts to elicit a
raptor detection used a tape player that pro¬
duced a broadcast volume, measured in deci¬
bels (db), of about 100 db (Fuller and
Mosher 1987, Devaul 1989, Johnson 1989,
Mosher et al. 1990, McLeod 1996). This db
level can generally be heard by humans 750
m from the speaker, assuming the human
hears well and there are no barriers or back¬
ground noises (Mosher et al. 1990). Bald¬
ing and Dibble (1984) suggested that a
broadcast with 130 db, which could be
heard by humans at 1600 m (pers. obs.),
would result in a greater number of detec¬
tions. Flowever, that work was with three
species and did not focus on the red-shoul¬
dered hawk. The focus of this study, con¬
ducted 1987-1989, was to test whether
more stations would have detections using
130 db volume compared to a conventional
portable tape-recorder volume (95 db), spe¬
cifically on red-shouldered hawks, using a
conspecific broadcast.

Study Area

Because of the proximity of the Chippewa
River in west-central Wisconsin and the oc¬
currence of red-shouldered hawk habitat in
the riparian corridor, the lower Chippewa
River was established as the study area (Fig¬
ure 1). A 70 km reach of the Chippewa

River from near Rock Falls, Wisconsin, to
the confluence with the Mississippi River
was used as a transect. Natural landmarks
were used to identify twenty-eight perma¬
nent broadcast stations along this transect,
approximately 2.5 km apart.

Methods

Two surveys were completed each year
(1987-1989) between 4-12 April and 5-15
June. These dates were used because by 4-
12 April, migrant red-shouldered hawks
have passed through the area, and residents
are in courtship (Buss and Mattison 1955).
During 5-15 June the birds are with nest¬
lings (Buss and Mattison 1955). The incu¬
bation period was avoided because of specu¬
lation that study activities might increase the
risk of nest predation. Broadcasts were not
conducted after the nestling period because
they may have generated detections from the
fledglings and biased the estimate of the
adult population. Surveys began at 0800 hr
and were completed the same day around
1600 hr and were only conducted on days
with <16 kph wind and no precipitation.
Data from April and June surveys were
paired by year and analyzed using a paired
£-test (a< = 0.05). Balding and Dibble
(1984), using conspecific broadcasts with
three Buteo species, found when five conspe¬
cific broadcasts were given at a broadcast sta¬
tion the majority (93.8%) of the birds were
detected during the first three broadcasts.
Therefore, in this study only three conspe¬
cific broadcasts were used at each station
with one-minute intervals between broad¬
casts to detect red-shouldered hawks either
aurally, visually, or both. If a red-shouldered
hawk was detected, no further broadcasts
were given at that broadcast station. Dur¬
ing surveys the speaker was directed toward
one shoreline (arbitrarily decided), then the

74

TRANSACTIONS

BALDING: Red-shouldered Hawk Detections with Tape-Recordings

Figure 1. Seventy kilometer transect on the Chippewa River, Wisconsin, for tape-
recorded call census of the red-shouldered hawk, 1986-1989.

opposite shoreline, and finally back to the
original direction. A boat with an outboard
motor was used to carry equipment and
move between stations.

At each broadcast station there were two
series of three conspecific broadcasts used.

The first series of broadcasts used the maxi¬
mum volume of a Marantz Superscope tape
recorder. A Simpson model 886 sound level
meter was used to determine that this vol¬
ume, hereafter referred to as low db, regis¬
tered 95 db one meter from the speaker. If

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no response occurred to the first series of low
db broadcasts at a station, then a second se¬
ries of three broadcasts were given, this time
using the tape recorder connected to a Sanyo
P6060 amplifier and a hand-held Atlas 30-
watt speaker. With this combination a
broadcast was generated that was 130 db one
meter from the speaker, hereafter referred to
as high db broadcast. Within years the pro¬
portion of detections from high db were
paired with the proportion of detections
from low db and analyzed using a paired t-
test (a< = 0.03).

The experimental design used (three low
then three high db broadcasts at one station)
was based on the assumption that detection
probability would not increase with the
number of broadcasts. This assumption is
supported by data from Balding and Dibble
(1984). where five sequential high db broad¬
casts from each station resulted in detections
of 38, 26, 28, 2, and 2. Johnson (1989) and
McLeod (1996), working with the red¬
shouldered hawk and using methodology
with four conspecific 100 db broadcasts and
six conspecific 100-110 db broadcasts, re¬
spectively, also observed there was not an
increase in birds detected with an increase
in the number of broadcasts.

The above design was chosen over visit¬
ing the same broadcast station several times
and each time randomly choosing three high
or three low db broadcasts. Repeated visits
to the same broadcast station risk habitua¬
tion, when animals become non-responsive
or less responsive because of repeated expo¬
sure to the same stimuli. Johnson et al.
(1981) suggested that habituation to repeti¬
tive broadcasts may lower detection rates.
However, Johnson (1989), Devaul (1990),
and Mosher et al. (1990) found little evi¬
dence of habituation in the red-shouldered
hawk. Additionally, subsequent replications
may be broadcast in a different part of the

breeding cycle where response rates may be
different. McLeod (1996) observed that re¬
sponse rates dropped as the season pro¬
gressed.

Data collected at each station included
date; weather; time of day; broadcast vol¬
ume; number of birds detected per station;
number of broadcasts given before detection;
number of vocalizations given per bird; di¬
rection from the speaker when the bird was
detected; whether the bird was detected au¬
rally, visually, or both; and estimated dis¬
tance of the broadcast from the detected
bird.

The red-shouldered hawk tape recording
used in this study was purchased from the
Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and ma¬
nipulated by University of Wisconsin-Eau
Claire media development to consist of three
“keeahh’s” and four “keeyip’s” (Crocoll
1994). Using high db broadcasts, a prelimi¬
nary survey was completed on 26 June 1986
to determine if red-shouldered hawks were
present along the transect.

Results and Discussion

Over all years combined, the 1986 prelimi¬
nary survey and the 1987—1989 surveys, red¬
shouldered hawks were detected at 36% (71
of 196) of the broadcast stations. Sixty-seven
percent (48 of 71) of the responding red¬
shouldered hawks vocalized more than twice,
38% (27 of 71) moved closer to the broad¬
cast, and 73% (32 of 71) vocalized but were
never seen. Likewise, Johnson (1989) re¬
ported 70.6% of red-shouldered hawks vo¬
calized but were not seen. In this study, on
only one occasion was a bird detected by vi¬
sual means but not heard vocalizing. It ap¬
pears the red-shouldered hawk is more likely
to be detected when it vocalizes in response
to a broadcast rather than be detected only
visually.

76

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BALDING: Red-shouldered Hawk Detections with Tape-Recordings

Comparison of Detections
Between Courtship and Nestling Stage

Using high db broadcasts, there was no sig¬
nificant difference (paired A test = 1.73, N
= 3 years, P > 0.05) in the number of red¬
shouldered hawks responding between
courtship stage and nestling stage. Therefore,
in this study high and low db broadcasts
from April and June were pooled within
years. Mosher et ah (1990), using 100-110
db broadcasts, also noted no difference be¬
tween red-shouldered hawk contacts among
breeding stages, pre-incubation through
post-incubation. However, Johnson (1989)
and McLeod (1996), using 100 and 100-
1 1 0 db respectively, found more detections
during courtship.

Effect of Volume

Results from the three survey years (1987 —
1989) indicate that significantly more detec¬
tions (paired A test = 4.78, N = 3 years, P <
0.05) occurred while using high db (mean
= 1 6.3/year) than with low db broadcasts
(mean = 3.0/year). On five occasions birds
within an estimated 100 m did not respond
to the three initial low db broadcasts, but
were subsequently detected during the high
db broadcasts. It is not known from what
distance the red-shouldered hawk can hear
a low db broadcast, but if we assume that
the red-shouldered hawk can hear the low
db at 100 m, it would appear that it re¬
sponds to the high db and not the low db,
because of greater volume. Anecdotally, it is
possible the bird is responding to a loud
noise similar to the gobbling response wild
turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) have to loud
noises (pers. obs.).

All detections resulting from low db broad¬
casts were from an estimated distance of 400
m or less, while 22 of the 49 detections result¬
ing from high db broadcasts were from an es¬

timated distance of more than 400 m. Prob¬
ably some detections resulting from the high
db broadcast were from birds that may not
have heard the three low db broadcasts.

The direction that the speaker was
pointed also influenced detections. For the
years 1987-1989, significantly more birds
(38 of 58; %2 = 5-59, P < 0.05) responded
when the speaker was directed toward them,
regardless of whether the broadcast was low
or high db. Since, when the speaker is
pointed toward the bird, it is louder than
when it is pointed away, it may have caused
the birds to perceive the call as closer than
it really was. Because initial speaker direc¬
tion was arbitrarily decided, it is possible
there was a bias of pointing the speaker in
the direction a bird was expected. However,
there was no significant (%2 = 0.71, P > 0.05)
relationship between the number of birds
detected and the direction the speaker was
initially pointed.

These data suggest using a high db broad¬
cast (130 db) red-shouldered hawk tape-re¬
cording will result in more red-shouldered
hawk detections than with the standard por¬
table tape recorder volume. Further, the data
indicate there may be more detections from
birds that are very close, as well as from more
distant birds.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the knowledge that Eugene
Jacobs so graciously shared with me about
the natural history of the red-shouldered
hawk. Special thanks are extended to my
wife, Nancy Balding, who helped me gather
data throughout the study. I appreciate the
helpful comments of my colleagues during
the preparation of this manuscript, T.
Duyfhuizen, D. Lonzarich, J. Rohrer, T.
Ho, P. Kleintjes, D. Wittrock, and the ar¬
ticle referees.

Volume 87 (1999)

77

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Literature Cited

Balding, T.A., and E. Dibble. 1984. Responses
of red-tailed, red-shouldered, and broad¬
winged hawks to high volume broadcast re¬
cordings. Passenger Pigeon 46:71— 75.

Buss, I.O., and H.M. Mattison. 1955. A half
century of change in bird populations of
the lower Chippewa River, Wisconsin.
Milwaukee Public Museum Publications
in Ornithology 1:11-77.

Crocoll, S.T. 1994. Red-shouldered hawk, Bu-
teo lineatus (Falconiformes: Accipitridae). In
The Birds of North America , No. 107. The
Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia,
and The American Ornithologist’s Union,
Washington, D.C. 20 pp.

Devaul, H.D. 1989. A theoretical and em¬
pirical evaluation of a method of estimat¬
ing area occupied for breeding woodland
hawks in Maine. M.S. Thesis. University
of Maine, Orono. 59 pp.

Fuller, M.R., and J.A. Mosher. 1981. Meth¬
ods of detecting and counting raptors: a
review. Studies in Avian Biology 6:235-46.

Fuller, M.R., and J.A. Mosher. 1987. Rap¬
tor survey techniques. Pp. 37-65 in F.A.
Giron Pendleton, B.A. Millsap, K.W.
Cline, and D.M. Bird, eds. Raptor man¬
agement techniques manual. National
Wildlife Federation Scientific Technical
Series No. 10. Washington, D. C.

Iverson, G.C. 1987. Woodland nesting rap¬
tor survey. Eyas 10:6-7.

Iverson, G.C., and M.R. Fuller. 1991. Area-
occupied survey technique for nesting
woodland raptors. Pp. 1 18-24 in B. Giron
Pendleton, D.L. Krahe, M.N. LeFranc Jr.,
K. Titus, J.C. Bednarz, D.E. Andersen,
and B.A . Millsap, eds. Proceedings of the
Midwest Raptor Management Symposium
and Workshop. National Wildlife Federa¬
tion Scientific Technical Series No. 15.
Washington, D.C.

Johnson, R.R., B.T. Brown, L.T. Haight, and
J.M. Simpson. 1981. Broadcast recordings
as a special avian censusing technique.
Studies in Avian Biology 6:68— 75.

Johnson, G. 1989. Status and breeding ecol¬
ogy of the red-shouldered hawk in north
central New York. M.S. Thesis. State Uni¬
versity of New York College of Environ¬
mental Science, Syracuse. 100 pp.

McLeod, M.A. 1996. Red-shouldered hawk
habitat use and detection to call-broadcast
surveys in north-central Minnesota. M.S.
Thesis. University of Minnesota.

Mosher, J.A., and M.R. Fuller. 1996. Survey¬
ing woodland hawks with broadcasts of
great horned owl vocalizations. Wildlife
Society Bulletin 24:431-536.

Mosher, J.A., M.R. Fuller, and M. Kopeny.

1990. Surveying woodland raptors by
broadcast of conspecific vocalizations.
Journal of Field Ornithology 61:453— 61

Robbins, S.D., Jr. 1991. Wisconsin birdlife. Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin Press, Madison. 702 pp.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 1987. Migra¬
tory nongame birds of management con¬
cern in the United States: the 1987 list.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and
Wildlife Service, Office of Migratory Bird
Management, Washington D.C. 27 pp.

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

1991. Endangered and threatened species
list. Department of Natural Resources,
Wisconsin Bureau of Endangered Re¬
sources, Madison. 4 pp.

Terry Balding has been studying red-shouldered
hawks and bivalve mollusks of the Chippewa
River basin since 1980. Terry is a professor of
biology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau
Claire. Address: Department of Biology , Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Eau Claire, WI
54702. Email: baldinta@uwec.edu

78

TRANSACTIONS

Thomas L. Eddy

A History and Vascular Flora

of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County,

Wisconsin

Abstract Mitchell Glen supports a climax forest “island” that occupies a
narrow post-glacial gorge along the Platteville-Galena
escarpment three miles southeast of Green Lake in Green Lake
County , Wisconsin. Since the time of European settlement in
the Green Lake region , circa 1840, and before then by Native
Americans, the glen area has been recognized for its high quality
natural features and admired for its scenic aesthetic landscape.

Although a modern-day county flora exists (Eddy 1996), no
formal study of the Mitchell Glen flora had been previously
undertaken. A total of 234 vascular plants were identified from
plant collections obtained during 1997 and 1998, representing
75 families and 177 genera. Voucher specimens are deposited in
the University ofWisconsin-Oshkosh Herbarium (OSH).

The known distribution ranges were extended for 23 species
previously unreported for the county, including plants with
boreal affinities (Eddy 1996). Mitchell Glen s shaded cliffs with
cold-air drainage and springs at the base of the gorge render a
moist, cool microclimate that sustains certain species more
typical of northern Wisconsin.

Oak savanna and tallgrass prairie covered most of the
immediate area surrounding Mitchell Glen (Finley 1976).
Although most of the prairies and oak openings were placed into
cultivation during the latter half of the 1800s, original maple-
basswood forest occupies Mitchell Glen and represents the only
significant tract of climax woodland in Green Lake County.

The main feature of this report is a catalog of vascular plants,
supported by vouchers, that grow in Mitchell Glen, Green
Lake County, Wisconsin (Figure 1). Despite its noteworthy
geology, prominent topographical features, and apparently rich
biological diversity, no systematic collecting or formal study

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79

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 1. Location of Green Lake County in east central Wisconsin (U.S. Department of
Agriculture 1977).

of the Mitchell Glen flora had been previ¬
ously undertaken. Besides contributing to
the broader regional botanical record, the
catalog of species serves as a basis of com¬
parison with the flora of the same area in the
future and with the flora of similar south¬
ern mesic forests in the upper Midwest.

A secondary objective of this study exam¬
ines the presettlement flora of Mitchell Glen,
circa 1834. The names of specific plants,
notably trees, and general references to the
vegetation that are mentioned in the origi¬

nal land survey records, old letters and
books, and earlier studies, specifically reports
of Indian antiquities, are used to establish a
historical record of the local flora. Along
with this evidence an examination of the his¬
tory of land use in and around Mitchell
Glen documents the environmental impact
of both natural processes and human-related
activities on the glen flora.

During this study the known distribution
ranges were extended for 23 species that had
been previously unreported for the county

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

(Eddy 1996). New county records are
mainly due to the fact that rich mesic cli¬
max woodlands are scarce in the county and
until recently have not been closely exam¬
ined and methodically botanized.

In contrast to the surrounding open up¬
lands, Mitchell Glen’s shaded cliff habitat
with cold-air drainage and springs at the base
of the gorge render a moist, cool microcli¬
mate that sustains certain plants with boreal
affinities. Among the species more typical of
northern Wisconsin but which occur at
Mitchell Glen are Acer spicatum, Aster
macrophyllus, Dire a palustris , Diervilla
Ionic era, Equisetum pratense, Lycopodium
lucidulum, and Taxus canadensis.

The oak savannas and tallgrass prairies
that once covered most of the immediate
area surrounding Mitchell Glen (Finley
1976) were placed into cultivation during
the latter half of the 1800s, but original
maple-basswood forest survives in Mitchell
Glen and represents the only significant tract
of climax woodland in Green Lake County.
Although the Mitchell Glen flora is com¬
prised of communities representative of the
original vegetation cover that include rare
species, no state threatened and endangered
plants were observed during the study.

Location

Mitchell Glen is located in the town of
Brooklyn, Green Lake County, Wisconsin
at parallel 43°48’57” north latitude and the
meridian 88°34’34” west longitude. It is
situated in NW lL SE lL section 35, Town¬
ship 16 North and Range 13 East (Figure
2). The study area is comprised of approxi¬
mately 20 acres.

Two state geographical provinces divide
Green Lake County roughly in two (Mar¬
tin 1965). The northwestern half lies on the
western edge of the Central Plain and is

characterized by gently rolling topography.
The southeastern half of the county, which
includes Mitchell Glen, is part of the East¬
ern Ridges and Lowlands and is interrupted
by numerous escarpments and valleys.

Nearly all of Green Lake County, includ¬
ing the area surrounding Mitchell Glen, is
classified as natural division 5c (Hole and
Germain 1994). Characteristic of this natu¬
ral division is undulating to rolling topog¬
raphy that supports oak savannas and prai¬
rie growing on silt loams over calcareous till.
Land classified as division 5cp, directly south
and east of Mitchell Glen, historically sup¬
ported extensive prairies.

The county is slightly below Wisconsin’s
tension zone, a region of transition between
Wisconsin’s northern hardwood province
and the prairie-forest province (Curtis 1959).
Although oak savanna is the dominant veg¬
etation cover throughout the county, some
species that are more typical north of the ten¬
sion zone are established here.

In a 1977 report by the East Central Wis¬
consin Regional Planning Commission,
Mitchell Glen was one of two sites in the re¬
gion (from a list of 10 potential locations)
that were recommended for development as
a regional park. While there are no current
plans for developing such a park at or near
Mitchell Glen, the fact that the area was rec¬
ognized for its unique aesthetic and natural
features underscores the high quality natu¬
ral landscape for which Mitchell Glen is re¬
nowned.

Geology, Soils, Water Resources

Mitchell Glen occupies a narrow post-glacial
gorge that was eroded by glacial meltwater
from the Green Bay Lobe approximately
12,500 years before the present. The upper
bedrock is Platteville-Galena dolomite; be¬
neath this is St. Peter sandstone, which forms

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 2. Green Lake County, Wisconsin (Adapted from the Wisconsin Department of
Transportation 1988).

the steep-sided walls of the glen. Mitchell
Glen, which is approximately 100 ft deep
from the floor to the top of the Platteville-
Galena escarpment, drains the cultivated up¬
lands that are to the southeast (Figure 3).

Torrential surface runoff that cascades
from the crest of the glen empties into
Mitchell Glen Creek, a small spring-fed rivu¬
let that begins at the base of the falls.
Mitchell Glen Creek is a tributary of Dakin
Creek, a minor stream that enters Green
Lake’s inlet, Silver Creek at NW lU NW XU
Section 33, R13E, T16N (Figure 3).

According to the county soil survey
(1977), soils of the Kidder-Rotamer-
Grellton association that are found at
Mitchell Glen vary from moderately well-
drained to well-drained loams. The subsoils
are mainly of loam, clay loam, and sandy
clay loam underlain by calcareous, gravelly
sandy loam glacial till.

Three marl pits in the vicinity of Mitchell
Glen were excavated in the past and used
as a source for “sweetening” acidic soils and
as an ingredient for mortar cement and
whitewash.

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

Figure 3. Topographic features of Mitchell Glen and immediate surrounding area. The
glen is a post-glacial gorge eroded by glacial meltwater. Note that the elevation at the
crest of Mitchell Glen is 950 feet above sea level — the base of the glen is 850 feet.
Mitchell Glen Greek (unnamed) begins at the southeast base of the gorge (arrow) and
drains into Dakin Greek, a tributary of Silver Creek, Green Lake’s inlet (United States
Geological Survey 1980).

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Original Vegetation Cover
Original Land Survey Records

The original government land survey for the
Mitchell Glen area, certified in 1835,
contains the most comprehensive record of
the vegetation prior to European settlement.
The field notes of the surveyors contain
references to the vegetation, as well as to
specific trees, making it possible to interpret
the general vegetation cover for the Mitchell
Glen area (Figure 4). Wherever possible,
individual trees that intersected section lines
were recorded, along with bearing trees that
helped identify corners. To supplement and
verify entries, surveyors recorded a summary
of the vegetation along the section lines and
often included sketch maps of each town¬
ship (Figure 5). When the survey of interior
section lines of a township was completed,
a general summary of the vegetation for the
township was written.

According to the surveyors’ field notes,
the original vegetation cover of Green Lake
County was predominantly oak savanna
(Finley 1976) (Figure 6). Oak forest was
prevalent throughout much of the county,
giving way to wetlands vegetation along the
lower Grand River and throughout most of
the Fox River Valley and its tributaries.
Where the canopy was one-half or more
open, surveyors often acknowledged the
scattered spacing of trees and recorded the
vegetation as oak opening, a transitional
community between oak forest and grass¬
lands. Because the field notes fail to
consistently mention the spacing between
trees, it is possible that areas of what is
mapped as oak forest may have actually been
oak opening (Finley 1976).

Where the oaks diminished in numbers,
notably on the flat uplands in the south¬
eastern townships, the landscape was
essentially treeless and covered by tallgrass

prairie. In the northern half of T15N R13E
the prairie succeeded into oak forest and
openings. A short distance farther north, in
the southwestern quarter of T16N R13E,
where the Platteville-Galena escarpment
overlooks Silver Creek, the oak openings
abruptly gave way to a small area of sugar
maple-basswood forest known as Mitchell
Glen. Prior to European settlement the
forest may have been spared from periodic
conflagrations, due in part to prevailing
northwest winds, the presence of wetlands
to the north and northwest, which helped
to contain the blazes, and the irregular
topography that may have acted as a natural
firebreak.

Completion of the survey of interior lines
for T16N R13E, which includes Mitchell
Glen (NW V4 SW V4 section 35), was
certified March 31, 1835, by Deputy
Surveyors James H. Mullett and John
Mullett (General Land Office 1834). Based
upon written summaries of the vegetation
along section lines and the marker trees
recorded in the original land surveys for
quarter section and corner posts, section 35
was bounded by tallgrass prairie on the
south and southeast (Figure 7). As the
grasslands approached Mitchell Glen they
graded into oak openings, which were
established up to the rim of the glen. Large
tracts of oak opening habitat were reported
northeast and southwest of Mitchell Glen,
while floodplain forest and other wetlands
occupied the lowlands to the northwest.

In short, maple-basswood forest at
Mitchell Glen existed then, as now, as an
“island” climax woodland. A similar climax
forest island, South Woods, occurs three
miles northeast along the southeast edge of
Ripon. Both tracts of maple-basswood forest
are established along the Platteville-Galena
escarpment where post-glacial gorges indent
the edges of the escarpment.

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

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A

Figure 4. A copied page from the original land survey field notes for T16N RISE. The
entry begins by surveying the section line north between sections 35 (Mitchell Glen)
and 36. Note the vegetation changes from prairie to oak opening, then to woodland, all
within a mile distance (General Land Office 1834).

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Figure 5. A copy from the original land survey map for “Township No. 16 North Range
No. 13 East in the Territory of Michigan. . . Certified this 31 day of March 1835,” show¬
ing Mitchell Glen (star), part of present-day Green Lake County, Wisconsin (General
Land Office 1834).

Tallgrass prairie is well-documented im¬
mediately south and southeast of Mitchell
Glen where surveyors “Set post corners Sec¬
tions 35 and 36 in Mound in Prairie Land
High Rolling first Rate.” Land along the
south section line of section 35 was charac¬
terized as . Rolling first rate Prairie and
Timbered White Black and Bur Oak.” Near
here, the field notes refer to a “trail” that oc¬

cupied the southwest quarter of section 35
and ran diagonally from southwest to north¬
east of section 36. The trail was originally an
Indian trail between Fort Howard, Green Bay
and Fort Winnebago, Portage, then later be¬
come known as part of the Military Road.
Within sections 35 and 36 the trail generally
followed the Platteville-Galena escarpment
across upland prairies and oak openings.

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

K = OAK FOREST
white oak, black
oak, bur oak

E = PINE FOREST
white pine, red pine

marsh, sedge meadc
wet prairie, lowlam
shrubs

bur oak, white oak,
black oak

J = CLIMAX FOREST*

sugar maple,
basswood, red oak,
white oak, black oak

includes Mitchell Glen

Figure 6. Original vegetation cover of Green Lake County, Wisconsin, circa 1834
(Adapted from Finley 1976).

Surveying north between sections 35 and
36, the land was described as . . rolling
second rate First part [southern half] roll¬
ing prairie Last part [northern half] wood¬
land — Timbered with W. B & Bur oak
[white, black and bur oaks, Quercus alba, Q.
velutina , Q. macrocarpa] . B. & W Ash
[. Fraxinus nigra and probably green, not
white ash, F. pennsylvanica] Aspen [Populus
tremuloides] Elm \Ulmus sp.] Ironwood
[Ostrya virginiana] Sugar Maple [Acer sac-
charum] Lynn [probably linden, i.e., bass¬
wood, Tilia americana ] Butternut [Juglans
cinerea] etc.”

The field notes confirm that oak open¬
ings occupied the area between grassland and
forest. South of the north corner post be¬
tween sections 25 and 36 the “. . . First
20.00 [20 chains or one-quarter mile] Tim¬
bered with sugar Maple Lynn [basswood] W
& B Ash Ironwood etc. Last part — Thinly
timbered with W. B and Bur oak.” Follow¬
ing this same section line one mile south
(T15N R13E) the field notes state: “Wood¬
land rolling second rate. Scattering W. B &
Bur oak Prairie level second rate — Red root
[Ceanothus americanus] rosin-weed [ Silphi -
urn sp.] rose-willow \Salix bebbiana ?] etc.”

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Figure 7. An enlarged portion of original land survey map for section 35 T16N R13E,
the area occupied by Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin. Marker trees and
prairie at quarter sections and corner posts, as well as section line summaries from the
field notes are displayed (General Land Office 1834).

Floodplain forest was encountered along
the north section line between sections 26
and 35. From west to east the surveyors de¬
scribed “Land First part Blk Ash swamp Last
part rolling timbered with W. B & Bur oak
Maple Aspen Cherry [Prunus serotina?\ etc.”
Further evidence of floodplain woodlands
was noted at post corner sections 26, 27, 34
and 35: “Land except swamp rolling second
rate. W. B and Bur oak Swamp timbered
with W. and Black Ash Maple [Acer
saccharinumV\ Elm willow [Salix sp.] etc.”

Based upon the original land survey
records it is apparent that the vegetation
cover for most of the immediate area sur¬
rounding Mitchell Glen was oak savanna
and tallgrass prairie. Upland prairie, which
graded into oak opening, flanked the south¬

ern margin, while extensive oak openings
occupied the areas southwest and northeast
of Mitchell Glen. Historically, recurrent
fires greatly influenced the vegetation cover
by diminishing woody climax succession
and favoring oak savanna. Although most
of the prairies and oak openings were placed
into cultivation during the latter half of the
1800s, the dominant vegetation cover for
Mitchell Glen remains maple-basswood for¬
est. It is the only significant tract of climax
forest in Green Lake County.

Native Americans and European
Settlement

Mitchell Glen and the surrounding lands are
noted for having been the site of the largest
camp of Winnebago Indians in the Green

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

Lake area (Heiple and Heiple 1978). There
is strong circumstantial evidence that the use
of fire by Winnebago Indians, the primary
inhabitants of the region, indirectly influ¬
enced the vegetation cover (Dorney 1981).
The presence of oak savanna and open wet¬
lands throughout Green Lake County, in¬
cluding those surrounding Mitchell Glen,
support this view because all of these plant
communities originate from recurrent fires
and depend on periodic burnings for their
continuation.

Among the Indian antiquities in Green
Lake County, thirteen Indian campsites,
three main planting grounds, and numer¬
ous food caches have been discovered within
the immediate vicinity of Mitchell Glen
(Brown 1917). The Indian planting
grounds, which yielded much corn, were
found in oak openings and on the prairie
where fire may have been utilized to main¬
tain open habitat (Dorney 1981). The
nearby oak forests yielded great quantities
of acorns, which were ground, dried, and
stored in buried caches for use in winter.

In 1840 Anson Dart and his family es¬
tablished the first permanent European
settlement on Green Lake. A son, Richard
Dart, then twelve years old, later reflected
on the resourcefulness of local Native
Americans:

The Winnebago used to make small mounds
to preserve their provisions. When plentiful,
they dried fish in the sun till they were as dry
as powder, then put them in big puckawa
sacks. The squaws also picked up bushels of
acorns. In deep holes, below frost-line, they
would bury their fish and acorns together,
twenty bushels or so in a place, and cover
them over with a mound of earth. When the
deer had gone south, and game was scarcer
they would come and camp on these mounds
and dig up fish and acorns for their winter

food, and live on this provender until spring

opened or game appeared. (Dart 1910)

Maple sugar was made from Acer saccha-
rum in at least two localities west and north
of Mitchell Glen, SW XU section 35 and SW
lU section 26 (Brown 1917). The maple
sugar was stored in birch bark baskets that
were fashioned from Betula papyrifera.
“. . . We had no sugar, save maple made by
Indians, and this was very dirty. The natives
used to pack this sugar in large baskets of
birch-bark, and sell it” (Dart 1910).

The area woodlands also supplied wood
for fuel, poles and bark for wigwams, and
wood for making tools and weapons.
Wooden bowls were carved out of ash,
Fraxinuss pp., and American basswood, Tilia
americana (Heiple and Heiple 1978). Shag-
bark hickory, Carya ovata, and red cedar,
Juniperus virginiana, both of which are
found at Mitchell Glen, were utilized to
make hunting bows (Brown 1917).

In 1835, one year after the township was
surveyed, the first European settler to occupy
land that included the glen was a trader
named James Powell (Heiple and Heiple
1978). Twenty-six years later, Archibald and
Laura Mitchell purchased 1 60 acres of land,
which included the glen, NW lU SE XU sec¬
tion 35. The Mitchells’ third son, Stephan
Decatur Mitchell, or S.D. Mitchell, eventu¬
ally acquired the glen, and this is when the
name “Mitchell Glen” became attached to
the site.

S.D. Mitchell was an amateur collector
and enthusiastic student of Indian antiqui¬
ties. His letters and reports to Charles E.
Brown, then President of the Wisconsin Ar¬
chaeological Society, were incorporated into
Brown’s 1917 paper, “The Antiquities of
Green Lake.” Numerous references to spe¬
cific trees and the vegetation cover appear
in Mitchell’s letters to Brown as he related

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his findings. In a letter dated February 4,
1903, Mitchell described the forest nearby
his home: “About Eighty rods to the North
west of my residence on same Section [33]
you will observe a conical mound this
mound was in the limets [sic] of what at one
time was one of the finest shugar [sic] bushes
[Acer saccharum] that I ever saw ...” (State
Historical Society of Wisconsin 1888).

In 1903 Mitchell posted a draft to Brown
entitled “Green Lake Report,” which in¬
cluded a list of Indian sites and descriptions
of the vegetation cover, as well as specific
uses of local plants by the Winnebago tribe
in and around Mitchell Glen. Mitchell re¬
lated how the Native Americans utilized lo¬
cal plants and animals, as explained to him
by Richard Dart (then 77 years old):

Before the building of the dam at Dartford
there was a bar at the north east portion of
the lake to the South and east of where the
Plasant [Pleasant] Point Hotell [sic] now
stand which was at that time grown up to
rushes the watter [sic] about five feet in depth
here during the summer the Indians speared
thousand and thousands of huge dog fish
these they Jurked [sic] or dried over a slow
fire and together with acorns they cached or
buried these in pits when winter came one
[on] and food became scarse [sic] they built
their huts or Wigwams over these caches and
boiled these fish and acorns together which
became a black mass. . . . (State Historical So¬
ciety of Wisconsin 1888)

Continuing, Mitchell went on to explain
the loss of floodplain forest north of Mitchell
Glen by the damming of Green Lake:

It might be well to state here that the intire
[sic] shoar [sic] line of the lake was changed
by the building of a dam across the out let
called the Pucyann [Puchyan] River at

Dartford in the year 1844. This dam Raised
the level of the lake some Four feet or more
flooding a large tract of very heavy tim¬
ber. . . some years since parties removed the
over flowed stumps in the shallow watter [sic]
between this [Silver Creek inlet, SW lU sec¬
tion 26] and the Lake. . . . (State Historical
Society of Wisconsin 1888)

South from the inlet “This whole tract
[NW lU section 35] to the south and west
also to the east dureing [sic] the knowlage
[sic] of the writer has been one vast tract of
heavy timber portions of which has been
since removed (from) the land and converted
into plowed fields. . . ” (State Historical So¬
ciety of Wisconsin 1888).

Mitchell’s references to maple trees fur¬
ther underscored the dependence of Native
Americans and early settlers on the tract of
climax forest in and around Mitchell Glen.
Approximately one mile northwest of
Mitchell Glen, a campsite on Silver Creek,
SW lU section 26, used by the Winnebago
tribe was described as

... a small island known as sugar creek island
this is surrounded on the north and west by
silver creek and on the south and east by
swamps this island formerly was covered with
heavy maple timber here again was shown the
hacking gouging present of the Indians mode
of taping [sic] the maple with his rude imple¬
ments. . . . (State Historical Society of Wis¬
consin 1888)

About a quarter mile north of Mitchell
Glen, SE V4 NW V4 section 35, Mitchell
states that “This site was one of the finest
maple groves [Acer saccharum] in the state
my Father at one time cut one Maple that
made 7lh cords of 4 ft wood These trees all
showed that they had been taped [sic] for
ages by the Indians. . . . (State Historical
Society of Wisconsin 1888).

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

Oak woods and openings bordered edges
of the maple-basswood forest. In a letter to
Brown on March 4, 1904, Mitchell described
five trees around Indian corn hills in SW V4
NW V4 section 35 as . . three of Oak
[Quercus sp.] and two of Cherry [Prunus
serotina] the largest oak is four ft eight inches
in circumference the other is smaller (State
Historical Society of Wisconsin 1888).

As the Green Lake area became more
settled, more land surrounding Mitchell
Glen was placed into pasture and cultiva¬
tion. By reporting the date when an Indian
site was disturbed or destroyed, Mitchell in¬
advertently documented destruction of the
vegetation cover and changes in land use sur¬
rounding Mitchell Glen. In 1904, for ex¬
ample, Mitchell laments that “. . . the tim¬
ber has been removed [SE lU NE V4 section
34] and in the early spring the Octogon [sic]
the wolf and part of the cornfield [Indian
corn] will be plowed for the first time
. . . Nearly all the damage [to effigy mounds]

. . . has been done within the last three
years” (State Historical Society of Wiscon¬
sin 1888). Mitchell noted even earlier
changes to the prairie southeast of Mitchell
Glen, NW V4 SW V4 section 36:

1862 first Plowed and yearly since . . . The
peculiarity about these mounds is their iso¬
lation from other mound and distance from
watter [sic] they are about one and a half
miles east a little south of the lak [sic] on high
table land about 400 feet above the lake on
the edge of Green Lake Prairie. Alass [sic]
there is but little sembalance [sic] to a mound
left the distructive [sic] plow has for more
than 40 year been accomplishing their
ruin. . . . (State Historical Society of Wiscon¬
sin 1888)

Elsewhere, about a quarter mile northwest
of Mitchell Glen, SE V4 NE V4 section 34,

Mitchell reports that “. . . two of the lizard
tails [effigy mounds] were plowed about
1858. More were plowed 1903 and more
. . . will be Plowed this season.”

Post-settlement to Present-day

The earliest known formal study to include
the Mitchell Glen flora is from 1889 by Mrs.
C.T. Tracy, a Ripon College botany instruc¬
tor. While many of the plants listed in her
Catalogue of Plants Growing Without Cul¬
tivation in Ripon and the Near Vicinity are
known from Mitchell Glen, Mrs. Tracy spe¬
cifically cites Mitchell Glen as the location
for two species: Impatiens capensis Meerb. (L
fulva as listed by Tracy) and Coreopsis
tripteris L. While I. capensis is common on
wet soils along Mitchell Glen Creek, there
are no known vouchers of C. tripteris for
Green Lake County, or Wisconsin for that
matter (Theodore S. Cochrane, personal
communication, 2 April 1999). (Other old
specimens, e.g., Carex shortiana, Phoraden-
dron serotinum, and Silphium asteriscus, bear¬
ing identical Ripon College labels, whether
collected by “J. Clark,” “Mrs. C. Tracy,” or
someone else, also must be excluded from
the Wisconsin flora for lack of specimen
vouchers (Theodore S. Cochrane, personal
communication, 2 April 1999).

Although many of the typical woodland
ephemerals that grow at Mitchell Glen oc¬
cur elsewhere in the county, some species are
exclusive to the glen. Showy orchis, Orchis
spectahilis, for example, was “discovered” in
1994 and is known only from Mitchell Glen
(Eddy 1996). Similarly, Hamamelis virgin-
iana, Symphoricarpos albus, and Symphori-
carpos occidentals are not rare in the south¬
ern half of Wisconsin but are recognized in
the county only from Mitchell Glen.

Cold-air drainage along the shaded cliffs
and cold springs at the base of the gorge
create a boreal micro-habitat for certain

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northern plants. Among the species more
typical of northern Wisconsin, and which
may be viewed as northern relics, are Acer
spicatum , Aster macrophyllus , Dirca palustris,
Diervilla lonicera, Equisetum pratense,
Lycopodium lucidulum , and Taxus cana¬
densis. The fact that T. canadensis is nearly
inaccessible because of the very steep slopes
on which it grows may explain why it has
not been extirpated by browsing white-tail
deer.

Twenty-three species are “new” to the
county, in that they were not known from
the county prior to 1996. These county
records listed below represent 2.4% of the
total county flora (currently 951 species)
and are based on voucher specimens col¬
lected after publication of the county flora
(Eddy 1996).

Acer spicatum Lam.

Aster macrophyllus L.

Aster shortii Lindley
Carex amphibola Steudel
Car ex blanda Dewey
Carex projecta Mackenzie
Cynoglossum amabile Stapf & Drumm.
Dirca palustris L.

Equisetum pratense Ehrh.

Erysimum cheiranthoides L.

Galium concinnum T. & G.

Hamamelis virginiana L.

Hydrophyllum virginianum L.

Lactuca serriola L.

Laportea canadensis (L.) Wedd.

Panicum bore ale Nash
Phlox divaricata L.

Rubus occidentals L.

Symphoricarpos albus (L.) S. F. Blake
Symphoricarpos occidentals Hook.

Taxus canadensis Marshall
Ulmus rubra Muhl.

Viburnum rafinesquianum Schultes
var. rafinesquianum

Although the vascular plant diversity of
Mitchell Glen compared with similar Wis¬
consin forests is difficult to measure, the site
is evidently richer than average. Based upon
plant inventories for southern mesic forests
in the State Natural Area system, an aver¬
age number of vascular plants on a 40-acre
tract is roughly 150 species (Thomas Meyer,
personal communication, 1 April 1998).
According to Meyer, in forests grown on cal¬
careous till or where limestone bedrock nears
the surface, which is the case at Mitchell
Glen, the number of vascular plants is about
175 species. These data may not be in ac¬
cord with the 234 species cataloged for the
glen and bordering uplands. However, when
considering the approximately 40 common
weeds that were among the 234 plants col¬
lected, as well as several prairie and savanna,
not forest species, the variety in Mitchell
Glen generally corresponds to the number
of species suggested by Meyer.

The origin of Mitchell Glen is similar to
that of Parfrey’s Glen, a 488-acre state natu¬
ral area in Sauk County. Parfrey’s Glen is a
post-glacial gorge cut into Cambrian sand¬
stone conglomerate of the Baraboo Hills and,
like Mitchell Glen, receives cold-air drainage
that supports a collection of northern plants,
as well as shaded cliff plants on steep rock out¬
crops. Eighty-eight vascular plants are reported
in a partial list compiled for Parfrey’s Glen
(Thomas Meyer, personal communication, 1 1
November 1998). Of these, 32 species or 36%
are common to the Mitchell Glen flora, in¬
cluding plants with northern affinities. Com¬
bined with the plants on the Parfrey’s list that
are identified to genus only, there are 45 spe¬
cies or 51% common to the Mitchell Glen
flora. Considering its rich plant diversity,
coupled to similarities with other preserved
southern mesic forests, Mitchell Glen stands
as a high-quality refugium for native biota in
east-central Wisconsin.

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

Past and Present Land Use

Land uses that affect the vegetation cover of
Mitchell Glen area are ongoing. Four years
ago nearly 30 acres of mature hardwood for¬
est was selectively logged directly northwest
of the glen, SE lU NE V4 section 35. Har¬
vested trees were mainly red and white oak,
but included some bur oak, sugar maple,
and basswood (John Koerner, personal com¬
munication, 7 January 1999). One year ear¬
lier area landowners successfully persuaded
a local excavator to abandon plans to quarry
gravel at a site less than one mile from
Mitchell Glen.

Directly south and east of Mitchell Glen
is land that has been under cultivation for
over a century, an activity that has obviously
destroyed the original vegetation cover. Fur¬
thermore, because the row-cropped fields fail
to slow and contain water during rains and
snowmelts, torrents of surface water stream
into the southeast comer of Mitchell Glen,
further eroding the edges of the soil grade
that borders the gorge. The excessive surface
runoff causes silting and flooding along
Mitchell Glen Creek and intermittently dis¬
rupts the bottomland vegetation. Patches of
reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea, and
stinging nettle, Urtica dioica , have become
firmly established on the moist alluvium.

By comparing the present-day vegetation
cover of Mitchell Glen with old photographs
and postcards it is evident that the edges of
the glen and former openings have become
more overgrown with woody growth. Alys
Gredler, a former resident of the area com¬
mented:

The greatest impression I had in going
through the glen was how different it was
from the pictures I have. It was quite obvi¬
ous that it was almost ninety years older than
it appeared in the pictures. The trees were

much younger and smaller and the glen was
very much less crowded with plant life
. . . The upper glen where the Mitchell fam¬
ily cemetery is located must have at one time
been fairly clear land but is very wooded now.
(Alys Gredler, personal communication, 16
November 1998)

Prairie and savanna groundlayer species
can still be observed growing along the mar¬
gins in semi-shade. Along the north and
south rims and on gently sloped terraces
overlooking Mitchell Glen Creek, pioneer
trees are present. The absence of fire and
other habitat disturbances that impede
woody succession have allowed aspen, black
cherry, and boxelder to become established.
Ironically, bur, white, and black oaks, trees
once common to nearby oak openings, were
not observed growing within the study area.

In addition, in oak openings and wood¬
lands that were logged and pastured, Euro¬
pean buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartica, has
become naturalized and at times forming
thickets. Left unmanaged, buckthorn devel¬
ops a dense understory that shades out na¬
tive species.

Both accidental and deliberate introduc¬
tions have adversely affected the groundlayer
cover. For example, periwinkle, Vinca minor,
was planted many years ago in the Mitchell
family cemetery. It has since spread to the
surrounding area, forming large evergreen
mats that crowd out native groundlayer spe¬
cies.

The present-day landholders of Mitchell
Glen are cognizant of the need for its long¬
term protection by implementing sustainable
land management practices. One option to
achieve this aim is to prepare a conservation
easement that specifies what land uses are
acceptable and unacceptable. When attached
to a deed, a conservation easement can as¬
sist protecting the land into perpetuity.

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Methodology and Catalog Design

Plant collections were obtained during the
1997 and 1998 growing seasons. In addi¬
tion to the glen, common weeds growing
along buildings and lanes, and in lawns and
cultivated fields were collected. Voucher
specimens were identified and deposited in
the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Her¬
barium (OSH). Besides plant collections,
numerous 35 mm slide photographs of in¬
dividual plants and entire communities were
taken to further document the Mitchell
Glen flora and general vegetation cover.

Plant families in the catalog are alphabet¬
ized within the major plant groups, as are
the genera and species within a family. No¬
menclature strictly follows Gleason and
Cronquist (1991). The treatment of nar¬
rowly defined species and most infraspecific
taxa is avoided, as is the listing of synonyms.

General locations, brief habitat descrip¬
tions, and the frequencies are stated for most
species. Plants collected during this study
that are not included in the Green Lake
County flora (Eddy 1996) are noted as
county records. Collection numbers cited are
my own and correspond to the voucher
specimens deposited at OSH.

Summary of Taxa

Presently, the total number of cataloged vas¬
cular plants at Mitchell Glen is 234 species
(Table 1). A summary of the number of
families, genera, and species for the three

largest dicot and three largest monocot fami¬
lies is compiled in Table 2.

A single family, the Asteraceae, represents
about one-fifth or 21% of the total number
of dicots. The monocots are largely repre¬
sented by the Poaceae and Cyperaceae,
which when combined, account for 67% of
the total number of monocots. The com¬
bined number of species of the three largest
dicot and three largest monocot families ac¬
counts for 43% of the total Mitchell Glen
flora (Table 2).

Table 1. Summary of Major Plant Taxa at
Mitchell Glen.

Plant group

Families

Genera

Species

Pteridophytes

6

9

11

Gymnosperms

3

3

3

Dicotyledons

59

129

169

Monocotyledons

7

36

51

Totals

75

177

234

Table 2. A comparison of the three largest
dicot and three largest monocot families.

Dicots

Genera

Species

% of Total
Mitchell Glen
Flora

Asteraceae

23

35

15%

Rosaceace

9

12

5%

Ranunculaceae 8

11

5%

Monocots

Poaceae

20

24

10%

Cyperaceae

1

10

4%

Liliaceae

9

10

4%

Totals

70

102

43%

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TRANSACTIONS

EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

CATALOG OF SPECIES

PTERIDOPHYTES

LYCOPODIACEAE (Clubmoss Family)

Lycopodium lucidulum Michx. Rare, one site;
moist shaded sandstone shelf above Glen
Creek. (4235,4531)

EQUISETACEAE (Horsetail Family)

Equisetum hyemale L. var. affinis (Engelm.)
A. A. Eaton. Rich shaded slope, growing
beside E. pratense. (4604)

E. pratense Ehrh. Rare, one site; rich shaded
slope. COUNTY RECORD. (4312, 4533)

ADIANTACEAE (Maidenhair Family)

Adiantum pedatum L. ssp. pedatum. Rich
wooded slopes. Locally common. (4346)

ASPLENIACEAE (Spleenwort Family)

Asplenium rhizophyllum L. Local on shaded
sandstone cliffs. (4497)

Cystopteris bulbifera (L.) Bernh. Shaded sand¬
stone outcrops. Uncommon. (4336, 4494)

Dryopteris carthusiana (Villars) H.P. Fuchs.
Rich woods along Glen Creek. Common.
(4361)

D. intermedia (Muhl.) A. Gray. Rich woods
along Glen Creek. Common. (4535)

Woodsia obtusa (Sprengel) Torr. Locally
abundant on shaded sandstone outcrops.
(4335, 4492, 4496, 4534)

OSMUNDACEAE (Royal Fern Family)

Osmunda claytoniana L. Rich woods along
Glen Creek. Uncommon. (4530)

POLYPODIACEAE (Polypody Family)

Polypodium virginianum L. Locally common
on moist shaded sandstone cliffs. (4234,
4493, 4628)

GYMNOSPERMS

CUPRESSACEAE (Cypress Family)

Juniperus virginiana L. Dry disturbed woods.
Common. (4279, 4305)

PINACEAE (Pine Family)

Pinus resinosa Aiton. Local on rocky ledge
alone north rim of glen; four mature trees.

(4639)

TAXACEAE (Yew Family)

Taxus canadensis Marshall. Local on steep
wooded rocky slopes along south wall of
Mitchell Glen. COUNTY RECORD.
(4509)

DICOTYLEDONS

ACERACEAE (Maple Family)

Acer negundo L. Common in disturbed
woods, fencerows, clearing. (4295)

A. saccharum Marshall. Throughout rich
woods. (4300)

A. spicatum Lam. Local on steep wooded
slopes along south wall of Mitchell Glen.
COUNTY RECORD. (4338, 4347,
4647)

AMARANTHACEAE (Amaranth Family)

Amaranthus hybridus L. Common weed.
(4523, 4553)

ANACARDIACEAE (Cashew Family)
Rhus glabra L. Dry opening along northeast
rim of Mitchell Glen. Common. (4633)
Toxicodendron radicans (L.) Kuntze. Occa¬
sional in disturbed woods, paths, clearings.

(4519, 4656)

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APIACEAE (Carrot Family)

Cryptotaenia canadensis DC. Rich woods.
Uncommon. (4345)

Osmorhiza claytonii (Michx.) C.B. Clarke.
Rich woods. Common. (4275)

APOCYNACEAE (Dogbane Family)

Vinca minor L. Planted and escaped about
shaded pioneer cemetery. (4241)

ARIST OLOCHLACEAE (Birthwort Family)

Asarum canadense L. Rich wooded slopes
along Glen Creek. (4264)

ASCLEPIADACEAE (Milkweed Family)
Asclepias incarnata L. One plant in old field.
(4559)

A. syriaca L. Field lanes, old fields. Com¬
mon. (4478)

A. verticillata L. Field lanes, old fields.
(4637, 4660)

ASTERACEAE (Aster Family)

Achillea millefolium L. Field lanes, dry
wooded openings. Common. (4464)
Ambrosia artemisiifolia L. Common weed.
(4582)

A. trifida L. Common weed. (4589)
Antennaria plantaginifolia (L.) Richardson.

Dry wooded openings. (4254, 4280)

Aster ericoides L. Dry wooded openings, field
lanes. Common. (4626)

A. lateriflorus (L.) Britt. Open woods, oak
openings. Common. (4607, 4616)

A. macrophyllus L. Dry wooded opening
along northern rim of Mitchell Glen.
COUNTY RECORD. (4617)

A. sagittifolius Willd. Oak openings. Com¬
mon. (4625, 4636)

A. shortii Lindley. Dry wooded opening
along northern rim of Mitchell Glen.

COUNTY RECORD. (4622, 4631)
Cirsium vulgare (Savi) Tenore. Common
weed. (4502, 4579)

Chrysanthemum leucanthemum L. Common
weed. (4293)

Erigeron annuus (L.) Pers. Common weed.
(4501)

E. pulchellus Michx. Dry open woods. Com¬
mon. (4314)

Eupatorium rugosum Houtt. Rich woods,
thickets. Common. (4595, 4605)
Gnaphalium obtusifolium L. Dry openings.
Common (4621)

Helianthus hirsutus Raf. Dry open woods.
Common. (4575)

Heliopsis helianthoides (L.) Sweet var. scabra
(Dunal) Fern. Open fields. Common.
(4356, 4527, 4569)

Hieracium aurantiacum L. Common weed.

(4325)

H. caespitosum Dumort. Common weed.
(4480, 4482, 4651)

H. scabrum Michx. Dry open woods, oak
openings. Common. (4598, 4620, 4658)
Krigia biflora (Walt.) S.F. Blake Oak open¬
ing above Glen Creek. Locally common.

(4349)

Lactuca canadensis L. Common weed.
(4600)

L. serriola L. Field lanes, open disturbed
soils. COUNTY RECORD. (4583)
Matricaria matricarioides (Less.) Porter.

Common weed. (4557)

Prenanthes alba L. Local on semi-shaded
sandstone shelf above Glen Creek. (4615)
Rudbeckia hirta L. Oak openings. Common.

(4561,4653)

Senecio pauperculus Michx. One site; oak
opening on natural terrace above Glen
Creek. (4296)

Solidago canadensis L. Field lanes, old fields.

Common. (4558, 4594)

S. flexicaulis L. Dry woods, oak openings.
Common. (4606)

S. rigida L. var. rigida One site; dry open¬
ing along northeast rim above Mitchell
Glen waterfalls.

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

S. ulmifolia Muhl. Oak openings. Common.
(4608)

Sonchus oleraceus L. Common weed. (4591)

Taraxacum officinale Weber. Common
weed. (4273)

Tragopogon pratensis L. Field lanes, open
habitats. (4499)

Xanthium strumarium L. Common weed.
(4545, 4576, 4577)

BALSAMINACEAE (Touch-me-not Family)

Impatiens capensis Meerb. Damp soils along
Mitchell Glen Creek. Common, (s. n.)

BERBER! DACEAE (Barberry Family)

Caulophyllum thalictroides (L.) Michx. Rich
woods. Common. (4267)

Podophyllum peltatum L. Throughout
woods. (4278)

BETULACEAE (Birch Family)

Betula papyrifera Marshall. Occasional along
edges of glen. (s. n.)

Ostrya virginiana (Miller) K. Koch. Through¬
out rich woods. (4567, 4599)

BORAGINACEAE (Borage Family)

Cynoglossum amahile Stapf & Drumm. Gar¬
den escape; waste ground along old build¬
ing. COUNTY RECORD. (4603)

Hackelia virginiana (L.) I. M. Johnst. Dry
woods. Common. (4540, 4580)

BRASSICACEAE (Mustard Family)

Barb area vulgaris R. Br. Common weed.
(4242)

Brassica nigra (L.) Koch. Common weed.
(4556)

Cardamine concatenata (Michx.) O.
Schwartz. Throughout rich woods. (4245)

Erysimum cheiranthoides L. Disturbed habi¬
tats. COUNTY RECORD. (4517)

Hesperis matronalis L. Common garden es¬
cape. (4274)

CAMPANULACEAE (Harebell Family)

Campanula rapunculoides L. Garden escape.
(4571)

Lobelia siphilitica L. Damp soils along Glen
Creek. Common. (4613)

L. spicata Lam. var. spicata Oak openings.
Common. (4471)

CAPRIFOLLACEAE (Honeysuckle Family)

Diervilla lonicera Mill. Dry and rocky
wooded openings. Uncommon. (4510,
4619)

Lonicera x bella Zabel. Woods, thickets.
(4281,4302)

Sambucus canadensis L. Woods, thickets.

Common. (4253, 4488)

S. racemosa L. ssp. pubens (Michx.) House.

Rich shaded slopes. Common (4573)
Symphoricarpos albus (L.) S.F. Blake Rare
county-wide; dry wooded opening along
northern rim of Mitchell Glen. COUNTY
RECORD. (4614, 4629)

S. occidentalis Hook. Rare county-wide;
wooded clearing above Glen Creek.
COUNTY RECORD. (4624).

Viburnum lentago L. Occasional throughout
woods. (4487)

V rafinesquianum Schultes var. rafines-
quianum. Dry woods along southern rim
of Mitchell Glen. COUNTY RECORD.
(4511,4623)

CARYOPHYLLACEAE (Pink Family)

Arenaria lateriflora L. Woods, openings.
Common. (4344)

Cerastium vulgatum L. Common weed.

(4289)

Silene latifolia Poiret. Field lanes, disturbed
habitats. Common. (4330, 4505, 4521)

CHENOPODIACEAE (Goosefoot Family)
Chenopodium album L. Common weed.
(4518,452 6, 4549)

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CLUSIACEAE (Mangosteen Family)

Hypericum punctatum Lam. Field lanes, dry
openings. Common. (4568)

CONVOLVULACEAE (Bindweed Family)

Convolvulus arvensis L. Common weed.

(4547)

CORNACEAE (Dogwood Family)

Cornus rugosa Lam. Rocky woods. Com¬
mon. (4532, 4645)

CUCURBITACEAE (Gourd Family)

Echinocystis lobata (Michx.) T. & G. Edges
of woods, thickets. Common. (4546)

EUPHORBIACEAE (Spurge Family)

Euphorbia corollata L. var. corollata. Dry
wooded openings, field lanes. Common.
(4592, 4650)

FABACEAE (Bean Family)

Amphicarpaea bracteata (L.) Fern. Through¬
out woods, openings. (4612)

Coronilla varia L. Roadside. (4515)
Medicago lupulina L. Common weed. (4307,
4525)

M. sativa L. Common along field lanes, old
fields. (4481)

Trifolium campestre Schreb. Common weed.
(4322)

T. pratense L. Common weed. (4327)

T. repens L. Common weed. (4328)

Vicia sativa L. ssp. nigra (L.) Ehrhart. Field
lanes. Common. (4483)

FAGACEAE (Beech Family)

Quercus rubra L. Throughout woods. (4564)

FUMARIACEAE (Fumitory Family)

Dicentra cucullaria (L.) Bernh. Rich wooded
slopes along Glen Creek. (4262)

GROSSULARIACEAE (Gooseberry Family)

Ribes cynosbati L. Rich woods. (4259, 4339,
4642)

HAMAMELIDACEAE (Witch Hazel
Family)

Hamamelis virginiana L. Local on shaded
slopes along Glen Creek. COUNTY
RECORD. (4529)

HYDROPHYLLACEAE (Waterleaf Family)

Hydrophyllum virginianum L. Rich wooded
slopes. Uncommon. COUNTY RECORD.
(4308)

JUGLANDACEAE (Walnut Family)

Carya cordiformis (Wangenh.) K. Koch. Rich
woods above Glen Creek. Uncommon.
(4351,4528)

Juglans cinerea L. Occasional throughout
woods. (4282)

LAMIACEAE (Mint Family)

Leonurus cardiaca L. Common weed. (4465)

Monarda fistulosa L. var. fistulosa. Old fields,
oak openings. Common. (4550)

Nepeta cataria L. Common weed. (4489)

Prunella vulgaris L. Common weed of damp
soils. (4572)

MALVACEAE (Mallow Family)

Abutilon theophrasti Medikus. Common
field weed. (4584)

MONOTROPACEAE (Indian Pipe Family)

Monotropa uniflora L. Dry woods, openings.
Uncommon. (4562)

OLEACEAE (Olive Family)

Fraxinus pennsylvanica Marshall. Occasional
throughout woods. (4472, 4627)

98

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

ONAGRACEAE (Evening Primrose Family)

Circaea alpina L. Local on moist shaded
sandstone cliff beside waterfalls of Glen
Creek. (4491)

C lutetiana L. Throughout rich woods. (4363)

Oenothera parviflora L. Field lanes, old fields.
(4390)

OXALIDACEAE (Oxalis Family)

Oxalis stricta L. Common weed. (4321, 4334)

PAPAVERACEAE (Poppy Family)

Sanguinaria canadensis L. Rich woods. Com¬
mon. (4266)

PLANTAGINACEAE (Plantain Family)

Plantago major L. Common weed. (4344)

P. rugelii Decne. Common weed. (4504)

POLEMONLACEAE (Phlox Family)

Phlox divaricata L. One site; edge of woods
along northeast rim of Mitchell Glen.
COUNTY RECORD. (4244)

POLYGONACEAE (Smartweed Family)

Polygonum pensylvanicum L. Field lanes,
open disturbed habitats. Common. (4589)

P. persicaria L. Common weed. (4555)

Rumex acetosella L. Common weed. (4585)

R. crispus L. Common weed of damp waste
places. (4323, 4485)

R. obtusifolius L. Damp disturbed soils. (4536)

R. salicifolius J.A. Weinm. Wet soils along
Glen Creek. (4467)

PORTULACACEAE (Purslane Family)

Claytonia virginica L. Throughout rich
woods. (4250)

Portulaca oleracea L. Common weed. (4581)

PRIMULACEAE (Primrose Family)

Dodecatheon meadia L. Locally abundant in
dry openings along southern and northern
rims of Mitchell Glen. (4277)

PYROLACEAE (Shinleaf Family)

Pyrola elliptica Nutt. Rare, one site; oak
opening on natural terrace above Glen
Creek. (4652)

RAN UN CULACEAE (Buttercup Family)
Actaea rubra (Aiton) Willd. Throughout rich
woods. (4261, 4286, 4287)

Anemone quinquefolia L. Throughout rich
woods. (4233)

A. virginiana L. Dry wooded openings.
Common. (4343, 4357, 4362)

Caltha palustris L. Wet soils along Glen
Creek. (4263)

Hepatica americana (DC.) Ker Gawler. Rich
wooded slopes along Glen Creek. (4260)
Isopyrum biternatum (Raf.) T. & G. Rich
woods. Uncommon. (4248)

Ranunculus abortions L. Dry woods. Com¬
mon. (4238)

R. fascicularis Muhl. Wooded openings.
Common. (4284)

R. recurvatus Poiret. Rich woods. Uncom¬
mon. (4288)

Thalictrum dioicum L. Woods. Common.
(4232)

RHAMNACEAE (Buckthorn Family)

Rhamnus cathartica L. Common, generally
naturalized in woods and openings. (4297)

ROSACEAE (Rose Family)

Agrimonia gryposepala Wallr. Dry woods,
oak openings. Common. (4554)
Amelanchier spicata (Lam.) K. Koch. Dry
woods, openings. (4251, 464 0, 4644)
Crataegus coccinea L. One site; beside a lane
in wooded opening on southwest edge of
Mitchell Glen. (4596)

Fragaria virginiana Duchesne. Dry wooded
openings. (4237)

Geum canadense Jacq. Throughout dry
woods. Common. (4355, 4548)

Potentilla recta L. Common weed. (4484)

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P. simplex Michx. Field lanes, disturbed
habitats. Common. (4350)

Prunus americana Marshall. Wooded open¬
ings, thickets. (4240)

P. pensylvanica L. f. Fencerow. (4643)

P. serotina Ehrh. Occasional throughout
woods. (4301)

Pyrus ioensis (A. Wood) L. H. Bailey.

Woods. Uncommon. (4271)

Rubus occidentalis L. Dry woods along south¬
ern rim of Mitchell Glen. COUNTY
RECORD. (4337)

RUBLACEAE (Madder Family)

Galium aparine L. Woods. Common.
(4272)

G. concinnum T. & G. Occasional in dry
woods. COUNTY RECORD. (4473)

G. triflorum Michx. Throughout dry woods.

(4655)

RUTACEAE (Rue Family)

Zanthoxylum americanum Mill. Disturbed
woods, openings along northern rim of
Mitchell Glen. Common. (4316)

SALICACEAE (Willow Family)

Populus tremuloides Michx. Disturbed
woods. (4503)

Salix humilis Marshall. One site; beside field
lane on eastern border of Mitchell Glen.
(4294)

SANTALACEAE (Sandlewood Family)

Comandra umbellata (L.) Nutt. var. umbel-
lata. Dry wooded openings along southern
rim of Mitchell Glen. (4313)

SCROPHULARIACEAE (Figwort Family)

Aureolaria grandiflora (Benth.) Pennell var.
pulchra Pennell. Adjacent to old lane and
local in wooded opening along southern
rim of Mitchell Glen. (4593)

Pedicularis canadensis L. Oak opening on

natural terrace above Glen Creek. Uncom¬
mon. (4352)

Scrophularia lanceolata Pursh. Edge of woods
on eastern border of Mitchell Glen. (4578)
Verbascum thapsus L. Common weed. (4520)
Veronica serpyllifolia L. Common lawn weed.
(4276, 4490)

SOLANACEAE (Nightshade Family)

Physalis longifolia Nutt. Old field next to
field lane. Common. (4479)

Solanum dulcamara L. Field lanes, open
woods, thickets. Common. (4160)

S. nigrum L. Open disturbed soils. (4524,
4602)

TILIACEAE (Linden Family)

Tilia americana L. Throughout rich woods.

(4299)

THYMELAEACEAE (Mezereum Family)

Dirca palustris L. Locally common in woods
along southern rim of Mitchell Glen.
COUNTY RECORD. (464 9)

ULMACEAE (Elm Family)

Ulmus americana L. Occasional dry woods
along southern rim of Mitchell Glen.
(4303, 4618)

U. rubra Muhl. Occasional in rich woods.
COUNTY RECORD. (4601)

URTICACEAE (Nettle Family)

Laportea canadensis (L.) Wedd. Partially
shaded wet soils along Glen Creek.
COUNTY RECORD. (4348, 4597)
Urtica dioica L. var. procera (Muhl.) Wedd.
Disturbed damp soils. Common, (s. n.)

VERBENACEAE (Vervain Family)

Phryma leptostachya L. Throughout dry
woods. (4563)

Verbena hastata L. Damp open habitats.
Common. (4560, 4565)

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

VIOLACEAE (Violet Family)

Viola pubescens Aiton. Woods. (4230, 4265)
V sororia Willd. Woods. (4231, 4239,
4243, 4249)

VITACEAE (Grape Family)

Parthenocissus vitacea (Knerr) A. Hitchc.
Throughout woods. (4304, 4469)

MONOCOTYLEDONS

ARACEAE (Arum Family)

Symplocarpus foetidus (L.) Nutt. Wet soils in
low woods and openings along Glen
Creek. Common. (4258)

CYPERACEAE (Sedge Family)

Carex amphibola Steudel. Woods. Uncom¬
mon. COUNTY RECORD. (4311)

C. blanda Dewey Throughout rich woods.
Common. COUNTY RECORD. (4298,
4332, 4500)

C cephalophora Muhl. Dry open woods. (4511)
C. gracillima Schwein. Low woods. Uncom¬
mon. (4292)

C. pensylvanica Lam. Throughout woods
and openings. (4236, 4246, 4252, 4269,
4270, 4309, 4331)

C. projecta Mackenzie. Low woods. Rare.

COUNTY RECORD. (4475)

C. rosea Schk. ex Willd. Low woods. (4310,
4474)

C. sparganioides Willd. Woods, thickets.
Common. (4358)

C. sprengelii Dewey. Rich woods. Uncom¬
mon. (4290)

C. vulpinoidea Michx. Wet soils along Glen
Creek. Uncommon. (4486)

JUNCACEAE (Rush Family)

Juncus tenuis Willd. Various damp habitats.
(4466)

Luzula multiflora (Retz.) Lej. Woods, clear¬
ings. Common. (4318)

LILIACEAE (Lily Family)

Allium canadense L. Oak opening on natural
terrace above Glen Creek. Common. (4353)
A. tricoccum Aiton. Rich woods bordering
Glen Creek. (4537)

Asparagus officinalis L. Common garden es¬
cape. (4283, 4507)

Erythronium albidum Nutt. Throughout rich
woods. (4247)

Hypoxis hirsuta (L.) Cov. Oak opening on
natural terrace above Glen Creek. Com¬
mon. (4315)

Polygonatum biflorum (Walter) Elliott. Open
woods, thickets. Common. (4333, 4498)
Scilla sibirica Andr. Planted and spreading
about buildings. (4256)

Smilacina racemosa (L.) Desf. Throughout
woods, openings. (4317)

Trillium grandiflorum (Michx.) Salisb.
Throughout rich woods. (4255)

Uvularia grandiflora Sm. Rich woods along
Glen Creek. (4257)

ORCHIDACEAE (Orchid Family)

Liparis lilifolia (L.) Rich. Two sites; local in
oak openings. (4342)

Orchis spectabilis L. Rare, one site; beside a
wooded path along northern rim of

Mitchell Glen. (4181,4285)

POACEAE (Grass Family)

Agrostis gigantea Roth. Open woods. Com¬
mon. (4512, 4514, 4543)

Andropogon gerardii Vitman. Dry opening
along northeast rim above Mitchell Glen
waterfalls. (4634, 4661)

Bromus inermis Leysser. Field lanes, dis¬
turbed sites. Common. (4326, 4506)
Cinna arundinacea L. Low woods, thickets.
(4320)

Dactylis glomerata L. Common weed. (4306,
4324)

Danthonia spicata (L.) P. Beauv. Old fields,
dry woods. Common. (4470, 4566, 4654)

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Dwitaria saneuinalis (L.) Scop. Common
weed. (4587)

Elymus canadensis L. Dry opening along
northeast rim of Mitchell Glen. (4632)

E. hystrix L. Woods, openings. Common.
(4539, 4570, 4659)

Elytrigia repens (L.) Nevski. Lawns, disturbed
habitats. Common. (4508)

Festuca subverticillata (Pers.) E. Alexeev.
Rich woods. Uncommon. (4477)

Glyceria striata (Lam.) A. Hitchc. Damp
soils along Glen Creek. Common. (4476,
4495)

Leersia virginica Willd. Damp soils along
Glen Creek. Common. (4574, 4611)
Lolium perenne L. Common weed. (4516,
4588)

Milium effusum L. Rich woods along Glen
Creek. Uncommon. (4 542)

Muhlenbergia frondosa (Poiret) Fern. Low
woods. Common. (4610)

Panicum boreale Nash. Wooded opening.
Uncommon. COUNTY RECORD.
(4353)

P. leibergii (Vasey) Scribn. Dry oak open¬
ing. Uncommon. (4340, 4341)

P. miliaceum L. ssp. ruderale (Kitigawa)
Tzvelev. Edge of cultivated field. (4551)
Phalaris arundinacea L. Various damp to wet
open habitats. Common. (4329)

Phleum pratense L. Field lanes, old fields,
clearings. (4359)

Poa compressa L. Field lanes, wooded open¬
ings. Common. (4291, 4319, 4468, 4513)
Setaria glauca (L.) P. Beauv. Common weed.

(4609)

S. viridis (L.) P. Beauv. Common weed.
(4552)

SMILACACEAE (Catbrier Family)

Smilax herbacea L. Occasional in damp
woods. (4635)

S. lasioneura Flooker. Dry woods along
northern rim of Mitchell Glen. (4360)

Acknowledgments

First, I wish to thank the Smith family for
granting me access to study the Mitchell
Glen flora. Their warm hospitality and
friendship made this study a “labor of love.”

Second, I’m beholden to Eric Ratering,
who transcribed the S.D. Mitchell and
Charles E. Brown letters and reports on local
Indian antiquities and shared them with me.

Neil A. Harriman, OSFI, was always
available for consultation, answering an end¬
less barrage of inquiries, and he made the
coffee strong. Thank you, Neil. Thanks is
extended also to Steve Ellis, Brian Neil, and
Tom Schultz, who assisted me with collect¬
ing at various times. Special thanks are ex¬
tended to Steve Ellis, Neil Harriman, and
two anonymous reviewers for proofreading
the manuscript — their suggestions greatly
enhanced the quality of the report.

Literature Cited

Brown, Charles E. 1917. The antiquities of
Green Lake. Wisconsin Archeologist 16:1-55.
Curtis, John T. 1959. The Vegetation of Wiscon¬
sin. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
657 pp.

Dart, Richard. 1910. Settlement of Green
Lake County. Proceedings of the State His¬
torical Society of Wisconsin (57th annual
meeting), pp. 252-72.

Dorney, John R. 1981. The impact of native
Americans on presettlement vegetation in
southeastern Wisconsin. Transactions of the
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters
69:26-36.

East Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Com¬
mission. 1977 (March). Regional Park System,
Outdoor Recreation and Open Space Plan for
East Central Wisconsin.

Eddy, Thomas L. 1996. A vascular flora of
Green Lake County, Wisconsin. Transactions

102

TRANSACTIONS

EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts &
Letters 84:23-67.

Finley, Robert W. 1976. Original Vegetation
Cover of Wisconsin (map). (St. Paul: North
Central Forest Experiment Station, Forest
Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture).

General Land Office. 1 834. Land surveyors’ field
notes for T16N R12E. State of Wisconsin,
Board of Commissioner of Public Lands.

Heiple, Robert W., and Emma B. Heiple. 1978
(2nd ed.). A Heritage History of Beautiful
Green Lake Wisconsin. McMillan Printing
Company, Ripon, Wisconsin.

Hole, Francis D., and Clifford E. Germain.
1994. Natural Divisions of Wisconsin (map).
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Martin, Lawrence. 1965. The physical geography
of Wisconsin. 3rd ed. Wisconsin Geological
and Natural History Survey Bulletin 36.

Pauli, Rachel Krebs, and Richard A. Pauli. 1977.
Geology of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan (. In¬
cluding Parts of Adjacent States). Kendall/
Hunt Publishing Company, Dubuque, Iowa.

232 pp.

State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 1888.
Catalogue of the S.D. Mitchell Archaeologi¬
cal Collection from Green Lake and Mar¬
quette counties, Wisconsin (January 1st,
1888). Archives Division, Register of the
Charles E. Brown Papers, 1889-1946 (Box
26 Folder 1).

Tracy, Mrs. C.T. 1889. Catalogue of plants
growing without cultivation in Ripon and the
near vicinity. (Unpublished).

United States Department of Agriculture. 1977.
Soil Survey of Green Lake County, Wiscon¬
sin. (Soil Conservation Service).

United State Geological Survey. 1980. Green
Lake quadrangle (map), 7.5 minute series.

University of Wisconsin-Extension, Geological
and Natural History Survey. 1981. Bedrock
Geology of Wisconsin (map).

Wisconsin Department of Transportation. 1988.
Green Lake County (highway map). State
Office Building, Madison, WI.

Thomas Eddy is a past recipient of the National
Association of Biology Teacher’s OBTA ( Out¬
standing Biology Teacher Award) and the Kohl
Teaching Fellowship Award. He teaches for the
Green Lake School District and for Marian Col¬
lege, Fond du Lac. Mr. Eddy is a founding mem¬
ber of the Green Lake Conservancy Foundation,
Inc. and serves on numerous committees and or¬
ganizations involved with natural areas preser¬
vation. He is author of “A Vascular Flora of
Green Lake County, Wisconsin, ” which appeared
in the 1996 Transactions. Address: 426
Walker Avenue, Green Lake, WI 54941.
Email: tleddy@vbe. com

This paper is dedicated to a young man who loved Mitchell
Glen like no other 17-year-old could. For those of us who
shared time in the glen with him, a walk through Mitchell Glen
will never be the same. So, Augie, this Mitchell Glen flora is
fondly dedicated to you.

In Memoriam

August DeForest Zebediah Smith
June 16, 1980 - January 20, 1998

Volume 87 (1999)

103

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Joan Jass and Jeanette Glenn

Measuring the Degree of Variation
in Wisconsin Pyganodon grandis
(Say 1829) (Mollusca: Bivalvia:
Unionidae)

Abstract Variation in the ubiquitous and abundant freshwater bivalve
Pyganodon grandis was studied using museum specimens collected
across Wisconsin from 1973 to 1977. Data on six shell traits were
gathered for each specimen: 1) beak sculpture, 2) overall length,
3) height, 4) width, 5) anterior-to-beak length of the right valve,
and 6) darkness of the periostracum. Data from the Wisconsin
specimens were subsequently pooled into three regional groupings
representing sites from the northeast, the southwest, and an
intermediate tension zone. Comparison of three groups revealed
statistically significant differences and indicated a high degree of
intraspecific variation.

Variation in populations of the ubiquitous and abundant
freshwater bivalve genus Anodonta was analyzed in Canada
by Clarke (1973). In order to assess the taxonomic importance
of such variation, Clarke conducted a statistical analysis of shell
traits and compared the results to ecological and geographic
data from Canadian collecting sites. In the past the extreme
variability displayed by Anodonta has given rise to a number
of subspecific divisions. In Wisconsin for example, F.C. Baker
(1928) found two subspecific level taxa in addition to the stan¬
dard Anodonta grandis. Turgeon et al. (1998) have placed this
species in the genus Pyganodon.

Clarke’s analysis revealed strong correlations between site
geography and the following shell traits: 1) beak sculpture, 2)
anterior-to-beak length/length overall, 3) width/length over¬
all, and a lesser degree of correlation to 4) height/length over¬
all. He also found good to fair correlations between site ecol¬
ogy and anterior-to-beak length/length overall, as well as
darkness of the periostracum.

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In Wisconsin, this taxon is also wide¬
spread and abundant. Mathiak’s five-year
survey (1973-1977) (Mathiak 1979) ranked
it second in both number of sites from
which he collected it (N = 202) and in total
number of specimens collected (N = 1039).
The Mathiak site map for this species shows
collecting localities well distributed over the
state. The Milwaukee Public Museum
(MPM) subset of the Mathiak collection in¬
cludes Pyganodon grandis (giant floater)
specimens from two-thirds of Wisconsin’s
72 counties. We measured these specimens
to examine the degree of variation present
within the state. A high degree of within-
state variability in aquatic invertebrate traits
was reported by Parejko (1987), who found
statistically significant north/south differ¬
ences in the life history parameters of sev¬
eral Wisconsin species.

Methods

The traits in Clarke’s study that showed
some significance were those measured in
MPM specimens of P. grandis : 1) beak
sculpture, which Clarke scored 1-4 (1,2 =
not in Wisconsin, 3 = double loop, 4 =
nodulous); 2) length overall; 3) height; 4)
width; 3) anterior-to-beak length, right valve
(traits 2-3 measured to the nearest tenth of
a millimeter with a dial caliper); 6) darkness
of the periostracum, arbitrarily scored as
light = 1, medium = 2, dark = 3. Four of
these traits (2-5) represent morphometric
variables, while traits 1 and 6 represent con¬
tinuous, nonnumeric traits that have been
assigned to numeric classes for purposes of
analysis.

For possible correlations with geography,
shells collected by Harold Mathiak (1979)
in a statewide survey of Wisconsin water¬
ways were chosen for this study (N = 139).
Data from these specimens, part of a repre¬

sentative subset of his collection selected for
donation to MPM by Mathiak, were ex¬
pected to give a good indication of the de¬
gree of geographic variation to be found
within the state, since his study included lo¬
calities from across Wisconsin. Collecting
sites were subsequently pooled into three
ecological regions, following Curtis’s divi¬
sion of Wisconsin into a northeastern prov¬
ince of northern hardwoods, an intermedi¬
ate tension zone, and a southwestern
province of prairie-forest (Curtis 1971). He
divided the state into these three regions by
mapping the ranges for 182 species that
reached their northern or southern limits in
Wisconsin. North of the area where these
range lines cross the state is the northeast¬
ern province, south of it is the southwest¬
ern province, and the summed region cov¬
ered by the 182 range lines is the tension
zone, where geology, climate, and environ¬
mental factors have combined to exert a de¬
fining selective pressure on those species.
Our pooling of Mathiak’s collecting sites
included creeks and rivers from both Great
Lakes and Mississippi River drainage basins
in the northeastern as well as in the south¬
western region. A £-test was used to compare
northeastern and southwestern shells, using
the means of the six measured traits (SAS
1987), with a Rvalue of 0.05 or less as the
level chosen to indicate statistical sig¬
nificance.

Results

Table 1 shows the results of t- tests on six
measured shell traits as well as the results
from tests on three ratios derived from the
original measurements. All tests showed a
statistically significant difference between
northeastern and southwestern groups of
shells. The P values for these tests ranged
from a very highly significant level of less

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JASS and GLENN: Measuring the Degree of Variation in Pyganodon grandis

Table 1. North/south comparison of shell traits in Wisconsin.

North

Mean (N)

South

Mean (N)

Value of t

Degrees
of Freedom

P

Beak sculpture

3.50

3.18

3.42

96

0.0009

(54)

(44)

Width (mm)

31.2

43.8

7.53

120

<0.00001

(77)

(45)

Height (mm)

46.8

66.9

8.88

120

<0.00001

(77)

(45)

Length (mm)

85.0

115.5

7.93

120

<0.00001

(77)

(45)

Anterior (mm)

24.8

38.1

9.36

120

<0.00001

(77)

(45)

Darkness

2.65

2.24

3.95

120

0.0001

(77)

(45)

Anterior/length

0.29

0.33

6.72

120

<0.00001

(77)

(45)

Width/length

0.37

0.38

2.04

120

0.0431

(77)

(45)

Height/length

0.55

0.58

4.25

120

<0.00001

(77)

(45)

than 0.00001 to 0.0431, all falling below the
0.05 level chosen for statistical significance.
Northern shells had darker color, beak sculp¬
ture less consistently double-looped, and
widths, heights, lengths, and anterior-to-
beak measurements that were smaller than
those in the southern group.

Tension zone shells (N = 17) had means
that were generally intermediate between
north and south values: beak = 3.21, width
= 33.8 mm, height = 52.4 mm, length =
91.0 mm, anterior-to-beak = 27.7 mm,
darkness = 2.35, anterior-to-beak/overall
length = 0.30, width/overall length = 0.37,
heigh t/overall length = 0.58.

Discussion

C.T. Simpson (1896) produced one of the
early summaries dealing with classification
in the group he called the “pearly freshwa¬
ter mussels.” Among the features he consid¬
ered key characteristics for this group were
the beak with its sculptural details and “re¬
mains of the nuclear shell.” Simpson fol¬

lowed the biological rule of reliance on the
characteristics of embryonic stages to deter¬
mine the relationships within a group un¬
der study.

However, a disadvantage to relying
heavily on such traits as beak sculpture is
that they may be shown only in very young
or well-preserved shells. Though beak details
can be definitive for such specimens, by the
time they have reached adulthood, many
shells have beaks significantly damaged by
mechanical erosion and/or dissolution from
acidic waters. In certain areas, virtually ev¬
ery shell collected may show such damage.
Clarke and Berg (1959) created a key to
northeastern North American species of
Unionacea that would allow most identifi¬
cations to be made without the use of beak
sculpture characters, because they were so
often obliterated in adult specimens. Nearly
20% (N = 27) of the specimens in our Wis¬
consin dataset had the beak too damaged for
scoring.

As other studies had done, Clarke and
Berg (1959) compared typical members of

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this species to its described subspecies on the
bases of shell measurements and ratios de¬
rived from them. As mentioned previously,
Baker (1928) found two subspecies in the
state in addition to the typical A. grandis, A.
g. plana and A. g. footiana. He additionally
listed as other species entities that today are
considered part of the P. grandis complex:
A. gigantea, A. kennicottii, A. marginata and
A. corpulenta. While our study did not fo¬
cus on possible taxonomic implications of
morphometric variation, data from Wiscon¬
sin specimens illustrate the high degree of
variability of shell traits within this taxon,
whether the material studied is considered
to be representative of several species as it
was by malacologists of the past such as
Baker or as an entity that includes several of
those formerly accepted species in synonymy
as more recent researchers have done. Table
2 gives a comparison of these variables from
Wisconsin specimens.

The most basic geographical correlation
with measured shell traits that Clarke (1973)
found in his analysis of Canadian specimens
was the smaller size of northern populations
due to a shorter growing season. Our results
show that this contrast can also be seen in
the analysis of specimens collected over a
much smaller area, in a statewide rather than
a countrywide survey. However, an alternate
pooling of data from the Wisconsin collect¬

ing sites on the basis of their township val¬
ues, which are calculated simply on distance
north of the Illinois state line, yielded a cor¬
relation less strong than the results we
present in Table 1, which were based on the
ecological regions of Curtis (1971). There¬
fore the regions of Curtis, which were origi¬
nally derived from plant species ranges, gave
the better key to analysis of zoogeographic
variability in the state, presenting a more so¬
phisticated picture of the climatic and other
similar phenological stresses on Wisconsin
species than straightforward north/south dif¬
ferences.

Cummings and Mayer (1992) confirm
that P. grandis is widespread and common
throughout the entire Midwest. Habitats
they list as typical range from ponds to
creeks and rivers. This ability to survive in
widely differing habitats is no doubt key to
the widespread distribution of this species.
In fact, had P. grandis been like many other
relatively thin-shelled species that are more
restricted to pool habitats, it would not have
ranked where it did in Mathiak’ s tabulated
results (Mathiak 1979). Mathiak generated
lists ranking all of the species he collected:
one list was based on the number of collect¬
ing sites where each species was found (fre¬
quency), and another was based on the num¬
ber of specimens collected of each species
(abundance) . Pyganodon grandis ranked sec-

Table 2. Range of measurements, Pyganodon grandis complex.

Length (mm)

Height/length

N

Source

A. grandis

67-190

0.56-0.67

6

Baker 1928

A. g. plana

58-145

0.52-0.59

8

Baker 1928

A. g. footiana

23-115

0.56-0.65

8

Baker 1928

A. gigantea

85-159

0.67-0.72

2

Baker 1928

A. kennicottii

56-90

0.54-0.62

6

Baker 1928

A. marginata

30-120

0.49-0.59

9

Baker 1928

A. corpulenta

103-153

0.67-0.74

5

Baker 1928

P. grandis — North

55-140

0.49-0.69

77

This study

P. grandis — South

50-168

0.49-0.65

45

This study

P. grandis — Tension Zone

66-110

0.51-0.68

17

This study

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JASS and GLENN: Measuring the Degree of Variation in Pyganodon grandis

ond to only one other of the 45 species in
both of these lists. The totals for the top-
ranked species were 236 sites and 1161
specimens; the third-ranked species’ num¬
bers fell to 169 and 721. Further evidence
of the wide tolerance of P. grandis is the
record this species holds for survival at a wa¬
ter depth of very low oxygen and tempera¬
ture (living at a depth of 102 ft in Lake
Michigan, Reigle 1967).

Cummings and Mayer (1992) also point
out the extreme variability in this taxon; for
example, they note that the umbos are lo¬
cated more toward the center than the an¬
terior in the large-river form of the species
they call P. grandis var. corpulenta (= Baker’s
Anodonta corpulenta , Table 2). Buchanan
(1980) still listed A. grandis corpulenta as a
subspecies, as did Burch (1975). These re¬
searchers differentiated the subspecies by its
length/height ratio of less than 1 .6 and an¬
terior/length ratio almost up to 0.5.

Any wide-ranging species, such as P.
grandis , is usually assumed to be made up
of a series of subpopulations, each with its
own morphological as well as physiological
characteristics. These characteristics include
seasonal growth patterns and reproductive
phenology. For example, Surber (1914) re¬
ported finding gravid A. corpulenta in the
spring (April) and fall (October, November)
but gravid A. grandis in the fall only (Sep¬
tember, October). A species complex such
as that represented by P. grandis may thus
be expected to contain considerable diver¬
sity in life history traits as well as morpho¬
logical traits.

In spite of a degree of diversity so high
that some prior researchers have divided the
taxon into subspecies, we have considered
all specimens in our study as simply P.
grandis. Our focus was zoogeographic rather
than taxonomic, to use shell traits to ana¬
lyze the degree of variation within speci¬

mens collected during one five-year survey
of Wisconsin’s waterways. Statistical analy¬
sis of P. grandis shell traits showed signifi¬
cant differences correlating with the ecologi¬
cal regions delimited for Wisconsin by
Curtis (1971). This met our two goals of
highlighting the great deal of variation
within this taxon and also, more specifically,
of showing that this variability follows a
zoogeographic pattern in which significant
differences occur between populations in
northern and southern ecological regions of
Wisconsin.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the donation
from Flarold A. Mathiak of Pyganodon
grandis specimens collected during his state¬
wide survey to the Milwaukee Public Mu¬
seum collection and the comments of
Marian E. Havlik, La Crosse, Wisconsin,
and Dr. David H. Stansbery, Curator of
Mollusca, The Ohio State University Mu¬
seum of Biological Diversity, Columbus,
Ohio, on earlier versions of this paper. Ini¬
tially a poster presentation at the 1998 an¬
nual conference of the Wisconsin Academy
of Sciences, Arts & Letters, our manuscript
subsequently received significant beneficial
input from Transactions reviewers.

Literature Cited

Baker, F.C. 1928. The freshwater Mollusca of
Wisconsin. Part II. Pelecypoda. Bulletin 70.
Wisconsin Geological and Natural History
Survey. Madison, Wisconsin. 495 pp.
Buchanan, A.C. 1980. Mussels (Naiades) of the
Meramec River Basin , Missouri. Aquatic Series
No. 17. Missouri Department of Conserva¬
tion. Jefferson City, Missouri. 68 pp.

Burch, J.B. 1975. Freshwater Unionacean clams
(Mollusca: Pelecypoda) of North America. U.S.

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Environmental Protection Agency Identification
Manual No. 11. Malacological Publications,
Hamburg, Michigan. 204 pp.

Clarke, A.H. 1973. The freshwater molluscs of
the Canadian Interior Basin. Malacologia
13(1—2): 1—509.

Clarke, A.H., and C.O. Berg. 1939. The fresh¬
water mussels of central New York with an
illustrated key to the species of northeastern
North America. Cornell University Agricul¬
tural Experiment Station Memoir 367: 1—79.

Cummings, K.S., and C.A. Mayer. 1992. Field
guide to freshwater mussels of the Midwest.
Manual 5. Illinois Natural History Survey.
Champaign, Illinois. 194 pp.

Curtis, J.T. 1971. The vegetation of Wisconsin,
an ordination of plant communities. Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin Press, Madison. 657 pp.

Mathiak, H.A. 1979. A river survey of the unionid
mussels of Wisconsin 1973-1977. Sand Shell
Press, Horicon, Wisconsin. 75 pp.

Parejko, K. 1987. A phenological study of
aquatic invertebrates. University ofWisconsin-
Stevens Point Museum of Natural History Re¬
ports 13:72.

Reigle, N. 1967. An occurrence of Anodonta
(Mollusca, Pelecypoda) in deep water. Ameri¬
can Midland Naturalist 78:530-3 1 .

SAS Institute Inc. 1987. SAS system for elemen¬
tary statistical analysis. SAS Institute Inc.
Cary, North Carolina. 416 pp.

Simpson, C.T. 1896. The classification and geo¬
graphical distribution of the pearly freshwa¬
ter mussels. Proceedings of the U.S. National
Museum 18:295-343.

Surber, T. 1914. Identification of the glochidia
of fresh-water mussels. U.S. Bureau of Fish¬
eries, Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Fish¬
eries for the Fiscal Year 1912A-10.

Turgeon, D.D., J.F. Quinn, Jr., A.E. Bogan,
E.V. Coan, F.G. Hochberg, W.G. Lyons,
P.M. Mikkelsen, R.J. Neves, C.F.E. Roper,
G. Rosenberg, B. Roth, A. Scheltema, F.G.
Thompson, M. Vecchione, and J.D. Will¬
iams. 1998. Common and scientific names
of aquatic invertebrates from the United
States and Canada: mollusks. 2nd ed.
American Fisheries Society, Bethesda,
Maryland. 526 pp.

Joan Jass is an assistant curator in the Zoology
Section of the Milwaukee Public Museum.
Among her curatorial responsibilities is the
museum s mollusk collection, which includes over
20,000 specimens from Wisconsin, the museum
being an officially designated repository for col¬
lections from the state. Address: Zoology Section,
Milwaukee Public Museum, 800 West Wells
Street, Milwaukee, WI 53233.

Email: jass@mpm. edu

Jeanette Glenn has been a volunteer in the Mil¬
waukee Public Museum s Zoology Section since
1983. With her assistance, data from the Wis¬
consin mollusks have been entered into a com¬
puterized dataset that documents voucher mate¬
rial deposited in the collection by a number of
state researchers, including Harold Mathiak.

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TRANSACTIONS

Jeffrey J. Ripp

Fisheries Management

in the Great Lakes: The Evolution of

the Great Lakes Fishery Commission

Abstract The responsibility for managing the fishery resources of the Great

Lakes is fragmented between two national governments, eight
states, one province, and two Indian fishery management authori¬
ties. The lack of coordination between government agencies that
have authority over the fisheries of the Great Lakes has hindered
effective fisheries policy in the past. The Great Lakes Fishery Com¬
mission (GLFC) was established under the 1955 binational Con¬
vention on Great Lakes Fisheries to address issues that were be¬
yond the ability of each agency to deal with singularly. Since the
formation of the Commission, the ecology and economy of the Great
Lakes basin has changed significantly, and the Commission has
changed its focus to address new concerns in innovative ways. The
last decade has seen the emergence of a new era of cooperative re¬
source management following the principles of ecosystem manage¬
ment. The GLFC, through the development of the Strategic Great
Lakes Fisheries Management Plan, provides a forum for raising
fishery issues and coordinating the ejforts of the government agen¬
cies charged with managing Great Lakes fisheries and habitat. The
GLFC has achieved mixed success in fostering the ecosystem man¬
agement approach. This paper provides an institutional analysis
of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, describes how the
Commission 's role has changed, and evaluates the Commission s
successes in implementing ecosystem management approaches.

fhe Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC) is a bina-

JL tional organization that was created in 1955 under the
Convention on Great Lakes Fisheries to advise the govern¬
ments of the United States and Canada on the sustainable
management of Great Lakes fisheries, promote fisheries

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research, and control the sea lamprey (Petro-
myzon marinus). Since 1955, both the
political climate and the fisheries of the
Great Lakes region have changed, and the
institutions for managing the fisheries have
adapted to address new concerns. The
GLFC has played a quiet but important role
in coordinating management efforts among
two national governments, eight states, one
province, and two Native American fishery
agencies. The GLFC’s effort to establish an
ecosystem-based management approach has
allowed it to expand beyond its original
study-and-advise mandate. Despite the
success of the GLFC in coordinating fishery
management, several hurdles must be
overcome before fishery management can be
integrated with other Great Lakes manage¬
ment efforts such as the Great Lakes Water
Quality Agreement.

In the 1980s, the GLFC recognized that
maintaining sustainable fish stocks in the
Great Lakes would require an integrated,
systems-oriented approach focused on the
development of stable, self-sustaining fish
communities. The approach has been
termed “ecosystem management” and can be
described as a shift from a media-based, pro¬
gram-focused approach to one that is place-
based and ecosystem-oriented (Donahue
1988$; MacKenzie 1990; Holland 1996;
Regier, unpublished). Ecosystem manage¬
ment has been described in many different
ways. In most contexts, ecosystem manage¬
ment is defined as a management philoso¬
phy that accounts for the interrelationships
among the land, air, water, and all living
things, including humans (Hartig et al.
1998). Unfortunately, this definition does
not truly describe what ecosystem manage¬
ment “is” or how it is implemented. In prac¬
tice, ecosystem management represents a
shift from single-issue approaches that treat
the symptom, rather than the cause, of a

problem to more holistic approaches that at¬
tempt to address the underlying causes. A
good start towards a working definition of
the ecosystem approach is “an action-based,
adaptive planning and management process
that accounts for the interrelationships
among ecological components, including
humans” (Hartig et al. 1998). This work¬
ing definition gives some insight into how
ecosystem approaches are used in practice.
One of the basic tenets of ecosystem man¬
agement is the reliance on involving stake¬
holders in the decision-making process. Un¬
der ecosystem management, stakeholders are
defined as any user or group that is affected
by the resource or has the potential to im¬
pact the resource. This concept of stake¬
holder involvement is crucial for the success
of ecosystem-based approaches.

The driving force for pursuing an ecosys¬
tem approach in fisheries management is the
acknowledgment that the traditionally nar¬
row focus of resource management agencies
is insufficient to deal with the complexity of
the ecosystem. The failure of Great Lakes
institutions to effectively confront large scale
problems is a result of fragmented author¬
ity for managing the resource. In many cases,
the authority for regulating pollution and
managing fisheries resides in separate gov¬
ernment agencies. Further, conflicting social
values and uncertainty associated with man¬
agement initiatives complicate fisheries man¬
agement. The joint Strategic Great Lakes
Fisheries Management Plan (Strategic Plan)
was prepared and adopted in 1980 by Great
Lakes fishery management authorities under
the direction of the GLFC to recognize com¬
mon agency goals and establish a commit¬
ment to interj urisdictional coordinated fish¬
ery management based upon the ecosystem
approach (GLFC 1997$).

In the Great Lakes, fishery management
is only one component of a larger integrated

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RIPP: Fisheries Management in the Great Lakes

environmental management framework.
The most studied manifestations of ecosys¬
tem management in the Great Lakes are the
Lakewide Management Plans (LaMPs) and
Remedial Action Plans (RAPs) for the 43
Areas of Concern established under the 1987
amendments to the Great Lakes Water
Quality Agreement. Despite considerable
overlap with fish management activities, the
LaMPs and RAPs have been criticized for
not adequately representing fish manage¬
ment goals (Hartig et al. 1996*2, Hartig et
al. 199 Sh). Under the Strategic Great Lakes
Fisheries Management Plan, the various
state, tribal, federal, and provincial natural
resources agencies call upon the GLFC to
provide the institutional capacity to coordi¬
nate fishery and environmental management
and maintain the necessary stakeholder part¬
nerships.

This paper describes the institutions in
place for managing the Great Lakes fishery,
explains the development of ecosystem-
based management approaches, and evalu¬
ates the GLFC’s efforts to improve the fish¬
ery. The focus of this paper is the expanded
role of the GLFC under the Strategic Great
Lakes Fisheries Management Plan. The pa¬
per concludes with a discussion of the chal¬
lenges facing the GLFC in implementing
ecosystem-based fishery management and an
investigation of lake trout rehabilitation.
The author conducted telephone interviews
with eight people involved with Great Lakes
fishery management from both the United
States and Canada, including current and
past GLFC staff, a former GLFC commis¬
sioner from Canada, fish managers from
Wisconsin, academics, and sport fishery
stakeholders. The criteria for evaluating the
success of the ecosystem approach are based
primarily upon the goals and objectives set
forth in the Strategic Plan and the Great
Lakes Fishery Commission’s Strategic Vision

for the Decade of the 1990s (GLFC 1992),
but additional criteria have been borrowed
from Donahue (1988*2).

Overview of the Great Lakes Fishery

Every spring and fall, thousands of migrat¬
ing Pacific salmon ( Oncorhynchus spp.),
steelhead ( Oncorhynchus mykiss), and brown
trout (Salmo trutta) surge up the tributaries
flowing into the Great Lakes to spawn.
None of these fish species are native to the
Great Lakes. Flistorical commercial fishing
records show that less than 30 years ago,
these species were not among the top catches
in these lakes. In fact, many of these species
were not even commonly found in the lakes
until as recent as the 1980s (Jude and Leach
1993). Over the last 100 years, the aquatic
community of the Great Lakes has been
drastically altered by human activities, in¬
cluding both planned and accidental species
introductions. Deterioration in water qual¬
ity, loss of habitat, and dramatic changes in
aquatic biota parallel the increasing use of
the region’s resources through mining, fish¬
ing, logging, agriculture, hydropower devel¬
opment, and industry. Despite changes in
fish communities, the Great Lakes fishery
remains today an important resource for the
region, contributing to the economies of the
eight riparian U.S. states and the Canadian
province of Ontario.

Historically, the Great Lakes supported a
tremendous commercial fishery of lake trout
(Salvelinus namaycush), sturgeon (Acipenser
fulvescens), whitefish (Coregonus clupea-
formis), walleye (Stizostedion vitreum vit¬
reum), lake herring ( Coregonus artedii), and
blue pike (Stizostedion vitreum glaucum)
(Baldwin et al. 1979). Throughout most of
the twentieth century, the reported annual
commercial fish harvest in the Great Lakes
has remained near 43,000 tons, but the

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composition of the catch has changed sig¬
nificantly (Kelso et al. 1996). Most native
fish populations in the Great Lakes suffered
dramatic declines between the mid- 1800s
and mid- 1900s. The collapse of these fish¬
eries has been attributed to the combined
pressures of decades of overfishing, habitat
degradation, and the invasion of the exotic
sea lamprey (Jude and Leach 1993). The sea
lamprey is a fish parasite believed to have
been introduced into Lake Ontario via the
Hudson River and Erie Canal and was first
observed in the 1830s. The lamprey mi¬
grated into Lake Erie in 1921 after the open¬
ing of the Welland Canal and made its way
into Lake Superior by 1938 (GLFC 1999).
Lake trout became extinct in Lakes Michi¬
gan, Ontario, and Erie, nearly extinct in
Lake Huron, and reduced to dangerously
low levels in Lake Superior by the mid-
1950s (Jude and Leach 1993). Basin-wide
commercial lake trout harvest declined from
5,248,000 pounds in 1926 to 503,100
pounds in I960, forcing Great Lakes states
to ban commercial lake trout fishing
(Baldwin et al. 1979).

In 1955, the United States and Canada
signed the binational Convention on Great
Lakes Fisheries, establishing the Great Lakes
Fishery Commission to implement lamprey
control measures, coordinate fishery research
activities, and advise the two governments
on how to best manage their common fish
stocks for maximum sustained productivity.
By 1966, the lamprey population had been
brought under control through selective
lampricide treatment of spawning streams in
Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron.
Concurrently, stocking programs were un¬
derway to introduce Pacific salmon into the
Great Lakes to control burgeoning alewife
(Alosa pseudo harengus) populations, an ex¬
otic forage species that responded favorably
to the disappearance of lake trout from the

ecosystem. Eventually, lamprey control and
salmon stocking were undertaken in all five
of the Great Lakes (Jude and Leach 1993).

Today, the sport fishery based on non¬
native salmonids is an important compo¬
nent of the regional economy. The expand¬
ing sport fishery generates between two to
four billion dollars annually in the Great
Lakes region (Talhelm 1988). The Ameri¬
can Sportfishing Association estimates that
in Wisconsin alone, the total economic im¬
pact of the Great Lakes sport fisheries is
$199 million, which includes angler spend¬
ing and subsequent stimulated economic
activity (Maharaj and Carpenter 1996). In
contrast, the annual commercial harvest in
the Great Lakes region is valued at $270
million (Talhelm 1988). While these num¬
bers are not directly comparable, they dem¬
onstrate the increasing importance of sport
fishing in the region. As a result, fishery
managers have felt increasing pressure to
expand sport fishing opportunities (prima¬
rily non-native species), often at the expense
of commercial fishing.

Despite significant improvements in wa¬
ter quality since 1970 and a resurgence in
some native fish populations, rehabilitating
native fish stocks and stabilizing the aquatic
ecosystem remain elusive goals that are of¬
ten at odds with one another. Lake trout re¬
habilitation efforts, with the exception of
Lake Superior, have generally failed to
achieve stable reproducing populations due
to loss of genetic strains, poor habitat, and
competition with non-native species (Jude
and Leach 1993). Overfishing remains a
concern for many species. Exotic nuisance
species, such as the sea lamprey, continually
challenge natural resource agencies’ budgets
and ability to manage the resource. Long-
lived toxic chemicals affect the wholesome¬
ness of fish as human food. Habitat degra¬
dation through wetland loss and shoreline

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development continue to reduce the avail¬
able spawning and rearing habitat for many
species. Further, changing social conditions
over the last 40 years have forced manage¬
ment institutions to address new public val¬
ues and concerns. These changes include a
reduction in commercial fishing of native
stocks in favor of recreational fishing of in¬
troduced species, the emergence of tribal
groups exercising legitimate commercial and
subsistence rights that did not exist 50 years
ago, increasing public concern about Great
Lakes environmental quality issues, and well-
organized environmental groups.

Authorities for Great Lakes
Fishery Management

Donahue (1988^) describes the complex
milieu of actors involved with managing the
Great Lakes as an “institutional ecosystem”
consisting of local, state, federal, and inter¬
national entities. In the Great Lakes region,
management responsibilities for the fishery
resource fall primarily under the jurisdiction
of eight states and one province, although
tribal agencies and the two federal govern¬
ments play a major role in many aspects of
fishery management.1 Great Lakes manage¬
ment is particularly complicated by the fact
that the responsibility for environmental
protection and resource management are of¬
ten divided between separate agencies. Ex¬
periments in regional government are also
common in the Great Lakes. Organizations
such as the Great Lakes Fishery Commis¬
sion, International Joint Commission, Great
Lakes Commission, and Council of Great
Lakes Governors all play a role in Great
Lakes management.

Canadian responsibilities for managing
the fishery resource are divided between the
federal government and the Province of
Ontario. Under the British North America

Act of 1867, the federal government has ex¬
clusive legislative jurisdiction over protection
and development of the fisheries. The fed¬
eral government also has indirect jurisdiction
through its authority to intervene in inter¬
provincial and international matters. Under
British common law, the provinces are the
proprietors of the natural resources within
their boundaries. The Canada-Ontario Fish¬
eries Agreement clarified the dual federal-
provincial responsibilities somewhat; the fed¬
eral government may legislate for the
regulation and protection of the Great Lakes
fishery, but the provinces may exercise their
proprietary rights to allocate the fish under
their jurisdiction as long as these acts are con¬
sistent with federal legislation (Thompson
1974). Canadian federal authority is demon¬
strated primarily through its focus on re¬
search, environmental quality, habitat issues,
and the establishment of treaties with the
United States. Provincial authority is mani¬
fest through licensing, permitting access to
the resource, and setting harvest restrictions
and goals (Dochoda, unpublished). On the
southern side of the border, the Great Lakes
states have supreme control over fisheries,
including the right to stock fish, manage
habitat, and regulate harvest with one limi¬
tation, the Commerce Clause of the United
States Constitution. The U.S. federal role for
managing the Great Lakes fishery is still be¬
ing defined but is expressed primarily in mat¬
ters of navigation, environmental quality,
habitat protection, endangered species, exotic
species, and international treaties. The U.S.
federal government has played a role sup¬
portive to the states and tribal governments
through research, fish stocking, and law en¬
forcement. In the U.S., these arrangements
reflect a strong states’ rights bias in fishery
management.

Native American rights in the Great
Lakes basin vary widely between the U.S.

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and Canada. In the U.S., off-reservation
fishing rights are rooted in treaties with the
federal government. The U.S.- Ottawa treaty
of 1836 preserves tribal fishing rights in the
northern Michigan waters of Lakes Superior,
Michigan, and Huron. In Wisconsin, the
1842 treaty with the Chippewa preserves
tribal fishing rights for the Red Cliff and Bad
River tribes in Lake Superior. Tribes with
off-reservation fishing rights have established
intertribal agencies to regulate their mem¬
bers’ activities. The Great Lakes Indian Fish
and Wildlife Commission and the Chip-
pewa-Ottawa Fishery Management Author¬
ity have considerable authority to manage
fisheries and, for the most part, operate in¬
dependently of state regulations. The rights
of Native Americans in Canada are much
less clear and are still being defined in the
Canadian Supreme Court. In these cases, the
Court has devised a test that assigns aborigi¬
nal fishing rights a high priority along with
commercial fishing, and less priority to rec¬
reational fishing. In general, the provinces
retain authority to regulate Indian fishing,
and it is unlikely that Canadian Native
Americans will achieve the same control over
fisheries that has been reserved by the U.S.
tribes (Dochoda, unpublished).

The Great Lakes Fishery Commission

In spite of obvious declines in shared fish
stocks, efforts to establish an international
fishery authority for the Great Lakes be¬
tween 1893 and 1932 failed repeatedly.
Ontario, being outnumbered by the states,
desired a convention that would allow full
representation of its interests on a one-to-
one basis with the states. Attempts at estab¬
lishing a convention between Canada and
the U.S. included the 1908 Treaty between
the United States and Great Britain on Fish¬
eries in the U.S. and Canadian Waters and

the 1946 Convention between the United
States of America and Canada for the De¬
velopment, Protection, and Conservation of
the Fisheries of the Great Lakes. The U.S.
Congress failed to ratify these agreements
due to the unwillingness of the states to re¬
linquish management authority to an inter¬
national body (Dochoda, unpublished). Ini¬
tiatives by the states and provinces to
coordinate among themselves were opposed
by the U.S. Department of State and the
U.S. Congress on the grounds that they vio¬
lated the Supremacy Clause of the U.S.
Constitution.2 The crisis that precipitated
true cooperation on fisheries management
in the Great Lakes was the destructive power
of the exotic sea lamprey. Recognizing that
state and provincial fish managers were in¬
capable of responding effectively to the sea
lamprey, the governments of the United
States and Canada ratified the 1935 Con¬
vention on Great Lakes Fisheries, establish¬
ing the binational Great Lakes Fishery
Commission.

The Commission was charged with a set
of duties that can be characterized as prima¬
rily “study-and-advise” (GLFC 1983). Un¬
der the 1955 Convention, the Commission
was authorized to formulate a research pro¬
gram designed to determine what measures
were necessary to maximize the sustained
production of fish stocks of concern in the
Great Lakes, publish results of this research,
and recommend appropriate management
measures to the United States and Canada.
In addition to the Commission’s general role
in coordinating fisheries research, the Com¬
mission was charged with the specific task
of formulating and implementing a compre¬
hensive program for the purpose of eradicat¬
ing or minimizing the impacts of the sea
lamprey in the Great Lakes.

The Commission consists of four3 ap¬
pointed commissioners from each nation for

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a total of eight, each with a single vote. Ap¬
pointments to the Commission are made by
the President of the United States and the
Privy Council of Canada for staggered six-
year terms. Two commissioners in each sec¬
tion represent federal interests and two rep¬
resent state or provincial interests. Carroll D.
Besadny, former secretary of the Wisconsin
Department of Natural Resources, served as
a United States commissioner between 1990
and 1996. The Convention stipulates that
any decision or recommendation from the
Commission requires approval from both
the U.S. and Canadian sections. The Con¬
vention allows each section of the Commis¬
sion to establish an advisory committee for
each of the Great Lakes, and the advisors
have the right to attend all sessions of the
Commission. To carry out the duties set
forth in the Convention, the GLFC has the
authority to conduct investigations, imple¬
ment lamprey control measures, and hold
public hearings in the United States and
Canada. The Convention authorizes the
Commission to appoint an executive secre¬
tary, retain staff, acquire facilities, contract
with other parties, and spend money to
cover the joint expenses of carrying out its
duties.

The U.S. enabling legislation, the Great
Lakes Fisheries Act of 1956, established a
mechanism for appointing advisors to the
GLFC and defined the terms of reference for
advisors. Under the terms of reference, ad¬
visors are appointed to the Commission
from each lake, based upon recommenda¬
tions of the governor of each state. Each state
is allowed up to four advisors for each lake,
representing the state agency with jurisdic¬
tion over the fishery, the commercial fish¬
ery, the sport fishery, and one public-at-large
interest. Typically, the advisors are agency
officials and influential fishery people. The
Canadian section has never established a

strong relationship with its advisors nor has
it developed a structured mechanism for
choosing advisors. Dr. Henry Regier, a
former Canadian commissioner, believes
that this lack of interest in advisors can be
attributed in part to the absence of strong
federalism objections from Ontario with re¬
spect to Canadian federal involvement with
Great Lakes fisheries (Henry Regier, former
GLFC commissioner, personal communica¬
tion 11 Oct 1998).

The Commission is jointly funded by the
U.S. and Canada. Administrative costs are
split evenly among the two nations, while
sea lamprey control costs are split 69% from
the U.S. and 31% from Canada, according
to historic lake trout harvest records. U.S.
appropriations come primarily from the
U.S. State Department, and Canadian
funding comes out of the budget of Fish¬
eries and Oceans Canada. This funding ar¬
rangement is vehemently supported by the
eight Great Lakes states and the tribes, who
view the State Department as being a neu¬
tral force in the dynamic interactions of the
region, as opposed to a competitive fund¬
ing source among the state, tribal, and fed¬
eral fisheries programs (Jim Addis, director,
Wisconsin Department of Natural Re¬
sources Bureau of Integrated Science Ser¬
vices, former Wisconsin fisheries director,
personal communication 3 Nov 1997). Ad¬
ditional funding is sometimes available
through grants from agencies such as the
U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration under the Department of
Commerce and through partnerships with
federal and state agencies implementing the
GLFC’s programs.

The GLFC maintains a full time staff (the
Secretariat) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The
Secretariat carries out the administrative re¬
sponsibilities of the GLFC, providing sup¬
port, leadership, and institutional memory

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for the various management committees and
technical boards. The Secretariat also plays
an important role in carrying out the
Commission’s duties under the joint Stra¬
tegic Plan. The Commission is required by
the Convention to “in so far as feasible,
make use of the official agencies of the Con¬
tracting parties and of their Provinces or
States and may make use of private or other
public organizations, including international
organizations, or of any person” (GLFC
1983). The Commission has contracted with
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S.
Geological Survey, U.S. Army Corps Engi¬
neers, and the Department of Fisheries and
Oceans Canada to conduct fisheries re¬
search, implement lamprey control measures
such as lampricide application in spawning
streams and construction of lamprey barri¬
ers, and maintain fish hatcheries for use in
rehabilitative lake trout stocking programs.

The Commission supports the work of
several management committees and boards
to carry out its responsibilities. The Sea
Lamprey Integration Committee is respon¬
sible for coordinating the GLFC’s lamprey
management program and consists of a
variety of members from academia and
government agencies. The Board of Techni¬
cal Experts serves as an independent, expert,
and professional panel to advise the GLFC
on technical matters relevant to the Com¬
mission’s mandate. Board members are
selected without consideration of agency or
institutional affiliation. The Board currently
has established four task groups dealing with
biodiversity, habitat, lake trout rehabi¬
litation, and alternative sea lamprey control.
The Habitat Advisory Board is charged with
identifying current and emerging habitat
issues that may impede fishery goals,
proposing strategies for habitat rehabili¬
tation, assisting Lake Committees develop
environmental objectives in fish manage¬

ment plans, and communicating the
GLFC’s habitat goals to resource managers,
interest groups, and the public. Habitat
Advisory Board members represent federal
environmental agencies, federal fishery
agencies, academia, tribal management
agencies, the International Joint Commis¬
sion, and non-governmental environmental
organizations. Members of these boards are
appointed by the Great Lakes Fishery
Commission. The Commission also sup¬
ports several state and provincially appointed
boards and committees, including the Lake
Committees, Fish Health Advisory Commit¬
tee, and Law Enforcement Committee.
Decisions on these boards and committees
are made by consensus of the members, and
when consensus cannot be reached, all
viewpoints are presented to the Commission
in technical reports.

State, provincial and tribal authorities
participate on formal Lake Committees that
exist independently of the GLFC. These
Lake Committees are arguably the most im¬
portant management institutions with re¬
spect to the Great Lakes fishery. Although
the Lake Committees do not report directly
to the GLFC, their activities are intricately
linked to the Commission’s mission. Thus,
the Lake Committees are often viewed as the
implementing arms of the Commission. The
GLFC originally helped to establish a Lake
Committee for each of the Great Lakes to
coordinate implementation of the sea lam¬
prey control program and to carry out many
of its research and advisory duties. The Lake
Committees consist of one senior fish man¬
ager from each agency with jurisdiction over
the lake and include tribal representation.4
The federal governments are not represented
on the Lake Committees. The Council of
Lake Committees is comprised of twenty-
one members selected from the various Lake
Committees. The Council’s primary func-

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RIPP: Fisheries Management in the Great Lakes

tion is to coordinate activities among the
Lake Committees, respond to requests made
by any of the Lake Committees, and con¬
sider issues pertinent to or referred by the
GLFC. The Council provides a forum for
state, provincial, and tribal agencies to de¬
velop and coordinate joint research projects,
share data, establish harvest objectives, and
consider issues of common concern to mem¬
ber agencies. The Lake Committees have
been tremendously successful at bringing the
managers together to discuss fish manage¬
ment issues. Dochoda reports that state and
provincial satisfaction with progress under
the Lake Committees was so high that the
Great Lakes states rejected an opportunity
to form a regional fishery management
council under the U.S. Magnuson Fishery
Act of 1976 (Dochoda, unpublished). In¬
stead, the state and provincial agencies re¬
quested, through the Lake Committee fo¬
rums, that the Commission assist with the
development of the joint Strategic Great
Lakes Fishery Management Plan (Fetterolf
1988).

Emerging Roles: The Joint Strategic Plan

The signing of the joint Strategic Great
Lakes Fishery Management Plan was the
most important advance in Great Lakes fish¬
ery management. Francis and Regier (1995)
claim that such advances occur when eco¬
systems, institutions, and societies become
congruent. These advances are characterized
by “inevitable bursts of human learning”
that proceed with “less conflict and more
creativity” (Francis and Regier 1995). The
Strategic Plan was developed during the era
of New Federalism in the early 1980s, as fed¬
eral oversight in state and regional manage¬
ment activities was finding disfavor. The
states saw an opportunity to delineate their
authority and preclude intervention from
well-funded federal agencies with broad

mandates (Jim Addis, personal communica¬
tion 3 Nov 1997). The development of the
plan was a logical activity for the GLFC un¬
der its study-and-advise mandate.5 The
GLFC facilitated the plan by providing
funding, policy guidance, and a neutral fo¬
rum to develop mutually beneficial strategies
for fishery management. The Commission
secured the commitment of each agency by
creating a Committee of the Whole, consist¬
ing of natural resource agency directors, each
with veto power (Fetterolf 1988). This sup¬
port was necessary to ensure that the agen¬
cies would take ownership of the plan and
become implementers and advocates (Jim
Addis, personal communication 3 Nov
1997).

The original Strategic Plan was signed in
1981 by top-level state, provincial, and
federal agency directors to express their
mutual commitment to interjurisdictional
and interdisciplinary coordinated fishery
management. In 1986, the Chippewa-
Ottawa Treaty Management Authority and
the Great Lakes Fish and Indian Wildlife
Commission joined the original twelve
fishery agencies in endorsing and signing the
memorandum of acceptance for the plan.
Prior to the establishment of the joint
Strategic Plan, arrangements for coordi¬
nating Great Lakes fishery management
among the array of actors were informal,
typically involving meetings among state fish
biologists with jurisdiction over common
lakes. These arrangements did not fully
address the binational profile of the resource,
nor did they regularly involve non-fishery-
related Great Lakes managers (Carlos
Fetterolf, retired executive secretary, Great
Lakes Fishery Commission, personal com¬
munication 6 Nov 1997). The plan re¬
mained essentially the same until 1997,
when it was revised at the request of the
signatories to establish a stronger ecosystem

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

management focus, ensure mutual accounta¬
bility in steps to implement the plan, enable
periodic review of the plan, and provide
guidance to the implementing agencies.

While ceding none of their statutory and
constitutional authority, the agencies agreed
to work with the Great Lakes Fishery Com¬
mission through the Lake Committees and
the Council of Lake Committees. These be¬
came the primary forums for addressing
management problems that exceeded each
agency’s authority and ability to address in¬
dividually. These problems include lost fish¬
ing opportunities, overharvest, instability of
fish communities due to sea lampreys, in¬
troduction of exotic species, inadequate en¬
vironmental quality due to conflicting ob¬
jectives of fishery and environmental
managers, competition and conflicts among
users of the fishery resource, and climate
change. The agencies agreed that changes to
the plan should be made by consensus of all
of the signatories. The Strategic Plan estab¬
lishes four fundamental strategies for achiev¬
ing common goals. These strategies deal
with the following areas: consensus-based
decision making, agency accountability, eco¬
system focus, and information management
(GLFC 1997^):

Consensus must be achieved when manage¬
ment will significantly influence the interests
of more than one jurisdiction. . . . Fishery
management agencies must be openly ac¬
countable for their performance. . . . The Par¬
ties must exercise their full authority and in¬
fluence in every available arena to meet the
biological, chemical and physical needs of the
desired fish communities. . . . Fishery agen¬
cies must cooperatively develop means of mea¬
suring and predicting the effects of fishery and
environmental management decisions.

— Strategic Great Lakes Fishery Management
Plan, 1997

The Great Lakes Fishery Commission
pledged to maintain and support the goals
and processes outlined in the Strategic Plan
and facilitate the plan’s implementation.
The Strategic Plan calls upon the Great
Lakes Fishery Commission to resolve differ¬
ences among the jurisdictions, undertake re¬
search for measuring and predicting the ef¬
fects of management decisions, and provide
institutional memory to avoid repeating past
management errors. The Commission’s spe¬
cific duties under the Strategic Plan include
the following:

• Maintaining and supporting the activities
of the Lake Committees for the develop¬
ment of fish community objectives and
identification of environmental issues im¬
peding fish community objectives.

• Providing a mechanism for conflict reso¬
lution. If the Lake Committees cannot
reach consensus on fish community ob¬
jectives, the problem will be taken to the
Great Lakes Fishery Commission for
non-binding mediation or arbitration.

• Representing fishery interests in unre¬
solved environmental issues to the appro¬
priate body (e.g., the International Joint
Commission, U.S. Environmental Pro¬
tection Agency, Environment Canada).

• Establishing the expert Habitat Advisory
Board to assist each Lake Committee in
developing ecosystem objectives and iden¬
tifying critical habitats essential to achiev¬
ing its fishery objectives.

• Coordinating the development and
implementation of standards for record¬
ing and maintaining fishery management
and assessment data.

• Maintaining current internet links to the
parties’ databases and a catalog of fishery
assessment and research data to facilitate
access by the parties.

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• Publishing a summary of the Lake Com¬
mittee reports in the Commission’s an¬
nual reports to the federal governments
and the public.

In 1992, the GLFC issued its Strategic
Vision for the Great Lakes Fishery Commis¬
sion for the Decade of the 1990s (GLFC
1992). The vision statement renewed the
Commission’s commitment to the ecosys¬
tem approach and covered three interrelated
areas: 1) maintain healthy Great Lakes eco¬
systems, 2) continue to apply integrated pest
management approaches for sea lamprey
control, and 3) develop and maintain insti¬
tutional and stakeholder partnerships. The
purpose of the Strategic Vision was to focus
the direction of the Commission’s programs
and provide a framework to ensure that the
programs were consistent with and compli¬
mentary to the Strategic Plan. The Strate¬
gic Vision provides milestones for measur¬
ing the progress towards implementation of
the Strategic Plan. These milestones set goals
for no net loss of habitat, lake trout restora¬
tion, reduction of toxic substances, inte¬
grated lamprey management, and delivery of
complimentary programs through the Lake
Committees. In summary, the Strategic Vi¬
sion emphasizes the GLFC’s commitment to
providing leadership to the Lake Commit¬
tees, coordinating fish management pro¬
grams, developing coordinated programs for
research, and strengthening partnerships
among fish management agencies and non¬
agency stakeholders.

Implementing Ecosystem
Management: Evaluation of the GLFC

In addition to maintaining its ongoing pro¬
grams for Great Lakes research and lamprey
control, the major activity of the GLFC in
recent years has been implementing the Stra¬

tegic Plan. The Commission has undertaken
several initiatives under the Strategic Plan
and the Strategic Vision, with variable suc¬
cess. These can be grouped into three broad
categories: 1) facilitating interjurisdictional
cooperation among fishery agencies, 2) es¬
tablishing interdisciplinary coordination
among natural resources and environmen¬
tal agencies, and 3) implementing unilateral
initiatives for ecosystem management and
developing partnerships with non-agency
stakeholders.

Interjurisdictional Cooperation

Overall, the GLFC and its various boards
and committees enjoy a mutually beneficial
relationship with state, provincial, and tribal
agencies. An informal survey conducted by
the Commission shows that the agencies
generally believe that the Lake Committees,
Council of Lake Committees, and the
Commission’s technical boards are serving
a useful purpose, providing adequate forums
for discussion and are appropriately charged
(GLFC, unpublished). State and provincial
support for the Great Lakes Fishery Com¬
mission can be attributed to the limited role
assigned to the Commission under the terms
of the 1933 Convention. Specifically, the
Commission’s limited autonomy and lack of
regulatory power pose little threat to state
management authority (Donahue 1998 b).
Because each nation has chosen to retain the
sovereign right to manage its own resources
in the way that maximizes national interests,
the Great Lakes Fishery Commission has of¬
ten played a quiet role in Great Lakes man¬
agement, serving mainly as a forum for co¬
ordinating management activities through
the Lake Committees and allowing the
states to take the credit (Carlos Fetterolf,
personal communication 6 Nov 1997).
State fishery interests feel that the Lake
Committees provide a valuable, non-hierar-

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chical forum for high-level fish managers to
share data, develop fish community objec¬
tives, and test new fish management ap¬
proaches in the basin.

One of the most important initiatives
under the Strategic Plan is the development
of fish community objectives (FCOs)
through the Lake Committees. The FCOs
are essentially lake-wide fish management
plans that describe the desired state of the
resource. Fish community objectives are de¬
scribed by a species mix and the necessary
ecological qualities (stability, balance,
sustainability, and diversity) that will enable
the communities to persist. Fish commu¬
nity objectives also contain measures of the
fishing opportunities that the community
offers (yield, allowable harvest, and recre¬
ational fishing hours). The objectives reflect
the understanding that natural systems are
dynamic and attempt to provide some flex¬
ibility to allow the agencies to adjust man¬
agement approaches to meet changing con¬
ditions. Fish community objectives serve as
the mechanism through which the states,
tribes, and provinces work out their specific
fish community, allocation, and harvest
goals for the resource. The development of
objectives requires each agency to identify
its operational plans for achieving the FCOs
and to submit changes to these plans to the
Lake Committees. The Strategic Plan stipu¬
lates that the fish community objectives be
determined by consensus. Any management
activity that may affect one of the other par¬
ties must be brought forward in the Lake
Committees. The Lake Committees are to
work in concert with the lake-wide manage¬
ment plans (LaMPs) established under the
Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement to
identify issues that may impede achieve¬
ment of the fish community objectives.

The Lake Committees have been success¬
ful in establishing fish community objectives

for Lakes Superior, Huron, and Michigan.
Draft fish community objectives have been
established for Lakes Ontario and Erie, but
have not been finalized because they have not
been supported by the public and local poli¬
ticians (Margaret Dochoda, fisheries biolo¬
gist, Great Lakes Fishery Commission, per¬
sonal communication 5 Nov 1997 and 17
Nov 1997). The establishment of fish com¬
munity objectives represents significant
progress towards interjurisdictional coopera¬
tion on fishery management. However, fish
community objectives have been criticized as
being an inadequate tool for coordinating
habitat management, controlling exotic spe¬
cies, and meeting public demands for the re¬
source. One of the criticisms is that the fish
community objectives often lack adequate
support (political and public) in the home
jurisdiction. In particular, the decision to
emphasize lake trout restoration in the fish
community objectives was reached by the
state and provincial fish chiefs, who were not
always in a position to negotiate their
agency’s interests, especially in states with
vocal sport fishery interests (Lee Kernen, re¬
tired Wisconsin Department of Natural Re¬
sources fisheries director, personal commu¬
nication 4 Nov 1997). Several managers have
questioned the effectiveness of establishing
quantitative objectives in light of the rapidly
changing resource conditions. Many manag¬
ers feel that the fish community objectives
are not sufficiently comprehensive and prin¬
ciple-based to serve as the basis for environ¬
mental planning in a dynamic resource (Lee
Kernen, personal communication 4 Nov
1997). Further, there is no formal commit¬
ment to follow the fish community objectives
in the home state until they are promulgated
as state law, and there is no regulatory “ham¬
mer” to enforce the plans once they are pub¬
lished. The GLFC’s sole influence in the de¬
velopment of fish community objectives is

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the technical assistance provided by the
Habitat Advisory Board, and its financial
support of the Lake Committees.

Nonetheless, the lack of enforceability has
not impeded the implementation of the fish
management plans. One of the unquan-
tifiable advantages of the formal Lake Com¬
mittees is that the agencies have been able
to exert peer pressure on one another to im¬
prove cooperation in allocating the resource
among jurisdictions, establishing common
consumption advisories, coordinating lam¬
prey control efforts, and identifying the best
use of federally stocked fish (Carlos Fetterolf,
personal communication 6 Nov 1997). A
good example of how the Lake Committees
function to manage the fishery is the recent
announcement of chinook salmon stocking
decreases in Lake Michigan for 1999. Con¬
cern over the forage base (primarily alewife)
and a desire to avoid a population crash
similar to what was experienced in the 1980s
led Wisconsin and Michigan fish managers
to agree on 27% decreases in chinook
salmon stocking ( Wisconsin Outdoor Journal
1999).

The cooperation among the different ju¬
risdictions on the Lake Committees has been
forced, in some instances, by the possibility
of using the Commission to mediate differ¬
ences on the Lake Committees, as provided
for in the Strategic Plan. To date, the Lake
Committees have only requested the Com¬
mission’s intervention twice: once pertain¬
ing to the introduction of disease through
stocked fish and once in Lake Erie due to a
dispute over the allocation of yellow perch
between Ohio and Ontario. In both cases,
the parties settled their disagreements before
the Commission could produce a non-bind¬
ing recommendation (Margaret Dochoda,
personal communication 5 Nov 1997 and
17 Nov 1997). The non-use of the Com¬
mission’s mediation powers suggests that the

states and province are unwilling to set a pre¬
cedent by using the Commission to formally
settle differences, for fear of relinquishing
their authority to a regional institution.
However, the results of a 1995 survey con¬
ducted by the Great Lakes Fishery Commis¬
sion indicated that the Lake Committees
have been frustrated by the lack of the
Commission’s ability to arbitrate differences
on fish community objectives (GLFC, un¬
published). The Strategic Plan was revised
in 1997 to broaden the possibilities for al¬
ternative dispute resolution, including ap¬
pointing a third party mediator or arbitra¬
tor. This provision has not been used, and
it is difficult to predict how successful con¬
flict resolution will be in the future. In all
likelihood, the conflict resolution mecha¬
nisms will not be used, but the fact that they
are present may exert enough pressure on the
Lake Committees to reach consensus.

Interdisciplinary Coordination

Resource management and environmental
protection have evolved under separate aus¬
pices. In an attempt to restore and main¬
tain the chemical, physical, and biological
integrity of the Great Lakes Basin ecosys¬
tem, the International Joint Commission
(IJC), U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), and Environment Canada
have undertaken comprehensive, lake-wide
management planning activities (LaMPs).
Remedial Action Plans (RAPs) have been
developed to rehabilitate the severely de¬
graded 43 Areas of Concern (AOCs) that
do not meet one or more of the beneficial
uses established by the Great Lakes Water
Quality Agreement. Of the fourteen impair¬
ments to beneficial uses, several pertain di¬
rectly to fishery management and fish habi¬
tat. These include restrictions on fish
consumption, degradation of fish popula¬
tions, fish tumors and deformities, degra-

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dation of phytoplankton and zooplankton
communities, and loss of fish habitat. The
RAP and LaMP initiatives have often failed
to include fishery managers in the decision¬
making process. The concern over lack of
participation is not new. In 1976, the
GLFC issued a brief to the IJC titled “En¬
vironmental Quality and Fishery Resources
of the Great Lakes.” The brief addressed
eutrophication, power plants, thermal pol¬
lution, dredging and spoils disposal, shore¬
line and nearshore habitat modification,
toxic contaminants, and flow regulation
(Johnson 1980). The primary concern was
with the command-and-control approach
to water quality management. The GLFC
wanted to be able to influence water-qual¬
ity management decisions, and the brief
called for the development of a mutually
productive consultative mechanism to ad¬
dress habitat issues. One of the thrusts of
the Strategic Plan was to provide this con¬
sultative mechanism using the Lake Com¬
mittees and the newly created Flabitat Ad¬
visory Board. In 1986, the Habitat Advisory
Board developed guidelines for fish habitat
management and planning in the Great
Lakes and actively engaged the Lake Com¬
mittees to become more involved in habi¬
tat issues. Increasingly, RAP teams, the
LaMPs, and the Lake Committees have
mutually acknowledged that the loss of
habitat is a serious concern (Hartig et al.
1996). However, many habitat rehabilita¬
tion efforts undertaken in the Areas of Con¬
cern (AOCs) are still not directly related to
fish community objectives.

In an effort to achieve greater coordina¬
tion and strengthened partnerships between
environmental and fishery planners, the
U.S. EPA, Environment Canada, and the
GLFC’s Habitat Advisory Board held a
workshop in 1993 to discuss fish commu¬
nity goals in RAPs and to develop recom¬

mendations for achieving better coordina¬
tion (Hartig 1993). Although fishery man¬
agement planning has been initiated in all
43 AOCs, successful integration of fish and
water quality goals has only occurred in
Green Bay, Hamilton Harbor, and several
AOCs in Canadian Lake Superior. The suc¬
cess of these remedial action plans was at¬
tributed to the availability of sufficient
funding, numerous dedicated individuals
who moved the RAP forward, and the prox¬
imity to high quality research facilities
(Hartig 1993). Attempting to build upon
the success of these RAPs, workshop par¬
ticipants emphasized that agreement on
clear, quantifiable fish community and
habitat objectives was necessary to direct
remedial efforts and measure progress. The
workshop called for accelerating the estab¬
lishment of fish community objectives to
guide water-quality planning efforts. An¬
other recommendation was for fish manag¬
ers with responsibilities in AOCs to work
directly with the RAP teams to set quanti¬
tative targets. The workshop recognized
that both top-down (senior agency staff)
and bottom-up support (coordinated by lo¬
cal RAP teams) were required for success¬
ful integration of management activities.

Integrating water quality and fishery
management in the Great Lakes continues
to be one of the most difficult challenges,
not only for the Great Lakes Fishery Com¬
mission, but also the parties involved in de¬
veloping RAPs and LaMPs. One reason for
the difficulty is that the RAPs and LaMPs
tend to be planning-led activities that set
specific targets for water quality and define
actions to achieve those targets, while the
fish management plans and fish community
objectives tend to be more adaptive and
learning-led (Margaret Dochoda, personal
communication 3 Nov 1997 and 17 Nov
1997). This distinction is best demon-

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strated by the difference in time scales ex¬
pected to achieve the goals. The RAPs of¬
ten focus on short-term goals, while the fish
community objectives address long-term
ecosystem objectives. Another difficulty is
that many of the fish community objectives
were drafted before undertaking a complete
assessment of physical habitat needs. The
effort involved in reaching consensus on
these objectives among the fishery agencies
may preclude revisiting and redesigning the
plans to accommodate the LaMP and RAP
processes (GLFC, unpublished). Coordina¬
tion has been achieved to some degree, with
the Lake Superior Committee providing the
Binational Program (Lake Superior LaMP)
with aquatic ecosystem indicators and feed¬
back on proposed initiatives. The best op¬
portunities for coordination exist in Lakes
Erie and Michigan, where the LaMP team
has actively engaged the Lake Committees
(Margaret Dochoda, personal communica¬
tion 5 Nov 1997 and 17 Nov 1997). On a
more basic level, many fish managers are
simply not interested in participating in the
RAP and LaMP processes because they view
them as endless planning cycles with no
teeth. In some cases fishery management
agency personnel are already stretched too
thin to participate in the RAP teams. Those
fish managers that do participate in the pro¬
cess often do so on their own initiative, with
no support from their agency (Lee Kernen,
personal communication 4 Nov 1997).

Both the Great Lakes Fishery Commis¬
sion and the International Joint Commis¬
sion continue to attempt integration of
these efforts, but the development of habi¬
tat objectives to link water quality and fish
communities ultimately depends upon the
state or province’s ability to designate re¬
sources to address the problem. Neither the
IJC nor the GLFC has any formal author¬
ity to coordinate these activities. The big¬

gest challenges for integrating management
initiatives are the lack of formal recognition
of each other’s authority and the absence of
rules of engagement for consultation be¬
tween planning groups. The GLFC contin¬
ues to represent fishery interests on advisory
and decision-making groups involved with
environmental quality, but the Commission
cannot force fishery managers to get in¬
volved with these groups (Fetterolf 1988).
The 1993 workshop recommended that the
terms of reference of either the GLFC or
the IJC be expanded to ensure integration
of environmental quality initiatives. This
has not happened. In the meantime, more
informal mechanisms including Lake Com-
mittee-LaMP initiatives and the IJC’s bien¬
nial State of the Lakes Conference continue
to be the primary mechanisms for integrat¬
ing fisheries and water quality management.

Unilateral Initiatives

Underlying all fishery management activi¬
ties in the Great Lakes is sea lamprey con¬
trol. The lamprey problem has been de¬
scribed as a “coiled spring” that must be
constantly managed or the population will
bounce back. Without lamprey control, all
of the other fishery management activities
would be pointless (Carlos Fetterolf, per¬
sonal communication 6 Nov 1997). Under
the Strategic Vision, the Commission is at¬
tempting to move away from the use of ex¬
pensive lampricides that are publicly unfa¬
vorable to more integrated lamprey control
measures, including the release of sterile
males and barrier dams, such as those found
on the Brule River in northwestern Wiscon¬
sin. Integrated lamprey control draws on the
experiences of integrated pest management
strategies that use multiple mechanisms to
control pest species. The GLFC relies
heavily on input from the Lake Committees
and technical committees to direct its lam-

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prey efforts. Almost all parties would agree
that the Commission has done a fine job in
implementing its lamprey control strategy.
In addition to lamprey control, the GLFC
has sponsored a series of successful sympo¬
sia on a wide variety of topics pertaining to
the Great Lakes. These symposia have gen¬
erated considerable interest in ecosystem
management initiatives and have allowed
fishery managers to interact with environ¬
mental managers on a professional level.
The GLFC has also been successful in
implementing the Strategic Plan’s manage¬
ment information strategy. The Habitat
Advisory Board has developed standard
methods for evaluating habitat, and other
technical committees have devised standards
for stocking fish and measuring lamprey
wounding rates. These activities have al¬
lowed the fishery agencies to share data. The
GLFC has provided an on-line database of
fish stocking efforts and sport and commer¬
cial harvest data from each state and for each
lake in the basin. Lee Kernen, former direc¬
tor of fisheries for the State of Wisconsin,
believes that the sharing and standardization
of information has been the biggest success
of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission (Lee
Kernen, personal communication 4 Nov
1997).

Another priority under the Strategic Vi¬
sion is improving the GLFC’s partnerships
and strengthening the role of its advisors in
Great Lakes management. The Canadian
Section has not established a strong advisory
committee. According to Carlos Fetterolf,
retired executive secretary of the GLFC,
Canada did not clearly define the role for its
advisors and none were initially appointed.
Fetterolf pushed for the Canadian section to
name an advisory committee. In the 1980s,
the section authorized five appointments, al¬
though only two have been filled (Carlos
Fetterolf, personal communication 6 Nov

1997). In contrast, the states have appointed
advisors to the U.S. section, but the U.S.
advisors have suffered from a lack of direc¬
tion and guidance. In general, the advisors
have not been effective in shaping the
Commission’s policies. The U.S. advisors are
supposed to provide alternative viewpoints
on the Lake Committees but generally rep¬
resent a narrow range of vocal commercial
and sport (primarily charter boat) fishing
interests (Ed Michaels, Trout Unlimited,
personal communication 18 Nov 1997).
Despite the enhanced emphasis on the ad¬
visors, many people believe that the Com¬
mission failed to bring the right representa¬
tion into the process from the start. One of
the criticisms of the advisors is that they do
not represent non-consumptive uses of the
fishery, such as environmental interests, lo¬
cal citizens, navigation, and other industry
(Ed Michaels, personal communication 18
Nov 1997; Dan Thomas, Great Lakes
Sportfishing Council, personal communica¬
tion 5 Nov 1997).

Achieving the 1955 Convention’s goal of
maximizing the sustained productivity of
the fishery depends upon promoting
healthy ecosystems and controlling the sea
lamprey. The Strategic Plan recognizes that
this will require flexible, adaptive manage¬
ment to deal with changing environmental
conditions and scientific uncertainty. Adap¬
tive management strategies are becoming
widely used where management actions of¬
ten have unintended consequences. Because
managers rarely fully understand the com¬
plexity of the system they are trying to man¬
age, adaptive management provides a way
for assessing the impacts of management de¬
cisions and redirecting efforts as research
demonstrates that change is needed. Hartig
et al. (199 6b) maintain that adaptive man¬
agement requires adequate assessment, re¬
search, and monitoring to define the prob-

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lems, establish cause and effect relation¬
ships, evaluate remedial options, and docu¬
ment effectiveness.

The Commission has continued to de¬
velop a research program to determine the
appropriate measures for supporting healthy
Great Lakes ecosystems and for controlling
the sea lamprey. Commission-sponsored
research takes advantage of the skills of a
variety of fisheries experts. The GLFC
cooperates with governmental and non¬
governmental agencies to carry out its
research program. For instance, the Com¬
mission contracts with the Great Lakes
Science Center, the Department of Fisheries
Oceans, the Ontario Ministry of Natural
Resources, universities, and tribal agencies.
The states rely on the Commission’s research
to investigate issues that they cannot tackle
alone. This research provides vital infor¬
mation for both the Commission and fish
managers to develop science-based fishery
programs and has been used to improve
coordination among fish management
agencies. Based on its research programs, the
Commission distributes funds to the Lake
Committees through its Coordinated
Activities Program. Recent research initia¬
tives have addressed the need for tighter
ballast management to prevent exotic species
introductions, examined the life history of
the sea lamprey to develop integrated control
techniques, investigated fish diseases trans¬
mitted through stocked fish, and supported
the development of environmental objectives
through partnerships with the Habitat

Advisory Board, Board of Technical Experts,
U.S. EPA, and Environment Canada
(GLFC 1995). The level of research support
the Commission will be able to provide is
threatened because funding for the GLFC’s
research activities has not kept pace with
needs. This has hindered many initiatives
that are critical to evaluating new manage¬
ment actions and supporting current
programs in the Great Lakes.

The Great Lakes Fishery Commission,
like many agencies, is being forced to do
more with less. Table 1 demonstrates the
funding level for the Fishery Commission
for 1995, the latest year for which numbers
are readily available. Sea lamprey manage¬
ment is the largest expense for the GLFC.
Beginning in 1992, the Commission began
submitting budget requests based upon ac¬
tual program needs instead of anticipated
government contributions. The annual pro¬
gram requirements and cost estimates are
submitted at two levels: one that will deliver
a base program of lamprey control and one
that will deliver the base program plus ad¬
ditional initiatives necessary to meet the
Commission’s mandate. In 1997, the Com¬
mission requested a 66% funding increase
(over 1995) to offset level funding through¬
out the 1990s. The 1997 budget requested
$21.5 million to deliver the objectives out¬
lined in the Strategic Vision for the 1990s
(GLFC 1997^). Despite this request, fund¬
ing for 1996, 1997, and 1998 remained
stagnant at $12.5 million. This trend may
be changing. The minister of Fisheries and

Table 1. 1995 Funding.

United States

Canada

Total

Sea lamprey management

$8,173,750

$ 3,748,177

$ 11,921,927

Administration and general research

$ 629,250

$ 549,250

$ 1,178,500

Total

$8,803,000

$4,4297,427

$ 13,100,427

Source: GLFC 1995 Annual Report.

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Oceans, Canada, announced that Canada
will provide $6 million in fiscal year 1999
to support the sea lamprey control program.
This represents a substantial increase over
the previous year and will allow the Com¬
mission to continue to fund other programs
and important research in 1999 (GLFC
1998).

Without additional funding, the Great
Lakes Fishery Commission will find it in¬
creasingly difficult to commit resources to
non-lamprey-related Great Lakes research
and the Lake Committees. As is typical of
learning-led management institutions, the
Lake Committees have limited autonomous
financial resources. The individual agencies
have cooperated to pool resources, but these
activities are threatened as state government
cutbacks force agencies to use their resources
in other areas. As support dwindles, the Lake
Committees will not be able to construc¬
tively engage the relatively well-funded
LaMPs (Dochoda, unpublished). The com¬
mitment to adaptive management made in
the Strategic Plan requires a strong commit¬
ment to research to evaluate the results of
management activities. As funds become
limited, the Commission must focus a larger
proportion of its budget on lamprey control
(Carlos Fetterolf, personal communication
6 Nov 1997). The Great Lakes states, Prov¬
ince of Ontario, and tribal agencies have
supported the Commission’s requests for ad¬
ditional funding to provide for more sea
lamprey control and research, especially in
the St. Mary’s River, which produces lam¬
preys that kill nearly 50% of the lake trout
in Lake Huron. It is estimated that it will
cost $1.2 million annually to treat the St.
Mary’s for lamprey (GLFC 199 7 b). The ad¬
ditional resources provided by Canada for
fiscal year 1 999 will allow the Commission
to begin necessary lamprey control programs
on the St. Mary’s River.

Challenges for the Future

The Commission was initially established to
eliminate the sea lamprey and, indirectly, to
protect the commercial fishery. Since 1980,
the Commission has been able to transform
itself into an integral partner in Great Lakes
management, and its programs have under¬
gone a transition away from lamprey control
towards ecosystem management. This transi¬
tion has been possible because the broad
scope of the 1955 Convention allows the
GLFC considerable flexibility in implement¬
ing its responsibilities for “maximizing the
sustained productivity” of fish stocks. Even
with the flexibility afforded to the Commis¬
sion under the Convention, implementing an
ecosystem approach to fishery management
in the Great Lakes will require overcoming
many institutional challenges. Francis and
Regier (1995) recognize that Great Lakes or¬
ganizations are driven by their policy and le¬
gal mandates, not intergovernmental agree¬
ments. These agreements are not accounta¬
bility-forcing documents, and nobody is
ultimately responsible for achieving ecosys¬
tem integrity or ecosystem health. The chal¬
lenge for the Great Lakes Fishery Commis¬
sion will be to improve interjurisdictional
cooperation and interdisciplinary coordina¬
tion on issues of common concern without
regulatory oversight. Past efforts to coordi¬
nate water quality and fishery goals have not
been entirely effective, and new mechanisms
for achieving integration must be sought.
One feasible approach would be to combine
the Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s State
of the Lakes Reports with the International
Joint Commission’s Biennial Report on the
Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement or co¬
sponsoring a State of the Lakes Conference,
similar to the IJC’s State of the Lakes Con¬
ference but with expanded terms of reference
to engage the other management interests.

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Another challenge will be to clearly de¬
fine the goals of ecosystem management for
the Great Lakes Basin and translate these
goals into implementable actions. Since
there is a general reluctance to relinquish
state and provincial authority to a regional
authority such as the GLFC, this will nec¬
essarily include fostering greater stakeholder
participation in fishery management activi¬
ties. Experience has shown that successful
ecosystem management requires effective co¬
ordination among multiple resource man¬
agement authorities, participatory planning
by local interests, consensus-based decision
making, interdisciplinary team building,
conflict resolution, and adaptive strategies
for dealing with unforeseen consequences of
management activities (MacKenzie 1990,
Hennessey 1994, Holland 1996). The suc¬
cess of the Strategic Plan and, ultimately,
ecosystem management in the Great Lakes
will depend on engaging the appropriate
stakeholders in management decisions. The
Commission has failed to achieve the mile¬
stones set forth in the Strategic Vision for
improving stakeholder participation. With¬
out public support for the ecosystem ap¬
proach, it is unlikely that the Commission
will be able to secure the necessary support
from the governments of the United States
and Canada to continue many of its critical
research and coordinative functions.

One way to improve cooperation among
the participating agencies and stakeholders
would be the adoption of a Great Lakes code
of conduct for responsible fisheries under the
model developed through the United Na¬
tions Convention on the Law of the Sea
(United Nations 1982). The Canadian De¬
partment of Fisheries and Oceans has al¬
ready adopted a Canadian Code of Conduct
for Responsible Fisheries. Many of the ar¬
ticles of the United Nations Convention
have been informally implemented in the

Great Lakes Basin, and the GLFC should
play a key role in bringing the United States
and Canada together to fully develop a
workable code of conduct for the Great
Lakes (Henry Regier, personal communica¬
tion 11 Oct 1998). Bringing the necessary
parties to the table to discuss a Code of Con¬
duct is a daunting task. The difficulty in de¬
fining the role of public participation in eco¬
system management can be illustrated by
briefly reviewing the controversy that exists
regarding lake trout rehabilitation, which has
been termed a metaphor for the larger issue
of whether fishery management should be
principally concerned with the optimization
of human uses of the resource or with the
restoration and protection of ecological
structure and function (Lange and Smith

1995).

The oligotrophic Great Lakes fish com¬
munities were traditionally dominated by
lake trout, and lake trout restoration is the
cornerstone of the fish community objec¬
tives developed by the various Lake Com¬
mittees. In spite of a concerted effort in all
of the Great Lakes to rehabilitate lake trout
with stocking, lake trout populations, with
the exception of Lake Superior, have not re¬
sponded as well as mangers had hoped
(Kernen 1995). The management rationale
for lake trout rehabilitation continues to be
that an ecosystem that ensures abundant,
reproducing diverse stocks of lake trout
would certainly protect most other constitu¬
ents of the cold-water community. The lake
trout is a long-lived predator species that
could naturally reproduce and lend ecosys¬
tem stability that is not obtainable under
an artificial stocking program. But it is also
a species that, because of its fatty flesh, con¬
centrates lipophilic substances and may not
provide a safe-to-eat sport fish. Fish man¬
agers have come to realize the dichotomy
of the two distinctly different goals of re-

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storing self-sustaining populations and pro¬
viding recreational fishing opportunities
(Lange and Smith 1995). The impediments
to lake trout restoration are not only bio¬
physical, but socioeconomic.

A recent survey showed that state and
provincial Great Lakes fish managers remain
committed to rehabilitating lake trout
(Knuth et al. 1995), but many are reeval¬
uating their fish community priorities in
light of increasing political pressure from
sport fishing interests. State and provincial
managers showed stronger support for
maintaining artificial fish communities than
federal agencies, due to the traditional
relationship between anglers and state
managers (i.e., the license fee). Although
fragmented, sport fishing interests (parti¬
cularly charter boat captains) view lake trout
rehabilitation as in direct competition to
their preferred species, the Pacific salmon,
and are often vehemently opposed to
rehabilitation efforts (Dan Thomas, personal
communication 5 Nov 1997). Some in the
sport fishing community would rather see
the money spent on propagating and
stocking non-native species, rather than
continuing to fund failing rehabilitation
efforts. Other sport fishing groups, such as
Trout Unlimited, view the re-establishment
of native fisheries as the ultimate goal for fish
management in the Great Lakes (Ed
Michaels, personal communication 18 Nov
1997). Commercial fishermen view the lake
trout as a hindrance to capturing their
preferred species, due to restrictions placed
on gillnetting for perch and whitefish.
Although the lake trout have historically
been a large portion of the commercial
catch, for the foreseeable future, there will
not be a sufficient population to allow a
directed harvest. Sport and commercial
fishing interests are in direct competition
with each other for a limited resource. As the

sport fishery expands, sport fishermen view
the commercial harvest as a threat to their
fish and blame the state managers for failing
to control commercial harvest. Another
important stakeholder in the fish commu¬
nity includes non-consumptive users, such
as environmentalists and environmental
agencies working to improve water quality.
They support lake trout rehabilitation
because the lake trout serves as a way to
measure water quality improvements and
ecosystem health (Marshall et al. 1987).

The fish-community objectives are an at¬
tempt to give direction to management ac¬
tions undertaken by the various fishery agen¬
cies by focusing on a set of ecological
principles. But these ecological principles
must be tempered by social values. Histori¬
cally, the states have not opened up the de¬
cision-making process to a wide range of
fishery stakeholders. Fish managers have as¬
signed differing priorities to stakeholder
viewpoints, with the state or provincial fish¬
ery agency being the most important, fol¬
lowed by the GLFC, federal fisheries agen¬
cies, provincial or state environmental
agencies, agency-appointed advisory groups,
the angling public, commercial fisheries,
tribal governments and local legislators,
sportsmen’s associations, Great Lakes envi¬
ronmental groups, and lastly, charter boat
captains (Knuth et al. 1995). Public support
can only be guaranteed by involving all of
the stakeholders in the decision-making pro¬
cess to set the priorities for fish management
activities through the Lake Committees. Al¬
though the GLFC does not have direct au¬
thority to implement management pro¬
grams, it can encourage discussion between
government managers and fishery stakehold¬
ers through the Lake Committees. The
Great Lakes Fishery Commission should
encourage discussion among the fish man¬
agers about their role in educating the pub-

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lie about the value of maintaining native
stocks. The Commission could play a larger
role in publishing information about the
value of native fisheries, using their web site,
press releases, and technical reports.

Simply engaging and educating the stake¬
holders will not be sufficient to meet
everyone’s goals for the resource. Lee Kernen,
former Wisconsin Department of Natural
Resources fisheries director, believes that a
native lake trout and Pacific salmon fishery
are not exclusive, but merely different routes
to the same goals. Instead of an all-or-noth¬
ing approach, Kernen recommends follow¬
ing a more balanced management scheme
that will continue to provide sport fishing
opportunities while allowing more time for
lake trout rehabilitation to occur. This ap¬
proach recognizes that the fish communities
will never return to what they were before
human perturbations, and public perceptions
about the fishery should be included in man¬
agement decisions. The approach advocated
by Kernen is similar to the rapid biotic and
ecosystem response strategy proposed by
Doppelt et ah (1993) for the Pacific North¬
west, which calls for protecting refuges of
undisturbed habitats first and then attempt¬
ing restoration on a priority system. If this
approach is to be successful in the Great
Lakes, fish managers must manage sport an¬
glers’ expectations for the resource, rather
than increasing stocking to meet demands.
They must also tighten commercial harvest
quotas to compensate for the efficiency of
modern technology. Kernen believes that the
future of the fishery will depend on manag¬
ers listening more to both consumptive and
non-consumptive users because management
decisions based on science alone cannot pro¬
vide resolution for competing values (Kernen
1995). Regardless of scientific soundness,
policies that lack support within society’s
views and values will fail.

The public doesn’t identify well with a [may¬
fly] hatch or a one-meter improvement in
Secchi-disk value. The public is pragmatic.
Their support is needed to fund programs to
clean the Great Lakes. . . . the current chal¬
lenge is to develop strategies without destroy¬
ing the fisheries and losing public support.

— Lee Kernen, 1991

Conclusion

The Great Lakes have been managed as an
international resource for over 90 years by the
United States and Canada. Both countries are
proud of their history of cooperation in
managing this shared multipurpose resource.
The continuation of the Great Lakes Fishery
Commission is critical to maintaining this
cooperation on fishery issues. In the short
term, fish management goals may be in
conflict with ecosystem management. This
can be resolved by expanding the temporal
scale of fish rehabilitation. The life span of
lake trout is over twenty years long, and
efforts to rehabilitate the species will expand
over more than one professional career. Thus,
long-term political support and institutional
memory will be required to fully rehabilitate
the Great Lakes. Fishery managers need to
expand their definition of stakeholders and
fully include all interests in the decision¬
making process. Improved communication
and participation with stakeholders can be
achieved by emphasizing successes and
fostering a sense of public ownership in the
process. Building an ecosystem management
framework in the Great Lakes will require
developing institutional mechanisms that
enable long-term agency commitments. This
task is difficult because the arrangements for
Great Lakes management reflect the dispute
over centralized (regional and federal) versus
decentralized (state and provincial) control.
Further, Donahue (1988^) claims that

Volume 87 (1999)

131

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

political realities cannot be avoided while
searching for the optimal management
framework for the Great Lakes. These
realities include the experimental nature of
regional institutions, aversion to large-scale
institutional reform, lack of commitment to
cooperative management, and the failure of
existing institutions to exercise their full
powers under their mandates. While the ideal
management framework may be indescrib¬
able and unattainable, the GLFC’s flexible
mandate will allow it meet the needs of the
resource and provide the institutional
leadership for fishery management. The
GLFC’s activities continue to be supported
by tribal, state, provincial, and federal
agencies, and the Commission is uniquely
poised to emphasize ecosystem management
for the entire region.

Ackknowledgments

The author would like to thank the following
for their patience and assistance in preparing
this manuscript: Margaret Dochoda (GLFC),
Carlos Fetterolf (GLFC), Marc Gaden
(GLFC), Jim Addis (Wisconsin Department
of Natural Resources), Lee Kernen (Wiscon¬
sin Department of Natural Resources), John
Magnuson (University of Wisconsin-Madi-
son), Ed Michaels (Trout Unlimited), Henry
Regier (GLFC), Dan Thomas (Great Lakes
Sport Fishing Council).

Endnotes

1 Government agencies responsible for Great
Lakes fish management are (alphabetically):
Canada Department of Fisheries and Oceans,
Chippewa-Ottawa Treaty Fishery Manage¬
ment Authority (U.S.), Great Lakes Indian
Fish and Wildlife Commission (U.S.), Illinois
Department of Natural Resources, Indiana
Department of Natural Resources, Michigan

Department of Natural Resources, Minnesota
Department of Natural Resources, National
Marine Fisheries Service (U.S.), New York
State Department of Environmental Conser¬
vation, Ohio Department of Natural Re¬
sources, Ontario Ministry of Natural
Resources, Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Com¬
mission, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S.
Geological Survey (Biological Resources
Division), and the Wisconsin Department of
Natural Resources.

2 The Great Lakes Basin Compact of 1955 was

not ratified by the U.S. Congress until 1964,
after provisions allowing membership for
Ontario and Quebec were rewritten to give
the provinces solely a consultative role. Al¬
though not specific to fishery issues, the
GLBC was an attempt to coordinate many
aspects of Great Lakes management.

3 The number of Commissioners was increased

by a diplomatic memorandum from three to
four per section, with one U.S. alternate, pri¬
marily to address U.S. concerns about inad¬
equate representation from the lower lakes.

4 Lake Ontario Committee: New York, Ontario.

Lake Erie Committee: Michigan, New York,
Ohio, Ontario, Pennsylvania. Lake Huron
Committee: Michigan, Ontario, Chippewa-
Ottawa Treaty Fishery Management Author¬
ity. Lake Michigan Committee: Illinois,
Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Chippewa-
Ottawa Treaty Management Authority. Lake
Superior Committee: Michigan, Minnesota,
Ontario, Wisconsin, Chippewa-Ottawa
Treaty Management Authority, Great Lakes
Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.

5 Initially, recalcitrant states claimed that the agree¬

ment was a violation of Article I of the U.S. Con¬
stitution which states “No State shall enter into
any Treaty, Alliance or Confederation.” How¬
ever, the U.S. State Department construed the
Strategic Plan to be simply rules of engagement,
and not to empower the GLFC with new au¬
thorities or create a new alliance.

132

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RIPP: Fisheries Management in the Great Lakes

Literature Cited

Baldwin, N.S., R.W. Saalfeld, M.A. Ross,
and H.J. Buettner. 1979. Commercial fish
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Great Lakes Fisheries Commission Tech¬
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Dochoda, M. Unpublished manuscript. Au¬
thorities, responsibilities and arrangements
for managing fish and fisheries in the
Great Lakes Ecosystem.

Donahue, M.J. 1988^. Institutional arrange¬
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on Ecosystem Management in the Great
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Doppelt, B., M. Scurlock, C. Frissell, and J.
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Francis, G.R., and H.A. Regier. 1995. Bar¬
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L.H. Gunderson, C.S. Holling, and 8.S.
Light, eds. Barriers and bridges to the re¬
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Fetterolf, C.M. 1988. Uniting habitat qual¬
ity and fishery programs in the Great
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ume II: impact of toxic contaminants on
fisheries management. Lewis Publishers,
Chelsea, MI.

Great Lakes Fishery Commission. Unpub¬

lished. Results of a 1995 survey: successes
and problem areas for the integration of
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Great Lakes fisheries.

Great Lakes Fishery Commission. 1983.
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and Canada on Great Lakes Fisheries
(1955). Great Lakes Fishery Commission,
Ann Arbor, ML

Great Lakes Fishery Commission. 1992. Stra¬
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Commission for the decade of the 1990s.
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Great Lakes Fishery Commission. 1995. An¬
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Commission for 1995. Great Lakes Fish¬
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Great Lakes Fishery Commission. 1997^. A
joint strategic plan for management of
Great Lakes fisheries. Great Lakes Fishery
Commission, Ann Arbor, MI. (Supersedes
1980 and 1994 versions).

Great Lakes Fishery Commission. 1997 A Fis¬
cal year 1997 program requirements and
cost estimates. Great Lakes Fishery Com¬
mission, Ann Arbor, MI.

Great Lakes Fishery Commission. 1998. Press
release April 3, 1998. Fisheries and Oceans
minister David Anderson announces in¬
creased support for the Great Lakes Fish¬
ery Commission. Great Lakes Fishery
Commission, Ann Arbor, ML

Great Lakes Fishery Commission. 1999. Fact
Sheet 3: Sea Lamprey: A Great Lakes In¬
vader. Available on the Fishery Commis¬
sion’s web site at http://www.glfc.org.

Hartig, J.H. 1993. Toward integrating reme¬
dial-action and fishery-management plan¬
ning in Great Lakes Areas of Concern.
Great Lakes Fishery Commission, Ann Ar¬
bor, MI. 34 p.

Flartig, J.H., D.P. Dodge, D. Jester, J.
Atkinson, R. Thoma, and K. Cullis.

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1996a. Toward integrating remedial ac¬
tion planning and fishery management
planning in Great Lakes areas of concern.
Fisheries 2 1 (2) : 6- 1 3 .

Hartig, J.H., J.R. Kelso, and C. Wooley.
199 6b. Are habitat rehabilitation initia¬
tives uncoupled from aquatic resource
management objectives in the Great
Lakes? Canadian Journal of Fisheries and
Aquatic Sciences 33 (Suppl. 1 ) :424 — 3 1 .

Hartig, J.H., M.A. Zarull, and N.L. Law.
1998. An ecosystem approach to Great
Lakes management: practical steps. Jour¬
nal of Great Lakes Research 24(3): 73 9-30.

Hennessey, T.M. 1994. Governance and
adaptive management for estuarine ecosys¬
tems: The case of Chesapeake Bay. Coastal
Management 22:1 19-43.

Holland, M.M. 1996. Ensuring sustainability
of natural resources: focus on institutional
arrangements. Canadian Journal of Fisher¬
ies and Aquatic Sciences 53 (Suppl. 1):432 —
39.

Johnson, M.G. 1980. Great Lakes environ¬
mental protection policies from a fisher¬
ies perspective. Canadian Journal of Fish¬
eries and Aquatic Sciences 37(7): 11 96—
2104.

Jude, D.J., and J. Leach. 1993. The Great
Lakes fisheries. Pp. 517-51 in C.C. Kohler
and W.A. Hubert, eds. Inland fisheries
management in North America. American
Fisheries Society, Bethesda, Maryland.

Kernen, L.T. 1991. Environmental objectives
for fish community remediation. Pp. 35-
38 in R.L. Eshenroder, J.H. Hartig, and
J. E. Gannon, eds. Lake Michigan: an eco¬
system approach for remediation of critical
pollutants and management offish commu¬
nities. Great Lakes Fisheries Commission
Special Publication 91-2.

Kernen, L.T. 1995. Lake trout: valuable na¬
tive fauna or just grease? Pp. 198—201 in
J.H. Selgeby, R.L. Eshenroder, C.C.

Krueger, J.E. Marsden, and R.L. Pycha,
eds. Proceedings of the international confer¬
ence on restoration of lake trout in the
Laurentian Great Lakes.

Kelso, R.M., R.J. Steedman, and S. Stoddart.
1996. Historical causes of change in Great
Lakes fish stocks and the implications for
ecosystem rehabilitation. Canadian Journal
of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 53 (Suppl.
1): 10-19.

Knuth, B.A., S. Lerner, N.A. Connelly, and
L. Gigliotti. 1995. Fishery and environ¬
mental managers’ attitudes about and sup¬
port for lake trout rehabilitation in the
Great Lakes. Pp. 185-97 /Vz J.H. Selgeby,
R.L. Eshenroder, C.C. Krueger, J.E.
Marsden, and R.L Pycha, eds. Proceedings
of the international conference on restoration
of lake trout in the Laurentian Great Lakes.

Lange, R.E., and P.A. Smith. 1995. Lake
Ontario fishery management: The lake
trout restoration issue. Pp. 470-76 in J.H.
Selgeby, R.L. Eshenroder, C.C. Krueger,
J.E. Marsden, and R.L Pycha, eds. Proceed¬
ings of the international conference on res¬
toration of lake trout in the Laurentian
Great Lakes.

MacKenzie, S.H. 1980. On the challenge of
implementing ecosystem management
plans in the Great Lakes basin. Pp. 69—77
in J.E. FitzGibbon, ed. International and
transboundary water resources issues. Ameri¬
can Water Resources Association.

Maharaj, V., and Carpenter, J.E. 1996. The
1996 Economic Impact of Sport Fishing
in the United States. American Sport¬
fishing Association, Alexandria VA.

Marshall, T.R, R.A. Ryder, C.J. Edwards,
and G.R. Spangler. 1987. Using the lake
trout as an indicator of ecosystem health-
application of the dichotomous key. Great
Lakes Fisheries Commission Technical Re¬
port 49. Ann Arbor, MI.

Regier, H.A. Unpublished. A case study on

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the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin.
Invited paper for a 1995 workshop on bio-
regional organizations in Portland, Or¬
egon.

Talhelm, D.R. 1988. Economics of Great
Lakes fisheries: A 1985 assessment. Great
Lakes Fisheries Commission Technical Re¬
port 54. Ann Arbor, ML 54 pp.

Thompson, P.C. 1974. Institutional con¬
straints in fisheries management. Journal
of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada
(3 1 ) : 1 965—8 1 .

United Nations. 1982. United Nations Con¬
vention on the Law of the Sea. Adopted
December 10, 1982. United Nations Sales

Publications, United Nations, NY. Docu¬
ment E.83.V.5.

Wisconsin Outdoor Journal. 1999. Lake Michi¬
gan chinook stocking to be cut 27%. Wis¬
consin Outdoor Journal J anuary 1, 1999.

Jeffrey Ripp holds a master's degree in Water
Resources Management from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and currently is a fellow
with the US. House of Representatives' Commit¬
tee on Resources in Washington, D. C. Address :
2211 N. Somerset Street, Arlington, VA 22205.
Email: jeff ripp @mail house.gov

Volume 87 (1999)

135

Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Executive Director
1999 Academy Council

Robert G. Lange
Officers

President: Rolf Wegenke, Madison
President-Elect: Mary Lynne Donohue, Sheboygan
Past President: Ody J. Fish, Pewaukee
Vice President-Sciences: Open
Vice President-Arts: Open

Vice-President-Letters: Paul G. Hayes, Cedarburg
Secretary: Judith L. Kuipers, La Crosse
Treasurer: Gerd H. Zoller, Poynette

Coun ci lo rs- at- Large

DeEtte Beilfuss Eager, Evansville
Donald R. Gray, Madison
James S. Haney, Madison
George C. Kaiser, Milwaukee
William J. Moynihan, Milwaukee
Nancy R. Noeske, Milwaukee*

Ann Peckham, Middleton*

Thomas E. Terry, Madison* *ex officio

Councilor- at-Large Emeritus

John W. Thomson, Mt. Horeb

Your membership will encourage research, discussion
and publication in the sciences, arts and letters of
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TRANSACTIONS

of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Volume 88

2000

TRANSACTIONS

of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Volume 88 • 2000

Editor William J. Urbrock

Department of Religious Studies
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Oshkosh, Wisconsin 54901

Managing Editor Patricia Allen Duyfhuizen
321 Heather Court
Eau Claire, Wisconsin 54701

© 2000 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and
All rights reserved

ISSN 0084-0505

For information on membership in the Academy,
call (608) 263-1692.

Contents

TRANSACTIONS

Volume 88 • 2000

From the Editor v

Part One: Aldo Leopold Commemorative Article

The Secret Leopold, or Who Really Wrote A Sand County Almanac? 1

Curt Meine

Since his death in 1948, Aldo Leopold has come to be regarded as one of the pre¬
eminent figures in the American conservation tradition. Popular and professional
attention to his work, however, has tended to focus on selected facets of his writing
and his experience, especially his final contributions in A Sand County Almanac .

Examination of the record of responses to Leopold’s work allow us to track broader
trends in conservation history.

Part Two: Other Current Articles

Presettlement Wildlife in Northwest Wisconsin Pine Barrens 23

James O. Evrard

Wildlife known to inhabit Wisconsin’s Northwest Pine Barrens during 1650 -1850
did not differ greatly from today’s wildlife community with the exception of a few
ungulate, furbearer, and bird species.

Birds and Amphibians of Selected Pine Barrens Wetlands 37

James O. Evrard

Breeding season surveys of small wetlands in and adjacent to the Namekagon Barrens
Wildlife Area recorded 25 bird and 1 1 amphibian species.

B landings Turtles in the Crex Meadows Wildlife Area 49

James O. Evrard and M. Eloise Canfield

Substantial numbers of threatened Blanding’s Turtles were found in the Crex
Meadows Wildlife Area.

Floating- leafed and Submersed Aquatic Macrophyte Distribution and
Abundance, with Emphasis on Eurasian Watermilfoil (Myriophyllum
spicatum), in Forest Lake, Fond Du Lac County, Wisconsin 57

D. Timothy Gerber

Frequency and abundance measures were compared among native aquatic macrophytes
and an exotic aquatic species in a 20.4-ha “kettle” lake within Kettle Moraine State
Forest.

in

Evaluation of Survey Methods for the Earner Blue Butterfly
on the Necedah Wildlife Management Area
Richard S. King

Mark-release-recapture methods are assumed to be the most accurate means of
estimating butterfly populations. The efficacy of three methods commonly used to
estimate Karner blue butterfly population levels, including mark-release-
recapture, were evaluated.

Eco regi ons of Wisco ns in

James M. Omernik, Shannen S. Chapman, Richard A. Lillie,
and Robert T. Dumke

Ecoregions provide the spatial framework needed to implement ecosystem management
and integrate management strategies across state and federal resource management
agencies that have different responsibilities for the same geographic areas.

Across the Unknown Waters to Wisconsin:
the Migration Narratives of Four Women Settlers
Cathleen Palmini

The writings of four women, bound for settlement in Wisconsin, chronicle their
eventful voyages across the Atlantic Ocean and through the Great Lakes.

Animal Remains from Native American Archaeological Sites
in Western Wisconsin
James Theler

This article reports the spatial and temporal distribution of 190 animal species
recovered at 32 ancient Native American living sites in western Wisconsin.

From the Editor

Rocks and more rocks! That phrase provides an apt descrip¬
tion of the two weeks my spouse and I enjoyed in England’s
West country and in Wales this past summer. During the first
of those weeks, we were among the thirty people enrolled in
a course on “West Country Geology and Scenery” taught by
Peter Hardy for the Summer Academy 2000 at Bristol Uni¬
versity. Armed with information and images from rock and
fossil samples we examined in the classroom, from Peter’s
fascinating slide-illustrated lectures, and from his book on
The Geology of Somerset (Bradford on Avon: Ex Libris Press,
1999), we thirty amateur geologists eagerly embarked on our
daily bus trips. We climbed and crawled, slogged and
scrambled, from Burrington Combe and Cheddar Gorge in
the Mendip Hills to Portishead along the Severn estuary, from
the coast at Watchet to the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire,
and from the wetlands of Somerset and the sandy formations
at Bridport on the English Channel to the high quarries and
mining sites at Ham Hill and the Forest of Dean. We re¬
entered the Paleozoic and Mesozoic Periods as we studied
Devonian red sandstones, carboniferous shales and oolitic
limestones, siltstone and red and gray banded marls from the
Triassic, and the fossil-rich dark-gray shales and limestones of
the lower Lias, the first unit of the Jurassic.

Rocks and more rocks! A highlight of our second week was
the time we spent in breathtakingly beautiful Snowdonia
National Park in Wales, including a full day’s outing up and
down the flanks of magnificent Mt. Snowdon, which reaches
to some 3500 feet above sea level. Up we went in 90 minutes
by Snodownia Railway (steam-driven); down we returned by
foot, hiking for four hours along a rocky pathway trodden by
thousands of others over the years.

Our rocky vacation was notable, too, for the fascinating
fossils we came across on several of our outings. We were
especially taken by the scores of ammonites we encountered,
especially in the shales of the tidal flats at Watchet. These
cephalopod molluscs with coiled plane-spiral shells lived in
the sea during the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods and then
became extinct. At Watchet, site of the first scientific record¬
ing of the species Psiloceras planorbis, the ammonites range in

v

size from some only as big as a fingernail to
others nearly a foot and a half across and in
variety from smooth to strongly-ribbed types.
The specimens that garnered most of our
oohs and aahs, however, were those of
Caloceras johnstoni, amazingly preserved with
their original mother-of-pearl luminescence
that shimmers in shades of red and green.

Rocks and more rocks! One of the realiza¬
tions that came to us during our visit to the
English West country was that we were tread¬
ing on land that, millions of years ago, had
been sandwiched much more closely between
what are now the continents of Europe and
North America. In fact, we were in a place
that, like the place we now call Wisconsin,
may have lain astride or been near the equa¬
tor in Paleozoic times! The old roadsign we
used to pass in Door County, “Halfway to
the North Pole,” still brings a chuckle when
we consider the Silurian limestone, rife with
fossils of ancient tropical reefs, that is visible
all over the county.

The current issue of Transactions , it must
be admitted, is not devoted to rocks! Further¬
more, unlike those long-extinct ammonite
fossils at Watchet, the life-forms discussed in
this year’s articles generally are still with us.
Some of them, however, are under threat of
extinction in Wisconsin or elsewhere. James
Evrard and M. Eloise Canfield provide in¬
formation about the status of the Blanding’s
turtle, a threatened species in Wisconsin, in
the wetlands of the Crex Meadows Wildlife
Area. In a second article, James Evrard sur¬
veys archaeological and historical records to
document the wildlife found in the North¬
west Pine Barrens of Wisconsin during the
period 1650-1850. In a third article Evrard
reports survey results on the status of several
species of birds and amphibians that cur¬
rently inhabit the little-known pine barrens
wetlands in and adjacent to the Namekagon
Barrens Wildlife Area. Another of Wisconsin’s

protected areas, the Necedah National Wild¬
life Refuge, is a home to the Karner blue
butterfly, listed as a federally endangered spe¬
cies. Richard King evaluates the reliability of
three standard survey methods used to moni¬
tor the populations of these endangered beau¬
ties and to provide information that might be
useful to helping their recovery. One com¬
mon threat to the native biodiversity of any
region comes from invasions of exotic species.
D. Timothy Gerber reports on the extent and
impact of the exotic eurasian watermilfoil on
the distribution and abundance of native
aquatic plants in Forest Lake within Kettle
Moraine State Forest in Fond du Lac County.
Archaeologist James Theler provides a sur¬
vey of the abundance of animal species evi¬
dent in occupational remains at nearly three
dozen archaic, woodland, and Oneota Na¬
tive American sites in western Wisconsin and
neighboring areas. One sobering statistic is
provided by the large shell “middens” (refuse
heaps) that testify to the great quantities of
freshwater mussels (several species of which
are now unknown in the region) that once
were harvested by native peoples in parts of
the Upper Mississippi River Valley.

A major contribution towards mapping
and understanding the mosaic of ecoregions
in our state is provided by James Omernik,
Shannon Chapman, Richard Lillie, and
Robert Dumke, in their presentation on
“Ecoregions of Wisconsin.” This study is
designed to aid integrated assessment and
management of Wisconsin’s environmental
resources across agency and program lines.

In an article rich in human interest,
Cathleen Palmini brings together the self-
narrated migration stories of four women
from Scotland, Germany, Vermont, and New
York. Their writings convey fascinating de¬
scriptions of the ups and downs of their
challenging boat journeys — including sea¬
sickness, homesickness, and shipwreck —

vi

across the Atlantic Ocean and through the
Great Lakes on the way to settlement in
Wisconsin during the mid 1800s.

Finally, as a parting salute to the many
special events that marked last year’s obser¬
vance of the fiftieth anniversary of A Sand
County Almanac, we are pleased to feature
one more article on Wisconsin’s now legend¬
ary “Land Ethic” proponent Aldo Leopold.
Curt Meine, of the International Crane Foun¬
dation in Baraboo, provides an insightful
assessment of how a variety of responses to
and adaptations of Leopold’s work and ideas

reflect developing trends in conservation his¬
tory. Meine’s concluding question, “Whither
Leopold’s legacy?,” invites all who care about
Earth (including the rocks!) to remain ac¬
tively engaged in discovering how best to live
on and with the land.

Rocks and more rocks — and turtles and
butterflies and mussels and aquatic plants
and ecoregions and pioneering women and
Aldo Leopold! All of us who worked together
to produce this issue of Transactions hope
that its contents will inform, delight, and
challenge all its readers.

Bill LJrbrock

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters was
chartered by the State Legislature on March 16, 1870, as a
membership organization serving the people of Wisconsin. Its
mission is to encourage investigation in the sciences, arts and
letters and to disseminate information and share knowledge.

Curt Meine

The Secret Leopold, or Who Really
Wrote A Sand County Almanac?

£ A ldo Leopold was a forester and wildlife ecologist who wrote
jljL A Sand County Almanac , a collection of essays about the
natural world and conservation. The book was published post¬
humously in 1949. A Sand County Almanac went on to be¬
come one of the key texts of the environmental movement.
Leopold is closely identified with ‘The Land Ethic/ the final
essay in the Almanac , in which he argued that people are part
of the ‘land community/ and so bear moral responsibilities that
extend beyond the realm of the human to include the non¬
human parts of that community.”

This would be a fair and accurate answer to the question
“Who was Aldo Leopold?” But is it a sufficient answer? To
conservationists and historians, at least, the question is increas¬
ingly urgent. Leopold defined challenges that remain at the core
of conservation thought and practice more than a half-century
after his death, even as conservation concerns increasingly over¬
lap other issues in contemporary life. The social, philosophi¬
cal, political, economic, and cultural demands being made
upon Leopold’s legacy are increasing. At the same time, the
living memory of Leopold must inevitably fade as direct con¬
nections to Leopold slip into the all-welcoming past. Paradoxi¬
cally, it will become both harder and easier to answer the ques¬
tion: “Who really wrote A Sand County Almanac ?” What we
may gain in detachment and critical judgment, we shall lose
by having first-hand impressions no longer available to us.

That these concerns are of more than passing importance
is plain. We may turn, for example, to the January 1998 issue
of the Journal of Forestry, the field’s premier professional jour¬
nal. Its cover featured Aldo Leopold and beckoned with the
question: “Has Leopold Supplanted Pinchot?” (i.e., as the guid¬
ing philosophical force behind American forestry). The lead
article, by a professor of forestry, offered “Another Look at
Leopold’s Land Ethic” — a harsh critique of the ideas in

TRANSACTIONS Volume 88 (2000)

1

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Leopold’s famous essay. The first sentence
of the article read: “Aldo Leopold’s influence
is based largely on a brief essay, 20 pages
long, that outlines what he calls the ‘land
ethic.’”1 The author’s argument, and a
counter-argument by environmental phi¬
losopher and Leopold scholar J. Baird
Callicott in the same issue, prompted intense
discussion among foresters and others, and
led to further rounds of discussion within
the journal.2

The point here is not to examine the play
in this particular volley of critique and re¬
sponse, but to note that our knowledge of
Leopold is, and must be, increasingly con¬
tingent not on the reality of the living hu¬
man being, but on the received images and
impressions of that reality. Leopold the hu¬
man being belongs to the ages. Leopold the
source and symbol has been and will be
shaped according to the ideas, questions, and
requirements — and also the fears, blind
spots, and prejudices — of subsequent gen¬
erations.

The above-quoted lead sentence from
the Journal of Forestry article illustrates how
time inevitably narrows the field of impres¬
sions of the rich, complex, multi-dimen¬
sional reality that is an individual human
life. In the case of Aldo Leopold, attention
has often focused largely on his writings in
A Sand County Almanac (or even, as in the
above instance, just one essay within the Al¬
manac). This focus has profoundly shaped
our ways of thinking about Leopold. There
is Aldo Leopold, who lived a life, and wrote
toward the end of it a memorable book.
Then there is “The Author of A Sand
County Almanac J a figure who for fifty
years has been a mirror to our relationship
with the natural world, and has borne the
burden of our environmental hopes and
fears. There is some confusion between the
two.

A Legacy Entire

For readers, reviewers, and scholars, Aldo
Leopold displays as many facets as there are
perspectives. Consider the variety of fields
that can — and do — legitimately claim
Leopold as an important figure in their de¬
velopment: forestry, wildlife ecology and
management, outdoor recreation, range
management, sustainable agriculture, wilder¬
ness protection, conservation biology, resto¬
ration ecology, environmental history, envi¬
ronmental ethics, environmental law,
environmental policy, environmental educa¬
tion, literature.3 Leopold remains a compel¬
ling figure, and A Sand County Almanac an
irresistible focal point, in part because all
these perspectives were tightly integrated in
his personality and prose. There are, in a
sense, many Leopolds. How, then, do we
reconcile these many Leopolds with the sin¬
gularity of Aldo Leopold as a human being?

We may begin with a brief review of the
basic facts of Leopold’s life and the wide
range of his contributions. For those who
know of Leopold purely through A Sand
County Almanac, the story bears retelling.4

Leopold belonged to the first generation
of trained American foresters, graduating
from Yale University’s Forest School in
1909. In a nearly twenty-year career with the
U.S. Forest Service, he gained expertise in a
wide range of sub-fields, including soil and
water conservation, game protection, range
and watershed management, and recre¬
ational planning. Leopold earned a reputa¬
tion within the Forest Service as one of its
most able and creative leaders, highly re¬
garded for his innovations in forest admin¬
istration. In the 1920s he spearheaded the
movement to protect wildlands under the
jurisdiction of the Forest Service, and was
largely responsible for designation of the
nation’s first wilderness area, the Gila, on the

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Gila National Forest, in 1924. A decade
later, in 1935, he helped to found the Wil¬
derness Society, providing a broad philo¬
sophical and professional base for the new
organization. Leopold also conducted im¬
portant field research in forest ecology dur¬
ing his Forest Service years, and in 1924 was
appointed assistant director of the Forest
Products Laboratory in Madison, Wiscon¬
sin. Fie remained in that position for four
years.

After leaving the Forest Service in 1928
Leopold devoted himself to game (later wild¬
life) management as it emerged as a distinct
field within conservation. Drawing upon
contemporary advances in animal ecology,
Leopold provided the field with its first text¬
book, Game Management, published in
1933. 5 lie was named the nation’s first pro¬
fessor of game management, also in 1933,
at the University of Wisconsin. He guided
the field through its first important decade,
leading it beyond its original mission of per¬
petuating populations of game animals and
integrating it with other conservation fields.
In the process he provided foundations for
later developments in ecology, sustainable
agriculture, and conservation biology.

Leopold was also an early advocate and
practitioner of ecological restoration— pro¬
fessionally at the University of Wisconsin’s
arboretum and other lands, and personally
at his farm property in Sauk County, Wis¬
consin (which the Leopold family acquired
in 1935). He was a widely respected com¬
municator, constantly writing and speaking
to varied audiences on a wide range of con¬
servation topics. As a teacher he instructed
leading professionals as well as hundreds of
undergraduate students at the University of
Wisconsin. He participated actively in doz¬
ens of professional societies and conservation
organizations at the local, state, national, and
even international levels, and was a promi¬

nent player in the development of conser¬
vation policy throughout his career.

As notable as Leopold’s achievements
were, all of the foregoing (and much else
besides) occurred before he had even begun
to contemplate the collection of essays
through which the world would come to
know him. Leopold’s list of professional ac¬
complishments was impressive long before
he began work on the manuscript that be¬
came A Sand County Almanac- — before, in
fact, the voice of the Almanac had matured.

When did that voice first emerge, and
how did it find its full expression in the Al¬
manac} A Sand County Almanac was the
product of the last ten years of Leopold’s
life.6 Leopold would work some earlier ma¬
terials into his evolving manuscript, but he
began to sound the new tone in his essay¬
writing only after two hunting trips, in 1936
and 1937, to Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occi¬
dental. After the first trip, Leopold prepared
an essay he called “The Thick-Billed Parrot
of Chihuahua,” published in the ornitho¬
logical journal The Condor in early 1937 (it
would eventually appear in the Almanac as
“Guacamaja”). Shortly thereafter, Leopold
composed “Marshland Elegy,” his moody
reflection on Wisconsin’s cranes and wet¬
lands. American Forests published it later in
1937.

These new expressions reflected a new
turn in Leopold’s work. Increasingly in the
late 1930s Leopold found himself teaching
and writing toward a non-professional au¬
dience. In 1938, he published the first in an
ongoing series of popular essays on wildlife
conservation for the Wisconsin Agriculturist
and Farmer, and in 1 940 he wrote two more
essays about Mexico and the Arizona, “Song
of the Gavilan” and “Escudilla.”7 Leopold
was not yet thinking about collecting these
essays into a book. However, he was encour¬
aged by the positive response of friends and

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colleagues and continued to write in this
new vein.

The voice of Aldo Leopold in A Sand
County Almanac, then, was late in its devel¬
opment. It first emerged in the late 1930s,
just as Leopold was fully integrating his con¬
servation ideas (a phase culminating in 1939
with publication of his essay “A Biotic View
of Land” in the journal of Forestry)} The
Aldo Leopold that most of the world knows,
admires, and criticizes is really the late
Leopold, and then only that part of himself
that is found in the pages of the Almanac.
It was of course one of the ironies of
Leopold’s life that he would not live to see
A Sand County Almanac published or to
know its influence. Indeed, he would never
even know his book by that title, which was
assigned posthumously; his name and the
book title became paired only after Leo¬
pold’s death in April 1948.

Changing Perspectives on Leopold

What perspectives on Aldo Leopold’s legacy
do we inherit? How has public understand¬
ing and appreciation of his work changed?
Because Leopold’s legacy is still being dis¬
covered by environmental professionals and
by the general public, and is revisited con¬
stantly by those who do know it, the answers
to these questions remain dynamic. In ret¬
rospect, however, we can identify several
general phases in the evolution of Leopold’s
public reputation. Those phases, in turn, tell
us much about what various audiences have
sought out — or neglected — in the record of
Leopold’s experience.

Leopold among His Contemporaries

We can begin by assessing Leopold’s repu¬
tation during his own lifetime, or more pre¬
cisely in the last years of his life, as he was

pulling together the manuscript that became
A Sand County Almanac. It is useful to dis¬
tinguish between Leopold’s local and “more-
than-local” reputation. Within the state of
Wisconsin, and especially at the University
of Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold was a recog¬
nized figure, though by no means “famous.”
He had played a leading role in several im¬
portant conservation policy initiatives at the
state level in the late 1920s. In 1933 he
joined the university, assuming a new and
experimental Chair of Game Management
within the College of Agriculture’s Depart¬
ment of Agricultural Economics. Leopold
was not an academic by background, and his
field of expertise had not yet gained intel¬
lectual definition or professional acceptance.
Securing wildlife conservation’s foothold in
academe would be one of Leopold’s premier
accomplishments in the remaining fifteen
years of his life.

For some time, Leopold remained, ac¬
cording to Arthur Hawkins, one of his early
graduate students, “suspect.” Hawkins re¬
called that Leopold was “not part of the aca¬
demic crowd” and “a real novice” in under¬
standing the social ecology of the university
campus.9 In the words of another student of
the time, Frances Hamerstrom, he was “very
thoroughly respected by a rather small, se¬
lect group; in general, he wasn’t even no¬
ticed.”10 By the late 1930s and early 1940s,
when Hawkins and Hamerstrom worked
most closely with him, Leopold had ac¬
quired a large circle of good friends and col¬
leagues within Madison, but continued to
lead a relatively quiet academic life.

By contrast, Leopold was very well known
and highly regarded among his professional
colleagues in conservation around the coun¬
try. His national reputation had risen
steadily over the decades, especially as wild¬
life management staked out its own territory
among the conservation professions in the

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1930s. Another student, H. Albert Hoch-
baum, with whom Leopold collaborated
during the early stages of the Sand County
Almanac manuscript, saw that this wider
reputation had to color Leopold’s writing.
He wrote to Leopold in 1944: “If you will
put yourself in perspective, you might real¬
ize that within your realm of influence,
which is probably larger than you know,
Aldo Leopold is considerably more than a
person; in fact, he is probably less a person
than he is a Standard. . . . Just for fun, then,
as you round out this collection of essays,
take a sidewise glance at this fellow and de¬
cide just how much of him you want to put
on paper. . . .”u

Of those few who were reading Leopold’s
draft essays, Hochbaum most deeply appre¬
ciated the task of self-reflection and self-ex¬
pression Leopold had taken on. He may also
have had the keenest sense of how others
viewed Leopold. In 1947, after attending a
conference of wildlife managers, Hochbaum
wrote to Leopold, “For a long time the
crowd has been more or less following (and
sometimes objecting to) the rules of wild¬
life management that you have prescribed.
Now they are beginning to follow your phi¬
losophies , by and large without realizing
whence they came. That is progress!”12
Hochbaum, a pioneer in waterfowl biology
who was also a skilled illustrator and writer,
saw into dimensions of Leopold’s private life
and public persona that others missed, and
he understood well the larger creative chal¬
lenge that Leopold had assumed in the Al¬
manac essays.

During his lifetime, Leopold’s reputation
reflected many qualities: his facility with
words, the effectiveness of his teaching, the
breadth of his conservation philosophy, and
especially the degree to which he matched
word and thought with deed. His profes¬
sional impact was far-reaching, especially

within wildlife management and forestry. By
the end of his life Leopold was well aware
of his professional prominence, and it is fair
to say that he was quietly proud of it. At the
same time, the older he grew — particularly
in the last three years of his life, from the
end of World War II until his death — the
more he could look back on his accomplish¬
ments with a mature and self-confident
modesty. He was certainly humbled by his
own earlier mistakes. He communicated this
most notably and famously in the essay
“Thinking Like a Mountain,” in which he
recounted his role in the extirpation of the
wolf from the American Southwest.13

Leopold, however, was far from univer¬
sally admired by his contemporaries. He of¬
ten found himself caught in thickets of con¬
troversy. The most prominent instance of
this derived from his role in Wisconsin’s
“deer wars,” the drawn-out and vitriolic
battles over the state’s deer management
policy in the 1940s. Leopold’s determined
advocacy of herd reduction made his name
well known — and oft-blasted — among some
portions of Wisconsin’s populace (including
many hunters, anti-hunters, and resort own¬
ers). Leopold neither welcomed nor enjoyed
the notoriety. Although decades of front-line
conservation battles had thickened his skin,
he now felt as viscerally as ever the differ¬
ence between his view of conservation and
that of “that collective person, the public.”14
Out of such controversies came the self-
awareness that Leopold expressed only rarely
and guardedly, the calm sadness in his ob¬
servation that “one of the penalties of an
ecological education is that one lives alone
in a world of wounds.”15

The deer management fight was only one
of many instances in which Leopold staked
out unpopular or controversial positions. He
continued to wage wilderness protection
battles up until the end of his life. He did

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not hesitate to use his voice directly and
forcefully to protect threatened wild lands,
to counter indiscriminate wartime incursions
into untrammeled country, to slow the post¬
war juggernaut of dam-building, to restrict
what he saw as inappropriate uses of desig¬
nated wilderness areas. He remained an ada¬
mantly active member of the Wilderness
Society until his death. The cause of wilder¬
ness protection had not yet achieved the
wider acceptance that would come with the
battle of the early 1950s over the proposed
Echo Park dam within Dinosaur National
Monument. As America entered the era of
post-war economic boom and political para¬
noia, Leopold occasionally found himself at
odds even with old colleagues within the
conservation movement over the wilderness
issue.

Leopold was known among his peers as
a hard-headed critic, though a fair, construc¬
tive, and thoughtful one. In the last decade
of his life Leopold became increasingly blunt
in his view of the direction taken by univer¬
sities and government agencies. He was no¬
tably critical of the trend toward increasing
specialization and toward what he called
“power science” within the academy. He
wrote in 1946, “Science, as now decanted
for public consumption, is mainly a race for
power. Science has no respect for the land
as a community of organisms, no concept
of man as a fellow passenger in the odyssey
of evolution.”16 Some of Leopold’s most
forceful prose (published and unpublished)
addressed this theme. In many ways, “The
Land Ethic” itself was the ultimate expres¬
sion of his concern.

At the end of Leopold’s life, then, his
conservation work was well known, widely
appreciated, and occasionally contentious,
but he himself was little known outside of
the professional conservation world. He was
one of several voices from within the move¬

ment (including especially William Vogt and
Fairfield Osborn) that in the immediate
post-war years sought to communicate the
importance of the science of ecology to a
broader public. As the manuscript of A Sand
County Almanac went to press, however, its
author remained “very thoroughly respected
by a rather small, select group.”

Leopold Reaches a Broader Audience

A second phase in public awareness of
Leopold began with the publication of A
Sand County Almanac and extended roughly
to the mid-1960s. This spans the time from
the first appearance of A Sand County Alma¬
nac to its later re-publication as a mass pa¬
perback. During these years two essentially
opposing trends played out: on the one
hand, the level of popular environmental
awareness rose dramatically; on the other
hand, the traditional conservation fields
found themselves internally divided over the
fundamental principles that Leopold and
others had sought to define.

A Sand County Almanac helped to stimu¬
late environmental literacy among the
American public; conversely, readership of
A Sand County Almanac and recognition of
Leopold’s contributions grew along with
that increasing awareness. This mutually re¬
inforcing process can be traced back to the
earliest reviews of the book. The book was
widely reviewed both locally and nationally,
both by readers familiar with Leopold and
by those learning of him for the first time.
Because of the confluence of events, many
reviews served in essence as obituaries of
Leopold, as reviewers used the occasion to
reflect upon Leopold’s legacy. The reviews
of the day thus provide a fair portrait of the
state of his public persona.

August Derleth, perhaps Wisconsin’s best
known regional writer, reviewed A Sand

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County Almanac for Madison’s Wisconsin
State Journal . Derleth knew of Leopold’s
work and was well familiar with the Wiscon¬
sin landscapes described in the Almanac. Al¬
though he and Leopold were not themselves
intimates, they shared many acquaintances.
Derleth wrote in his review, “All genuine
conservationists throughout Wisconsin and
the Midwest generally realize that in the
death of Aldo Leopold, Wisconsin lost one
of its most able men in the field of conser¬
vation. Posthumous publication of his book
offers ample evidence that his death deprived
us also of an author of no mean merit. His
book is one of those rare volumes to which
sensitive and intelligent readers will turn
again and again” [emphasis added].17 Der-
leth’s phrasing is instructive. For most read¬
ers, Aldo Leopold would be known first and
foremost, and often only, as an author. For
Leopold’s contemporaries, and especially lo¬
cal contemporaries, Leopold was known pri¬
marily as a conservationist.

Many of the national reviews of A Sand
County Almanac were marked by a similar
tone of surprise, delight, and deep respect,
although the reviewers knew little if any¬
thing of Leopold’s professional accomplish¬
ments. Lewis Gannett, in the New York Her¬
ald-Tribune, wrote: “Aldo Leopold died
fighting a neighbor’s fire in the spring of
1948. I am sorry, for I should like to have
known him. I do not recall ever hearing his
name until I stumbled on this book; to read
it is a deeply satisfying adventure. This was
a man who wrote sparsely, out of intense
feeling and long experience. You will find
here no statistics about erosion, no scream¬
ing warnings to ‘do something about the
soil.’ Aldo Leopold was primarily concerned
with the importance of feeling something.
He himself felt deeply, and his feeling gives
a rich texture to this too-short book.”18
Gannett did not know, of course, about

Leopold’s years of devoted statistic-taking on
erosion, his many forceful pleas for action,
his constant emphasis on the vital role of sci¬
entific research in conservation. Yet, all that
was beside the point. Gannett was quite cor¬
rect; in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold
was “primarily concerned with the impor¬
tance of feeling something.”

It is an important point. New readers
from beyond Leopold’s personal or profes¬
sional circles found here something unusual.
The tone and style of A Sand County Alma¬
nac were quite different from that of other
prominent conservation books of the time,
in particular Vogt’s Road to Survival and
Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet, both of
which were published in 1948. These two
prescient books on the state of the global
environment were chock-full of statistics and
warnings. Their authors read the future, and
it was not pretty. Both books gained an im¬
mediate, sizable, and influential audience.
Leopold shared their profound concern — he
in fact knew both Vogt and Osborn and had
read Vogt’s book in manuscript — but he
spoke in subtler tones. Leopold’s book sold
more modestly but, as it turned out, more
steadily. A Sand County Almanac continued
to gain readers through the 1950s and into
the 1960s. By the mid-1960s, some twenty
thousand copies had been sold, but mostly
among dedicated conservationists and read¬
ers of natural history.

The significance of the Almanac becomes
clearer when viewed in relation to the sec¬
ond general trend in this period: the ambiva¬
lence with which many conservation profes¬
sionals regarded (if they regarded it at all)
the path that Leopold and his like-minded
colleagues had blazed. Through the 1950s,
the professions in a sense left behind
Leopold and those who shared his more in¬
tegrated outlook on conservation challenges
and solutions. In “The Land Ethic,” Leopold

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had expressed concern over the growing di¬
vision between conservationists who “[re¬
gard] the land as soil, and its function as
commodity production,” and those who
“[regard] the land as a biota, and its func¬
tion as something broader.”19 The former
were gaining a firm upper hand.

Through the post-war era, the professions
and disciplines became increasingly segre¬
gated. Engineering solutions replaced more
agronomic or naturalistic approaches. “We
are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-
shovel,” Leopold lamented in “The Land
Ethic, “and we are proud of our yardage.”
Soil conservation, agriculture, forestry, rec¬
reational planning, and range, fisheries, and
wildlife management bent increasingly to¬
ward utilitarian ends, while ecology turned
increasingly experimental, quantitative, and
model-oriented. As the professions “modern¬
ized,” Leopold and his generation came to
be seen as important albeit old-fashioned
predecessors. The kernel of their legacy — the
integration of the natural sciences and hu¬
manities in the service of conservation — fell
under the heavy tread of the steam-shovels.20

Leopold and the
Environmental Awakening

That seed, however, would prove hardy. A
third phase in public appreciation of
Leopold began in the mid-1960s and would
last roughly into the mid-1980s. Paperback
editions of A Sand County Almanac , pub¬
lished in 1966 and 1970, brought Leopold
to the very forefront of the incipient envi¬
ronmental movement. Rachel Carson’s Si¬
lent Spring (1962), Stewart Udall’s The Quiet
Crisis (1963), and other books of the period
created a growing critical mass of readers as
A Sand County Almanac reappeared in its
more accessible and affordable form.

As the paperback worked its way into the

backpacks and reading lists of the baby
boomers, a generation gap began to emerge
in perceptions of Leopold and the applica¬
tion of his ideas. On one side were the more
senior conservationists, many of whom per¬
sonally knew and worked with Leopold or
his contemporaries. On the other side stood
the growing corps of younger environmen¬
talists who knew of Leopold only through
the Almanac essays. These younger devotees
came into their environmental awareness as
the landmark legislation of the era — the
Wilderness Act (1964), the National Envi¬
ronmental Protection Act (1970), the Clean
Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972),
the Endangered Species Act (1973) — rede¬
fined the context of the older conservation
movement.

Older and younger readers alike would
invoke Leopold in support of their causes
and adapt him in their approaches, but those
causes and approaches did not always jibe.
Underlying differences in (to cite just a few
examples) the aims of resource management,
attitudes toward hunting, appreciation of
wilderness, and the role of political activism
in solving environmental problems divided
these audiences. Importantly, however,
Leopold also served as a bridge across the
generations. All were reading from the same
book, a fact that would prove highly signifi¬
cant in the long run.

Leopold and the
Re-integration of Conservation

By the 1980s, another demographic shift
began to play out. Within the conservation
professions, elders from the post-World War
II generation began to approach their retire¬
ment years; older baby boomers rose
through the professional ranks; and younger
baby boomers, trained in the post-Earth Day
era, entered those ranks. Meanwhile, non-

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professional readers of A Sand County Alma¬
nac went about their lives in their commu¬
nities, the paperbacks still residing on their
bookshelves, the words still working their
quiet influence.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s,
changes in society, in politics, and in the
environment itself cast Leopold’s words in
new light. Systemic environmental prob¬
lems — increasingly vitriolic disputes over
national forest management policy, ground-
water pollution problems due to intensified
agricultural practices, climate change, glo¬
bal-scale threats to biological diversity, in¬
cessant suburban sprawl, and on down the
list of modern conservation dilemmas — de¬
manded more systemic solutions. Such so¬
lutions came to be explored under many
names, including ecosystem management ,
conservation biology , ecological economics ,
community -based conservation , and sustain¬
able agriculture . New terms — biodiversity
and sustainability prominent among
them— were invoked to broaden the con¬
ceptual ground on which conservation
stood.21 These responses, while novel in
name, often returned for grounding to the
fundamentals of integrated conservation, as
outlined by Leopold and his contemporar¬
ies. As a result, Leopold’s intellectual stock
continued to rise through the 1980s and
1990s.

As we are still working within this most
recent phase, we are unable to read it with
clarity. But as the waves of passion in the
conservation and environmental movements
have swelled and subsided, Leopold’s legacy
has ridden through them all, and remained
robust. Why and how? It has to do in part,
of course, with the historic record of his ac¬
complishments and the quality of his writ¬
ing and thinking. But it has also to do with
the welter of forces that keep Leopold rel¬
evant, that bring us invariably back to him,

more sober but more ready perhaps to con¬
sider the subtleties of his work. These forces
might include the following:

• The fact of continuing environmental
degradation, and the need for more inte¬
grated responses that are informed by eth¬
ics. For those who see our fragmented ap¬
proach to landscapes, their biota, and their
human communities as a primary cause of
environmental degradation, the search for
solutions leads back to the integrated view
that Leopold articulated finally in “The
Land Ethic.” Leopold’s declaration of the
ethical underpinnings of conservation has
continued to gain attention and to have sub¬
stantial impacts on national policy (through,
for example, the shift toward ecosystem
management in the land management agen¬
cies and in many conservation organiza¬
tions).22 Leopold regarded the lack of atten¬
tion from philosophy and religion as “proof
that conservation [had] not yet touched [the]
foundations of conduct”; the consolidation
of environmental ethics and the greening of
religion may now be regarded as proof that
it has at least begun to touch those founda¬
tions.23

• The anti-environmental “wise use” move¬
ment. As forces of opposition to conserva¬
tion and environmentalism assumed greater
power in the 1980s and 1990s, many
younger environmentalists were compelled
to revisit their roots and to learn (often for
the first time) their connections to the older
conservation movement. Likewise, more
conservative conservationists were also led to
examine their political loyalties. Even
staunch conservatives began to rethink their
priorities when Ronald Reagan named James
Watt his Secretary of the Interior. For many
in this period, Aldo Leopold stood out as
one who did not place his politics before his

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conservation commitments. The relation¬
ship between political conviction and con¬
servation action has always been complex. In
his writing Leopold does not come across as
an ideologue, and in life he was not. He has
remained a relevant and flexible voice dur¬
ing a period of intense politicization of con¬
servation.

• The erosion of community. During these
same years many have sensed and tried to
define the changes that are transforming our
human communities.24 Somewhere between
the shoals of unwarranted nostalgia and un¬
critical economic optimism lies (we may
hope) safe passage, but the route is difficult
to discern. Renewed attention to communi¬
tarian values is an important part of contem¬
porary social criticism. A parallel expression
has emerged from within conservation, em¬
phasizing the need to re-place communities,
to see them in terms of the biophysical en¬
vironments in which they are embedded.
“Community” was a key word in Leopold’s
lexicon, and the “extension” of community
that Leopold advocated in “The Land Ethic”
has accordingly assumed increased impor¬
tance.

• The interdisciplinary imperative. This per¬
tains particularly to academia, where hyper¬
specialization and reductionism move on
apace, opportunities for “thinking time”
shrink, and the selective pressures on success
continue to intensify. Such trends tend to
overwhelm efforts to maintain connections
among the sciences, arts, and letters. Leo¬
pold’s characteristic interdisciplinary ap¬
proach carries authority here. He stands as an
example and reminder of a time before the
need to specialize was ratcheted up several ad¬
ditional notches, and a greater share of re¬
wards still accrued to those whose training,
teaching, and work were broad and diverse.

These forces — and no doubt many oth¬
ers — have allowed Leopold’s readers to see
him in a new light, as one who identified
tendencies that would increasingly character¬
ize American society and the American land¬
scape through the twentieth century. The
implicit messages in Leopold’s essays, spoken
amid the bugling of cranes and the songs of
wild rivers, have become more explicit. Yet,
new readers can still respond to the faith
Leopold felt down to his very marrow: that
the future of the human enterprise on this
(and any other) continent is tied fundamen¬
tally, if not always clearly, to the future of
our wild co-inhabitants and landscapes.

A Taxonomy of Responses

Since A Sand County Almanac was pub¬
lished, most of its readers have remained
unaware of the life that gave it shape, re¬
sponding not so much to Aldo Leopold the
historical personage as to “The Author of A
Sand County Almanac .” For the general
reader, this may be of small consequence; a
good book stands on its own, and its qual¬
ity endures regardless. (Does it matter that
we know so little of the author of the Book
of Job? That Shakespeare’s life remains
opaque to us? We know the author through
the words and the story.)

It is the duty, however, of the historian
and literary biographer to fill in the facts, to
weigh the text against the life, and to pro¬
vide the book with a sort of narrative habi¬
tat. Such scrutiny enriches our understand¬
ing of the creature itself— robbing it perhaps
of some of its immediate mystery, but pro¬
viding a richer appreciation of its existence.
With such perspective, we may see in our
prior responses and images a little less of
Leopold and a little more of ourselves. What
do we see when we reexamine “The Author
of A Sand County Almanac'7.

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Leopold the Prophet

We encounter first, of course, Leopold the
environmental “prophet.” Leopold’s daugh¬
ter Nina Leopold Bradley, when asked to
speak of her father’s conservation philoso¬
phy, has sometimes referred to “that poor
old land ethic.” It is a great deal to ask one
essay, or book, or person, to bear the weight
of society’s need to transform its relationship
with the natural world. Over the decades, a
disproportionate amount of that weight has
fallen upon Aldo Leopold.

Among Leopold’s contemporaries were
several who recognized the full depth of
Leopold’s conservationist critique and first
employed the all-but-inevitable tag of
“prophet.” Roberts Mann, a Leopold friend
and superintendent of the Cook County (Il¬
linois) Forest Preserve District, published an
article in 1954 entitled “Aldo Leopold,
Priest and Prophet.”25 Ernie Swift, another
friend and colleague who led Wisconsin’s
Conservation Department, followed in 1961
with “Aldo Leopold, Wisconsin’s Conserva¬
tion Prophet.”26 Historian Roderick Nash,
in his classic 1 967 book Wilderness and the
American Mind , called his chapter on
Leopold simply “Aldo Leopold, Prophet.”27
The trope has endured. Wallace Stegner, not
one given to hyperbole, regarded A Sand
County Almanac as “the utterance of an
American Isaiah. . . almost a holy book in
conservation circles.”28 A Sand County Alma¬
nac continues to be referred to regularly as
the “Bible” or “scripture” of the environ¬
mental movement.

This “prophet” tradition, whether one
regards it as appropriate invocation or un¬
necessary overstatement, is instructive. Aldo
Leopold has reflected a strong social need.
Any social movement (especially in its
emergent phase) requires a prophetic voice
to give itself coherence and direction. Mar¬

tin Luther King was the pre-eminent pro¬
phetic voice of the modern civil rights
movement. For complex reasons, there was
no equivalent iconic figure in the environ¬
mental movement. But environmental re¬
formers could and did look back to find not
only Leopold, but John Muir, Henry David
Thoreau, and, among contemporaries,
Rachel Carson and David Brower, Sigurd
Olson and Barry Commoner, Edward Ab¬
bey and Gary Snyder. They became the
movement’s “prophets.” As conservation it¬
self continued to evolve at the turn of the
twenty-first century, Leopold (among these
others) continued to fulfill the prophet
function.

Leopold the All-purpose Hero

One key factor set Leopold apart even
within the pantheon of environmental
prophets: he coupled the inspiration of his
prose, thought, and activism with the au¬
thority of his experience. Leopold, unlike the
others, wrote from a varied professional
background in on-the-ground forestry, range
management, wildlife management, wilder¬
ness protection, and restoration work. He
was a respected figure in each of these fields
and could speak to all his professional col¬
leagues in their own languages. And so
Leopold served another posthumous func¬
tion: as an all-around, acceptable and acces¬
sible “conservation hero,” able to appeal to
a broad range of conservation factions — at
least as long as the deeper tensions within
conservation lay dormant.

One of the more interesting variations on
this image of Leopold involved an unlikely
source. The February 18, 1956, edition of
the Saturday Evening Post featured a realis¬
tic sketch of Leopold in a full-page adver¬
tisement for the Weyerhauser company. The
ad depicted Leopold, on bended knee with

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a fawn under his protective watch, against a
clear-cut mountainside in the background,
Aldo Leopold by this time was apparently
seen as a reasonable conservationist who
could support, as the text of the ad put it,
“true conservation through the wise use and
perpetuation of industrial forest uses” [em¬
phasis in original].29

This Leopold-as-conservation-hero mo¬
tif reflected conservation’s growing main¬
stream constituency. By 1956 conservation,
however vague, fuzzy, and pliable its defi¬
nition, had become acceptable across a
broad demographic spectrum. As long as
Leopold represented the kindly and con¬
structive school of reasonable conservation,
even a major industrial force such as
Weyerhauser could present his image in one
of their prominent advertisements. It could,
for the time being, ignore the fact that
Leopold was a dedicated activist, a critical
scientist, politically involved and often cou¬
rageous, and not one to shrink from un¬
seemly controversies involving conservation
policy.

Leopold the Radical Environmentalist

If Leopold’s work and words had helped to
build a broader, more popular, better
funded, more respectable, more mainstream
environmental movement, it also inspired
the counter-response. As environmentalism
became more acceptable, it became, in the
view of others, more diluted. And so we find
another reading of Leopold’s legacy in
ascendance: Leopold as radical environmen¬
talist and deep ecologist.

The most prominent example of this “re¬
deployment” of Leopold came through the
actions of the 1980s Earth First! movement.
When Dave Foreman, Edward Abbey, and
their compatriots launched the movement,
they drew heavily upon Leopold in raising

high the bar of compromise in conservation
politics. Leopold’s powerful image of the fal¬
tering “green fire” in the eyes of the dying
wolf of “Thinking Like a Mountain” came
to symbolize for this new generation of wil¬
derness activists the loss of the North Ameri¬
can wilds. “A militant minority of wilder¬
ness-minded citizens,” they read in Leopold’s
essay “Wilderness, “must be on watch
throughout the nation and available for ac¬
tion in a pinch.”30 At the same time, their
philosophical standard-bearers in the deep
ecology movement could point to “The
Land Ethic” as a foundational document.31

Of course, counter-responses ensued.
Hence the disgruntled forester, who groused
in the journal of Forestry that Leopold was
merely a “starry eyed. . . pipe-smoking aca¬
demician.” Another suggested that the pipe
held more sinister substances, noting that he
[the reader] had “seen nothing that Aldo
Leopold had to say that does not make me
think that he was anything but the original
pot-head.”32

What do we learn from Leopold the
Deep and Radical Ecologist? He reflected
the increasingly polarity within the environ¬
mental movement as its influence rose
through the 1970s and 1980s. During these
years, the ranks of environmental profes¬
sionals and bureaucrats burgeoned. Prior to
that, if one were engaged in environmental
work, one was likely an amateur — poorly
paid (if paid at all) and engaged primarily
out of a sense of public duty. By the mid-
1970s, the scene was changing. Membership
in the major environmental organizations
was on the rise. As paid staffs expanded, pro¬
fessional expertise began to overshadow
grassroots activism. Passion was nice, but a
master’s degree got you the job and respect.
As the environmental professional class
grew, however, the grassroots activists,
driven by powerful social, political, and

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spiritual motives, hardly went away. The
result, in a sense, was a splitting of the
Leopold legacy. Suited professionals could
see Leopold as a sort of master diplomat and
spokesman, able to speak to all sides on en¬
vironmental issues. Activists could see
Leopold as a committed and deeply honest
radical, whose message provided intellectual
armor.

Leopold the Naive Interloper

This category encompasses an entire suite of
images. It refers to the response evoked as
Leopold’s interdisciplinary influence has
come to be felt in fields not his own. This
response may be traced in any number of
fields; it will suffice here to examine it in
philosophy, politics, and conservation itself.

As J. Baird Callicott has pointed out, that
Leopold in fact made any contribution to
philosophy is not a view that all philosophers
have shared.33 Consider the following state¬
ments. H. J. McCloskey, an Australian phi¬
losopher, suggested that “there is a real prob¬
lem in attributing a coherent meaning to
Leopold’s statements, one that exhibits his
‘Land Ethic’ as representing a major advance
in ethics rather than a retrogression to a
morality of a kind held by various primitive
peoples.” Far from an advance in ethics,
then, Leopold offered only retrogression.
Another regarded Leopold the philosopher
as “something of a disaster, and I dread the
thought of the student whose concept of
philosophy is modeled principally on these
extracts from Leopold’s writings.” Another
reviewer saw “The Land Ethic” as “danger¬
ous nonsense.”34 In short, for a few of the
more formally trained philosophers, Aldo
Leopold’s forays in this field are hardly. wor¬
thy of serious consideration.

How does Leopold fare among politicians
and political theorists? Somewhat better, ac¬

tually, especially in recent years. Because
Leopold’s conservation politics defied con¬
ventional ideological pigeonholing, those
searching for deeper political lessons have
found his work in this arena especially in¬
structive.35 The same maverick quality, how¬
ever, has also left Leopold open to easy criti¬
cism. Such criticism has come, on the one
hand, from those who have preferred a more
direct political approach to environmental
issues. Thus, in 1974, still in the wake of the
high wave of the environmental movement,
we find an article entitled “The Inadequate
Politics of Aldo Leopold.” The author found
Leopold’s politics to be “wholly conven¬
tional, some would say naive. From one
point of view the wonder is not that he ac¬
complished so much as a political operator,
but that he accomplished so little. . . . One
reason for Leopold’s frustration was his own
inability to face the likelihood that so fun¬
damental a change in people’s attitudes as
he advocated would involve concomitant
changes in the economic system and prob¬
ably in the political superstructure. Again
and again in his writing he seemed on the
verge of some sort of ideological break¬
through, but appeared to draw back from
the brink of discovery. In the political and
administrative sector. . . this inexperienced
administrator had little to offer for imple¬
mentation of his ‘land ethic’ beyond a very
traditional reliance on high-minded moral
persuasion.”36

If some saw Leopold’s politics as naive
and inadequate in the highly politicized con¬
text of 1970s environmental activism, oth¬
ers would see his approach in a new light as
that context continued to change. A decade
later, Leopold’s biographer (i.e., this author)
could receive inquiries from a conservative
journal interested in an article on Aldo
Leopold, because they felt he was “an envi¬
ronmentalist we could live with.” This is not

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as surprising as it may seem. Conservatives
and libertarians can find much to agree with
in “The Land Ethic.” A core component of
“The Land Ethic” is in fact Leopold’s belief
that individuals had to assume greater re¬
sponsibility for the health of the land; that
absent such responsibility, governments
would inevitably need to step in, and gov¬
ernments simply could not assume or carry
out all necessary conservation functions. The
editors evidently saw here an opportunity to
explore these “conservative” elements of
“The Land Ethic.”37

Aldo Leopold’s politics were not naive. As
Susan Flader has shown, Leopold’s sense of
citizenship and civic responsibility was keen
and evolved along with the changing cur¬
rents in the conservation movement.38 That
we can read his politics as conservative and
progressive, naive and sophisticated, personal
and public, again tells us as much about our¬
selves as it does about Leopold. It says, per¬
haps, that we have yet to evolve a politics
that can respond in a healthy and democratic
fashion to complex conservation dilemmas;
that we are still struggling to find ways to
protect, in Leopold’s words, “the public in¬
terest in private land”39; that we continue to
paw among our traditional political ideolo¬
gies in search of solutions and find it very
difficult to imagine where constructive alter¬
natives may lie. For those deeply involved
in the struggle to forge new relationships on
and with the land and among the people
who inhabit it, Leopold’s politics, far from
being naive, remain instructive and encour¬
aging. (And, yes, inspiring.)

The Leopold-as-na'fve-interloper view has
occasionally found currency within the con¬
servation world as well. Many of Leopold’s
precepts of conservation were beyond the
pale in his own day, and many remain so.
More specifically, the breadth of perspective
he brought to conservation was highly un¬

usual, so that those who inhabited one por¬
tion of the conservation spectrum could not
always appreciate his comprehensive view.
(The story is told, for example, of the joke
that went around the hallways of Wis¬
consin’s state Conservation Department,
about how to spell this word “aesthetic” that
the Professor was always using).

Leopold was both a specialist (in several
fields) and a generalist. But as the conserva¬
tion professions specialized further in the
years following his death, it became very easy
for some to look back and regard Leopold
as a dilettante in their increasingly insular
fields. Hence, for example, latter day forest¬
ers could ignore Leopold’s credentials in the
field and claim in effect that he wasn’t much
of a forester after all.

Another “sub-heading” in this particular
category involves the problematic (for some)
fact that Aldo Leopold was also a life-long
hunter. For this, Leopold has received his
share of criticism from at least some anti¬
hunters, activists, and environmental ethi-
cists. Conversely, he has been held high by
conscientious hunters as a premier example
of the ethically sophisticated and environ¬
mentally committed sportsman.

Leopold confronted the chasm in atti¬
tudes toward hunting directly and regularly
in his own lifetime. The chasm grew only
deeper in the years that followed. No less a
figure than Rachel Carson, for example, had
an outright disdain for the only Leopold, ap¬
parently, that she knew: the one of Round
River , the collection of Leopold’s hunting
journal entries first published in 1953. 40
Carson’s conservation ethic, of course, was
more closely aligned with Albert Schweitzer’s
“reverence for life” philosophy than with a
Leopoldian land ethic. Round Rivers portrait
of Leopold the hunter was more than she
could tolerate. The same response can be
found, again, in the recent Journal of For-

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estry critique, where we find the following
lambaste: “Leopold preached the extension
of ethics to all fellow members of the land
community, and he practiced killing them
until the end of his life.”41 Suffice it to say
that this critic chose the bluntest of rheto¬
ric to address one of the most sensitive is¬
sues in conservation and one of the most
complex of human behaviors— -one, it is safe
to say, that Leopold pondered carefully and
consciously on a daily basis for decades.

These dismissals of Leopold by selected
philosophers, political activists, and even
conservationists again track broad trends in
society. In them we can read the impact of
increased specialization and politicization in
conservation. Divided into areas of special
knowledge and special interest, conservation
like other fields struggles to find coherent
connections between the present and the
past, the abstract and the actual, the sciences
and the arts, philosophy and practice. By
contrast, Leopold’s written record reveals a
mind at ease with complexity, open to mys¬
tery as well as to new data, and resistant to
reductive tendencies in both science and
politics.

He was, by all but unanimous consent of
historical sources, a decent and delightful
person to know and to work with, an inspi¬
ration to those working in conservation, tol¬
erant of human foibles, and lacking in hid¬
den demons. Ironically, such qualities may
account for the challenge some have in “han¬
dling” Leopold. Modern readers, accus¬
tomed to irony and alienation and sensitive
to political subtexts, may find Leopold’s per¬
sonality an increasingly difficult kind to get
a hold on. In our contemporary attempts to
resolve postmodern dilemmas, we may
project them onto Leopold.

Several illustrations may serve to make
the point. For years, a portrait of Leopold
has hung on the walls of the Department of

Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wis¬
consin in Madison. The artist chose to de¬
pict Leopold with cigarette in hand (an in¬
termittent smoker, he preferred his pipe to
cigarettes). Graduate students — if not the
genuflectors— have appreciated the human¬
ity in that particular icon. Then there was
the survey question in Sierra magazine. The
editors asked readers to respond to the
query, “Can you eat meat and consider your¬
self an environmentalist?” Among the re¬
sponses: “Remember: Aldo Leopold ate
meat, Adolph Hitler did not.”42 The past
calls out to us. . . from the far side of the
postmodern minefield.

Leopold the Eco-fascist

More extreme examples of the above may be
found on the far fringes. Because Aldo
Leopold is a focal point for discussion of
environmental ideas and strategies, he is oc¬
casionally criticized as an advocate of oppres¬
sive social and governmental actions to safe¬
guard the environment. The reasoning is
this: Leopold in “The Land Ethic” places the
good of the collective, the community, the
whole, the ecosystem, above the good of the
constituent parts; he, therefore, would have
the whole impose its will on the constitu¬
ent members of that whole. (The irony, of
course, is easily lost on many such critics,
i.e., that Leopold saw individual responsibil¬
ity, as articulated in “The Land Ethic,” as
the only sure antidote to such eventualities).

Many of these criticisms arise out of rea¬
soned consideration of the difficult questions
that Leopold’s work-— indeed, that conser¬
vation generally-— poses. These arguments,
well developed and thoughtful, appear in
our academic journals and conference pro¬
ceedings. So do effective counter-argu¬
ments.43 Not all such exchanges, however,
are so rational. One of the strangest, a 1993

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letter to the editor of Iowa State Daily, criti¬
cized the mission of Iowa State University’s
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
Not content to question the institution, the
letter-writer attacked Leopold as “racist,”
stating that “He believed in the superiority
of the Nordic race. He believed that popu¬
lation growth has to be stopped; he rejected
the sanctity of life and he scorned human
beings so much that he believed the popu¬
lation of a country could be managed like
an animal reservation.”44 However bizarre
such rantings may seem, they are not to be
dismissed lightly. We read into Leopold
(however undeserving) not only our hopes
and concerns, but our uneasiness and our
fears.

There are, no doubt, other “Leopolds”
that bear consideration. As the taxonomy
fills out, we can begin to identify the sev¬
eral basic tendencies that mark much
Leopold commentary and criticism. The
most common, noted above, is to assume
that Aldo Leopold existed only as “The Au¬
thor of A Sand County Almanac ”; that it is
unnecessary to take into account other as¬
pects of his conservation career; that the his¬
torical and personal context of the Almanac,
however interesting, is of incidental impor¬
tance. One may find this view among
Leopold’s devotees as well as his detractors.

A second common tendency is to divorce
Leopold’s publications from his practice.
Leopold was a man of action as well as
words, and the dynamic between these two
spheres of his life may be the most signifi¬
cant of his many contributions. He tried to
define a workable standard for conservation
to follow and work toward. But he also
worked toward it himself, and thereby hu¬
manized it.

A third common tendency is to read only
that part of Leopold with which one feels
most comfortable or conversant and to avoid

confronting the entirety of the person, his
expertise, and his record. Hence we find the
critic who attends only to one of the several
disciplines Leopold worked in, or one of the
professions he practiced. Evidence of this
tendency can be found in many the fields
to which Leopold contributed, from wild¬
life ecology and agriculture to economics
and philosophy.

Finally, another common tendency is to
consider Leopold’s work only up to a cer¬
tain point in time. Hence, for example, the
occasional wildlife manager who will read
Game Management and appreciate it as the
profession’s founding volume, while ignor¬
ing or slighting the epic progression from
Game Management (1933) to A Sand County
Almanac (1949). Again, evidence of this ten¬
dency is widely distributed.

Leopold, in short, has been a mirror to
our environmental responses. We see in him
a succession of reflections over the decades
since his death. In the years immediately fol¬
lowing World War II, awareness of wide¬
spread environmental problems increased,
and our fears grew apace. Leopold offered a
way of understanding the human dimen¬
sions of these problems, and of imagining
possible solutions. He cast warnings, as did
others of the time, but tempered the warn¬
ings with wonder and wry humor, humility
and poetry. In one essay after another, he
leavened his conservation message not only
through his expressions of love for “things
natural, wild, and free,” but also through his
understanding of the human condition and
of human shortcomings (including, of
course, his own).

As the environmental movement coa¬
lesced in the 1960s and early 1970s, many
found inspiration in Leopold’s words.
Leopold recognized clearly the harsh reali¬
ties of environmental degradation, but pro¬
vided a positive response to those realities.

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In the academic and policy arenas, he
showed how the sciences, literature, history,
and philosophy not only could be, but had
to be, brought together to address problems
and suggest solutions. He contributed to the
foundations upon which new, more inte¬
grated environmental policies and programs
could be built.

Into the 1970s and 1980s, Leopold's
words provided guidance not only for far-
reaching policy changes, but in a sense for
their complement: a well tempered under¬
standing that conservation problems could
not merely be legislated or administered
away, but had to be addressed from with¬
in — within our selves, communities, cul¬
tures, agencies, businesses, organizations,
and institutions. A sense of the limits of
purely technical or political solutions gained
ground. Stated another way, Leopold’s land
ethic was now read not just as a rationale for
short-term technical fixes or policy initia¬
tives, but as a guide to necessary longer-term
social and cultural changes.

Finally, it seems of late that readers are
responding increasingly to the degree of per¬
sonal commitment that they find in Leo¬
pold. Leopold, although profoundly aware
of harsh conservation realities, avoided the
mire of despair. One of his most notable
character traits was his capacity to face
squarely and honestly a difficult conserva¬
tion dilemma and to address it in a construc¬
tive manner despite overwhelming odds.
This trait marked his literary endeavors as
well, and never more so than in completing
“The Land Ethic.” Despite serious health
problems and other difficult personal cir¬
cumstances, he found the internal resources
to pull together “The Land Ethic” as he
completed his collection of essays in the
summer of 1947. That strength of charac¬
ter rests between every line of A Sand County
Almanac.

Whither Leopold’s Legacy?

How will future generations respond to the
Leopold legacy? What will they look for
there, and what will they find? How will
Leopold’s work and thought reflect back
upon them? Those questions are of course
unanswerable, but we may speculate around
the fringes.

The various disciplines and professions to
which Leopold contributed are still strug¬
gling to gain historical self-awareness. Few
foresters are taught the history of forestry.
Few wildlife managers are taught the history
of wildlife management. Ecologists are
sometimes taught the history of ecology.
Most professionals have a strong curiosity
about their professional past, and seek it out,
but only recently have more formal oppor¬
tunities to understand this past arisen. Many
still find Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac
a better history text than anything they re¬
ceive through their formal training. Environ¬
mental history has emerged to fill in some
of these gaps, but we still lack comprehen¬
sive treatments of the development of con¬
servation through the nineteenth and twen¬
tieth centuries. This situation, if nothing
else, will ensure that attention will continue
to focus on Leopold, for the simple reason
that his life provides a unique medium
through which to address recurring issues,
debates, developments, and trends in con¬
servation. His life story will continue to of¬
fer critical insights into not only the past,
but the future.

An inescapable dilemma will need to be
taken into account. As noted above, Leo¬
pold’s legacy is likely to become even more
important with time, even as the immedi¬
ate connections to that legacy inexorably
fade. Conservationists will continue to ex¬
amine that legacy, but Leopold’s insights
cannot serve if they are regarded as inert

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museum specimens. Leopold’s legacy, if it is
to remain vital, must be able to grow and
evolve, to tolerate dissent, resist dogma, and
welcome criticism.

Leopold’s legacy already comes with built-
in defenses. He was in many ways his own
sharpest critic and anticipated many of the
forces that might have led to the fossilization
of his ideas. Many a critic will yet discover
that Leopold was often there first and had al¬
ready taken his own weakest points into ac¬
count. Moreover, Leopold was not alone in
his prescient views. He was, to borrow his
words from “The Land Ethic,” part of a
“thinking community” that struggled to meet
the conservation challenges of its day. We
build upon the work, not simply of Leopold,
but of a generation whose achievements and
frustrations he articulated.

Students of Leopold’s work are fortunate
to have the testimony of primary sources,
many of whom in the year 2000 are still
with us. They have as well a generous inher¬
itance of recorded impressions of Aldo
Leopold upon which to draw. Alfred Etter,
who studied with Leopold, penned in 1948
one of the more sensitive accounts. It ap¬
peared as an obituary, and described a day
afield with Leopold. Etter’s account cap¬
tured well the enduring personal qualities of
Leopold. At the family’s shack, wrote Etter,
“[Leopold] tried to piece together answers
to the questions which Nature so often
tempted him to solve. From pads of moss
or patches of quack grass he learned a piece
of history. From a tangle of ash logs a sug¬
gestion of some principle dawned upon him.
From a broken pine a brief diagram of the
balance of the forces in the environment was
devised. Above all, this farm was a place
where his children could learn the meaning
of life and gain confidence in their ability
to investigate small problems and discover
things which no one knew.”45

For those who consult the historic record,
this understanding of Leopold’s way of
thinking and observing and conducting
himself offers resistance to distortion. Paul
Errington, another contemporary, also spoke
to this, again in a 1948 obituary: “Let no
one do [Leopold] the disservice of fostering
Leopoldian legends or Leopoldian dogmas.
Knowing him as I have, I can say that he
would not wish these to arise from his hav¬
ing lived. I can imagine his gentle scorn at
the thought of anything like elaborate statu¬
ary in his memory, while despoliation and
wastage of the land and its biota continue
as usual.”46

Readers returning to Leopold will no
doubt continue to find their own growth
reflected in his words. Not uncommonly,
readers who first encountered Leopold
through A Sand County Almanac in their
idealistic youth return years later to its pages
to find the earlier inspiration now enriched
by more subtle wisdom. For many, Leopold
has become the proverbial parent who has
“grown so much wiser since / was young.”

A fine example of this can be found in a
1988 essay published in the North Dakota
Quarterly. The author, Patrick Nunnally,
recalled that he had first read A Sand County
Almanac in the politically charged 1970s,
when he was involved in wilderness protec¬
tion battles in the southern Appalachians.
He later moved to Iowa, where he found
himself interacting more regularly with
farmers. He also found himself asking what
Leopold had to offer under those different
circumstances. Nunnally recalls returning to
the Almanac , only to find a broader appre¬
ciation of its value:

[Leopold] establishes a grounding, a frame¬
work for conversation, without foreclosing
much in the way of intelligent reflection and
inquiry. It seems to me that I formerly used

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MEINE: The Secret Leopold, or Who Really Wrote A Sand County Almanac?

Leopold to end conversations: “This is what
Leopold says, and that is the final word.” In¬
stead, I look to him now to keep me focused
and to keep me reminded of the larger con¬
versation and stakes of which individual land
protection discussions are a part. His prin¬
ciples provide a steady foundation that guides
my discussions with individual farmers about
the possibilities for conservation tillage and
that grounds abstract philosophizing about
the need to overthrow the Western world
view for an ecologically-just society. He still
has value as a source for quotations — he
writes better on this subject than nearly any¬
one else who has tried, and his particular
phrases ring better than any of my own. But
it is more important to me now that he pro¬
vides exemplary inquiry to complicated prob¬
lems, with more than one viable position but
only one best position. What formerly I cited
as received dogma, now, I hope, I can use as
wisdom of a thinker who has preceded me in
the land conservation debate.47

This is the more measured and better-bal¬
anced view of Leopold that we can antici¬
pate and work toward. Finally, five decades
after Leopold’s death, we may appreciate his
continuing influence without having to
make him over into a deity or a devil, a hero
or a threat, without having to regard him as
naive, radical, old-fashioned, or prophetic.
This is the kind of critical attitude that pays
due honor to Leopold by reflecting not
merely our desires or our fears, but our
growth.

Notes

1. Boris Zeide, “Another Look at Leopold’s ‘Land
Ethic,”’ Journal of Forestry 96, 1 (January 1998),
13-19.

2. J. Baird Callicott, “A Critical Examination of ‘An¬

other Look at Leopold’s “Land Ethic,””’ Journal

of Forestry 96, 1 (January 1998), 20-26. The April
1998 issue of the Journal of Forestry featured eight
further commentaries. These articles were re¬
printed by the Society for American Foresters in
a Forestry Forum publication, The Land Ethic:
Meeting Human Needs for the Land and Its Re¬
sources (Bethesda, Md.: SAF, 1998).

3. For a compilation of Leopold’s writings, with com¬

mentary, in these diverse fields, see Curt Meine
and Richard L. Knight, The Essential Aldo Leopold:
Quotations and Commentaries (Madison, Wise.:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).

4. For biographical treatments of Leopold, see Susan

L. Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold
and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude Toward
Deer, Mountains, and Forests (Columbia: Univer¬
sity of Missouri Press, 1974; reprinted by the Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Curt Meine,
Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison, Wise.:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Marybeth
Lorbiecki, Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire (Hel¬
ena and Billings, Mont.: Falcon Publishing Co.,
1996).

5. Aldo Leopold, Game Management (New York,
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933; reprinted by the
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

6. See Dennis Ribbens, “The Making of A Sand
County Almanac," pp. 91-109 in J. Baird Callicott,
ed., Companion to A Sand County Almanac: In¬
terpretive & Critical Essays (Madison, Wise.: Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Curt Meine,
“Moving Mountains: Aldo Leopold &: A Sand
County Almanac, ” Wildlife Society Bulletin 26:4
(1998), 697-706.

7. Aldo Leopold, “The Thick-billed Parrot in Chi¬
huahua,” The Condor 39:1 (January-February
1937), 9-10; Leopold, “Marshland Elegy,” Ameri¬
can Forests 43:10 (October 1937), 472-474;
Leopold, “Song of the Gavilan,” Journal of Wild¬
life Management 4:3 (July 1940), 329-332;
Leopold, “Escudilla,” American Forests 46:12 (De¬
cember 1940), 539-540. The Wisconsin Agricul¬
turist and Farmer essays can be found in J. Baird
Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle, eds., For the

Volume 88 (2000)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays
and Other Writings (Washington, D.C. and
Covelo, Calif.: Island Press, 1999).

8. Aldo Leopold, “A Biotic View of Land.,” Journal

of Forestry 37:9 (September 1939), 727-730; pp.
266-273 in Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott,
eds. The River of the Mother of God and Other Es¬
says by Aldo Leopold (Madison, Wise.: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1991).

9. Arthur Hawkins, interview with author, 4 Decem¬

ber 1999.

10. Frances Hamerstrom, quoted in Meine, Aldo
Leopold: His Life and Work , 378. The most exten¬
sive first-person account of Aldo Leopold’s activi¬
ties and interests during his later Wisconsin years
is Robert E. McCabe, Aldo Leopold: The Professor
(Madison, Wise.: Rusty Rock Press, 1987).

11. H. Albert Hochbaum, quoted in Meine, Aldo
Leopold: His Life and Work , 456-457.

12. H. Albert Hochbaum, quoted in Meine, Aldo
Leopold: His Life and Work , 511.

13. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and
Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford Uni¬
versity Press, 1949), 129-133.

14. Aldo Leopold, “Adventures of a Conservation
Commissioner,” pp. 149-154 in Flader and
Callicott.

15- Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of
Aldo Leopold (New York: Oxford University Press,
1953), 165.

16. Leopold, “On a Monument to the Passenger Pi¬
geon,” pp. 3-5 in Silent Wings (Madison, Wise.:
Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, 1 1 May
1947).

17. August Derleth, “Of Aldo Leopold,” Capital
Times (Wise.), 5 November 1949.

18. Lewis Gannett, “Books and Things,” New York
Herald Tribune , 27 October 1949.

19. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 221.

20. Curt Meine, “The Oldest Task in Human His¬
tory,” pp. 7-35 in Richard L. Knight and Sarah
F. Bates, eds., A New Century for Natural Resources
Management (Washington D.C. and Covelo Ca¬
lif.: Island Press, 1995). Leopold’s reference to the

Alhambra may be found in A Sand County Alma¬
nac, 225.

21. Curt Meine, “Conservation Biology and Sustain¬
able Societies: A Historical Perspective,” pp. 35-
61 in Max Oelschlaeger, ed., After Earth Day:
Continuing the Conservation Effort (Denton,
Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1992).

22. See Richard L. Knight and Peter B. Landres, Stew¬
ardship Across Boundaries (Washington D.C. and
Covelo Calif: Island Press, 1998); Eric T.
Freyfogle, Bounded People, Boundless Lands: En¬
visioning a New Land Ethic (Washington D.C. and
Covelo Calif.: Island Press, 1998).

23. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 210.

24. See Daniel Kemmis, Community and the Politics
of Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1990); Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994);
Ted Bernard and Jora Young, The Ecology of Hope:
Communities Collaborate for Sustainability
(Gabriola Island, B.C. and East Haven, Conn.:
New Society Publishers, 1997); William Vitek and
Wes Jackson, eds., Rooted in the Land: Essays on
Community and Place (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1996).

25. Roberts Mann, “Aldo Leopold: Priest and
Prophet,” American Forests 74, 2 (February 1954),
23, 42-43.

26. Ernest Swift, “Aldo Leopold: Wisconsin’s Con¬
servation Prophet,” Wisconsin Tales and Trails 2,3
(Fall 1961), 2-5.

27. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American
Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven and London: Yale Uni¬
versity Press, 1982; original edition 1967), 182-
199.

28. Wallace Stegner, “Living on Our Principal,” Wil¬
derness 48, 168 (Spring 1985), 5-21. Reprinted as
“The Legacy of Aldo Leopold,” pp. 233-245 in
Callicott, Companion to A Sand County Almanac.

29. “Making Forestlands Serve America Better
Through Good Management,” Saturday Evening
Post , 18 February 1956.

30. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 200.

31. In the extensive literature of deep ecology, see,

20

TRANSACTIONS

MEINE: The Secret Leopold, or Who Really Wrote A Sand County Almanac?

for example: Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep
Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake
City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985); Dave Fore¬
man, Confessions of an Eco-warrior (New York:
Harmony Books, 1991); and Max Oelschlaeger,
The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age
of Ecology (New Haven and London: Yale Univer¬
sity Press, 1991). See also Susan Zakin, Coyotes
and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmen¬
tal Movement (New York: Viking Press, 1993).

32. Letters to the editor in the journal of Forestry 88,2
(February 1990), 4; and Journal of Forestry 89,9
(September 1991), 5.

33. J. Baird Callicott, “The Conceptual Foundations
of the Land Ethic, ” pp. 75-99 in In Defense of
the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philoso¬
phy (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York
Press, 1989).

34. Quoted in Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic,
75-76, 279 n. 4.

35. See, for example, Robert Paehlke, Environmen¬
talism and the Future of Progressive Politics (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989);
C. Brant Short, Ronald Reagan and the Public
Lands: America's Conservation Debate, 1979-1984
(College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1989); Bryan
G. Norton, Toward Unity Among Environmental¬
ists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
and H. Lewis Ulman, “‘Thinking Like a Moun¬
tain’: Persona, Ethos, and Judgment in American
Nature Writing,” pp. 46-81 in Carl G. Herndl
and Stuart C. Brown, eds., Green Culture: Envi¬
ronmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America
(Madison, Wise.: University of Wisconsin Press,
1996).

36. Norris Yates, “The Inadequate Politics of Aldo
Leopold,” pp. 219-221 in Proceedings of the Fifth
Midwest Prairie Conference (Ames, Iowa: Iowa
State University, 1978).

37. At the time, I was a busy graduate student, and
had no time to take on the article. As I remem¬
ber, my response at the time was: “I’ll tell you
what. I’ll write the article, and if you can get The
Progressive to publish it simultaneously, I’ll do it.”

Nothing came of the suggestion.

38. Susan Flader, “Aldo Leopold and Environmen¬
tal Citizenship, ” Transactions of the Wisconsin
Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters v. 87 (1999),
23-35.

39. Flader and Callicott, 215.

40. Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work, 525.

41. Zeide, “Another Look as Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic.’”

42. “Can You Eat Meat and Consider Yourself an
Environmentalist?” Sierra 76, 6 (November/De¬
cember 1991), 122.

43. J. Baird Callicott, “The Conceptual Foundations
of the Land Ethic”; Michael Nelson, “Holists and
Fascists and Paper Tigers. . . Oh My!,” Ethics and
the Environment 1 (2): 103-1 17.

44. Francis Lepine, “Shut Down Leopold,” Iowa State
Daily, 26 February 1993.

45. Alfred G. Etter, “A Day with Aldo Leopold,” The
Landis (Fall 1948); reprinted, pp. 384-389 in
Nancy P. Pittman, ed., From The Land (Wash¬
ington D.C. and Covelo, Calif.: Island Press,
1988).

46. Paul Errington, “In Appreciation of Aldo
Leopold,” Journal of Wildlife Management 12,4
(October 1948), 341-350.

47. Patrick Nunnally, “A Mind at Work: Aldo
Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac," North Dakota
Quarterly 56, 3 (Summer 1988), 79-8 6.

Curt Meine is a conservation biologist and
writer with the International Crane Foundation
in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and director of conser¬
vation programs at the Wisconsin Academy of
Sciences, Arts and Letters. He is author of the
biography Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work
(University of Wisconsin Press, 1988) and co¬
editor with Richard L. Knight of The Essential
Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries
( University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). Address:
International Crane Foundation, P. O. Box 447,
Baraboo, WI 53913-0447.

Email: curt@savingcranes.org

Volume 88 (2000)

21

James O. Evrard

Presettlement Wildlife in
Northwest Wisconsin Pine Barrens

Abstract Archeological and historical records were used to document wild¬
life found in Wisconsin s Northwest Pine Barrens during the two
hundred-year period from European discovery ( 1 650) to European
settlement ( 1850). The Northwest Pine Barrens , a relatively nar¬
row strip ofxeric sandy soils , is a fire-dominated ecotonal com¬
munity between western prairies and eastern forests. Archeologi¬
cal records of wildlife exist along the St. Croix River and its major
tributary , the Namekagon River, and at the site of two fur trad¬
ing posts on the Yellow River. Historical wildlife records exist in
the journals of French explorers, French and English fur traders,
and American traders, missionaries, and government officials. The
open pine barrens supported a wildlife community not unlike that
of today with the exception of large ungulates including the buf¬
falo, moose, elk , some furbearers like the marten, and a few birds
like the passenger pigeon.

Knowledge of the species composition, population sizes, and
range distribution of Wisconsin’s wildlife prior to Euro¬
pean settlement is important. Environmental conditions that
existed at the time of exploration and settlement are generally
accepted as desired future states by the emerging discipline of
restoration biology. Agreement on common ground such as
presettlement vegetation or wildlife is needed by the many var¬
ied interest groups involved in developing increasingly impor¬
tant ecosystem management plans (Kay 1994, Neumann
1995). Finally, accounts of early wildlife misinterpreted either
in error or by a conscious effort to revise history need to be
identified and corrected.

The objectives of this article are to document presence and
distribution of some wildlife species that existed in the
Wisconsin’s Northwest Pine Barrens during the two hundred-
year period from European discovery and exploration (1650)
to European settlement (1850).

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The Barrens

A pine barrens is a transitional ecosystem,
an ecotone between forest and prairie, born
of fire and maintained by fire. Pine barrens
are savannas which were described by Curtis
(1959) as

a peculiar combination of grassland and for¬
est, in which the bulk of the land was occu¬
pied by grasses and a few shrubs, but which
also had widely spaced tall trees, frequently
of a given species at a given place.

The Northwest Pine Barrens is an area of
sandy soils approximately 12-15 miles wide
and 125 miles long from the Sterling Bar¬
rens in Polk County in the southwest to the
Moquah Barrens in Bayfield County to the
northeast (Figure 1).

The northwest pine barrens have been
described in detail by Curtis (1959), Vogl
(1970), Mossman et ah (1991), Niemuth
(1995), and Radeloff et al. 1999. Murphy
(1931) described the “barrens” as “where
coniferous forests and open expanses of
sweet fern and grassy barrens dwarf into in¬
significance the few evidences of man’s
present occupancy and use of the land.” He
further stated, “The grassy and sweet fern
barrens . . . are desolate open tracts where
only a charred stump, a cluster of jack pines,
or a scrub oak bush breaks the monotonous
sweep of the rolling, thinly clad ground sur¬
face.” Originally there were about 2.3 mil¬
lion acres of pine barrens in Wisconsin, but
today only a few percent of the ecosystem’s
early serai stages remains (Curtis 1959,
Shively 1994), a victim of wildfire control,
forest succession, and tree plantations.

Sources of Records

In order to discuss presettlement wildlife and
habitat we must examine available wildlife

records. One source is the oral history of
Native Americans or Indians in the region.
Another source is prehistoric evidence gath¬
ered by archeologists. A third source is the
historical record left in the form of letters,
journals, and books written by early Euro¬
pean discoverers and explorers.

Oral History

Oral history of present Native Americans,
despite romantic appeal, is subject to doubt.
Indians passed their largely spiritual history
from generation to generation through story
telling. This tradition was severely damaged
by the federal government in misguided at¬
tempts to force these people into the domi¬
nant white culture. Indian children were
taken from their families and placed into
boarding schools where they were punished
for participating in any part of their native
culture including using their native language
and story telling (Edgar Oerichbauer,
Burnett County Historical Society, personal
communication 1993). The oral chain of
history was damaged and perhaps broken in
many cases. The most reliable information
we have about presettlement indigenous cul¬
tures and their relationships to wildlife is
from materials written by Europeans, despite
the possibility of non-Indian biases.

Archeological Records

Archeological records are not abundant in
this region of Wisconsin. Both prehistoric
man and early historic man traveled along
and lived near water. It is in this shoreline
habitat that limited archeological material is
found.

After the St. Croix National Scenic
Riverway (SCNSR) was created, the U.S.
National Park Service initiated archeologi¬
cal investigations of the property (Perry
1986). A series of sites from the lower St.
Croix River to the upper or its major tribu-

24

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EVRARD: Presettlement Wildlife in Northwest Wisconsin Pine Barrens

Figure 1 . Northwest Wisconsin Pine Barrens (from Radeloff et al. 1999).

tary, the Namekagon River, were excavated
from 1976 to 1982. Most of the upper
SCNSR sites appeared to have been inhab¬
ited by humans for varying lengths of time
during the Woodland Period (200 BC-
1650 AD). Mammalian bones were the pre¬
dominant (95%) artifacts found. This does
not necessarily imply that mammals made
up a large part of the aboriginal diet since
fish and bird bones are more fragile and less
apt to survive the ravages of time than mam¬
malian bones.

The prehistoric fauna suggested by the
specimens recovered from the sites does not
differ noticeably from the modern fauna of
the area with the exception of several speci¬
mens of elk or wapiti (Table 1). White- tailed

deer was the dominant species. Other iden¬
tifiable mammals included the dog or wild
canids, beaver, muskrat, raccoon, striped
skunk, snowshoe hare/white-tailed jackrab-
bit, eastern cottontail, woodchuck, porcu¬
pine, and pocket gopher. Pocket gopher re¬
mains were thought to be natural intrusions
in the sites where encountered, not cultural
artifacts. Although bird bones were found,
none were identifiable. Reptile remains in¬
cluded the Blanding’s turtle, snapping turtle,
box/water turtle, and map/false map turtle.
Fish identified at upper riverway sites in¬
cluded the northern pike, walleye, white
bass, and catfish. Along the lower river, mus¬
sels are found at the sites along with greater
number of fish remains.

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Table 1. Wildlife records obtained from archeological and historical sources in
Wisconsin’s Northwest Pine Barrens.

Species

Source a

Birds

Swans ( Cygnus spp.)

Canada Goose (Branta canadensis)

Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)

Northern pintail (Anas acuta)

Blue-winged teal (Anas discors)

Redhead duck (Aythya americana)

Merganser ( Merges spp.)

Wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)

Crane ( Grus spp.)

Plover (Charadriidae)

Passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius)

Belted kingfisher (Ceryle alcyon)

Red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus)
Yellow-shafted flicker (Colaptes auratus)

Eastern kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus)

Gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis)

American robin (Turdus migratorius)

Blackbird (Icteridae)

6

4-5

4

4

4

4

7

4-7-10

5

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

Mammals

Snowshoe hare/white-tailed jackrabbit (Leporidae)

Eastern Cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus floridanus)

Woodchuck (Marmota monax)

Thirteen-lined ground squirrel (Ci tell us tridecemlineatus)

Pocket gopher (Geomys busarius)

Beaver (Castor canadensis)

Muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus)

Porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum)

Wild canids (Canidae)

Timber wolf (Canis lupus)

Black Bear (Ursus americanus)

Raccoon (Procyon lotor)

Marten (Maries americana)

Fisher (Martes pennanti)

Weasels ( Mustela spp.)

Mink (Mustela vison)

Badger (Taxidea taxus)

Striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis)

River otter (Lutra canadensis)

Mountain lion (Felis concolor)

Lynx/bobcat (Lynx spp.)

Elk (Cervus canadensis)

White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

Moose (Alces alces)

Caribou (Rangifer caribou)

Buffalo (Bison bison)

1

1

1

9

1

1 -4-5-6

1- 4-5

1-8

1

5

2- 4-5-6-8

1- 4

4-5

4-5

5

4-5

4

1

4-5-6

2- 4

4.-5

1-2-4-5-11

1- 2-5-6-8

2- 5-8-9-12

2

2-3

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EVRARD: Presettlement Wildlife in Northwest Wisconsin Pine Barrens

Table 1 , continued

Species

Source a

Turtles

Snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina)

Blanding’s turtle (Emydoidea blandingii)

Painted turtle (Chrysemys picta)

Map/false map turtle ( Graptemys sp.)

Box/water turtle (Emydidae)

1

1

4

1

1

Snakes

Fox snake (Elaphe vulpina)

9

Fish

Sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens)

Whitefish (Coregoninae)

Northern pike/muskellunge (Esox sp.)

Buffalo ( Ictiobus sp.)

Redhorse (Moxostoma erythrurum)

White sucker (Catostomus commersoni)

Other suckers (Catostomidae)

Catfish (Ictalurus)

White bass (Morone chrysops)

Walleye (Stizostedion vitreum)

5-6

5

1 -4-5-6

4-6

4-6

4-6

4-5

1-4-5

1

1 -4-5-6

Invertebrates

Mussels (Unionidae)

1

a1 - Perry 1986; 2 - Adams 1961 ; 3 - Schorger 1937; 4 - Ewen 1983; 5 - Thwaites 191 1 ; 6 - Nelson 1947;
7 - Birk and White 1979; 8 - Ely 1835; 9 - Mossman 1994; 10 - Schorger 1942a; 1 1 - Schorger 1954; and

12 - Schorger 1956.

Mammal remains found at the sites are
from forest-dwelling species with the excep¬
tion of elk and possibly white-tailed jackrab-
bit and pocket gopher, which are more typi¬
cally creatures of grasslands and savannas.

Another significant source of information
about early wildlife resources in the area was
an archeological excavation of the historic
NW and XY Company fur trading forts on
the Yellow River, just downstream of Little
Yellow Lake, Burnett County. These adja¬
cent posts, rediscovered in 1969 and named
Forts Folle Avoine, were occupied during
the winters of 1802-03 and 1803-04
(Oerichbauer and Mueller 1988).

Refuse pits at the Forts Folle Avoine

yielded the remains of 13 mammal, 6 bird,
1 turtle and 7 fish species (Ewen 1983).

White-tailed deer again dominated the
number of specimens recovered followed by
the beaver, black bear, otter, raccoon, musk¬
rat, fisher, badger, lynx/bobcat, marten, and
mink (Table 1). In addition, there were pos¬
sible elk or wapiti and mountain lion re¬
mains found at the site. Birds identified in¬
cluded the Canada goose and four duck
species: the mallard, pintail, blue-winged
teal, and redhead. In addition, a wild tur¬
key bone was tentatively identified. The
painted turtle was the only reptile found.
Fish species included the northern pike/
muskellunge, walleye, buffalo, white sucker,

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

redhorse sucker, other suckers, and catfish.
Wild rice ( Zizania aquatica) and corn (Zea
mays) were also found at the site.

Historical Records

Historical records begin in the 1620s when
the Frenchman Etienne Brule explored the
south shore of Lake Superior, possibly reach¬
ing Chequamegon Bay (Holzhueter 1986).
Brule was followed by Radisson, who ex¬
plored and traded furs with the Indians of
northwest Wisconsin during 1658-62
(Adams 1961). The Frenchman, in their
wanderings from Madeline Island in Che¬
quamegon Bay of Lake Superior to Lac
Court Orielles to the Mississippi River, re¬
ported killing stagg [elk], boeuf [buffalo],
oriniack and elan [moose], fallow does and
bucks [white-tailed deer], carribouck [cari¬
bou], bear [black bear], and mountain lions
(Table 1).

Radisson mentioned that “Buffs [buffa¬
lo] .. . come to the upper lake [Lake Supe¬
rior] but by chance.” Schorger (1937), in an
examination of Radisson’s journal, con¬
cluded that Radisson probably first encoun¬
tered buffalo near the Brule-St. Croix wa¬
terway [in the pine barrens], ranging east of
the St. Croix River. Schorger lists Burnett
and Polk counties in the southern part of the
northwest pine barrens as being within the
range of the buffalo.

Radisson also mentioned that the Sault
[Ojibwa or Chippewa] Indians were at war
with the Nation [Sioux} Indians at that time.
In 1680, the French coureur de bois , Daniel
Greysolon, Sieur Du Llut [Duluth], traveled
up the Bois Brule River from Lake Superior
and down the St. Croix River to the Missis¬
sippi River (Turner 1970). Duluth estab¬
lished Fort St. Croix at the portage between
the Brule River and the St. Croix River. The
French named a river that entered the St.

Croix River just south of the outlet of St.
Croix Lake, river au boeuf [ox or buffalo
River]. The French fur traders traveled the
waterways, trading with the Chippewa In¬
dians centered in La Pointe on Madeline Is¬
land in Chequamegon Bay and the Sioux
Indians centered in the region of the Upper
Mississippi River. The two tribes had been
at war until Duluth negotiated peace be¬
tween them to facilitate trading.

Indian life had an annual cycle. Turner
(1970) stated:

The Indians, returning from the [winter]
hunting grounds to their [permanent] villages
in the spring, set the squaws to making maple
sugar, planting corn, watermelons, potatoes,
squashes, etc., and a little hunting was carried
on. The summer was given over to enjoyment,
and in the early period to wars. In the autumn
they collected their wild rice, or their corn,
and again were ready to start for the hunting
grounds, sometimes 300 miles distant.

The Chippeways had an institution called
by them by a term signifying “to enter one
another’s lodge.” whereby a truce was made
between them and the Sioux at the winter
hunting season.

In 1763, the English gained control of the
fur trade in northwest Wisconsin as a result
of their victory over the French in the
French and Indian War (Turner 1970).
With the French gone, warfare between the
Chippewa and Sioux resumed.

According to Hickerson (1988), a “con¬
tested” or “debatable” zone up to 200 miles
wide from northwest Wisconsin to northwest
Minnesota (Figure 2) developed between the
two tribes by 1780 and continued until
1850. No permanent villages were found in
this buffer zone located in the ecotone be¬
tween the forest to the north and the prairie
to the south. Both Chippewa and Sioux ven¬
tured into the zone only to make war and

28

TRANSACTIONS

EVRARD: Presettlement Wildlife in Northwest Wisconsin Pine Barrens

hunt at the risk of their lives. The effect of
this buffer zone on wildlife was dramatic.
Hickerson (1988) stated:

Warfare between members of the two tribes had
the effect of preventing hunters from occupy¬
ing the best game region intensively enough to
deplete the [game] supply. ... In the one in¬
stance in which a lengthy truce was maintained
between certain Chippewa and Sioux, the
buffer, in effect a protective zone for the deer,
was destroyed, and famine ensued.

Hickerson’s conclusions were based upon
reports by Carver in 1767, Perrault in 1785—
86, Pike in 1805-06, Johnson in 1809, Cass
and Doty in 1820, and Schoolcraft in 1824
and 1831. Irving (1835) reported a similar
intertribal buffer zone containing an abun¬
dance of wildlife in present-day Oklahoma,
and Jackson (1993) reported another inter¬
tribal battle zone with abundant wildlife in
the Bear Valley of Idaho. Kentucky, prob¬
ably the Kentucky Barrens (Schorger 1943),
was also an early game-rich battleground of

Volume 88 (2000)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

the tribes east of the Mississippi (Jackson
1993).

The existence of several journals main¬
tained by fur traders stationed at the Forts
Folle Avoine and the Connor Post, a con¬
temporary fur trading site on the Snake
River, a tributary of the St. Croix River in
Minnesota 28 miles west of Yellow Lake,
provides a rare opportunity to compare his¬
toric records with archeological evidence. All
trade was with the Chippewa Indians for
both furs and food (Ewen 1983).

While the traders did some of their own
hunting, their subsistence depended upon
the Indian hunters. Journal entries from
both forts (Thwaites 1911, Gates 1963) in¬
dicated that hunters took their game within
20-30 miles of the trading posts.

The best records were kept by Michael
Curot at Forts Folle Avoine from September
16, 1803, to May 9, 1804 (Thwaites 1911).
Curot, a clerk for the XY Company, recorded
the pelts and meat he traded for to feed him¬
self and his co-workers. Furs and hides were
from approximately 247 beaver, 88 muskrats,
68 deer, 42 lynxes (includes bobcats), 23 ot¬
ter, 15 bear, 13 fisher, 6 weasels, 4 moose, 3
marten, 2 mink, and 1 possible elk or “red
deer” (Table 1). The beaver pelts were
shipped to Grand Portage, Minnesota in 3
packs weighing approximately 90 pounds
each. He also shipped 6 packs of other fur.
The adjacent NW post shipped 21 packs of
pelts including 6 beaver packs. Curot also re¬
corded the presence of wolves in the area.

Curot traded for the meat of 41 deer, 4
elk or “machichinse,” 3 bear, 22 ducks, 9
geese, and 1 crane. He also acquired fawn
skins filled with wild rice, cakes of fat, and
maple ( Acer spp.) sugar. In addition, the
trader and his hunters netted and speared
nearly 700 fish including sturgeon, pike,
walleyes, suckers, catfish, and whitefish dur¬
ing the nearly eight month period.

The lack of grouse traded for food was
explained by Schorger (1942b):

Game-birds, though numerous, were seldom
molested since the [relatively-expensive lead]
ball [for a black-powder muzzle- loading rifle]
required to secure a sharp-tailed grouse
[Tympanuchas phasianellus] could fell a deer
as readily.

George Nelson, a fur trader for the XY
Company, who spent the previous winter of
1802—03 at the same post wrote of his ex¬
perience some years later (Nelson 1947). His
sketchy records describe the area surround¬
ing the fort in somewhat more detail than
Curot. He stated:

The Indian name is “Yellow water lake” [Yel¬
low Lake] from the yellow sand in the bot¬
tom. ... At the S.E. side it is flat & miry; &
an immense quantity of rice grows there; and
in their Season, ducks of various Sorts [20
species] , Geese & Swans in multitudes. There
is also plenty of fish, Carp of several sorts,
some of monstrous size, pickeral, pike &c.

In the morning Early I would steal out af¬
ter taking a careful survey of the coast [for
Sioux Indians, mortal enemies of the Chip¬
pewa and possibly white men trading and liv¬
ing with the Chippewa], go to the river &
firing one or two shots killing 3 or 4 ducks.

Deer in great numbers & bears of every
colour from deep black to a light brown, nearly
yellow . . . Beaver & raccoons & porcu¬
pine. . . . Beaver and otter ... no troute nor cat¬
fish (Barbotte), Carp [probably suckers] of sev¬
eral varieties & good, one sort particularly, very
large, almost enormous, & very fat. Pickeral &
Pike a variety of Pike, some of which are very
large and excellent. Sturgeon . . . eels . . . turtle,
some of 18 ins. diameter.

Both Nelson and Curot worried about
the presence of Sioux Indians, enemies of the

30

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EVRARD: Presettlement Wildlife in Northwest Wisconsin Pine Barrens

Chippewa, since the location of their trad¬
ing posts were just north of the buffer zone
described by Hickerson (1988).

The Snake River, Minnesota, post was
occupied during the winter of 1804-05
(Gates 1965). John Sayer was the clerk sta¬
tioned at that post and was assisted by trader
Thomas Connor. Sayer kept a detailed jour¬
nal (Birk and White 1979), much like that
of Curot.

The wildlife pelts and meat obtained in
trade with the Chippewa Indians were simi¬
lar to that of Curot. Exceptions include
“shelldrakes” or mergansers and a “Outarde”
or wild turkey (Evrard 1993). The Minne¬
sota fur traders apparently included more
deer and ducks and fewer fish in their diets
compared to the more diverse diet of the
Wisconsin traders.

In 1816, the Americans took control of
the fur trade from the English as a result of
the War of 1812. In 1835, the Protestant
missionary Edmund Ely recorded the hunt¬
ing results of 5 Chippewa men from the Yel¬
low Lake area of present-day Burnett
County. From November 15 until January
15, they killed 13 moose, 9 bears, and 2 deer
(Ely 1835). In addition, the Indian hunters
also harvested porcupines, rabbits, grouse,
and “furred game.”

Henry Schoolcraft made several trips
through northwest Wisconsin during 1831 —
34 and reported extensively on the vegeta¬
tion of the area in addition to the wildlife
(Schoolcraft 1834 and 1851, Mossman
1994). He stated:

The country [the lower Namekagon River] as
we decend assumes more the appearance of
upland prairie, from the repeated burnings of
the forest. The effect is, nearly all the small
trees have been consumed, and grass has
taken their place. One result of this is, the
deer are drawn up from the more open lands

of the Mississippi, to follow the advance of
the prairie and open lands towards Lake Su¬
perior.

The moose is also an inhabitant of the
Namekagun. The Chippewas, at a hunting
camp we passed yesterday, said they had
been on the tracks of a moose, but lost
them [the tracks] in high brush. Ducks and
pigeons [the now-extinct Passenger pigeon]
appear common.

Among smaller birds are the blackbird
[probably the red-winged blackbird (Aege-
laius phoeniceus) or Brewer’s blackbird
(Euphagus cyanocephalus)} , robin (Turdus
migratorius), catbird (Dumetella caro linen-
sis), red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes
erythrocephalus), kingfisher ( Ceryle a Icy on),
kingbird (Tyrannus t.), plover [probably
killdeer ( Charadrius vociferos) or upland
sandpiper (Bartramia longicauda), but
possibly also spotted sandpiper (Actitus
macularia) or migrant shorebirds] and
yellowhammer [possibly the yellow-shafted
flicker ( Colaptes auratus)\ .

The copper head snake [probably fox
snake (Elaphe vulpina)} is found at the
Yellow River [in Burnett and/or Washburn
counties]; also the thirteen striped squirrel
(Citellus tricemlineatus). . . . Its [Yellow
River] banks afford much of the open
ground [barrens] which are favorable the
thirteen-striped or prairie squirrel.

Schoolcraft also discussed vegetation in
the Northwest Pine Barrens. He remarked
on the abundance of the whortleberry [blue¬
berry or Vaccinium spp.] along the Name¬
kagon River.

Both banks of the river are literally covered
with the ripe whortleberry — it is large and
delicious. The Indians feast on it. Thousands
and thousands of bushels of this fruit could
be gathered with very little labor.

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Schoolcraft mentioned a “plain” that ex¬
isted in 1832 near present-day Gordon. He
also discussed the impact of fire on the land¬
scape to the east of the pine barrens region.
On the Sawyer/Washburn County line just
south of the present city of Hayward, he
stated:

Just after passing the middle pause [on the
portage from the Namekagon River to Lac
Court Orielles], the path mounts and is car¬
ried along a considerable ridge, from which
there is a good view of the country. It is open
as far as the eye can reach. Sometimes there
is a fine range of large pines: in by far the larg¬
est space ancient fires appear to have spread,
destroying the forest and giving rise to a
young growth of pines ( Pinus spp.), aspen
(Populus spp.), shadbush (. Amelanchier sp.),
and bramble ( Rubus spp.).

It is obvious from the description of the
vegetation of the Northwest Pine Barrens
that the character of the landscape was open
and the wildlife species found there reflected
that openness.

Other records during this period reinforce
the concept. Schorger (1942a) mentions
“John Lewis Peyton ... in 1848 . . . saw
some wild turkeys while crossing a plain be¬
tween La Pointe and the St. Croix River.”
In another work, Schorger (1934) reported
that a Reverend Brunson traveled by horse
and wagon from Prairie du Chien to La
Pointe in 1 843 before any roads existed, an
indication of the openness of the country.

The open landscape and its wildlife in¬
habitants were a function of climate, soils,
topography, and the Native American use of
fire. Indians used fire extensively for warmth
and to prepare and preserve food, to stimu¬
late food production such as blueberries, to
simplify wood collecting, to reduce insect
pests, to clear land, to drive and attract
game, and to harass and attack their enemies

(McKinney 1939, Muir 1913, Murphy
1931, Schroger 1937 and 1943, Appleman
1975, Dorney and Dorney 1989. Simms
1992, Stolzenburg 1994, Ashworth 1995,
MacCleery 1995, Mills 1995, Pyne 1995,
Quaife 1995, Mirk 1997, Schneider 1997,
and Loope and Anderton 1998).

As a result of a series of treaties ending
in 1842, the Chippewa and Sioux Indians
made peace with each other, ceded their
lands to the U.S. Government, and were
confined to reservations in northern Wis¬
consin and Minnesota. This opened the area
to European settlement. Scandinavian set¬
tlers first arrived in Burnett County in the
1850s and became the first permanent white
residents in the pine barrens. Cessation of
Indian burning and uncontrolled subsis¬
tence hunting, farming, and logging activi¬
ties of the settlers were largely responsible
for changes in the wildlife community in¬
habiting northwest Wisconsin in the late
nineteenth century.

Buffalo disappeared from the region by
1830 (Schorger 1937) before the arrival of
European settlers, elk by 1860 (Schorger
1954), and the moose by 1890 (Schorger
1956). Deer remained in good numbers un¬
til 1890 (Schorger 1953). Birds, especially
waterfowl and grouse prospered in the early
part of the twentieth century (Schorger 1943
and 1945) then declined, setting the stage
for the rise of the modern-day conservation
movement.

Conclusions

The northwest Wisconsin pine barrens dur¬
ing the 200 years from discovery (1650) to
European settlement (1850) was a mosiac
of grassland, brushland, and forest. This fire
community owed its existence to xeric,
sandy soils that were warmed and dried by
prevailing southwest winds, allowing fre-

32

TRANSACTIONS

EVRARD: Presettlement Wildlife in Northwest Wisconsin Pine Barrens

quent fires, set by lightning and Indians, to
sweep Its length.

The openness of the Northwest Pine Bar¬
rens vegetation was reflected by the wildlife
community inhabiting the region. The high
grass component of the ecosystem provided
forage for large ungulates including the buf¬
falo in the southern part of the barrens and
the elk throughout the barrens. Other grass-
and brushland wildlife reported in the bar¬
rens included the white-tailed deer, thirteen-
lined ground squirrel, pocket gopher, red¬
winged and/or Brewer’s blackbird, catbird,
kingbird, red-headed woodpecker, yellow-
shafted flicker, Blanding’s turtle, and fox
snake.

Some wildlife species such as the buffalo,
caribou, and passenger pigeon disappeared.
The passenger pigeon is extinct, and the cari¬
bou was a creature of Wisconsin’s boreal for¬
est and bogs, not the barrens. Most species
including the white-tailed deer, black bear,
and sandhill crane, were reduced to low
numbers but have recovered spectacularly in
the last 50 years. Some extirpated species re¬
turned, either with human help (fisher,
Canada goose, trumpeter swan ( Cygnus buc¬
cinator ), and wild turkey) or with our rela¬
tively newly acquired tolerance of wildlife
(moose and timber wolf). Several species
such as the elk and marten have been suc¬
cessfully reintroduced elsewhere in Wiscon¬
sin but have not yet recolonized the north¬
west pine barrens. In addition, there are
unconfirmed observations of mountain lions
roaming the barrens again and the reintro¬
duction of the whooping crane (Grus
americana) is now being contemplated.

If the habitat base of the Northwest Pine
Barrens ecosystem can be preserved in the
face of increasing human development pres¬
sures, the wildlife community we know to¬
day should remain with us into the foresee¬
able future.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank E. Oerichbauer of the
Burnett County Historical Society for guid¬
ance to historical and archeological records
and J. Schaeppi of the National Park Ser¬
vice for additional archeological records. I
also wish to thank Keith McCaffery and two
anonymous referees for critical review of the
manuscript. Partial funding for this study
was provided by the Federal Aid to Wild¬
life Restoration under Pittman-Robertson
Wisconsin Project W-141-R.

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James O. Evrard is a retired wildlife research
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Pine Street, Grantsburg, WI 54840. Email:
evrardsc@win. bright, net

Volume 88 (2000)

35

I

James O. Evrard

Birds and Amphibians
of Selected Pine Barrens Wetlands

Abstract Wildlife inhabiting the wetlands of the pitted outwash section of

Wisconsin s northwest pine barrens are little known. Six small and
relatively infertile wetlands located in and adjacent to the
Namekagon Barrens Wildlife Area were surveyed in 1996 and
1997 to determine the distribution and abundance of birds and
amphibians. Three frog and two bird surveys were conducted in
each wetland. Pi fall traps associated with drifi fences adjacent to
three of the wetlands were also used to capture amphibians. Inci¬
dental wildlife observations were recorded. Nine frog species, two
salamander species, and twenty-five bird species were observed in,
over, and immediately adjacent to the six wetlands. The value of
the pine barrens wetlands for some wildlife species probably has
been underestimated based upon the perceived infertility of the
wetlands. These wetlands should continue to provide secure habi¬
tat for a wide range of wildlife due to little human development
and large-block public and private forest ownership.

fhe northwest Wisconsin pine barrens is an area of sandy

JL soils approximately 12-15 miles wide and 125 miles long
extending from the junction of Wolf Creek and the St. Croix
River in Polk County in the southwest to Bayfield County
about 12 miles south of Lake Superior in the northeast (Strong
1880) (Figure 1).

The “barrens,” an ecosystem born in fire and maintained
by frequent wild fires, was described by Murphy (1931) as
“where coniferous forests and open expanses of sweet fern and
grassy barrens dwarf into insignificance the few evidences of
man’s present occupancy and use of the land.” He further
stated, “The grassy and sweet fern barrens . . . are desolate open
tracts where only a charred stump, a cluster of jack pines, or a
scrub oak bush breaks the monotonous sweep of the rolling,
thinly clad ground surface.”

TRANSACTIONS Volume 88 (2000)

37

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 1. Wisconsin’s northwest pine barrens (from Radeloff et al. 1998).

Originally, there were about 2.3 million
acres of pine barrens in Wisconsin, but to¬
day only about 1% of the ecosystem’s early
serai stages remains (Curtis 1939), a victim
of wild fire control, forest succession, and
tree plantations. Much of the land is still
wild, being in large-block public and private
land ownership dominated by forestry activi¬
ties (Riegler 1995).

Murphy (1931) divided the northwest
pine barrens into three geographic sections:
the northeastern hill section, the pitted sand
plain section, and the southwestern marsh
section. The northeastern hill section was
earlier termed the Kettle Range by Sweet
(1880). Mossman et al. (1991) devoted only
part of one paragraph of their lengthy pa¬
per on the birds of Wisconsin’s pine and oak

barrens to birds observed in pine barrens
wetlands. Faanes (1981) failed to discuss
wetland birds in the northwest pine barrens
other than those inhabiting the large sedge
meadows in the vicinity of Grantsburg in the
southwestern section.

Wildlife inhabiting these extensive
marshes are relatively well known. A bibli¬
ography developed by Evrard (1997) lists
over 25 citations dealing specifically with
birds inhabiting the large wetlands in west¬
ern Burnett County.

In contrast, wildlife inhabiting the lakes
and wetlands in the pitted sand plain and
northeastern hill or Kettle Range sections of
the northwest pine barrens are little known.
Jahn and Hunt (1964) discussed the limited
value to waterfowl of two types of naturally

38

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EVRARD: Birds and Amphibians of Selected Pine Barrens Wetlands

occurring wetlands in this pitted sand plain
subsection, the “soft-water bog lakes and
sand-lined kettle lakes.”

Similarly, the amphibians inhabiting
these kettle wetlands are not well known.
Hay (1995) stated that little was known
about the abundance, health, or effects of
habitat management on herptile populations
in the barrens ecosystem. Vogt (1981), later
updated by Casper (1996), summarized
what little was known of amphibians occur¬
ring in the Wisconsin’s northern pine bar¬
rens wetlands.

The objective of this study was to deter¬
mine the species and relative abundances of
the birds and amphibians inhabiting six se¬
lected wetlands located in and adjacent to
the Namekagon Barrens Wildlife Area in the
northwest Wisconsin pine barrens.

Study Area

The pitted sand plain consists of drift ma¬
terial originating from receding glaciers. The
pits or depressions were formed by melting
blocks of ice left imbedded in the sand and
gravel drift. Many of the depressions are oc¬
cupied by lakes and marshes, while others
are dry. Some depressions are relatively shal¬
low, and some exceed 30 m in depth (Strong
1880). Some have sloping sides, but many
have characteristic abrupt banks from wet¬
land margins to the nearly uniform plain.

The Namekagon Barrens Wildlife Area is
located within the pitted sand plain near the
junction of the Namekagon and St. Croix
rivers in Burnett County. The Namekagon
Barrens Wildlife Area is owned by Burnett
County but is leased by the Wisconsin De¬
partment of Natural Resources and managed
primarily for sharp-tailed grouse (Tym-
panuchus phasianellus) using prescribed
burning (Vogl 1970).

Six wetlands were studied within or ad¬

jacent to the NBWA including four un¬
named wetlands in Section 12 and two wet¬
lands (Richart and Bradley lakes), in Section
24, T42N, R14W, Town of Blaine, Burnett
County (Figure 2). Aquatic vegetation of
each wetland was mapped and sampled in
mid-summer of 1996 using the line inter¬
cept method (Greig-Smith 1964). Two
lines, perpendicular to the shoreline in each
wetland, beginning at the high water mark
and extending 30 m into the wetland, were
used to identify and quantify aquatic veg¬
etation. Wetland A was a 4.1 -ha semi-per¬
manent marsh with 95% of its surface area
covered by emergent aquatic vegetation
dominated primarily by slender sedge ( Carex
lasiocarpa) and blue-joint grass ( Calama-
grostis canadensis) with several “islands” of
cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos) and Sphag¬
num moss {Sphagnum sp.). Wetland B was
a 7.5-ha permanent pond with 50% of its
surface covered by floating and emergent
vegetation. Emergent aquatics were domi¬
nated by slender sedge, blue-joint grass, and
three-way sedge (Dulichium arundinaceum).
Floating vegetation was dominated by spat-
terdock (Nuphar variegatum). Wetlands A
and B were surrounded by fire-managed
“brush prairie,” first named by Strong
(1880).

Wetland C was a semi-permanent marsh,
4.1 ha in size, and was surrounded by re¬
cently clear-cut and burned jack pine (Pinus
hanksiana) and oak (Quercus ellipsoidalis)
vegetation. Its surface is totally covered by
aquatic vegetation dominated by slender
sedge and manna grass ( Glyceria canadensis).
Wetland D was a smaller (2.6-ha) shallow
semi-permanent marsh with 100% of its sur¬
face area covered by emergent vegetation.
This wetland was more bog-like with emer¬
gent vegetation dominated by slender sedge,
cranberry, and sphagnum moss.

The northern lobe of Richart Lake (Wet-

Volume 88 (2000)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

40

TRANSACTIONS

EVRARD: Birds and Amphibians of Selected Pine Barrens Wetlands

land E), about 25% of the 17-ha permanent
wetland, was included in this study. About
35% of the surface of the lobe was covered
by floating-leaf and emergent vegetation,
mostly water smartweed (Polygonum amphi-
bium) and soft-stem bulrush (Scirpus validus).
The smaller (4.2 ha) but deeper Bradley Lake
(Wetland F) had concentric bands of aquatic
vegetation extending out from its shores to a
mean distance of 25 m. Dominant plant spe¬
cies included water lily (Nymphaea odorata),
manna grass, and slender sedge. Both Rickart
and Bradley Lakes were surrounded by jack
pine/oak forest.

There was no difference in the water
chemistry of Wetlands A, B, and D when
tested in June 1997 — slightly acidic with a
pH of 6.0 and with a methyl orange total
alkalinity of 18 ppm (Water Ecology Kit
Model AL-36B, Hach Company, P.O. Box
389, Loveland, CO 80539). The waters of
Wetland C and Richart Lake, however, were
? less acid (6.5 pH), but with the same total
alkalinity (18 ppm). The water in Bradley
Lake was neutral (7.0 pH) and had higher
total alkalinity (36 ppm) than the other five
wetlands. Total alkalinity less than 40 ppm
is considered low, and aquatic vegetation,
plankton, and fish populations in such wa¬
ter are normally sparse (Moyle 1956).

Methods

Frog and bird surveys were conducted in
cooperation with the Marsh Monitoring
Program of Environment Canada and the
Long Point Bird Observatory (Anonymous
1996). Three frog surveys (early and late
May and early June, 1996-97) were con¬
ducted after 10 p.m. Three minutes were
spent at each station or wetland, recording
and mapping frog species by call level and
the number of individuals calling within a
180° semi-circle facing towards the wetland

away from the station marker, a 2-m high
steel fence post.

Amphibians also were captured in pitfall
and funnel traps associated with drift fences
(Vogt and Hine 1982). The drift fences were
operated for 6-day periods in late April, early
and late May, and early June 1996-97.
Traps were opened after a major precipita¬
tion event, beginning with snow melt in late
April, and checked every second day during
the four periods. All captured amphibians
were released after being identified.

One drift fence was installed immediately
adjacent to each of Wetlands B, C, and D.
Eleven pitfall traps and five funnel traps were
spaced along the 1 5-m-long, 46-cm-high
metal sides of each T-shaped drift fence. Pit-
fall traps were made of 1 9-1 plastic pails bur¬
ied flush with the ground surface. At least 3
cm of water was maintained in each trap to
prevent desiccation and death of captured
amphibians. Triangular funnel traps (60 x
30 cm) were made of welded wire mesh
lined with aluminum screening (after
Immler 1945). Both ends of the funnel trap
were fitted with an inverted aluminum
screen cone having a 5 x 8-cm elliptical
opening.

The study wetlands were surveyed for
birds twice each year, once in late May and
again in mid-June 1996-97, beginning af¬
ter 6 p.m. A playback audio tape was played
on a cassette player for 5 minutes followed
by 5 minutes of silent listening at each sta¬
tion. The playback tape consisted of 30 sec¬
onds each of calls of the Virginia rail (Rallus
limicola), sora rail (Porzana Carolina ), least
bittern (Ixobrychus exilis), pied-billed grebe
(Podilymbus podiceps), and combination
common moor hen (Gallinula chloropus)!
American coot (Fulica americana), followed
by 30 seconds of silent listening between
each species. All adult birds seen and heard
within a 100-m radius semi-circle centered

Volume 88 (2000)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

on the station marker were recorded and
mapped. The area surveyed in each wetland
was 1.57 ha. Birds recorded included terri¬
torial birds and aerial foragers and birds as¬
sociated with aquatic habitat that were seen
flying through the sampled area. In addition,
observations of birds and amphibians in the
wetlands made incidental to other study ac¬
tivities were recorded.

Results

Amphibians

Eight frog species were recorded during the
thrice-yearly auditory censuses during 199 6—
97 (Table 1). Incidental observations added
a ninth species, the mink frog (Rana
septentrionalis). The number of species heard
per wetland ranged from five to eight, but
only three species, the gray treefrog (Hyla
versicolor ), northern spring peeper (Pseudacris
c. crucifer ), and chorus frog (P. triseriata)
were heard in all six wetlands. Cope’s gray
treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis) was found in five
of the six wetlands, not being recorded in
Richart Lake.

Wetland B had the most species of the
six wetlands, including the mink frog heard
in mid-July 1997. Eastern American toads
(Bufo a, americanus) also were heard inciden¬
tally in Wetland C in 1996 but were not re¬
corded during the formal auditory surveys.

Bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana) were re¬
corded in Wetlands E and F, but only in
1997. Green frogs (R. clamitans malanota)
were much more numerous in 1997 than in
1996. Northern leopard frogs (R. pipiens)
were heard in only three of the six wetlands.

Only five amphibian species were captured
in the pitfall traps associated with drift fences
adjacent to Wetlands B, C, and D (Table 2).
These species included two salamanders, the
blue-spotted salamander (Ambystoma laterale)
and the eastern tiger salamander ' (A. t.

tigrinum), and three frogs, the eastern Ameri¬
can toad, chorus frog, and northern spring
peeper. The blue-spotted salamander was by
far the most numerous amphibian captured
in the pitfall traps. Only one tiger salamander
was captured in two years.

Birds

Eighteen bird species were recorded during
the twice-yearly bird censuses during 1 996-
97 (Table 3). Only three species, the mal¬
lard (Anas platyrhynchos ), tree swallow
(Tachycineta bicolor ), and red-winged black¬
bird (Agelaius phoeniceus) were recorded on
all six wetlands. Wetlands A and B were
richer (more species observed) and more
productive (more individual birds counted)
than the other wetlands.

Ten bird species were recorded in Wet¬
land A during the surveys in 1996 and 1997.
The Virginia rail was recorded only in Wet¬
land A and only in 1997, once during a for¬
mal survey and once incidentally. Miscella¬
neous observations added to the number of
species and individuals using the wetland.
There was a possible breeding pair of
Canada geese (Branta canadensis) in the wet¬
land, along with breeding pairs of mallards,
ring-necked ducks (Aythya collaris )> and
pied-billed grebes. In addition, the northern
harrier (Circus cyaneus), belted-kingfisher
(Ceryle alcyon ), eastern kingbird (Try annus
try annus), barn swallow (Hirundo rustic a),
yellow warbler (Dendroica petechia ), and
common yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas)
were seen in the wetland. A brood of pied¬
billed grebes was recorded in July 1997.

Wetland B was similar to Wetland A in
terms of number of species and individuals
recorded (Table 3). A single common loon
( Gavia immer) was recorded in the wetland
in addition to breeding pairs of mallards,
ring-necked ducks, pied-billed grebes, and
up to four male wood ducks (Aix sponsa).

42

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EVRARD: Birds and Amphibians of Selected Pine Barrens Wetlands

Table 1. Numbers of frogs recorded in audio surveys in selected northwest Wisconsin
pine barrens wetlands, 1996-97.

Wetland

J

4

B

C

D

E

/

Species

96

97

96

97

96

97

96

97

96 97

96

97

Eastern American toad

1

1

1

2

2

Chorus frog

4

2

1

1

2

2

1

3

1

3

4

Northern spring peeper

*

11

*

8

11

*

*

*

* 4

*

*

Cope’s gray treefrog

4

4

9

1

2

3

3

3

2

4

Eastern gray treefrog

2

2

2

1

1

3

3

3

1

2

3

Bullfrog

4

2

Green frog

6

2

3

1 10

1

2

Northern leopard frog

2

1

1

1

1

*Too many frogs calling to count individuals.

Table 2. Numbers of amphibians captured in pitfall and funnel traps associated with
drift fences adjacent to selected northwest Wisconsin pine barrens wetlands, 1996-97.

Wetland

B

C

D

1996a 1997b

1996 1997

1996 1997

Blue-spotted salamander

Tiger salamander

11

6

1

18

6

84

23

American toad

Chorus frog

1

1

1

6

1

2

4

1

Spring peeper

1

3

3

5

a Four trapping periods (4/22-28, 5/6-12, 5/26-31, 6/17-24).
b Four trapping periods (4/18-24, 5/12-20, 5/28-6/4, 6/16-21).

Incidental observations of other species in
Wetland B included a red-necked grebe
(Podiceps grisegena) and a pair of green¬
winged teal (Anas crecca), both considered
visitors, and migrant bufflehead (Bucephala
albeola) and lesser yellowlegs (Tringa
flavipes). In addition, a breeding pair of com¬
mon loons was confirmed, along with breed¬
ing pairs of Canada geese, hooded mergan¬
sers (Lophodytes cucullatus), blue-winged teal
(Anas discors), and northern harriers. A
brood of ring-necked ducks was seen in
1997. A sora rail also was heard in the wet¬
land.

Wetland C had only six bird species re¬
corded during surveys (Table 3). Incidental

observations added only one additional spe¬
cies, migrant lesser yellowlegs, in the two
years. The 1996 surveys failed to detect
breeding mallards, sora rails, and eastern
kingbirds, which were seen incidental to
other work.

Wetland D was similar to Wetland C,
with only seven species recorded during sur¬
veys. Incidental observations added species
(breeding pairs of Canada geese and mal¬
lards, common snipe [Gallinago g.J, killdeer
[Charadrius vociferus], and migrant lesser
yellowlegs).

Few species or individual birds were sur¬
veyed in Wetlands E (Richart Lake) and F
(Bradley Lake). The only observation of a

Volume 88 (2000)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Table 3. Birds recorded in 1.57-ha samples of selected northwest Wisconsin pine

barrens wetlands, 1996-

CD

Wetland

A

B

c

D

E

F

Species

96 97

96 97

96 97

96 97

96 97

96 97

Common loon

1 2

1

1

Pied-billed grebe

Great blue heron

1

3

1

Canada goose

Mallard

1 1

2

2 1

3

2

*

*

Green-winged teal

2

Ring-necked duck

Hooded merganser

2

3

2

Virginia rail

Sora rail

Common snipe

1

2 2

2

1 1

Belted kingfisher

Eastern kingbird

Tree swallow

6 1

1 1

3 3

1

2

1 2

1

1

2 2

1

Barn swallow

Yellow warbler

Common yellowthroat
Red-winged blackbird

4 5

1

1 *

4 2

1

3 2

1

4 5

1

1

1

Total

13 15

15 16

5 9

6 12

5 5

1 3

*Flew over wetland, not recorded in wetland.

great blue heron (Ardea herodias) was made
on Richart Lake. Incidental observations
added only increased numbers of ring¬
necked ducks and mallards in Richart Lake
in 1996 and confirmed a pair of breeding
loons using Bradley Lake in 1997.

Discussion

Northern spring peepers, chorus frogs, and
treefrogs were the most frequently recorded
frogs in the study area wetlands despite the
green frog and eastern American toad being
considered common and ubiquitous in Wis¬
consin (Vogt 1981, Casper 1996).

A possible reason for the relatively low
frequency of green frogs recorded in this
study could be the cool spring of 1996.
Green and bullfrogs are among the last frog
species to begin calling in the spring (Vogt

1981), with night-time temperatures influ¬
encing the initiation and intensity of calling
(Anonymous 1996). Cooler weather could
. also be the reason bullfrogs were not re¬
corded in 1996 but were heard calling in the
warmer spring of 1997, the first record for
this species in Burnett County (Casper
1996). The bullfrog has a patchy distribu¬
tion in Wisconsin due to human introduc¬
tions and overexploitation for bait and food
(Vogt 1981, Casper 1996).

Spring peepers have been reported to have
declined in Wisconsin during the past de¬
cade (Mossman and Hine 1984, 1985) but
appear to be abundant in the study area wet¬
lands. The Cope’s gray treefrog is a savanna
species (Jaslow and Vogt 1977, Vogt 1981)
and apparently the northwest pine barrens
are suitable habitat, judging by the numbers
recorded in this study.

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EVRARD: Birds and Amphibians of Selected Pine Barrens Wetlands

The northern leopard frog was formerly
widespread and common in Wisconsin
(Vogt 1981), but the population crashed in
the 1970s (Hine et ah 1981) and has not re¬
covered (Casper 1996). This decline could
be the reason for the low numbers and lim¬
ited distribution in the study wetlands. The
relatively low volume of their calls and the
brief annual calling period might also have
contributed to the low frequency of calls re¬
corded.

The boreal mink frog is at its southern
range limit in Burnett County (Casper
1996), which could explain the single record
in two years of surveys. Finally, no wood
frogs (Rana sylvanica) were found in the
study area wetlands, despite the species be¬
ing common and widespread in Wisconsin
(Casper 1996). Their apparent absence
could be explained by the audio censuses
being conducted too late in the spring for
the very early calling species and by their
preference for wooded habitat (Vogt 1981).

There were more blue-spotted sala¬
manders captured adjacent to study area
wetlands in 1996 than in 1997. This differ¬
ence may be due to the cooler and moister
spring of 1996, which are conditions that
promote salamander movements (Anony¬
mous 1996). The blue-spotted salamander
is the most abundant salamander in Wiscon¬
sin (Casper 1996) and in the study wetlands.
This species is often found in areas with very
sandy soil (Vogt 1981).

Despite the tiger salamander being con¬
sidered a savanna species inhabiting prairie
ponds, marshes, and kettle potholes (Vogt
1981), only one individual was captured in
my study, perhaps a reflection of the meth¬
ods used to detect this species rather than
its abundance.

All the bird species recorded incidentally
and during the formal surveys were known
to nest in northwest Wisconsin, with the

exception of the bufflehead and lesser yel-
lowlegs (Robbins 1991).

The common loon used the larger wet¬
lands (B, E, F) consistently and was sus¬
pected to nest in the area, although no nests
or young were observed. Loons are known
to feed and nest in wetlands as small as 5
and 6 ha in the southwest marsh area of the
northwest Wisconsin pine barrens (Evrard
1995) and may nest in the larger study area
wetlands in the future. The presence of suc¬
cessfully nesting pied-billed grebes in the
wetlands indicates that aquatic food re¬
sources are probably adequate for this spe¬
cies.

The red-necked grebe, which is endan¬
gered in Wisconsin (Anonymous 1997), was
seen once in April 1996 in Wetland B and
must be considered a visitor, although the
species presently nests 37 air miles southwest
in the large pine barrens marshes near
Grantsburg (Gieck 1988, James Hoefler,
Wisconsin Department of Natural Re¬
sources, personal communication, 1997)

Waterfowl use of study area wetlands was
greater than anticipated given the relative
infertility of the wetlands. Breeding pairs of
mallard were recorded on all but Wetland
F. Ring-necked duck breeding pairs were
found on Wetlands A, B, and E, and a fe¬
male with a brood was seen on Wetland B.
Breeding Canada geese were found in Wet¬
land A in 1996 and 1997 and were sus¬
pected of nesting. A Canada goose pair with
a brood was observed on Wetland E but out¬
side of the area studied. Pairs of green¬
winged and blue-winged teal, lone hooded
mergansers, and molting male wood ducks
were recorded in the wetlands, indicating
breeding birds in the region (Jahn and Flunt
1964, March et al. 1973) but not necessar¬
ily nesting in or near the wetlands studied.
Because waterfowl are not very vocal com¬
pared to other groups of birds and their pres-

Volume 88 (2000)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

ence was mostly detected by sight rather
than sound, the dense emergent aquatic veg¬
etation in some of the wetlands may have
allowed some birds to go undetected.

The value of pine barrens wetlands for
breeding mallards and ring-necked ducks
may have been underestimated. Ring-necked
ducks historically nested throughout Wis¬
consin but retreated to the northern third
of state by the 1950s because of habitat de¬
struction and human disturbance (Jahn and
Hunt 1964). In the 1950s, the ringneck rep¬
resented 4-19% of the breeding ducks in
Wisconsin and by the late 1960s had de¬
clined to only 1—4% of the total breeding
community (March et al. 1973).

Sora rails were found in Wetlands A, C,
and D, which had 95-100% of their sur¬
face area covered by emergent aquatic veg¬
etation. The Virginia rail was heard on two
occasions in Wetland A. The surface area of
Wetlands B, E, and F may have been too
open to provide suitable habitat for the rails.

The northern harrier was observed hunt¬
ing over the grassy and shrubby margins of
Wetlands A and B, habitat of the yellow
warbler and common yellowthroat. Eastern
kingbirds and many tree swallows were seen
flying over the surface of the wetlands, feed¬
ing on insects.

The red-winged blackbird was the most
numerous species in the wetlands studied,
and it is the most common summer bird
in Wisconsin (Robbins 1991). Based on the
area censused, there was a mean of 1.7 ter¬
ritorial males/ha in the six wetlands stud¬
ied in 1996 and 1.6/ha in 1997. Densities
ranged from a low of 0.6 males/ha in Wet¬
lands E and F in 1996 and 1997 to a high
of 3.2/ha in Wetlands A and D in 1997, a
five-fold difference. The low densities in
Wetlands E and F are due to a scarcity of
nesting habitat (tall grasses and low shrubs)
along the wetland margins.

Conclusions

The little-known wetlands in the pitted
outwash plain section of Wisconsin’s north¬
west pine barrens support a surprising vari¬
ety and number of amphibians and birds.
While these wetlands are not as productive
as the more fertile southern wetlands, they
have been less affected by man. The value
of these wetlands may have been underesti¬
mated and may contribute significantly to
statewide populations of certain wildlife spe¬
cies. The lack of human development and
the large-block public and private industrial
forest ownership increases the importance of
these wetlands as wildlife habitat now and
in the future.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank L. Rantala of the Wiscon¬
sin Department of Natural Resources for
drift fence trapping and vegetation sampling
assistance; K. Swingle, Burnett County Sur¬
veyor, for GIS mapping of study area wet¬
lands; and two anonymous reviewers for
critical review of the manuscript. The Marsh
Monitoring Program provided audio tapes
(training and broadcast calls), stake markers,
instructions, and data forms. Partial fund¬
ing for this study was provided by the Fed¬
eral Aid to Wildlife Restoration under
Pittman-Robertson Wisconsin Project W-
141-R.

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Museum, Inc., Milwaukee, WI. 203 pp.

Vogt, R. C., and R. L. Hine. 1982. Evaluation
of techniques for assessment of amphibian
and reptile populations in Wisconsin. Pp.
210-17 in N. J. Scott, Jr., ed. Herpetologi-
cal Communities. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser¬
vice Research Report 13.

James O. Evrard is a retired wildlife research
biologist for the Wisconsin Department of Natu¬
ral Resources at Grantsburg. Address: 630 North
Pine Street , Grantsburg, WI 54840. Email:
evrardsc@win. bright, net

48

TRANSACTIONS

James O. Evrard and M. Eloise Canfield

Blanding s Turtles

in the Crex Meadows Wildlife Area

Abstract Little is known about the Blandings turtle (Emydoidea blandingii),
a threatened species in Wisconsin. The study's objective was to de¬
termine the status of the species in the extensive wetlands of the
Crex Meadows, Wisconsin s largest wildlife management area.
From 10 June to 17 July 1997, 51 Blandings turtles were cap¬
tured, measured, marked, and released to determine sex and age
and estimate the population size. Eleven Blandings turtles were
recaptured, providing population estimates for Crex Meadows that
ranged from 107 to 16 1 turtles. The sex ratio was highly skewed
towards females, which was probably an artifact of the sampling
methods used. Because 95 % of the turtles captured were adult fe¬
males, the population estimate provided only an estimate of the
numbers of female, not male, Blandings turtles. The age ratio was
highly skewed towards adults. This again could be sampling bias
or could be due to high nest and juvenile mortality. The many
deep and permanent marshes and open brush prairie uplands of
the Crex Meadows Wildlife Area apparently provide good habi¬
tat for the Blanding’s turtle.

The Wisconsin Natural Heritage Inventory lists the pine
barrens as rare globally (G3) and imperiled in the state
(S2) (Temple 1993), with only 1% of the original 2.3 million
acres of pine barrens remaining in Wisconsin (Curtis 1939).
These remnants are fragmented and isolated (Shively 1994),
potentially endangering the continued existence of plant and
animal species, including the Blanding’s turtle.

The State of Wisconsin lists the Blanding’s turtle as a threat¬
ened species (NR 27.03, effective October 1979). The
Blanding’s turtle is a long-lived species, not reaching sexual
maturity until 15 to 20 years of age (Ross 1989, Rowe 1992,
Congdon et al. 1993, McGown 1999). Long-lived species need
high juvenile survival or large numbers of offspring to main-

TRANSACTIONS Volume 88 (2000)

49

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

tain a stable population. Recent declines in
nest survival, measured by low recaptures of
juvenile turtles and attributed to increases in
mammalian and avian predators (Congdon
et al. 1993, McGown 1999), have caused
concern for the species. Despite its wide geo¬
graphical distribution in the state (Casper
1996), the status of the species in Wiscon¬
sin is poorly known. Only one study of the
Blanding’s turtle has been completed in
Wisconsin, and that was conducted in the
central part of the state (Ross 1983). Little
is known about the Blanding’s turtle in the
northwest pine barrens (Hay 1993).

This study attempted to determine the
status of the Blanding’s turtle inhabiting the
extensive wetlands and pine barrens of the
Crex Meadows Wildlife Area in northwest
Wisconsin.

Study Area

Crex Meadows is the largest state-owned
wildlife management area in Wisconsin and
the largest restored pine barrens in the state.
Crex Meadows Wildlife Area is a 10,800-
ha brush prairie-wetland complex managed
by the Wisconsin Department of Natural
Resources (Vogl 1964, Zicus 1964). It is an
area of many large deep marshes, numer¬
ous small shallow wetlands, and an exten¬
sive system of all-weather roads. The slightly
rolling uplands surrounding the wetlands
consist of brush prairie (Strong 1880),
maintained by intensive prescribed burning,
and young jack pine (Pinus banksiana),
Hill’s oak (Quercus ellipsoidalis), and aspen
(Populus tremuloides) forests.

Methods

Blanding’s turtles were captured by hand by
slowly driving on roads in June and July
1997, looking for turtles on or adjacent to

the roads. Turtles were also captured in
hoop-net traps (Lagler 1943, Legler I960)
and seine nets from 10 June to 16 July 1997
in roadside wetlands where turtles were ob¬
served.

Turtles were aged by counting plastral
annuli (Sexton 1939). Annuli develop by
periods of rapid growth (summer), followed
by periods of slow growth (winter). How¬
ever, the annuli of older turtles are worn and
difficult or impossible to count. Annuli
lengths were measured to the nearest mm
using dial calipers. Plastron and carapace
lengths were measured to the nearest mm
using outside calipers.

The sex of the turtles was determined by
plastron and tail characteristics (Graham and
Doyle 1977), with males having concave
plastrons and females having flat plastrons
and an anal opening on the tail anterior to
the carapacial margin.

Turtles were weighed to the nearest 0.1
g on a spring scale, marked with notches in
the carapace (Cagle 1939), and released at
the capture site. Recapture of marked turtles
provided population estimates using the
marked/recapture methods developed by
Schnabel (1938) and Schumacher and
Eschmeyer (1943). Recaptures, especially in
the future, could provide information about
recruitment, survival, and habitat use.

Results and Discussion

Sixty-two Blanding’s turtles were captured,
of which 5 1 individuals were first-time cap¬
tures and 1 1 were recaptures of turtles pre¬
viously’ marked in this study. In addition,
two mortalities were recorded. One un¬
marked turtle was found dead in a cultivated
field, and a marked turtle was found killed
by a vehicle on a road.

The locations of the 62 captures and re¬
captures were as follows: 54 on road, 5 in

50

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EVRARD and CANFIELD: Blanding’s Turtles in the Crex Meadows Wildlife Area

hoop nets, 2 in hand nets, and 1 in a seine
net.

The first turtle was marked on 10 June
1998 and the last turtle on 17 July, a pe¬
riod of 4 1 days. Eighty-four percent of the
turtles were captured and marked during the
first 10 days of the sampling period. Peak
capture success occurred from 15 to 20 June
when an average of eight turtles was cap¬
tured per day.

Marked/recapture estimates of the popu¬
lation size of Blanding’s turtles in Crex
Meadows ranged from 107.3 (Schnabel
1936) to 161.3 (Schumacher and Eschmeyer
1943) turtles (Canfield and Evrard 1997).
Because these estimates don’t agree, their
validity is questionable. Koper and Brooks
(1998) recently compared mark-recapture
population estimates with known popula¬
tion sizes of painted turtles ( Chrysemys picta)
and found that almost all the estimates were
far below the true population sizes. Based on
their findings, our highly variable population
estimates of Blanding’s turtles in the Crex
Meadows Wildlife Area should probably be
considered a minimum estimate.

Because the population estimate of 107-
161 turtles was based upon a sample of ani¬
mals that was 95% female, the population
size is more correctly an estimate of the
number of nesting female Blanding’s turtles
rather than the total population inhabiting
Crex Meadows.

In our study, the sample of turtles cap¬
tured was skewed heavily towards adult fe¬
males (48 females vs. 3 males or 16:1).
Other studies (Congdon and van Loben Sels
1991, Piepgras et al. 1998) have reported sex
ratios favoring female Blanding’s turtles, but
none were as skewed as in this study. This
skewed ratio is understandable since female
turtles select sandy road edges for nesting,
and 44 of the 54 turtles captured on roads
were female. All 3 males and 4 females were
captured in the water. The sex ratio for those
turtles captured in the water was less skewed
(1.3:1) and similar to that range reported in
earlier research (Joyal 1996).

Mean carapace lengths and widths were
similar between 47 female and 3 male
Blanding’s turtles, although the male
sample size was limited (Table 1). This

Table 1. Measurements of Blanding’s turtles captured in the Crex Meadows Wildlife
Area, Wisconsin, 1997.

Carapace
Length 3

Carapace

Width3

Plastron

Length3

Weight b

Sex - Age

Number

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Female

47

234.2

10.6

157.6

6.6

186.1

9.7

1942.0

253.4

Male

3

234.3

20.8

158.0

13.4

173.7

16.9

1866.7

365.3

Annuli

4

1

105.0

0.0

81.0

0.0

80.0

0.0

200.0

0.0

10

2

231.0

60.0

154.5

36.0

182.0

49.0

1850.0

825.0

11

11

228.5

11.6

154.4

7.5

181.5

13.3

1859.1

251.7

12

7

228.0

10.1

155.3

7.7

181.2

10.0

1804.2

224.4

13

6

234.2

12.0

156.0

7.3

188.3

9.9

1937.5

236.2

14

7

232.9

9.6

159.3

7.6

182.4

7.2

1885.7

219.9

15

5

234.0

3.6

158.6

3.6

184.2

3.9

1920.0

119.8

16

3

236.3

0.9

160.0

2.4

187.3

1.9

2000.0

204.1

amillimeters

bgrams

Volume 88 (2000)

51

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

similarity agrees with previous work done
by Rowe (1987), Congdon and van Loben
Sels (1991), Rowe (1992), and Joyal
(1996).

However, there appear to be differences
in Blanding’s turtle sizes from one geo¬
graphic area to another (Joyal 1996). For 47
female Blanding’s turtles in our study, the
mean carapace length was 234 mm, the
mean carapace width was 138 mm, and the
mean plastron length was 186 mm (Table
1). Sizes of Blanding’s turtles in adjacent
Minnesota were similar — mean carapace
length for 37 adult females was 237 mm
(Piepgras et al. 1998) and 243 mm for 42
adult females (Sajwaj et al. 1998).

However, mean carapace lengths for 1 1
adult females in southern Maine and for 20
adult females in Nebraska were 206 mm and
185 mm respectively (Joyal 1996, Germano
et al. 1998). Differences also apparently ex¬
isted between mean measurements for males
from northwest Wisconsin and from south¬
ern Maine. However, this comparison is
questionable due to small male sample sizes
in our study.

Age structure and/or food quality and
availability could possibly be responsible for
these size differences (Quinn and Chris¬
tiansen 1972, Graham and Doyle 1977).

The age structure, determined by count¬
ing plastron annuli, indicated that the
Blanding’s turtle population inhabiting Crex
Meadows apparently has many adults but
very few young. Another explanation might
be that capture techniques used in this study
could be unsuitable for sampling young
turtles.

Male Blanding’s turtles reach sexual ma¬
turity at approximately 12 years of age
(Graham and Doyle 1977) and females at
14-20 years (Petokas 1977, Ross 1989,
Congdon and van Loben Sels 1991).
Twenty-seven or 66% of the turtles cap¬

tured were breeding adults (>12 years of
age), 13 or 32% were subadults (10 and 1 1
years old), and only 1 or 2% was a juvenile
(4 years old).

Other Blanding’s turtle studies have re¬
ported finding very few young animals (Gib¬
bons 1968, Graham and Doyle 1977,
Congdon et al. 1983, Kofron and Schreiber
1985, Petokas 1987, Ross 1989, Joyal 1996,
Standing et al. 1997, Germano et al. 1998,
Piepgras et al. 1998, Sajwaj et al. 1998). Ei¬
ther nest success is very low and/or survival
of young turtles is low due to predation, or
juvenile turtles’ behavior or habitat (Ross
1989, Pappas and Brecke 1992, Congdon et
al. 1993, Herman et al. 1998, McMaster
and Herman 1998, Morrison et al. 1998) is
considerably different than that used by
adult turtles (Sexton 1995).

The limited information gathered in this
study did not permit determining habitat
preferences of Blanding’s turtles. However,
in general, the deep, large, permanent
marshes interspersed with upland brush prai¬
rie of the Crex Meadows Wildlife Area ap¬
parently were preferred compared to nearby
heavily wooded river valleys. In an extensive
two-year survey of turtles on the nearby St.
Croix River, Donner-Wright (1997) found
only one Blanding’s turtle.

Joyal (1996) in southern Maine found
that Blanding’s turtles preferred permanent,
deep marshes in large wetland complexes in
areas sufficiently open for abundant sunlight
to reach the wetlands. She also found that
the turtles needed open uplands for nesting,
short-term basking, long-term estivation, and
travel between wetlands. Linck and Moriarity
(1998) found that recently burned upland
prairies are important nesting habitat in
Minnesota. Crex Meadows provides the ap¬
propriate wetland and upland habitat, but
the many roads may provide barriers and
danger to migratory turtles (McGown 1999).

52

TRANSACTIONS

EVRARD and CANFIELD: Blanding’s Turtles in the Crex Meadows Wildlife Area

Recommendations

The apparent absence of young Blanding’s
turtles in this study and other studies (Stand¬
ing et al. 1997), whether a reflection of ac¬
tual numbers or inadequate sampling tech¬
niques, might be a factor limiting the
population of this threatened species. Small
radio transmitters attached to newly hatched
turtles (Herman et al. 1998, McMaster and
Herman 1998, Morrison et al. 1998, Tanck
and Thiel 1998, McGown 1999) as they
emerge from their nests might help deter¬
mine juvenile turtle survival and habitat
preferences or reveal potential techniques to
increase their capture. Transmitters attached
to adults of both sexes could also reveal habi¬
tat preferences and mortality patterns. This
knowledge could ensure the continued sur¬
vival of the Blanding’s turtle in Crex Mead¬
ows.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Paul Kooiker, Jim
Hoefler, Steve Hoffman, Lyman Lang, and
Orlie Luedtke of the Wisconsin Department
of Natural Resources, Grantsburg, for field
assistance and two anonymous reviewers for
critical review of the manuscript. Partial
funding for this study was provided by the
Society of Tympanuchus Cupido Pinnatus,
Ltd. and the Federal Aid to Wildlife Resto¬
ration under Pittman-Robertson Wisconsin
Project W-141-R.

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ture of pine barrens in northwest Wisconsin : a
workshop summary. Wisconsin Department of
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Herman, T., I. Morrison, and N. McMaster. 1998.
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(Emydoidea blandingii) and spotted ( Clemmys
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structure, habitat use, movements, and repro¬
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ogy of two endangered aquatic turtles in Mis¬
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ments and habitat selection of juvenile
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Minneapolis, MN, 6—9 May 1998.

Morrison, I., T. Herman, and L. Standing. 1998.
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hatchlings in a threatened population of

Blanding’s turtles (Emydoidea blandingii) in
Kejimkujik National Park, Nova Scotia. Pro¬
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neapolis, MN, 6-9 May 1 998.

Pappas, M. J., and B. J. Brecke. 1992. Habitat
selection of juvenile Blanding’s turtles
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26:233-34.

Petokas, P. J. 1987. Patterns of reproduction and
growth in the freshwater turtle Emydoidea
blandingii. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of
New York, Binghamton.

Piepgras, S., T. Sajwaj, M. Hamerick, and J. W.
Lang. 1998. Blanding’s turtle (Emydoidea
blandingii) in the Brainerd/Baxter region:
population status, distribution, and manage¬
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Wildlife Office, Minnesota Department of
Natural Resources, Brainerd.

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relationship between pond bottom type and
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of a Blanding’s turtle (Emydoidea blandingii)
population in central Wisconsin. M.S. The¬
sis, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

Ross, D. A. 1989. Population ecology of painted
and Blanding’s turtles (Chrysemys picta and
Emydoidea blandingii) in central Wisconsin.
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ences, Arts and Letters 77:77-84.

Rowe, J. W. 1992. Observations on body size,
growth, and reproduction in Blanding’s turtle
(Emydoidea blandingii) from western Nebraska.
Canadian Journal of Zoology 70: 1690-95.

Sajwaj, T. D., S. A. Piepgras, and J. W. Lang.
1998. Blanding’s turtle (Emydoidea blandingii)
at Camp Ripley: critical habitats, population sta¬
tus and management guidelines. Final Report,
Nongame Wildlife Office, Minnesota Depart¬
ment of Natural Resources, Brainerd.

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Schnabel, Z. E. 1938. Estimation of the total fish
population of a lake. American Mathematics
Monthly 45:348-52.

Schumacher, F. X., and R. W. Eschmeyer. 1943.
The estimation of fish populations in lakes
and ponds. The Journal of the Tennessee Acad¬
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Sexton, O. J. 1939. A method of estimating the
age of painted turtles for use in demographic
studies. Ecology 40:716-18.

Sexton, O. J. 1995. Miscellaneous comments on
the natural history of Blanding’s turtle
(Emydoidea blandingii). Transactions of the
Missouri Academy of Sciences 29: 1—13.

Shively, M. M. R. 1994. Wisconsin pine-shrub-
grassland (pine barrens) ecosystems: an eco¬
system recovery plan. M.S. Thesis, Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin, Madison.

Standing, K. L., T. B. Herman, D. D. Hurlburt,
and I. P. Morrison. 1997. Postemergence be¬
havior of neonates in a northern peripheral
population of Blanding’s turtle, Emydoidea
blandingii , in Nova Scotia. Canadian Journal
of Zoology 75:1387-93.

Strong, M. 1880. The geology of the upper St.
Croix district. In The Geology of Wisconsin
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Tanck, J. D., and R. P. Thiel. 1998. Blanding’s
turtle population studies — Sandhill Wildlife
Area, Wood County, Wisconsin. Proceedings

of the Blandings Turtle Workshop, Minneapo¬
lis, MN, 6— 9 May 1998.

Temple, S. A. 1995. Biodiversity, landscape-scale
management and the ecological importance
of the pine barrens community. P. 2 in E. A.
Borgerding, G. A. Bartelt, and W. M.
McCown, eds. The future of pine barrens in
northwest Wisconsin: a workshop summary.
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
PUBL-RS-9 13-94.

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Meadows, a prairie savanna in northwestern
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Crex Meadows, Wisconsin. M.S. Thesis,
University of Minnesota, St. Paul.

James O. Evrard is a retired wildlife research
biologist for the Wisconsin Department of Natu¬
ral Resources at Grantsburg. Address: 630 North
Pine Street, Grantsburg, WI 54840. Email:
evrardsc@win. bright, net

M. Eloise Canfield was a graduate student with
the University of Indiana at the time of the
study. Address: 45 Inwood Road, Chatham, NJ
07928

Volume 88 (2000)

55

D. Timothy Gerber

Floating-leafed and Submersed Aquatic
Macrophyte Distribution and Abundance,
With Emphasis on Eurasian Watermilfoil
(Myriophyllum spicatum) in Forest Lake,
Fond Du Lac County, Wisconsin

Abstract Exotic species invasions play an important role in reducing native
biodiversity. Tracking the spread, distribution, and abundance of
the exotic submersed aquatic macrophyte eurasian watermilfoil
(Myriophyllum spicatum) in Wisconsin and cataloging native
biodiversity within the lakes it invades is of interest to state aquatic
biologists, lake managers, and lake property owners. The purpose
of this paper is to assess, through the use of a nondestructive sam¬
pling method, both the spread and distribution of this exotic spe¬
cies and the distribution of native aquatic flora in Forest Lake,
Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin. L found twenty-two species of
aquatic macrophytes, including eurasion watermilfoil, within the
lake. Some significant differences in abundance and depth distri¬
bution were found for six of the most dominant aquatic species.
Although eurasion watermilfoil was not listed in previous plant
surveys of Forest Lake, it has become well established. An addi¬
tional exotic emergent aquatic species, purple loosestrife (Lythrum
salicaria), was also found, and its distribution was determined.

Exotic species invasions have historically played an impor¬
tant role in reducing native biodiversity (Devine 1998).
Since the early 1 960s, invasion of the exotic Eurasian
watermilfoil {Myriophyllum spicatum, hereafter EWM) in
southern Wisconsin (Engel 1993) has negatively affected na¬
tive aquatic macrophyte communities and thus has had an im¬
pact on many organisms that interact with these plants. Track¬
ing the spread, distribution, and abundance of EWM in

TRANSACTIONS Volume 88 (2000)

57

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Wisconsin and cataloging native biodiversity
within the lakes it invades is therefore of in¬
terest to aquatic biologists, lake managers,
and lake users.

Forest Lake (T13N, R19E, sec. 12, Hy¬
drologic unit 04040003, Fond du Lac
County, WI) is a 20.4-ha kettle lake located
in the terminal moraine of the Green Bay
glacier. This single basin lake receives no
permanent surface water inflow and has no
stream outlet (Wisconsin Department of
Natural Resources 1970, U.S. Geological
Survey 1994). With a mean depth of 3.3 m,
Forest Lake supports a diverse assemblage of
rooted, floating-leafed and submersed
aquatic plant species that cover much of the
lake’s bottom. The 47.6-ha watershed sur¬
rounding Forest Lake is moderately to
steeply sloped with a loam soil that supports
primarily woody vegetation (47 ha). The re¬
maining area (0.6 ha) is marsh and shrub
wetland (Wisconsin Department of Natural
Resources 1970). The watershed has been
extensively developed on the northern and
eastern sides (private homes and cottages)
where shoreline disturbance (sand beach de¬
velopment) is greatest. During the 1960s,
dredging at the northern end of the lake
caused additional disturbance to the native
aquatic plant community.

As of 1968 (Wisconsin Department of
Natural Resources 1970), EWM was not
found in Forest Lake; however, since then
this exotic species has become a problem.
Because of interest in exotic species distribu¬
tion and control in Wisconsin, a systematic
survey of Forest Lake’s aquatic macrophyte
community was conducted to determine the
extent of the EWM invasion. The purpose
of this paper is to (1) quantitatively and quali¬
tatively document the native aquatic macro¬
phytes and EWM in Forest Lake, (2) describe
the within-lake distribution of native macro¬
phytes and EWM at present, (3) assess if

changes in macrophyte distribution have oc¬
curred since the 1968 survey, (4) determine
if other exotic species occur, and (3) deter¬
mine sediment characteristics within dis¬
turbed areas of the lake.

Methods

Data Collection

A qualitative and quantitative aquatic veg¬
etation survey was conducted during July
1993. To minimize disturbance to aquatic
plant beds, a nondestructive sampling tech¬
nique (Titus 1993) was used. Twenty evenly
spaced (approximately 107 m between)
transects were established perpendicular to
the shoreline to assess species composition,
frequency, and abundance (Figure 1). Four
0.25-m2 sample sites were located along each
transect, one site at each depth interval (0.5,
1, 2, and 3 m) for a total of 80 sample sites.
The maximum depth interval was set at 3
m because aquatic plant growth was limited
to 3.7 m (Wisconsin Department of Natu¬
ral Resources 1970). Each transect was as¬
sessed visually for the presence or absence of
plants and percent cover of each species us¬
ing snorkel or SCUBA equipment. An abun¬
dance score was determined for each site
based on the percent cover for each species
(see below). Voucher specimens of each spe¬
cies were deposited in the University of Wis-
consin-Milwaukee herbarium.

To determine the range of sediment
characteristics under which EWM grows
within the most disturbed extreme northern
region of Forest Lake, six 200-g samples of
sediment were randomly collected within
EWM beds at 1-2 m depth during Septem¬
ber 1993. Each sample was dried and sent
to the University of Wisconsin-Extension
Soil and Plant Analysis Lab (5711 Mineral
Point Road, Madison, WI) for analysis of
pH, organic matter (percent organic matter

58

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GERBER: Aquatic Macrophyte Distribution and Abundance in Forest Lake

Figure 1. Locations of the 20 transects (lines perpendicular to shore) used for the
vegetation survey of Forest Lake. Squares represent private homes or cottages on the
lake. The dotted line separates the lake into northern and southern regions. Contour
lines are drawn at 5 ft (1.5 m) intervals.

Volume 88 (2000)

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by titration), texture (percent silt, percent
sand, percent clay), and mineral content.

Analyses

In a 1968 Department of Natural Resources
aquatic plant survey (Wisconsin Depart¬
ment of Natural Resources 1970), differ¬
ences were found between the northern and
southern regions of Forest Lake; therefore,
the lake was again divided into northern and
southern regions for this study. Abundance,
relative abundance, frequency, and relative
frequency were calculated using an abun¬
dance score (modification of Titus 1993) to
determine how common each species was in
the northern versus southern regions and
within the whole lake. For each sample site,
an abundance score was determined in the
field for each species using the following
designations: 0 (Absent); 1 (Present) = single
plant to plants covering < 1% of 0.25-m2

sampling area; 2 (Abundant) = plants cov¬
ering 1-30% of sampling area; 3 (Common)
= plants covering > 50% of sampling area.
Mann-Whitney U tests were performed on
the most abundant species to determine if
significant differences exist for abundance
between northern and southern regions.
Abundance differences were also determined
for the most dominant species at two depth
levels for the entire lake: shallow (0.5 m and
1 m depths combined) and deep (2 m and
3 m depths combined). Wilcoxon’s Signed
Ranks tests were performed on depth dis¬
tribution (shallow vs. deep) within the en¬
tire lake.

Results

Twenty-two aquatic macrophyte species
were found within Forest Lake (Table 1).
Three native emergent species [Sagittaria sp.,

Table 1. Aquatic macrophyte species in Forest Lake, Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin
(taxonomy follows Gleason and Cronquist 1991) by region. N = northern, S = southern.

Scientific Name

Common Name

Region

Ceratophyllum demersum L.

Coontail

N, S

Chara sp.

Muskgrass

N, S

Eleocharis acicularis (L.) Roemer & Schultes.

Spike Rush

N, S

Lythrum salicaria L.

Purple Loosestrife

N, S

Myriophyllum sibericum Komarov

Northern Watermilfoil

N, S

Myriophyllum spicatum L.

Eurasian Watermilfoil

N, S

Najas flexilis (Willd.) Rostk. & Schmidt

Bushy Pondweed

N, S

Nuphar variegata Durand

Yellow Water Lily

N

Nymphaea oderata Aiton

White Water Lily

S

Polygonum amphibium L.

Water Smartweed

S

Potamogeton amplifolius Tuckerman

Large-leafed Pondweed

N, S

Potamogeton foliosus Rat.

Leafy Pondweed

N

Potamogeton gramineus L.

Variable-leaf Pondweed

N, S

Potamogeton natans L.

Floating-leaf Pondweed

S

Potamogeton pectinatus L.

Sago Pondweed

N, S

Potamogeton pusillus L.

Slender Pondweed

N, S

Potamogeton zosteriformis Fern.

Flat-stemmed Pondweed

N, S

Sagittaria sp.

Arrowhead

N, S

Scirpus valid us Vahl

Soft-stem Bulrush

N, S

Typha sp.

Cattail

S

Vallisneria americana L.

Water-celery

N, S

Zosterella dubia (Jacq.) Small.

Water star-grass

N, S

60

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GERBER: Aquatic Macrophyte Distribution and Abundance in Forest Lake

Scirpus validus, and Typha sp.) and one ex¬
otic emergent species (purple loosestrife,
Ly thrum salicaria) were excluded from abun¬
dance and frequency analyses. The native
floating-leafed Nuphar variegata, found in
the lake but not within any sampling sites,
was also excluded from analyses. Only the
seventeen true aquatic species (i.e., floating-
leafed and submersed) found within sam¬
pling sites were considered for abundance
and frequency analyses. The number of spe¬
cies at individual sampling sites ranged from
zero (8 sites) to six (1 site).

Six dominant species (RAW > 10% or
RFW > 10%; Tables 2 and 3) were found
within Forest Lake: Chara sp., Najas flexilis,
Myriophyllum sibiricum , Myriophyllum
spicatum (EWM), Potamogeton pusillus, and
Vallisneria americana. Significant differences
(P < 0.03) in abundance among these six
species existed between the northern and
southern halves of Forest Lake. EWM ( P =
0.004) was significantly more abundant in
the northern region, whereas Najas flexilis
(P = 0.002) and Potamogeton pusillus {P =
0.001) were more abundant in the south.
No significant differences in abundance be¬
tween northern and southern regions were
found for Myriophyllum sibiricum (P =
0.971), Chara sp. (P = 0.684), and Vallis¬
neria americana (P = 0.529). Of aquatic
macrophytes other than the six dominant
species, Potamogeton foliosus was present in
the northern region but absent in the south¬
ern region. Nymphaea odorata , Polygonum
amphibium, and Potamogeton natans were
present in the southern region but not the
northern region.

Species abundance differs at different
depths in Forest Lake. Within the entire
lake, Myriophyllum sibiricum ( P = 0.015),
Chara sp. (P = 0.017), and Potamogeton
pusillus (. P = 0.023) were found in higher
abundance in deep water. No significant dif¬

ferences in abundance for depth were found
for Najas flexilis (P = 0.134), EWM (P =
0.279), and Vallisneria americana (P =
0.209).

Purple loosestrife, an exotic emergent
aquatic species, was found growing in sparse
patches within the lake and in dense patches
in surrounding wetlands. A visual inspection
of the wetlands was made to determine dis¬
tribution of this species. Because of the in¬
terest in exotic species control, distributions
for both EWM and purple loosestrife were
mapped (Figure 2).

Sediments found within EWM plant
beds at the extreme northern end of Forest
Lake were assigned a designation of sand to
sand-loamy. Sediment texture composition
ranged from 95-85% sand, 14-6% silt, and
<1% clay. Organic matter content was low
(4.24—0.97%). This was probably due to
human disturbance along the northern lake
shore, where property owners use sand to
maintain beaches. Sediment pH values
ranged from 7. 2-6. 7. Sediment mineral
ranges are given in Table 4. Water mineral
ranges are taken from U.S. Geological Sur¬
vey (1994) data and Wisconsin Department
of Natural Resources (1970) data (Table 4).

Discussion

Within the last 30 years, EWM has become
well established in Forest Lake, and purple
loosestrife has become well established in the
surrounding wetlands. Neither exotic species
was found during the 1968 Wisconsin De¬
partment of Natural Resources survey
(1970), but EWM has now become the
most dominant true aquatic macrophyte
species within the northern region of Forest
Lake and the fifth most abundant species
within the entire lake. EWM distribution
within the lake is not uniform, however; its
greatest concentration was at the 2-m depth

Volume 88 (2000)

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Table 2. Abundance (A = sums of abundance scores) and relative abundance (RA) of
floating-leafed and submersed species of the northern region (N), southern region (S),
and whole lake (W) for Forest Lake, Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin. Aw = 0 (absence),

1 (present), 2 (abundant), or 3 (common) for each occurrence in a 0.25 m2 area and
%RAW = ( A/ATotal)* 1 00 for 80 sample sites; AN , As , %RAN and %RAS are calculated
similarly for 40 sample sites each.

Species

%ran

4

%RAS

Aw

%RAW

Ceratophyllum demersum

3

2.2

3

1.8

6

2.0

Char a sp.

25

18.7

20

12.1

45

15.1

Eleocharis acicularis

1

0.7

2

1.2

3

1.0

Myriophyllum sibericum

26

19.4

24

14.5

50

16.7

Myriophyllum spicatum

35

26.1

2

1.2

37

12.4

Najas flexilis

14

10.4

43

26.1

57

19.1

Nymphaea oderata

0

0

5

3.0

5

1.7

Polygonum amphibium

0

0

2

1.2

2

0.7

Potamogeton amplifolius

2

1.5

3

1.8

5

1.7

Potamogeton foliosus

1

0.7

0

0

1

0.3

Potamogeton gramineus

4

3.0

4

2.4

8

2.7

Potamogeton natans

0

0

3

1.8

3

1.0

Potamogeton pectin at us

1

0.7

4

2.4

5

1.7

Potamogeton pusillus

4

3.0

36

21.8

40

13.4

Potamogeton zosteriformis

3

2.2

4

2.4

7

2.3

Vallisneria americana

14

10.4

9

5.5

23

7.7

Zosterella dubia

1

0.7

1

0.6

2

0.7

Total

134

100

165

100

299

100

Table 3. Frequency (F) and relative frequency (RF) of floating-leafed and submersed
species of the northern region (N), southern region (S), and whole lake (W) for Forest
Lake, Fond du Lac County, Wl. Fw = no. of occurrences/80 sample sites; %RFW = (F /
FTotai)*100: Fn , Fs , %RFn and %RFS were calculated similarly for 40 sample sites each.

Species

Fn

%rfn

T

%RFS

Fw

%RFW

Ceratophyllum demersum

3.8

3.4

2.5

1.9

6.3

2.6

Char a sp.

17.5

15.8

10.0

7.7

27.5

11.5

Eleocharis acicularis

1.3

1.2

1.3

1.0

2.6

1.1

Myriophyllum sibericum

17.5

15.8

16.3

12.6

33.8

14.1

Myriophyllum spicatum

23.8

21.5

2.5

1.9

26.3

11.0

Najas flexilis

13.8

12.5

33.8

26.2

47.6

19.9

Nymphaea oderata

0

0

6.3

4.9

6.3

2.6

Polygonum amphibium

0

0

2.5

1.9

2.5

1.0

Potamogeton amplifolius

2.5

2.3

3.8

2.9

6.3

2.6

Potamogeton foliosus

1.3

1.2

0

0

1.3

0.5

Potamogeton gramineus

5.0

4.5

5.0

3.9

10.0

4.2

Potamogeton natans

0

0

3.8

2.9

3.8

1.6

Potamogeton pectinatus

1.3

1.2

5.0

3.9

6.3

2.6

Potamogeton pusillus

3.8

3.4

18.8

14.6

22.6

9.4

Potamogeton zosteriformis

3.8

3.4

5.0

3.9

8.8

3.7

Vallisneria americana

13.8

12.5

11.3

8.7

25.1

10.5

Zosterella dubia

1.3

1.2

1.3

1.0

2.6

1.1

Total

110.5

100

129.2

100

239.7

100

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GERBER: Aquatic Macrophyte Distribution and Abundance in Forest Lake

Figure 2. Distributions of EWM and purple loosestrife within and surrounding Forest Lake.
Areas with dense (D) or patchy (P) stands of EWM are shown. The stippled deep water
area contains patches of dense EWM stands that reach the surface later in the growing
season. The cross-hatched, stippled areas identify loosestrife stands.

Volume 88 (2000)

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Table 4. Range of sediment (see collection site information in text, N = 6) and water
mineral characteristics (N = 2, one shallow and one deep water sample, unless other¬
wise indicated; taken on May 3 [USGS 1994]) at the north end of lake; and mean water
mineral characteristics (N = 1) on April 1968 (modified from WDNR 1970) of Forest
Lake, Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin.

Water, dissolved (ppm)

Characteristic

Sediment (ppm)

1994

1968

Calcium

94,800-81,400

26

10.8

Magnesium

59,300-50,100

15

18.3

Iron

5,000-2,800

<50

0.01

Aluminum

3,800-2,000

—

—

Sulfur

501-103

4-5 (sulfate)

17.0

Potassium

468- 128

<1

1.7

Phosphorus

247- 155

<1 (total P; N = 8)

0.12

Sodium

231-173

2.4

8.7

Manganese

106-76

<40

—

Zinc

51-29

—

—

Copper

9-5

—

—

Boron

5-3

—

—

interval, which is consistent with other re¬
ports for this species (Nichols 1992, Deppe
and Lathrop 1993, Lillie 1996). Purple
loosestrife is restricted to shallow areas, and
a visual inspection of surrounding wetlands
suggests that this species warrants consider¬
ation to contain further spread.

As reported for other Wisconsin lakes
(Nichols 1988), EWM was found in great¬
est abundance in the most disturbed areas
of Forest Lake. Dense concentrations of
EWM, often in pure stands, were found
where the greatest number of sand beaches
were located and also were growing from the
shoreline to a depth of 4 m in previously
dredged areas of the lake. Four sampling
sites along beach areas had monotypic stands
of EWM. Char a and Vallisneria americana
were the only other species found in mono¬
typic stands at one sample site each.

Changes in native aquatic plant distribu¬
tion and abundance are evident within For¬
est Lake in the last 30 years. Several notable
differences were found when comparing this
report with the 1968 survey. Potamogeton

amplifolius, once common within the north¬
ern lake region, is now much less abundant.
Although Chara is still found along the
northern shore, the thick growths of this spe¬
cies previously reported in the 1968 survey
were not found in this survey. Within the
southern region, Potamogeton pectinatus and
Potamogeton zosteriformis are now found in
comparatively low abundance but were pre¬
viously listed as dominant species. Najas
flexilis, while common in this report, was not
mentioned in the 1968 survey. Interestingly,
Najas flexilis has also been identified as a spe¬
cies that does well in disturbed areas
(Nichols 1988).

While EWM is considerably less abun¬
dant in the southern half of the lake, its
spread into this region has been noticed
within the last several years (personal com¬
munication, C. Kendziorski). Previous re¬
search (Nichols 1990, Nichols and Buchan
1997) suggests that certain aquatic macro¬
phytes show significant habitat associations
with EWM. Three of these “indicator spe¬
cies” (e.g., Najas flexilis , Myriophyllum

64

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GERBER: Aquatic Macrophyte Distribution and Abundance in Forest Lake

sibiricum, Potamogeton gramineus) are domi¬
nant in the southern region of Forest Lake.
Fish Lake (Dane County, WI), similar to
Forest Lake in aquatic macrophyte species
composition, has shown a drastic increase in
EWM over the last two decades (Nichols
1984, Lillie 1996). Although Fish Lake at
present has shown some decline in EWM,
it is still by far the most dominant species
within the lake (Lillie 1996).

Physical and chemical sediment charac¬
teristics influence the distribution of rooted,
submersed and floating-leafed aquatic mac¬
rophytes (Sculthorpe 1967). EWM has been
shown to colonize many different sediment
types, from high organic-mucky to low or¬
ganic-sandy sediments (Nichols 1971, Lillie
and Barko 1990, Gerber and Les 1996,
Nichols and Rogers 1997). In Forest Lake,
the northern shoreline has been disturbed by
the development of sandy beach areas with
sandy sediments to a depth of >2 m. These
sandy sediments are colonized in monotypic
or mixed stands by EWM, Najas flexilis,
Chara , Ceratophyllum demersum, and Vallis-
neria americana. These species, excluding
Chara , are described by Nichols (1988) as
being tolerant of disturbance.

Determination of native and exotic plant
abundance, frequency, and distribution are
important for understanding plant commu¬
nity dynamics and for developing an aquatic
plant management program aimed at slow¬
ing EWM spread. Helsel et al. (1996) have
shown that when physical and chemical con¬
trol techniques are used in combination, na¬
tive plants can recover and reestablish after
EWM eradication. However, minimizing
lake disturbance and maintaining a healthy
native macrophyte standing crop are prob¬
ably the best preventative measures to keep
exotic species from establishing or spreading
within a lake. Within Forest Lake, changes
in the native species assemblage may be a

harbinger of EWM dominance in southern
Forest Lake. The southern end of the lake
shows fewer signs of disturbance; however,
now that EWM has established in the north¬
ern end its spread will probably continue.

Acknowledgments

C. Kendziorski and M. Sessing assisted with
field work and project development. Two
anonymous referees provided many helpful
suggestions for improving the original
manuscript. Funding was provided through
Wisconsin Department of Natural Re¬
sources, Lake Planning Aids Grant (LPL-
346), and the Forest Lake Improvement As¬
sociation.

Works Cited

Devine, R. 1998. Alien invasion. National Geo¬
graphic Society, Washington, D.C. 280 pp.
Deppe, E. R., and R. C. Lathrop. 1993. Recent
changes in the aquatic macrophyte commu¬
nity of Lake Mendota. Transactions of the
Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters
81:47-38.

Engel, S. 1993. Status of Eurasian watermilfoil
in Wisconsin. LakeLine 13:10-13.

Gerber, D. T., and D. H. Les. 1996. Habitat
differences among seven species of Myrio-
phyllum (Haloragaceae) in Wisconsin and
Michigan. The Michigan Botanist 35:73-86.
Gleason, H. A., and A. Cronquist. 1991.
Manual of vascular plants of northeastern
United States and adjacent Canada. 2nd edi¬
tion. New York Botanical Garden, Bronx,
NY. 910 pp.

Helsel, D. R., D. T. Gerber, and S. Engel. 1996.
Comparing spring treatments of 2,4-D with
bottom fabrics to control a new infestation
of Eurasian Watermilfoil. Journal of Aquatic
Plant Management 34:68-7 1 .

Lillie, R. A. 1996. A quantitative survey of the

Volume 88 (2000)

65

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

floating-leafed and submersed macrophytes of
Fish Lake, Dane county, Wisconsin. Trans¬
actions of the Wisconsin Academy of Science,
Arts and Letters 84: 1 1 1-25.

Lillie, R. A., and J. W. Barko. 1990. Influence
of sediment and groundwater on the distri¬
bution and biomass of Myriophyllum spicatum
L. in Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin. Journal of
Freshwater Ecology 5:41 7—26.

Nichols, S. A. 1971. The distribution and con¬
trol of macrophyte biomass in Lake Wingra.
Technical Report OWRR-B-019-WIS, Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin-Madison, Water Re¬
sources Center. Madison, WI. 132 pp.

Nichols, S. A. 1984. Phytochemical and mor¬
phological differentiation between Myrio¬
phyllum spicatum L. and Myriophyllum
exalbescens Fern, in two Wisconsin lakes.
Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sci¬
ence, Arts and Letters 7 2:1 53—56.

Nichols, S. A. 1988. Vegetation of Wisconsin’s
benchmark lakes. Transactions of the Wiscon¬
sin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 76: 1 —
9.

Nichols, S. A. 1990. Interspecific association of
some Wisconsin lake plants. Transactions of
the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Let¬
ters 7 SAW -2%.

Nichols, S. A. 1992. Depth, substrate, and tur¬
bidity relationships of some Wisconsin lake
plants. Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy
of Science, Arts and Letters 80:97-1 18.

Nichols, S. A., and L. A. J. Buchan. 1997. Use

of native macrophytes as indicators of suit¬
able Eurasian watermilfoil habitat in Wiscon¬
sin lakes. Journal of Aquatic Plant Manage¬
ment 35:21-24.

Nichols, S. A., and S. J. Rogers. 1997. Within-
bed distribution of Myriophyllum spicatum L.
in Lake Onalaska, Upper Mississippi River.
Journal of Freshwater Ecology 12:1 83—9 1 .

Sculthorpe, C. D. 1967. The biology of aquatic
vascular plants. Edward Arnold. London. 610

pp.

Titus, J. E. 1993. Submersed macrophyte veg¬
etation and distribution within lakes: line
transect sampling. Lake and Reservoir Man¬
agement 7 1155-64.

U.S. Geological Survey. 1994. Water-quality and
lake-stage data for Wisconsin lakes, water year
1994.

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
1970. Forest Lake, Fond Du Lac County,
Wisconsin. Lake use report number MI-21.
Department of Natural Resources, Madison,
WI. 16 pp.

D. Timothy Gerber is a member of the River
Studies Center and assistant professor in the Bi¬
ology Department at the University of Wiscon-
sin-La Crosse. Address: Department of Biology,
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, 1725 State
Street, La Crosse, WI 54601.

Email: gerber. dani @uwlax. edu

66

TRANSACTIONS

Richard S. King

Evaluation of Survey Methods
for the Karner Blue Butterfly on the
Necedah Wildlife Management Area

Abstract Three Karner blue butterfly (Tycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov)
populations were simultaneously monitored using three standard
methods. Population estimates resulting from the methods were
correlated with the number of butterflies counted while uniformly
searching 50 x 50 m plots within the study sites. This deviates
from other studies that evaluated survey methods based on corre¬
lation with mark-release-recapture surveys. A fundamental flaw
of these studies is the assumption that mark-release-recapture esti¬
mates are the most accurate. Population estimates from Pollard-
Yates surveys showed the highest correlation with the number of
individuals found on the 50 x 50 m plots. Population estimates
derived from straight-line transects provided the second best cor¬
relation followed by mark-release-recapture estimates. With data
pooled by date, no significant differences between Pollard-Yates
and straight-line transect derived population estimates were de¬
tected. Error estimates for mark-release-recapture surveys could be
determined for only 59.5% of the population estimates. No sig¬
nificant differences in the variability estimates were detected among
survey methods.

Methods for estimating butterfly numbers are well estab¬
lished (Pollard 1977, Thomas 1983, Pollard and Yates
1993, Brown and Boyce 1998). Validation of monitoring
methods has been accomplished for several species by dem¬
onstrating strong correlations between survey counts and
population estimates derived from mark-release-recapture
(MRR) studies (Douwes 1970, 1976; Pollard 1977; Warren
1981; Thomas 1983; Warren et al. 1986; Warren 1987). The

TRANSACTIONS Volume 88 (2000)

67

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

underlying assumption of all such studies is
that mark-release-recapture population esti¬
mates are the most accurate and should be
the benchmark by which ail other survey
methods are gauged. As is the case with
many Lepidoptera, MRR has been used ex¬
tensively for estimating Karner blue butter¬
fly ( Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov)
populations (Schweitzer 1994). The use of
MRR has raised concern because it requires
many assumptions (Begon 1983) that are
difficult to meet and can lead to biased es¬
timates (Gall 1983).

Listing of the Karner blue butterfly as a
federally endangered species (Clough 1992)
heightened the need for reliable survey
methods that are time and cost effective.
Currently several methods are used to esti¬
mate Karner blue butterfly populations
(Andow et al. 1994). The use of different
methods in different geographic areas has
made inter-site comparisons difficult. Data
summary further complicates interpretation
because some surveys are summarized by
duration and others by transect length
(Andow et al. 1994). Demonstrating Karner
blue butterfly recovery requires range-wide
population evaluations. Without uniform
survey methods and data summary, range¬
wide analysis will be difficult at best. There¬
fore, recovery of the Karner blue butterfly
is directly dependent on researchers and
managers developing uniformity in survey
protocol.

The goal of this project was to evaluate
the accuracy and variability of three standard
butterfly survey methods. The efficacy of
each method was evaluated based on corre¬
lations with an independent, daily popula¬
tion index. Each method was further evalu¬
ated based on the spuriousness of the data
it produced. The legitimacy of the methods
was evaluated by exploring the assumption
and limitations implicit to each.

Methods

The study was conducted during July and
August 1995 on three different populations
on the Necedah Wildlife Management Area
in south-central Wisconsin (48°83 'N,
90°10/W). All surveys, regardless of method,
were conducted between 0800 and 1530. All
study sites were staked with a 50 x 50 m grid
system. The sites contained 130, 45, and 57
50 x 50 m plots. Each 50 x 50 m cell was
searched on most days (70%) with equal ef¬
fort between 20 July and August 8. The
amount of survey effort was dependent on
the number of surveyors, which ranged from
5 (9.1 min/plot) to 12 (22.0 min/plot). The
order of cell surveys was randomized by
population daily. The number of Karner
blue butterflies counted while surveying each
cell was recorded. The number of butterflies
counted was summed for all cells within
each population. Therefore, a daily popula¬
tion index (PI) was obtained by tallying the
number of butterflies seen among 50 x 50
m cells within a population. The PI requires
two assumptions: (1) the butterflies are not
attracted to or repulsed by the observer and
(2) butterflies counted in one cell are not
counted while surveying subsequent cells.
To minimize the risk of double-counting, as
many as 12 surveyors were used to simulta¬
neously survey two to four adjacent 50 x 50
m plots. By surveying adjacent plots and sys¬
tematically advancing to new plots in the
same direction, the risk of double counting
butterflies was further reduced.

Mark-release-recapture activities were
conducted on all three populations most
days (70%) between 19 July and 1 1 August
regardless of weather conditions. Butterflies
were captured with standard aerial butter¬
fly nets and given a unique three digit num¬
ber with an ultra-fine point felt-tip pen. No
mortalities were observed while conducting

68

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KING: Evaluation of Survey Methods for the Karner Blue Butterfly

MRR methods. Population estimates from
MRR surveys (Pmrr) were calculated using
the Jolly-Seber method with Jolly Software
(Pollock et al. 1990). Mark-release-recapture
requires three key assumptions: (1) the
probability of capture is the same for all in¬
dividuals, marked and unmarked; (2) the
probability of survival is the same for all in¬
dividuals, including marked individuals; (3)
emigration is permanent and thus equal to
death (Begon 1983).

Pollard-Yates (PY) surveys (Pollard
1977) and straight-line transect (SLT) sur¬
veys were conducted on all three popula¬
tions. All PY and SLT surveys were con¬
ducted between 20 July and 13 August
when rain or wind speed (> 1 3 km/h) would
not interfere. While conducting PY counts,
observers walked a circular route through a
subsection of the habitat patch attempting
to cover all areas of high nectar/butterfly
abundance. Time permitting, additional
subsections were surveyed with PY tran¬
sects, which resulted in more than one PY
population estimate per day for some sites.
SLTs ran across the entire habitat patch.
The first SLT in each unit was randomly
placed. Subsequent transects were added at
15 m intervals from the original transect
until the habitat patch was saturated. Spac¬
ing of 15 m was used because it provided
the most thorough coverage while minimiz¬
ing the risk of counting the same Karner
blue butterfly on subsequent transects.
SLTs were permanently staked and color-
coded to prevent observer deviation while
traversing them. Sample size variations for
SLTs resulted when all transects could not
be surveyed because of logistical constraints.
While conducting PY and SLT surveys, ob¬
servers recorded the perpendicular distance
from the transect to each butterfly. Perpen¬
dicular distances were recorded in 1/2-m
intervals. While conducting PY surveys, a

hand-held measuring wheel was used to
measure transect length. Population esti¬
mates from the SLT and PY surveys were
obtained by first determining the effective-
strip-width.

Effective-strip-width is the distance from
the transect that every butterfly can be as¬
sumed to be counted (Buckland et al. 1993).
Effective-strip-widths were determined by
fitting curves to the distribution of perpen¬
dicular distance estimates for each unit us¬
ing the software “Distance” (Buckland et al.
1993). Karner blue butterflies per hectare
were determined as:

2*esw*L

where n = number of Karner blue butterflies
counted, esw = effective strip width, and L
= transect length. Density estimates were
then multiplied by the hectares in each unit
to give absolute population estimates for PY
(PpY) and SLT (P k) surveys. When estimat¬
ing abundance with PY and SLT surveys,
four assumptions must be made: (1) butter¬
flies are not double counted; (2) perpendicu¬
lar distance from the transect to the butter¬
fly is estimated accurately; (3) the probability
of detecting a butterfly immediately on the
transect is 100%; (4) butterflies are not at¬
tracted to or repulsed from the surveyor
(Buckland et al. 1993). Assumptions 1 and
4 are shared with the PI method.

The risk of double-counting on PY
transects was greatly reduced by using cir¬
cular versus zig-zag routes. Much like the PI
surveys, the risk of double-counting on SLT
was reduced by having several surveyors si¬
multaneously walking adjacent transects.
The sessile nature of Karner blue butterflies
also helps reduce the risk of double-count¬
ing on PY, SLT, and PI surveys. Although
Karner blue butterflies can move several

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

hundred meters on a weekly basis (King
1998), they move little over the course of
several minutes (the time between surveys on
adjacent plots or transects) (Fried 1987,
Packer 1987, Lawrence and Cook 1989,
Sferra et al. 1993, Welch 1993, Bidwell
1993). The effects of double-counting on
either PY or SLT were further minimized by
deriving population estimates from indi¬
vidual transects as opposed to summing the
butterflies counted by day and site.

As with other butterflies (Douwes 1970,
1976; Pollard 1977; Warren 1981; Thomas
1983; Warren et al. 1986; Warren 1987),
Pearson correlation analysis was used to vali¬
date the survey methods. The population
estimates, P , Pnv, and P , , were correlated
with the PI by population and date to de¬
termine which method provided the most
accurate estimate. Therefore, accuracy was
assumed to equal the precision between the
population estimates and the PI. The PI was
used as the benchmark because it was inde¬
pendent of the other methods, required the
most time observing the populations, had
the least assumptions and could therefore be
assumed to most accurately reflect true
population fluctuations. A Wilcoxon rank-
sums test was used to test for differences be¬
tween the Pnv and P . estimates where n for
both was > 1. P could not be included in

mrr

this analysis as MRR provides only one es¬
timate per population per day. Differences
in the perpendicular distance estimates be¬
tween PY and SLT methods were tested
with a Wilcoxon rank-sums test. The coef¬
ficients of variation for P , Pnv, and P , were
measured as SE/x. An ANOVA was used to
test for differences in the coefficients of
variation for the P , Pnv, and P , estimates.

mrr PYJ sit

When needed to meet test assumptions,
data were logarithmically transformed using
SAS software. All statistics are reported as x
± SE with significance set at P < 0.05.

Results

A total of 58 and 878 Karner blue butter¬
flies were counted on 32 PY and 492 SLT
surveys respectively. The distribution of the
perpendicular distance estimates for both
methods approximated a half-normal distri¬
bution (Figure 1). Mean perpendicular dis¬
tance for PY (1.47 ± 0.12) was slightly
higher than that for SLT surveys (1.36 ±
0.07) but not significantly (P > 0.05). MRR
surveys resulted in 1,487 marked individu¬
als with a recapture rate of 27.8% with re¬
captures pooled by sex and population. Con¬
fidence intervals could be determined for
only 59.5% of the P estimates because of
small sample sizes (Table 1).

Karner blue butterfly abundance (PI) was
most strongly correlated (r = 0.90; p =
0.0001; n = 15) with population estimates
derived from the Pollard-Yates surveys (Ppy)
(Table 1). P provided the second best cor¬
relation (r = 0.72; p = 0.001 1; n = 17) with
PI, followed by Pmrr (r = 0.66; p = 0.0001; n
= 42 ) (Table 1). With data pooled by date,
PpY and P k estimates were not significantly
different. P had the highest mean coeffi-
cient of variance (0.57 ± 0.31) followed by
PpY (0.54 ± 0.09) and Pk (0.50 ± 0.24) al¬
though these differences were not significant.

Of the 427 recaptures, 90.5% occurred
within seven days of the original capture date
(Figure 2). The mean number of days be¬
tween original capture and final capture
dates was 3.59 ± 0.18. One female was re¬
captured 19 days after her original capture,
and two males were recaptured 15 days af¬
ter their original capture.

Discussion

PY surveys provided the most accurate
population estimate based on correlations
with PI. Straight-line transect surveys pro-

70

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KING: Evaluation of Survey Methods for the Karner Blue Butterfly

Straight-Line Transects

Meters

Figure 1. Distribution of perpendicular distance estimates from transect to Karner blue
butterflies ( Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov) on the Necedah Wildlife Management
Area, Juneau County, Wisconsin.

vided less accurate and variable estimates but
the estimates were not significantly (P <
0.05) less variable. Mark-release-recapture
surveys provided the least accurate popula¬
tion estimates. Further complicating the in¬
terpretation of P estimates was the lack of
confidence intervals around some of those

estimates. Proper testing of MRR data is pre¬
cluded by the fact that only one population
estimate is provided per site and day, which
limits comparisons to correlation analysis.
Another concern about the use of MRR with
Karner blue butterflies is that individuals not
only leave populations, they come back fre-

Volume 88 (2000)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Table 1. Population estimates for three Karner blue butterfly ( Lycaeides melissa samuelis
Nabokov) populations on the Necedah Wildlife Mangagement Area, Juneau County, Wisconsin.

Method

Date

Population

Population
Index (PI)

Straight-line
Transects (n)

Pollard-Yates
Transects (n)

Mark-release-

recapture

July 20

NRYN

70

2, 1 74 ± 339 (15)

195

SRYN

11

121 ± 49 (12)

32

301 27

ERYN

16

16

July 21

NRYN

81

3261108

SRYN

10

79± 27 (32)

0

169

ERYN

2

130± 130 (43)

2

July 22

SRYN

13± 13 (12)

96

July 23

SRYN

0± 0 (12)

0

July 24

NRYN

90

4641143

SRYN

19

40± 29 (12)

32

58144

ERYN

6

6

July 25

NRYN

102

436197

SRYN

28

94± 37 (12)

96

2801244

ERYN

15

64

July 26

NRYN

128

5401121

SRYN

31

27±18 (12)

129

3411272

ERYN

9

24120

July 27

NRYN

78

1, 1041325 (15)

2,123

6171175

SRYN

41

134174(12)

161

2751157

ERYN

14

35140

July 28

NRYN

96

9221280

SRYN

35

252163 (20)

3061163 (3)

2771163

ERYN

10

3091138 (43)

010(2)

10

July 31

NRYN

86

8261250

SRYN

47

212196

ERYN

8

8

August 1

NRYN

71

5521142

SRYN

7

128196

ERYN

6

36

August 2

NRYN

56

7751248

SRYN

68

225186

ERYN

67

36

August 3

NRYN

77

4931133

SRYN

28

27118 (12)

32

4911407

ERYN

3

3

August 4

NRYN

96

8301184(15)

620

259198

SRYN

32

173133 (20)

197190 (4)

1931211

ERYN

2

139172 (43)

010(2)

2

August 7

NRYN

21

7781879

SRYN

13

54136(12)

0

52

ERYN

1

1

August 8

NRYN

7

16

SRYN

6

54130(12)

0

6

ERYN

0

0

August 9

SRYN

67124 (12)

161

August 10

SRYN

94142 (12)

161

August 1 1

SRYN

36113 (32)

73146 (4)

ERYN

010(43)

August 15

NRYN

38138 (15)

100

SRYN

27118(12)

0

*Population estimates ± SE. Sample sizes are 1, regardless of method, unless otherwise indicated.

72

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KING: Evaluation of Survey Methods for the Karner Blue Butterfly

Days Between Original and Final Capture

Figure 2. Days between original and final capture dates for Karner blue butterflies
(, Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov) on the Necedah Wildlife Management Area,
Juneau County, Wisconsin.

quently (King 1998), which is a violation of
one underlying assumption of MRR meth¬
odology.

The recapture data indicates that seven-
day spacing between counts on the same
unit provides relative confidence (90.5%)
that the same individuals are not counted on
subsequent surveys. This is useful as it pro¬
vides independence, which allows counts to
be summed instead of averaged. The lack of
significant differences between PY and SLT
perpendicular distance estimates demon¬
strates the robustness of “Distance” meth¬
odology, which helps to validate its use for
highly visible Lepidoptera like the Karner

blue butterfly. Regardless of the method,
population estimates employing “Distance”
methodology provided more accurate results
than MRR methods. More important, PY
and SLT surveys provide the opportunity to
independently evaluate the effectiveness and
accuracy of population estimates as well as
develop confidence limits around those es¬
timates. At best, confidence limits can be
established around only some MRR popu¬
lation estimates (< 60% during this study).
Even if confidence intervals can be deter¬
mined, MRR requires that they are derived
internally and are therefore suspect (Manly

1971, Roff 1973).

Volume 88 (2000)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

The accuracy and reliability (variability)
of PY derived estimates is encouraging for
those charged with monitoring Karner blue
butterfly populations. As with all endan¬
gered species, managers must be aware of the
status of all Karner blue butterfly popula¬
tions they manage. Monitoring dozens of
populations across a broad geographic range
requires a quick but dependable survey
method. Of the methods tested during this
study, PY counts required the least time/fi-
nancial investment followed by SLT and
MRR. Although clearly biased toward “op¬
timal” habitat, PY surveys provide a quick
but accurate means of monitoring Karner
blue butterfly populations. This bias toward
“optimal” habitat provides flexibility to re¬
route transects within sites as nectar sources
shift throughout the flight, which is an ad¬
vantage of the PY method. Data obtained
from PY surveys are robust, require less time,
and best describe population fluctuations.
PY surveys can answer local questions about
habitat management or individual popula¬
tion fluctuations but can also answer range¬
wide, recovery questions that require inter¬
site comparisons (Thomas 1983, Pollard and
Yates 1993, Swengel 1996).

Acknowledgments

I thank C. Bosely, J. Black, C. Minch, R.
Burger, and J. Johnson for their work as field
assistance. This study was partially funded
be the National Fish and Wildlife Founda¬
tion. I thank P. Stangel of the Foundation
for his assistance. Special thanks to J. Brown
for comments on the manuscript and calcu¬
lations of the effective strip widths. Helpful
comments on this manuscript were provided
by D. Andow, M. Boyce, C. Lane, C.
Carnes, C. Bleser, D. Schweitzer, R. Power,
A. Swengel, R. Grundel, R. Dana, and sev¬
eral anonymous reviewers.

Literature Cited

Andow, D. A., C. P. Lane, and R. J. Baker.
1994. Karner blue butterfly: a symbol of a
vanishing landscape. University of Minne¬
sota, Miscellaneous Publication 84-1994.

222 pp.

Begon, M. 1983. Abuses of mathematical tech¬
niques in ecology: applications of Jolly’s cap¬
ture-recapture method. Oikos 40:153-38.

Bidwell, A. 1995. Karner blue butterfly (Lycaeides
melissa samuelis) dispersal and habitat distri¬
bution at Fort McCoy Military Reservation,
Wisconsin. Masters Thesis. University of
Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Stevens Point, WI.
109 pp.

Brown, J. A., and M. S. Boyce. 1998. Line
transect sampling of Karner blue butterflies
(Lycaeides melissa samuelis). Environmental
and Ecological Statistics 5:81-91.

Buckland, S. T., D. R. Anderson, K. P. Burnham,
and J. L. Laake. 1993. Distance sampling: esti¬
mating abundance of biological populations.
Chapman & Hall. New York, NY.

Clough, M. W. 1992. Endangered and threat¬
ened wildlife and plants: determination of
endangered status for the Karner blue butter¬
fly. Federal Register 57:59236-244.

Douwes, P. 1970. Size of, gain to and loss from
a population of Heodes virgaureae L. (Lep.,
Lycaenidae). Entomologica Scandinavica
1:263-81.

Douwes, P. 1976. An area census method for
estimating butterfly population numbers.
The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera
15:146-52.

Fried, C. S. 1987. Dispersal of the Karner blue
butterfly [Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov)
in the Albany Pine Bush. Unpublished Re¬
port. Endangered Species Unit, New York
Department of Environmental Conservation.

Gall, L. F. 1985. Measuring the size of Lepi-
dopteran populations. The Journal of Research
on the Lepidoptera 27:97-16.

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King, R. S. 1998. Dispersal of Karner blue but¬
terflies (Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov)
at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge. Trans¬
actions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences ,
Arts and Letters 86: 101-10.

Lawrence, W. S., and A. C. Cook. 1989. The
status and management of Karner blue
(Lycaeides melissa samuelis) populations in the
Allegan State Game Area, Michigan. Unpub¬
lished Report. The Nature Conservancy,
Michigan Field Office.

Manly, B. F. J. 1971. A simulation study of
Jolly’s method for analyzing capture-recap¬
ture data. Biometrics 27:415-424.

Packer, L. 1987. Status report on the Karner
blue butterfly, Lycaeides melissa samuelis
Nabokov, in Ontario. Committee on the Sta¬
tus of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. 65 pp.

Pollard, E. 1977. A method for assessing changes
in the abundance of butterflies. Biological
Conservation 1 2: 1 1 5— 34.

Pollard, E., and T. J. Yates. 1993. Monitoring
butterflies for ecology and conservation.
Chapman & Hall, London.

Pollock, K. H., J. D. Nichols, C. Brownie, and
J. E. Hines. 1990. Statistical inference for
capture-recapture experiments. Wildlife
Monographs 54:1. 95 pp.

Roff, D. A. 1973. On the accuracy of some mark-
recapture estimators. Oecologia 12:15-34.

Schweitzer, D. F. 1994. Prioritizing Karner blue
butterfly habitats for protection activities. Pp.
173-84 in D. A. Andow, C. P. Lane, and
R. J. Baker. Karner blue butterfly: a symbol
of a vanishing landscape. University of Min¬
nesota, Miscellaneous Publication 84-1994.

222 pp.

Sferra, N. J., D. N. Ewert, C. A. Clampitt, H.
E. Ballard, J. M. Aguiar, and T. Darnell.

1993. Management of oak savanna and oak
barrens habitat in Newaygo and Muskegon
Counties, Michigan. Unpublished Report.
The Nature Conservancy, Michigan Field
Office.

Swengel, A. B. 1996. Effects of fire and hay
management on abundance of prairie butter¬
flies. Biological Conservation 76:73-85.

Thomas, J. A. 1983. A quick method of estimat¬
ing butterfly numbers during surveys. Biologi¬
cal Conservation 27 : 195-2 1 1 .

Warren, M. S. 1981. The ecology of the wood
white butterfly Leptidea sinapis L. Ph.D. The¬
sis, University of Cambridge.

Warren, M. S. 1987. The ecology and conser¬
vation of the heath fritillary butterfly,
Mellicta athalia. III. Population dynamics
and the effects of habitat management. Jour¬
nal of Applied Ecology 24:499-5 13.

Warren, M. S., E. Pollard, and T. J. Bibby.
1986. Annual and long-term changes in a
population of the wood white butterfly,
Leptidea sinapis. Journal of Animal Ecology
55:707-19.

Welch, R. J. 1993. Dispersal and colonization
behavior in the Karner blue butterfly (Ly¬
caeides melissa samuelis) in central Wisconsin.
Unpublished Report. U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, Green Bay Field Office.

Richard King is the staff biologist at the
Necedah National Wildlife Refuge. His research
currently focuses on the eastern massasauga,
Karner blue butterfly, savanna ecology, and fire
dynamics. Address: Necedah National Wildlife
Refuge, W7996 20th Street West, Necedah, WI
54646-7531. Email: richard_s_king@fws.gov

Volume 88 (2000)

75

f

James M. Omernik, Shannen S. Chapman,
Richard A. Lillie, and Robert T. Dumke

Ecoregions of Wisconsin

Abstract Ecoregions are geographical areas within which the biotic and
abiotic components of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems exhibit
different but relatively homogeneous patterns in comparison to that
of other areas. As such these regions serve as a framework for
ecosystem management in a holistic sense and allow integration
of assessment and management activities across state and federal
agencies that may have different responsibilities and missions for
the same geographic areas. Most of the spatial frameworks of
Wisconsin that are termed ecoregions or have been used for
environmental management in the state were designed to address
specific aspects of resource management. In a collaborative effort
with various state and federal agencies, we have attempted to define
a framework to meet broader ecosystem management needs that
consider both the terrestrial and aquatic components as well as
the human influences and associations with other ecosystem
characteristics that affect management potentials for land and
water resources. The “Ecoregions of Wisconsin” consist of 27 level
IV regions nested within six larger level III regions that also occupy
portions of adjoining states. We provide a brief description of the
primary distinguishing characteristics (such as soils, vegetation,
climate, geology, physiography, water quality, hydrology, and land
use) within each level III and IV ecoregion, and discuss the
potential applications of the ecoregion map in context of current
and future directions of ecosystem management in Wisconsin.

Ecoregions denote areas of general similarity in ecosystems
and in the type, quality, and quantity of environmental
resources; they are designed to serve as a spatial framework for
the research, assessment, monitoring, and management of eco¬
systems and ecosystem components. Special purpose maps of

TRANSACTIONS Volume 88 (2000)

77

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

characteristics such as plant communities,
water quality, soils, and fish distributions are
necessary and have long been used for deal¬
ing with specific research and management
problems. Ecoregions, on the other hand,
portray areas within which there is similar¬
ity in the mosaic of all biotic and abiotic
components of both terrestrial and aquatic
ecosystems. Recognition, identification, and
delineation of these multipurpose regions are
critical for structuring and implementing
integrated management strategies across fed¬
eral, state, tribal, and local governmental
agencies that are responsible for different
types of resources within the same geo¬
graphical areas.

Several spatial frameworks that either are
termed ecoregions or are used for environ¬
mental resource management have been de¬
veloped for Wisconsin. Most, however, were
designed to address specific aspects of re¬
source management rather than ecosystem
management in a holistic sense. Others were
not refined or subdivided adequately to meet
the needs of integrated resource assessment
and management across agency and program
lines. The purpose of this paper is to present
a mapped framework of ecological regions
designed to address these broader needs.
These regions are intended to complement
rather than replace the more specific ecologi¬
cal classifications systems, which may remain
more effective for the particular subjects they
were designed to address.

Historical Definition and Use
of Ecoregions of Wisconsin

Although there is general agreement on the
need for an ecoregion-type framework for
the research, assessment, and management
of environmental resources in Wisconsin,
there is considerable disagreement over
which framework is the most appropriate.

The most popular of the several spatial
frameworks that cover Wisconsin are those
developed by the U.S. Department of Agri¬
culture (USDA) Forest Service (Bailey et al.
1994, Keys et al. 1995), Albert (1995), and
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) (Omernik 1987, 1995a; EPA 1999).
The Forest Service and EPA frameworks are
national or international in scope and are
still undergoing development. Prior to the
development of the Forest Service and EPA
ecoregion maps, resource managers in Wis¬
consin used a number of mapping schemes
to associate, describe, classify, and otherwise
assemble the terrestrial and aquatic resources
of Wisconsin into somewhat homogeneous
groupings. These included works by Martin
(1916) depicting geographical provinces,
Finley’s (1976) original vegetation cover
map, PoflP s (1970) hydro-chemical lake re¬
gions, and the map of total phosphorus in
lakes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michi¬
gan (Omernik et al. 1988). The more re¬
cently developed map of “natural divisions
of Wisconsin” (Hole and Germain 1994)
has also been used. These conceptual orga¬
nizations of Wisconsin’s landscape, together
with many other special purpose maps (e.g.,
geology, soils, current vegetation, and land
use), were precursors to, and were used in
the compilation of, the map presented in
this paper.

Titled “Regional landscape ecosystems,”
the mapped classification by Albert (1995)
was based largely on patterns of climate, ge¬
ology, physiography, and soil, as well as the
“natural regions” of Hole and Germain
(1994), which were heavily based on poten¬
tial natural vegetation and soils. The por¬
tion of the current Forest Service’s National
Hierarchy of Ecological Units (Keys et al.
1995) that covers Wisconsin was derived
from the work of Albert (1995) and the na¬
tional classification developed by Bailey

78

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OMERNIK, CHAPMAN, LILLIE, and DUMKE: Ecoregions of Wisconsin

(1976). The Forest Service classification was
initiated by Bailey (1976) and was fairly con¬
sistent across the country regarding scale,
level of detail, and its hierarchical approach.
The revised Forest Service framework (Bailey
et al. 1994, Keys et al. 1995) was compiled
by different regional and/or state groups and
reflects spatial inconsistencies because of the
different perspectives, approaches, and back¬
grounds of the different individuals or
groups who have conducted the work. For
Wisconsin, both Albert’s and the Forest
Service’s classifications are weighted toward
terrestrial ecosystems and forest management
uses. Consideration of patterns of land use
and aquatic characteristics was relatively un¬
important in the development of either of
these classifications. This apparent lack of
attention to land use and water resource
characteristics is viewed by some resource
managers as a weakness in these frameworks.
Conversely, the inclusion of land use and
water resource characteristics into the EPA
framework is sometimes viewed as a bias by
terrestrial resource managers. This difference
in perspectives among user groups is the
foundation for a continuing debate and em¬
phasizes the need for further dialog and evo¬
lution of all frameworks.

The EPA framework, of which the map
of Level III and IV Ecoregions of Wiscon¬
sin (Figure 1) is a part, is based on the be¬
lief that ecological regions can be determined
by identifying areas within which there is
coincidence in patterns of geographic phe¬
nomena, natural and human-related, that
reflect spatial differences in ecosystems and
their components. This approach also rec¬
ognizes that the relative importance of each
of these phenomena (which include geology,
physiography, vegetation, climate, soils, land
use, wildlife, and hydrology) varies from one
region to another regardless of scale or hier¬
archical level. To avoid confusion with other

meanings for different hierarchical levels of
ecological regions a Roman numeral classi¬
fication was adopted for the EPA maps and
a North American ecological region frame¬
work of which they are a part (Commission
for Environmental Cooperation [CEC]
1997). As with other similar state and re¬
gional mapping efforts, the process used to
compile this new map of level III and IV
ecoregions of Wisconsin was collaborative,
involving numerous individuals representing
several government agencies.

The major differences between this map
of ecoregions of Wisconsin and those by the
Forest Service and Albert lie in their meth¬
ods of compilation and their intended use.
Whereas the focus of the compilation of the
maps by the Forest Service and Albert was
on depicting regions in the terrestrial land¬
scape that might exist in the absence of hu¬
mans, the intent of this map is to show pat¬
terns of the entire ecosystem, biotic and
abiotic, terrestrial and aquatic, with humans
being considered as a biotic component.
Until only recently, most attempts to define
ecological regions did not consider patterns
of human use or influence. It is now gener¬
ally understood that if humans were re¬
moved from the planet the mosaic of eco¬
system components would not revert to the
patterns that existed in the United States
before Europeans set foot on the continent
or before Native Americans made their im¬
pact on the landscape. Too many plants and
animals have been removed and introduced,
and the land and water have been too dras¬
tically modified through activities including
mining, urbanization, and channelization.
Although the importance of human influ¬
ence on ecosystems and their patterns is now
obvious, the tendency to consider nature as
if humans were not part of it seems to have
been the norm. Likens (1993) commented
that in spite of the fact that humans live in

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47 Western Corn Belt Plains

47g Prairie Pothole Region

50 Northern Lakes and Forests

50a Lake Superior Clay Plain
50b Minnesota/Wisconsin Upland Till Plain
50c St. Croix Pine Barrens
50d Ontonagon Lobe Moraines
and Gogebic Iron Range
50e Chequamegon Moraine
and Outwash Plain
50f Blue Hills
50g Chippewa Lobe Rocky
Ground Moraines
50h Perkinstown End Moraine
50i Northern Highlands Lakes Country
50j Brule and Paint River Drumlins
50k Wisconsin/Michigan Pine and Oak Barrens
501 Menominee Ground Moraine

51 North Central Hardwood Forests

51a St. Croix Stagnation Moraines
51b Central Wisconsin Undulating
Till Plain

51c Glacial Lake Wisconsin Sand Plain
5 Id Central Sand Ridges
5 le Upper Wolf River Stagnation Moraine
5 If Green Bay Till and Lacustrine Plain
5 1 g Door Peninsula

52 Driftless Area

52a Savanna Section
52b Coulee Section

53 Southeastern Wisconsin Till Plains

53a Rock River Drift Plain
53b Kettle Moraines
53c Southeastern Wisconsin Savanna
and Till Plain

53d Lake Michigan Lacustrine Clay Plain

54 Central Corn Belt Plains

54e Chiwaukee Prairie Region

- - - Level III Ecoregion

- Level IV Ecoregion

- State Boundary

— County Boundary

Albers Equal Area Projection

0 20 40 60 80 Miles

0 40 80 120 160 Kilometers

Larger scale, color versions of this map can be obtained from Richard Lillie, Wisconsin DNR,
Bureau of Integrated Science Services Research, 1350 Femrite Dr., Monona, WI 53716
<lillir@dnr.state.wi.us> or James Omernik, USEPA, 200 SW 35th St., Corvallis, OR 97333
<omernik@mail. cor.epa.gov>. Information on electronic coverages of the map is also available
from the authors.

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and among ecosystems, ecologists have
avoided making detailed and rigorous analy¬
ses of the effects of human activities on eco¬
systems and have sought out pristine or re¬
mote areas for their study. Some have stated
that, at least for environmental policy, hu¬
mans should not be considered as a biotic
component of ecosystems (Udo de Haes and
Klijn 1994). However, humans have clearly
had an effect on the regional capacities of
ecosystems (Holling 1994). As Meeus
(1995) has written, “In the course of time
each culture leaves behind its own land¬
scape.”

It has been argued that the Forest Ser¬
vice map depicts patterns in terrestrial eco¬
systems and that the EPA maps, including
this one of Wisconsin, reflect patterns in
aquatic ecosystems, and that there is a need
for separate frameworks for both types of
systems. We believe that this argument is
flawed for at least two reasons. First, a truly
holistic approach to ecosystem management
should not consider the aquatic and terres¬
trial ecosystems separately. “An ‘ecosystem
approach’ recognizes that ecosystem compo¬
nents do not function as independent sys¬
tems, rather they exist only in association
with one another” (Omernik and Bailey
1997). Second, the approach used to define
the EPA maps, including this one of Wis¬
consin, was not focused solely on aquatic
systems, nor did it only consider patterns in
lake density and quality in the map compi¬
lation process. Just as patterns of bedrock
geology and physiography are of prime im¬
portance in defining level IV ecoregions in
the Appalachians, surficial geology and soils
are key components in Iowa, and elevational
banding is critical in the mountains of the
western United States, for parts of the coun¬
try that are covered by high densities of
natural lakes, such as in most of Wiscon¬
sin, patterns in lake quality are extremely

helpful in revealing ecological regions. In
order to define meaningful ecoregion
boundaries in these types of areas it is im¬
portant to recognize differences in lake den¬
sity and quality with differences in many
causal and reflective characteristics, includ¬
ing soils, surficial geology, physiography, cli¬
mate, land use, and vegetation.

The Interagency Ecoregion
Mapping Effort

A recent U.S. General Accounting Office
(GAO) Report to Congress (GAO 1994)
documented the need for agency-wide adop¬
tion of an ecosystem approach to resource
management and the fact that there is no
common spatial ecoregion framework to
implement the approach. Although the
GAO report was primarily directed toward
the need for a common federal interagency
framework, the report implied the need to
involve state agencies as well and stated that
effective ecosystem management “will re¬
quire collaboration and consensus-building
among federal and nonfederal parties within
the larger national land and natural resource
use framework” (GAO 1994). In response
to the need to identify or develop a com¬
mon framework of ecological regions, a Na¬
tional Interagency Technical Team on eco¬
logical mapping formed and was responsible
for creating a Memorandum of Understand¬
ing entitled “Developing a Spatial Frame¬
work of Ecological Units of the United
States.” This Memorandum of Understand¬
ing was signed by the heads of all of the fed¬
eral resource management agencies in 1996.
Reaching the objective of the Memorandum
of Understanding requires recognition of the
differences in the conceptual approaches and
mapping methodologies that have been used
to develop the most commonly used exist¬
ing ecoregion-type frameworks, including

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those developed by the Forest Service (Bailey
et ah 1994), the EPA (Omernik 1987,
1995a), and the USDA Natural Resources
Conservation Service (USDA 1981). The
first task of the interagency effort is to iden¬
tify ecological regions common to the three
existing frameworks that also have meaning
to the holistic objective to depict patterns in
the mosaic of all ecosystem components,
aquatic and terrestrial, as well as biotic and
abiotic. These regions will be roughly at the
scale of the Level III ecoregions and origi¬
nal Forest Service sections. While debate
continues within the National Interagency
Technical Team on the strengths and limi¬
tations of the different agency frameworks
and the value of rule-based (quantitative)
and weight-of-evidence (qualitative) ap¬
proaches to defining ecoregions, the group
has developed a draft map of ecological re¬
gions at this general level of detail (Mc¬
Mahon et ah in press).

Important to the work and final product
of the interagency effort is the understand¬
ing that the common framework of ecologi¬
cal regions is not meant to replace many of
the existing frameworks, insofar as their uses
for specific applications is concerned.
Mapped classifications, such as the USDA
map of Major Land Resource Areas that was
based on aggregations of map units from
state soils maps and was originally intended
to reflect patterns in soils properties as they
relate to agricultural potential, should con¬
tinue to be used for their specific applica¬
tions. Likewise, state and regional maps that
focus on terrestrial ecosystems for forest
management uses will remain important for
those purposes. However, for addressing
ecosystem management in an integrated
fashion across agencies and special interests,
an ecoregional classification that reflects spa¬
tial patterns in the mosaic of all ecosystem
components will be necessary.

Methods

We have defined ecoregions as areas of rela¬
tive homogeneity in ecological systems and
their components. Factors associated with
spatial differences in the quality and quan¬
tity of ecosystem components, including
soils, vegetation, climate, geology, and physi¬
ography, are relatively homogeneous within
an ecoregion. The relative importance of
each characteristic varies from one ecologi¬
cal region to another regardless of the hier¬
archical level. Level I and level II divide the
North American continent into 15 and 51
regions, respectively (CEC 1997). At level
III, the continental United States contains
103 regions (EPA 1999). Level IV is a fur¬
ther subdivision of the level III ecoregions.
Wisconsin contains six level III (Figure 2)
and twenty-seven level IV ecoregions (Fig¬
ure 1). The level III descriptions contain
some general characteristics of the region,
emphasizing the features that make the
ecoregion unique from surrounding regions.
Level IV descriptions emphasize the impor¬
tant characteristics that make the region dif¬
ferent from other ecoregions within the same
level III ecoregion.

The approach used to compile this Wis¬
consin map is based on the premise that
ecological regions can be identified through
the analysis of the patterns of biotic and abi¬
otic phenomena that reflect differences in
ecosystem quality and integrity (Wiken
1986; Omernik, 1987, 1995a). The process
of defining the ecological regions involved
collaboration with local experts and began
with a data collection meeting held in
Madison at which time ecoregionalization
methods, existing regional frameworks, and
other relevant source material were dis¬
cussed. Based on the approaches outlined
in Omernik (1987, 1995a, 1995b) and Gal¬
lant et ah (1989, 1995) and the materials

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Level I Ecoregions of the
Conterminous United States

8

Northern Forests
Northwestern
Forested Mountains
Marine West Coast
Forests

Eastern Temperate
Forests

9 Great Plains

10 North American Deserts

11 Mediterranean California

12 Southern Semi- Arid Highlands

13 Temperate Sierras
15 Tropical Wet Forests

Level II Ecoregions of the
Mid-Western United States

Mixed Wood Shield
Mixed Wood Plains
Central Plains
Southeastern Plains
Ozark, Ouachita- Appalachian
Forests

Temperate Prairies

9.2

5.2
8.1

8.2

8.3

8.4

Adapted from Ecological Regions of North America (CEC 1997).

Figure 2

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OMERNIK, CHAPMAN, LILLIE, and DUMKE: Ecoregions of Wisconsin

and ideas provided by state and local col¬
laborators and other experts, a draft map of
level III and IV ecoregions of Wisconsin
was developed and circulated among many
of the attendees of the first meeting. A sec¬
ond meeting was then held in Central Wis¬
consin to receive reviewer comments on the
draft map and attempt to reach consensus
on boundary delineations among the col¬
laborators.

Unlike most of the other similar state and
regional efforts to map level III and IV
ecoregions, consensus was not reached
among those invited to collaborate or con¬
fer in this project to map ecoregions of Wis¬
consin. The reasons for this became clear at
the review meeting when the attendees were
asked for their comments, suggestions, and
concerns regarding the draft map and the
method used to compile it. Although 70%
or more of these people were comfortable
with the product and approach, the remain¬
der were not in agreement, generally for one
or more of the following reasons: (1) a con¬
cern that the “weight-of-evidence” method
used to compile the map was inappropriate
and that a quantitative approach should
have been used instead; (2) a belief that the
map represented aquatic systems and that
there should be separate frameworks for ter¬
restrial and aquatic systems; (3) a belief that
there should be separate frameworks for
aquatic and terrestrial systems and that the
aquatic framework should be based on wa¬
tersheds and/or hydrologic units (see Seaber
et al. 1987); (4) a concern that the “tension
line” (Curtis 1978) had not been followed
in defining the regions; and (5) a concern
that patterns of present or past land use
should not be used as a tool in defining
ecoregions.

The differences in perceptions over how
to map ecological regions in Wisconsin as
well as at the national level were not surpris¬

ing given the general lack of agreement on
the definitions of ecosystems (Gonzalez
1996) and ecosystem management (Lackey
1998), the disagreement over whether eco¬
systems are abstract concepts or areas with
geographical borders (Rowe and Barnes
1994, Blew 1996, Marin 1997, Rowe 1997),
and the history of debate over regional¬
ization and whether quantitative or qualita¬
tive techniques are more appropriate for the
task (see for example Grigg 1967 and Hart
1982). However, acceptance of the approach
used to develop the map of ecological re¬
gions of Wisconsin has grown. Consensus
has been reached across state and federal
agencies in a growing number of states (e.g.,
Pater et ah 1998, Woods et ah 1999,
Chapman et al. in review), and the frame¬
work is being used or is being strongly con¬
sidered for use for many national resource
management activities, including the devel¬
opment of biological criteria in surface wa¬
ters (Davis et al. 1996), the development of
nutrient criteria in streams (EPA 1998), and
the planning, implementation, and evalua¬
tion of bird conservation (USFWS 1999).

We stress that the purpose of this paper
is not to tout the advantages of one frame¬
work or approach over another, but rather
to provide another step in the process of
thoughtfully pursuing the debate on and ad¬
vancement of the definition of ecosystems,
the delineation of ecological regions, and ul¬
timately more effective ecosystem manage¬
ment.

Descriptions

The naming of level III and level IV
ecoregions was intended to associate place
names with a key landscape characteristic
descriptive or unique to the region. Conse¬
quently, the ecoregion names (and the map)
serve an educational purpose by relating

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public perceptions to the environment, thus
playing on the concept of “place” and allow¬
ing a connection to be made between
ecoregions and the general public.

47. Western Corn Belt Plains

Once covered with tail-grass prairie, over
75% of the Western Corn Belt Plains is now
used for cropland agriculture, and much of
the remainder is in forage for livestock. A
combination of nearly level to gently roll¬
ing till plains and hilly loess plains, an av¬
erage annual precipitation of 63-89 cm,
which occurs mainly in the growing season,
and fertile, warm, moist soils make this one
of the most productive areas of corn and
soybeans in the world. Surface and ground-
water contamination from fertilizer and pes¬
ticide applications as well as livestock con¬
centrations are a major concern for this
ecoregion.

The northeastern corner of the Western
Corn Belt Plains (47) is a loess-covered till
plain and extends into a small area in west¬
ern Wisconsin and borders the northern
boundary of the Driftless Area (52). The fer¬
tile prairie soils and gentle topography of this
area contributes to more intensive agricul¬
ture than in the adjacent North Central
Hardwood Forests (51) and Driftless Area
(52) ecoregions.

47g. Prairie Pothole Region. The Prairie
Pothole Region (47g) is characterized by
smooth to undulating topography, produc¬
tive prairie soils, and loess- and till-capped
dolomite bedrock. The potential natural
vegetation (PNV) is predominantly tall grass
prairie with a gradual transition eastward to
more mixed hardwoods, distinguishing 47g
from the greater concentration of mixed
hardwoods of both 51a to the north and 51b
to the east, and the mixed prairie and oak
savanna of 52b to the south.

50. Northern Lakes and Forests

The Northern Lakes and Forests (50) is an
ecoregion of relatively nutrient poor glacial
soils, coniferous and northern hardwoods
forests, undulating till plains, morainal hills,
broad lacustrine basins, and areas of exten¬
sive sandy outwash plains. Soils are formed
primarily from sandy and loamy glacial drift
material and generally lack the arability of
those in adjacent ecoregions to the south.
Ecoregion 50 also has lower annual tempera¬
tures and a frost-free period that is consid¬
erably shorter than other ecoregions in Wis¬
consin (NOAA 1974, Hole 1976). These
conditions generally hinder agriculture;
therefore, woodland and forest are the pre¬
dominant land use/land cover.

The numerous lakes that dot the land¬
scape are clearer, at a lower trophic state
(mostly oligotrophic to mesotrophic with
few eutrophic lakes), and less productive
than those in ecoregions to the south.
Streams of ecoregion 50 are mostly peren¬
nial, originating in lakes and wetlands; how¬
ever, stream density is relatively low com¬
pared to ecoregions to the south. The
Northern Lakes and Forests region is the
only ecoregion in Wisconsin where acid sen¬
sitive lakes are found. Portions of the south¬
ern boundary of ecoregion 50 roughly cor¬
respond to the southernmost extent of lakes
with alkalinity values less than 400 JLleq/1
(Omernik and Griffith 1986).

50a. Lake Superior Clay Plain. The Lake
Superior Clay Plain (50a) is a flat to undu¬
lating lake plain and outwash lowland. The
soils of 50a are generally calcareous red clays
with organic deposits in swampy areas. A
dearth of lakes along with a somewhat
milder climate and longer growing season,
due to the climate amelioration by Lake Su¬
perior, differentiates 50a from surrounding
ecoregions. Land use in 50a is predomi-

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nantly woodland with some limited agricul¬
ture of hay, small grains, and apples on
Bayfield Peninsula, distinguishing 50a from
most other level IV ecoregions in Northern
Lakes and Forests (50) where the land use/
land cover is predominantly forest and
woodland. Ecoregion 50a has a PNV of bo¬
real forest (although somewhat different
than boreal forests to the north), unlike the
pine barrens and pine forests of 50c, the
mosaic of pine and birch in 50b, and the
northern mesic forest of 50e.

50b. Minnesota! Wisconsin Upland Till
Plain. The Minnesota/Wisconsin Upland
Till Plain (50b) is an undulating stagnation
and ground moraine plain, with broad ar¬
eas of hummocky, acid, loamy and sandy till
and outwash. Ecoregion 50b has fewer lakes
than ecoregions to the east, but a greater lake
density than ecoregion 50a to the north. Ex¬
tensive wetlands — in areas of poorly drained
soils, peat over acid sedge and woody peat
soils — are scattered throughout the eco¬
region and are common in hummocky ar¬
eas. The till plain of 50b supports a PNV
mosaic of red and white pine, conifer
swamps, and aspen/white birch/pine forests.
Woodland and forest cover the majority of
the ecoregion, although there is some lim¬
ited agriculture with feed-grains and pota¬
toes as the main crops. This region also has
one of the lowest densities of roads in the
state.

50c. St. Croix Pine Barrens. The St.
Croix Pine Barrens (50c) ecoregion is char¬
acterized by mostly jack pine, concentrations
of red and white pine forests and barrens,
well-drained, pink sandy soils. Ecoregion
50c has a greater concentration of lakes, a
higher percentage of clear lakes, and lakes
with a lower trophic state than in surround¬
ing ecoregions. The sandy soils and pine bar¬
ren vegetation distinguishes ecoregion 50c
from the silty lake plain and boreal forests

of 50a and the till plain and more decidu¬
ous forest mosaic of 50b.

50 d. Ontonagon Lobe Moraines and
Gogebic Iron Range. The rolling to hilly,
bedrock-controlled and collapsed moraines
consisting of loamy till, much of it shallow
over igneous and metamorphic rock, distin¬
guish the Ontonagon Lobe Moraines and
Gogebic Iron Range (50d) ecoregion from
surrounding regions. Rock outcrops increase
from very few in the southern portion of this
ecoregion to abundant in the north. Like¬
wise, the topography changes from rolling
in the southern portion to hilly in the north.
Perennial streams are common, and there are
fewer lakes than in ecoregions to the south,
but more than adjacent ecoregion 50a. The
PNV of 50d is a mosaic of hemlock/sugar-
maple/pine forests, swamp conifers, and ce¬
dar/hemlock forests. This represents a tran¬
sition from the boreal forests of ecoregion
50a to the mix of hardwoods and conifer
forests of ecoregion 50e. Historic mining of
iron and copper occurred along the north¬
ern and northwestern edge of this region.

50e. Chequamegon Moraine and Out¬
wash Plain. Irregular plains and stagnation
moraines, broad areas of hummocky topog¬
raphy, pitted glacial outwash, numerous
kettle lakes, and abundant swamps and bogs
characterize the Chequamegon Moraine and
Outwash Plain (50e) ecoregion. This region
has more poorly developed drainage than
ecoregions to the west. The soils are coarse,
acid, loamy, and sandy-loam mixed — differ¬
ent from the pink sandy soils of ecoregion
50c and the more rocky and silty soils of
ecoregion 50g.

5 Of. Blue Hills. The Blue Hills (50f)
ecoregion is characterized by greater relief
and a higher concentration of lakes than
most surrounding ecoregions, and it con¬
tains lakes with generally lower lake trophic
states than those of adjacent ecoregions to

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the east, south, and southwest. End mo¬
raines, hummocky hills and depressions,
along with areas of Precambrian intrusives
are common to 50f as compared to the pre¬
dominantly rocky ground moraines in 50g
to the east. Periodic outcrops of pink quartz¬
ite have influenced the topography of the
region. Ecoregion 50f supports a PNV of
hemlock/sugar maple/yellow birch, white
pine and red pine forests, a transition from
predominantly hemlock/sugar maple/pine
forests of ecoregions in the east to sugar-
maple/basswood/ oak forests, oak forests, and
prairie vegetation of ecoregion 51 to the
west.

50g. Chippewa Lobe Rocky Ground Mo¬
raines. Much of the Chippewa Lobe Rocky
Ground Moraines (50g) ecoregion is com¬
prised of productive but rocky soils, scat¬
tered wetlands, extensive eskers and drum-
lins, and outwash plains. Ecoregion 50g has
a considerably lower density of lakes that
generally have higher trophic states than 50e,
5 Of, 50i, and 50h. The rocky soils of 50g
are a contrast to the well-drained loamy soils
in 50f and the sandy soils in 50i. Ecoregion
50g also supports a PNV mosaic of north¬
ern mesic forest (hemlock/sugar maple/yel¬
low birch/white and red pine) and wetland
vegetation (swamp conifers/white cedar /
black spruce), as compared to the predomi¬
nantly red and white pine forest of ecoregion
50i and the much lower hemlock compo¬
nent of ecoregions 50f and 50h.

5 Oh. Perkinstown End Moraine. The
Perkinstown End Moraine (50h) ecoregion
is characterized by hilly to rolling collapsed
moraines with outwash sand and gravel and
Precambrian intrusives. Relief in this
ecoregion is greater than that of the sur¬
rounding regions. The soils of 50h are
coarse, loamy, and moderate to well drained,
over till, in contrast to the more silty, rocky
and poorly drained soils of 50g to the south.

In addition, ecoregion 50h has fewer lakes
than adjacent level IV ecoregions in the
Northern Lakes and Forests (50) ecoregion.

50i. Northern Highlands Lakes Country.
The Northern Highlands Lakes Country
(50i) ecoregion is distinguished from sur¬
rounding ecoregions by pitted outwash, ex¬
tensive glacial lakes (many of which are shal¬
low), and wetlands. In contrast to other
ecoregions in the Northern Lakes and For¬
ests (50) ecoregion, Ecoregion 50i contains
a much higher density of lakes of generally
lower trophic state and lower alkalinity val¬
ues (hence, greater sensitivity to acidifica¬
tion). The region has soils that are more
gravelly, sandy, well to excessively drained,
and developed in deep, acid drift. Ecoregion
50i supports a PNV of white and red pine
forests, some pine barrens, and jack pine to
the south, unlike the predominantly hard¬
wood forests of surrounding ecoregions.

50 j. Brule and Paint Rivers Drumlins.
The Brule and Paint Rivers Drumlins ( 5 0 j )
ecoregion has extensive eskers and drum-
linized ground moraines, pitted and un¬
pitted outwash, wetlands, large glacial lakes,
and a lower density of lakes than in adjacent
ecoregion 50i. Lake trophic state is very low
with a higher percentage of oligotrophic and
mesotrophic lakes than most Level IV
ecoregions in the Northern Lakes and For¬
ests (50) ecoregion. Soils of the region range
from fine to coarse, poor to well drained,
and loamy and silty with extensive organic
deposits, differing from the sandy, more acid
soils in adjacent ecoregions. The PNV is
sugar-maple/basswood forest and hemlock/
sugar-maple forest, as compared to the more
coniferous forests of 50i and the pine and
oak barrens of 50k.

50k. Wisconsin/ Michigan Pine and Oak
Barrens. Irregular outwash plains and mo¬
raines, sandy and sandy-loam soils over
outwash, sandy and loamy till, and peat de-

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posits in depressions characterize the Wis¬
consin/Michigan Pine and Oak Barrens
(50k) eco region. The features are a contrast
to the extensive eskers and drumlins, and
more loamy and silty soils of adjacent
eco region 50j. Also, unlike the hardwood
forests of ecoregion 50j to the west, 50k sup¬
ports a PNV of white/red pine forests, jack
pine forests, and oak forests and barrens.
Land use in 50k is predominantly woodland,
although some mixed agriculture is found.
More frost-free days occur in 50k than in
adjacent eastern ecoregions, due to the ame¬
liorating effect of Lake Michigan and Green
Bay, contributing to the greater agricultural
component of the land cover/land use. In
addition, 50k has more shallow bedrock
than surrounding regions, with areas of ex¬
posed Precambrian basalt and granite.

501 Menominee Ground Moraine . The
Menominee Ground Moraine (501) eco¬
region is characterized by an undulating
ground moraine with drumlins and swamps.
The uplands consists of loamy soil over cal¬
careous loamy till (some over dolomite); the
lowland areas are muck. The region is domi¬
nantly woodland and woodland swamp, but
there is a significant agricultural presence.
PNV of the region is beech/sugar maple/
hemlock and swamp conifer, a contrast to
the white/red pine, jack pine, and oak for¬
ests of neighboring 50k.

51. North Central Hardwood Forests

The North Central Hardwoods Forests (51)
ecoregion is transitional between the pre¬
dominantly forested Northern Lakes and
Forests (50) and the agricultural ecoregions
to the south. Nearly level to rolling till
plains, lacustrine basins, outwash plains, and
rolling to hilly moraines comprise the physi¬
ography of this region. The land use/land
cover in this ecoregion consists of a mosaic

of forests, wetlands and lakes, cropland ag¬
riculture, pasture, and dairy operations. The
growing season is generally longer and
warmer than that of ecoregion 50 to the
north, and the soils are more arable and fer¬
tile, contributing to the greater agricultural
component of the land use. Lake densities
are generally lower here than in the North¬
ern Lakes and Forests, and lake trophic states
tend to be higher, with higher percentages
in eutrophic and hypereutrophic classes.
Stream density is highly variable, with some
areas having virtually no streams — in wet¬
land and kettle terrain — -to others with high
densities of perennial streams.

51a, St. Croix Stagnation Moraines . The
St. Croix Stagnation Moraines (51a) is a re¬
gion of ground and stagnation moraines
with broad irregular areas of hummocky to¬
pography. Soils are silty and loamy, with
sandy loamy till commonly underlain by a
substratum of acid sand and gravel glacial
outwash. There are more lakes in 51a than
in ecoregions to the east and south, and lake
trophic states, although generally higher
than in the region to the north, are lower
than in the bordering ecoregion to the
southeast. Land use in this region is a mix
of agriculture and woodland, in contrast to
the mostly woodland and forest land cover
of ecoregions to the north, and the greater
amounts of agriculture in ecoregions to the
southeast. The PNV of 51a ranges from as¬
pen/birch/pine forest, oak-maple forests, and
sugar-maple/birch/pine forests and repre¬
sents a transition from the pines of 50b to
the tall grass prairie and oak forests of 47g.

51b. Central Wisconsin Undulating Till
Plain. The Central Wisconsin Undulating
Till Plain (51b) ecoregion has a greater per¬
centage of agricultural land use than adja¬
cent Ecoregion 51a. The land cover mosaic
of woodland and agriculture includes large
areas of cropland that produce silage corn,

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oats, barley, and some apples. Ecoregion 51b
has fewer lakes, with higher trophic states,
than adjacent level IV eco regions in eco¬
region 5 1 . The undulating to rolling irregu¬
lar plains of sandy loam till and outwash
sands also distinguish this ecoregion from
the stagnation moraines of ecoregion 51a to
the west and the lacustrine sand plains of
ecoregion 51c to the south. This ecoregion
ranges from areas in the far east that are un¬
derlain with igneous metamorphic rock out¬
crops to areas in the west and southwest that
are underlain by sandstone and shale, which
also outcrops with sandstone, comprising
roughly 70% of the total area. The region
supports a transitional PNV mosaic of oak,
hemlock/sugar maple/yellow birch, and
white pine/red pine forests in the north, and
more sugar maple/basswood/ oak forests to
the south.

51c. Glacial Lake Wisconsin Sand Plain.
Compared to adjacent ecoregions, the Gla¬
cial Lake Wisconsin Sand Plain (51c) is an
area of little relief. The droughty outwash,
lacustrine, and slope wash sands, sand
buttes, and stream bottom and wetland soils
support a PNV of jack pine/scrub-oak for¬
ests and barrens, along with sedge meadows
and conifer swamps, which characterize this
flat sandy lake plain. This PNV is in con¬
trast to the predominantly white and black
oak vegetation of ecoregion 5 Id. The region
is also distinguished by its more extensive
wetlands and a lack of natural lakes. Most
of the existing lakes have been constructed
for use in cranberry production. Land use
in this region consists of woodland and ag¬
riculture with crops including mainly cran¬
berries, strawberries, and potatoes.

51 d. Central Sand Ridges. The Central
Sand Ridges (5 Id) ecoregion has the high¬
est density of lakes with the lowest trophic
states of all level IV ecoregions in the North
Central Hardwood Lorests (51). Pitted gla¬

cial outwash with extensive eskers and drum-
lins, ice contact deposits, rolling ground
moraines, and steep end moraines distin¬
guish this region from the flat lake plain of
adjacent ecoregion 51c. The dry, sandy, and
loamy till soils of the region support a PNV
of oak savanna (white oak, black oak, and
bur oak) with areas of sedge meadows, un¬
like the wetland vegetation and pine or oak
barrens of ecoregion 51c and the mosaic of
hemlock/beech/maple forests and mixed co¬
nifers of northern ecoregion 51e.

51e. Upper Wolf River Stagnation Mo¬
raine. The Upper Wolf River Stagnation
Moraine (51e) ecoregion is characterized by
the hummocky ground and end moraines
and pitted outwash, in contrast to the level
till plains of ecoregion 5 If to the east and
the irregular till plain of ecoregion 51b to
the west. This region supports a PNV mo¬
saic of hemlock/beech/sugar-maple, wetland
vegetation, and mixed conifers, as compared
to the predominantly oak forests of 5 Id to
the south. Land use in 51e is mixed agricul¬
ture/woodland with a larger area of intact
forest than adjacent level IV ecoregions in
the North Central Hardwoods Lorests (51).
This is due to land use practices within the
Menominee Indian Reservation; more for¬
est cover is still intact, and agricultural prac¬
tices are less significant. The lake trophic
state in 51e is generally higher than in 5 Id
to the south.

5 If. Green Bay Till and Lacustrine
Plain. Green Bay Till and Lacustrine Plain
(5 If) is a transitional ecoregion characterized
by wetlands, a mix of outwash and loamy
recessional moraines, with many areas of
outwash plains in the northwest, lake plains
and ground moraines in the south, and
ground moraines throughout the rest of the
region. The PNV of the region represents a
shift from the predominantly northern hard¬
woods and conifer swamps along the lake

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shore to the maple/basswood/oak forests and
oak savanna to the south. The red sandy,
loamy soils of this ecoregion are similar to
some southern areas in the northern Wis¬
consin/Michigan Pine Barrens (50k); how¬
ever, due to the generally milder climate (be¬
cause of proximity to Lake Michigan), the
growing season is more favorable and much
of the area has been cleared of natural veg¬
etation and replaced by agriculture.

51g. Door Peninsula. The Door Penin¬
sula (5 1 g) ecoregion is a lakeshore region
with ground moraines. The longer growing
season and shallow fertile, calcareous loamy
till soils of this ecoregion support a mixed
woodland/agriculture land use. Crops in this
ecoregion are mostly orchard and fruit crops,
including apples and cherries. The bedrock
geology of 5 1 g is shallower than other
ecoregions in 51 and consists primarily of
Silurian bedrock. In recent years this region
has become a popular tourism area.

52. Driftless Area

The hilly uplands of the Driftless Area (52)
ecoregion easily distinguish it from sur¬
rounding ecoregions. Much of the area con¬
sists of a loess-capped plateau with deeply
dissected streams. Also called the Paleozoic
Plateau, because there is evidence of glacial
drift in this region, the glacial deposits have
done little to affect the landscape compared
to the subduing influences in adjacent
ecoregions. Livestock and dairy farming are
major land uses and have had a major im¬
pact on stream quality. In contrast to the
adjacent glaciated ecoregions, the Driftless
ecoregion has few lakes, most of which are
reservoirs with generally high trophic states,
and a stream density and flow that is gener¬
ally greater than regions to the east.

52a. Savanna Section. Topography in the
Savanna Section (52a) of the Driftless Area

is different than the rest of the level III
ecoregion because of its characteristic broad
relatively level ridge tops and narrow steep
sided valley bottoms. Elsewhere in the dis¬
sected Driftless Area the landform mosaic
comprises relatively broad, flat valley bot¬
toms with steep sharper crested ridges or a
pattern of nearly equal amounts of flatter
areas in the valley bottoms and interfluves.
The soils are well drained silty loess over re¬
siduum, dolostone, limestone, or sandstone.
Land use patterns in the Driftless Area also
follow spatial differences in slope; hence, 52a
is predominantly agriculture on the uplands
and some mixed woodland/agriculture in
lowland areas. The PNV of the region is a
mosaic of oak forests and savannas, large
prairie grassland areas, and some sugar
maple/basswood/oak forests. The region is
also known for past lead and zinc mining.

52b. Coulee Section. Dissected slopes and
open hills with most of the gentle slope on
the lowland characterize the Coulee Section
(52b) ecoregion. Soils are well drained silty
loess over residuum, limestone, sandstone or
shale, with soils over quartzite in the
Baraboo Hills area. Land use in the region
is predominantly mixed agriculture/wood¬
land, with most of the agriculture occurring
on the lowlands and more level hilltops. The
PNV of ecoregion 52b is a mosaic of oak
forests, prairie, with larger areas of sugar
maple/basswood/oak forests than in 52a.

53. Southeastern Wisconsin Till Plains

The Southeastern Wisconsin Till Plains (53)
ecoregion supports a mosaic of vegetation
types and represents a transition between the
hardwood forests and oak savannas of the
ecoregions to the west and the tail-grass prai¬
ries of the Central Corn Belt Plains (54) to
the south. Like the Corn Belt Plains (54)
ecoregion, land use in the Southeastern Wis-

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consin Till Plains (53) is mostly cropland,
but the crops have historically been largely
forage and feed grains to support dairy op¬
erations, rather than corn and soybeans for
cash crops. The ecoregion has a higher plant
hardiness value than in ecoregions to the
north and west, a different mosaic of soils
than western ecoregions, and flatter topog¬
raphy. There are fewer lakes here than in
ecoregions to the north, but considerably
more than in the western Driftless Area (52)
and the southern Central Corn Belt Plain
(47). The region also has a relatively high
aquatic species diversity.

53a. Rock River Drift: Plain. The Rock
River Drift Plain (53a) ecoregion has numer¬
ous small creeks, a greater stream density and
fewer lakes than in ecoregions to the north
and east. Glaciation of this region is much
older, late Pliocene-early Pleistocene, than in
surrounding ecoregions. The drift mantle is
thin and deeply weathered with leached soils
developed from a silt-loam cap of loess over
glacial drift. Steeper topography and broad
outwash plains with loamy and sandy soils
also characterize this region.

53b. Kettle Moraines. The Kettle Mo¬
raines (53b) ecoregion contains a higher
concentration of lakes with lower trophic
states than in the rest of the level III
ecoregions of the Southeastern Wisconsin
Till Plains (53). The soils are clayey to the
east, especially along the Lake Michigan
shore, and more sandy to the west, but gen¬
erally less clayey than the soils in ecoregion
53d to the north. The region also contains
extensive ground and end moraines and pit¬
ted outwash with belts of hilly moraines and
generally has greater relief than ecoregion
53d to the northeast.

53c. Southeastern Wisconsin Savanna
and Till Plain. The till plains of the South¬
eastern Wisconsin Savanna and Till Plain
(53c) ecoregion support a mix of agriculture

(cropland and dairy operations) and wood¬
land. Crops include forage crops to support
the dairy operations and a wide range of
truck and specialty crops. Most of the origi¬
nal vegetation has been cleared with forested
areas remaining only on steeper end mo¬
raines and poorly drained depressions. Ir¬
regular till plains, end moraines, kettles, and
drumlins are common, and wetlands are
found throughout the region, especially
along end morainal ridges. PNV of this re¬
gion is transitional with a mosaic of sugar
maple, basswood, oak to the east, and an in¬
creasing amount of white, black, and bur
oak, oak savanna, prairie, and sedge mead¬
ows toward the west.

53d. Lake Michigan Lacustrine Clay
Plain. The Lake Michigan Lacustrine Clay
Plain (53d) ecoregion is characterized by red
calcareous clay soil, lacustrine and till depos¬
its, and a flat plain. The topography of this
ecoregion is much flatter than ecoregions to
the south, and there are fewer lakes, but the
lakes have generally higher trophic states
than in adjacent level IV ecoregions in (50)
and (51). Soils are generally silty and loamy
over calcareous loamy till, with muck and
loamy lacustrine soils in low-lying areas.
Ecoregion 53d has prime farmland with a
longer growing season and more fertile soils
than surrounding ecoregions. Agriculture
has a different mosaic of crops, with more
fruit and vegetable crops, than that of
ecoregion 53c. The PNV of this region is
beech/sugar maple/basswood/ red and white
oak forests with a greater concentration of
beech than other ecoregions in 53.

54. Central Corn Belt Plains

Prairie communities were native to the gla¬
ciated plains of the Central Corn Belt Plains,
and they were a stark contrast to the hard¬
wood forests that grew on the drift plains of

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ecoregions to the east. Beginning in the
nineteenth century, the natural vegetation
was gradually replaced by agriculture. Farms
are now extensive on the dark, fertile soils
of the Central Corn Belt Plains, mainly pro¬
ducing corn and soybeans, cattle, sheep,
poultry, and especially hogs, but are not as
dominant as in the drier Western Corn Belt
Plains to the west. Agriculture has affected
stream chemistry, turbidity, and habitat.
The extent of the Central Corn Belt Plains
(54) ecoregion in Wisconsin is contained
within a small area in the southeastern por¬
tion of the state. Land use of the ecoregion
continues to change, from exclusively agri¬
culture to a pattern with an increasing
amount of urban and industrial land.

54e. Chiwaukee Prairie Region. The
Chiwaukee Prairie Region (54e) ecoregion is
characterized by intensive agriculture, prai¬
rie soils, loess capped loamy till, and lacus¬
trine deposits. The soils of ecoregion 54e are
fertile and generally more productive than
those of ecoregion 53 to the north and west.
The PNV of the Chiwaukee Prairie Region
is predominantly tail-grass prairie, in contrast
to the southern mesic forest and oak savanna
of the adjacent region to the north and west.
Most of the natural prairie vegetation of
ecoregion 54e has been replaced with crop¬
land or urban and industrial land cover.

Applications

The ecoregion framework outlined in this
paper will be particularly supportive of the
more holistic approaches to natural re¬
sources conservation emerging in Wiscon¬
sin because it considers elements of the en¬
tire ecosystem, terrestrial and aquatic,
abiotic and biotic, including humans. These
contemporary approaches to environmental
stewardship, collectively termed ecosystem
management by some practitioners, strive to

reconcile the conservation of ecological in¬
tegrity and biological diversity with the
availability of economic opportunities and
livable communities. The overall goal is sus¬
tainable ecological, social, and economic sys¬
tems. Ecoregions can provide a framework
to which pertinent socio-economic and de¬
mographic information may be linked us¬
ing geographic information systems.

The finding of common ground among
socio-economic and ecological consider¬
ations is increasingly being undertaken
through stakeholder partnerships. Partici¬
pants in these endeavors generally have di¬
verse interests, values, and technical knowl¬
edge; therefore, processes and tools — such
as ecological classification systems — devel¬
oped for these new management approaches
should consider this circumstance. The
ecoregions defined herein are intended to be
broadly understandable and acceptable due
to their inclusive nature. Furthermore, they
are named with consideration for widespread
recognition by resource managers and pub¬
lics alike. Nonetheless, this ecological frame¬
work must be considered dynamic and sub¬
ject to refinement with ongoing use and
increased understanding in the spatial nature
of ecosystems.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural
Resources (WDNR) prepared a report for its
resource managers in May 1995 titled
“Wisconsin’s Biodiversity as a Management
Issue” (WDNR 1995). The report recom¬
mended (page 31) that WDNR manage at
a landscape scale that involves determining
both spatial and temporal scales appropriate
to the problem or project and then assess¬
ing implications at larger and smaller scales.
Furthermore, the WDNR biodiversity re¬
port proposed that ecoregions be determined
for Wisconsin for use in developing manage¬
ment goals. These goals would “meet a wide
variety of diverse ecological and socio-eco-

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nomic needs, including the conservation of
biodiversity.”

In response to the need to define eco-
region boundaries, in 1998 the agency ini¬
tiated a project to identify Ecological Land¬
scapes of Wisconsin (WDNR 1999). The
ecological landscape units defined in the
1998-99 effort followed the USDA Forest
Service’s National Hierarchy Framework of
Ecological Units and were designed prima¬
rily to assist regional and statewide efforts for
maintaining and restoring natural commu¬
nities. However, consideration was also
given to broader ecosystem planning and
communications applications. Ecological,
social, and institutional data plus manage¬
ment opportunities were to be assembled for
each of the 17 ecological landscape units.
The Ecological Landscapes of Wisconsin
map has many similarities (e.g., some
boundaries lines and units are similar in po¬
sition and shape) to the level III and IV
ecoregion map presented in this paper, leav¬
ing the impression that the two maps are re¬
dundant. However, while both maps con¬
tain similarities, their differences reflect
different origins and purposes. The Ecologi¬
cal Landscape map was designed by the
WDNR’s Land Ecosystem Management
Planning Team for the exclusive purpose of
defining “areas similar in ecology and man¬
agement opportunities.” The delineation of
area boundaries on the Ecological Landscape
map was influenced by a tendency to mesh
the map units into the hierarchical units de¬
fined in the Forest Service’s National Hier¬
archy mapping system. As mentioned pre¬
viously, the National Hierarchy mapping
was directed primarily towards forestry eco¬
systems and paid little consideration to land
use, hydrology, and water quality, which are
of critical importance to aquatic ecosystems.
Recognizing the emphasis given to terrestrial
ecosystems in their National Hierarchy

maps, the Forest Service designed a separate
framework for aquatic ecosystems (Maxwell
etal. 1995).

The ecoregions described in this paper
were, on the other hand, developed to fa¬
cilitate ecosystem management in a more
holistic sense and define regions of similar
patterns in the mosaic of terrestrial, aquatic,
biotic, and abiotic ecosystem components
with humans being considered as part of the
biota. The intent was to define “general pur¬
pose” regions to allow the various state (and
federal) agencies and programs with differ¬
ent interests and missions to integrate their
assessment, management, and reporting ac¬
tivities. The framework was not intended to
replace narrower or special purpose frame¬
works or maps that may be better suited for
addressing specific issues. Also, the level III
and IV ecoregion framework described in
this paper will augment the set of ecologi¬
cal landscapes by providing counterpart
ecoregions that are more broadly defined
and linked to the international framework —
Ecological Regions of North America (CEC
1997).

The WDNR has also identified adminis¬
trative areas termed Geographic Manage¬
ment Units (GMUs), which represent a
compromise among ecoregions, watershed
management units, and jurisdictional/politi¬
cal boundaries. These GMUs cannot serve
the same ecological purposes as a strictly eco¬
logical framework but likely have advantages
for working collaboratively with stakeholder
partnerships. Ecoregions as planning entities
tend to encourage ecological thinking, which
most often must be then transferred to
socio-political contexts for implementation.
Effective use of these various spatial net¬
works critically depends on the development
of “cross-walking” capability using GIS tech¬
nologies.

The ecoregions described in this paper

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can serve research and education purposes
as well as management functions. Ecoregions
can provide a basis for the collection and
organization of biogeophysical data such as
that being contemplated under the new
WDNR initiative entitled the Aquatic and
Terrestrial Resources Inventory. They can
also provide a framework for the develop¬
ment of indices of ecological integrity and
other parameters that reveal the status of our
landscape. Ecoregions can assist habitat suit¬
ability analyses and studies of landscape pat¬
terns that look at fragmentation and habi¬
tat corridor issues. These investigations can
be helpful in designating recovery strategies
for threatened and endangered species such
as the timber wolf.

Ecoregions can serve an educational func¬
tion by improving awareness of ecosystem
spatial scales and their nested hierarchy. Eco¬
logical classification per se helps us appreci¬
ate the interconnectedness and dependency
among ecosystems and also helps us learn
more about the elasticity of ecological sys¬
tems and their responses to natural and hu¬
man-induced disturbances. Ecoregions pro¬
vide a suitable context for deliberations of
ecosystem opportunities and limitations plus
a basis for identifying future desired condi¬
tions expressed as ecosystem goals and ob¬
jectives. Eco region frameworks help provide
an understanding of the “big picture” for
local initiatives and also the converse; they
should be viewed not just as an analytical
tool but a tool for learning ecological rela¬
tionships and concepts.

Management actions can be benefited by
the use of ecoregions. The protection and
preservation of sensitive areas and critical
resources can employ ecoregions as a basis
for examining the patterns and distributions
of these elements across broad suitable land¬
scapes to avoid actions that cause isolation
effects but instead encourage connectedness.

Some natural communities such as pine-oak
barrens and grasslands occurred in widely
distributed units in presettlement Wiscon¬
sin. An evaluation of current opportunities
can benefit from an assessment of potential
sites within the context of their respective
ecoregions. Although grassland restoration
might be considered in several ecoregions
(e.g., Prairie Pothole Region, Savanna Sec¬
tion, Rock River Drift Plain, Kettle Mo¬
raines, Southeastern Wisconsin Savanna and
Till Plain, and Chiwaukee Prairie Region)
based on historic presence, an analysis of
opportunities and limitations for the various
ecoregions may suggest better potential for
building a viable (i.e., sustainable) matrix of
grasslands within one or two of these re¬
gions. This type of analysis is probably im¬
proved by the use of ecoregions that consider
land use among their determining factors.

Ecoregions can help structure water re¬
source assessment and management pro¬
grams in Wisconsin. Watersheds, as land¬
scape units, are generally well understood by
various publics and are often used as the ba¬
sis for water resource programs. Watersheds
are critical as research units because they
help identify areas of influence on water
quality relative to a particular point. How¬
ever, watersheds seldom correspond to areas
within which there is similarity in the fac¬
tors that cause or reflect differences in the
quality and quantity of water (Omernik and
Bailey 1997, Griffith et al. 1999). In con¬
trast, ecological regions define areas of simi¬
larity in mosaics of these factors and hence
depict areas of reduced variability in capaci¬
ties, potentials, and responses to land man¬
agement activities. A more refined analysis
of the characteristics associated with spatial
differences in water quality is yielded by con¬
sideration of ecological regions within and
across watershed boundaries. Here again the
incorporation of land use as a component

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of this ecological classification system is im¬
portant to its use in exploring non-point
source water quality issues, developing ref¬
erence site data, defining biogeophysical cri¬
teria, and setting goals for watersheds, espe¬
cially larger units such as the Wisconsin and
Mississippi River basins.

In 1999, the Forest Service undertook a
reassessment of “roadless areas” and road
building in national forests. The protection
of roadless areas can impact water quality,
biological diversity, forest health, and recre¬
ational opportunities. Concerns were raised
on how management of the Nicolet-Che-
quamegon Forest in Wisconsin might be al¬
tered by the assessment. The Forest was
evaluated under a similar study (RARE —
Roadless Area Review and Evaluation) in the
1970s (U.S. Forest Service 1979). A contem¬
porary assessment of opportunities for des¬
ignation of roadless areas or similar manage¬
ment units such as wilderness or natural
areas could involve a look at the size and dis¬
tribution of potential sites across various
ownerships by ecoregions.

We believe that the level III and IV
ecoregion map presented herein is the most
integrated ecological framework developed
for Wisconsin. It is nested within an inter¬
national system and has excellent potential
for structuring environmental monitoring
and management activities. Because of its
widespread development and comprehensive
nature, the framework is particularly suited
to multidisciplinary, interagency work. The
map can enhance collaborative ecosystem
research, monitoring, planning, and man¬
agement. It can also provide a foundation
for conducting bioassessments, establishing
environmental standards, and reporting such
as the 305(b) Wisconsin Water Quality As¬
sessment Report to Congress (a requirement
of the Federal Clean Water Act) and the
State of the Natural Resources (an annual

report produced by the WDNR to the citi¬
zens of Wisconsin.) Clearly, this ecoregion
framework has many potential applications,
but they will not be realized unless the map
is added to the tool kit of Wisconsin re¬
source managers and used along with other
tools to meet the challenges of contempo¬
rary management of natural resources.

Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge the many individu¬
als who provided materials and ideas that
were used to distinguish the ecoregions and
delineate their boundaries. Particularly de¬
serving of mention is Dave Hvizdak. Jim
Addis should be recognized for his help in
initiating the project and providing partial
support. We thank Darrell Zastrow, Gerald
Bartelt, Joe Kovach, Dave Hvizdak, and
Gordon Matzke for their critical comments
of earlier drafts of the manuscript. Partial
support was also provided by the U.S. En¬
vironmental Protection Agency Region V
REMAP program. The Wisconsin Depart¬
ment of Natural Resources provided addi¬
tional funding.

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98

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OMERNIK, CHAPMAN, LILLIE, and DUMKE: Ecoregions of Wisconsin

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100

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OMERNIK, CHAPMAN, LILLIE, and DUMKE: Ecoregions of Wisconsin

Mudrey, M.G., B.A. Brown, and J.K. Green¬
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Omernik, J.M. and R.G. Bailey. 1997. Dis¬
tinguishing between watersheds and eco¬
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Protection Agency, Corvallis, Oregon, 56

pp.

Omernik, J.M., and G.E. Griffith. 1986. To¬
tal alkalinity of surface waters: a map of the
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Volume 88 (2000)

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ity site selection. Fact Sheet FS-220-95.
U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S.
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State Planning Office. 1974. Generalized land
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in cooperation with the U.S. Water Re¬
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[various maps]. Map (scale 1:250,000).

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 1999.
Level III ecoregions of the continental
United States (revision of Omernik, 1987).
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
National Health and Environmental Effects
Research Laboratory, Western Ecology Di¬
vision, Corvallis, Oregon.

U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad¬
ministration. 1974. Climates of the States;
a practical reference containing basic clima¬
tological data of the United States. Vol. 1,
Eastern States , plus Puerto Rico and the U.S.
Virgin Islands. Water Information Center,
Port Washington, New York. 975 pp.

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1997. Draft: Land type associations
(LTA’s) for northern Wisconsin. Map
(scale 1:550,000). Madison, Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Geological and Natural History
Survey. 1976. Glacial deposits of Wiscon¬
sin: sand and gravel resource potential.
Map (scale 1:500,000). Wisconsin Geologi-

102

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OMERNIK, CHAPMAN, LILLIE, and DUMKE: Ecoregions of Wisconsin

cal and Natural History Survey, University
of Wisconsin-Extension, and the State
Planning Office, Wisconsin Department of
Administration, Madison, Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Geological and Natural History
Survey. 1989. Groundwater contamination
susceptibility in Wisconsin. Map (scale
1:500,000). Wisconsin Geological and
Natural History Survey, University of Wis¬
consin-Extension, Madison, Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Geological and Natural History
Survey. Various page size (8"x 10") maps
(scale approx. 1:2,730,000). Wisconsin
Geological and Natural History Survey,
University of Wisconsin-Extension, Madi¬
son, Wisconsin.

- . 1968. Aeolian silt and sand deposits

of Wisconsin.

- - — 1996. Bedrock geology of Wisconsin.

- - — . 1986. General land use/land cover.

- . 1989. Groundwater contamination

susceptibility in Wisconsin.

— — 1964. Glacial deposits of Wisconsin.

— - - . 1995- Hydric soils in Wisconsin

(STATSGO data).

■ - -. 1979. Major land use.

— . 1990. Plant hardiness zone map:

Wisconsin.

- — — . 1995. Potential gravel source areas:

Wisconsin (STATSGO data).

- - — 1996. Potential prime farmland in

Wisconsin (STATSGO data).

- — . 1983. Thickness of unconsolidated

material in Wisconsin.

James M. Omernik is a geographer with the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency. His work has
included the design and development of national
and regional maps of nutrient concentrations in
streams , total alkalinity of surface waters , total
phosphorus regions for lakes , and ecological regions .
Address: USEPA, 200 SW 35th St. , Corvallis, OR
97333 . E-mail: omernik@mail.cor.epa.gov

Shannon S. Chapman is a geographer with
Dynamac Corporation , a contractor with the
USEPA. Her current research focuses on ecoregion
delineation and mapping, and she has worked on
ecoregion refinement for the states of Wisconsin,
Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri. Address:
Dynamac Corporation, USEPA Environmental
Research Laboratory, 200 SW 35th St., Corvallis,
OR 97333. E-mail: chapman@mail.cor.epa.gov

Richard A. Lillie is a research biologist with the
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Bu¬
reau of Integrated Science Services, Ecological In-
ventory and Monitoring Section, Monona. Address:
1350 Femrite Drive, Monona, Wl 53716 .
E-mail: Ullir@mail01.dnr. state, wi. us

Robert T. Dumke (Retired) was with the Wiscon¬
sin Department of Natural Resources, Office of the
Secretary, Madison, during the time this project was
conducted. He was formerly the Director, Bureau
of Research (now Bureau of Integrated Science Ser¬
vices). Former Address: 101 S. Webster St., Madi¬
son, WI 53707 (Retired). Current Address : Box
688, Three Lakes, WI 54562.

Volume 88 (2000)

103

Cathleen Palmini

Across the Unknown Waters to
Wisconsin: The Migration Narratives
of Four Women Settlers

“When i [sic*] looked into the water and see the little waves that
receded back from the boat it seemed that every one was bearing
me away from all my friends forever.”

— Orpha Bushnell Ranney, letter of September 1847

“Sick still. Took nothing the last two days except a little brandy and
Laudnum. ... A fair wind, a great swell on the sea. Ship rolling
tremendously.”

— Isabella Mckinnon , diary entry of April 15, 1852

“All of us, including the sailors thought that this was the end, for
we could feel the ship sinking lower and lower. . . . The yelling, the
noise, and the panic was terrible.”

— Emilie Schramm Crusius, memoir of 1854 trans-Atlantic voyage

“What inexpressible joy and relief did I experience when I set my
feet on terra firma.”

— Racheline S. Wood, letter of December 1, 1838

The words of ordinary women in a period of upheaval
chronicle homesickness, seasickness, shipwreck, and joy
at setting their feet again on firm ground. Compelling glimpses
into individual women’s lives in the mid- 1800s, these words
are more compelling for their rarity — few Wisconsin women’s
writings from the settlement period are accessible which de¬
scribe the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and through the
Great Lakes to Wisconsin. Held in archives or remaining with
family members, the sometimes brief or fragmentary diaries,

^Writings have been transcribed as found with no editorial corrections.

TRANSACTIONS Volume 88 (2000)

105

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

letters, and memoirs of common women
have often been viewed as historically insig¬
nificant and remain unpublished. The
memorable writings of four women of this
period, describing travel by water to Wiscon¬
sin, humanize the broad sweep of Wiscon¬
sin history by focusing on personal accounts
of voyages. What does one write when the
immediate future is unknown, when the
only certainty is what one has left behind?
These women express in four unique, femi¬
nine voices not only daily experiences while
sailing or steaming toward Wisconsin but
feelings and attitudes about their lives dur¬
ing this transition.

Who were these women? Isabella Mckin-
non, quiet and uncomplaining, crossed the
Atlantic in a sailing ship in 1852 and wrote
each day in a diary ending with her arrival
in Otsego, Wisconsin. In 1854, adventur¬
ous, seemingly ever-hungry Emilie Schramm
and her mother traveled by steamship from
Germany bound for Sauk City. Racheline S.
Wood, self-assured but lonely, chronicled in
letters her difficult travels of 1838, through
the Erie Canal and through the Great Lakes
by steamship settling in Plattville. Orpha
Bushnell Ranney, although the least-edu¬
cated, expressed clearly in letters of 1 847 her
loneliness for loved ones left behind, as she
and her husband undertook Great Lakes
travel to reach Sun Prairie.

Across the Atlantic

To merely state that the population of Wis¬
consin grew from 30,945 to 775,881 be¬
tween 1840 and 1860 is to belie the drama
as well as the tedium of the actual journeys
of settlers (Smith 466). Immigrants who had
crossed the Atlantic by sailing ship or
steamer during this period made up approxi¬
mately half the population of Wisconsin in
1860 (Current 78). The diary of Isabella

Mckinnon, written aboard a sailing ship, and
the memoir of Emilie Schramm Grusius, de¬
scribing a steamship voyage, are first-person
descriptions of trans-Atlantic immigration to
Wisconsin.

Isabella Mckinnon

Nineteen-year-old Isabella Mckinnon, after
leaving her village of Findhorn, Scotland,
boarded the sailing ship “Sarah Mary” on
April 9, 1852, bound for America. In her
small four-by-six inch leather journal,
Isabella recorded in pencil the notable hap¬
penings of each day until June 4, 1852,
when she reached her destination — -Otsego,
Wisconsin. Written in sentence fragments
most often without subjects, her diary never
reveals whether she made the trip alone or
with her family. Isabella’s account is notable
for her succinctness and calm in describing
a voyage that included days of discomfort
and dangerous storms as well as days of be¬
calmed seas when the ship made no progress.

The average length of travel to America
by sail was six weeks, depending on whether
the wind was fair and whether the captain
and crew were skilled. Isabella’s trip took
eight weeks, and she probably traveled as a
steerage passenger rather than a higher-pay¬
ing cabin passenger. The steerage passenger
lived in the long ‘tween decks— the space
between the main deck open to the weather
and the lower deck below it. The rows of
bunks built there, usually in two tiers, were
temporary for the east to west journey. For
the trip from America back east, the ‘tween
decks often carried lumber— a cargo com¬
monly considered more valuable than the
steerage passenger (Greenhill 16-17).

Isabella’s record did not dwell on the liv¬
ing conditions but briefly described activity
on board. Her first entry after boarding the
“Sarah Mary” was typical as she matter-of-
factly stated “Captain Brown delivered a lec-

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ture on board to the passengers from John
6.” They remained in the Bay of Greenoch
for one day for inspections:

Passengers examined by the Doctor and Gov¬
ernment Inspector. Eight of the passengers
rejected. The sugar condemned by the Gov¬
ernment Inspector. Superior [sugar] returned.
Left the Bay of Greenoch at 5:00 o’clock
P.M. Wind unfavorable. Towed out to Sea
by a steam tug. One of the passengers a
woman, got drunk and disorderly and was
put in irons for sometime.

On April 11, she recorded the first of
many Sundays, the observance of Sabbath
being important enough to her always to
merit comment. Of one Sunday, she wrote:
“Public worship on the quarter deck. A good
attendance, very impressive on the mighty
deep.” This Sabbath she called unprofitable
because the ship was becalmed. To pass the
day, the Captain distributed tracts to the
passengers, and Isabella spent the greater
part of the day reading. The following day
the rules of the ship were read.

April 12: A committee of the passengers
formed to keep order and observe cleanliness,
one of the rules, to rise at 7:00 A.M. To be
in bed at 10:00 P.M. to be rigidly enforced.
A fine day, wind favorable. Took the last look
of Scotlands hills at 10:00 o’clock A.M. A
little sick, soon got better, employed the day
in sewing, crocheting and reading. An alarm
of fire, nothing serious. A fair wind, all sails
set. Going at the rate of 8 knots an hour. A
dance, to the music of the Bagpipes, Fiddle
and Tambarine, got up amongst the passen¬
gers. A beautiful night. On deck all the
evening.

And so Isabella was on her way, and her
diary revealed that she did not complain and
she did not dramatize happenings. Unused
to the motion of the ship, many passengers

on sailing ships were seasick as the ship
rolled and pitched and tossed. Isabella was
seasick for several days and wrote only “A
strong fair wind. Sick all day.” and the next
day “Still continuing a fair wind. Very sick.”
On the sixth day out, she was still seasick
and mentioned the remedy she was trying:
“Sick still. Took nothing the last two days
except a little brandy and Laudnum.” Later
that day she reported:

Went on the quarter deck at 12:00 o’clock.
Was much refreshed with the fresh air. A fair
wind, a great swell on the sea. Ship going at
the rate of 8 1/2 knots an hour. Ship rolling
tremendously. Every one more afraid than
another. Passed a wreck in the morning.

That seemed to be the end of her seasick¬
ness, and she turned to brief descriptions of
daily activities. The weather and sailing con¬
ditions always merited comment, and dur¬
ing an April storm she did not display her
usual calm:

April 20: A very fine day, calm. The Atlantic
like a loch. The wind rose at 3:00 p.m. A
strong breeze with rain at 7:00 P.M. Ship
going a good rate. On deck at 9:00 o’clock,
looking rather stormy. Stayed on the deck an
hour with very interesting company.

April 21: Very stormy all day. High wind
with showers of rain and hail, continued very
severe all night. Thought we would never see
morning. Water rushing into the steerage.
April 22: Storm somewhat abated, wind con¬
trary.

After this initial storm, even severe
weather did not cause her to make worried
remarks about their safety. The days seemed
to drag on and Isabella’s writing dwindled
to two or three phrases each day. Notewor¬
thy were two days when fights broke out and
the men involved were put in irons for an
hour. Passing ships also broke the monotony.

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Steerage passengers. Illustrated London News , May 5, 1851.

On May 7, about four weeks out, she ex¬
perienced an event worth recording in more
detail:

Seven ships in sight, fishing for Cod. Passed
close by one. Some one with the life boat
went and brought some cod, part of which
Captain Brown distributed to the passengers
gratis. The deck very much resembled a fish
market. Every one crowding to get their
share. Wind somewhat favorable. 16 miles
from Sable Island. 400 from New York.

The passengers’ enthusiasm probably re¬
flects the poor quality or at least the sameness
of the food provided on board. The food
provided for cabin passengers on many sail¬
ing ships was adequate to mediocre, and for
steerage passengers some ships provided only
meager rations with the passengers being ex¬
pected to cook their own (Greenhill 17).

After several days of misty weather, Long
Island, “a very welcome sight,” came into
view on May 17, and Isabella’s daily writ¬
ing increased. Her first views of America
were described with a good-humored tone:

The tug came along side at 12:00 O’clock.
Coming up the River was the finest sight I
ever saw. The scenery exceeded everything I
have seen. Off Staten Island at 2:00 o’clock.
A very pretty place. The doctor came aboard.
The passengers all on deck and examined in
less than five minutes. The Doctor said he
had never examined a more healthy good
looking set of passengers. Arrived opposite
New York at 3:30 o’clock P.M. The first
thing I got belonging to America was a New
Testament, which a gentleman came aboard
and kindly presented to the passengers. A very
amusing sight to see friends meeting friends.

True to form, Isabella did not say v/ho
met her. She noted that New York was a
very fine city and then detailed her meth¬
ods of travel across the country. She traveled
up the Hudson River and took the Erie Rail¬
way for 300 miles to Dunkirk, New York.
She took lodging there in a house kept by
“very fine people” but was “very much dis¬
appointed with the look of the country.”

The steamer “Niagara” took her up Lake
Erie to Cleveland, a city which she found

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impressive: “A very fine place and beautiful
buildings. Far surpassing any I have yet seen
in America. Streets so wide and trees grow¬
ing on each side.” Continuing to Detroit by
the steamer “Detroit,” Isabella arrived on a
Sunday morning in time to visit a Roman
Catholic Church. She appreciated the very
large, fine building but not the “very strange
ceremonies.” After staying only a few min¬
utes, she found a Methodist Episcopal
Church more to her liking: “Very clean,
never saw a more respectable looking con¬
gregation.”

Continuing on to Chicago by railroad,
she found that cholera was spreading in the
town. On May 29 she took the “Arctic
Steamer” to Milwaukee of which she wrote,
“Apparently a fine place.” She took lodging
in the Wisconsin House, walked around the
town, and visited the Congregational Ply¬
mouth Church and an “English Church.”

On June 1, 1852 she left Milwaukee for
Otsego, a distance of 80 miles. Traveling
half way the first day, she stayed overnight
at “a tavern by the way.” Her last three di¬
ary entries took her through stormy weather
to Otsego:

June 2nd - Passed through Watertown in the
forenoon. A very nice little place. Arrived at
Lowell a small village and stayed all night. An
awful night of thunder and lightining. Never
saw anything like it before. The sky all in a
blaze for two hours.

June 3rd - Left Lowell early in the morning
and were detained in Columbus by a thun¬
der storm. A nice little place. Proceeded to
Otsego and were overtaken by another thun¬
der storm and heavy rain. Were obliged to
remain all night in the “Prairie House” about
5 miles from Otsego.

June 4th - Arrived all safe at Otsego in good
health not without a good deal of fatigue on
the 4th of June, 1852.

There, Isabella Mckinnon ended her di¬
ary with no mention of whom she might
have joined in Otsego or her reasons for this
destination. Isabella’s detached written reac¬
tion to the trip, although not the difficulty
of the ocean passage itself, is in stark con¬
trast to Emilie Schramm Crusius’s descrip¬
tive and good-humored memoir of her trans-
Atlantic voyage on a steamship.

Emilie Schramm Crusius

In 1854, the unmarried Emilie Schramm
and her mother crossed from Neckargartach,
Germany, to Philadelphia on the maiden
voyage of the screw steamship “City of
Philadelphia.” During this mid- 1800s pe¬
riod, when sailing ships were being replaced
by steamships for emigrant travel, the con¬
ditions for passengers did not improve im¬
mediately. However, the traveling time was
cut from six weeks on a sailing ship to about
ten days on a steamer, meaning a shorter
time to endure the hardships and the te¬
dium. Cabin passage on some liners became
lush, but ship owners remained disinterested
in the conditions for steerage passengers un¬
til William Inman began in 1850 providing
ships on which emigrants in steerage could
travel in relative comfort. His liners were
built to accommodate emigrants, not to
transport timber, mail, or other freight
(Armstrong 34-35). Emilie and her mother
were fortunate that the “City of Philadel¬
phia” was an Inman steamer, because al¬
though they had paid for cabin passage, they
were assigned bunks in the steerage section
because of the large number of passengers.

From the beginning of her account,
Emilie wrote as if the trip were an adven¬
ture. At age 28, Emilie took charge of the
arrangements, and, by comparison, her
mother seemed timid and scolding and al¬
ways expecting the worst. Beginning with
the steamboat trip down the Rhine River to

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PALMINI: The Migration Narratives of Four Women Settlers

Emigrants. Illustrated London News, May 10, 1851.

Rotterdam, Emilie wrote with a great deal
of descriptive detail and expressed an appre¬
ciation for any kindness shown her and her
mother:

On Thursday we boarded the steamer,
“Victoria,” and traveled down the Rhine, ad¬
miring the beautiful scenery, the many ro¬
mantic ancient castles, and the high bluffs on
either shore, covered with rows upon rows of
fruitful vineyards. On board we found a
rather boisterous group, but we always dis¬
covered some nice people with whom we
could chat. We were traveling second class,
but for some unknown reason the steward al¬
lowed us to occupy two beautifully uphol¬
stered easy chairs in a cabin with large gold¬
framed mirrors on the walls and beautiful
rugs on the floor. I had never seen such regal
splendor.

Emilie tended her seasick mother on the
steamer and also recorded that her mother
became ill after drinking the water in
Rotterdam. Because milk soup was all her
mother wanted to eat, Emilie sought out
fresh milk and, when she could find it,
cooked milk soup for her mother.

On the night before departure for Phila¬
delphia, they waited with other travelers in
the Emigrants’ Hotel, and that evening a
dance kept them awake most of the night:
“We both wept to think of such levity and
irresponsible behavior on the last night on
terra firma. So many were very drunk in
spite of having to start on the long perilous
journey the next day.” In boarding the ten¬
der that was to take them to the “City of
Philadelphia,” they faced trouble with their
baggage:

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All passengers had to carry their own luggage.
We were really in a bad situation. I tried to
take some of our belongings to the tender,
but there was such a crowd of passengers who
pushed and crowded so persistently that it
was impossible to make any headway, much
less to go back after mother. I was beside my¬
self; called to her and finally she came, hardly
able to drag the remaining luggage with her.
Just as she set foot on the boat it raised an¬
chor. To this day I can’t understand how we
two helpless women overcame every obstacle
as well as we did!

While her mother was again seasick,
Emilie couldn’t get enough to eat. Although
the soup was too peppery, the smoked meat
smelly, and the coffee served with molasses,
she enjoyed the excellent potatoes and deli¬
cious white bread so unlike what she had
eaten in Germany. Emilie soon made friends
with Marie Siegel, another young adult trav¬
eling with her mother, and the two became
friendly with the steward who “showered us
with favors whenever possible.” Emilie re¬
ported: “I really had no complaint, and so,
just like pretty blond Marie, I was always in
a happy mood. She and I were among the few
who weren’t seasick, spending most of our
time on deck, healthy and gay as the fish.”

This carefree passage to America was in¬
terrupted when the ship rammed a cliff near
Newfoundland. Near midnight a terrific
crash was followed by a furious rolling of the
ship.

All of us, including the sailors thought that
this was the end, for we could feel the ship
sinking lower and lower. . . . The yelling, the
noise, and the panic was terrible. . . . The
men who slept on the level below us tumbled
out of their beds and immediately found
themselves standing in a foot of water. Try¬
ing to save what they could, they grabbed the
next best thing and rushed up the stairway.

When they reached us, -—but what was that?
There the fellow stood, wearing nothing but
a long white shirt and a high silk hat! We all
screamed with hysterical laughter, but soon
again soberly realized our perilous plight. Ev¬
eryone was terrified; mother prayed fervently
and I — I went to get something to eat. I re¬
called the story of Robinson Crusoe who was
shipwrecked on a deserted island and learned
to fend for himself without the help of the
barest necessities. Of course, mother scolded
me for thinking of food at a time like this
when we stood so close to eternity.

By pumping out the engine room, the
crew was able to back the ship onto a sand¬
bar. The passengers were ordered to one side
of the ship to counter-balance the tilt of the
ship which continued to sink. Rockets were
sent up, a little cask containing the names
of the passengers and the crew thrown into
the sea, and the lifeboats lowered. Amid ter¬
rific crowding and pushing, Emilie, holding
her mother’s hand and the zwieback and
honey cakes from Germany, stepped down
into a lifeboat. They were taken to a nearby
island where the men made a big bonfire out
of driftwood.

The next few days the crew rowed back
to the ship several times and retrieved lug¬
gage and food. Their baggage was not recov¬
ered, and Emilie theorized that their cases
had “probably plunged into the ocean
through the great hole in the hull when we
struck the rock.” On the third day they
heard a startling blast of a cannon from a
ship that was to transport them to the city
of St. John on the Canadian coast. When
their turn came:

We scrambled on to the little steamer, but it
didn’t leave until ten o’clock that night! Never,
as long as I live, will I forget the awful night¬
mare of that trip. Frenzied, hysterical screams
of “Fire! Fire!” suddenly awakened us out of

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a deep sleep. Poor mother, wringing her hands
and weeping, kept lamenting, “We’ve escaped
death by drowning, and now we’ll be burned
to death!” the fire at last brought under con¬
trol and after a seemingly endless night we
landed, exhausted, at St. John at 5 a.m.

Those people who were shipwrecked
lodged with families in St. John for nearly a
month, and Emilie was amused when “a
mass was said for all of us poor victims of
shipwrecks.” Her proud mother refused of¬
fers of financial assistance as well as gifts in¬
cluding used clothing from a Protestant
bishop, so Emilie sewed garments for them.
She seemed happy in their cozy host home,
appreciated the food, attended a church ser¬
vice at which they couldn’t understand the
sermon but enjoyed the music, and turned
down social invitations because they lacked
suitable dresses. However, they continued to
be concerned by the high stormy seas and
the reports of steamers sinking.

On a stormy October day they departed
for Boston, but couldn’t land there:

We were supposed to disembark at Boston,
but imagine our surprise when we passed it
by, why we weren’t told; but some of the pas¬
sengers said it would have been impossible to
land in Boston Harbor. This is a rough voy¬
age, very stormy, with a dark, forbidding sea,
and our boat, a small steamer, rocks and
pitches like a cork on the angry waves. Poor
mother has lost all hope thinking the good
Lord has forsaken us now.

But eventually the strong wind subsided,
and they entered Philadelphia harbor on a
calm, placid sea.

Emilie and her mother settled with her
brother in Sauk City, where Emilie became
a school teacher and married Louis Crusius
in 1860. While her travel narrative brims
with youthful enthusiasm and optimism, her

summation of her life written in a second
memoir is heavily sad. She lost all but three
of the nine children she bore. At age 73 she
wrote:

I was blessed with a sunny nature and really
would have enjoyed life, had not misfortune
after misfortune continually hunted me
down. While my children were small I was
so happy with them and it was my then care¬
free outlook which my dear husband so loved
in me; but the tragic loss of one dear little
one after the other threatened to break me
down both mentally and physically. ... It
truly is a miracle I’m still alive; I must be a
pretty tough weed. My one wish is just to be
near my dear children.

Through the Great Lakes

While Emilie’s travel memoir does not de¬
tail her methods of travel to Wisconsin, she
may have joined the tens of thousands in this
mid- 1800s period who crossed the Great
Lakes to settle in Wisconsin. Often begin¬
ning with a trip down the Erie Canal, ap¬
proximately half of all trans-America mi¬
grants to Wisconsin during this period made
part of their journey by steamboat through
the Great Lakes. Steamers advertised regu¬
lar schedules, speedy trips, and luxurious ac¬
commodations, but travel by Great Lakes
steamer was not without mishaps. Seasick¬
ness among passengers was common as were
accidents involving piers, ice, rocks, and
other vessels. Larger steamers were especially
prone to hang up on sandbars and beaches
during low water or storms. Fires on board
were sometimes deadly: the steamship
“Niagara,” taken by Isabella Mckinnon, was
destroyed by fire in 1836 at a loss of over
60 lives (Jenson 212). Some passengers de¬
scribed their trips through the Great Lakes
as more harrowing than crossing the Atlan¬
tic Ocean.

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Racheline S. Wood

In 1838, Racheline S. Wood experienced an
eventful trip west through the Great Lakes
which included the rescue of passengers af¬
ter their steamboat hung up on a reef of
rocks. Her letters of 1837 to 1840 chronicle
Racheline’s travels from Vermont to Platte-
ville, Wisconsin, where she settled. Each let¬
ter was addressed to her sister Maryann
Wood, Enosburgh, Vermont, a place
Racheline called home.

Racheline’s letters show a degree of edu¬
cation and lofty language not found in the
first two travel accounts. At times she pro¬
jected the sense that she was above the sta¬
tion of many of her fellow travelers, and in
frequent comparisons between the east and
other areas through which she traveled, she
left no doubt that New England was supe¬
rior in most respects.

In a letter of December 1, 1838, Rache¬
line described the highlights of her journey
through the Erie Canal and Great Lakes and
her loneliness. The previous distance that
divided her from her sister in Vermont
seemed short in comparison: “now hundreds
of miles with the broad lakes roll between
us.” But although she and her sister were di¬
vided in body, Racheline said their spirits
might converse through letters, and she be¬
gan with the story of her journey. After de¬
ciding in mid-August 1838 to leave “dear
New England for the far west,” she traveled
by private conveyance for three days to Troy,
New York.

Her spirits fell as they entered New York
state: “we rumbled along over those try pa¬
tience roads gasping at the lofty eminences
which rose on either side of us threatening
to shut out the light of day.” Having previ¬
ously mentioned “the sterile fields, the
frowning heights, the miserable huts” they
passed in their travels, she became more
cheerful as they came to an area of “highly

luxuriant and fruitful fields” which extended
all the way to Troy.

Arriving in Troy, she “spent there about
three hours running up and down the city
most delightfully, called at multitudes of
stores and milliners shops and at 5 o’clock
was glad to get on board of a canal boat
bound for Buffalo on which I remained a
week.” Her summary of Troy was this:

Yet with all the pride and advantages of the
Yorkers I think New England has whereof to
boast not only in morals but in the tidiness
and good taste of their establishments. Their
buildings are constructed very different from
ours with much less good taste and with a
general appearance of slackness.

Racheline’s “brief sketch of our first
nights repose” on the Erie Canal boat in¬
cluded a characterization of her fellow trav¬
elers as all grades and ages from the “poor
to the man of honour, little babes of 3
weeks, squalling young ones of 1-2-3 years.”
The sleeping arrangements proved less than
satisfactory. Near nine o’clock hammocks
were swung to accommodate about half the
passengers. In the small room appropriated
to the ladies, she selected a place to sleep:

The middle birth in the middle range was
fairly laid there and congratulating myself in
having found the best birth when crash went
the one above me and down it fell. I sprang
to evade it, which going down went mine
with the one beneath. Such a racket, the la¬
dies room called forth the simpathies of the
gentlemen whose room resounded with mirth
when ascertaining the cause of disturbance.

They picked up their berths and made
beds on the floor, but she reported that she
didn’t get a wink of sleep with the “noise
of the crew on the deck and the fussing of
the rolling of babies upon my feet.” Dur¬
ing the day, she wrote, they were privileged

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to get out on the tow path and walk a mile
or more.

Leaving the canal, Racheline joined the
estimated 5,000 travelers who in a single day
in 1838 steamed from Buffalo through the
Great Lakes for the west (Channing 267).
Racheline reduced the steamboat trip
through Lake Erie to only a single line:
“Thursday I took the steamboat at Buffalo
had a pleasant ride to Detroit where we
stopped some hours.” After changing boats
the passengers continued the journey
through Lake Huron and into Lake Michi¬
gan, but Sunday morning their boat ran up
on a reef of rocks opposite Beaver Island in
the straits of Mackinac: “a punishment it
would seem for travelling on the sabbath but
I must do so or lose my company.” The pas¬
sengers were thrown from their berths as the
first sign of disaster, and all attempts to free
the boat failed. They waited “near 40 long,
wearisome, trying hours” hoping for a boat
to come and take them to shore which was
about two miles away.

On Tuesday with the waters rising,
freight was thrown overboard and the 400
passengers were taken to shore in a small
boat:

In haste we prepared to leave what had
seemed our grave, and although the waves
were so high as to hide the small boat from
view when within but a few rods of our de¬
serted home I never enjoyed a ride better.
What inexpressible joy and relief did I expe¬
rience when I set my feet on terra firma.

After the boat landed with difficulty still
some distance from shore, Racheline was
carried ashore on a gentleman’s shoulders
and the passengers took refuge in the fort.
In a note written in the margin she regret¬
ted she did not have space to better describe
“the thousands of Indians which I saw at
Michaelimack in their bark canoes their

tents which were placed along the Lake al¬
most as far as the eye could reach.”

Late in the afternoon enough freight had
been thrown overboard so that their ship
floated, and it was moored about six miles
further out. On Wednesday the passengers
were returned to board, and they continued
to Chicago having been on the lakes “near
a fortnight.” “Carelessness was considered
the cause of the disaster; as the boat was at
least six miles out of its right course when
she struck.” Thus she ended her travel nar¬
rative but her marginal writing included a
plea for a long and detailed letter from her
sister. Her loneliness was clear in this mar¬
ginal note:

I seem to be clear out of the world. I cannot
even realize how far I am from you and ev¬
ery relative on earth. When musing on what
intervenes between me and those dearer than
all resides on earth my heart sickens within
me. I dash the thought away as poison.

In a final letter from Platteville, Wiscon¬
sin, dated March 10, 1840, Racheline urged
her sister Mary to come and live with her
and take up a teaching position. Racheline
had planned a select school for girls, num¬
ber limited to 20 and pay of $4 a quarter.
She would not be taking the post because
she was to be married:

About a year since, I became acquainted with
a Mr. Bass. ... A strictly moral person, a
member of the total abstinence society and
is reputed to be worth. . . some thousands
exclusive of all debts. I think it more than
probable you will not like him but if I do no
matter for your opinion.

After giving Mary traveling advice and
asking her to bring a dozen good used silver
teaspoons and a pair of sugar tongs, Rache¬
line concluded: “I would like to have you
live constantly with me.” No further letters

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are available to indicate what Mary thought
of these plans and whether she moved to
Plattville.

Orpha Bushnell Ranney

Also urging her family to move to Wiscon¬
sin, Orpha Bushnell Ranney’s letters pro¬
vided details on farming in Wisconsin as
well as a description of her trip west. As a
new bride of 21, she traveled with her hus¬
band from New York State in September,
1847, settling first near Sun Prairie. In the
first of her letters written over a period of
50 years to her sister in Connecticut, Orpha
described her trip by canal boat through the
Erie Canal and then by steamboat through
the Great Lakes.

Of the four women in this article, Orpha
appears the least educated. Her writing,
with its lack of punctuation and capi¬
talization (except for names), was not
unusual for women’s writing of the time.
Her letters continued line after line with no
sentence breaks and sometimes incorrect
grammar and spelling. The spidery script
penmanship of the period filled every inch
of the paper.

Most letter-writers of this time used a
standard 10”xl5” sheet of paper which was
folded once to provide three writing pages
and one blank side. The written-on sides
were folded inside the blank side until a 3”x
5” clean surface remained for the address.
The folds were then sealed with wax. Orpha
not only filled the three sides of her paper
in the usual fashion but also filled all the
margins as well by writing in them sideways.
From the tone of her letters, and many oth¬
ers from this period, this practice of using
every bit of space spoke not only of the fru¬
gality of the writer but the desire and ur¬
gency to use every opportunity to commu¬
nicate with loved-ones left behind.

In her letter of September, 1847, Orpha

seemed alternately engaged in the new ex¬
periences of the “long and tedious journey”
and saddened by leaving family and friends.

it was very pleasant on the canal i see a great
many pleasant places and things and those that
were interesting but when i looked back and
thought of what i was leaving and where i was
going it spoilt it all when i looked in to the
water and see the little waves that receded back
from the boat it seemed that every one was
bearing me away from all my friends forever

Although lacking in education, Orpha’s
writing clearly conveyed her feelings of lone¬
liness as well as her amazement and some¬
times fear during some of the trip’s happen¬
ings. She wrote that she loved to travel and
“see so many things which you know are
new to me.” Orpha, probably from a lower
social stratum than Racheline Wood, did
not expect special favors and appreciated any
that came her way. Describing the journey
from Buffalo by steamboat through the
Great Lakes, she wrote:

we took Cabin passage had a room to our¬
selves which was pleasanter than to be obliged
to stay with the rest of the passengers all the
while if you want to see a table set in style
and vituals cooked in style of all sorts and
descriptions you must travel on board a
steamboat there is a great deal to be learnt you
are waited on in style if you take a Cabin pas¬
sage you are as big as any of them

However, on the third day the weather
became stormy, and Orpha became seasick
as did her husband Edward: “the third the
lake was rough enough the white caps rolled
the boat rocked and tumbled we staggered
about like a pack of drunkards i was as sick
as death.” She also feared that the boat
would sink in the storm: “every time the
boat stirred it seemed as if we should all sink
to the bottom she would rock and twist

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PALM INI: The Migration Narratives of Four Women Settlers

Letter of 1842. State Historical Society of Wisconsin Archives.

Volume 88 (2000)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

about and i thought she would all fall to
pieces O how i wished i was on land.”

The water remained rough for the re¬
mainder of the trip, and Orpha reported that
the crossing took eight days rather than the
general four days when the weather was
good. One night the steamer struck a sand¬
bar, and it took the crew most of the night
to free it. On a second stormy night the boat
was anchored on a sandbar behind an island,
perhaps to evade the windy weather. In the
process the engine was damaged: “when they
were on the sand bar they strained there en¬
gine so that they could not keep up against
head winds at all when the wind was ahead
they had to stop I was afraid the old boiler
would burst I was sick all the rest of the
way.”

Although her letter did not contain spe¬
cifics on the route traveled, she wrote “we
stopt at Cannada and at Mackinaw” where
the passengers had some trout. She was im¬
pressed by an Indian camp probably on the
north shore passing through the straits of
Mackinac: “there was between two and three
hundred Indians there boats and wigwams
were scattered all along the shore they had
on there blankets and their wampum and
tassels on there heads they looked curious
enough.”

The travel portion of her letter ended
with a visit ashore at one of their stops: “i
went in and see the glass works how curi¬
ous and the salt works it does not seem as if
man could ever learn so much.” So despite
the stormy weather and seasickness, Orpha
seemed to retain her sense of amazement at
the things she was seeing on the trip.

From later letters and a short memoir, we
know that Orpha and Edward Ranney lived
the first winter of 1847 in Wisconsin with
his brother and that their first child was born
in January and died that September. The
Ranneys’ story was not one of successful

Wisconsin settlers who easily put down
roots. The family farmed only a short time
in Wisconsin, moved back east to New York
and then Connecticut. They returned to a
Wisconsin log house and farming in Dane
County in 1852. By the time they moved
to Dunn County in 1855, first living in a
shanty, Orpha had given birth to six
children, five living. Edward soon built a
house and, within weeks of moving in,
Orpha gave birth to her seventh child who
lived only minutes. After living for six years
“on the prairie,” Edward sold out, invested
in timber, and moved the family to Cedar
Falls, Dunn County. While her writings
indicated that Edward was the decision¬
maker, Orpha wrote matter-of-factly about
all these moves and followed no matter how
harsh the conditions.

Edward’s health failed and he died “of
consumption” in May 1867. Their ninth
child was born three months later. Orpha
and the children stayed to farm — raising
crops and hogs, cattle, and hens. The fam¬
ily got along pretty well, according to
Orpha, and she continued to write her sis¬
ter from Cedar Falls, Dunn County, Wis¬
consin, the last letter dated August 28, 1898
(Orpha was 74).

Conclusion

Each of these women wrote a highly
personal account of her migration to
Wisconsin, and each writing provides both
glimpses of what happened on the journey
as well as how each woman felt and reacted.
These accounts vary from brief and detached
to detailed and humorous and are expressed
in styles from very educated to bordering on
illiterate. Each trip was unique, but the sense
of voyaging into the unknown was universal.

These narratives make clear that there
were no uneventful voyages in route to Wis-

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PALMINI: The Migration Narratives of Four Women Settlers

Wisconsin family. Wisconsin Visual Materials Archive.

consin. Because of storms, accidents, and
shipwreck, each of these four women feared
for her safety and her life during her trav¬
els. Every voyager bound for Wisconsin may
not have experienced such life-threatening
events, but all had to cope with unfamiliar
and often harsh conditions on board and
throughout their travels. While caught up in
the rigors of the trip, travelers were also pain¬
fully aware of the distance between them and
loved ones left behind. For most immigrants
there would be no going back.

It is not surprising that these women
voiced complaints and fears, described lone¬
liness and bouts with seasickness. It is sur¬
prising that their writing and outlook is not
more negative. They just as readily wrote
with humor and matter-of-fact acceptance
and expressed appreciation for kindnesses
received and amazement at new sights and
experiences. Their writings contain a mix of
beautiful as well as bleak scenery, unease at
unfamiliar types of fellow travelers and plea¬
sure with new companions, strange food rel¬
ished or found unpalatable, luxurious cab¬

ins as well as difficult sleeping accommoda¬
tions, events that were amusing and fearful
events that nearly led to a watery grave. They
recorded their travels to Wisconsin with a
keen eye, and amazingly their complaints
were not in proportion to the conditions and
events they endured during their trips.

Although Emilie describes herself and her
mother as “we two helpless women,” this
characterization clearly does not hold for any
of these women. They each accomplished
their trips across unknown waters, the At¬
lantic and the Great Lakes, with a combi¬
nation of resilience, sturdiness, and cour-
age — qualities that stood them in good stead
when they reached Wisconsin.

Literature Cited

Armstrong, Warren. Atlantic Highway. New
York: John Day, 1962.

Channing, Edward. The Story of the Great Lakes.

New York: Macmillan, 1910.

Crusius, Emilie Schramm. Memoirs, 1900. Ms.
MAD 4/14/SC 1354. State Historical Soci-

Volume 88 (2000)

1 19

Whi (W6)19726

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

ety of Wisconsin Archives, Madison.

Current, Richard N. History of Wisconsin, Vol¬
ume II. Madison: State Historical Society of
Wisconsin, 1976.

Greenhill, Basil. Travelling by Sea in the Nine¬
teenth Century. London: Black, 1972.

Jensen, John Odin. History and Archeology of
the Great Lakes Steamer Niagara. Wisconsin
Magazine of History 82 (1999): 198-230.

Mckinnon, Isabella. Diary, 1832. Ms. MAD 4/
14/File 1852 March 1832. State Historical
Society of Wisconsin Archives, Madison.

Ranney, Orpha Bushnell. Papers, 1847-1898.
Ms. Stout SC 118. State Historical Society
of Wisconsin Archives, Madison.

Smith, Alice E. History of Wisconsin, Volume I.

Madison: State Historical Society of Wiscon¬
sin, 1973.

Wood, Racheline S. Letters, 1837-1842. Ms.
MAD 4/ 14/File 1837 July 14. State Histori¬
cal Society of Wisconsin Archives, Madison.

Cathleen Palmini is an associate professor at
University ofWisconsin-Stevens Point, where she
serves as Wisconsin Documents and Reference
Librarian. She has studied the private writings
of midwestern pioneer women for the last ten
years. Address: University Library, University of
Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Stevens Point, WI
54481. Email: cpalmini@uwsp.edu

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TRANSACTIONS

James L. Theler

Animal Remains from Native
American Archaeological Sites
in Western Wisconsin

Since the 1950s archaeological teams have worked at exca¬
vating ancient Native American living sites in western Wis¬
consin to learn how the ancestors of modern American Indi¬
ans lived and how their way of life changed over time. Included
among the rich harvest of archaeological materials recovered
from excavated sites are a large number of shells and bones from
the animals that provided animal protein for the region’s Na¬
tive Americans prior to the arrival of Europeans. In addition,
remains of small vertebrates recovered occasionally during ar¬
chaeological work provide a glimpse of animals that were not
used for food but were simply part of the local environment.

This summary has been compiled for people interested in
documenting which species of animals were present in the west¬
ern Wisconsin area of the Upper Mississippi Valley during the
five thousand years prior to European arrival. The 190 species
listed here were recovered as bones and shells from 32 Native
American living sites, the majority of which are located in west¬
ern Wisconsin (see Table 1 and Figure 1). Because they have
passed through a series of “human filters,” these archaeological
faunal assemblages do not constitute statistically representative
samples of local animal populations at the time the sites were
occupied. First, these species were selectively chosen by ancient
peoples for their suitability as food, clothing, and tool stock.
Second, the archaeological recovery process itself can be selec¬
tive for both the size and the type of faunal material recovered.
Third, the existing archaeological faunal assemblages have been
analyzed by people with varying levels of expertise. Nonethe¬
less, these faunal remains provide a wealth of information on

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 1 . Archaic and woodland sites and selected Oneota sites outside of the La Crosse
locality.

the animals used by Native Americans and
also serve as a general index for the species
once present in the region. Because of their
particular relevance I have included a small
number of archaeological sites outside west¬
ern Wisconsin, including the John Deere
Harvester site, Albany Mounds, Carroll
Rockshelter, and the Farley Village (see
Table 1 and Figure 1).

Methods and Materials

Most faunal remains recovered from ar¬
chaeological sites are discarded food residue
deposited with other debris as trash or
refuse. At open-air living sites, archaeologists
find much of this refuse in pits that the resi¬
dents dug into the ground and used for stor¬
ing agricultural produce or other products.
When a pit fell into disuse, it was sometimes

filled with camp refuse. Archaeologists can
usually detect these pits by the dark stain¬
ing that permeates the soil when organic
material decays.

Protective rock overhangs, or rock-
shelters, were commonly used for human
habitation and often contain animal remains
in great abundance. These remains are
sometimes found in refuse pits but are most
abundant in middens that accumulated on
the surface as trash repeatedly deposited in
the same location. The rockshelters of west¬
ern Wisconsin appear to have been com¬
monly occupied during the cooler months
of the year. The occupants tended to con¬
centrate their living areas at the front of the
shelter and toss unwanted materials, includ¬
ing animal bones, to the rear. Open
middens or individual discarded bones were
often scavenged by domestic dogs and wild

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THELER: Animal Remains from Native American Archaeological Sites

Table 1. List of archaeological sites with identified animal remains.

Abbreviation

Site Name Site Number

Location

References

Oneota Sites

PC

Pammel Creek

47Lc61

La Crosse Co., Wl

Theler 1989,

Arzigian et al. 1989

vv

Valley View

47Lc34

La Crosse Co., Wl

Stevenson 1994

GU

Gundersen

47Lc394

La Crosse Co., Wl

Theler 1994a,

Arzigian et al. 1994

MV

Midway Village

47Lc19

La Crosse Co., Wl

Scott 1994, Gibbon 1970,
Theler 1994b

NS

North Shore

47Lc185

La Crosse Co., Wl

Theler 1994b

JB

Jim Braun

47LC59

La Crosse Co., Wl

Theler 1994b

TS

Tremaine

47Lc95

La Crosse Co., Wl

Styles and White 1993,
Theler 1994b

SR

State Road Coulee

47Lc176

La Crosse Co., Wl

Theler 1994b,

Anderson et al. 1995

LC

Long Coulee

47LC333

La Crosse Co., Wl

Theler 1990

KS

Krause

47Lc41

La Crosse Co., Wl

Theler n.d. a

SL

Sand Lake

47Lc44

La Crosse Co., Wl

Theler 1985

OT

OT

47LC262

La Crosse Co., Wl

Styles and White 1993

FS

Filler

47LC149

La Crosse Co., Wl

Styles and White 1993,
Penman and Yerkes 1992

AR

Armstrong

47Pe12

Pepin Co., Wl

Savage 1978

FV

Farley Village

21 Hu2

Houston Co., MN

Theler 1994b

Woodland and Archaic Sites

CR

Carrol Rockshelter

13Db486

Dubuque Co., la

Collins et al. 1997

QR

Quail Rockshelter

47Lc84

La Crosse Co., Wl

Theler n.d. b

VR

Viola Rockshelter

47Ve640

Vernon Co., Wl

Theler n.d. c

CS

Cade sites

47Ve631,

643, 644

Vernon Co., Wl

Theler et al. n.d.

MS

Millville

47Gt53

Grant Co., Wl

Pillaert 1969, Theler 1983

SF

Stonefield Village

47Gt1

Grant Co., Wl

Theler 1983

PR

Preston Rockshelter

47Gt157

Grant Co., Wl

Theler 1987a

RR

Raddatz Rockshelter

47Sk5

Sauk Co., Wl

Parmalee 1959

DR

Durst Rockshelter

47Sk2

Sauk Co., Wl

Parmalee 1960

BR

Brogley Rockshelter

47Gt156

Grant Co., Wl

Theler 1987b

MP

Mill Pond

47Cr186

Crawford Co., Wl

Theler 1987a

MC

Mill Coulee

47Cr100

Crawford Co., Wl

Theler 1987c

LR

Lawrence 1 Rockshelter

47Ve154

Vernon Co., Wl

Berwick 1975

ML

Mayland Cave

47la38

Iowa Co., Wl

Storck 1972

BS

Bluff Siding

47Bf45

Buffalo Co., Wl

Theler 1981

JD

John Deere Harvester

11RI337

Rock Island Co., II

Van Dyke et al. 1980

AM

Albany Mounds

iiwti

Whiteside Co., II

Klippel 1977,

Benchley et al. 1977

Other Sites Mentioned in Text

RB

Rud Bison

Buffalo Co., Wl

Theler et al. 1994

BM

Boaz Mastodon

Richland Co., Wl

Palmer and Stoltman 1976

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animals, causing loss of the least resilient
portions of the bone assemblage and dam¬
age to surviving bone.

Native Americans harvested huge quan¬
tities of freshwater mussels in portions of the
Upper Mississippi River Valley, especially in
the vicinity of the Rock Island Rapids in Il¬
linois and Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin.
At these locations, Native Americans made
seasonal mussel harvests over many hun¬
dreds of years. The resulting discarded shells
built up to create large shell middens that
blanket portions of these areas.

Recovery and Identification
of Animal Remains

During the past fifty years, as archaeologists
have become interested in understanding the
contents of living sites, they have generally
used some type of screening device to sepa¬
rate artifacts and animal remains from the
excavated soil. An archaeological screen is an
open-topped box with wood sides and a
metal screen attached as the bottom. Screen
mesh sizes have varied depending on the ex¬
cavators5 objectives. Some excavators in the
past used screen with a 1 /2-inch mesh, but
today the minimum standard is 1 /4-inch
mesh. Since the 1970s many archaeologists
have employed finer screens with a mesh size
of 1/16 inch or less to recover both animal
and carbonized plant remains. The recovery
method is a critical factor in the types and
frequencies of animal species recovered. Few
fish or small mammal remains are recovered
with 1/2- or 1/4-inch screen.

Another critical factor is how the animal
remains are identified. The remains analyzed
by J. Theler as cited in this summary were
identified through direct comparisons of the
archaeological specimens to modern speci¬
mens of known species. Collections of “syn¬
optic” reference skeletons and shells used in
these analyses are housed at the University

of Wisconsin-La Crosse and at the Zoology
Museum at the University of Wisconsin—
Madison. A number of experts have pro¬
vided identifications for specimens that were
difficult to identify because of a lack of ref¬
erence material and/or expertise.

Archaeological specimens for which spe¬
cies identification was ambiguous are not
included in the tables accompanying this
summary, although they are listed in the
original reports. Most faunal analysts note
ambiguous identifications by the use of “cf.,55
which indicates that a specimen “compares
favorably” but cannot be definitely assigned
to the species. Mallards, for example, are of¬
ten cited as “mallard (?) cf. Anas platy-
rhynchos ” or “probable mallard, Anas cf. A .
platyrhynchos ” because most mallard bones
are difficult or impossible to distinguish
from those of the black duck (Anas rubripes).
Many archaeological sites of the Upper Mis¬
sissippi region document the presence of
“cf.” mallard, but these identifications are
not included in this summary, causing mal¬
lards to appear rather uncommon in the
tables. The taxonomic nomenclature used in
this summary for mammals follows Hazard
(1982), except for elk (see Thomas and
Toweill 1982). Birds follow Robbins (1991),
amphibians and reptiles are after Vogt
(1981), fish are after Becker (1983), craw¬
fishes are after Page (1983), and mollusks
follow Turgeon et al. (1988).

Animal Remains Excluded
from This Summary

Bone, antler, or shell of many animal spe¬
cies were commonly used as raw material for
making tools and ornaments. Bone tools,
even if identifiable to species, were not in¬
cluded in this summary because the materi¬
als were often collected or retained in a very
different way from animal products used for
food. Certain skeletal elements, such as ant-

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TRANSACTIONS

THELER: Animal Remains from Native American Archaeological Sites

lers dropped by elk and deer in mid-winter,
appear to have been collected and saved for
future conversion into tools (Theler 1989).
During certain periods in pre-European
times, bones and shells of some species seem
to have been traded as raw materials for tool
manufacture.

One example of tool stock are the shoul¬
der blades (scapulae) of bison, used for the
manufacture of agricultural hoes. The latest
prehistoric people in the La Crosse area were
the Oneota, agriculturalists who grew do¬
mestic plant crops in the region between
A.D. 1250 and A.D. 1650 (Figure 2).

The most common large Oneota artifact
is the bison scapula hoe, with nearly one
hundred specimens recovered at local sites.
Unworked, non-scapula bison bones, how¬
ever, are very rare at all sites in the La Crosse
area, indicating that living bison were un¬
common locally. The most likely source of
Oneota bison scapulae was the region west
of the Mississippi River in Iowa and Min¬
nesota.

This summary does not give the number
of recovered bones for each animal species
or the number of individual animals, al¬
though that information is usually available
in the cited reports. There is evidence that
many groups deboned large mammals at the
kill location, retaining only selected bones
to be used as tool stock, or left smaller bones
on the hide to aid in carrying the meat/hide
bundle back to the camp or village (Perkins
and Daly 1968; Skinner 1923:142). Elk and
white-tailed deer seem to have been consis¬
tently deboned in the field during the later
prehistoric period (Theler 1989:223,
1994a:40-4l).

Two other types of remains are also omit¬
ted from this summary. The first are animal
remains occasionally found as possible ritual
items placed with human burials. The sec¬
ond are faunal materials that represent long¬

distance trade, such as marine shell (Mar-
ginella apicina) beads recovered at the Over¬
head and Sand Lake sites and a single
unworked American alligator (Alligator
mississipiensis) tooth from the State Road
Coulee site (see Anderson et al. 1995).

Pre-European Native American
Cultures and Time Units

Four archaeological cultural/time units are
used in this summary. They represent a
simplified version of the subdivisions of the
pre-European human prehistory of the
region. The best archaeological evidence
indicates that the first people to enter the
Upper Mississippi River Valley, the Paleo-
Indians, arrived about 12,000 years ago.
They were the peoples who hunted mam¬
moths (Mammuthus) and mastodon(t)
(Mammut americanum) in North America.
Not included in the present summary are the
remains of animals associated with the last
Ice Age or Pleistocene period, which ended
about 11,000 years ago. At the Boaz
mastodon site in Richland County, Wis¬
consin, mastodon remains appear to be
associated with a spear point, suggesting
Paleolndian-mastodon contact (Palmer and
Stoltman 1976). Animal remains associated
with the early portion of the current
postglacial (Holocene) period, but without
human association, are not included in the
tables. One such early Holocene paleon¬
tological site is the Rud Bison site (Theler
et al. 1994), which produced several partial
skeletons of the extinct bison (Bison occi¬
dentals) in Buffalo County, Wisconsin.

Following the Pleistocene, the descen¬
dants of the Paleolndians settled into the re¬
gion. These Archaic groups followed an an¬
nual subsistence cycle of hunting and
gathering wild resources. They did not make
pottery containers or build earthen mounds

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BLACK RIVER

GU

Gundersen

JB

Jim Braun

KS

Krause

LC

Long Coulee

MV Midway Village

NS

North Shore

PC

Pammel Creek

SL

Sand Lake

SR

State Road Coulee

TS

Tremaine/OT/Filler

W

Valley View

8 10

MILES

(3 PLEISTOCENE TERRACE

Figure 2. Oneota sites at the La Crosse locality.

to cover their dead. The Archaic period
lasted from about 1 1,000 to 2,000 years ago.
The subsequent Woodland peoples (2,000
to 800 years ago) are characterized by the use
of pottery vessels and constructed burial
mounds. In the later part of the Woodland
period, there is evidence for the use of the
bow and arrow, the building of effigy

mounds, and adaptation to domestic plant
cultivation. The final pre-European residents
of western Wisconsin, the Oneota, lived in
the area between 800 and 400 years ago.
These village agriculturalists raised corn,
beans, squash, and tobacco. They harvested
local game during the summer and season¬
ally hunted bison and other large game west

126

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THELER: Animal Remains from Native American Archaeological Sites

of the Mississippi River. In early historic
times the La Crosse area Oneota are believed
to be people known as the Ioway Indians.

Results

Mammals

There are 44 species of mammals repre¬
sented at the 32 archaeological sites covered
in this summary (Table 2). Those interested
in the distribution of Late Quaternary
mammals recovered from archaeological or
paleontological contexts in North America
are referred to Faunmap (Faunmap Work¬
ing Group 1994). The human remains
listed in Table 2 do not represent burials,
but rather isolated bones or teeth that are
occasionally found during excavations of
habitation areas.

It is clear that the most economically im¬
portant animal utilized by pre-European
groups was the white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus
virginianus) . The remains of this species are
especially numerous at Archaic and Wood¬
land fall-winter occupations in western Wis¬
consin rockshelters. The occupation zones in
these rockshelters often contain thousands
of deer bones, broken open for extraction of
the fat-rich marrow. The fall-winter white¬
tailed deer provided a perfect package, in
both size and quality, of meat, fat, and hide
(Gramly 1977). While not nearly as abun¬
dant as deer, bones of elk ( Cervus canadensis j
are present at most sites. These bones are
usually from the hoof. Presumably, they
were left on the hide to help transport the
hide/meat bundle, while most of the skel¬
eton was left at the kill location.

The situation for bison (Bison bison) is
similar to that for elk, though found at fewer
sites. The few unmodified bison bones at
Oneota sites on the La Crosse terrace are
mostly hoof bones (phalanges). Bison re¬
mains are almost unknown at sites in

Wisconsin’s Driftless area, with an exception
in the Archaic component at Preston
Rockshelter in Grant County. At the Carroll
Rock Shelter, a Late Woodland site in
Dubuque County, Iowa, a different pattern
is represented with bison apparently taken
close to the occupation area and the meat
with some associated bone returned to the
site (Collins et al. 1997).

The remains of black bear (Ursus ameri-
canus) are widely but thinly represented, par¬
ticularly at La Crosse area Oneota sites.
Most of these remains are mandible/maxilla
sections and bones associated with leg ex¬
tremities (e.g., metacarpals, metatarsals, and
phalanges), presumably bones left on the
skin. The presence of bear skull parts seems
to relate to an interest in acquiring the ani¬
mals’ large canine teeth.

Mustelids, the members of the weasel
family, are rare at all sites and often are rep¬
resented only by skull parts (mandibles or
crania). River otter (Lutra canadensis) and
mink (Mustela vison) remains are found at
many Oneota sites in the La Crosse area. It
is possible that the particular elements rep¬
resented relate to special or ritual use of these
animals (Parmalee 1959b:89, 1963:67, Plate
2; Skinner 1923:130-31, Plates 25-26;
1926:248, Plate 41; Theler 1989, 1994:42-
43).

Other mammals of some importance are
the muskrat and beaver. The remains of
both riparian species were widespread at re¬
gional sites. At La Crosse area Oneota sites,
beaver are represented largely by skull parts.
Numerous lower jaws (mandibles) of beaver
have been found with the incisors carefully
removed. This pattern is believed to be re¬
lated to the use of beaver incisors as wood¬
working tools (Theler 1989, 1994).

In pre-European times, the dog was the
only domestic animal in the Upper Missis¬
sippi River Valley. Domestic dogs were

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Table 2. Mammals.

Common Name

Scientific Name

Oneota

Woodland

Archaic

Opossum

Didelphis virginiana

CR/PR

Masked Shrew

Sorex cinereus

FV

Short-tailed Shrew

Blarina brevicauda

VV/SR/FV

VR/CR

PR/RR

Prairie Mole

Scalopus aquaticus

PC/VV/FV/SR/

SL/MV

OR/MS/PR/CR

PR/RR

Big Brown Bat

Eptesicus fuscus

RR

Eastern Cottontail

Sylvilagus floridanus

VV/SR

OR/VR/PR/DR/ML

PR/RR/DR

Eastern Chipmunk

Tamias striatus

VV/MV/FV

CR/VR/MS/PR/

DR/MC

CS/PR/

RR/DR

Woodchuck

Marmota monax

VV/MV

QR/VR/MS/PR/

DR/MP/ML

PR/RR/DR

Thirteen-lined

Ground Squirrel

Spermophilus

tridecemlineatus

PC/VV/FV/KS/OT

CR/PR/AM

PR

Gray Squirrel

Sciurus carolinensis

VV

VR/MS/PR/DR/ML

PR/RR/DR

Fox Squirrel

Sciurus niger

VV

Red Squirrel

Tamiasciurus hudsonicus

OR/AM

PR/RR

Flying Squirrel

Glau corny s volans

OR/PR

PR/RR

Plains Pocket Gopher

Geomys bursarius

VV/GU/MV/FV/

SR/SL/OT/AR

OR/VR/CS

Beaver

Castor canadensis

PC/GU/MV/JB/

SR/FV/KS/SL/

OT/FS/AR

OR/VR/CS/MS/

PR/DR/MP//ML/

AM/CR

PR/RR/DR

Deer Mouse

Peromyscus maniculatus

PC/KS

White-footed Mouse

Peromyscus leucopus

CS

Meadow Vole

Microtus pennsylvanicus

PC/FV/KS/SL/FS

CS

Prairie Vole

Microtus ochrogaster

KS/SL

CS

CS

Southern Bog

Lemming

Synaptomys cooperi

CS

RR

Muskrat

Ondatra zibethicus

PC/VV/GU/MV/

TS/SR/FV/KS/

SL/OT/AR/FS

CR/VR/CS/MS/

PR/DR/MP/ML/AM

CS/PR/

RR/DR

Meadow Jumping
Mouse

Zapus hudsonius

KS

Porcupine

Erethizon dorsatum

VV

VR

Domestic Dog

Canis familiaris

PC/GU/MV/

KS/OT

MS

Coyote

Can is latrans

DR

DR

Wolf

Canis lupus

PC

CR/MP

PR/RR/LR

Red Fox

Vulpes vulpes

DR/AM

Grey Fox

Urocyon cinereoargenteus

PR/AM

Black Bear

Ursus americanus

PCA/V/GU/MV/

JB/TS/FV/SE/

KS/SL/AR

DR/ML

LR

Raccoon

Procyon lotor

PC/VV/GU/JB/

FV/KS/SL/MV

ML/AM/QR/VR/

MS/PR/DR/MP/MC

CS/PR/

RR/DR

Pine Marten

Martes americana

MV

RR

Fisher

Martes pennanti

CR/PR/DR

RR/DR

Long-tailed Weasel

Mustela frenata

PR

PR/RR

128

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Table 2, continued.

Common Name

Scientific Name

Oneota

Woodland

Archaic

Mink

Mustela vison

PC/VV/GU/

SR/SL/AR

MS/DR

Badger

Taxidea taxus

VV/FV/SR

QR/MS

Striped Skunk

Mephitis mephitis

OT

QR/PR

PR

River Otter

Lutra canadensis

PC/VV/GU/

SR/SL/FS

MS/PR/DR

Mountain Lion

Felis concolor

RR/LR

Bobcat

Lynx rufus

GU

MS/AM

RR

American Elk

Cervus canadensis

AR/PC/VV/GU/

JD/BS/VR/CS/

CS/PR/

MV/JB/TS/FV/

SR/KS/SL/OT

MS/PR/DR/MP/AM

RR/DR

White-tailed Deer

Odocoileus virginianus

OT/FS/AR/PC/

MC/LR/ML/AM/

LR/ML/

VV/G U/MV/NS/

JD/QR/VR/CS/

CS/PR /

JB/TS/SR/FV/

KS/SL

MS/PR/DR/MP

RR/DR

Moose

Alces alces

FV

Bison

Bison bison

PC/VV/MV/JB/

SR/KS/OT/AR

CR

PR

Human

Homo sapiens

PC/MV/TS/SR/

KS/SL/OT/AR

QR/CS/PR

associated with Native peoples throughout

Birds

most of North America over the past 10,000
years. Dogs were important in Native
societies as pack animals (Henderson 1994),
assistants in the hunt, village alarm systems,
disposers of unused food, and sometimes a
food resource (Snyder 1991). Dog remains
have been found at a number of archaeologi¬
cal sites where they appear to have been used
as a food. A complete set of four discarded
lower leg extremities (paws) was found
adjacent to a refuse pit at the Pammel Creek
site (Theler 1989:181, Figure 5.3), and
another set was found in pit fill at the Krause
site. Two dog skulls were recovered in a
refuse-filled pit at the OT site (O’Gorman
1989). Intentional dog burials appear to be
rare at Woodland or Oneota sites in the
Upper Mississippi River Valley. One dog
burial was found in a conical mound at the
Raisbeck Mound group in Grant County,
Wisconsin, by W. C. McKern in 1932
(Rowe 1956:41).

In all, 51 species of birds are represented in
the 32 faunal assemblages (Table 3). As
noted in the Methods and Material section,
bones with uncertain identifications were
excluded from the table.

The most widely represented bird species
is the wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo). In
southwestern Wisconsin, turkey remains are
represented by a range of skeletal elements.
They are fairly abundant at both Archaic
and Woodland sites south of a line from
Green Bay to Prairie du Chien that marks
the species’ distribution before European
contact (Schorger 1942, 1966: Figure 6).
Ten La Crosse area Oneota sites have pro¬
duced turkey remains. These bones are pri¬
marily those from the wing tips (carpometa-
carpus, phalanges, and digits) that support
the stout primary feathers. Primary feath¬
ers are the best choice for arrow fetching,
according to Schorger (1966:361-62) and
Loran Cade, a Wisconsin primitive archery

Volume 88 (2000)

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Table 3. Birds.

Common Name

Scientific Name

Oneota

Woodland

Archaic

Common Loon

Gavia immer

VV/AR

Great Egret

Casmerodius albus

SL

American Bittern

Botaurus lentiginosus

SR/AR

Tundra Swan

Cygnus columbianus

AM

PR

Trumpeter Swan

Cygnus buccinator

MV/SL/AR

AM

Canada Goose

Branta canadensis

PC/VV/MV/SR/

KS/FS/AR

QR/MS/DR/PR/AM

RR

Woodduck

Aix sponsa

PC/VV/GU/MV

AM

RR

Green-winged Teal

Anas crecca

GU/AR

QR/ML

Blue-winged Teal

Anas discors

MV

MS

Mallard

Anas platyrhynchos

MV/SR

MS/DR/ML/AM

RR

Northern Pintail

Anas acuta

AM

PR

Northern Shoveler

Anas clypeata

VV

Gadwall

Anas strepera

PR

Redhead

Aythya americana

VV

MS

Ring-necked Duck

Aythya collaris

VV

ML

Common Goldeneye

Bucephala clangula

ML

Bufflehead

Bucephala albeola

GU/AR

CR

Common Merganser

Mergus merganser

PC

MS/AM/CR

Hooded Merganser

Lophodytes cucullatus

VV/AR

Turkey Vulture

Cathartes aura

RR

Northern Harrier

Circus cyaneus

SL

American Kestrel

Falco sparverius

PR

Merlin '

Falco columbarius

VV

Peregrine Falcon

Falco peregrinus

FS

Red-tailed Hawk

Buteo jamaicensis

AR

PR

RR/PR

Bald Eagle

Flaliaeetus leucocephalus

VR

Red-shouldered Hawk

Buteo lineatus

DR

Ruffed Grouse

Bonasa umbellus

DR/ML/PR

RR/DR/PR

Greater Prairie

Chicken

Tympanuchus cupido

MV

PR

PR

Wild Turkey

Meleagris gallopavo

PC/VV/GU/MV/

TS/SR/FV/SL/

OT/FS

VR/MS/DR/ML/

PR/AM/CR

PR/CS /
RR/DR/LR

Virginia Rail

Ball us limicola

AR

Common Moorhen

Gullinula chloropus

AR

Sora

Porzana Carolina

VV/GU/MV

RR

American Coot

Fulica americana

GU/TS/SR/

KS/AR

PR/AM

RR

Sandhill Crane

Grus canadensis

PC/VV/SR/FS/AR

Upland Sandpiper

Bartramia longicauda

VV

Passenger Pigeon

Ectopistes migratorius

VV/FV/SR/MV

VR/DR/PR

RR/PR

Sharp-tailed Grouse

Tympanuchus phasianellus

QR/MS/DR/ML/PR

RR/DR/PR

Eastern Screech-owl

Otus asio

VV

PR

RR

Great Horned Owl

Bubo virginianus

VV/SR

130

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THELER: Animal Remains from Native American Archaeological Sites

Table 3, continued.

Common Name

Scientific Name

Oneota

Woodland

Archaic

Barred Owl

Strix varia

vv

RR

Belted Kingfisher

Ceryle alcyon

vv

Red-headed

Melanerpes

PC/SR

RR

Woodpecker

erythrocephalus

Northern Flicker

Colaptes auratus

VV/GU

PR

Blue Jay

Cyanocitta cristata

AR

RR

American Crow

Corvus brachyrhynchos

VV

AM

RR

Common Raven

Corvus corax

VV

Red-bellied

Woodpecker

Melanerpes carolinus

VR

American Robin

Turdus migratorius

PR

PR

Red-winged Blackbird

Agelaius phoeniceus

PC/GU/MV/TS/

FV/KS/SL

VR

RR

Northern Cardinal

Cardinalis cardinalis

RR

enthusiast (personal communication,
1993). This distribution of bones seems to
indicate that turkey wing tips, with the pri¬
mary feathers attached, were saved during
seasonal travel or hunts or perhaps traded
into the La Crosse area during the Oneota
occupation.

Waterfowl are present at many sites, with
Canada geese and dabbling ducks being
most common. Canada geese are the most
widespread, with both bones and eggshell
having been recovered. According to an
analysis of bone size and eggshell structure
(Speth 1987), the Canada geese harvested in
the La Crosse area were the “giant race”
(Branta canadensis maxima). Mallards (Anas
platyrhynchos) and wood ducks (Aix sponsa)
have been found at several sites. The pres¬
ence of eggshell and medullary bone (Rick
1975) in some elements indicates spring har¬
vest of waterfowl eggs and nesting birds. The
trumpeter swan ( Cygnus buccinator) is rep¬
resented at three La Crosse area Oneota sites.

A wide range of raptorial birds (e.g.,
hawks, owls) as well as crows and ravens
show up in small numbers at archaeological
sites. It is well known that Native American

peoples often assigned ritual significance to
certain bird species (Skinner 1923, 1925:89;
Wilson 1928). Although not included in the
tables, two burial sites of the Upper Missis¬
sippi River Valley contain interesting bird
remains. A “headdress” found with a human
burial in a Sauk County, Wisconsin, mound
included the remains of two bird skulls and
portions of four wing bones from the com¬
mon raven ( Corvus corax , see Wittry 1962).
At the Flynn site, a protohistoric Oneota
cemetery uncovered during road construc¬
tion in Allamakee County, Iowa, a raven
skull was also associated with a human burial
(Bray 1961).

Smaller species of perching birds (Passeri-
forms) are rare or absent in the faunal as¬
semblages from sites of all time periods. The
single exception is the red-winged blackbird
(Agelaius phoeniceus), represented at seven
Oneota sites in the La Crosse area. The
bones of this species are sometimes found
charred, indicating their probable use as
food. Red-winged blackbirds are a noted ag¬
ricultural pest and would have been a com¬
mon summer resident near Oneota villages
and cornfields.

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Fishes

There are 35 species of fish represented at
the 32 archaeological sites (Table 4). The
most widespread species is the freshwater
drum (Aplodinotus grunniens), and the most
common fish are the catfishes, particularly
the black bullhead (Ictalurus melas). Many
fish species, including northern pike (Esox
lucius) and members of the sucker family
(Catostomidae), were taken during spawn¬
ing periods. Others (gar, bowfin, and bull¬
heads) were taken during the summer
months by seining or trapping in shallow
backwaters along the Mississippi River. The
thick, durable rhombic scales of gar (Lepiso-
steidae) are present at most sites along the
Mississippi River, but well-preserved skull
bones are necessary to separate the longnose
gar (Lepisosteus osseus) from the shortnose gar
(Lepisosteus platostomus). The exterior surface
of gar scales often exhibit evidence of being
burned or scorched, an indication that en¬
tire fish may have been roasted in their ar-
mor-like scale covering.

Exceptionally large flathead catfish
(Pylodictis olivaris) of 50 pounds or more
and large channel catfish (Ictalurus punc-
tatus) are present at many Woodland and
Oneota sites adjacent to the Mississippi
River. These catfish were probably harvested
from their nest sites during the mid-sum¬
mer. There is no indication based on esti¬
mated size or species distribution that gill
nets were used or swift waters fished. For
example, juvenile individuals of the flathead
and channel catfish that are typically asso¬
ciated with relatively swift water are almost
unknown from the late prehistoric sites of
the Upper Mississippi River.

Amphibians

The bones of frogs, toads, or salamanders are
occasionally found by use of fine-screen re¬
covery techniques at archaeological sites. In

most cases these remains appear to be part of
the natural rain of small-scale fauna preserved
at some sites, rather than a regular part of the
human diet. Four amphibian species are repre¬
sented at the sites considered here (Table 5).

Two occurrences of amphibians are wor¬
thy of mention. The skeletal remains of nine
leopard frogs (Rana pipiens) were found in
the bottom of a refuse-filled pit at the
Tremaine site, an Oneota site on the La
Crosse terrace. It is unclear whether these
individuals represent a natural inclusion or
were brought to the site as food items. The
rock fill at the base of the pit lay directly on
the bones of these frogs.

Also of interest are the skeletal remains of
at least three tiger salamanders (Amhystoma
tigrinum) recovered from pit fill at the Krause
site, an Oneota habitation area on the La
Crosse terrace. The zone of pit fill that con¬
tained the salamander bones also produced
over 14,000 bones representing more than
400 individual fish (mostly small black bull¬
heads) of 16 species. Thrown into this mix
were crawfish remains, the bones of a coot
(Fulica americana), and the paws of a dog.
This deposit is thought to largely represent
a seining episode in a backwater habitat. The
occurrence of the tiger salamander is of in¬
terest given the historic absence of the spe¬
cies in the unglaciated Driftless Area of
southwestern Wisconsin, except for one his¬
toric report (Vogt 1981:45).

Reptiles

The remains of turtles occur at many of the
32 archaeological sites considered, with nine
species represented (Table 5). They are typi¬
cally represented by segments of the upper
and lower shells (the carapace and plastron).
Turtle remains appear most frequently at the
open-air Woodland and Oneota sites found
adjacent to the Mississippi River and its wet¬
lands.

1 32

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THELER: Animal Remains from Native American Archaeological Sites

Table 4. Fishes.

Common Name

Scientific Name

Oneota

Woodland Archaic

Lake Sturgeon

Acipenser fulvescens

PC/VV/MV/FS

Shovelnose Sturgeon

Scaphirhynchus

platorynchus

PC

Paddlefish

Polyodon spathula

SL

Shortnose Gar

Lepisosteus platostomus

PC/MV

Longnose Gar

Lepisosteus osseus

PC/MV

MS

Bowfin

Amia calva

PC/VV/GU/MV/

NS/JB/TS/SR/

KS/SL/OT/FS

QR/MS/MP/MC CS

Northern Pike

Esox lucius

PC/GU/SR/KS/

OT/FS

Bigmouth Buffalo

Ictiobus cyprinellus

PC/VV/SR

Smallmouth Buffalo

Ictiobus bubalus

VV/SL

MC

Quillback

Carpiodes cyprinus

VV/OT

River Carpsucker

Carpiodes carpio

VV

Black Redhorse

Moxostoma duquesnei

PC/KS

Golden Redhorse

Moxostoma erythrurum

PC/VV/KS/SL

VR/MC

Silver Redhorse

Moxostoma anisurum

PC

Shorthead Redhorse

Moxostoma

PC/VV/MV/

QR/VR

macrolepidotum

TS/FV/SL/FS

River Redhorse

Moxostoma carinatum

VV/KS

Northern Hog Sucker

Hypentelium nigricans

OT

White Sucker

Catostomus commersoni

PC/VV/FV/SR/OT

Black Bullhead

Ictalurus melas

PC/VV/GU/MV/

NS/TS/KS/SL/

OT/FS

PR

Brown Bullhead

Ictalurus nebulosus

PC/VV/MV/NS/

TS/KS/SL/OT

Yellow Bullhead

Ictalurus natalis

PC/VV/MV/NS/

TS/KS/SL/OT/FS

Channel Catfish

Ictalurus punctatus

PC/VV/GU/MV/

JB/TS/FV/SR/

KS/SL/OT/FS

VR/PR/MP

Tadpole Madtom

Noturus gyrinus

PC/KS

Flathead Catfish

Pylodictis olivaris

PC/VV/MV/JB/

SR/SL/OT

MP/MC

Smallmouth Bass

Micropterus dolomieui

VV/GU

Largemouth Bass

Micropterus salmoides

PC/MV/RB/SL

MP/MC

Green Sunfish

Lepomis cyanellus

VV/GU

Pumpkinseed

Lepomis gibbosus

PC/VV/KS/SL

Bluegill

Lepomis macrochi rus

VV/MV/KS

Rock Bass

Ambloplites rupestris

VV/MV/FV/ST

White Crappie

Pomoxis annularis

VV/KS

Black Crappie

Pomoxis nigromaculatus

PC/VV/MV

Walleye

Stizostedion vitreum

PC/VV/GU/KS/FS

Yellow Perch

Perea flavescens

PC/VV/GU/MV/

FV/SR/SL

QR/MS

Freshwater Drum

Aplodinotus grunniens

PC/VV/GU/MV/

NS/JB/TS/SR/FV/

KS/SL/OT/FS/JD

QR/MP/MC CS

Volume 88 (2000)

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Table 5. Amphibians, reptiles and crawfish.

Common Name

Scientific Name

Oneota

Woodland

Archaic

Amphibians

Eastern Tiger
Salamander

Amhystoma tigrinum

KS

American Toad

Bufo americanus

SR/KS

Northern Leopard

Frog

Rana pipiens

MV/TS/SR/KS

VR

Green Frog

Rana clamitans

MV

Reptiles

Snapping Turtle

Chelydra serpentina

AR/JD/PC/VV/

GU/MV/NS/SR/

KS/SL/OT/FS

CR/VR/MS/

DR/AM

RR/DR

Stinkpot Turtle

Sternotherus odoratus

MP

Wood Turtle

Clemmys insculpta

VR

Blanding’s Turtle

Emydoidea blandingi

TS/SR/AR

MS/DR/MP

RR/DR

Ornate Box Turtle

Terrapene ornata

PR/DR/AM

RR/DR

Painted Turtle

Chrysemys picta

PC/VV/GU/MV/

JB/SR/OT/AR

CR/VR/MS/

PR/AM

RR

Map Turtle

False Map Turtle

Graptemys geographica

Graptemys

pseudogeographica

PC/VV/MV/

SR/OT

PC/GU

CR

Softshell Turtle

Trionyx

JD/PC/GU/MV/
JB/TS/SR/KS /
SL/OT/FS

QR/MS/DR /
MP/AM

Bullsnake

Pituophis melanoleucus

PC/GU/MV

OR/VR

Garter Snake

Thamnophis radix

KS

Timber Rattlesnake

Crotalus horridus

CR/VR

Eastern Hognose
Snake

Heterodon platyrhinos

SR

Fox Snake

Elaphe vulpina

SR

VR

Crayfish

Papershell Crayfish

Orconectes immunis

PC

Northern Crayfish

Orconectes virilis

PC

Devil Crayfish

Cambarus diogenes

PC

White River Crayfish

Procambarus acutus

KS

The most widespread turtle remains are
those of the snapping turtle (Chelydra
serpentina). Although the remains are present
on many sites, only one or two individuals
are represented in most of the site assem¬
blages. Scorching on the exterior of many
shell fragments indicates that when captured
(perhaps during spring egg-laying on dry

land), turtles were cooked in their shell. The
softshell turtle (Trionyx) is also widespread,
but few individuals are represented. The
softshell turtle is easy to identify to the ge¬
nus level by the distinctly sculptured exte¬
rior surface of its shell, but it is difficult to
distinguish between the two species ( Trionyx
spiniferus and Trionyx muticus ) found in the

134

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THELER: Animal Remains from Native American Archaeological Sites

Upper Mississippi Valley. Therefore, the
tables include this common taxon only at
the genus level. The ornate box turtle
(Terrapene ornata) has been recovered at ar¬
chaeological sites (e.g., Preston Rockshelter
in Grant County) adjacent to this species’
historically known range on the sand terraces
along the lower Wisconsin River (Vogt
1981:99-100). The box turtle is absent from
the archaeological sites at the Prairie du
Chien and La Crosse terraces. A variety of
other turtles show up infrequently. The
Blanding’s turtle (Emydoidea blandingi) has
been found at a few sites, and its deeply
cupped upper shell was sometimes modified
for use as a container.

The vertebrae of five species of snakes have
been recovered. Snakes are believed to be part
of a natural accumulation of smaller verte¬
brates that can become incorporated into ar¬
chaeological site deposits. There is no indi¬
cation that snakes were harvested for any
reason by Native Americans of the Upper
Mississippi River Valley. The late prehistoric
Oneota sites of the La Crosse terrace do show
several occurrences of the bullsnake (Pituophis
melanoleucus). The bullsnake’s presence is not
surprising given that many La Crosse terrace
Oneota sites contain bones and burrows of
the Plains pocket gopher ( Geomys hunarius ),
a common prey species of the bullsnake.

Crayfish

Crayfish remains have been recovered from
refuse-filled pits at the Krause and Pammel
Creek sites, both Oneota villages (Table 5).
At Pammel Creek, hundreds of burned
crawfish carapace (shell) fragments occurred
in ash zones that also produced red-winged
blackbird bones and carbonized wild rice
(Zizania aquatic a) grains (see Arzigian et al.
1989). These three food items may have
been harvested during the mid-summer pe¬
riod at a single floodplain habitat.

Freshwater Mussels

There are 39 species of freshwater mussels
represented at the 32 archaeological sites
(Table 6). Many Native peoples of the Up¬
per Mississippi River Valley harvested large
numbers of freshwater mussels as a seasonal
food source. One Woodland period shell
midden near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin,
is estimated to contain more than a million
shells, the result of many seasons of use
(Theler 1987a). Although mussels were used
primarily as food, their shells were some¬
times converted into tools (Theler 1991,
1994) and crushed into the tempering agent
used in Oneota shell-tempered pottery
(Theler 1990). In a few cases, attractive
shells such as the elephant-ear (Elliptio
crassidens) were buried with the dead (see
Mead 1979:164).

While the shells of large, heavy mussels
such as the washboard (Megalonaias nervosa)
were sometimes traded or carried over some
distance (Theler 1991:324-25), most shells
were evidently discarded adjacent to the
body of water in which they were harvested.
These shells accumulated to form middens
or were used as fill for storage pits that had
fallen into disuse. The archaeological record
of freshwater mussel distribution provides a
unique view of the geographic distribution
of these animals prior to European disrup¬
tion of the native aquatic ecosystem. A case
in point is the assemblage of mussels from
the Brogley Rockshelter, located along the
Platte River in Grant County, Wisconsin.
Brogley Rockshelter produced thousands of
individual shells of more than 20 mussel
species (Theler 1987b). This site is an im¬
portant example because it demonstrates the
rich freshwater mussel fauna that occupied
the interior small streams of western
Wisconsin’s Driftless Area prior to Euro¬
pean settlement. The two most abundant
species at Brogley were the spike (Elliptio

Volume 88 (2000)

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Table 6. Freshwater mussels.

Common Name

Scientific Name

Oneota

Woodland

Archaic

Cylindrical Papershell
Giant Floater

Anodontoides
ferussacianus
Anodonta grandis

QR/PR

PR/BR

Squawfoot

Strophitus undulatus

Elktoe

Slippershell Mussel

Rock-Pocketbook

White Heelsplitter

Alasmidonta marginata
Alasmidonta viridis

Arcidens confragosus
Lasmigona complanata

Fluted-Shell

Lasmigona costata

Creek Heelsplitter

Washboard

Pistolgrip

Lasmigona compressa
Megalonaias nervosa
Tritogonia verrucosa

Maple Leaf

Quadrula quadrula

Winged Maple Leaf
Monkeyface

Quadrula fragosa

Quadrula metanevra

Wartyback

Pimpleback

Quadrula nodulata
Quadrula pustulosa
pustulosa

Threeridge

Amblema plicata

Ebonyshell

Fusconaia ebena

Wabash Pigtoe

Fusconaia flava

Purple Wartyback

Cyclonaias tuberculata

Sheepnose

Plethobasus cyphyus

Round Pigtoe

Pleurobema coccineum

Elephant-ear

Elliptio crassidens

Spike

Ellipio d Hat at a

Threehorn Wartyback

Obliquaria reflexa

Mucket

Actinonaias ligamentina

PC/W/GU/MV/

NS/SR/SL/FS

QR/VR/PR/BR

PR/BR

VV/SR/FV

QR/VR/DR/MP/

BR/BS

BR

PC/GU/MV/AR

VR/MS/BR/JD

BR

BR

BR

NS

MC

PC/VV/GU/SR/

BS/QR/PR/DR/

SL/AR

MP/AM/BR/JD

GU/AR

QR/VR/MS/DR/

MP/BR/BS

BR

FV

BR

BR

VV

MS/BR/JD

BR

PC/VV/GU/MV/

MS/SF/MP/MC/

SR/SL/FS

JD/BS

PC/W/GU/MV/

NS/LC

MS/MP/MC/JD/BS

GU/MV

MP/MC/BS

PC/VV/GU/NS/

MS/SF/MC/AM /

RR

JB/LC/SR/FS/AR

JD/CR

MP/MC/JD

PC/VV/GU/MV/

MS/SF/MP/MC/

NS/JB/LC/SR/

SL/FS

AM/JD/BS/CR

PC/VV/GU/MV/

QR/MS/SF/PR/

DR/BR

NS/JB/SR/LC/

DR/MP/MC/AM/

SR/SL/FS/AR

BR/JD/BS

PC/VV/GU/MV/

QR/MS/SF/MD/

NS/JB/SR/LC/

SL/FS

MC/AM/BR/JD/CR

PC/VV/GU/MV/

MS/SF/MP/MC/

BR

NS/JB/SR/LC/

SL/FS/AR

AM/BR/JD/BS

JB/LC

SF/DR/MP/MC/

AM/JD

VV/GU/NS/LC/

MS/SF/DR/MP/

RR

SR

MC/AM/JD

PC//VV/GU/MV/

MS/SF/MP/MC/

NS/JB/LC/SR/

FS/AR

JD/BS

QR/SF/MP/MC/

AM/JD/CR

PC/GU/JB/AR

QR/VR/MS/PR/

BR/PR/

DR/MP/MC/AM/

BR/JD/BS

RR/DR

PC/VV/MV/NS/

SL/FS

SF/MP/MC/JD

PC/VV/MV/JB/

QR/MS/SF/DR/

RR/DR/BR

SR/FS

MP/MC/AM/BR/

JD/CR

136

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THELER: Animal Remains from Native American Archaeological Sites

Table 6, continued.

Common Name Scientific Name

Oneota Woodland

Archaic

Butterfly

Ellipsaria lineolata

PC/VV/GU/MV/

NS

SF/MP/MC/AM/

JD/CR

Hickorynut

Obovaria olivaria

PC/VV/GU/MV/

NS/LC/SR

MS/SF/MP/MC/

AM/JD

Deertoe

Truncilla truncata

VV/MV/NS/JB/LC

MP/MC/JD

Fragile Papershell

Leptodea fragilis

PC/VV/GU/MV/NS

Pink Heelsplitter

Potamilus alatus

PC/VV/GU/MV/

SR/SL/FS/AR

QR/MS/PR/DR/

BR/JD/BS

PR/DR/BR

Pink Papershell

Potamilus ohiensis

VV

MP

Black Sandshell

Ligumia recta

PC/SL/AR

QR/MS/MP/MC/

BR/JD/BS/CR

RR

Ellipse

Venustaconcha

ellipsiformis

VR/BR

BR

Rainbow

Villosa iris

BR

Yellow Sandshell

Lampsiiis teres

FS

MS/SF/MC/AM

Fatmucket

Lampsiiis siliquoidea

PC/VV/GU/MV/

NS/SR/SL/AR

QR/VR/MS/SF/

PR/DR/MP/BR/BS

PR/RR/BR

Higgins Eye

Lampsiiis higginsi

VV/LC

SF/MP/MC

Plain Pocketbook

Lampsiiis cardium

PC/VV/GU/MV/

SR

QR/MS/SF/PR/

DR/MP/MR/AM/

BR/JD/BS

PR/RR/

DR/BR

dilatata) and the ellipse (Venustaconcha
ellipsiformis). These species, along with an
array of other small-stream mussel taxa (e.g.,
Alasmidonta viridis, Lasmigona compress a,
and Villosa iris iris) are unknown in the re¬
gion today and illustrate the importance of
the archaeological record for producing
well-dated assemblages to aid in an accurate
biogeography.

Summary and Conclusions

The pre-European peoples of western Wis¬
consin occupied a region rich in animal re¬
sources. These people followed an annual
round to harvest subsistence resources. This
round involved a schedule of movement to
place people at the best location during the
season most advantageous for taking favored
plants and animals. By 7000 years ago, Ar¬
chaic peoples of the region harvested deer
during the fall and winter as a major food

resource along with many other animal spe¬
cies. The spring-summer resource base of
Archaic peoples is not known.

During Woodland times, human groups
were engaged in an annual fall-winter har¬
vest of deer and elk as their primary source
of meat and skins for leather. Cool season
camps were generally positioned in the game
rich valleys of the dissected uplands, often
many miles from larger river valleys. The
largest number of deer seem to have been
taken in the fall of the year when these ani¬
mals are in prime condition. Animal bones
were broken open at these fall-winter camps
in a process to extract the nutrient- and fat-
rich marrow. This marrow was perhaps
mixed with dried (jerked) meat and some¬
times berries to produce a sausage-type prod¬
uct known in the early historic period as
pemmican, which could be kept for a year
or more and often served as a winter food
resource.

Volume 88 (2000)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

During the summer months, many
Woodland groups were concentrated along
the margins of larger waterways to harvest
fish, freshwater mussels, turtles, waterfowl,
and riparian mammals. At many locations
summer camps were strategically positioned
near beds of mussels and floodplain lakes
seasonally replenished with fish. In the mid-
to late summer as water levels dropped, nets
were apparently be used to harvest fish. In
addition to netting in backwaters, fish ap¬
pear to have been taken while spawning in
the spring and early summer months.

It is not until the end of the Late Wood¬
land period at about A.D. 900-1000 that the
peoples of western Wisconsin become in¬
volved in horticulture by tending small gar¬
den plots planted in corn. The adoption of
gardening did not occur until the seasonal
round of wild food harvest became difficult
under the stress of increased population den¬
sity. This prevented effective cool season
movement as the dissected uplands became
occupied by some Woodland peoples on a
year-round basis.

At the end of prehistory we see the de¬
velopment of the Oneota, who represent a
distinct cultural tradition. The Oneota were
the first to practice corn agriculture using
field systems, rather than the hypothesized
Woodland garden plots. In addition to cul¬
tivated plants, the Oneota made extensive
use of fish, mussels, waterfowl, and mam¬
mals during their summer residence at farm¬
ing villages. During the cool season, most of
the Oneota along the Mississippi are be¬
lieved to have traveled west to hunt bison,
deer, and elk, as well as trade with neigh¬
boring peoples.

Domestic dogs were kept by the Archaic,
Woodland, and Oneota peoples of Wiscon¬
sin. Dogs were the only domestic animal
found in pre-European Wisconsin. They
served many functions in these Native

American societies that included carrying
burdens during annual movements and act¬
ing as an alarm system when intruders ap¬
proached encampments. Dogs also ate ani¬
mal and vegetable products that were not
eaten by people. In times of special need, or
for certain ceremonies, dog would be eaten.
Dogs served as storage on-the-paw to con¬
vert and store protein until needed by hu¬
mans.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the scientists who pro¬
vided identifications or confirmed identifi¬
cations on a number of specimens. Bobcat
and certain black bear bones from the
Gundersen site were identified by Dr.
Danny Walker and Matthew Glenn Hill at
the University of Wyoming, Laramie. The
fragment of antler from Farley Village ten¬
tatively identified as moose was confirmed
based on a direct comparison of antler sur¬
face sculpture conducted by Dr. Orrin C.
Shane at the Science Museum of Minnesota,
St. Paul, Minnesota. The small mammal
jaws/ teeth reported by Theler from Farley
Village, Pammel Creek, Krause, Sand Lake,
and the Cade sites were identified by Dr.
Holmes A. Semken, Jr., of the Department
of Geology, University of Iowa, Iowa City,
Iowa. Several of the uncommon species of
birds from the Sand Lake site were identi¬
fied by Dr. Paul W. Parmalee of the Frank
H. McClung Museum, University of Ten¬
nessee. Dr. J. Alan Holman at Michigan
State University identified certain amphib¬
ian and reptile remains, including the tiger
salamander bones recovered at the Krause
site. Dr. David A. Stansbery of the Museum
of Zoology, Ohio State University, offered
comments on my early analysis of freshwa¬
ter mussel shells recovered from the Prairie
du Chien shell middens.

138

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THELER: Animal Remains from Native American Archaeological Sites

My colleagues Constance M. Arzigian
and Robert F. Boszhardt at the Mississippi
Valley Archaeology Center, University of
Wisconsin-La Crosse, provided valuable
comments on this report. I would like to
thank Ms. Tricia Duyfhuizen, Managing
Editor of the Transactions , for her editorial
assistance. Katherine Stevenson generously
provided her editorial skills in the prepara¬
tion of this manuscript. Edward Brush is
thanked for preparing the tables. Jean
Dowiasch is thanked for preparing the maps
used in this report. I would like to thank Dr.
Jeffery A. Behm and one anonymous re¬
viewer for their insightful comments on this
paper. Finally, I would like to express my
thanks to Mr. John Dobrovolny, Regional
Historian with the Upper Mississippi River
Wildlife Refuge of the U.S. Fish and Wild¬
life Service for the support to prepare por¬
tions of the report.

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James Theler is a professor of archaeology at the
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. His archaeo¬
logical research has focused on the subsistence and
settlement patterns of Native American peoples
of western Wisconsin prior to the arrival of Eu¬
ropeans. Address: Department of Sociology and
Archaeology, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse,
La Crosse, Wisconsin 54601.

Email: theler.ja m e @u wlax. edu

1 42

TRANSACTIONS

Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

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Since 1870, supporting thought, culture, and the exchange of ideas

Of Frankenfoods and Golden Rice

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University of Wisconsin-Madison

Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters
Since 1870 , supporting thought, culture, and the exchange of ideas

Managing Editors

Joan Fischer
Michael Goodman

About the Wisconsin Academy

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters is an independent,
nonprofit membership organization founded in 1870 to gather, share, and
act upon knowledge in the sciences, arts, and letters for the benefit of the
people of Wisconsin. Everyone is welcome to join. Programs include an art
gallery featuring a different Wisconsin artist every month; a quarterly
magazine about Wisconsin thought and culture (the Wisconsin Academy
Review); the Wisconsin Idea at the Academy, which brings together people
from diverse fields to examine public policy issues; and public forums on
topics of current interest. Our annual journal Transactions, which has been
published since 1872, this year reflects content of our Fall Forum 2000 on
genetically modified foods.

®2001 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters
All rights reserved

ISSN 0084-0505

Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters
1922 University Avenue
Madison, Wisconsin 53705
www.wisconsinacademy.org
Tel. 608/263-1692

e-mail: contact@wisconsinacademy.org

From the Wisconsin Academy

Contents

Introduction to the Scientific, Political, and Ethical Dialogue on
Genetically Modified Organisms 1

Frederick H. Butte! and Robert M. Goodman

Telling the Story 15

Daniel Charles

Ending World Hunger:

The Promise of Biotechnology and the Threat of Antiscience Zealotry 25
Norman E. Borlaug

Questioning Biotechnology's Claims and Imagining Alternatives 35

Frederick Kirschenmann

The Genetically Modified Organism and Genetically

Modified Foods Debates: Why Ethics Matters 63

Jeffrey Burkhardt

Biotechnology and Agriculture: A Skeptical Perspective 83

Vernon W. Ruttan

Biodiversity and Bioprospecting: Conflicting Worldviews 93

Lori P. Knowles

Biotechnology and Genetically Modified Foods:

The Role of Environmental Journalists 103

Richard Manning

Adoption of Agricultural Biotechnology

by Wisconsin Farmers: Recent Evidence 109

Bradford L. Barham

Don't Ask, Don't Tell: U.S. Policy on Labeling of

Genetically Engineered Foods 121

Lydia Zepeda

Off the Farm: Transportation, Storage, and Handling Issues 131

John Petty

University Ownership of Patents: The Bayh-Dole Act and Using

Patents for the Public Good 135

Carl E. Gulbrandsen and Howard W. Bremer

Appendix

Fall Forum 2000 Agenda

145

Michael Goodman

Fall Forum Director

Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

From the
Wisconsin Academy

U-V -yo one in biotech will want to speak at a public forum. They’re hoping

I I that the whole issue will just go away.” I heard this sentiment often in
-L. ^ the early days of planning for the Wisconsin Academy’s Fall Forum

2000, “Genetically Modified Food: Risks, Rewards, & Realities,” which was held in
Madison in November of that year. As it turned out, that sentiment was stating things
far too simply.

When I met with scientists and others working in the biotechnology realm, I
learned that many indeed were interested in letting others know their thoughts and
motivations. Among those standing on the “other side” of the issue — people who
oppose production of genetically modified foods — there were some who wanted to
denounce the entire science, but many more who were interested in searching for com¬
mon ground. And then there were those people — specifically, farmers — who felt they
were being left out of the discussion altogether. It became clear that there was a tremen¬
dous opportunity to initiate an open discussion on this very contentious issue.

The Wisconsin Academy’s mission to further knowledge required us to bring in
as many points of view as possible (and believe me, there are many more than the ones
I portrayed above). Our goal was to craft a discussion that would allow those involved

Transactions Volume 89 2001

i

and those in attendance not only to learn some basics and hear the disagreements, but
also to hear where those in opposition could find common ground. Forum planners
and advisors — a diverse group that included scientists, educators, farmers, historians,
writers, and ethicists — came up with a structure that brought a wide range of experts,
views, and content to the one-day discussion (see appendix for the forum agenda). You
can see the basics of the format we chose in the content of this volume of Transactions .
Much of the content for this book came from the forum. Presenters generously
rewrote, adapted, and updated their talks for this collection.

These articles represent a wide range of thoughts on the subject of biotechnolo¬
gy and agriculture. Topics touch upon economics and international trade, farming and
storage, world hunger, history, and ethics. The introduction to this book by our guest
editors Frederick Buttel and Robert Goodman, who also served as forum planners,
does a wonderful job giving the reader a thorough background on the subject of genet¬
ically modified food as well as outlining the range of authors and subjects in this vol¬
ume. Our special thanks to them for their expertise and hard work in putting together
this volume of Transactions.

I believe that this mix of topics and viewpoints is greater than the sum of its parts.
Forum attendees were given the opportunity to have some of their opinions questioned
and to discover the many shades of gray that exist when talking about such complicat¬
ed issues. I am sure that some people left with the same opinions they had on arrival.
But I know that many others changed their views, maybe not enough to make them join
the “other side,” but enough to leave them thinking about these issues with new insights
and more information at their disposal. I am certain this collection of essays will offer
readers that same opportunity. And that is the Wisconsin Academy at its best, w

Major conference support for the Fall Forum 2000 was made possible through a
grant from The Evjue Foundation, Inc., the charitable arm of The Capital Times.

ii

Transactions

Fall Forum 2000 Planning Committee

Deborah Blum

Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication,
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Frederick H. Buttel

Chair, Department of Rural Sociology,

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Terry Devitt

Science Editor, Office of News and Public Affairs,

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Michael Goodman

Fall Forum Director and Associate Director of Programs,

Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Robert M. Goodman
Professor of Plant Pathology,

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Paul Hayes
Science Writer,

Wisconsin Academy Fellow

Karl Nichols
Research Scientist,

Third Wave Technologies

Louise Robbins
Historian of Science

Robert Streiffer

Professor of Ethics, Medical School and Department of Philosophy,
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Craig Trumbo

Professor of Life Sciences Communications,

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Tom Zinnen

Biotechnology Education,

University of Wisconsin-Madison Biotechnology Center

Volume 89 2001

Introduction to the
Scientific, Political,
and Ethical Dialogue
Genetically Modified
Organisms

Frederick H. Buttel and Robert M. Goodman

The genetically modified organism (GMO) controversy in the United States is
in one sense a very particular phenomenon; yet in another sense it is an en¬
tirely predictable occurrence in the early twenty-first-century development of
the agricultural and food system.1 In the latter sense, it is deeply rooted in U.S. regu¬
latory politics of the 1980s and corporate decisions of the early 1990s. In the 1980s, a
laissez-faire regulatory environment coincided with new technologies and new invest¬
ment emerging from the private sector that resulted in prototype GMO and GM food
products (Flavr Savr tomatoes and virus-, herbicide-, and insect-resistant crops). These
new products were “shoehorned” into existing regulations at the EPA, the USDA, or
both, with only grudging overview from the FDA. Ironically, what regulatory over¬
sight these early products received was demanded by industry.

'Accordingly, genetically modified (GM) foods are those that contain ingredients from GMO crop vari¬
eties, though there remains debate as to whether there should or should not be a statistical definition
(regarding “tolerance” of the maximum permissible amounts of one or another GM ingredient) in defin¬
ing what are and are not GM foods. Also, as we will note, the definition — even the usage — of GMO is
subject to debate. We actually prefer the terminology “genetically engineered crop.”

Transactions Volume 89 2001

1

In the 1980s and 1990s, several major chemical companies experimented with
their reinvention as “life sciences” companies. These companies, which emerged as
the commercial proponents of GMO crops, made a fateful decision — to reject label¬
ing of their products and largely withdraw from early initiatives to educate a public
whose nascent skepticism had failed to ignite in response to Jeremy Rifkin and vari¬
ous environmental groups. They also ignored the early signs from Europe of a contro¬
versy in the making.

By early 1999, agricultural biotechnology in the United States was clearly on a
roll with considerable momentum. As of the 1998 growing season about 36 percent of
U.S. soybean acreage, 20 percent of U.S. cotton acreage, and 22 percent of U.S. corn
acreage was devoted to genetically engineered varieties, and about 60 percent of
Canadian canola acreage was devoted to genetically engineered varieties (James
1998). The adoption rates for U.S. GMO soybeans, corn, and cotton from 1995 to 1998
and for Canadian canola arguably represented the most rapid adoption curve of any
new agricultural technology in world history. The controversy over recombinant
bovine somatotropin (rBST; also known as recombinant bovine growth hormone, or
rBGH), which had heretofore been the United States’s most contested new biotech¬
nology product, had largely blown over by early 1999, and in retrospect nothing that
might have been learned about corporate approaches to public concerns over tech¬
nologies provided to farmers was in fact learned.

By April 1999, the European Union (EU) had approved three Bacillus
thuringiensis (Bt) corn varieties and one herbicide-tolerant corn variety, and at least
six additional Bt and herbicide-resistant crop varieties (and two “stacked” [both Bt
and herbicide-resistant] varieties) were under EU regulatory review. In early 1999,
the World Trade Organization (WTO), which included a number of provisions on
intellectual property, nontariff barriers to trade, and the harmonization of national
standards of food regulations that were favorable to commercial biotechnology, had
been in effect for nearly four years and appeared to be becoming increasingly well
institutionalized. WTO rules seemed to obligate the EU countries to not only approve
these new agricultural input products but also to accept imports of GM grains and
oilseeds product.

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Transactions

By the summer of 1999, however, there was a transnational eruption of social
conflict over GMOs. The EU began to restrict imports of GM corn and soybeans and
initiated what at this writing remains a de facto moratorium on approval of new GM
input products. The Seattle protests at the 1999 WTO ministerial meeting were galva¬
nized to a significant degree around consensus among environmental, labor, con¬
sumer, sustainable agriculture, development-assistance, and human rights groups that
there should be resistance against GM foods and, most importantly, against WTO rules
that limit the ability of nations and consumers to choose not to consume GM food
ingredients. In 2000, the resistance to GM foods spread to a number of other nations
and regions, including especially Japan, Korea, Thailand, Australia, and India. In early
2000 there was so much uncertainty about securing markets for GM corn and soybean
products that many U.S. farmers stopped using them, or continued to do so with great
apprehension. Bt corn use in the U.S., for example, has declined during each of the
past two growing seasons.

One of the points that came out at the Wisconsin Academy conference
“Genetically Modified Food: Risks, Rewards, and Realities” is that there is little
agreement on what the notion of “GMO” (and thus of “GM food”) means. Before pro¬
ceeding further we want to be clear about what we mean by GMOs. Some observers —
including, interestingly enough, many of the most active proponents and opponents of
molecular biological technologies used in agriculture — tend to see GMOs as being
synonymous with “agricultural biotechnology.” Biotechnology is a very broad term
that encompasses a suite of conventional methods — including tissue culture — as well
as newer techniques based on molecular biology used for enhanced management of
plant-breeding programs and in diagnosis of diseases and stresses that reduce crop
production. These biotechnology methods are not what the GMO controversy is about.
Rather, the focus of the controversy is on crop varieties and the foods derived there¬
from that have been developed with the use of genetic engineering. By genetic engi¬
neering is meant the construction of genes engineered from recombinant DNA made
in the laboratory and introduced into the chromosomes of a crop plant. Such genes,
collectively called transgenes, when expressed in the recipient plant impart a new trait
or property on the plant.

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Today, GMO crop plants contain single-gene (or a small number of) transgenes
that impart two major types of traits: There are the Bt crops (chiefly corn, cotton, and
potatoes) that as a result of expression of a gene taken from the soil bacterium Bacillus
thuringiensis are resistant to insect pests, and herbicide-resistant (HR) crops (chiefly
soybeans, corn, and canola) engineered using bacterial or modified plant genes. Virus-
resistant crops also fall within our definition of GMOs, since they involve one or a few
transgenes that code for proteins that affect input traits. Interestingly, virus-resistant
crops have not been particularly controversial. In part, this is because virus-resistant
crops were not adopted rapidly and have not been the commercial blockbuster prod¬
ucts that Bt cotton and corn and HR soybeans have been. It is also the case that most
environmental and related organizations see virus-resistant crops as being environ¬
mentally benign, if not somewhat positive.

The fact that during mid- to late 1999 there emerged very rapidly a considerable
controversy over GMOs was in some sense not surprising. This controversy is in many
respects a fairly typical aspect of agricultural research and development in the United
States and elsewhere. Agricultural science is no longer undertaken in a relative vacu¬
um of interest and concern by most farmers, consumers, and citizens groups, as was
the case until about the early 1970s. The dominant institutions of agricultural research
and development — especially the land-grant universities and affiliated system of agri¬
cultural experiment stations, the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department
of Agriculture, and multinational seed-chemical-biotechnology companies — have
quite definite sets of supporters and detractors among the American public. Though
the reasons for this support and dissent vary, the system’s supporters believe that the
research and development trajectories that are under way are either clearly proven or
highly promising and portend a more sound future of expanded productivity and out¬
put, increased food quality, and greater food security. Detractors worry that the agro¬
food system is being shaped according to a corporate agribusiness agenda, that the
new technologies that are being developed are environmentally unsustainable and
detrimental to the future of family farming, and that GMOs are likely to contribute lit¬
tle to global food security. The relative lull in what had become a fairly standard 1980s
and 1990s debate over a range of agro-science issues was more the exception than the

4

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rule. Since that time, however, there has been a steady — if not always newsworthy or
publicly visible — struggle within and between countries over GMOs.

But while it has become commonplace that agricultural research and new agricul¬
tural technologies are subject to debate and controversy, in certain ways the GMO con¬
troversy differs from those of previous decades (such as the controversies over Alar use
on apples, antibiotic use in livestock, and factory methods of livestock farming). First,
the GMO controversy was unique in that it was essentially induced by international trade
and by the WTO’s rules governing trade. European resistance to GMOs was spear¬
headed by the realization by European people, European nations, and the EU that adher¬
ence to WTO rules would result in a widespread presence of GM foods in the European
food supply Thus, the GMO controversy was set in motion by WTO rules and European
reactions to these trade rules. Not surprisingly, concern about GMOs would ultimately
prove to be one of the major factors that catalyzed the ongoing antiglobalization move¬
ment (though GMO concerns now play a very minor role in this movement).

A second distinctive aspect of the GMO controversy is closely related to the
first: this controversy is a global one. Clearly, every Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) country must deal with a range of GMO pol¬
icy issues — regulatory issues, intellectual property issues, agro-food trade policy, and
so on. But the GMO controversy does not end there. The GMO controversy has
become a North-South and international development controversy. As Borlaug and
Ruttan suggest in their articles on biotechnology and the prospects for food-produc¬
tion increases in the developing world, the voices of the contending parties are perhaps
most shrill when they discuss whether GMOs — or biotechnology more generally —
will be positive for the developing world.

Much of the North-South GMO debate has centered on the “golden rice” issue.
GMO proponents tout the potentials of golden rice — a transgenic rice containing one
daffodil gene and two bacterial genes that together code for an increased level of provi¬
tamin A — for its being able to reduce the incidence of night blindness and other dis¬
orders that lead vitamin A deficiency to be associated with elevated rates of mortal¬
ity, especially childhood mortality. GMO opponents, however, suggest that golden rice
is little more than a “rhetorical technology.”2 Golden rice, they say, will probably never

2The term “rhetorical technology” was used by Michael Pollan in his widely circulated March 4, 2001 , New
York Times Magazine article on the golden rice debate entitled “The Great Yellow Hype ”

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5

be deployed in a widespread manner, since it is covered by dozens of patents, many of
which are likely to involve claims on new rice varietal products that will make them
impractical to commercialize. Further, they suggest that golden rice is a wrongheaded
solution to the problem of poverty and homogenization of the food supply. Poor rural
people do not need golden rice as much as they need social arrangements that enable
them to diversify their production systems and to have access to balanced diets con¬
taining sufficient vitamin A. There is also legitimate concern about acceptance of this
odd-looking rice by the world’s poorest.

A final way in which the GMO controversy has been distinctive is in the degree
to which agricultural scientists have been mobilized to support one or the other side
of the issue. A good many molecular biology researchers in the agricultural sciences
have banded together under the organizational banner of the AgBioWorld Web site
(http://www.agbioworld.org/) created by Tuskegee University molecular biology
researcher C. K. Prakash. AgBioWorld has obtained the endorsement of more than
3,000 agricultural scientists around the world and is the leading nonprofit group sup¬
porting the use of biotechnology and molecular biology in agriculture. Importantly,
AgBio World’s home page touts golden rice technology. AgBio World’s mobilization of
agricultural scientists against those who criticize the technology (e.g., Pat Roy
Mooney, who is also mentioned on the home page of this Web site) is one of the largest
and most impressive instances of agricultural researchers banding together to defend
this cluster of new technologies. Note, though, that while the cadre of agricultural sci¬
entists who support GMOs is very substantial and represents the majority of
researchers, a smaller but still impressive-sized group of agricultural scientists and
other biologists (especially ecologists) has expressed significant concerns about GMO
technology. The skeptical minority of agricultural and ecological scientists is con¬
cerned that the methods and regulatory procedures for determining the environmental
risks of these technologies are inadequate, and that these technologies may already be
exhibiting major environmental (as well as socioeconomic) problems such as weed

6

Transactions

resistance to herbicides, genetic drift to wild and weedy relatives, and insect resistance
to Bt. In addition, there are a good many other scientists whose views about GMOs are
ambivalent; they recognize the importance of molecular tools in agricultural research
and see some advantages to GMOs, but they also recognize that the current generation
of GMO products has shortcomings and that public opposition to GMOs carries the
risk of souring the public on agricultural research as a whole. In general, then, there
has never before been a sociotechnical issue in agriculture that has so divided citizens,
agricultural scientists, and countries as this one.

The Conference Papers and the Key Issues Regarding GMOs and GM Foods

The papers in this special issue of Transactions represent a variety of views and touch
on a wide-ranging set of issues relating to GMOs. The first paper, by Dan Charles, is
based on Charles’s research and writing of Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money,
and the Future of Food (Perseus, 2001). In his book, Charles provides an overview of
the development of the agricultural biotechnology industry and of the GMO contro¬
versy. Charles, a former reporter for National Public Radio, is not a biologist, histor¬
ian, or social scientist but rather a storyteller. In his contribution to this volume, he
draws on his upbringing and subsequent family experiences in agriculture to capture
in stories the disconnect that often is found between the thinking and actions of cor¬
porate scientists and their leaders on the one hand and the realities of agriculture on
the other. He also raises the specter of a “double standard” of society’s interest in agri¬
culture. To go along with the question “Where do the realities of GMO crops end and
the myths begin?”, Charles also asks, “Where do the myths of traditional agriculture
end and the realities begin?”

The next two papers illustrate the main dimensions of the GMO debate. One of
these papers, by the renowned plant breeder and geneticist Norman Borlaug and
reprinted from Plant Physiology , is a spirited advocacy of biotechnology in general
and contemporary GMO products in particular. Norman Borlaug was for about two
decades the principal wheat breeder at CIMMYT (the Spanish acronym for
International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat, located outside Mexico
City), and for his efforts in introducing Green Revolution wheat to South Asia he

Volume 89 2001

7

received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. The wheat Green Revolution in India,
Bangladesh, and Pakistan, along with the introduction of Green Revolution rice vari¬
eties from the International Rice Research Institute into the region in the 1970s, is
credited with saving millions of lives of persons who would otherwise have perished
due to the direct and indirect results of malnutrition. Borlaug’s scientific and political
stature has provided him with a unique vantage point and platform from which to
assess the new trajectory of agro-food research and development.

Borlaug stresses that ultimately the focal issues in evaluating the matter of
biotechnology and the future of world agriculture are the relative safety of GM crops
for humans and the environment, and the fact that the future food security status of the
majority of the world — the peasants and urban dwellers of low-income countries —
depend on pursuing biotechnological research with dispatch. Borlaug stresses that GM
crop varieties do not differ in any significant ways from conventional or nontransgenic
ones, and that the new GMOs are as safe as — and in some ways superior to — conven¬
tional varieties on human health and ecological grounds. But Borlaug’s most direct
comments come on the topic of the role that biotechnological research and GMO tech¬
nology will need to play in winning the race against population in the developing
world, and on the related topic of the environmental and other activist groups that he
sees as impeding the pursuit of food production innovations needed by the poor.

In contrast to Borlaug’s confidence in biotechnology and his conviction that the
future well-being of billions of the world’s poorest depend on aggressive development
of these new technologies, Frederick Kirschenmann, director of the Leopold Center
for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, raises a number of pointed con¬
cerns about GMOs and biotechnology. GMO technology, according to Kirschenmann,
is rooted in an ideology of biological determinism, which sees agricultural problems
and their necessary solutions primarily in genetic terms, and in terms of “quick fixes.”
Not only does this ideology tend to lead to de-emphasis on ecological and social risks;
in addition, Kirschenmann argues, biological determinism tends to crowd out promis¬
ing alternatives such as agroecological approaches that employ, rather than suppress,
biological and habitat diversity.

Jeffrey Burkhardt, a professor of agriculture and natural resource ethics in the

8

Transactions

Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida, begins his arti¬
cle by noting that as important and widely discussed as the scientific and legal-politi¬
cal dimensions of GMOs have become, the GMO issue should ultimately be seen as
being an ethical one — whether GMOs and GM foods are ultimately morally and ethi¬
cally acceptable. Burkhardt stresses, however, that the matter of ethical acceptability
of GMOs and GM crops is a complex matter in that there are several extant “ethical
paradigms” — consequentialist ethics, the ethics of autonomy and consent, and the
ethics of virtue and tradition — that bring very different ethical considerations to bear
on GMO issues. In addition, ethical acceptability of GM inputs and food products
depends on the kind of GM product being considered. Various GM products, for
example, involve major variations in environmental, social-distributional, and produc¬
tivity consequences.

Borlaug, Kirschenmann, and Burkhardt all make frequent reference to the issue
of whether GMOs and GM foods are critical to economic development and food secu¬
rity in the low-income countries of the South. Vernon Ruttan, Regents Professor
Emeritus of Economics and Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of
Minnesota and the former head of agricultural economics at the International Rice
Research Institute during the early years of the Green Revolution, addresses this issue
in a provocative and somewhat unexpected way. As amply illustrated by Borlaug ’s arti¬
cle, it has become fairly typical that those persons who were involved in the early
stages of the Green Revolution tend to support GMOs, and biotechnology research
and development more generally, because of biotechnology’s promise in generating
sustained agricultural productivity improvement in developing countries. Ruttan states
how important it will be to achieve new trajectories of productivity and output
improvement in agriculture in the South. He suggests, however, that it remains an open
question as to whether GMO-type technology will have sufficient potential to remove
the current physiological constraints to yield increase that are now becoming manifest
in crop agriculture across the developing world.

International aspects of the GMO food controversy receive two further treat¬
ments from very different perspectives. Lori P. Knowles brings the perspective of one
who has studied contemporary trade negotiations and the related international politi-

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9

cal issues; she places the GMO issues in this context and in particular focuses on their
relationship to the politics of biodiversity issues. Agriculture’s history is one of inter¬
national exchange of biological materials; no country in the world, in the North or the
South, depends for its agriculture primarily on its native species but instead relies on
species introduced over centuries of international trade, and more recently through
intentional collection and distribution of germ plasm. Richard Manning has traveled
the world in recent years reporting on crop improvement research being carried out in
developing countries, from Brazil, Chile, China, and India to Ethiopia, Uganda, and
Zimbabwe. In an article based on his recent book, Foods Frontier: The Next Green
Revolution (North Point Press, 2000), Manning contrasts the debate over GMO tech¬
nologies in the developed countries to the issues of local empowerment of developing-
country citizens to make their own decisions about appropriate technologies as they
strive to address the critical need, for example, for improved pest resistance in a grain
legume, chickpea, which is an important source of protein in the diets of many of the
poor in India.

While the implications of GMOs and GM foods for international development
are among the most potent social and ethical issues in evaluating these new technolo¬
gies, the articles by Bradford Barham, Lydia Zepeda, John Petty, and Carl
Gulbrandsen and Howard Bremer suggest that there are crucial domestic policy
dimensions of GMOs. Barham argues that in some respects GMO technology has sim¬
ilarities to that of rBST in the dairy sector. Both technologies are seemingly scale neu¬
tral because the input product can be purchased in either small or large lots and can be
used on farms ranging from very small to very large. At the same time, available data
on both technologies suggest that they are much more applicable to large-farm opera¬
tions, suggesting the likelihood that GMOs as well as other agricultural biotechnol¬
ogy products will benefit larger farmers over smaller ones.

Zepeda examines the second crucial domestic policy issue relating to GMOs,
that of labeling for international — and possibly domestic— markets. Zepeda suggests
that strong rationales exist for GMO labeling for both domestic and international mar¬
kets. Survey data from American consumers show very strong public support for
labeling, and GMO labeling for international markets would serve to help maintain

10

Transactions

U.S. market access in Europe and Asia and to diffuse trade conflicts between the
United States and its major trading partners. These factors, plus the reality that label¬
ing is already widespread in many other countries, suggest that GMO labeling is the
appropriate direction to follow. The fact that GMO labeling is not actively being con¬
sidered in the United States indicates the range of powerful interests that are opposed
to labeling.

John Petty’s paper illustrates one of the reasons that GM food labeling has its crit¬
ics and opponents. Petty, Executive Director of the Wisconsin Agri-Service Association,
a trade association of the state’s feed, grain, and seed managers and owners, notes that
GM food labeling would entail a number of costs for consumers and farmers as well as
the grain and food-manufacturing industries. In addition to the costs of labeling, Petty
stresses that it will be impossible to ensure that there will be no “adventitious presence”
of GMO grain; tolerances for GMO-free grains will need to be established, and the
smaller the tolerance, the more expense will be incurred in labeling.

A significant subtext in the broader consideration of biotechnologies in agricul¬
ture has been the issue of ownership of intellectual property. In 1980 in its landmark
5-4 Diamond v. Chakrabarty decision, the U.S. Supreme Court made it possible to lay
claim to patents covering living things, including genes. Subsequent interpretations of
this ruling have extended to patenting of crop varieties, particularly in the United
States. A further development in this recent history has been the growth of patent seek¬
ing by public institutions, such as universities and agencies of the U.S. government
itself. Carl Gulbrandsen and Howard Bremer describe some of the history behind
these trends, with particular focus on the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 as subsequently
amended. Their article places the history of Bayh-Dole in the context of the much
longer history of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, one of the pioneering
institutions for protecting intellectual property arising from publicly funded research.

Conclusion

The Wisconsin Academy conference, entitled “Genetically Modified Food: Risks,
Rewards, and Realities,” was extraordinarily exciting and informative. A good many
people came to the conference with fairly definite ideas about genetically engineered

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11

crop varieties and GM foods, but regardless of their previous commitments on the
issues at hand, most of the approximately 250 people in attendance found they learned
a great deal. The articles in this special issue include several of the major addresses
given at the conference, but dozens of other contributions were lively, informative,
and well received.

It is telling that despite the particular points of view expressed in the articles on
GM food issues, three aspects of these issues — ethical responsibilities, the emergence
of new paradigms, and global relevance and impacts — were repeatedly touched on by
the authors. All of our authors see that the GMO/GM foods issue must ultimately be
addressed or resolved on ethical grounds, or on grounds of the public good, even
though the authors have varying views about how ethical and public good considera¬
tions should be weighed. The authors also see the GMO/GM foods issue in paradig¬
matic terms — that the way we debate, address, and resolve these issues will cast the
die for decades to come in terms of how we approach food and agriculture. Finally,
while the U.S. government and its social groups will address GMO/GM foods policy
issues in terms of domestic considerations, these issues are by their nature global.
What we do here in the United States and how we do so will shape the future of food
security across most of the nations of the world. The nature of GMO/GM foods issues
is that we cannot approach them solely in terms of group or national interests, since
the welfare of much of the rest of the world depends on the quality of the judgments
we will make during the first decade of this new millennium, w

Frederick H. Buttel (Guest Editor, Transactions^ is professor and chair, Department
of Rural Sociology, and professor of Environmental Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He is also associate director of the Program on Agricultural
Technology Studies at UW-Madison after having served as its director from 1992-
1998, and an affiliated professor in the Development Studies Program and a senior
fellow at the Center on World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE). Buttel has
had a longstanding interest in environmental sociology, rural sociology, and the
sociology of the environmental and agricultural sciences. He was elected a fellow of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1987, and is
past president of the Rural Sociological Society, past president of the Agriculture,

12

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Food, and Human Values Society, and a former chair of the Section on Environment
and Technology of the American Sociological Association. He is currently president
of the Environment and Society Research Committee (RC 24) of the International
Sociological Association ( 1 998-2002).

Robert M. Goodman (Guest Editor, Transactions^) is a professor in the departments
of Plant Pathology and Environmental Studies, and chair of the Undergraduate
Program in Molecular Biology, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He chairs
the oversight committee for the McKnight Foundation s Collaborative Crop Research
Program and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Centro Internacional de
Meijoramiento de Maizy Trigo (CIMMYT). He serves on the Boards of Directors of
two genomics companies and of the Cornell Research Foundation, and was formerly
executive vice president for research and development at Calgene, Inc . Prior to his
years at Calgene , Goodman was on the faculty of the Department of Plant Pathology
and the International Soybean Program (INTSOY) at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. Goodman was the first to prove the viral cause of a wide¬
spread group of devastating tropical plant diseases and to show that the genomes of
the viruses involved were tiny circular molecules of DNA, which are still among the
smallest known viruses. Since moving to Wisconsin in 1991, Goodman s research has
turned to basic studies on microbial diversity in natural environments. He is current¬
ly writing a book and developing a new course on microbial symbiosis.

Reference

James, C. A. 1998. Global Review of Commercialized Transgenic Crops : 1998. No.

9-98. Ithaca, N.Y.: International Service for the Acquisition of Ag Biotech

Applications.

Volume 89

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13

Telling
the Story

Daniel Charles

Reprinted with permission from Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food
by Daniel Charles (Perseus Publishing, 2001).

I am a storyteller by profession and with conviction. I’m convinced that stories stay
with us longer than any collection of miscellaneous facts. They help us make
some sense of the world. When I began working on a book about genetically engi¬
neered crops, I imagined that storytellers got a special exemption from being drafted
into the battles raging over them. I thought I could stroll unimpeded among the bris¬
tling barricades, and I tried to persuade everyone I met that I posed no threat to any¬
one. I just want to tell this story.

They still didn’t trust me. Below the surface of almost every conversation, evi¬
dent in opaque expressions, in hesitations and vague answers, lurked uncertainty.
Friend or foe? Later, as I struggled to carve a narrative out of masses of information,
I decided that the people I’d been interviewing had been right all along. Storytellers
were not onlookers in this battle; we were, if anything, its grand strategists. The dis¬
pute over genetic engineering involves facts, to be sure. But its parties disagree far
more passionately over the story. They quarrel over the nature of the characters, over
the plot, and over the editing. They also feud over the unknowable: the ending.

Among the anecdotes and tales that occupy our minds, a few are embedded so
deeply that they shape the way we perceive the world. Those stories — sometimes we
call them myths — create cavities within our brains, shaped to accept any similar narra-

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15

tives. Facts and experiences stick with us — they strike a chord, to use a common
phrase — if they slip into these preformed contours. And as it happens, the tale of genet¬
ically engineered plants fits some of the most cherished spaces that our minds possess.

It is, for instance, a tale of progress, of discovery and creativity, solving prob¬
lems and expanding the boundaries of human possibility. It follows outlines carved out
by the Wright brothers, and Alexander Graham Bell, and Jonas Salk with his vaccine
for polio. It’s Gregor Mendel, planting peas in the garden of his monastery more than
a century ago and discovering the patterns of human inheritance. These stories form
part of the professional ideology of scientists, each of whom dreams of finding his or
her role in this grand tale. And it is a powerful myth that shapes many people’s under¬
standing of genetically engineered food. (When I interviewed people recently at
Cereon, Monsanto’s genomics subsidiary, I met them in a small room with a revealing
name: the Copernicus Room.)

Others think of the story of Bill Gates, or the Internet. It’s a tale of new tech¬
nology that will destroy old businesses and build new ones; it’s also a dream of great
wealth. I was talking to a financial analyst the other day about agricultural biotech¬
nology. He said, “It’s like — and this sound crazy- — but it’s like if you got plunked down
fifty years ago in the orchards of places like Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto.” This, of
course, is the place known today as Silicon Valley.

A countervailing myth flows like an undertow beneath the triumphal story of
progress, undermining it. It’s the story of unpredictable, threatening technology
unleashed upon an unsuspecting world through human folly: Pandora opening her box;
Rachel Carson’s account of DDT in Silent Spring; nuclear power and Chernobyl. In
the words of a passionate opponent of biotechnology in New Zealand: “Today, the
smug status of genetic engineering eerily recalls that period in the early 1960s when
nuclear reactors were ‘commercialized’ on the basis of enthusiasts’ claims of under¬
standing and control. . . . Alongside airy dismissals of the dangers, the promised ben¬
efits are wildly exaggerated.”

Several layers deeper, almost buried in our collective unconscious, lie other sto¬
ries, ancient ones from the Mediterranean cradle of civilization, warning against the
temptation to overstep humanity’s rightful bounds. In the Garden of Eden, the serpent

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tempts Eve: You can eat the fruit of this tree. You will be like God. Just a few pages
further on, God contemplates humanity’s attempts to build a tower that will reach to
heaven, and confounds its hubris in a confusion of languages. Centuries later, Mary
Shelley repeats the warning in her story of Dr. Frankenstein and his fateful, doomed
monster. Echoes of these tales resound in the anti-biotechnology proclamation of
Charles, Prince of Wales, from the summer of 1998: “This kind of genetic modifica¬
tion takes mankind into realms that belong to God, and to God alone.”

It’s pointless to argue over which one of these versions of the agricultural
biotechnology story is true. They all hold some truth. They all are, in the same meas¬
ure, false, because they aren’t really about agricultural biotechnology at all. They are,
literally, preconceptions. They allow us to recognize important things about the world,
but they also blind us to reality, when that reality doesn’t fit such preset patterns.

I’d like to tell a few stories as well. These aren’t grand, mythic stories like the
ones I just mentioned. Those you might call stories with a capital S. These are small
stories, the kind you might tell about your slightly crazy uncle. The good thing about
them is that they really are about genetically engineered food, as opposed to something
else. And they do, I think, offer some food for thought. So we’ll just see if these sto¬
ries are powerful enough to stick in your minds.

Twenty years ago a man named David Padwa went to see the famous financier
George Soros. Padwa was one of the earliest visionaries of agricultural biotechnology.
He was a precocious child of New York City; he’d made a fortune in the computer
business, then he’d wandered the world and ended up in Santa Fe. He’d also acquired
some small seed companies. And when he heard about the first breakthroughs in gene
splicing, a light bulb turned on in his head. My seeds, he said to himself, are really
packages of DNA. We now can manipulate that DNA, create new genetic packages,
and sell them for lots of money.

This was 1981; biotechnology was hot in the investment community. And Padwa
tried to tap some of that money. He went to see Soros and presented his vision for a
revolution in agriculture.

When Padwa was done, Soros said, “I’m not going to give you any money. Two
reasons. I don’t like businesses where you only get to sell your product once a year,

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and I don’t like businesses in which anything you could possibly do can be over¬
whelmed by the weather.”

When David Padwa told me this story he laughed and said, “Two very good rea¬
sons!” The point of this story is: Agriculture is different. Selling genetically altered
plants is different from selling chemicals, and it’s different from selling pharmaceuti¬
cals. And from the point of view of biotech companies, agriculture is different in
extremely annoying ways.

I’ll quote one former executive from the company Calgene: “I love agricultural
biotechnology . . . except for the fact that it involves agriculture.” This, in fact, could
be the epitaph on Calgene ’s tomb.

Some of you may remember Calgene. In the early 1990s, it was the first com¬
pany to sell a genetically engineered plant: the Flavr Savr™ tomato. Calgene ’s scien¬
tists had figured out how to shut down a particular gene within the plant. As a result,
the tomato didn’t go soft as fast as a conventional tomato; it had a longer shelf life.
And Calgene told the world that this genetic alteration was so powerful, it would allow
the company to take over a big chunk of the fresh tomato business. They were going
to sell a billion dollars’ worth of tomatoes each year.

Then Calgene ran into agriculture. The first problem was that somehow they
didn’t quite get around to breeding their new gene into all the different varieties of
tomatoes that might grow well in different parts of California, Florida, and Mexico.
When they finally got some tomato breeders working on the problem, there was
almost no time left.

This is my favorite part of the story. One of the company’s young executives
went to see the tomato breeder and told her that she needed to have the breeding done
in a year. The breeder was doing her work as fast as she possibly could, but a tomato
plant will grow only so fast. “It’s not possible,” she said.

“But you’ve got to said the man from the business side of the company.
“Listen! Money is no object! Anything you need to speed it up, we can get it!”

The plant breeder, getting exasperated, replied, “It can’t be done! There are bio¬
logical limits!”

The division of Calgene that was producing the Flavr Savr™ was seriously de-

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voted to new ideas in management. People there talked a lot about teamwork and
communication and synergy. “Come on!” said the man from Calgene to the breeder.
“Think outside the box!”

To make a short story even shorter, the tomato flopped in the field. Yields were
terrible. Disease claimed much of the crop in Florida. And many of the tomatoes
weren’t hard enough to withstand shipping and handling; they turned into tomato
puree en route.

With a bit of time, Calgene managed to iron out many of those problems, but
they still were losing money. And then came the final, fatal insult. Calgene ’s products
were buried in a flood of tomatoes from Mexico — a product of traditional breeding
called the Long Shelf Life tomato. It was a beautifully ripe-looking, red, hard tomato;
it didn’t taste that great, but at least visually, it delivered what Calgene had promised.
Tomato prices fell through the floor, and Calgene ’s project was finally dead. It was a
triumph of old technology over new technology.

A few years later, Monsanto came along, with a couple of genes that really did
make a big enough difference that farmers would be willing to pay extra for them:
Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), and Roundup resistance genes. Monsanto’s leaders really
did believe the Silicon Valley story. Their company, they said, would be the Microsoft
of agriculture. It would deliver the software, in this case the genes. It would license
those genes to seed companies, which owned the hardware — the seed.

But once again, agriculture is different. Monsanto ran into the complexity of the
seed business. Seed lives in this twilight zone of capitalism — somewhere between a
real product, like a car, and a free gift of nature, like the air. (Hybrid corn is a special
case: it’s more like a product, because it’s complicated to create hybrid seed, and farm¬
ers can’t usually do that on their own.) Companies in the soybean or wheat seed busi¬
ness were selling something that they couldn’t really control. Farmers could take part
of the harvest and use it for seed the next year. Other seed companies could take any
new variety and start using it as breeding material. As a result, seed companies had
never been able to charge a huge amount for an improved product. But Monsanto
wanted huge amounts of money for its genes — huge amounts at least by the standards
of the seed industry.

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This led to two things: Monsanto came up with ways to impose new rules on the
seed trade; it used patents and contracts to ban the saving of seed and to set the prices that
farmers were charged for the use of Monsanto’s genes. And as time went on, Monsanto
became convinced that the only way to earn what it wanted was to own substantial chunks
of the seed industry. So Monsanto went out and spent $8 billion to buy seed companies.
(One of the acquisitions was blocked, so the final total was closer to $5 billion.)

It was a more fateful decision, I think, than anyone inside the company realized
at the time. Some risks the company’s executives had considered. They understood the
financial impact. They thought about potential antitrust problems. But they did not
comprehend the emotional impact of those decisions on a community of people who
object to turning biology into commodities.

Seeds are different. They are products, but they represent the bounty of the earth
and the mysterious nature of life. For twenty years, a committed band of activists had
been predicting that patents on life would bring forth monopolists of life. Monsanto,
because of the manner in which it had entered the seed business, had become exactly
the corporate monster that these activists had long predicted. And one of the most
gifted of these activists, Pat Mooney, stood at a pay phone on a chilly streetcorner in
Victoria, British Columbia, listening to one of his colleagues describe a new technol¬
ogy that would render the offspring of a harvest sterile. It was a biological tool that
would prevent the saving and replanting of a farmer’s harvest. Monsanto was about to
buy the seed company that owned this technology. And Pat Mooney said, “Let’s call it
Terminator!” The Terminator gene, as millions of people around the world came to call
it, symbolized everything that people felt was wrong and perverse about biotechnol¬
ogy in agriculture.

There is a moral to these stories. It’s the second point I’m trying to make. People
who are trying to introduce products of biotechnology into agriculture would do well
to remember some old-fashioned virtues: modesty and patience. Modesty in one’s
claims regarding the technology, and patience when it comes to trying to extract prof¬
its from it. Calgene couldn’t afford to be modest and patient with its tomato and was
punished by the market. Monsanto wasn’t willing to be modest and patient and reaped
a whirlwind of public opposition. If a company can’t afford to be modest and patient

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in this business, well, maybe it shouldn’t be in the business in the first place.

The tale of agricultural biotechnology is one of new wine in old wineskins, of
new technology emerging within a traditional industry unwilling to change its prac¬
tices. It is a story of double standards, as the public demanded strict assurances from
genetic engineering while taking a relatively laissez-faire approach to traditional agri¬
culture. Indeed, if the standards governing genetic engineering were applied to the rest
of agriculture, much food production would have to be shut down.

Forget chemical factories and toxic waste dumps — the single most environmen¬
tally destructive human activity on the planet is agriculture. Clearing and plowing land
in order to grow crops (even following organic methods) amounts to an ecological dis¬
aster visited annually upon at least a quarter of the planet’s land surface.

Nor are the products of traditional agriculture uniformly safe to eat. Food from
some plants, such as peanuts, causes allergic reactions among hundreds of thousands
of people. Other grains, including wheat and corn, contain small amounts of ex¬
tremely toxic and carcinogenic compounds that result from certain plant diseases. Yet
the public, for the most part, smiles indulgently. As the hapless George Banks says of
fox hunting in Mary Poppins , “Well, I don’t mind that so much. It’s tradition!”

Except for the use of technology invented since World War II — primarily pesti¬
cides — agriculture is largely unregulated. Farmers can plant what they want on their
land. They can plow right up to the edges of creeks, causing soil erosion; they can
overdose their land with fertilizer or agricultural chemicals, placing nearby streams or
groundwater at risk. They can plant the same crops year after year, depleting the soil
of nutrients and risking infestations of destructive pests or epidemics of plant disease.
Farmers shouldn ’t do any of this; it’s not in their economic self-interest, and most
don’t. But none of it is illegal.

Plant breeders, for their part, are free to introduce genes into crops from any of
the plant’s closely related species without worrying about reactions from either gov¬
ernment regulators or consumers. Some years ago, a soybean breeder located wild rel¬
atives of the soybean in Australia that appeared to be immune to one of the major pests
afflicting soybeans in the United States, a worm called the cyst nematode. He took
pollen from these plants, fertilized conventional soybeans, and managed to recover

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fertile offspring of this union that also were immune to the pest. The trait was then
bred into standard soybean varieties, ready for planting by any American farmer. These
varieties were products of the laboratory, not of nature. No one, in this case, even
knows what genes make the plant immune to the cyst nematode, or why. No one needs
to know. They are subject to no regulatory review.

Neither are so-called STS soybeans, which can tolerate sprays of an herbicide
called Synchrony. These plants were created by soaking soybeans in chemicals, induc¬
ing random mutations in soybean DNA. Because the mutation was created within the
cell, and not spliced in from an outside source, it faced no government review.

The supporters of biotechnology speak constantly and with great irritation about
the higher standards applied to genetically engineered crops. It would be more logical
(and therefore more correct, they believe) to apply the same standard across all crops.

But which standard? Consider the unspeakable: that all of agriculture deserves
the same scrutiny applied to genetically engineered crops. Perhaps, when plant breed¬
ers create STS soybeans, or a variety of wheat that resists the predations of the Hessian
fly, they shouldn’t simply be allowed to start selling such seeds to farmers. Perhaps
they should be required to find out what genes produce this trait and whether these
varieties might cause any unwanted effects either to the ecosystem or to human health.

If farmers are required to limit their plantings of Bt corn or cotton for the good
of the ecosystem (as indeed they should be), why not go further? Why not compel (or
induce, through cash incentives) farmers to do other things that would produce even
more substantial environmental benefits, such as allow more of their land to revert to
grasslands or wooded areas?

Plant breeders, and most farmers, will be outraged at such suggestions. They
will point out that the burden of such initiatives will fall most heavily on the smallest
seed companies and on farmers already teetering on the edge of financial oblivion.
Others will point out that efforts to subsidize better (but less efficient) agricultural
practices might be incompatible with free trade in agricultural products.

That’s all true. Those are good reasons for proceeding cautiously and patiently,
alert to the social and economic consequences of our actions. But they aren’t reasons
for turning a blind eye toward the environmental effects of traditional agriculture.

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Finally, there is the most pernicious aspect of the double standard affecting agri¬
culture and biotechnology: the double standard of knowledge and passion. This dou¬
ble standard needs to be abolished first. If genetic engineering is fascinating, or even
ominous, then plowing, sowing, reaping, or breeding cannot be mundane.

So let genetic engineering be a window into things that ultimately are more
important. Let us begin to learn where the myth of agriculture ends and reality begins.
Let’s try to understand why farmers do what they do to so much of Earth’s surface.
And if we care about the health of the planet, particularly the part of it devoted to agri¬
culture, perhaps we’ll be willing to pay for what we value, either through direct pur¬
chases of food or through taxes. In the best of worlds, we might be able to create forms
of agriculture that are good for all of the world’s inhabitants, w

Daniel Charles is author of the book, Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and
the Future of Food (Perseus Publishing, 2001), from which this chapter was reprinted.
He has been a reporter for National Public Radio and New Scientist magazine.

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Ending World
Hunger: The Promise
of Biotechnology
and the Threat of
Antiscience Zealotry

Norman E. Borlaug

Reprinted with permission from Plant Physiology 124:487-90 (October 2000). Copyright © 2000, ASPB.

During the twentieth century, conventional breeding produced a vast number
of varieties and hybrids that contributed immensely to higher grain yield,
stability of harvests, and farm income. Despite the successes of the Green
Revolution, the battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably
poor people is far from won. Mushrooming populations, changing demographics, and
inadequate poverty-intervention programs have eroded many of the gains of the Green
Revolution. This is not to say that the Green Revolution is over. Increases in crop man¬
agement productivity can be made all along the line: in tillage, water use, fertilization,
weed and pest control, and harvesting. However, for the genetic improvement of food
crops to continue at a pace sufficient to meet the needs of the 8.3 billion people pro¬
jected to be on this planet at the end of the quarter century, both conventional tech¬
nology and biotechnology are needed.

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25

What Can We Expect from Biotechnology?

The majority of agricultural scientists, including myself, anticipate great benefits from
biotechnology in the coming decades to help meet our future needs for food and fiber.
The commercial adoption by farmers of transgenic crops has been one of the most
rapid cases of technology diffusion in the history of agriculture. Between 1996 and
1999, the area planted commercially with transgenic crops has increased from 1.7 to
39.9 million hectares (James 1999). In the last twenty years, biotechnology has devel¬
oped invaluable new scientific methodologies and products, which need active finan¬
cial and organizational support to bring them to fruition. So far, biotechnology has had
the greatest impact in medicine and public health. However, a number of fascinating
developments are approaching commercial applications in agriculture.

Transgenic varieties and hybrids of cotton, maize, and potatoes, containing
genes from Bacillus thuringiensis that effectively control a number of serious insect
pests, are now being successfully introduced commercially in the United States. The
use of such varieties will greatly reduce the need for insecticides. Considerable
progress also has been made in the development of transgenic plants of cotton, maize,
oilseed rape, soybeans, sugar beet, and wheat, with tolerance to a number of herbi¬
cides. The development of these plants could lead to a reduction in overall herbicide
use through more specific interventions and dosages. Not only will this development
lower production costs, but it also has important environmental advantages.

Good progress has been made in developing cereal varieties with greater toler¬
ance for soil alkalinity, free aluminum, and iron toxicities. These varieties will help to
ameliorate the soil degradation problems that have developed in many existing irriga¬
tion systems. These varieties will also allow agriculture to succeed in acidic soil areas,
thus adding more arable land to the global production base. Greater tolerance of abi¬
otic extremes, such as drought, heat, and cold, will benefit irrigated areas in several
ways. We will be able to achieve more crop per drop by designing plants with reduced
water requirements and adopting between-crop/water-management systems.
Recombinant DNA techniques can speed up the development process.

There are also hopeful signs that we will be able to improve fertilizer-use effi¬
ciency by genetically engineering wheat and other crops to have high levels of Glu

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(glutamine) dehydrogenase. Transgenic wheats with high Glu dehydrogenase, for
example, yielded up to 29 percent more crop with the same amount of fertilizer than
did the normal crop (Smil 1999).

Transgenic plants that can control viral and fungal diseases are not nearly as
developed. Nevertheless, there are some promising examples of specific virus coat
genes in transgenic varieties of potatoes and rice that confer considerable protection.
Other promising genes for disease resistance are being incorporated into other crop
species through transgenic manipulations.

I would like to share one dream that I hope scientists will achieve in the not-too-
distant future. Rice is the only cereal that has immunity to the Puccinia sp. of rust.
Imagine the benefits if the genes for rust immunity in rice could be transferred into
wheat, barley, oats, maize, millet, and sorghum. The world could finally be free of the
scourge of the rusts, which have led to so many famines over human history.

The power of genetic engineering to improve the nutritional quality of our food
crop species is also immense. Scientists have long had an interest in improving maize
protein quality. More than seventy years ago, researchers determined the importance of
certain amino acids for nutrition. More than fifty years ago, scientists began a search
for a maize kernel that had higher levels of Lys (lysine) and Trp (tryptophan), two
essential amino acids that are normally deficient in maize. Thirty-six years ago, scien¬
tists at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Ind.) discovered a floury maize grain from
the South American Andean highlands carrying the opaque-2 gene that had much higher
levels of Lys and Trp. But as is all too often the case in plant breeding, a highly desir¬
able trait turned out to be closely associated with several undesirable ones. The dull,
chalky, soft opaque-2 maize kernels yielded 15 to 20 percent less grain weight than nor¬
mal maize grain. However, scientists from the International Maize and Wheat
Improvement Center (near Mexico City) who were working with opaque-2 maize
observed little islands of translucent starch in some opaque-2 endosperms. Using con¬
ventional breeding methodologies supported by rapid chemical analysis of large num¬
bers of samples, the scientists were able to slowly accumulate modifier genes to con¬
vert the original soft opaque-2 endosperm into vitreous, hard-endosperm types. This
conversion took nearly twenty years. Had genetic engineering techniques been available

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then, the genes that controlled high Lys and Trp could have been inserted into high-
yielding hard-endosperm phenotypes. Thus, through the use of genetic engineering
tools, instead of a thirty-five-year gestation period, quality protein maize could have
been available to improve human and animal nutrition twenty years earlier. This is the
power of the new science.

Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich) and the
International Rice Research Institute (Los Banos, the Philippines) have recently suc¬
ceeded in transferring genes into “golden rice” to increase the quantities of vitamin A,
iron, and other micronutrients. This work could eventually have profound impact for
millions of people with deficiencies of vitamin A and iron, causes of blindness and
anemia, respectively.

Because most of the genetic engineering research is being done by the private
sector, which patents its inventions, agricultural policy makers must face a potentially
serious problem. How will these resource-poor farmers of the world be able to gain
access to the products of biotechnology research? How long, and under what terms,
should patents be granted for bioengineered products? Furthermore, the high cost of
biotechnology research is leading to a rapid consolidation in the ownership of agricul¬
tural life science companies. Is this consolidation desirable? These issues are matters
for serious consideration by national, regional, and global governmental organizations.

National governments need to be prepared to work with and benefit from the
new breakthroughs in biotechnology. First and foremost, governments must establish
regulatory frameworks to guide the testing and use of genetically modified crops.
These rules and regulations should be reasonable in terms of risk aversion and imple¬
mentation costs. Science must not be hobbled by excessively restrictive regulations.
Because much of the biotechnology research is under way in the private sector, the
issue of intellectual property rights must be addressed and accorded adequate safe¬
guards by national governments.

Standing Up to the Antiscience Crowd

The world has or will soon have the agricultural technology available to feed the 8.3
billion people anticipated in the next quarter of a century. The more pertinent question

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today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use that technology.
Extremists in the environmental movement, largely from rich nations or the privileged
strata of society in poor nations, seem to be doing everything they can to stop scien¬
tific progress in its tracks. It is sad that some scientists, many of whom should or do
know better, have also jumped on the extremist environmental bandwagon in search of
research funds. When scientists align themselves with antiscience political movements
or lend their names to unscientific propositions, what are we to think? Is it any won¬
der that science is losing its constituency? We must be on guard against politically
opportunistic pseudoscientists like the late Trofim D. Lysenko, whose bizarre ideas
and vicious persecution of his detractors contributed greatly to the collapse of the for¬
mer USSR.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to the environmental movement that has taken
place over the past forty years. This movement has led to legislation to improve air and
water quality, protect wildlife, control the disposal of toxic wastes, protect the soils,
and reduce the loss of biodiversity. It is ironic, therefore, that the platform of the
antibiotechnology extremists, if it were to be adopted, would have grievous conse¬
quences for both the environment and humanity. I often ask the critics of modern agri¬
cultural technology: What would the world have been like without the technological
advances that have occurred? For those who profess a concern for protecting the envi¬
ronment, consider the positive impact resulting from the application of science-based
technology. Had 1961 average world cereal yields (1,531 kilograms per hectare) still
prevailed, nearly 850 million hectares of additional land of the same quality would
have been needed to equal the 1999 cereal harvest (2.06 billion gross metric tons). It
is obvious that such a surplus of land was not available, and certainly not in populous
Asia. Moreover, even if it were available, think of the soil erosion and the loss of
forests, grasslands, and wildlife that would have resulted had we tried to produce these
larger harvests with the older, low-input technology! Nevertheless, the antibiotechnol¬
ogy zealots continue to wage their campaigns of propaganda and vandalism.

One particularly egregious example of antibiotechnology propaganda came to
my attention during a recent field tour to Africa. An article in the Independent news¬
paper from London, entitled “America Finds Ready Market for Genetically Modified

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Food: The Hungry” (Walsh 2000), is accompanied by a ghastly photograph depicting
a man near death from starvation, lying next to food sacks. The caption below reads,
“Sudanese man collapsing as he waits for food from the UN World Food Program.”

The article’s author, Declan Walsh, writing from Nairobi, implies that there is a
conspiracy between the U.S. government and the World Food Program (WFP) to dump
unsafe, genetically modified American crops into the one remaining unquestioning
market: emergency aid for the world’s starving and displaced. I, for one, take heartfelt
umbrage against this insult to the WFP, whose workers and collaborators helped feed
86 million people in eighty-two countries in 1999. The employees of the WFP are
among the world’s unsung heroes, who struggle against the clock and under exceed¬
ingly difficult conditions to save people from famine. Their achievements, dedication,
and bravery deserve our highest respect and praise.

In his article, Walsh quotes several critics of the use of genetically modified food
in Africa. Elfrieda Pschorn-Strauss, from the South African organization Biowatch,
says, “The US does not need to grow nor donate genetically modified crops. To donate
untested food and seed to Africa is not an act of kindness but an attempt to lure Africa
into further dependence on foreign aid.” Dr. Tewolde Gebre Egziabher of Ethiopia
states, “Countries in the grip of a crisis are unlikely to have leverage to say, ‘This crop
is contaminated; we’re not taking it.’ They should not be faced with a dilemma
between allowing a million people to starve to death and allowing their genetic pool
to be polluted.” Neither of these individuals offers any credible scientific evidence to
back their false assertions concerning the safety of genetically modified foods. The
WFP accepts only food donations that fully meet the safety standards in the donor
country. In the United States, genetically modified foods are judged to be safe by the
Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental
Protection Agency and thus they are acceptable to the WFP. That the EU has placed a
two-year moratorium on genetically modified imports says little per se about food
safety, but rather it says more about consumer concerns, largely the result of unsub¬
stantiated scare mongering done by opponents of genetic engineering.

Let’s consider the underlying thrust of Walsh’s article that genetically modified
food is unnatural and unsafe. Genetically modified organisms and genetically modi-

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fied foods are imprecise terms that refer to the use of transgenic crops (i.e., those
grown from seeds that contain the genes of different species). The fact is that genetic
modification started long before humankind began altering crops by artificial selec¬
tion. Mother Nature did it, and often in a big way. For example, the wheat groups we
rely on for much of our food supply are the result of unusual (but natural) crosses
between different species of grasses. Today’s bread wheat is the result of the hybridiza¬
tion of three different plant genomes, each containing a set of seven chromosomes,
and thus could easily be classified as transgenic. Maize is another crop that is the
product of transgenic hybridization (probably of teosinte and Tripsacum). Neolithic
humans domesticated virtually all of our food and livestock species over a relatively
short period 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. Several hundred generations of farmer
descendents were subsequently responsible for making enormous genetic modifica¬
tions in all of our major crop and animal species. To see how far the evolutionary
changes have come, one needs only to look at the 5,000-year-old fossilized corn cobs
found in the caves of Tehuacan in Mexico, which are about one-tenth the size of mod¬
ern maize varieties. Thanks to the development of science over the past 150 years, we
now have the insights into plant genetics and breeding to do purposefully what Mother
Nature did herself in the past by chance.

Genetic modification of crops is not some kind of witchcraft; rather, it is the pro¬
gressive harnessing of the forces of nature to the benefit of feeding the human race. The
genetic engineering of plants at the molecular level is just another step in humankind’s
deepening scientific journey into living genomes. Genetic engineering is not a replace¬
ment of conventional breeding but rather a complementary research tool to identify
desirable genes from remotely related taxonomic groups and transfer these genes more
quickly and precisely into high-yield, high-quality crop varieties. To date, there has
been no credible scientific evidence to suggest that the ingestion of transgenic products
is injurious to human health or the environment. Scientists have debated the possible
benefits of transgenic products versus the risks society is willing to take. Certainly, zero
risk is unrealistic and probably unattainable. Scientific advances always involve some
risk that unintended outcomes could occur. So far, the most prestigious national acad¬
emies of science, and now even the Vatican, have come out in support of genetic engi-

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neering to improve the quantity, quality, and availability of food supplies. The more
important matters of concern by civil societies should be equity issues related to gen¬
etic ownership, control, and access to transgenic agricultural products.

One of the great challenges facing society in the twenty-first century will be a
renewal and broadening of scientific education at all age levels that keeps pace with
the times. Nowhere is it more important for knowledge to confront fear born of igno¬
rance than in the production of food, still the basic human activity. In particular, we
need to close the biological science knowledge gap in the affluent societies now thor¬
oughly urban and removed from any tangible relationship to the land. The needless
confrontation of consumers against the use of transgenic crop technology in Europe
and elsewhere might have been avoided had more people received a better education
about genetic diversity and variation. Privileged societies have the luxury of adopting
a very low risk position on the genetically modified crop issue, even if this action later
turns out to be unnecessary. But the vast majority of humankind, including the hungry
victims of wars, natural disasters, and economic crises who are served by the WFP,
does not have such a luxury. I agree with Mr. Walsh when he speculates that esoteric
arguments about the genetic makeup of a bag of grain mean little to those for whom
food aid is a matter of life or death. He should take this thought more deeply to heart.

We cannot turn back the clock on agriculture and use only methods that were
developed to feed a much smaller population. It took some 10,000 years to expand food
production to the current level of about five billion tons per year. By 2025, we will have
to nearly double current production again. This increase cannot be accomplished unless
farmers across the world have access to current high-yielding crop production methods
as well as new biotechnological breakthroughs that can increase the yields, depend¬
ability, and nutritional quality of our basic food crops. We need to bring common sense
into the debate on agricultural science and technology, and the sooner the better!

Conclusion

Thirty years ago, in my acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, I said that the
Green Revolution had won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger, which if
fully implemented could provide sufficient food for humankind through the end of the

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twentieth century. But I warned that unless the frightening power of human reproduc¬
tion was curbed, the success of the Green Revolution would be only ephemeral.

I now say that the world has the technology that is either available or well advanced
in the research pipeline to feed a population of ten billion people. The more pertinent ques¬
tion today is: Will farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology?

Extreme environmental elitists seem to be doing everything they can to derail
scientific progress. Small, well-financed, vociferous, and antiscience groups are
threatening the development and application of new technology, whether it is devel¬
oped from biotechnology or more conventional methods of agricultural science.

I agree fully with a petition written by Professor C. S. Prakash of Tuskegee
University, and now signed by several thousand scientists worldwide, in support of agri¬
cultural biotechnology, which states that no food products, whether produced with recom¬
binant DNA techniques or more traditional methods, are totally without risk. The risks
posed by foods are a function of the biological characteristics of those foods and the spe¬
cific genes that have been used, not of the processes employed in their development.

The affluent nations can afford to adopt elitist positions and pay more for food
produced by the so-called natural methods; the one billion chronically poor and hun¬
gry people of this world cannot. New technology will be their salvation, freeing them
from obsolete, low-yielding, and more costly production technology.

Most certainly, agricultural scientists and leaders have a moral obligation to warn
the political, educational, and religious leaders about the magnitude and seriousness of
the arable land, food, and population problems that lie ahead, even with breakthroughs
in biotechnology. If we fail to do so, then we will be negligent in our duty and inad¬
vertently may be contributing to the pending chaos of incalculable millions of deaths
by starvation. But we must also speak unequivocally and convincingly to policy mak¬
ers that global food insecurity will not disappear without new technol-ogy; to ignore
this reality will make future solutions all the more difficult to achieve, w1

Norman E. Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for launching the
“Green Revolution f which helped Pakistan, India, and a number of other countries

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improve their food production , and for his lifelong work in helping feed the hungry.
Borlaug, who grew up on his family s farm in rural Iowa and attended a one-room
schoolhouse, was awarded his doctorate in plant pathology in 1942 by the
University of Minnesota. He served at the Rockefeller Foundation as the scientist in
charge of wheat improvement under the Cooperative Mexican Agricultural Program.
With the establishment of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center
(CIMMYT) in Mexico in 1964, he assumed leadership of the Wheat Program, a posi¬
tion he held until his official retirement in 1979. He now leads the Sasakawa-Global
2000 agriculture program (SG 2000), a joint venture between the Sasakawa Africa
Association and The Carter Centers Global 2000 program. SG 2000 works with
more than 600,000 small-scale farmers in eleven sub-Saharan African countries. For
more information, see the Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation at
www.normanborlaug.org

References

James, C. 1999. Global Review of Commercialized Transgenic Crops: 1999.

International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotechnology Applications
Briefs No. 12. Preview. Ithaca, N.Y.: International Service for the
Acquisition of Agri-biotechnology Applications.

Smil, V 1999. “Long-Range Perspectives on Inorganic Fertilizers in Global

Agriculture.” Travis P. Hignett Memorial Lecture, International Fertilizer
Development Center, Muscle Shoals, Ala.

Walsh, D. 2000. “America Finds Ready Market for Genetically Modified Food: The
Hungry.” Independent [London], March 30.

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Questioning
Biotechnology's
Claims and
Imagining
Alternatives

Frederick Kirschenmann

. . .[humans] are only fellow-voyagers with other
creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This . . . should
have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-
creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder
over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.

— Aldo Leopold

The controversy surrounding the use of transgenic technology appears to be
based largely on different assessments of the merits of that technology.
Proponents argue that genetic manipulation will help us feed the world, cure
diseases, and solve many other problems facing the human species. Opponents argue
that the projected benefits are overblown and that the technology poses many risks that
have not been adequately assessed.

But these quarrels inevitably lead us into circular arguments. We won’t know ,for
sure , whether genetic engineering will feed the world until we try it, and if it doesn’t,
it will be too late — developing other options for enabling the world to feed itself will

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35

have been ignored. We won’t know,ybr sure , if transgenic organisms will create eco¬
logical havoc until we release them, and if they do, it will be too late — we won’t be
able to put the genie back into the bottle. In the meantime, we continue to limit our
debate to our assessment of the technology’s potential risks or benefits, relying on our
personal or collective judgments about the technology’s efficacy or on our biases
about the technology’s capabilities.

It seems more fruitful to look at some of the underlying assumptions that lead
us to our conclusions about the technology’s promises and problems. If the assump¬
tions are faulty, a strong likelihood exists that the conclusions may be unreliable as
well. The fact that many of these assumptions are found wanting leads us to the sec¬
ond topic of this paper: an examination of alternatives to biotechnology.

Prevailing Ideology

The first questions we might consider are these: What is the ideology that informs
modern science, and is that ideology sound? Richard Lewontin, the prominent geneti¬
cist at Harvard University, argues persuasively that our modern optimism regarding
the ability to solve many of our social, medical, and agricultural problems with trans¬
genic technologies is based on an ideology that he calls “biological determinism.” This
is an ideology that, he says,

. . . makes the atom or individual the causal source of all the properties of
larger collections. It prescribes a way of studying the world, which is to cut
it up into the individual bits. It breaks the world down into independent
autonomous domains, the internal and the external. Causes are either inter¬
nal or external, and there is no mutual dependency between them.

For biology, this world-view has resulted in a particular picture of
organisms and their total life activity. Living beings are seen as being
determined by internal factors, the genes. (Lewontin 1991, 13)

But Lewontin (1991) argues that this ideology completely ignores the actual rela¬
tionship that exists between organisms and their environments. He suggests that there are

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actually four rules of“the real relationship between organisms and their environment” (87):

1. “Environments do not exist in the absence of organisms, but are constructed by

them out of bits and pieces of the external world” (87).

2. “The environment of organisms is constantly being remade during the life of those

living beings” (87).

3. “Fluctuations in the world matter only as organisms transform them” (90).

4. “The very physical nature of the environment as it is relevant to organisms is deter¬

mined by the organisms themselves” (91).

Lewontin’s rules of biology remind us that organisms are not the isolated enti¬
ties that we assume they are when we fantasize about feeding the world by manipu¬
lating a few genes in a few plants or animals, or healing debilitating diseases by adjust¬
ing a few defective genes. Each individual within a species is a “unique consequence
of both genes and the developmental environment in a constant interaction” (Lewontin
1991, 26). Such interactions remind us that all problems and threats to our well-being
are finally a combination of molecular specification and the unique interactions
among genes, organisms, and environment. “It is a fundamental principle of develop¬
mental genetics,” writes Lewontin, “that every organism is the outcome of a unique
interaction between genes and environmental sequences modulated by random
chances of cell growth and division, and that all these together finally produce an
organism. Moreover, an organism changes throughout its life” (27).

The notion that gene technology can, by itself, solve problems when those prob¬
lems are, at least in part, derived from social and environmental interactions illustrates
a faith in technological fixes that is not corroborated by experience. For example, it
has always been something of a mystery to me how we can claim that we will be able
to “feed the world” of expanding future populations by producing more food with
biotechnology when we are presently failing to feed more than 800 million malnour¬
ished people in an era of overproduction (Sen, 1981, 1984; Leisinger, 2000).

Molecular World as Ecosystem

A second underlying question we might ask is this: Is it possible to do “just one thing”

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at the molecular level? Ecologists have demonstrated that it is not possible to do “just
one thing” in the ecosystems in which we live. Even when we have made good-faith
efforts to improve the resilience of our ecological homes, we have often miscal¬
culated the extent to which, and the manner in which, species within ecosystems are
interdependent.

Ecologist Yvonne Baskin provides a chilling example. In an effort to boost the
numbers of salmon that swim upstream from Montana’s Flathead Lake to spawn in
Glacier National Park’s McDonald Creek, state fisheries officials stocked the
upstream portions of the watershed with exotic opossum shrimp to provide extra food
for the salmon. Extra salmon, they believed, would, in turn, provide more food for
eagles, bears, gulls, mallards, goldeneyes, coyotes, minks, otters, and many other
species that feed on the salmon and their eggs.

But, as Baskin (1997) notes, “The plan overlooked an important bit of natural
history of both shrimp and fish” (41). The salmon, it seems, feed on zooplankton near
the surface during the day while the shrimp spend the day near the bottom, pretty
much out of reach of the fish. “At night the shrimp migrate upwards to feed on zoo¬
plankton themselves — the same zooplankton, unfortunately, that serve as the chief
food for [the salmon]” (41). Consequently, “Rather than supplying a new food
resource for the [salmon], humans had unwittingly introduced a competitor” (41). As
a result, writes Baskin,

. . . zooplankton quickly declined, especially populations of daphnia, or water
fleas, which are a favored food of both the [salmon] and the shrimp. Within
just a few years, the [salmon] population in the lake had collapsed, too. One
hundred kilometers upstream in McDonald Creek, the disappearance of the
spawning [salmon] eliminated a food resource that had once fortified eagles
for their winter migration and fattened bears for hibernation. It also brought
to an end a wildlife spectacle that had boosted off-season tourism revenues
for the park and neighboring communities. (Baskin 1997, 42)

In less than nine years, the population of 100,000 salmon was reduced to 50. If

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our judgment is this bad, are we really ready to begin modifying the genome?

There is every reason to believe that the same ecosystems dynamics that are at
work on the organism level are also at work on the molecular level. In fact, Robert
Service revealed in a 1997 Science magazine article that the use of “gene-typing tech¬
niques that directly sample and compare gene sequences from different organisms”
(1740) for the first time reveals just how diverse and interconnected the world of sin¬
gle-celled microbes is. He reports that “a pinch of soil can contain 1 billion microbes
or more” and describes the world of microbes as a “thimble-sized rainforest” (1740).
Moreover, he concedes that describing the “ecological structure” of this biodiversity
is “virtually impossible” (1740).

Such observations, made possible by sophisticated analyses of DNA, would tend
to confirm Richard Lewontin’s suggestion that the ecosystem metaphor is much more
appropriate for biotechnology than the software “operating systems” metaphor that the
biotech industry prefers.1 “You can always intervene and change something in it,” says
Lewontin, “but there’s no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or
how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of
how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don ’t get one
rude shock after another” (quoted in Pollan 1998, 49).

This is not to suggest that all genetic engineering should be banned. All species,
after all, do modify their environments. In fact, as we have seen, Lewontin argues that
the environment is constructed by living organisms out of the bits and pieces of the
external world available to them. In other words, the environment wouldn’t even exist
if it were not for organisms modifying it. But it does suggest that if we continue to
ignore the ecological dimensions of our modifications, as we seem to regularly do
with genetic engineering, we are likely to experience many unpleasant surprises.

The awareness that ecosystems dynamics are at work at the molecular level sug¬
gests that we need to proceed more cautiously than most molecular biologists have

'Evelyn Fox Keller in The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)
argues that given the dynamic, ecosystem nature of the genetic world, the major lesson we are likely to
learn from our further research in genetics is “humility.”

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done thus far. And it means that we need to pay attention to fundamental ecological
principles in the process of our modifications. We can no longer blithely continue to
assume that our proposed modifications are “safe” simply because we have convinced
ourselves that

• genetic engineering is no different from ordinary sexual reproduction,

• nature will always keep all populations in balance,

• transgenic organisms will always be ecologically competent, or

• because the host has been domesticated, it is so genetically debilitated that the
transgenic organism will not pose an ecological problem.

None of these assumptions will serve us well.

It is prudent to remember here that not all of our natural selection modifications
have been problem-free. For example, Phil Regal, professor in the college of biological
sciences at the University of Minnesota, reminds us that domesticated bees “became a
spreading menace when the genes of African bees were added to their populations”
(Regal 1994, 12). Regal has provided us with a good set of ecological principles for
assessing the risk of releasing transgenic organisms based on his extensive studies of
patterns and mechanisms of adaptation to natural environments in plants and animals.

The Basis for Assessing Risk

There is a third underlying question we might ask ourselves: What is an appropriate
basis for evaluating a decision to release a transgenic organism into the environment?

In a cogent essay published in the November 1994 issue of BioScience maga¬
zine, Mario Giampietro, at that time a visiting associate professor at Cornell
University, evaluated the bases on which we might determine whether or not it is
“good” to release a transgenic organism into the environment. He suggested that such
a decision must be analyzed on at least three different levels — the individual, the
social, and the biospherical (Giampietro 1994).

At the individual level we would ask whether a transgenic organism would be ben¬
eficial to individuals — to the company that develops it, to the individual who will use it,
to the organism that has been altered. At this level it is relatively easy to quantify risks

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and benefits. It is also the level at which most industries want to make decisions.

At the social level things begin to get more complicated. Here we need to deter¬
mine if the release of the transgenic organism will contribute to the overall well-being
and stability of society. At this level we need to ascertain if the release of a particular
organism will contribute to the economic welfare of the community in which it is
released and whether it poses unacceptable health risks to human populations.

At the biospheric level we begin to encounter a wide range of issues that are
extremely difficult to assess through conventional risk/benefit analysis. The overarch¬
ing complexity of ecological systems makes it impossible to quantify outcomes, but
we should at least acknowledge the complexity and the questions it raises.

Since every organism is part of a very complex, well-orchestrated ecosys¬
tem that has evolved over several millennia it is virtually impossible to
assess, in advance, how changes in an organism may change the ecology in
which that organism exists. How do these changes affect energy flows? How
do they affect oscillations in predator-prey relationships over many life
cycles? Do they increase the possibility of one species taking over, as non¬
native species have done when introduced into new ecologies?
(Kirschenmann and Raffensperger 1995, 6)

Giampietro suggests that our decisions regarding transgenic organisms are made
mostly at the individual level, with occasional passing reference to the social level. We
rarely make them on the biospheric level. He reminds us that if we are interested in
sustainability, then we need to give primary attention to the biospheric level.

Giampietro ’s analysis implores us to be clear about which problems we are try¬
ing to solve with transgenic organisms. For example, if we are concerned only about
making more food immediately available to help feed a growing population, we might
well decide to support the development of genetically engineered organisms that prom¬
ise to improve yield (the individual level). If, on the other hand, we are concerned about
the social inequities and the political structures that prevent people from gaining access
to food despite adequate production (the social level), or if we are concerned about the

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size of the ecological footprint that increased populations of overconsuming humans
leave on the planet, causing a degradation of the environment and loss of the ecosys¬
tem services on which food production depends (the biospheric level), then we might
be led to approach the problem of hunger from a different perspective.

If Giampietro’s analysis helps us to be clearer about the problem we are actu¬
ally trying to solve, his proposal might help us realize, for example, that current appli¬
cations of biotechnology in agriculture are primarily designed to solve the problems
of monoculture farming — specializing production systems by reducing them to one or
two species of crops or animals within a bioregion.

Most biotechnology applications in crop production seem to be designed to prop
up monocultures and the industrial food system they serve. But as every biologist and
every farmer surely knows by now, monocultures are inherently unstable and fraught
with pest problems. This is because monocultures are fundamentally at odds with
nature. Nature is diverse and complex. All organisms in nature have learned to adapt to
biodiversity. Nature, accordingly, will always find ways to overcome the specialization
and simplification of monocultures. A recent study on the benefits of biodiversity pub¬
lished by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology concludes that “the
development and increased use of high-diversity cropping systems, which currently are
greatly underutilized, could substantially contribute to agricultural productivity, sus¬
tainability, and stability” (Council for Agricultural Science and Technology 1999, 1).
On what basis do we convince ourselves that molecular biology will be any more suc¬
cessful at solving monoculture’s inherent weaknesses than toxic chemicals have been?

Ethical Issues

The aforementioned issues, of course, force us to ask yet another question: What is the
ethical basis for making decisions with respect to transgenic organisms? This is a par¬
ticularly difficult question to answer in that our culture, going all the way back to the
seventeenth century, has insisted on separating facts from values. Values, accordingly,
have been relegated to the realm of personal opinion and private faith. Ethics and val¬
ues have nothing to do with science and facts. That perspective has left us with few
disciplined tools for making ethical decisions as a society. The technologies of our new

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generation, however, are rapidly propelling us into a world in which we no longer have
the luxury of relegating ethics to the arena of private and personal choice.

In his thought-provoking paper published in the April 2000 issue of Wired mag¬
azine, Bill Joy, cofounder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, helps us to under¬
stand why this is so. Our new-generation technologies — robotics, genetic engineering,
and nanotechnology — not only are self-replicating, but they also have the power to
radically change the physical world and run the risk of doing “substantial damage in
the physical world’5 (Joy 2000, 240). Moreover, while they have the potential to “sig¬
nificantly extend our average life span and improve the quality of our lives,” they lead
“to an accumulation of great power and, concomitantly, great danger” (242).

Joy proceeds to spell out what is different about the dangers of twenty-first-cen-
tury technologies compared with the dangers of those of the twentieth century.

Certainly the technologies underlying the weapons of mass destruction . . .
— nuclear, biological, and chemical . . . — were powerful, and the weapons
an enormous threat. But building nuclear weapons required, at least for a
time, access to both rare — indeed, effectively unavailable — raw material and
highly protected information: biological and chemical weapons programs
also tended to require large-scale activities.

The 2 1 st century technologies — genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics
. . . — are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents
and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abus¬
es are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not
require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable
the use of them. Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass
destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction . . . , this destruc¬
tiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further per¬
fection of extreme evil . . . (Joy 2000, 242)

It may be important to remind ourselves that this is not the ranting of an end-

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of-the-world fanatic who foresees Armageddon at every turn. This is someone who
has been at the forefront of developing the very technologies that he feels now put
us in a situation where we simply no longer have the luxury of ignoring difficult eth¬
ical issues.

In the December 1 997 issue of Harper ’s magazine, David Shenk reaches simi¬
lar conclusions about the decisions that society will impose as a result of the new
choices that will be available to us. He describes these choices as “the burden of know¬
ing, the burden of choosing’' (Shenk 1997, 39). He imagines his daughter, twenty years
from now, pregnant with her first child. Her doctor informs her that the karyotype and
the computer analysis indicate that the fetus is carrying a genetic marker for severe
manic depression. Will she abort?

According to Shenk, that question is only the beginning of a long list of ethical
decisions we will be forced to make, including what kind of children we will decide
to bring forth into the world. And what happens if a “pop-genetics culture” emerges
that leads millions of people to choose identical offspring — another monoculture with
all of its attendant deficiencies?

Shenk, like Joy, ultimately finds us wrestling with the issues of control and free¬
dom. Are we going to allow these powerful technologies to be available to anyone who
wants them, or are we going to control who uses them and for what purpose — and if
so, who will be the ones to control them? If we allow them to be freely available, Joy
argues, they will inevitably fall into the hands of people who will use them for evil,
evil that can destroy the world as we know it. Likewise, Shenk argues that free mar¬
kets and consumer choice would become even more dominant forces in society than
they already are, and the prospect of individuals or elite groups of individuals buying
genetic advantages for themselves “might well spell the end” to “egalitarian harmony”
(Shenk 1997, 45). The faith we have had in the notion that we all have to be consid¬
ered equal at some fundamental level in order to sustain a peaceful, just, and func¬
tional society may evaporate.

For farmers who have worked hard to develop and supply markets for crops that
do not contain genetically modified organisms (GMO), there is another, more imme¬
diate ethical problem. As transgenic crops spread throughout the landscape, it is

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becoming increasingly difficult for farmers to produce GMO-free crops.

Mary-Howell Martens recently completed research that explores the difficulty
farmers are having with the production of non-GMO crops. She discovered that virtu¬
ally all of the 2000 non-GMO corn crop produced in the Midwest that has been test¬
ed revealed GMO contamination at an average level of 0.25 percent (Martens 2001).

David Vetter, a veteran organic grower and processor near Marquette, Nebraska,
had managed to keep his open-pollinated organic com free of GMO contamination
since he started developing the variety twelve years ago. But when he finished harvest
in November he had his 2000 crop tested and found GMO contamination. Careful
management and selective breeding enabled Vetter to develop an open-pollinated vari¬
ety of corn that produces a quality comparable to that of standard hybrid varieties —
making it a valuable product. Quality open-pollinated varieties not only save on input
costs, but Vetter’s customers prefer them as well. In addition to the extra costs involved
in managing his corn to prevent pollen drift, Vetter now also has to absorb the addi¬
tional cost of testing all of his corn. Further, now that the corn has traces of GMO con¬
tamination, Dave will label his corn to reflect the contamination — something he feels
he must ethically do, but also something he is certain will cost him some of his cus¬
tomers (Vetter 2000, personal communication).

Seed companies that sell GMO-free seed are now pushing for higher GMO
residue tolerances of GMO contamination so they can still market their seed as GMO-
free. Vetter believes this is an indication that the more often such seed is planted, the
higher the contamination levels will climb. That prospect, plus the expectation that
many additional GMO crop varieties will be introduced into the environment, suggests
that farmers in the United States will soon be unable to produce any GMO-free, and
therefore any “organic,” crops at all.

Small farms everywhere are finding that the development of specialty markets is
critical to their survival. The market Vetter has developed for his com is a very high value
specialty market that took him twenty years to develop. If he must finally sell his certi¬
fied organic com on the conventional market because his customers reject it, the price dif¬
ferential will be equal to his annual farm income, approximately $17,000 on forty acres.

Who pays for David Vetter’s loss?

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Imagining Alternatives to Biotechnology

Most proponents of agricultural biotechnology argue that although some risks may be
involved in using this technology, we have no alternative but to forge ahead. Given the
exploding growth of the world’s human population, it is the only way to avoid calam¬
ity. A recent essay by Klaus Leisinger (Leisinger 2000), executive director of the
Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development and professor of sociology at the
University of Basel, serves as a good example of this position. Leisenger paints the
usual picture. The global population will grow another 50 percent by the year 2050 —
three billion additional people. Most of that population growth will take place in the
developing world. And much of it will take place in urban centers since urbanization
will soar. By 2030, 57 percent of the population of developing countries will live in
cities. And, he says, “People living in cities are not able to feed themselves through
subsistence food production in the same way that people living in rural areas do” (2).

This will have a cascadelike effect. Exploding populations living in urban areas
of poor nations where the people do not have the opportunity to feed themselves
(urban gardens and urban fringe farms notwithstanding) will require that we begin
producing higher yields. Because the eating patterns of urban people are substantially
different from those of rural people, we will also have to produce different food. Urban
people eat more high-value foods, more animal proteins, and more vegetables. That
means that there will be a diversion of cereals from food to feed and the need to pro¬
duce even more grain because of the loss of protein involved in the conversion of plant
food to meat. Leisinger doesn’t tell us why this shift from rural to urban must neces¬
sarily take place. We do know that the industrialization of agriculture in the industrial
world has had the related social cost of pushing farmers off their land by increasing
farm size. But the necessity of doing this to achieve production goals is not self-evi¬
dent. In fact, many studies show that midsized farms are more efficient producers than
megafarms (Peterson 1997; Strange 1988).

Leisinger goes on to argue that this higher productivity (which, in his view, can
be achieved only with biotechnology) will also have positive ecological effects. “If
average annual per hectare productivity increases just 1 percent, the world will have to
bring more than 300 million hectares of new land into agriculture by 2050 to meet

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expected demand. But a productivity increase of 1 .5 percent could double output with¬
out using any additional cropland” (Leisinger 2000, 2-3). Failure to achieve that pro¬
ductivity through biotechnology will necessitate bringing fragile lands and wilderness
areas into agricultural production, with all of the attendant ecological devastation.
There is no mention of the land that will be taken out of production due to urban
sprawl if Leisinger’s scenario comes to pass, or the potential for increased production
through successful urban farming ventures such as the urban gardens in Cuba, where
50,000 tons of food are now produced annually inside the city of Havana — without the
aid of genetic engineering.

Nor does Leisinger mention the potential for increasing food availability by
decreasing waste. In the United States it is estimated that 25 to 40 percent of the food
produced in agricultural fields is lost due to waste and spoilage between field and
table. Nor does he mention the potential of increasing yields by improving soil qual¬
ity — the most effective way to further increase yields, according to the National
Academy of Sciences (National Research Council 1993). Nor does Leisinger tell us
how people crammed into urban centers, living on annual incomes of less than $400,
are going to be able to buy the food produced with biotechnology. He suggests that as
the economies of developing nations grow, people will eat higher on the food chain.
But he fails to mention the fact that as economies grow, the “absolute gap between rich
and poor ... increase[s]” (Korten 1995, 48).

To his credit, Leisinger does call attention to the additional problems associated
with maintaining current levels of productivity, such as declining water resources,
declining soil quality, unforeseen climate changes, and poor governance — issues that
biotechnology proponents often overlook. He fails to mention, however, that most of
these problems were caused by the industrial farming methods that he wants to per¬
petuate. He also fails to acknowledge that food security is often most radically affected
by two consequences of modem industrial agriculture: the pest infestations that occur
because of the lack of biodiversity and genetic variability that is integral to modern
industrial farming practices, and the failure to initiate land reforms that could put land
into the hands of local farmers who can produce food for local populations.

Nevertheless, Leisinger believes that agricultural biotechnology is the linchpin to

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solving the food security problem associated with global population explosion. His con¬
tention, however, is rarely based on concrete field data. Mostly it is based on conjecture
and analogy. He cites a World Bank panel’s prediction that rice yields in Asia could
increase by 10 or 20 percent with biotechnology. He compares the future potential of
biotechnology with the past yield increases achieved with Green Revolution technologies.

Yet he does not mention the downsides of the Green Revolution technologies —
the same waterlogging and salinization of soils, depletion of water resources, and envi¬
ronmental contamination that he feels we must now address with biotechnology in
order to achieve adequate yields. He also fails to report that while rice yields increased
with Green Revolution technologies, other food sources were depleted, such as the fruit
previously grown on trees surrounding rice paddies and the fish previously produced
within rice paddies. Both were destroyed by the pesticide inputs required to make the
Green Revolution technologies perform. Neither does he mention that in many devel¬
oping countries farmers are abandoning the Green Revolution technologies in favor of
integrated pest management (IPM) and other less invasive agroecological practices, and
in many instances they are now experiencing higher yields with less costly inputs.

To his credit, Leisinger acknowledges that we should judge genetic engineering
“in the context of a wider technological pluralism” (Leisinger 2000, 11).
Biotechnology, he argues, should be used only if it proves “superior to other tech¬
nologies with regard to cost-effectiveness” (11).

Fair enough. But cost-effectiveness has to include the potential ecological and
social costs. And here, I think, is where Leisinger’s analysis, as well as the analyses of
many other proponents of agricultural biotechnology, fails to give us a sufficiently
thorough perspective. Above all, it does not give adequate attention to alternatives for
achieving the goals of providing adequate food and fiber within a robust economy, a
healthy ecology, and vibrant communities.

Assessing Risk

If we include the social and ecological costs in our assessment of the cost-effective¬
ness of agricultural biotechnology, we have to begin with the question of risk. Most
proponents (and Leisinger is no exception) want to dismiss the problem of risk by

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claiming that “sound science” has already settled the matter. Leisinger argues, for
example, that “there is a scientific consensus” establishing that there is “no concept¬
ual distinction” between biotechnology and classical methods, and that the same laws
govern both methods (Leisinger 2000, 11). That presumably provides prima facie evi¬
dence that there is no significant risk.

That assumption leads him to the conclusion that anyone who introduces the
specter of “speculative risks” into the debate is doing so deliberately in an “attempt to
stir up controversy” (12). He goes on to imply that the debate over risk finally boils
down to uninformed “laypersons” on one side, who operate out of “Angst” and “feel¬
ings,” and Nobel laureates in biochemistry and molecular biology on the other, who
have the “irrefutable facts presented by scientists” (17).

One almost doesn’t know where to begin here. One would have thought that the
discoveries of quantum mechanics had laid to rest, once and for all, the flawed notion
that science can establish anything as an “irrefutable fact.” Quantum physicists
demonstrated that the world is a world of probability , not predictability (Pagels 1982).
Risks, therefore, can never be assessed with any kind of certainty.

Furthermore, science doesn’t operate on the basis of “irrefutable facts.” It oper¬
ates on the basis of a consensus of the scientific community. That consensus is arrived
at as a result of the peer review of data over long periods of time. And the consensus
is always subject to review. Whenever scientists discover new data, or look at old data
from a new perspective, old conclusions can give way to radical new ones, establish¬
ing a new consensus — and therefore a new “objective” truth. It is the scientific com¬
munity’s own failure, from time to time, to honor this reality, and therefore the neces¬
sary tentativeness of its conclusions, that gives rise to public distrust of science. Jim
Davidson, research dean at the University of Florida, stated the matter with poignant
clarity, with respect to agricultural science, as early as 1989.

The distrust on the part of non-agricultural groups is well justified. With the
publication of Rachel Carson’s book entitled Silent Spring , we, in agricul¬
ture, loudly and in unison stated that pesticides did not contaminate the
environment — we now admit that they do. When confronted with the pres-

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49

ence of nitrates in groundwater we responded that it was not possible for
nitrates from commercial fertilizer to reach groundwater in excess of 10
parts per million under normal productive agricultural systems — we now
admit they do. When questioned about the presence of pesticides in food
and food quality, we assured the public that if a pesticide was applied in
compliance with the label, agricultural products would be free of pesti¬
cides — we now admit they’re not. (Quoted in Pesek 1990)

To this list, one can add scientists’ assurances that there was no link between
mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, between organophosphates and pes¬
ticide poisoning, and between the release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and the hole
in the ozone. One can also add the assurances of scientists that nuclear energy was safe
and would be “too cheap to meter” and that thalidomide was a safe drug. Proponents
of biotechnology always seem to leave these examples out when they compare oppo¬
nents of biotechnology to the technophobes who were opposed to railroads and the
Model T (Anderson 2000; Leisinger 2000).

The problem here is not with the intelligence of scientists. If that were the case,
the solution would be simple — just get smarter scientists. The problem is that scien¬
tists sometimes fall into the trap of making universal claims based on insular data. We
simply cannot make accurate predictions about how a technology will perform in the
world of interconnected and interdependent relationships of living systems based on
isolated data collected in laboratories. In the world of social and ecological relation¬
ships there will simply always be surprises — and the surprises will be vastly magni¬
fied when we introduce technologies into ecosystems with which they did not evolve.
And finding out the “truth” about how these technologies will behave in that complex,
interdependent world usually takes a lot of time and careful monitoring. It took us
forty years to discover that CFCs were blowing a hole in the ozone.

Thoughtful scientists and conservationists have, in fact, suggested some “laws
of technology” based on these ecological observations. Stephen Schneider suggests,
“The bigger the technological solution, the greater the chance of extensive, unforeseen
side effects and, thus, the greater the number of lives ultimately at risk” (Schneider

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1976, 14). And Aldo Leopold proclaimed, 'The greater the rapidity of human-induced
changes, the more likely they are to destabilize the complex systems of nature”
(Leopold 1949, 220).

So when Professor Leisinger wants to assure us that agricultural biotechnology
does not pose any significant risk, that it is “not very different” from what we have
done in the past, and that the only reason there is so much opposition is that “highly
sophisticated activists are easily able to mislead a scientifically uneducated public”
(Leisinger 2000, 15), we can perhaps be forgiven if we simply disagree.

Bill Joy, cofounder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, also disagrees. Joy
suggests that our new generation of technologies — robotics, genetic engineering, and
nanotechnology — do “pose a different threat than the technologies that have come
before” since they “share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate” (Joy
2000, 240). Joy, who has been at the forefront of developing these technologies and is
a consummate student of the science of those technologies, hardly fits Leisinger’s
description of a “sophisticated activist” intent on misleading an “uneducated public.”

I believe we will be better served if we follow the advice of ecologists who have
carefully observed the workings of nature rather than the advice of Leisinger, who
seems to have observed only the tantalizing promises of a largely untested technol¬
ogy. Ecologists warn that “the level of uncertainty in our understanding of ecological
processes suggests that it would be prudent to avoid courses of action that involve pos¬
sibly dramatic and irreversible consequences and, instead, to wait for better informa¬
tion” (Daily et al. 2000, 395).

The Wrong Paradigm

But concerns about the potential risks embedded in this technology are not the only
reason that we should look for alternatives. Perhaps the more basic reason to search
for alternatives is that the present application of biotechnology in agriculture conforms
to the same paradigm that has failed us in chemical technology.

The central problem is brilliantly articulated by Joe Lewis and his colleagues in a
brief perspective paper published by the National Academy of Sciences (Lewis et al.
1997). Lewis is a researcher with the Agricultural Research Service’s Insect Biology and

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51

Population Management Research Laboratory in Tifton, Georgia. His research has
focused on pest-management problems in agriculture. Lewis argues that the principal
problem with industrial pest management is that we are operating out of a paradigm that
he calls “therapeutic intervention.” That approach attempts to solve pest problems by
applying a “direct external counterforce” against the problem. In other words, we attack
the problem of a pest within a complicated, interconnected system by intervening in that
system with an external force geared simply to eradicate the pest. Though that approach
has succeeded in killing some target pests, it has not solved the problem of crop losses
due to pests. Some studies, in fact, indicate that crop losses have actually increased with
the continued intensification of pesticide applications (Lewis et al. 1997).

This therapeutic intervention approach is now being widely questioned, not only
in agriculture but also in medicine, social systems, and business management. The rea¬
son this approach is being abandoned is that we now generally recognize that using a
counterforce from outside the system to solve a problem that is intrinsic to the system
exacerbates rather than solves the problem.

In his work on systems dynamics, Peter Senge helps us understand why this is
so. He warns that applying externally imposed solutions at the expense of analyzing
and understanding the functions of the system usually leads to creating the problem
we are trying to solve. The reason, he suggests, is that “the long-term, most insidious
consequences of applying non-systemic solutions is increased need for more and more
of the solution” (Senge 1990, 61).

Industrial pest management is simply a classic example of this principle at work.
Trying to solve a pest problem by applying a pesticide kills not only some of the tar¬
get pest but also nontarget predators that previously kept other pests in check. In addi¬
tion, it creates resistant varieties of the target pest, making the original pest even more
difficult to manage.

To date, the application of biotechnology has largely followed this same inter¬
ventionist paradigm and therefore is likely to experience the same problems. Instead
of using the technology to better understand how systems work and perhaps using it
as one tool within a whole-systems approach, we use the technology to intervene in
the system to “fix” the problem. Genetically inserting Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) into

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the corn plant to control the corn borer is a poignant example. Virtually all entomolo¬
gists agree that the corn borer will develop resistance to Bt; it is simply a question of
when. And if the study reported in Science magazine is correct in its assessment that
genes encoding resistance to Bt in the European corn borer are dominant rather than
recessive as previously thought, then the high dose/refuge strategy2 that farmers have
been told to use to postpone resistance is likely to have little effect (Huang et al. 1999).

Furthermore, if we apply Professor Leisinger’s cost-effectiveness screen, then
planting Bt corn to control corn borer turns out not to be a very good choice. Peer-
reviewed data now suggest that yield losses due to corn borer infestations have to
exceed 10 to 15 bushels an acre before Bt corn becomes less costly than other options.
And that does not take into account the yield loss the farmer will experience from
planting the 20 percent of his crop to conventional corn not protected with insecti¬
cides ', which farmers are supposed to plant to slow down resistance (Sears and
Schaafsma 1999).

The Alternatives

As it turns out, alternatives often exist to the “quick-fix” applications of biotechnol¬
ogy. Managing corn rootworm serves as an example. Corn rootworm has become one
of the most difficult pests for corn farmers to manage. The University of Illinois’s
Michael Gray, one of the leading entomologists in the country studying this pest,
reports that Western corn rootworm has not only become resistant to most of the insec¬
ticides used against it, but it also has evolved resistance to cultural practices such as
crop rotation. So here it would seem we have a perfect candidate for a transgenic Bt
variety to control a problem for which there are no alternatives (Gray 2000).

But Gray is not so sure. First, from the cost-effectiveness perspective, he calcu¬
lates that farmers will invest more than $400 million annually in technology fees alone
to prevent an economic loss estimated at $650 million annually. So at best, farmers can

2The high dose/refuge strategy is the practice of inserting high doses of Bt into the transgenic plants to
obtain maximum kill and simultaneously requiring that farmers plant at least 20 percent of their crop to
conventional, non-transgenic varieties on which no pesticides at all are used to serve as a breeding ground
for insects unaffected by Bt.

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expect less than a one-dollar return for each dollar invested, and that assumes that
losses due to pest infestation in the refuge acres will be minimized.

But there are other problems. The long-term cost to the environment, and even¬
tually to the farmer, could be significant. Some scientists believe a strong likelihood
exists that Bt corn for rootworm control could harm beneficial insects, such as the
pest-eating ladybird beetle. They also worry that the toxins may not break down in the
soil and therefore may harm vital soil organisms, which could affect yields. There is
also concern that this technology may quickly lead to the development and spread of
Bt-resistant rootworms because the rootworms will feed on the endotoxins of the
transgenic plants twice during a growing season, first as larvae on the roots and then
as adults on the pollen and foliage. Gray believes that apart from careful IPM moni¬
toring and careful selection of fields in which the transgenic varieties would be plant¬
ed, resistance is assured (Ferber 2000).

But even in this case there may be an alternative scenario. A trio of researchers
with the Agricultural Research Service at the University of Missouri have developed
corn lines with native-plant resistance to com rootworms. The selection process used
to develop new varieties from these native plant sources produces resistance with mul¬
tiple proteins. Transgenic varieties, on the other hand, depend on only one protein.
Rootworms, accordingly, will likely develop resistance to the transgenic varieties
rather quickly, while the multiple-protein varieties could be effective much longer.
Interestingly, Bruce Hibbard, one of the researchers working with the native plant vari¬
eties, says that they “aren’t necessarily trying to eradicate com rootworms com¬
pletely” but desire simply to hold “rootworm damage below the economic threshold”
(Ritchie 2000, 14). Hibbard’s comment suggests an effort to understand why the root-
worm is a pest and find ways to alter the system so that it will no longer be a pest
rather than introducing an external counterforce to eradicate it.

This raises an important question. If we were to put as much effort and research
funding into ecological approaches for solving production problems as we are cur¬
rently expending in the engineering approach, what solutions would we find?
Conversely, if we begin by telling ourselves that there are no alternatives to engineer¬
ing external controls, we guarantee that the ecological approaches won’t be explored.

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Leisinger suggests the possibility of increasing rice yields by 10 or 20 percent
with biotechnology But Science magazine reported on a research project conducted in
China recently in which two varieties of traditional rice that are locally adapted were
companion planted. Farmers experienced an 1 8 percent overall yield increase and did
not need to use a fungicide (“Variety Spices Up Chinese Rice Yields,” 2000). Mae-
Wan Ho, head of the bioelectrodynamics laboratory at Open University in the United
Kingdom, reports that a Japanese farmer has developed a method of producing rice,
which he calls the Aigamo method, that increases rice yields 20 to 50 percent in the
first year. The method involves putting about 200 ducklings into each hectare of rice
paddy. The ducks, it seems, eat insects and snails that attack rice plants; eat weed seeds
and seedlings; and oxygenate the water, which encourages the roots of rice plants to
grow. And the mechanical stimulation of their paddling makes for sturdier rice plants.
Using this method, the farmer’s two-hectare farm annually produces “seven tonnes of
rice, 300 ducks, 4,000 ducklings and enough vegetables to supply 100 people” (Ho
1999, 339). Observers believe that the Aigamo method, which is now being adopted in
many developing countries, has the potential to make Japan — which currently imports
80 percent of its food — food self-sufficient again.3

The type of agriculture the Aigamo method represents has the potential to bring
about other positive effects. Agriculture that is based on such wonderful complexities
cannot be readily managed in large-scale monocultures. And because the method
promises to be extremely productive, it suggests the possibility of supporting more
people on the land with smaller-scale, highly productive farms. That poses the possi¬
bility of a different kind of future. A system that supports more people on the land may
slow down, or even reverse, the migration to megacities. Could it therefore be possi¬
ble that the rest of the scenario Leisinger predicts, which follows from the continued
trend toward urbanization, might also not come to pass?

3Brian Halweil (2001) provides another example of an alternative to transgenic crops. He reports that farm¬
ers in East Africa have managed to successfully control the Striga weed by planting leguminous trees prior
to planting corn. He argues this may be a more useful technology than herbicide-resistant corn because
the corn and the herbicide would be too expensive for African farmers. “Biotech, African Com and the
Vampire Weed,” World Watch magazine, September/October 2001. Volume 14, Number 5 ( pp. 26-31).

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55

There are other examples of alternative approaches to food security that do not
include the use of biotechnology. The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has been devel¬
oping perennial polycultures from wild grasses that could reduce soil erosion, use
water more efficiently, and reduce planting and tillage costs (Land Institute 2000).
John Jevons, world renowned for his “double digging”4 method, has experienced phe¬
nomenal yield increases in vegetable production (Madden and Chaplowe 1997).
Richard Manning, after studying the various sites where the McKnight Foundation is
conducting pioneering research in developing countries, concludes that we will never
be successful in our efforts to feed the world if we do not take the complexity and
diversity of local cultures and local ecologies into consideration (Manning 2000).
After careful observation, Manning concludes that genetic engineering may be a lim¬
ited tool that can be used effectively in these whole-systems approaches to food pro¬
duction in an expanding human population, but it will not be the solution.

Manning’s concluding remarks are instructive for us.

The genetic engineering business is going to get all the headlines, but these
simple matters [attending to the needs of local cultures and local ecologies]
are potentially far more earth-shaking. What must happen, and to a degree
is happening, in agriculture is also an information revolution. If there was a
key mistake of the Green Revolution, it was in simplifying a system that is
by its very nature complex.

Farming is not just growing food. It is not simply a tool we use to feed
however many beings our social structure generates. The way we grow food
determines our structure, makes our megacities, makes us who we are.
Agriculture is culture, at bottom about the integrity of individual lives.
Those lives gain their integrity and value when they are deeply embedded in
a rich environment of information. This is about growing good food, but
more important, it is about making good lives. We will fail if we attend to
the former without considering the latter. (Manning 2000, 218)

4Double digging is a method of cultivation that loosens the soil at both the topsoil and subsoil levels.

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Conclusion

What is our prevailing scientific ideology, and how does it affect the assessment of
these new technologies? Do we recognize ecosystems dynamics at the molecular level,
and will we incorporate the potential consequences of ecosystems functions in our
assessment of the potential ramifications of the release of transgenic organisms? Will
we be clear about the level at which we are attempting to solve a problem and prop¬
erly assess the risk at the individual, the societal, and the biospheric levels? What are
the ethical implications of the new technologies, and how do we begin making sound
ethical choices in the wake of an ethically challenged society? These are all questions
we need to ponder if we are going to make sound decisions as we enter the new era of
our new-generation technologies.

Our current fascination with new-generation technologies may be distracting us
from recognizing at least two important human failures. The first is our tendency to
believe that we can solve all our problems without nature. In Iowa we now have a cow
named Bessie that will shortly give birth to a gaur, an oxlike Asian bovine mammal.
It will be the world’s first cloned endangered species, and the experiment is being exe¬
cuted to help save the species from extinction.

Columnist Ellen Goodman suggests that this may be a necessary thing to do, but
it raises a number of questions when one looks at the problem from a whole-systems
perspective. How is it that we are willing to expend this extraordinary effort to save
one species while we seem oblivious to the fact that we continue to destroy the habi¬
tat of hundreds of others? What does it mean to save a species from extinction when
its habitat has been destroyed? Do we think that the baby guar can live on an Iowa
farm, raised by an Iowa cow, and still be a gaur (Goodman 2000)?5

Proponents of biotechnology often seem to be oblivious to the context in which
the technology is released — all the complex, interdependent relationships of organ¬
isms within a species and of species within their environments. Biotechnology is never
simply a matter of “just adding another gene to what we have already been doing,” as
Monsanto Science Fellow and Agronomist John Kaufmann put it recently at a biotech

5The gaur was born on January 8, 2001, and died eighteen hours after birth.

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conference.6 Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York
Medical College, says, “There is an incorrect, but prevalent notion, that genes are
modular entities with a one-to-one correspondence between function and a gene”
(Newman 2000, 27).

An article that appeared in the New York Times science section in July 1994 pro¬
vides one example of the complex relationships that have evolved in nature. The arti¬
cle points out that researchers have discovered “a chemical laxative in the cherry-sized
fruit of a Costa Rican shrub. The drug appears to act on the bowels of the birds, to the
plants’ and not the birds’ advantage” (Yoon 1994, 1). Though we have known that
fruits contain laxatives, this is the first evidence that “the biological effect of these
tasty treats is the result of chemical manipulation in which animals are drugged into
transporting and dropping the precious seeds quickly” (1). In other words, plants have
evolved a complex mechanism that enables them to control the rate of passage of a
seed through birds to give the plants the best opportunity to propagate themselves. We
simply have to take such contexts into account as we contemplate changing the world
with powerful, self-replicating technologies.

Everyone agrees that biotechnology has the ability to make dramatic changes in
nature. If that were not true, then the argument that it has the potential to dramatically
increase productivity would be hollow. But if powerful technologies have the potential to
radically change components of such complex relationships, thereby potentially upset¬
ting delicate interactions that have evolved over millennia, shouldn’t it inspire caution?

Bill Joy reminds us of a second human failure that we also must ponder as we
develop new technologies. He writes that we almost never pause to try to “understand
the consequences of our innovations while we are in the rapture of discovery and inno¬
vation” (Joy 2000, 243). laar

Frederick Kirschenmann is the director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable
Agriculture at Iowa State University. He is also the president of Kirschenmann

6Comment made by Dr. Kaufmann during a panel presentation at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts
and Letters conference on genetically modified foods in Madison, Wise., November 3-4, 2000.

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Family Farms , a certified organic farm in Windsor, North Dakota. He earned
degrees from Yankton College in South Dakota , from the Hartford Theological
Seminary in Connecticut , and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

References

Anderson, Barb Baylor. 2000. “21st Century Model T.” Agri-Marketing , July/ August,
74-76.

Baskin, Yvonne. 1997. The Work of Nature. Washington, D.C.: Island.

Council for Agricultural Science and Technology. 1999. “Benefits of Biodiversity.”
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133, February. Ames, Iowa: Council for Agricultural Science and
Technology.

Daily, Gretchen C, Tore Soderqvist, Sara Aniyar, Kenneth Arrow, Partha Dasgupta,
Paul R. Erlich, Carl Folke, AnnMari Jansson, Bengt-Owe Jansson, Niles
Kautsky, Simon Levin, Jane Lubshenco, Karl-Goran maler, David Simpson,
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Ferber, Dan. 2000. “New Corn Plant Draws Fire From GM Food Opponents.”

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Goodman, Ellen. 2000. “Cloning of Endangered Species Isn’t a Parlor Trick.” Des
Moines Register, October 18, 15 A.

Gray, Michael. 2000. “Proscriptive Use of Transgenic Hybrids for Corn Rootworms:
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Paper presented at a conference at the University of Illinois. (Available from
Frederick Kirschenmann; contact at leopoldl@iastate.edu)

Ho, Mae- Wan. 1999. “One Bird — Ten Thousand Treasures.” The Ecologist, October, 339.

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The Genetically
Modified Organism and
Genetically Modified
Foods Debates: Why
Ethics Matters

Jeffrey Burkhardt

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetically modified (GM)
foods have become subjects of considerable public debate. The controver¬
sies are the result of differing views concerning the products of “the new
biotechnology” — recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology, to be precise. rDNA tech¬
nology has allowed scientists to move genes across species’ boundaries, to create traits
in plants, animals, and microorganisms that could never be accomplished using tradi¬
tional crossbreeding techniques. For example, genes from cold-water fish can be
inserted into tomato plants to make them more tolerant to colder weather. The reality
of transgenic technology has caused some people to raise questions about the nature
and consequences of GMOs. For example, do GM foods differ in any relevant ways
from non-GM foods? Are any differences significant as to how they will affect human
health or the environment? How strictly are GMOs being tested? Who oversees the
regulation and registration process? These are scientific and legal-political issues, and
they are being discussed everywhere from grocery stores to the halls of Congress.

As important as these kinds of issues are in the GMOs/GM foods debates, other

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63

controversies have arisen regarding the ethics of GMOs and GM foods. People differ
in their judgments about whether producing and using GMOs are morally correct
things to do. The issue is whether GMOs and GM foods are morally and ethically
acceptable. If they are ethically acceptable, then there is nothing wrong about produc¬
ing, using, or consuming them. If they are not acceptable, people should stop produc¬
ing them; or at least those people who find them unacceptable should be able to avoid
them. Clearly, some people think GMOs and GM foods are ethically acceptable,
whereas others do not. The point of this essay is to explain why the deeper ethical-
philosophical reasons underlying the GMO debates are so important. If we are to
resolve ethical (as opposed to scientific) controversies associated with GMOs and GM
foods, a key step is to acknowledge differences in basic values and then debate the
matter in terms of these deeper commitments and concerns.

Components of Acceptability

Judgments about ethical acceptability depend on answering several preliminary ques¬
tions. Although there are people who for philosophical or religious reasons reject
transgenic technology whatever its applications, it is still important to recognize that
differences exist among the products of biotechnology. The first question regarding
acceptability should be, “What GMO are we talking about?”

What Product?

Different products have different ethical dimensions. For example, bovine growth hor¬
mone (recombinant bovine somatotropin, or rBST), an early GM product, was
designed to increase the efficiency of milk production by getting cows to produce
more milk without increasing their feed intake. People who have written on the ethi¬
cal acceptability of rBST have called attention to its possible negative effects on cows,
potential impact on human health, and economic effects on small-scale dairy opera¬
tions (see, e.g., Comstock 1989). In contrast, Roundup-Ready® crops, such as soy¬
beans and cotton, were designed to permit a farmer to spray a herbicide on his or her
field, killing weeds but not affecting the Roundup-Ready® crops at all. Analysts have
written on the potential cost savings resulting from farmers not having to till weeds or

64

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use numerous herbicides to kill the different sorts of weeds that invade the field.
Others have pointed out the potential human health risks and, again, economic effects
on small farms (Lappe and Bailey 1998). Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) com is yet another
example. Bt corn was engineered to produce a substance in the plant that is toxic to
insect pests. The product was designed to reduce the need for spraying insecticides;
however, people have claimed — in fact, it was a major controversy in the Com Belt —
that the pollen from Bt crops kills monarch butterfly larvae that consume it, a signif¬
icant environmental impact (Environmental News Service 1999). Finally (though the
list of GMOs and GM foods is much longer than provided in these examples), so-
called “golden rice” is a transgenic product with greatly enhanced beta carotene (vita¬
min A-producing) content, intended to provide a more nutritious food staple for peo¬
ple in Third World rice-consuming countries where vitamin A deficiency is a serious
problem — a cause of blindness in children. Although this GM product is several years
away from the market, it has been discussed in terms of both its major health benefits
as well as its potentially prohibitive cost to poor people (Burkhardt 2001).

The point concerning each of these examples is that, in part, the ethical accept¬
ability or lack of it depends on the kind of GMO or GM food we are addressing: What
are its features? What are its intended consequences?

What Context?

A second set of concerns that bear on ethical acceptability is the context in which the
analysis or argument is set. Part of what has made the GMO and GM foods debates
difficult for some people to understand is that individuals frequently talk past each
other, as one party focuses on a set of issues in one context that are different from the
issues and context that concern another party. For instance, much of the scientific
community has tended to focus on the role of the new biotechnology in contributing
to food quantity, quality, and affordability, whereas others have focused on contexts
such as human (animal) health, environmental safety, issues concerning social justice
or fairness, or different implications of GM technology for the developed versus the
developing world. Certainly, each of these general areas of concern is important in the
ethical appraisal of GMOs and GM foods. By focusing primarily or even exclusively

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on one area, however, parties involved in the debates or controversies tend to ignore
other relevant issues or considerations that appear in a different context. For example,
when scientists limit the context of their ethical appraisal of GMOs and GM foods to
the context of producing enough affordable food (“feeding the world”), they bypass
other legitimate issues such as whether peasant farmers in a developing nation may be
put at a disadvantage because they are unable to afford to employ the newest bioengi¬
neered crop variety. Similarly, those who limit their vision regarding rBST to effects
on animals may have missed important points about the need for increased dairy pro¬
ductivity in poor areas of the world. Attention needs to be paid to all of the relevant
contexts in which a judgment about the ethical acceptability of GMOs and GM foods
can (and should) be made.

What Ethical Paradigm?

Focusing on particular products and their contexts provides the target forjudging eth¬
ical acceptability. An ethical paradigm provides the criteria for making judgments. An
ethical paradigm is a basic, general philosophy about what things count as right or
wrong, and why. The paradigm contains basic value judgments about what is most
important for people to do, or how they should be treated, or overall how we should
live. In essence, the paradigm establishes the lens through which people view the
world, providing a substantive standard for unequivocally deciding whether actions,
policies, or, in this case, a set of products and processes are ethically correct. In the
following section the three major paradigms identified by philosophers of ethics are
discussed. These are (1) consequentialism, (2) autonomy/consent ethics, and (3)
virtue/tradition ethics. Each of these implies a set of ethical judgments about food and
agriculture generally, which in turn entails a judgment about the ethical acceptability
of GMOs and GM foods.

In our daily lives, we seem to make ethical judgments on the basis of all three
paradigms. Sometimes we decide as if we are consequentialists, sometimes as if we
hold to autonomy/consent ethics, and sometimes as if we are virtue/tradition based.
However, in our public acts — voting, expressing opinions in community forums, talk¬
ing with friends or colleagues — we tend to fall into one of the camps. We become

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more consequentialist, more autonomy/consent oriented, or more virtue/tradition
focused. Regardless of an individual’s own moral or ethical code, these ethical para¬
digms provide criteria forjudging how we collectively ought to act, how we societally
ought to judge right and wrong, and how we ought to direct public policy. In the pub¬
lic debates over GMOs and GM foods, the three ethical paradigms discussed here are
routinely invoked as reasons why we should do something regarding GMOs.
Scientists, farmers, consumer activists, environmentalists, animal welfarists, con¬
cerned citizens, and so on — the parties to the debate — express these ethical perspec¬
tives in clear and forceful ways. Just as it is worth paying attention to differences
among products and contexts, it is worth attending to differences among ethical para¬
digms or basic ethical philosophy. It may not make the disagreements go away, but we
will be clearer about where we all stand.

Three Ethical Paradigms

Consequentialist Ethics

For many people, the question “Is X ethically right?,” where X stands for an action,
policy, or, in the present case, the production and use of a technology, is best answered
by answering a different question: “Does (will) X produce good consequences (out¬
comes, effects, etc.)?” If the answer to this latter question is yes, then we have an obli¬
gation to do X, or at least it is permissible (acceptable) to do X. If the answer is no,
then it is ethically or morally wrong to do or allow X. The question here is, what counts
as a good consequence?

Despite general agreement among consequentialists that we ought to promote
good consequences or outcomes, there is no universal assent as to what those might
be. Numerous candidates have been offered: we ought to satisfy the wants and needs
of the greatest number of people; we ought to promote the greatest amount of materi¬
al, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional happiness as possible; we ought to maximize
material benefits and minimize costs; and so forth. Some have placed an economic
value on the definition of “good,” yielding what we commonly call the benefit-cost
approach: try to achieve the greatest net financial benefit as a result of our actions or
policies. Not everyone agrees with the financial interpretation of consequentialist

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ethics, but some version of a “satisfied wants and preferences” criterion has come to
dominate the consequentialist paradigm’s calculus of right and wrong. Indeed, the
long-standing slogan of consequentialist ethics, that “the greatest good of the greatest
number” is what determines ethical acceptability or ethical obligations, has come to
be understood as what satisfies most people’s preferences and desires. Personal health
and security (and hence financial stability) are undoubtedly part of what most people
want, so that consequentialist ethics also requires actions or policies that help achieve
those goods. Most who subscribe to the consquentialist ethical paradigm believe that
with enough foresight and care in reasoning, we can find the ethically right solution
to any problem we may face (see Slote 1985).

Ethics of Autonomy /Consent

Those who subscribe to the ethics of autonomy/consent approach the matter of right
and wrong in a very different fashion. Ethical rightness or acceptability depends on
whether an action, practice, or policy respects or protects the individual person as he
or she acts on his or her judgments about morality. The assumption, initially, is that
people are generally rational and are mature enough to make judgments about what is
right and wrong. People are entitled to make their own judgments. This is what auton¬
omy means — self-determination. There is a long history, within the paradigm, of dis¬
cussion about what it is that makes individual human beings deserving of personal
sovereignty or autonomy, and how respecting and protecting autonomy should be
translated into practical ethical rules or duties. One line of thought views this as a mat¬
ter of respecting people’s rights , that is, legitimate claims people have that others do
or do not act toward them in particular ways. For many contemporary autonomy/con¬
sent ethicists, the idea of individual rights is further refined: anything anyone might
do that affects other people, potentially infringing on rights or limiting self-determi¬
nation, requires the consent of those affected. Without prior consent, actions that affect
people are ethically unacceptable, indeed, ethically wrong.

It is instructive to note here that those who subscribe to the ethics of auto¬
nomy/consent demand that actions be consented to, even if, on some consequentialist
calculation, those actions would benefit people. For example, it might be shown that

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putting chemicals in the public water supply kills bacteria that could harm people;
hence, adding the chemical achieves a public good. Even so, the autonomy/consent
paradigm requires that people be given the opportunity to agree with or object to the
action and, at the extreme, be provided with an alternative water source if they dis¬
agree. For those accustomed to the consequentialist or benefit-cost approach, this
demand may seem stubborn or unreasonable. Nevertheless, it is based on the princi¬
ple that each individual person is entitled to decide how to live his or her life; others
may not interfere without each individual’s prior agreement (see Rippe 2000).

Ethics of Virtue/Tradition

A third basic ethical paradigm defines ethical rightness in terms of whether an action,
practice, or policy promotes or is consistent with a set of virtues, usually set by a par¬
ticular ethical or moral tradition. Virtues are ideal character traits or states of being
that are thought to be definitive of the ethical life. For example, honesty, integrity,
piety, and fairness are virtues under this definition. So are self-actualization, har¬
mony with human nature, and life in accordance with Nature. These are in turn
defined by the community within which one lives or by which he or she defines him¬
self or herself. Honesty may mean complete openness and candor (“tell all”) in one
community’s view; it may be simple truthfulness (“don’t lie”) in another’s. Fife in
accordance with Nature may mean not killing animals in one community, and humane
killing for consumption in another. The key is that the community and its tradition
define what it understands to be the “excellences of character” that constitute the good
life, the ethical life. It is incumbent on others not to endanger the so-defined way of
life or act in ways that prevent people from virtuous actions (Crisp and Slote 1997).

An important aspect of this is that there may be certain elements of a communi¬
ty’s tradition that seem at odds with what the majority believe, or even what is in the
majority’s best interests. Indeed, there may be occasions where the greatest good for
the greatest number appears to require violation of a tradition or limitation on the prac¬
tice of particular virtues. For example, the demands of an ethically justifiable war
require drafting religious pacifists into military service. All this attests to is the fact
that the virtue/tradition paradigm, like the autonomy/consent paradigm, can stand in

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decided opposition to what consequentialist ethics deems ethically acceptable or even
obligatory. There may also be cases where preservation of a community’s way of life
seems to require violation of a person’s autonomy Literature and films are filled with
examples of people torn between self-determination and the demands of their religious
or cultural tradition.

The preceding discussion of ethical paradigms is far too brief to do justice to the
complexity of these positions. I refer the interested reader to Blackburn (2001) for a
more thorough discussion of the major differences among, and subtle nuances within,
each of the paradigms or ethical orientations. The point is to recognize, in advance of
any discussion of food and agricultural GMOs, that these are long-standing ethical
perspectives that have informed ethical debate on matters from slavery to abortion.
How they apply to the GMO and GM foods controversies remains an interesting and
critical aspect of these disagreements.

Ethics and Agricultural Biotechnology

The ethical acceptability of agricultural GMOs, whatever paradigm the issue is
approached from, in part depends on judgments about the ethical acceptability of
major features of the food and agricultural system. For example, the judgment that
pesticide-reducing GMOs are ethically acceptable depends on a more basic judgment
about the unacceptability of pesticide use. In fact, debates about the ethics of certain
agricultural practices predate current controversies about GMOs and GM foods. Each
of the paradigms entails judgments about agriculture and the food system, and argu¬
ments or positions regarding biotechnology are based on those judgments.

The Consequentialist Perspective on Agricultural Biotech

Consequentialists subscribe to the view that actions, policies, practices, and technolo¬
gies ought to promote people’s happiness, defined as satisfied wants or preferences.
The question is whether agriculture does this, and the answer is usually that it does.
Historically, agricultural policy in the United States has been guided by a set of clear¬
ly consequentialist goals: (1) produce enough food to feed a growing and nonrural
population (sufficient quantity ), (2) produce food that is safe and nutritionally ade-

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quate (good quality ), and (3) ensure that food is generally affordable for consumers
while also ensuring that farmers receive profits from their work sufficient to keep
them in business (adequate price). I refer to these goals collectively as the QQP for¬
mula, which in turn provides a consequentialist justification for actions or technolo¬
gies needed to maintain QQP. Those actions and technologies help to guarantee as far
as possible that the greatest good of the greatest number is achieved. People’s wants
and preferences for available, safe, and affordable food are satisfied.

Most observers agree that the key to achieving QQP is efficiency in agricultural
production. This means getting the most output from the least inputs, or in standard
farming terms, productivity and yields. Growers want to keep costs down while main¬
taining high quality and high quantity. Historically, most successful farm technology,
from hybrid seed to chemicals to high-tech machines, has been adopted with produc¬
tivity and yield in mind. It is not surprising, then, that farmers and policy makers con¬
cerned with efficiency, and ultimately with QQP, should want technologies continually
improved so as to achieve even greater productivity and yield — all the time maintain¬
ing safe, affordable food. This is where agricultural biotechnology enters the picture.

The so-called “first generation”1 of GM technology was designed to help farm¬
ers achieve greater degrees of efficiency. Roundup-Ready® crops were intended to
reduce the need for costly herbicides while maintaining or improving yield. Bt crops
were designed to reduce the need to spray pesticides, and rBST’s purpose was to
increase milk yields without increased feed costs. To the extent that each of these GM
products and any others intended for increased efficiency achieve their desired results,
they logically must receive a judgment of approval in terms of QQP. Generally speak¬
ing, a consequentialist appraisal of the ethical acceptability of these GM products
results in a straightforward endorsement. If GMOs and GM foods contribute to the sat¬
isfaction of people’s wants and preferences, they are ethically justifiable — perhaps
even ethically required (Burkhardt 2001).

Currently, most ethical discourse about GMOs has been couched in consquen-
tialist terms. At issue have been questions about whether current or foreseeable GM

1 Please refer to end notes for all notes in this article.

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products will satisfy the “greatest good for the greatest number” criterion. Though the
answer is usually yes, occasionally there have been concerns that some things that peo¬
ple want other than QQP, for example, environmental protection, are not being pro¬
vided by GMO and GM food technology, and in fact, GMOs may endanger these
“other goods.” The controversy over Bt corn and monarch butterflies is a case in point.
People want butterflies protected at the same time they want inexpensively produced,
available, safe food. Similarly, some consequentialists have raised issues about long¬
term consequences of GMOs: Will our children’s health be placed at risk by the use of
GM technology? What about future people’s wants and preferences? Are they being
placed at risk?

Despite these kinds of questions, by and large the consequentialist position has
been that with enough foresight and a careful calculation of benefits and costs, we can
find the ethically correct solution to any problem we may face. This implies vigilance
in risk assessments and inclusion of food and environmental safety concerns in
appraisals of acceptability. Once we commit to satisfying wants and preferences, how¬
ever, we have to at least implicitly endorse those technologies that help us achieve that
end. For the vast majority of consequentialists, GM technology, in agriculture as in
medicine, in principle and nearly always in practice is ethically acceptable.

Autonomy/Consent and Food/ Agricultural Biotech

The autonomy/consent paradigm begins with the axiom that self-determination implies
that people have inviolable rights, which establishes the ethical demand that people be
given a choice concerning how they want to act and be treated. Foremost among these
rights is the right not to be harmed or placed at risk against one’s will. Certainly, an indi¬
vidual can choose to accept some risks: people freely choose to drive cars, fly in air¬
planes, engage in sports such as football, invest in the stock market — all activities with
some degree of risk associated with them. As long as a person’s choice to engage in one
of these activities is not coerced and does not harm others or place other people at risk,
these are ethically acceptable acts. When a person drives drunk, plays sports reck¬
lessly, or puts all the family savings into a stock of questionable value, acceptability
starts to evaporate: the individual is risking or harming others. This is ethically wrong.

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Autonomy/consent ethicists may not concern themselves with the overall goals of
the agricultural/food system, as do consequentialists, but proponents of free choice and
the right not to be harmed occasionally agree with some consequentialists in posing this
question: Is our food safe? The food system, they maintain, is far from transparent.
Most consumers know nothing of farm production techniques, transportation and pro¬
cessing systems, even packaging and marketing activities. Yet most consumers want to
know that when they purchase foods from the grocery store or at a restaurant, the food
will not harm them. In fact, under this ethical orientation, people have a right to pur¬
chase items that will not place them unknowingly at risk. This puts the ethical burden
on everyone in the chain from farm gate to food store to ensure that food is free from
harmful contaminants and as safe as can reasonably be expected. And it is also part of
the legal (and I would add ethical) mandate of certain agencies of the U.S. Department
of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, and state and local public health agencies. Autonomy/consent demands
that people not be placed at risk against their wills; lack of transparency in the food sys¬
tem makes the obligation of government agencies to ensure safety a strong one.

For the autonomy/consent perspective, the issue of GM foods arises in part
because of the lack of transparency of the food system to consumers, but also because
at least in the United States, the regulatory agencies made a decision that, in effect,
exempted most GM foodstuffs from any special testing regarding safety. USDA, EPA,
and FDA agreed that the process of modifying soybeans, for example, was irrelevant
to the safety of the soybeans themselves. That is, if a soybean is submitted for approval
by EPA or FDA, it does not matter if it was modified through conventional plant¬
breeding techniques or with the use of rDNA technology (FDA 2000). Some consumer
activist groups saw this as an attempt to smuggle GM crops into the food supply, even
though, they argued, there had not been any long-term studies concerning the safety
(particularly regarding allergenicity) of GM-derived crops. Even if GM foods are safe
under current government guidelines, over the long term, consumers may be being
placed at risk against their wills.

An even more fundamental point of the autonomy/consent proponents is this:
whatever reasons a person might have to want to avoid GMOs and GM foods, he or

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she has the right to be able to avoid them. Some people may have reservations about
government and industry claims regarding the safety of GM foods. Some may object
to the specific kinds of commodities that are being genetically engineered, for exam¬
ple, corn and rice, staples in poor nations. And some may have deeper religious objec¬
tions to GMOs and GM foods — concerns about scientists “playing God.” Whatever
the reason, autonomy/consent ethics demands that people have the choice to avoid
these products. Hence, autonomy/consent proponents have been the strongest sup¬
porters of some form of labeling of GM foods. Mandatory labeling is now the rule in
other parts of the world, notably, the European Union (EU), and various pieces of leg¬
islation have been put forth in the U.S. Congress and in state legislatures requiring
some form of labeling. How this will play out in the United States remains to be seen.
The point is that labeling receives its strongest philosophical and ethical justification
in terms of the ethics of autonomy/consent.

One further dimension of the autonomy/consent perspective on GMOs deserves
attention. This has to do with farmers’ choices. Even before the enactment of the EU
labeling legislation, there were concerns among some farm groups that non-GM crop
seed would become less and less available. Because farmers make their planting deci¬
sions on the basis of expected markets (among other things), and with the possibility
that markets for GM grains would shrink significantly (boycotts in the EU), some
farmers desired to plant non-GM varieties. The way the seed industry is structured,
however — with a very small number of large corporations, all heavily invested in GM
crop technology, controlling a large portion of the seed market — questions have been
raised as to whether corporations will continue to supply non-GM seed.

For affected farmers, this is also a matter of autonomy/consent. Some small-
farm activists maintain that the actions of the commercial seed industry giants delib¬
erately harm smaller operations, especially those in developing nations (Rural
Advancement Foundation International 1999). Whether or not that is true, it has pri¬
marily been larger commercial farm operations in the United States (and commodity
associations such as the American Corn Growers Association [ACGA]) who have
voiced concern about choices and alternatives. Despite costs and other practical con¬
straints, government agencies and seed industry giants are exploring ways to “segre-

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gate” and “identity preserve” GM and non-GM seed as a way of accommodating farm¬
ers’ needs and the demands of the global market.

Many people who take a consequentialist view on these matters believe that the
autonomy/consent issues that are raised are not so much a matter of biotechnology as
a matter of power and control: consumers and farmers want greater control over the
choices available to them in their respective arenas. Consequentialists liken the GMO
controversy to the issue of organic foods: organics tended to be produced for local
markets by smaller-sized producers, so that a choice for organic was really a rejection
of large-scale corporate agriculture and the multinational seed/chemical inputs corpo¬
rations. Though there may be some truth in these claims, they do not undermine the
essential claims of the autonomy/consent approach to the ethical acceptability of
GMOs, GM foods, and GM crop seed. People have the ethical right to choose what
they consume and purchase, which implies that they be allowed both to know what
they are consuming and to avoid or reject it if they so desire.

Ethics of Virtue/Tradition and Food/ Agricultural Biotech

Several versions of virtue/tradition ethics have been offered in connection with the
appraisal of agriculture generally and food/agricultural biotechnology in particular.
These include the positions taken by Roman Catholics and some fundamentalist
Protestant denominations in the United States (see Warner 2000), and rural and farm
groups in other nations, again notably the EU. Though each position has its unique fea¬
tures, these usually negative appraisals of GMOs and GM foods tend to reflect more
general traditions within virtue/tradition ethics, agrarian ethical philosophy, and, for
lack of a better term, what I call naturism. These are somewhat different approaches
to assessing ethical acceptability in general, so they will be discussed separately.

Agrarianism is the philosophy that views agriculture as more than a business or
economic sector in society: agriculture is a “way of life.” What this means is that agri¬
culture has a unique and ethically special set of contexts, practices, and virtues that are
inherent in its nature. The practice of bringing forth sustenance from the soil in the
face of nature’s unpredictability requires that the farmer be patient, strong, and self-
reliant and respectful of natural processes. It also requires that the farmer work in har-

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75

mony with others in the community, since only through mutual respect and reciproc¬
ity can many of the tasks of farming, or living in a rural community, be accomplished.
Agrarianism sees the traditional family farm as a place where real human values and
virtues can be practiced, instilled in the next generation, and hence preserved.
Participation in and psychological and ethical “ownership5’ of an agricultural commu¬
nity is among the most important virtues or values people can embrace (Berry 1977).

Whatever challenges or threatens traditional farm virtues and rural communities
is regarded as ethically suspect if not plain unacceptable. For this reason, agrarians
have long been critics of government policies, business decisions, and technology-
development agendas that have tended to undermine farming as a way of life. For
example, agrarians claim that U.S. government policies have tended to favor larger,
corporate, heavily “industrialized” farms that are (assumed to be) better able to de¬
liver QQP to a predominantly urban/suburban population. Nonfarm interests (e.g.,
multinational petrochemical corporations) have increasingly purchased large blocks of
farmland and have destroyed many rural communities as farming transformed from a
family-based, labor-intensive, community-oriented enterprise to a mechanical/chemi¬
cal production system. Researchers in both industry and in agricultural colleges and
universities have limited their attention to efficiency and productivity in the develop¬
ment of technologies for agriculture. With the exception of farm protest groups and
some academics, respect for traditional family farms and rural communities is rarely
found outside those rural communities that have managed to hang on despite the accel¬
erating trends toward large agri business.

Given the basic ethical position of agrarians toward modern agriculture, it
should come as no surprise that most agrarians find GM technology to be ethically
unacceptable. As noted earlier, food/agricultural GMOs are usually designed and
intended for businesslike efficient production. They are not designed to enhance the
quality of life for farm families or their communities. In this regard, agrarians echo
many of the concerns voiced by proponents of autonomy/consent ethics: farmers are
systematically being robbed of the ability to choose. In this case, however, it is not
only that they may not be able to resist the technology — they may not be able to pre¬
serve their values and ways of life (Burkhardt 2000).

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By far the strongest expression of the agrarian rejection of modern agriculture
and GM technology has come from smaller-sized, traditional farm communities in
Europe and from peasant farm activists in developing nations in Africa, Latin
America, East Asia, and India. In Europe, the concern is that GM technology will
favor larger farms, make traditional agriculture less competitive, and drive small farms
out of business. Alternatively, GM technology may make foodstuffs cheaper, allowing
foreign- (read: U.S.-) produced foods to replace domestic products, again, forcing tra¬
ditional farmers out of business. In either case, a valued way of life is threatened.

In the developing world, the agrarian critique of GMOs reflects a view that even
if traditional family-style agriculture is not threatened initially, decreased availability
of non-GM crop seed (again as a result of the concentration of ownership in the seed
industry) may mean peasant farmers would be forced to use GM seed. This may be
costly, and it may force farmers to get big or get out. More importantly, it threatens
traditional ways of life, including the use of indigenous crops and growing practices.

In the United States and Canada, where most people are so far removed (physi¬
cally and psychologically) from agriculture, the agrarian position and critique of the
ethical acceptability of GMOs and GM foods has not received much attention. In the
late 1980s and early 1990s the agrarian critique of bovine growth hormone (rBST) did
surface in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, and a few dairy farm-rich areas in New
England. After that controversy faded from public awareness, agrarianism itself faded
from public view.

The second version of a virtue/tradition ethics to be considered here is what I
call naturism. This view has also been endorsed in part by members of religious
denominations in their exhortations that scientists engaged in GM research and devel¬
opment should not be “playing God.” In its more general and secular interpretation,
this view simply argues that we should not be engaging in transgenic technology —
crossing species boundaries. Nature , understood as an integrated system of beings and
processes, should not be treated this way: GM technology is ethically unacceptable.

Appealing to nature in this way can occasionally seem fuzzy-headed or mysti¬
cal, but there is actually a rational basis for this perspective. The term nature is a place¬
holder for a complex set of relationships among species of plants and animals, what

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we call an ecosystem. Though ecosystemic interactions are not all beneficial to every
participant in the system — some things die, some things prey on others, some things
mutate into others — the process of evolution produces, at any given point in time, an
equilibrium. This is not to say that the system becomes static, rather, that each species
functions in such a way that makes the system work as it does. In effect, each species
contributes to the ecosystem’s operations.

The problem with GM technology is that by transferring genetic material across
species boundaries, one transfers physical traits from the donor to the recipient. These
are not always (nor are they usually intended to be) traits that would appear in the
recipient species through natural evolutionary processes or even through deliberate
intraspecies crossbreeding. According to naturism, trans-species transfers of genetic
material can upset the operation of ecosystems. At the very least, we do not know
enough about, nor can we control enough of, complex ecosystems to be sure that the
GMO will not cause irreparable damage. Perhaps even life as we know it — including
human life — may be threatened.

For naturists, once we recognize the delicate balancing processes that constitute
ecosystems or nature, we must see that human beings have no right to manipulate
species or processes in this way. At root, people have an ethical responsibility to try to
avoid disruption of deep ecological processes. Obviously, nearly everything people do
“interferes with nature,” and much of this is necessary for people to live their lives.
However, the position taken by naturists is that GM technology is an arbitrary and
capricious attempt to manipulate life at the deepest level.

The specific virtues and tradition implied by the naturist perspective are not as
well defined as within agrarianism and some other virtue/tradition ethical orientations.
Considerable philosophical work is under way to try to articulate what naturism prac¬
tically implies (Callicott 1999). One thing naturists agree on is that genetic engineer¬
ing is ethically unacceptable.

In sum, then, virtue/tradition ethics defines ethical acceptability in terms of con¬
sistency with some deeply held values and virtues, whether they relate to farming as a
way of life, to life in accord with nature, or to following God’s plan and will. Not all
virtue/tradition ethical perspectives will necessarily reject GMOs or biotechnology

78

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overall. However, both in the United States and around the world, variations on this
ethical paradigm have generally rejected GMOs and GM food. The depth of convic¬
tions among adherents to virtue/tradition ethics, as well as the force of reasoned argu¬
ments stemming from these convictions, have contributed to the seriousness and inten¬
sity of public debates and have occasionally fueled violent political action against
GMOs and GM foods.

Concluding Remarks

It has not been the intention here to argue in favor of any of the ethical paradigms or
approaches to evaluating the ethical acceptability of GMOs and GM foods. Rather, the
point has been to illustrate the importance of each of these three ethical paradigms in
the GMO debates. In many respects, both autonomy/consent and virtue/tradition
ethics have been marginal to public debate, though perhaps autonomy/consent less so
than virtue/tradition ethics. While somewhat marginal, these orientations should not
be marginal/zed.

Indeed, public debate about GMOs and GM foods over the past decade-plus has
been dominated by considerations of risk, costs, and benefits of these products of the
new biotechnology. Because these products and technologies are logically and institu¬
tionally linked to an important social and economic force in the global community —
agriculture — it is hardly surprising and initially justifiable that the economic dimensions
be primary. Potential implications for the environment and for people’s health
demanded that environmental and food safety be factored into the assessment of ethical
acceptability. Still, these concerns were defined in terms of economic costs and benefits.

In the 1990s, however, consumer activist groups began to push an agenda of
autonomy/consent regarding GM foods. In some cases this opened the debate to a dif¬
ferent set of ethical concerns, indeed, a different way to think about the ethics of
GMOs. So-called “civil society organizations” (CSOs) such as the Rural
Advancement Foundation International and Farm Aid began to push agendas stressing
protections for small farms and the rural way of life. Environmentalist groups encour¬
aged considerations of intrinsic value in natural systems and places. Each perspective
introduced ethical considerations that had been absent from the public arena.

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79

Whatever one may believe about the soundness of the arguments presented by
political actors opposed to GMOs, these critics have provided a valuable service to all
of us concerned about agriculture and food as well as technology. The three ethical
paradigms presented here predate and are independent of any critics’ (or proponents’)
use of them in public discourse and debate. Professional philosophers and ethicists
wrote about issues in agriculture and agricultural biotechnology years before these
issues became matters of widespread public controversy.2 Nevertheless, the fact is that
autonomy/consent and virtue/tradition ethics were forced into the public conscious¬
ness by activist critics. Activists have refused to limit ethical discussion to conse-
quentialist issues — costs, benefits, risks. In so doing, they have forced policy makers
and concerned citizens to recognize that we differ in what we believe is right or wrong
about GMOs, but more importantly, why we differ.

As is true regarding many public issues with ethical dimensions or with deep,
conflicting underlying ethical judgments, the solution to the GMO controversies may
ultimately come down to political-economic decisions. Lawmakers may decide in favor
of labeling as a way of appeasing constituents. Policy makers in USDA, EPA, or FDA
may decide that any additional or different kinds of tests for GMOs would be too cost¬
ly and establish inefficient barriers to marketing these products. The president of the
United States may direct the secretary of the Department of Agriculture to press ahead
with a “more biotech is better” research agenda to try to capture the world market for
GMOs, GM foods, and GM crops. Regardless of the reasons that laws and policies ulti¬
mately are made, ethics still matters. Recognizing — and respecting — the rationality of
opposing basic ethical beliefs and a different ethical paradigm is an important step in
understanding the debates. Those who disagree with us are not always uninformed or
irrational; sometimes they just subscribe to a different ethical paradigm, yjbt

Jeffrey Burkhardt, Ph.D., is Professor of Agriculture and Natural Resource Ethics
and Professor of Food and Resource Economics in the Institute of Food and
Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) of the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is author
of two books and numerous professional articles on ethics of food and agricultural
biotechnology and has lectured widely in the United States and Europe on this topic.

80

Transactions

He teaches courses on agriculture and natural resource ethics and coordinates the
University of Florida/IFAS teaching, research, and extension program in this area.

Notes

1 . Observers have characterized the products of GM technology in terms of the gen¬
eral kinds of goals or properties associated with them. The so-called “first generation”
has been targeted at agronomic goals — productivity and yield, reduced chemical
inputs, and the like. The “second generation” is supposed to provide benefits more
directly to consumers, such as better flavor, longer shelf life, improved nutrition con¬
tent, and so forth. The “third generation,” still a long way from reality, would include
novel uses of agricultural products, for example, building materials from plant fibers
(not wood) and oils, alternative energy sources, and single foods (e.g., corn) with all
the vitamins, minerals, and proteins necessary for a wholly nutritious diet.

2. Berry (1977) alluded to the development of agricultural biotechnology and offered
an agrarian critique as early as 1977, although the agricultural biotechnology research
and development effort was still in a prenatal stage at the time. It was not until after
the 1980 Diamond v. Chakrabarty U.S. Supreme Court decision, allowing patents on
“novel life forms” produced through rDNA techniques, that the agricultural biotech¬
nology industry began in earnest. Among the earliest ethical treatments of food and
agricultural biotechnology are Thompson (1984), Doyle (1985), and Burkhardt
(1986). There is now a considerable ethical/philosophical literature on GMOs and GM
foods; I refer the reader to the extensive bibliography in Thompson (1998).

References

Berry, W. 1977. The Unsettling of America. San Francisco: Sierra Club.

Blackburn, S. 2001. Being Good: An Introduction to Ethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.

Burkhardt, I 1986. “Biotechnology, Ethics, and the Structure of Agriculture.”
Agriculture and Human Values 4:2.

Burkhardt, J. 2000. “Agricultural Biotechnology, Ethics, Family Farms, and

Industrialization.” In Encyclopedia of Ethical, Legal, and Policy Issues in
Biotechnology, edited by T. Murray and M. Mehlman. New York: Wiley.

Burkhardt, I 2001. “Agricultural Biotechnology and the Future Benefits Argument.”
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 14:2.

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81

Callicott, J. B. 1999. Beyond the Land Ethics: Essays in Environmental Philosophy.
Albany: State University of New York Press.

Comstock, G. 1989. “The Case Against BGH .” Agriculture and Human Values 5:1.

Crisp, R., and M. Slote, eds. 1997. Virtue Ethics . Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.

Doyle, J. 1985. Altered Harvest: Agriculture, Genetics and the Future of the Worlds
Food Supply. New York: Viking.

Environmental News Service. 1999. “bT Corn Deadly to Buterflies” (May).
http://www.lycos.ens.com/

Food and Drug Administration. 2000. Use of Standards in Substantial Equivalence
Determination. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Lappe, M., and B. Bailey. 1998. Against the Grain . Monroe, Maine: Common
Courage Press.

Rippe, K. P. 2000. “Novel Foods and Consumer Rights: Concerning Food Policy in a
Liberal State.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 14:1.

Rural Advancement Foundation International. 1999. “Traitor Technology: How

Suicide Seeds Work/Where They Are Being Patented.” RAF I Communique
(January 30). http://www.rafi.org

Slote, M. 1985. Common-Sense Morality and Consequentialism. Boston: Routledge.

Thompson, P. B. 1984. “Agricultural Biotechnology and the Rhetoric of Risk.”
Environmental Professional 9:3.

Thompson, P. B. 1998. Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective. London: Blackie
Academic.

Warner, K. D. 2000. Questioning the Promise: Critical Reflections on Agricultural
Biotechnology from the Perspective of Catholic Teaching (March). Des
Moines, Iowa: National Catholic Rural Life Commission.

82

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Biotechnology and
Agriculture:

A Skeptical Perspective

Vernon W. Ruttan

Reprinted with permission from AgBioForum, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1999.

A combination of population and income growth will almost double the
demand for food and other agricultural commodities over the next half cen¬
tury. Advances in crop productivity during the twentieth century have
largely been based on the application of Mendelian genetics. If farmers are to respond
effectively to the demands that will be placed on them over the next half century,
research in molecular biology and biotechnology will have to be directed to removing
the physiological constraints that are the source of present crop yield ceilings.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, a series of strategic or general-
purpose technologies have served as the primary vehicles for technical change across
broad industrial sectors. In the nineteenth century the steam engine was the dominant
general-purpose technology. In the early twentieth century the electric generator and
the internal combustion engine became pervasive sources of technical change. By the
third quarter of the twentieth century, the computer and the semiconductor had
assumed that role across both the manufacturing and service industries. It is not an
exaggeration to suggest that biotechnology is poised to become the most important
new general-purpose technology of the first half of the twenty-first century.

A consistent feature of these general-purpose technologies has been a long per¬
iod between their initial emergence and their measurable impact (David 1990). The

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83

steam engine underwent a century of modification and improvement before its wide¬
spread adoption in industry and transport. It was half a century from the time electric
power was first introduced until it became a measurable source of growth in industrial
productivity. Controversy about the impact of computers on productivity continued into
the 1990s. It is not yet possible to demonstrate measurable impact of biotechnology on
either human health or agriculture in terms of broad indicators for health (such as infant
mortality or life expectancy) or agriculture (such as output per hectare or per worker).

The argument I make in this paper is that the advances in crop productivity expe¬
rienced during the twentieth century were made possible primarily by the application
of the principles of Mendelian genetics to crop improvement. Biotechnology is poised
to become an important source of productivity growth in agriculture during the first
half of the twenty-first century. But the advances in the new biotechnology achieved
thus far have not yet raised yield ceilings beyond the levels achieved using the older
methods. Nor do they promise to do so in the near future.

The Mendelian Revolution

Before the beginning of the twentieth century almost all increases in crop production
were achieved by expanding the area cultivated. Selection by farmers led to the devel¬
opment of landraces suited to particular agroclimatic environments. But grain yields,
even in favorable environments, rarely averaged above 2.0 metric tons per hectare (30
bushels per acre). Efforts to improve yields through farmers’ seed selection and
improved cultivation practices had relatively modest impact on yield prior to the appli¬
cation of the principles of Mendelian genetics to crop improvement. In the United
States, for example, maize yields remained essentially unchanged, at below 30 bushels
per acre, until the 1930s. Not until the introduction of hybrids was the corn yield ceil¬
ing broken (Duvick 1996; Mosher 1962).

Similar yield increases have occurred in other crops. These increases occurred
first in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. Since the early 1970s, dramatic
yield increases, heralded as the Green Revolution, have occurred in many developing
countries, primarily in Asia and Latin America. By the 1990s, several countries in Africa
were beginning to experience substantial gains in maize and rice yields (Eicher 1995).

84

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Yield Constraints

By the early 1990s, however, concern was growing that yields of a number of impor¬
tant cereal crops, such as maize and rice, might again be approaching yield ceilings.
In the Philippines, rice yields in maximum yield trials at the International Rice
Research Institute had not risen since the early 1980s (Pingali, Moya, and Velasco
1990). In the United States, maize yields that had been rising at an arithmetically lin¬
ear rate of approximately 2.0 bushels per year appeared to be following a logarithmic
path. Two bushels per year is a much lower percentage rate of increase when maize
yield stands at 130 bushels per acre than when it was 30 bushels per acre.

The issue of whether crop yields are approaching a yield plateau has become
increasingly controversial. In an exceedingly careful review and assessment of yield
trends for eleven crops in the United States, Reilly and Fuglie found that an arith¬
metically linear trend model provided the best fit for five crops while an exponential
model provided the best fit for another five — “but none of the differences between the
two models are statistically significant” (Reilly and Fuglie 1998, 280).

Efforts have been made to partition the sources of yield increases among ge¬
netic improvements, technical inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation), and manage¬
ment. I find many of these approaches conceptually flawed.1 Genetic improvements
have been specifically directed to enabling yield response to technical inputs and man¬
agement. For example, changes in plant architecture such as short stature and more
erect leaves have been designed to increase plant populations per unit area and to
enhance fertilizer response. The combined effect has been to substantially raise yield
per acre or per hectare.

It is hard to escape a conclusion, drawing on the basic crop science literature,

'In the mid-1990s, Donald N. Duvick of Pioneer Hybrid International conducted a series of very careful
experiments to determine the relative contribution of increases in maize yields due to breeding. His results
suggest that plant breeding contributed about 60 percent of the yield increases between 1935 and 1975.
Duvick has also suggested in correspondence (February 13, 1999) that by the mid-1990s in the United
States and other developed countries, the relative contribution of plant breeding is probably higher than in
the period he studied because there are fewer increments to yield being realized from more effective weed
control or higher levels of nitrogen fertilizer application. Duvick also reminded me that advances in crop
yield from plant breeding has been due at least as much to the tacit knowledge of experienced breeders as
from the application of the principles of Mendelian genetics.

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85

that advances in the yields of the major food and feed grains are approaching physio¬
logical limits that are not very far above the yields obtained by the better farmers in
favorable areas, or at experiment station maximum yield trials (Cassman 1998;
Sinclair 1998). If present yield ceilings are to be broken, it seems apparent that
improvements in photosynthetic efficiency, particularly the capture of solar radiation
and reduction of water loss through transpiration, will be required. Even researchers
working at the frontiers of plant physiology are not optimistic about the rate of
progress that will be realized in enhancing crop metabolism (Cassman 1998; Mann
1999; Sinclair 1998).

The Biotechnology Revolution

The impact of advances in biotechnology on crop yields has come much more slowly
than the authors of press releases announcing the biotechnology breakthrough of the
week anticipated in the early 1980s (Ruttan 2001). The development of in vitro tissue
and cell culture techniques, which were occurring in parallel with monoclonal antibody
and rDNA techniques, would make possible the regeneration of whole plants from a
single cell or a small piece of tissue. It was anticipated that the next series of advances
would be in plant protection through introduction or manipulation of genes that confer
resistance to pests and pathogens. Many leading participants in the development of the
new biotechnologies expected that these advances would lead to measurable increases
in crop yields by the early 1990s (Sundquist, Menz, and Neumeyer 1982).

Though the early projections were overly enthusiastic, significant applications
were beginning to occur by the mid-1990s. The first commercially successful virus-
resistant crop, a virus-resistant tobacco, was introduced in China in the early 1990s.
The Calgene Flavr Savr™ tomato, the first genetically altered whole food product to
be commercially marketed, was introduced (unsuccessfully) in 1994. Important
progress was made in transgenic approaches to the development of herbicide resist¬
ance, insect resistance, and pest and pathogen resistance in a number of crops. DNA
marker technology was being employed to locate important chromosomal regions
affecting a given trait in order to track and manipulate desirable gene linkages with
greater speed and precision. By the 1998 crop year, almost 1 10 million acres (44 mil-

86

Transactions

lion hectares) had been planted worldwide to transgenic crops, primarily herbicide or
virus-resistant soybeans, maize, tobacco, and cotton (table 1).

Table 1. Global Area of Transgenic Crops in 1999 and 2000 by Crop and by Trait

1999 2000 1999-2000

Hectares
planted
(in millions)

Area

planted

(%)

Hectares
planted
(in millions)

Area

planted

(%)

Hectares

increase
(in millions)

Percent

increase

(1999/2000)

Crop

Soybean

21.6

54

25.8

58

+4.2

19

Corn

11.1

28

10.3

23

-0.8

-7

Cotton

3.7

9

5.3

12

+1.6

43

Canola

3.4

9

2.8

7

-0.6

-18

Potato

<0.1

<1

<0.1

<1

<0.1

N/A

Total

39.9

100

44.2

100

4.3

+ 11

Trait

Herbicide tolerance

28.1

71

32.7

74

+4.6

+ 16

Insect resistance

8.9

22

8.3

19

-0.6

-2

Bt/Herbicide tolerance 2.9

7

3.2

7

+0.3

+10

Other traits

<0.1

<1

<0.1

<1

<0.1

N/A

Total

39.9

100

44.2

100

+4.3

11

Source: Review: Global Review of Commercialized Transgenetic Crops
(ISAAA Briefs No. 21-2000) by Clive James, 2000.

The important point that needs to be made, however, is that the biotechnology products
presently on the market are almost entirely designed to enable producers to achieve
yields that are closer to present yield ceilings rather than to lift yield ceilings.2 When I

2Control of insect pests of cotton, primarily tobacco budworm, cotton bollworm, and pink bollworm, rep¬
resents one of the most dramatic, and clearly positive, results of the introduction of a transgenic crop. The
introduction of the Bacillus microorganism into cotton has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the use of
insecticides while substantially enhancing cotton yields (Flack-Zepeda, Traxler, and Nelson 2000). The
effect was, however, not to enhance the genetic potential of the cotton plant but rather to enable the plant
to come closer to realizing its genetic potential in the field.

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87

asked the research director of a major commercial seed company when he might expect
to see a line in table 1 for higher biological potential, his response was, “I don’t know.
There is a lot of hype out there.” One reason for the cautious response is that attention
is shifting away from yield to a second-generation emphasis on quality traits.

More Generations

Even as we move into the initial years of the first generation of agricultural biotech¬
nologies, second- and third-generation technologies are being enthusiastically her¬
alded (Kishore and Shewmaker 1998). The objective of the second generation, now
being explored at the laboratory level, is to create value downstream from production.
A high-oil maize, recently introduced by DuPont, though not strictly a biotechnology
product, is often referred to as an example. Efforts are being directed to develop cere¬
als fortified with the critical essential amino acids such as lysine, methionine, threo¬
nine, and tryptophan for use in animal feed rations and in consumer products. It is also
anticipated that oilseeds will be modified to enhance protein quality and their content
of fat that is free of trans fatty acids (Kalaitzandonakes 1998).

A third generation of biotechnologies, directed to the development of plants as
nutrient factories to supply food, feed, and fiber, is also anticipated. High-carotene
fruits, vegetables, and oils designed to reduce vitamin A deficiency is one example.
In the longer run it is anticipated that biotechnology will revolutionize crop produc¬
tion and utilization technology. Processed feed and food will be grown in fermenta¬
tion vats using biotechnology-engineered microorganisms and generic biomass
feedstocks (J. Reilly, personal communication, January 25, 1999; Rogoff and
Rawlins 1987).

In a fit of what can only be characterized as irrational exuberance, some biotech¬
nology publicists have proclaimed that the benefits of new value-added grain produc¬
tion systems will be shared equitably among producers, the biotechnology and food
industries, and consumers. In addition, these systems will eliminate the historic cycles
of price and profit instability associated with traditional commodity market instabil¬
ity (Freiberg 1998). It is not too difficult to hear echoes of the hype of the early 1980s
when the first-generation biotechnologies were still in the laboratory.

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Some Concerns

I am concerned that more intensive research efforts are not being devoted to attempts
to break the physiological constraints that will limit future increases in crop yields.
These constraints will impinge most severely on yield gains in those areas that have
already achieved the highest yields. It is possible that advances in fundamental knowl¬
edge in areas such as functional genomics, for example, might provide a scientific
foundation for a new round of rapid yield increases. This would, in turn, enhance the
profitability of private-sector allocation of research resources to yield improvement.
But it would appear exceedingly rash to predict that these advances will leave any
measurable impact on production within the next several decades (Duvick 1996).

I am concerned that many developing countries have not yet acquired the
research and development capacity necessary to enable their farmers to realize the
potential yield gains from crop-improvement efforts. In most developing countries,
yields are still so far below existing biological ceilings that substantial gains can be
realized from a strategy emphasizing traditional crop breeding combined with higher
levels of technical inputs, better soil and crop management, and first-generation
biotechnology crop-protection technology. Because the fastest rates of growth in
demand, arising out of population and income growth, will occur in the poorest coun¬
tries, it is doubly important that these countries acquire the capacity to sustain sub¬
stantial agricultural research efforts.

I am also concerned about the economic and scientific viability of public-sector
agriculturally oriented research in developed countries. Since 1980, the resources avail¬
able to the federal government (USDA) agricultural research system have remained
essentially unchanged in real terms. Public support for the state agricultural experiment
stations (from federal and state sources) has barely kept up with inflation.3 The eco-

3The Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California-Berkeley has recently
entered into an arrangement to sell its “research product” to Novartis (Wein 1999). A number of similar
relationships had been developed between private universities (Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and Washington University) and large pharmaceutical companies in the early 1980s. The
Berkeley arrangement is controversial, primarily because it is the first time a major public university has
entered into such a close arrangement.

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89

nomic viability of private- sector research requires that it be directed to the development
of proprietary products. It is important for the scientific and technical viability of pri¬
vate-sector agricultural research that the capacity of public-sector institutions to con¬
duct basic and generic research be not only maintained but enhanced as well, im w

Vernon W. Ruttan is a Regents’ Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Economics
and Applied Economics and an Adjunct Professor in the Hubert H. Humphrey
Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. He has served as a staff
member of the Presidents Council of Economic Advisors (1961-63) and as President
of the Agricultural Development Council (1973-78). Ruttans research has been in
the field of agricultural development, resource economics, and research policy. He is
the author of numerous books and is currently writing Social Science Knowledge
and Economic Development, to be published by the University of Michigan Press,
2002. Ruttan has been elected a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics
Association (1974); American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976); the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (1986); and to membership in the
National Academy of Sciences (1990).

References

Cassman, K. 1998. “Ecological Intensification of Cereal Production Systems: The
Challenge of Increasing Crop Yield Potential and Precision Agriculture.” In
Plants and People: Is There Time? Proceedings of a National Academy of
Sciences Colloquium, Irvine, California, December 5-6, 1998. (Retrieved
January 31, 1999, from the World Wide Web,
http://www.lsc.psu.edu/nas/colloquium.html)

David, P. A. 1990. “Computer and Dynamo: A Historical Perspective on the Modern
Productivity Paradox.” American Economic Review 80:355-61.

Duvick, D. N. 1996. “Plant Breeding, an Evolutionary Concept.” Crop Science
36:359-548.

Eicher, C. K. 1995. “Zimbabwe’s Maize-Based Green Revolution: Preconditions for
Replication.” World Development 23:805-18.

Flack-Zepeda, J. B., G. Traxler, and R. G. Nelson. 2000. “Supplies Distribution from
the Introduction of a Biotechnology Innovation.” American Journal of
Agricultural Economics 82:360-69.

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Freiberg, B. 1998. “Will Biotechnology Bring Prosperity to Rural America?” AgBio
Forum l(2):76-77. (Retrieved January 1, 1999, from World Wide Web,
http://www.agbioforum.missouri.edu)

Kalaitzandonakes, N. 1998. “Biotechnology and Identity-Preserved Supply Chains:

A Look at the Future of Crop Production and Marketing.” Choices (Fourth
Quarter), 15-18.

Kishore, G. M., and Shewmaker, C. 1998. “Biotechnology: Enhancing Human

Nutrition in Developing and Developed Worlds.” In Plants and Population:
Is There Time? Proceedings of a National Academy of Sciences Colloquium,
Irvine, Calif, December 5-6, 1998. (Retrieved January 31, 1999, from the
World Wide Web: http://www.lsc.psu/nas/colloquium.html)

Mann, C. G. 1999. “Genetic Engineers Aim to Soup Up Crop Photosynthesis.”
Science 283:314-16.

Mosher, M. L. 1962. Early Iowa Corn Yield Tests and Related Later Programs.

Ames: Iowa State University Press.

Pingali, P. L., P. F. Moya, and L. E. Velasco. 1990. “The Post-Green Revolution

Blues in Asian Rice Production: The Diminished Gap Between Experiment
Station and Farmer Yields.” Social Science Paper 90-01. Manila,

Philippines: International Rice Research Institute.

Reilly, J. M., and K. O. Fuglie. 1998. “Future Yield Growth in Field Crops: What
Evidence Exists.” Soil and Tillage Research 47:275-90.

Rogoff, M., and S. L. Rawlins. 1987. “Food Security: A Technological Alternative.”
BioScience 37:800-807.

Ruttan, V W. 2001. Technology, Growth and Development: An Induced Innovation
Perspective . New York: Oxford University Press.

Sinclair, T. R. 1998. “Limits on Land, Water, Energy and Biological Resources:
Comment.” In Plants and Population: Is There Time? Proceedings of a
National Academy of Science Colloquium, Irvine, Calif., December 5-6,
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Sundquist, W. B., K. M. Menz, and C. F. Neumeyer. 1982. A Technology Assessment
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Biodiversity and
Bioprospecting:
Conflicting
Worldviews

Lori P. Knowles

Much of the debate over the ethical use of agricultural biotechnology focus¬
es on domestic perception and regulation of genetically modified foods.
Commentators often neglect the importance of situating this technology
within the international political and legal context. The value of agricultural biotech¬
nology to the United States is dependent on the acceptance of its products by overseas
markets. Genetically modified (GM) food and crop exports are, therefore, affected by
trade negotiations regarding the importation of these goods. In addition, approximately
90 percent of the world’s biological resources are found in developing countries. From
these biological resources, medicines, pesticides, and other profitable products may be
extracted. Exploring agreements affecting international trade will show that conflicting
worldviews are embodied in international instruments with respect to the use and pro¬
tection of the world’s biological resources. The primacy of economic value and intellec¬
tual property right protections over social, cultural, and ethical values in international
agreements has profound implications for both bioprospecting and biodiversity.

Challenging the International Commonwealth

At this time in history we are seeing a shift in global political and legal ideology. Until

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recently, the international legal system has been based on a commonwealth model.1
This model has strengths and weaknesses. The commonwealth model is predicated on
multiparty diplomacy, global representation, and respect for national sovereignty. In
theory, the entire human community is represented by their governments and by non¬
governmental organizations in organs such as the United Nations. Work generated by
parties to the international legal system is largely embodied in agreements, treaties,
covenants, and conventions.

Despite the politics of power that exist in any international legal system, many
believe that a cooperative model of dispute resolution will best respect and serve the
interests of each party as well as the interests of the international community. This
method of problem solving has developed tremendously positive and authoritative
agreements, not the least of which are the agreements forming the International Bill
of Human Rights.2 The strengths of the commonwealth model are accompanied by
some weaknesses; a system based on multiparty diplomacy is complex, somewhat
cumbersome, and resistant to change. It also requires a commitment of time and
respect for cultural differences by all parties. These characteristics have proven to be
impediments in the search for effective responses to international emergencies.

The traditional multiparty diplomacy model of international law is being chal¬
lenged. Its importance is being rapidly superseded by the emergence of a new inter¬
national political order resulting from the rise of global capitalism. The World Trade
Organization (WTO) best exemplifies the values and workings of this new order.
International decision making on a wide range of activities is now to a large extent cir¬
cumscribed by WTO dispute mechanisms. Accordingly, the economic might of domi¬
nant parties in the WTO, such as the United States, plays a tremendous role in the out¬
comes of various disputes.

Issues adjudicated before the WTO often have more than simple “trade” implica¬
tions. The WTO’s decision-making power is far-reaching; it does not, however, ade¬
quately recognize legitimate concerns of a nontrade orientation that are intimately con-

1 Please refer to end notes for all notes in this article.

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nected to the trade aspects under consideration. There is disagreement about which cri¬
teria are relevant and what values are at stake in trade disputes. Americans argue that
only economic concerns are relevant in trade negotiations, with very limited excep¬
tions. For example, with respect to agricultural trade, Americans consider European
concerns about animal welfare to be an illegitimate concern in trade negotiations.
Several American commentators have even accused the Europeans of raising such con¬
cerns as a way to introduce nontrade tariff barriers into international negotiations.3

With respect to GM food and bioprospecting (mining biological resources for
profitable properties), concerns about corporate ownership of the world’s future food
supply, benefit sharing, and irreversible environmental degradation cannot be ade¬
quately addressed through WTO negotiations.4 The WTO represents the emergence of
an openly competitive and adversarial model of international dispute resolution. It is
competitive rather than cooperative and promotes the primacy of economic value in
making decisions to order world affairs. Understanding this background helps illumi¬
nate the motivations behind recent antiglobalization demonstrations in Seattle and
Sweden and the popular backlash against American multinational corporations
involved in agricultural biotechnology. Alongside concerns about risks to human
health, the environment, and global justice, there appears to be deep concern about the
imposition of “capitalist values” on an agrarian tradition that incorporates other
frames of valuation: spiritual, cultural, social, and economic. The impact of this on the
conservation of biological diversity is apparent when one looks at the conflict of
worldviews between the commonwealth approach and the trade approach to conser¬
vation and use of the world’s biological resources.5

Intellectual Property Rights

One of the building blocks of global capitalism is the international protection of intel¬
lectual property rights (IPRs). IPRs include copyright, trade secrets, patents, indus¬
trial design, and trademarks, among other things. Of particular interest with respect to
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are patents. A patent represents a bargain
with an inventor that is based on the endowment of a time-limited monopoly (usually
20 years) in exchange for public disclosure of the inventor’s creation. In this way

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patents are thought to stimulate research and development, although in the age of
biotechnology this has become a more controversial claim.6

Until recently there has been a long tradition of not permitting the patenting of
“products of nature”; therefore, animals and plants were not patentable. To provide for
the protection of new plant varieties developed by traditional techniques of cross¬
breeding, plant breeders’ rights were introduced. In 1980 in the United States, the
Supreme Court of that country opened the gates to the patenting of “non-naturally
occurring” living substances.7 As a result virtually any living thing that can be repro¬
duced by human intervention has become patentable. The ability to patent living prod¬
ucts of biotechnology has been controversial for many years. At the same time, this
ability forms the backbone of American biotechnology dominance and investment by
multinational corporations in exploiting the world’s biological resources. European
experience with patenting of life forms has been markedly different. Political ambiva¬
lence in Europe on this issue for many years resulted in the passage of a moratorium
on the patenting of life forms.8 Recently, in the face of American dominance in global
biotechnology that moratorium was lifted, although the change in policy continues to
be controversial.

Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights
and the Convention on Biological Diversity

It is telling to engage in an examination of the conflicting approaches to the treatment
of the world’s biological diversity and biological resources as articulated under the
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement, a product
of the WTO; and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a product of the com¬
monwealth model to international agreement.9 A cursory examination of the values
that motivate these international agreements illustrates the conflicts that exist between
them. The TRIPS agreement is based on the protection of economic value, the pursuit
of capitalism and profit, and the safeguarding of individual property rights. By con¬
trast, the CBD emphasizes the value of conservation, fair and equitable sharing of ben¬
efits, and the value of communities of people.

The TRIPs agreement is a WTO agreement based on the promotion of effective

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and adequate protection of IPRs. It is also based on the extension of patentability to
pharmaceuticals and to the microorganisms and processes for creating plants and ani¬
mals. All signatories must have an effective plant-protection system in place.
Exceptions to the intellectual property protections required by the agreement are per¬
mitted if they are based on measures for public health and interest. Permitted excep¬
tions must, however, be consistent with the provisions of the TRIPs agreement.
Consequently, whether such measures could be instituted to protect cultural and social
welfare in a given country seems unlikely. Valuation of biological diversity, under
TRIPs, therefore, is clearly instrumental to the desires and needs of parties wishing to
exploit biological resources found around the world or, in other words, those compa¬
nies and governments engaging in bioprospecting.10

The CBD resulted from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is a prod¬
uct of the commonwealth approach to formulation of international policy. Where the
TRIPs agreement is based on economic exploitation of existing biological diversity,
the CBD is committed to the conservation of the world’s biological diversity. In addi¬
tion, the CBD is premised on the principle of fair and equitable sharing, not only of
the profits from exploiting those resources, but also of the medical benefits derived
from them. Furthermore, provisions for transfer of technologies is included. The CBD
explicitly provides for the recognition of and compensation for the contributions of
indigenous peoples in cultivating and caring for plants that yield patentable properties.
In stark contrast to the TRIPs agreement, the CBD states that intellectual property
regimes must be consistent with and not detract from the provisions of the CBD. It is
clear, therefore, that the values of conservation, stewardship, sharing, and inclusion are
paramount values in the vision articulated by the CBD.

Commodification, Exploitation, and the Property Paradigm

The contrasting approaches to biological diversity embodied in the TRIPs and CBD
raise a number of other ethical issues. For example, the imposition of property rights
on living material raises concerns about the commodification and commercialization
of life forms. In addition, introducing Anglo American property schemes into agrar¬
ian traditions customarily ordered by other norms may disrupt cultural and societal tra-

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ditions as well as biological diversity. Finally, the appropriateness of choosing the legal
tool of private property to govern our use of biological resources rather than other
legal property concepts is at issue.

The application of IPRs to plants, animals, and other living matter has created a
significant amount of debate about the commodification and commercialization of
life. This concern is popularly articulated as concerns about the appropriateness of
“owning life.” Although IPRs do not confer ownership in the legal sense, concerns
about “owning life” respond more generally to the commodification of living things.

The sentiment is widely shared that living things are sacred or different from
nonliving things in a morally relevant way. For many, this special character mandates
that living matter not be subject to the rules that govern private property. Many peo¬
ple believe that applying private property rights to living organisms serves to devalue
that life by changing it into a commodity that can be transferred in the marketplace
much like any other thing. This concern can be seen with respect to the whole spec¬
trum of living matter, be it property rights in the human body, animals, plant life, or
embryonic stem cells.11 Regardless of one’s views about the character of living matter,
it is true that much living matter does not correspond to our notions of what consti¬
tutes fungible property that can be bought, sold, traded, or destroyed according to an
individual’s whim.12 This is particularly true when we consider the nature of property
in the human body, animals, frozen embryos, and plants that are used as food or for
medicine by whole communities of people.13

Awarding IPRs to corporations in the industrialized world in products derived
from biological resources found in developing nations raises concerns about exploita¬
tion. That exploitation concerns the contribution of indigenous peoples who for cen¬
turies have cultivated and used plants for their properties that are now patentable.
Approximately 90 percent of the world’s biological resources can be found in under¬
developed regions of Asia and Africa. Despite this, multinational corporations hold 97
percent of all patents worldwide.14 Granting IPRs in these biological resources over¬
looks indigenous contributions that have led to the discovery of the valuable proper¬
ties in the first instance. In addition, few corporations provide for sharing the finan¬
cial or medicinal benefits derived from the biological resource with indigenous peo-

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pies. Perhaps the most notorious example is the European patent that was granted to
the United States Department of Agriculture and the multinational agricultural com¬
pany WR Grace on fungicidal properties of the neem tree.15 In India the neem tree is
revered. It has been carefully cultivated, and its fungicidal, pesticide, and medicinal
properties have been used for centuries. The privatization of those properties for prof¬
it in industrialized nations has been widely condemned as a textbook case of biopira¬
cy.16 Recently that patent was overturned; however, hundreds of other patents on neem
are still under consideration.17

IPRs can be disruptive and disrespectful of agrarian traditions in countries in
which the sharing of crops and seeds is part of the culture. Private property traditions
emphasize the dominion of an individual over a good, and in particular the right of that
individual to exclude others from using that good. Although many argue that no form
of property rights should be used with respect to living matter, in truth property rights
have extended to land, plants, and animals for many years. The question, therefore, is
whether intellectual property is the best legal tool to describe humankind’s relation¬
ship to biological resources or whether some other property relationship better
describes our relationship and serves our interests.

The ability to protect a resource for the use of many is part of our legal proper¬
ty traditions. Notions of “the commons” reflect the idea that there are some resources,
formerly common lands, that should be open to all and cannot be subject to exclusive
dominion or exploitation. It is this notion of common property that has been used to
protect the integrity and sharing of the deep-sea beds. In addition, notions of common
property apply to heritage and cultural property.18 As with objects of cultural signifi¬
cance to the people of a particular region or heritage, our biological diversity is more
than simply a tangible thing to be exploited and used up at the owners’ whim. Notions
of intrinsic value aside, the world’s genetic resources often represent the cumulative
efforts of generations of care and cultivation. Consequently, the benefits of those gen¬
erations of stewardship should be protected and accrue to all people as well as future
generations. The interests of all humankind would be better served if the world’s bio¬
logical resources were considered common property to be preserved and shared rather
than individual property to be exploited.

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Conclusion

Agricultural biotechnology is part of the larger biotechnology industry, which relies
on exploiting useful properties from the world’s rich biological diversity.
Understanding ethical issues associated with this technology requires an examination
of the international legal and political context as well as domestic perceptions and reg¬
ulatory concerns. The rise of global capitalism has created new political and legal
norms. A shift from a commonwealth model of international negotiation based on
cooperation and equality to a trade-oriented model that is adversarial and favors the
economically powerful is taking place. This shift places conflicting worldviews about
the value and stewardship of the world’s biological resources in stark contrast. Trade
agreements involving biological products are intimately connected with intellectual
property protections. The extension of intellectual property to life forms has paved the
way for industrial countries and corporations to lay claim to biological resources in
developing countries with medicinal and other useful properties. With privatization of
these resources, social, historical, and cultural traditions are disrupted and the contri¬
butions of indigenous peoples are ignored. Not all property notions need lead to this
result. The world’s biological resources should be conserved and shared. Rather than
awarding private property rights to their bounty, we should consider the wisdom of
regarding biological diversity as our cultural and environmental heritage and common
property for all people, yjbt

Lori P. Knowles, LLB BCL MA LLM, is associate for Law and Bioethics and
Director of Education and Outreach at The Hastings Center, a nonprofit, independ¬
ent bioethics research center in Garrison, New York. She researches and publishes in
international and comparative health and bioethics law. Knowles is a lawyer with
law degrees from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Notes

1 . I take this notion of the international commonwealth from Peter G. Brown, Ethics,
Economics and International Relations: Transparent Sovereignty in the
Commonwealth of Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

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2. Universal Declaration of Human Rights , adopted and proclaimed by UN General
Assembly Resolution 2 1 7A(III) (December 10, 1948). International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights, G.A. Res. 2200(XXI), 21 U.N. GAOR, Supp (No. 16) 52, U.N.
Doc. A/6316 (1966). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
G.A. Res. 2200 (XXI), U.N. GAOR, Supp. (No. 16) 49, U.N. Doc. A(6316) 1966.

3. John Micklethwait, “Europe’s Profound Fear of Food,” New York Times , 7 June
1999, p. A21; Rick Weiss, “In Europe, Cuisine de Gene Gets a Vehement Thumbs
Down,” Washington Post , 24 April 1999, p. Al.

4. Editorial, “The Name of the Game: The Battle over Genetically Modified Foods Is
Not What It Seems,” New Scientist , 22 May 1999, p. 3.

5. See Lori Wallach and Michelle Sforza, Whose Trade Organization? Corporate
Globalization and The Erosion of Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Public Citizen,
1999).

6. See Robert Mullan Cook-Deegan and Stephen J. McCormack, “Patents, Secrecy,
and DNA,” Science , 13 July 2001, 217.

7. Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980).

8. See http://www.European-patent--office.org; Quirin Schiermeirer, “European
Union Move to Curb Moratorium on Transgenic Plants,” Nature 409 (22 February
2001): 967.

9. The TRIPS agreement can be found at

http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/intel2_e.htm. Convention on Biological
Diversity, Decreto No. 2519, de 16 de marco de 1998, DO de 17/03/98.

10. See Panos Kanavos, “The WTO-TRIPS Agreement: Areas of Dispute and
Implications,” EuroHealth 6 (Autumn 2000): 21.

11. Biotechnology, Patents and Morality , edited by Sigrid Sterckx (England: Ashgate
Publishing Ltd., 1997); editorial, “Who Owns Plant Genetics?” Nature Genetics 26
(4 December 2000): 385.

12. The body of property law is, of course, more complex than I present it. In a num¬
ber of circumstances there are restrictions on the uses that an owner can make of his
or her property. Those restrictions may take the form of zoning bylaws, or restric¬
tions on the treatment of one’s own body or one’s pets.

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13. See, for example, Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop: The Cloning,
Engineering, and Marketing of Life, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1997).

14. “India: New IPR Regime: Protection for Indian Patents,” Financial Times
Information , 24 April 2001.

15. Patent 0436257 Bl. See also Paul Hoversten, “Legal Battle Takes Root Over
‘Miracle Tree,’” USA Today , 18 October 1995.

16. Vandana Shiva, “Free Tree,” Hindustan Times , 9 June 2000, http://wwwl.hindus-
tantimes.com/nonfram/090600/detOPI0 1 .htm.

17. Karen Hogan, “Neem Tree Patent Revoked,” BBC News ,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech.

18. Joseph L. Sax, “Heritage Preservation as a Public Duty: The Abbe Gregoire and
the Origins of an Idea,” Michigan Law Review 88 (1990): 1 142, 1152.

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Biotechnology and
Genetically Modified
Foods: The Role of
Environmental
Journalists

Richard Manning

This article first appeared in SE Journal , the quarterly publication of
the Society of Environmental Journalists.

The controversy about genetically modified foods looks so very different when
laid out not in the way we who work in environmental journalism usually
cover it, in a confrontation between a corporation and food activists, but by
three middle-aged women in saris in a spartan lab in Pune, India. The three, each with
a Ph.D. and full careers in biological research, are tinkering with the genes of chick¬
peas but begin the conversation by speaking of suicides.

Their target is an insidious little worm called a pod borer, which makes its way
into the ripening chickpea pods and, unseen, eats the peas inside. Subsistence farmers
expecting a bumper crop find the fat pods hollow at harvest. Then — and this happens
most every year — a few hundred suicides preface a hungry season for entire villages.

Three years ago I began profiling nine agricultural research projects in the
developing world. The idea was that these projects, culled from a list of 450 applica¬
tions for grants from the McKnight Foundation, would distill cutting-edge ag research

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to its essence and give a mosaic picture of the future of the human enterprise with the
greatest environmental footprint on the planet.

There is some urgency to this. In the late 1960s Paul Ehrlich warned of world¬
wide famine in The Population Bomb (Sierra Club-Ballantine, 1968). Population dou¬
bled in the past generation to six billion, but doom did not occur, mostly because of
the massive increase in yields of grain brought on by the Green Revolution. Now,
though, even most unrepentant “Green Revolutionaries” agree those technologies have
almost reached their limits for increasing yields. More important, the environmental
damage from the Green Revolution’s dependence on pesticides and chemical fertiliz¬
ers, and the consequences — soil and water depletion, and habitat loss — are simply
unsustainable at present levels, never mind future increases. Meanwhile, 800 million
people are underfed in the developing world. The expected population increase from
6 to 9 billion by 2050 likely all will accrue in the poorest parts of the globe. This is
one of the biggest environmental stories of our time, and we’re missing it. Worse, our
focus on safety and genetically modified foods hypes a developed-world debate that is
damaging biotechnology, an important tool to address the bigger problems in the
developing world. We are feeding a sort of agricultural NIMBYism.

I went into my piece of this story expecting to write about warm and fuzzy sus¬
tainable ag techniques such as crop rotation, intercropping, neglected crops, and inte¬
grated pest management. In fact, that’s what I found in most of the projects, but what
blindsided me was the degree to which each is dependent on some form of biotech¬
nology, even in some of the world’s most primitive places. I was in a lab in Uganda
that could not regularly flush its toilets because of a lack of running water, but its work
relied on biotech.

This, of course, raises the specter of genetic engineering. Because I write books,
I don’t have to hide my judgments and opinions, but I went into the story almost with¬
out an opinion; if anything, I was biased against genetically engineered crops. I remain
ambivalent, opposed to some cheap parlor tricks like Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) corn
that has gotten all the press in the United States. When all is said and done, Bt corn is
simply a passive way of applying insecticide; it doesn’t matter a bit that the insecticide
is “natural.”

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Still, I think badly needed biotechnology is being suppressed by overblown fears
about genetic engineering. The way the debate is structured — and this is mostly jour¬
nalists’ fault in that we are paid to guide debate — causes us to miss some big pieces of
this story.

First, genetic engineering is a subset of biotechnology. We often err by treating
it as if it were the whole, and that is dangerous. For more than twenty years, scientists
have been able to splice genes from one organism to another and have done so again
and again. That technique is controversial. Three of the nine projects relied on genet¬
ic engineering, but all relied on what I call biotechnology.

Sequencing, reading, and marking genes does not necessarily imply their manip¬
ulation. Traditional plant breeders, for instance, now routinely rely on genetic markers
to guide their work. We are entering an exceedingly sophisticated era of science of
which the human genome project is a part. A little-noticed parallel to the human
genome project has taken place in Brazil, where scientists have mapped the gene of a
bacterium that destroys citrus crops. This area of genomics has enormous promise to
refine our basic understanding of host-parasite relationships. At the genetic level, those
relationships are guided by a series of locks and keys. A firm understanding of them
will allow us to gently lock out one burglar — likely without genetic engineering —
instead of using the neutron bomb of pesticides to poison every being in the vicinity.

My biggest concern here is that the controversy about genetic engineering will
hamper all of biotechnology, and this set of tools will never reach its potential, or, more
darkly, that the controversy will leave the corporations, over which we have very little
control, operating largely unaffected and tie the hands of public-sector scientists. This
is especially important in the developing world, where most crop science is public.
Many countries such as India, Brazil, Cuba, China, and Chile are already effectively
using these tools, and many more, such as Uganda and Ethiopia, have begun to. The
very act of exercising these skills gives them a big leg up in building the infrastructure
they need to gain some independence in charting their own agricultural destiny.

The distinction between public and corporate science is key in all of this. We
have already seen how corporate science gave us Bt corn, a technology now consid¬
ered primitive by many working in the field. Corporations such as Monsanto and

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Novartis go ahead with these blunt instruments only because a decade or so of research
and development money has to be recovered. They are in a time warp, and attaching
the discussion to their actions leaves all of us in the same warp. Recovering investment
is also why they mercilessly pursue any farmers who break licensing agreements and
save seeds. (With the earlier generation of improved crop plants, this was not an issue,
because the gains came largely from development of hybrid varieties, and hybrid vigor
does not carry to the next generation, so seeds must be bought each year. Many of the
transgenics are not hybrids, so the gain is permanent.)

In my mind, I contrast all of this with the case of chickpeas cited earlier. India’s
protein consumption is about half what it should be, mostly because of losses to this
one neglected crop, a situation that has to be corrected if a billion people are to main¬
tain an efficient vegetarian diet. The scientists are getting the genes for resistance to
the pod borer from Asian wing bean and peanuts, already food crops. It will cause
chickpeas to express not an insecticide, but a protease inhibitor, a common protein that
disables the pod borers’ digestive enzymes. Humans can and already do digest this
same protein in beans and peanuts. The pod borer is now controlled in India with
insecticides, which, environmental and health problems aside, most farmers can’t
afford. Yet if the government gives them this new seed, they need only save seed to
keep this resistance on their fields.

And, yes, there are drawbacks, chief among them that the pod borer can and will
build resistance to the protease inhibitor, but that’s agriculture and has been for 10,000
years. We need to do all the running we can to hold our place. Or at least buy us time
to gain the wisdom and will to pursue longer-term solutions.

Genetic modification and even biotech need to be looked at in the context of
conventional plant breeding. For all 10,000 years of the history of this enterprise, most
gains in agricultural productivity have come through breeding, especially in the time
since Gregor Mendel. Breeding haphazardly alters genes through human selection and
carries with it many of the same problems now ascribed to genetic modification.
Further, breeding has become sophisticated enough to force matings that never would
occur naturally, many of them across species lines, some across genera.

In turning all this over in my mind for the past few years, it finally snapped into

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focus when I heard someone worry that genetic modification could provoke an envi¬
ronmental catastrophe. Maybe, but in a very real and demonstrable sense, all of agri¬
culture already is an environmental catastrophe, in fact, our biggest. News of this has
not been in all the papers, but this is journalists’ fault.

Aldo Leopold said even a generation ago: “As for diversity, what remains of
our native fauna and flora remains only because agriculture has not got around to
destroying it.”

A century before Leopold, George Perkins Marsh said, “With the pastoral state,
man at once commences an almost indiscriminate warfare upon all the forms of ani¬
mal and vegetable existence around him, and as he advances in civilization, he gradu¬
ally eradicates or transforms every spontaneous product of the soil he occupies.”

That is no less true in our time, and our coverage needs that perspective.

Richard Manning is the author of six books, including Food’s Frontier: The Next
Green Revolution (North Point Press, 2000). An award-winning environmental
writer, Manning has had articles published in many leading national magazines and
newspapers. He lives in Lolo, Montana.

Volume 89

2001

107

Adoption of
Agricultural
Biotechnology by
Wisconsin Farmers:
Recent Evidence

Bradford L. Barham

Two major types of agricultural biotechnology are currently available to
Wisconsin farmers, recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) (otherwise
known as bovine growth hormone [BGH]) and genetically modified organism
(GMO) crops, particularly herbicide-tolerant soybeans and corn and Bacillus thuringien-
sis (Bt) com. This paper examines the adoption patterns of these two types of agricul¬
tural biotechnologies to see what lessons might be drawn from their experiences that
might be of relevance to the controversy surrounding genetically modified foods.

Wisconsin agriculture provides a fascinating backdrop for such a study. First,
Wisconsin agriculture remains to this day dominated by moderate-scale family farms
in both the dairy and grain sectors. For example, 96 percent of Wisconsin dairy farms
have less than 200 cows, and more than 85 percent have less than 100 cows (Jackson-
Smith and Barham 2000). Similarly, Wisconsin has very few large-scale grain farms.
Indeed, most grain production occurs on dairy farms, and most of the rest is on what
were once dairy farms. Second, dairy farming remains the dominant sector of
Wisconsin agriculture (accounting for 30 percent of the farms and more than 60 per¬
cent of the agricultural output), so what happens on dairy farms is crucial to the out-

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109

come of agricultural biotechnology adoption in Wisconsin. Third, unlike many other
states, the articulation between Wisconsin consumers and Wisconsin’s farmers and
agricultural sector, overall, remains quite strong. Even though less than 2 percent of
Wisconsin’s population works as farmers, I would not be surprised if a third to a half
of Wisconsin’s population knows either through family connections or close friends
people who are currently or were recently farmers. This connection is reinforced
through farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture schemes, county dairy
breakfasts, and all kinds of less formal events that bring consumers and farmers
together. Fourth, Wisconsin was very much at the heart of the international debate that
preceded the commercial approval of rBST in the United States in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, and as such the politicization of these technologies was quite extensive
here in Wisconsin, among both farmers and consumers.

One of the major institutional outcomes of the political debate over rBST in
Wisconsin was the State Legislature’s 1990 decision to create the Agricultural
Technology and Family Farm Institute (ATFFI) as an independent research and exten¬
sion unit at the university dedicated to studying the impacts of new technologies and
public policies on family farming in Wisconsin. From its inception in 1992, ATFFI,
now known as the Program on Agricultural Technology Studies (PATS), has monitored
the commercialization and adoption of rBST and other emerging technologies in
Wisconsin. The first survey undertaken by ATFFI in 1 993 asked a random sample of
1,000 dairy farmers about their intentions to adopt rBST (BGH) under two potential
scenarios of marketing conditions being debated at that time (no labeling of products
versus mandatory labeling for all dairy products using milk from cows treated with
rBST). Since that time, ATFFI, and later PATS, has surveyed dairy farmers again in
1994, 1995, 1996 (only recent entrants), 1997, and 1999. In 2001, PATS completed
two more surveys, a statewide random sample and a statewide panel data sample
(including farmers who were interviewed previously in 1994, 1995, and 1997), to
examine the dynamics of technology adoption change among dairy farmers over the
relevant time period. In the case of GMO crops, PATS has done surveys in 1999 (ask¬
ing about 1998) and in 2000 (to the same farmers as in 1999, asking about 1999 and
looking forward to 2000). This panel has also been recently extended to the year 2001 .

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Before we pursue the main task of this paper, which is to examine the adoption
patterns of rBST and GMO crops among Wisconsin farmers, it is worth briefly con¬
trasting the two technologies to identify some important differences between them. To
begin, while rBST works in combination with a suite of other technologies and man¬
agement practices to augment the productivity of cows, GMO crop varieties are essen¬
tially input-reducing technologies aimed at allowing farmers to spend less time in the
fields with their machinery and chemicals fighting weeds and other pests. In addition,
rBST has a longer commercial history (released in February 1994 vs. 1996 to 1998 for
most of the GMO crops) and was much more controversial among both farmers and
consumers, especially in their involvement in the protracted political struggle that sur¬
rounded its commercial approval and initial introduction. As a result, voluntary label¬
ing of fluid milk and some other dairy products began immediately after the commer¬
cial release of rBST in 1994, whereas the push to label products according to their use
of GMO crops is still unfolding, several years after the release of these technologies
and the ongoing commercialization of processed foods using these crops. Finally,
GMO crops in Wisconsin are largely used as inputs to livestock (especially on dairy
farms), and because unlike rBST they are essentially input-reducing rather than out¬
put-enhancing technologies, they are not as likely to be viewed by farmers (both
adopters and nonadopters) as likely to lower prices and revenues.

The rBST Experience in Wisconsin

Adoption of rBST in Wisconsin has been quite moderate, especially when compared
with most precommercialization predictions of rapid adoption.1 In 1999, five years
after the commercial release of the technology, rBST was being used on 15.4 percent
of Wisconsin dairy farms. As figure 1 demonstrates, the rate of adoption increased by
more than 1,000 users between 1994 and 1995 and again between 1995 and 1997.
However, between 1997 and 1999, the estimated number of new users increased by
less than 450. Thus, while figure 1 shows a pattern of increasing adoption, the rate of
adoption growth appears to be flattening out. Indeed, as this article goes to press,

'The figures and data for this section are from Barham, Jackson-Smith, and Moon 2000.

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Figure 1

Percent (estimated number of farmers) of Wisconsin Dairy Farms using rBST

1994 1995 1997 1999

Wisconsin survey data for 2001 show that rBST adoption is 16.5 percent, having
grown only slightly in the past two years.

Several factors limited the adoption of rBST among Wisconsin dairy farmers.
Certainly, following its commercial release, consumer and farmer resistance to the
technology prompted processors and retailers to pursue a voluntary labeling scheme
especially for fluid milk, which in most grocery stores led retailers to advertise quite
explicitly that their milk came from cows not treated with rBST. In addition, the sur¬
vey data collected by ATFFI and PATS in those years revealed a surprising percentage
of farmers who claimed to refuse to use the technology for essentially political reasons
(Barham et al. 1995). Recent studies of rBST adoption (Stefanides and Tauer 1999;
Foltz and Chang 2000) and its impacts on profitability suggest another reason that
many farmers may not be using the technology, namely that, on average, it does not

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appear to enhance profitability. If these results are valid, perhaps it should not be such
a surprising outcome given that sales of the technology are monopolized by a single
company. Finally, there is the fact that for many dairy farmers rBST may not fit with
the other production system decisions they are making and the ways in which they are
organizing management and labor on their farms.

What types of farms are adopting rBST? As table 1 reveals, there is definitely a
strong size bias in the adoption patterns in Wisconsin. Only 5 percent of farms under
50 cows use it. About 15 percent of farms in the 50 to 99 herd size category use it, but
over 75 percent of the farms in the over 200 herd size category are rBST adopters.
There is no other technology in dairy farming, other than parlors and free stalls that
are built explicitly for large herds, that demonstrates a similar scale bias.

Table 1

Percent of Farms Using rBST in Wisconsin, by Size of Milking Herd (%, 1999)

Size Categories

1995

1997

1999

1-49 cows

2.2

3.3

5.3

50-99 cows

10.4

13.9

15.3

100-199 cows

20.8

30.1

34.9

200+ cows

46.7

48.3

75.0

All dairy farmers

6.6

11.8

15.4

The interesting puzzle about this size bias in rBST adoption is that, prima facie,
the actual application of the technology offers no compelling reason that adoption
should be so size biased. Basically, applying it to 200 cows should take a farmer four
times as long as applying it to 50 cows would. Of course, applying the technology says
nothing about its efficacy, and that is where issues of management and complemen¬
tary technologies come into play. In fact, effective rBST use depends on careful feed
and herd management to insure that the cows can make efficient use of the stimulus
to milk production provided by the hormone. As a result, it should not be surprising
that rBST adoption, as shown in table 2, is much higher on farms using other produc¬
tivity-enhancing practices, such as total mixed ration (TMR) equipment, regular feed

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113

balancing, herd production record keeping, and regular veterinary services. As shown,
rBST adopters in all herd size categories are much more likely than nonadopters to use
these other productivity-oriented management practices.

The association of rBST with other productivity-enhancing technology use
helps to explain the size bias in rBST adoption, at least in Wisconsin. Adopters of
rBST appear to have a certain production system orientation that gives rise to the use

Table 2

Adoption (A) and Nonadoption (NA) of Various Milk Production Practices,
by rBST Use Status and Herd Size in Wisconsin (%,1999)

TMR

Vet Service

Herd Prod.

Record

Bal

Feed Rations

rBST Adoption

A

NA

A

NA

A

NA

A

NA

1-49 cows

35.3

6.6

70.6

50.2

88.2

36.6

58.8

41.3

50-99 cows

70.0

27.1

90.2

71.6

92.0

60.5

98.0

74.8

100-199 cows

93.1

50.0

93.1

79.6

93.1

58.5

100.0

90.7

200+ cows

95.2

57.1

93.1

58.5

95.2

42.9

100.0

85.7

All

75.2

19.7

89.8

62.2

92.3

48.9

93.2

60.5

of a whole package of technologies, facilities, and management practices, most of
which reward rBST use. Because many of these in turn have strong technical, invest¬
ment, or labor-scale biases, their differential adoption profiles and their association
with rBST use affect the scale neutrality of rBST adoption.

GMO Corn and Soybeans

Nationally, many analysts viewed the 2000 growing season as a potential turning point
in terms of the adoption of two of the major GMO crop varieties, Bt corn and herbi¬
cide-tolerant (HT) soybeans.2 From 1996 to 1999, the pace of adoption of these two

2The figures and data for this section are from Chen, Barham, and Buttel 2000.

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GMO varieties had been precedent setting; no other major agricultural technologies in
the United States had been adopted as rapidly as Bt corn (and cotton) and HT soy¬
beans. From minuscule levels of adoption in the first marketing season of 1996, by

1999 about 25 percent of U.S. corn acreage had been planted in Bt corn, and about 57
percent of U.S. soybean acres were in HT soybean varieties.

Then, the European storm clouds of consumer opposition to GMO crops began
to roll across the oceans toward the United States. Would the adoption decisions of

2000 be substantially different, as U.S. farmers found themselves facing a more uncer¬
tain marketing environment for GMO crops than they had in the first three years of the
technology’s commercial availability? PATS survey work allows a careful look at that
issue for Bt corn and HT soybeans.

As shown in figures 2 and 3, there was essentially no growth between 1999 and
2000 in farmer adoption of Bt corn and HT soybeans, but acreage of soybeans expand-

Figure 2

The Adoption of Bt Corn among Wisconsin Corn Producers

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115

Figure 3

The Adoption of HT Soybeans among Wisconsin Soybean Producers

1998 1999 2000

ed significantly. In particular, Bt corn adoption remained at around 1 8 percent of farms
raising com and 1 1 percent of com acres. Meanwhile, HT soybean adoption fell slightly
from 53 percent of farms raising soybeans to 50 percent, while the share of soybean
acres accounted for by HT soybean varieties increased from 44.5 percent to 56.5 per¬
cent. This rather notable increase in acreage also underscores the size bias in HT soy¬
bean adoption illustrated in figure 4. Note that in 1999, whereas HT soybean adoption
was around 50 percent on farms with less than 250 acres of soybeans planted, HT soy¬
bean adoption was about 78 percent on farms with more than 250 acres of soybeans
planted. This size bias is notable but not nearly as strong as the case of rBST.

On the whole, then, 2000 did not give rise to a significant downturn in adoption
or de-adoption of GMO crops as some had anticipated it might. That said, there is con¬
siderable turnover in adoption from one year to the next. Tables 3 and 4 provide tran¬
sition data on farmers’ decisions across two time periods. It is noteworthy that about

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Figure 4

The Adoption of HT Soybeans by Size of Farm in 1999

<50 50- 100 100 - 250 250

acres acres acres or more acres

20 to 25 percent of farmers who adopted one of these GMO crop varieties in 1999 did
not use the variety again in 2000 and were replaced by new adopters. While the basis
for this turnover is still being investigated, initial analyses suggest that those continu¬
ing with the crop report having had higher per-acre yields and profits and less labor
effort than those who de-adopted. Relatedly, marketing concerns and uncertainties
appear to be considerably less important to the de-adoption decisions than were crop
performance variables. In 2001, as this article goes to press, marketing issues con¬
tinue to appear to be secondary to farmers’ adoption decisions relative to production
experiences, though there is some evidence of those who choose not to adopt GMOs
again being more concerned about marketing problems in the future. The fact that the
majority of Wisconsin’s GMO crops are destined for animal feed may help to explain
what appear to be the rather small impacts so far of marketing concerns on producer
GMO adoption decisions.

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Table 3

Number and Percent of Bt Corn Adopters and
Nonadopters in Wisconsin: 1999-2000

Bt Corn in 1999

Yes No

Bt Corn in 2000

Yes

46

16

(Column %)

(76.7)

(6.3)

No

14

238

(Column %)

(23.3)

(93.7)

(Total %)

(100.0)

(100.0)

Lessons from Wisconsin and Looking Ahead

The experiences with rBST and GMO adoption in Wisconsin offer several important
lessons to help guide public policy discussions regarding agricultural biotechnology.
First is the fact that adoption patterns of agricultural biotechnology vary substantially.
Only HT soybeans appear to be a “juggernaut” technology, where widespread adop¬
tion is occurring and perhaps transforming the performance of the sector. In the case
of dairy farming, more than five years after the release of rBST, adoption is rather
moderate and is having only small impacts on the sector’s performance. Similarly, Bt
corn appears to be on more of a rBST adoption track, stalling out at a relatively mod¬
erate level of adoption rather than becoming widely used and accepted.

Though consumer resistance may have played a decisive role in the early years
of the rBST experience (giving rise as it did to a voluntary labeling scheme for fluid
milk products), more recent evidence suggests that farm-level characteristics are also
playing a crucial role in determining adoption outcomes. In particular, the potential
importance of distinctive production systems should not be underestimated and may
give rise to considerable heterogeneity in adoption patterns of technologies across
similar types of agricultural enterprises. Again, in the case of dairy farming, rBST use
is much higher on farms where a suite of other productivity-enhancing technologies
are used and is lower where grazing-oriented production systems are in place.

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Table 4

Number and Percent of HT Soybean Adopters and
Nonadopters in Wisconsin: 1999-2000

HT Soybean in 1999

Yes No

HT Soybean in 2000

Yes

57

15

(Column %)

(78.1)

(22.7)

No

16

51

(Column %)

(21.9)

(77.3)

(Total %)

(100.0)

(100.0)

Considerable size bias is evident in the adoption of these three agricultural
biotechnologies, especially in the case of rBST. However, the reasons for this size bias
may be related more to the overall management orientation and production system
being used on the farm than to the inherent properties of the technologies themselves.
Nonetheless, to those who argue that these technologies are scale neutral, the evidence
from adoption patterns in Wisconsin does not support that contention at all.

The rapid pace of HT soybean adoption illustrates that future agbiotech innova¬
tions could sweep rapidly through the system. This experience suggests that a little
more attention to up-front review and evaluation will probably not slow down greatly
the realization of gains from highly productive new varieties and may save a lot of
potential costs and risks for this type of technology in general. Although companies in
a hurry to market their new agricultural biotechnologies may not like that advice,
except as it applies to their competitors, it may well be that the old maxim holds true
here in slightly modified form, that an ounce of precaution might be worth many
bushels of returned grains.

Finally, the kind of regular, random-sample-based survey work that PATS under¬
takes to document the details of adoption patterns can reveal a lot about emerging
technologies, the decisions being made by farmers, and hence the likely impacts of the
agricultural biotechnology revolution on the economy and society. It would be espe-

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119

dally useful if there were other similar programs or centers doing comparable studies
in other states. Integrating the findings across different states would allow policy mak¬
ers a much better picture of the agricultural biotechnology adoption story than current
evidence provides, imt

Bradford L. Barham is an associate professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics

at the University ofWisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as co-director of the

Program on Agricultural Technology Studies.

References

Barham, Bradford L., Douglas Jackson-Smith, and Sunung Moon. 2000. “The

Adoption of rBST on Wisconsin Dairy Farms.” AgBioForum 3 (2,3): 18 1-87.

Barham, Bradford L., Frederick H. Buttel, Douglas Jackson-Smith, Jason McNichol,
and Spencer D. Wood. 1995. “The Political Economy of rBST Adoption in
America’s Dairy land.” Agricultural Technology and Family Farm Institute
Technical Report no. 2. Madison: University of Wisconsin.

Chen, Lucy, Brad Barham, and Fred Buttel. 2000. “The Adoption and De-Adoption
of GMO Crop Varieties in Wisconsin.” Program on Agricultural Technology
Studies Family Farm Facts no. 10 (September). Madison: University of
Wisconsin.

Foltz, Jeremy, and H. H. Chang. 2000. The Adoption of rBST on Connecticut Farms.
Storrs: University of Connecticut.

Jackson-Smith, Douglas, and Bradford L. Barham. 2000. “The Changing Face of
Wisconsin Dairy Farming: PATS’ Research on Structural Change in the
1990s.” Program on Agricultural Technology Studies Research Report no. 7
(August). Madison: University of Wisconsin.

Stefanides, Zdenko, and Loren Tauer. 1999. “The Empirical Impact of Bovine

Somatotropin on a Group of New York Dairy Farms.” American Journal of
Agricultural Economics 8 1 : 95- 102.

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Don't Ask, Don't Tell:
U.S. Policy on Labeling
of Genetically
Engineered Foods

Lydia Zepeda1

This paper was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, San Francisco,
California, 18 February 2001. It was subsequently presented at the Wisconsin Dietetic Association,
Appleton, Wisconsin, 20 April 2001. Copyright April 2001.

Many people assume that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
says that all genetically engineered (GE) food is safe because it does not
require premarket approval. However, the FDA’s 1992 policy document
identifies specific GE applications that pose potential human and animal health risks.2
The document indicates that the burden of identifying and reporting potential prob¬
lems is placed on the companies manufacturing GE products. The policy statement
further recommends that manufacturers label foods with any of these potential risks.

‘The author notes that this paper does not reflect the views of the University of Wisconsin, where Lydia
Zepeda is a professor in the Department of Consumer Science and director of the Center for Integrated
Agricultural Systems. Dr. Zepeda would like to express gratitude to Colleen Curran for feedback on a
draft of this paper. Any errors are entirely the responsibility of Dr. Zepeda.

Among those cited by FDA scientists (Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug
Administration 1992) were the transfer of genes from common allergens (milk, eggs, fish, Crustacea, mol-
lusks, tree nuts, wheat, and legumes), known toxicants (protease inhibitors, lectins, and cyanogenic glyco¬
sides), antibiotic resistance selectable markers (kanamycin resistance gene), and any change in nutrient or
toxicant composition of plants that constitute a significant portion of domestic animals’ diet (e.g., field corn).

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121

Subsequent investigations by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
(Anderson and Milewski 1999), Health Canada, the European Commission, and oth¬
ers have confirmed or broadened the specific health risks identified in the FDA pol¬
icy statement. This, along with such controversies as human consumption of Starlink
corn, has led to criticism of self-enforcement. In response, the FDA has proposed a
revision in its policy that will require premarket review 120 days prior to release of all
new GE food and animal feeds.

In contrast to the United States, the European Community (EC) has had a mora¬
torium, recently lifted, on approval of GE food. The proposed legislation had strict
labeling and tracing requirements for all food with GE ingredients. Individual countries
such as Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand have also enacted legislation requir¬
ing labels for GE food. Thailand has temporarily banned imports of GE seed. These
countries have been buying about 43 percent of U.S. agricultural exports. It is estimat¬
ed that U.S. farmers lost $300 million in overseas sales in 1999 due to GE corn alone.

Given that some health risks are associated with specific GE applications; that
a growing number of major trade partners and competitors, as well as a United Nations
agreement, require labeling; and that most U.S. consumers favor labeling, the big pol¬
icy issue in the United States is not whether labeling will take place. The real ques¬
tions are how and when, and whether labeling will apply only to the export market.

Consumers Want Labels

Most surveys indicate a high proportion (82 to 93 percent) of U.S. consumers want GE
food labeled.3 Support for labeling is so overwhelming that the Secretary of
Agriculture has hinted at being more open to the idea. Outside the United States, sup¬
port for labeling is high as well: 74 percent in the EC, 80 percent in Australia, 92 per¬
cent in the United Kingdom, and 98 percent in Canada (Consumers Union 1999).

That most consumers would use labels to make purchase decisions, whether ver-

Tn a very long question regarding FDA policy, a 1999 International Food Information Council survey
found that 58 percent of those surveyed favored the FDA labeling policy. The question is somewhat con¬
fusing since it seems to imply that the FDA does not support labeling under any circumstances, which con¬
tradicts the FDA’s policy document (Consumers Union 1999).

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ifiable or not, is probably unlikely.4 This does not mean that labels would not have an
impact. Apart from making it possible to trace any potential problems, labels by them¬
selves serve to reduce the perception of risks associated with GE food. Consumers can
choose to incorporate the label information in their buying decision, or not. More
importantly, it permits informed consent, that is, it transforms risk perceptions from
being “involuntary” to “voluntary” (Thompson 1996). Theoretically and empirically,
this reduces the perception of risk. A recent study demonstrated that availability of
labels reduces risk perceptions toward GE food (Zepeda, Douthitt, and You, in press),
irrespective of whether people act on the information.

Voluntary Labeling: Consumers with Money Will Get What They Want

Voluntary labeling in the United States permits access to GE-free food for some prod¬
ucts, generally at a higher price. Voluntary labeling has been exclusively linked to
“GE-free” labels. Individual manufacturers of foods with GE ingredients have no
incentive to label their products voluntarily given public perceptions about GE food.
Collectively, if all manufacturers labeled their products, risk perceptions would
decline because involuntary risk exposure would be eliminated.

Agriculture has had a notoriously difficult time finding ways for farmers to cap¬
ture value-added or to differentiate products. GE-free food is a case where a niche has
been created not only at the retail level but also at the farm level. Farmers producing
for the export market have already felt the downside of producing unwanted products.
The cost savings of pesticide applications due to using Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) corn
are estimated to be between $2.80 and $14.50 per acre (Carlson, Marra, and Hubbell
1997). However, given the acres planted to Bt corn in 1999 this was more than offset
by the estimated loss to farmers of $300 million in overseas sales attributed to un¬
wanted GE corn. Farmers themselves, concerned about loss of markets at home and
abroad, have reduced their use of GE crops. In 1999 about 33 percent of all corn
acreage was GE; in 2000 it dropped to 19.5 percent.

4While for some GE foods labels might be difficult to verify, cheap tests ($5.75) are available for some
foods (Bett 1999). The demand for developing such tests has spurred a growing industry.

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In the United States, the definition of organic excludes GE ingredients. Organic
sales have climbed, driven in large part by the demand for GE-free food. For example,
organic milk sales were up 72 percent in 2000. The demand for organic soybeans in
the United States is so high that we are importing them from China, one of our largest
export markets for commodity soybeans. The net returns per acre of organic soybeans
run about a third higher than for commodity soybeans. A study of Midwestern grain
and soybean production found that many organic crops were profitable without any
price premiums and for those that were not, the current price premiums exceeded
break-even premiums (Welsh 1999). Organic prices are running about 75 percent
above commodity prices for soybeans and corn.

U.S. food manufacturers are using voluntary GE-free labels to increase sales or
prevent loss of sales due to consumer concerns about GE foods. Individual companies
(Nestle, Gerber, Heinz, FritoLay, McDonald’s, and lams) have banned all GE ingredi¬
ents in some food lines, particularly those consumed by babies, children, and pets
(Bett 1999).

That voluntary labeling is concentrated in baby and pet foods is entirely consis¬
tent with risk theory. Involuntary risk exposure has been shown to increase the per¬
ception of risk (Starr 1969; Fischoff et al. 1978). Thus, adult caregivers are more cau¬
tious about exposing others to risks, particularly those who cannot make a choice for
themselves, such as children and pets.

Mandatory Labeling: Wording Affects Who Pays and How Much

Effective labeling hinges on the existence of four factors: standards, testing, certifica¬
tion, and enforcement. If all four factors are not in place, it leads to confusion and
expense. StarLink corn is an example of such an outcome. Bags of the seed were
labeled “not for human consumption.” However, there was no testing, certification, or
enforcement, which led to the corn being mingled with corn directed to products for
human consumption. The estimated value of the StarLink crop was only $68 million;
however, its manufacturer, Aventis, set aside $92 million to buy the com, and it is likely
the cost will eventually be much higher. Three separate class-action suits in Nebraska,
Iowa, and Illinois have been filed by farmers who claim they incurred losses due to

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their corn being contaminated or commingled with StarLink corn.

Existing labeling laws abroad and those proposed at both state and federal lev¬
els in the United States vary in label wording and implementation. In some cases, ani¬
mal feeds and products in which it is difficult to verify genetic material, such as oil,
are exempt. Because corn and soybeans are largely used for animal feed or oil and are
also the primary GE crops, such exemptions imply that the legislation would have lit¬
tle impact.

The two phrases “contains GE ingredients” and “may contain GE ingredients”
seem only subtly different, but these differences affect monitoring costs as well as who
pays them. The first implies that ingredients are tracked or tested, processes that result
in additional costs for anyone involved in growing, selling, or using GE crops. Use of
the label “may contain GE ingredients” could eliminate monitoring costs for this
group. The presumption would be that some ingredients probably are genetically mod¬
ified, but if using such a label, one would not need to track, and indeed in some cases
all of the ingredients might be GE-free. Because it would require no verification, the
only additional cost is the trivial cost of the label itself.

Such subtle differences in wording shift the burden of the cost. In the former
case, the direct cost of separation and monitoring is placed on producers, exporters,
and processors of GE crops. In the latter case, the burden of separation and monitor¬
ing is placed on producers, exporters, and processors of GE-free crops. This cost
would be recouped through charging a premium for GE-free food, or perhaps by
increasing market share, or both. Clearly under mandatory “may contain GE ingredi¬
ents” legislation no one would voluntarily label their product “GE-free” unless they
expected to recover the cost of verifying that it is free of GE ingredients.

While commodity prices have remained low, the demand and premium for
organic products (the best approximation for GE-free) have remained strong.
Presumably this would provide incentives to shift to GE-free production and price con¬
vergence. How fast prices converge depends ultimately on demand and supply
response. However, some farmers may not be able to obtain a premium for GE-free
crops if there is no local buyer.

The imposition of mandatory labeling in much of the rest of the developed world

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125

and in a recent UN proposal (Codex Committee on Food Labelling, 2001) indicate that
labeling of US. food exports is inevitable to maintain markets. What is unclear is
whether it will extend to the entire domestic market and the form the wording of the
label will take. Also, will there be a threshold level of GE content, and what might it
be? What products might be exempt? Would labels such as organic, biologique, parve,
kosher, and vegan be excluded from a GE label? Given the important role exports play
in U.S. agriculture, these details are extremely important. Developing a coordinated
set of international standards is vital to reduce information costs and send clear sig¬
nals to farmers. Even if mandatory labeling is not implemented in the domestic mar¬
ket, the United States has an interest in coordinating international standards to ensure
overseas markets for U.S. goods.

Opposition to Labeling: Follow the Money

Consumers clearly state they want labels. The proliferation of voluntary GE-free
labels indicates that there is a market for such goods. So why is there opposition to
labeling? Manufacturers of GE foods are not necessarily acting solely to avoid the
direct cost of labeling, but they wish to avoid the potentially greater cost of liability.
Under mandatory labeling, because all companies would bear the direct cost of label¬
ing, they could pass it on to the consumers (which consumers bear that cost depends
on the type of label, as discussed earlier). Liability costs, on the other hand, generally
affect a single company, making it difficult for them to pass the costs on to consumers
without becoming uncompetitive.

Fueling these liability concerns are insurance underwriters who either want
compensation for underwriting the risk of GE food or wish to shift liability. In Latin
America, insurers exclude GE crops from basic insurance policies, charging a special
premium to cover them. Indeed, some insurance underwriters refuse to insure biotech
firms against potential risks of GE food at any cost. Zurich-based Swiss Re, one of
the largest international reinsurance companies, refuses to insure any risks associated
with GE food.

Clearly, liability exposure would be reduced without mandatory labeling. A
plaintiff would have a difficult time demonstrating that he had consumed GE food.

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Indeed, the British Medical Association, representing over 80 percent of all British
physicians, advocates mandatory labeling for the sole reason that it would be easier to
identify, trace, and verify problems should they occur (Weiss 1999). Even the wording
of the label (“may contain” versus “contains” GE foods) might make it difficult for the
plaintiff to prove exposure to GE foods. This is quite apart from demonstrating that
exposure to the particular GE ingredient caused harm. In other words, a plaintiff could
convince a jury that the substance causes harm but still could lose the case because she
is unable to demonstrate that she was exposed to it.

Minimizing liability exposure would explain why efforts to block labeling are
concentrated in the litigious United States as opposed to Europe and Asia. Personal
injury lawsuits in Europe and Asia are infrequent compared to those in the United
States because they are costlier, drag on longer, and rarely result in the level of dam¬
ages that occur in this country.

Another factor influencing the incentives to label is the distribution of where GE
crops are grown. They are predominantly grown in the United States. Worldwide, the
United States represents about 74 percent of all GE acreage. Argentina represents
about 15 percent, Canada 10 percent, and the rest of the world 1 percent
( Biodemocracy News 2000).

Conclusions

Human and animal health risks have been identified for only some specific applica¬
tions of GE crops and are recognized in the 1 992 FDA policy document on GE food.
Despite this, the policy debate, analysis, legislation, and consumer opinion tend to
treat all GE food the same. Indeed, some of our major trading partners and competi¬
tors have implemented mandatory labeling of GE food, resulting in lost export sales
of US. agricultural products. The implication in the United States is that some form
of labeling will be necessary for at least some export crops to avoid jeopardizing fur¬
ther sales.

The details of any labeling policy or legislation remain to be worked out, such
as threshold levels, overlap or mutual exclusivity regarding other label names, and,
most importantly, compatible international standards for labels. The wording and the

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implementation of any label will greatly affect how much it will cost and who pays for
it. Mandatory “may contain GE ingredients” would be much less costly than manda¬
tory “contains GE ingredients” because the latter would require monitoring, testing, or
tracking of ingredients whereas the former would not. However, there is already a
small and growing market in the United States for voluntarily labeled GE-free prod¬
ucts. The purchasers of these products currently bear the costs.

Biotech firms have a strong incentive to oppose any kind of labeling in the liti¬
gious United States to minimize their liability exposure. Insurers have increased this
incentive by charging extra premiums or refusing to insure at any price. Absence of
labels reduces the ability of a potential plaintiff to easily trace consumption of GE food.

Currently, three policy alternatives for GE food labels are being pursued in the US:

1 . Laissez-faire. Let the market for voluntarily labeled GE-free products evolve.

2. Build on the 1992 FDA policy recommendations. Develop explicit procedures
and requirements for testing, reporting, and labeling of risky applications.

3. Labeling legislation. This is currently proposed in Congress and various state
legislatures.

Voluntary GE-free labels are likely to continue even if labeling legislation passes
in the United States because such legislation is directed at foods containing GE ingredi¬
ents. Relatively cheap tests exist to verify the presence of many GE ingredients, and cur¬
rently the market for GE-free food is profitable.

Domestically, if the laissez-faire policy is the only policy option pursued, it is likely
to be criticized as elitist, since it provides choice only to those with money Particularly if
the price differential continues to be large for GE-free food, the poor would be unable to
avoid GE foods even if they wished to. Given income distribution in the United States, it
would not be long before such a policy would be criticized as one that disadvantages peo¬
ple of color. Not only do they earn less than Caucasians, but they also have a higher preva¬
lence of food-related illnesses and allergies, and tend to have diets heavy in foods that hap¬
pen to be GE crops.

The second and third options are being proposed in the United States. The FDA
has proposed modifications in its GE food policy that would require premarket

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approval of any new GE food. It affirmed its opposition to mandatory labeling; how¬
ever, it has provided some guidelines on voluntary labeling. Mandatory labeling legis¬
lation has been proposed in Congress and in several state legislatures. For both the sec¬
ond and third options, the details of the wording and implementation will determine
who pays and how much they pay However, the second option does not address the
need to develop internationally recognized label standards to facilitate export sales.

Given that labeling legislation already exists outside the United States, it appears
to be in our economic interest to have internationally uniform and clear standards.
Without them, US. farmers will not have clear demand signals and will continue to
lose export markets. The current policy disadvantages U.S. farmers and does not serve
US. economic interests to maintain export markets for U.S. agricultural products. This
would argue for having a uniform domestic labeling policy that coincides with inter¬
nationally accepted standards, even if it applies only to our export products, w

Lydia Zepeda is a professor in the Department of Consumer Science and director of
the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

References

Anderson, J. L., and E. Milewski. 1999. “Regulation of Plant-Pesticides: Current
Status” (March), http://www.epa.gov/oppbppdl/biopesticides/otherdocs/
ncipm_speech.htm

Bett, K. 1999. “Mounting Evidence of Genetic Pollution from GE Crops: Growing
Evidence of Widespread Contamination.” From Environmental Science and
Technology , December 1, www.purefood.org/ge/gepollution.cfm.

Biodemocracy News 30 (November 2000), 2.

Carlson, G. A., M. C. Marra, and B. Hubbell. 1997. “The Economics of First Crop
Biotechnologies.” Raleigh: North Carolina State University.

Codex Committee on Food Labelling. 2001. “Proposed Draft Recommendations for
the Labelling of Food and Food Ingredients Obtained through Certain
Techniques of Genetic Modifcati on/Genetic Engineering (Proposed Draft
Amendment to the General Standard for the Labelling of Prepackaged
Food). Twenty-ninth session, Ottawa, Canada, May 1-4, 2001. CX/FL 01/7.

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Consumers Union. 1999. “Summary of Public Opinion Surveys Related to Labeling
of Genetically Engineered Foods.” www.consumersunion.org/food/
summpollny699.htm.

Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration. 1992.
“Statement of Policy: Foods Derived from New Plant Varieties.” Federal
Register 57(104, May 29): 22984-23001.

Fischoff, B., P. Slovic, S. Lichtenstein, S. Read, and B. Combs. 1978. “How Safe is
Safe Enough? A Psychometric Study of Attitudes toward Technological Risk
and Benefits.” Policy Sciences 9:127-52.

Starr, C. 1969. “Social Benefits Versus Technological Risk.” Science 165:1232-38.

Thompson, P. B. 1996. “Food Labels and the Ethics of Consent.” Choices (First
Quarter): 11-13.

Weiss, R. 1999. “British Medical Association Warns of Health Hazards of GE
Foods.” Washington Post , May 18, A2.

Welsh, R. 1999. “The Economics of Organic Grain and Soybean Production in the
Midwestern States.” Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture,
May. www.hawiaa.org/psprl3.htm

Zepeda, L., R. Douthitt, and S. Y. You. In press. “Consumer Acceptance of

Agricultural Biotechnology: The Role of Labeling and Risk Perceptions on
Food Demand.” In Transitions in Agbiotech: Economics of Strategy and
Policy , ed. R. Evenson, V Santaniello, and D. Zilberman. New York: CABI.

For More Information

Environmental Protection Agency. 1998. “Reregistration Eligibility Decision (RED)
Bacillus Thuringiensis .” EPA738-R-98-004. Washington, D.C.:
Environmental Protection Agency.

Slovic, P. 1987. “Perceptions of Risk.” Science 236:280-85.

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Off the Farm:
Transportation,
Storage, and
Handling Issues

John Petty

I recently heard a radio commentator state, when questioned as to what to do
regarding genetically modified organisms (GMOs), “The simplest answer is to
label everything.” This statement assumes a great deal of infrastructure and pro¬
cedures in grain handling that currently, by and large, don’t exist. To the uninformed,
“label everything” may seem like a quick fix — that is, until we think about the changes
such a policy would require.

First, a little history. The current grain-handling system was developed over
many years as the most efficient and economical system to gather, store, and transport
a fungible commodity. Most grain handlers dealt with two or three different com¬
modities at most. Why? Because it was the most efficient method for them. They had
less need for the separate storage bins that would be necessary for multiple commodi¬
ties, and existing space could be used to maximum efficiency. To paraphrase Gertrude
Stein, corn was corn was corn.

If GMO crops were to be labeled, what type of grain-handling system would be
necessary? Within the United States there exist two parallel handling systems — one
for handling human food grade commodities, and the other for handling animal feed
or industrial-use commodities. These parallel systems are not perfectly segregated, and

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latitude exists in the segregation based on the type of human usage for which the com¬
modity will be processed. For example, corn that is going into cornflake production
for breakfast cereal is graded much more stringently than corn going into high-fruc¬
tose corn syrup (HFCS). Obviously, corn destined for HFCS will be processed much
more heavily than corn for cornflakes. Both are perfectly safe for human consumption,
but eliminating broken kernels and moisture content is not as critical to HFCS pro¬
duction as it is to cornflake production.

That said, if labeling is mandated, identity preservation is required. And identity
preservation means segregation of GMO crops from non-GMO crops in the storage,
handling, and transportation of the commodities. This means that every grain handler
in the country might have to instantly double the number of commodities they currently
handle — that is, they would handle a GMO and a non-GMO version of each commod¬
ity. Because of identity preservation, these two versions are viewed (and handled) as
separate, distinct commodities. Before GMO, the worst thing that a grain
dealer could do was mix two commodities, typically corn and soybeans. The commod¬
ity mistakenly put in the wrong storage bin instantly becomes what is known in the
trade as foreign material. And because there is no economical method of separating the
two commodities, the commodity that now contains foreign material has its percentage
weight, as determined by sample testing, deducted from the volume of the whole. The
net effect is that the grain handler or producer loses the value of the commodity that
was dumped into the other commodity’s storage bin. Under identity preservation, you
wouldn’t simply have a commingled commodity — you’d now have a different com¬
modity. And that commodity would have the value of the GMO-grade commodity.

Simple segregation is not as simple as keeping each commodity in its proper bin.
Seed companies concede that their non-GMO-labeled seed may contain GMO germ
plasm. Cross-pollination can occur in corn when pollen is moved by insects or the
wind. Most pollen will fall within 50 feet of its source, and USDA guidelines require
buffers of 660 feet around GMO-planted fields to keep pollen drift to a minimum.
However, I know of reports here in Wisconsin of corn pollen traveling over a mile and
a half. Even if the producer gets a GMO-free seed and experiences no pollen drift,
commingling can occur at every step in which the commodity is handled. Planters,

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harvesting equipment, storage bins, and transportation equipment may have been used
to handle a GMO product and were not thoroughly cleaned. A single kernel is enough
to change a labeled non-GMO quantity to GMO-positive.

Because so many chances for commingling exist, testing should and will have to
be done at every step where the commodity changes hands. But there are problems with
testing, too. Currently, there is no quick, inexpensive spot test available to test for any
and all GMOs. There do exist “quick tests” that take about five minutes and test for one
single type of GMO. In this case, if you don’t have the right test for the right GMO,
your test comes up negative. In order to test a sample for most GMOs, a test costing
about $350 that takes two to three days for results to be reported is available. Obviously,
use of this test is problematic when a grain handler is faced with truckloads of pro¬
ducer grain waiting to unload at a facility. Also, not all GMO crops express their trait
in the seed. Some have the trait only in the vegetative parts of the plant, so testing the
harvested kernels would yield a negative test even though the plant is definitely GMO.

Another problem with any test is the quality of the sample. If a sample isn’t rep¬
resentative of the whole, the best test methodology and equipment are worthless and
the test itself is called into question. Also, there is currently no available nondestruc¬
tive test; it is impossible to give complete assurance that a particular quantity is 1 00
percent non-GMO because by definition, one cannot test every single kernel.

Given the problems and uncertainties of testing, the industry will likely impose
a system of warranty conditions on each seller in the line of transactions. This means
each seller will be liable for the product they sell if it proves not to match their pro¬
vided product description. If you wish to see a vision of the future, I ask you only to
monitor the news stories concerning the legal battles resulting from the StarLink™
fiasco. In that situation, the StarLink™ hybrid was the only GMO corn not approved
for both human and animal consumption. StarLink™ corn eventually was found in sev¬
eral brands of taco shells and resulted in nationwide recalls of the products. All of the
affected corn flour was traced to one mill in Texas. In order to keep StarLink™ out of
human food channels, Aventis, the company that registered StarLink™, and the U.S.
Department of Agriculture agreed to develop plans under which the Commodity
Credit Corporation would purchase StarLink™ corn at a cost into the multimillions of

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dollars. In addition, various food companies that were affected by the recalls sued
Aventis. The only definite point that we know now is the USDA’s statement that a sin¬
gle market approval of a GMO variety will never be allowed again.

So this is where we came in. “Label everything” is not the simplest solution.
Labeling advocates must first understand a couple of concepts before we are able to
move forward. First, realistic, allowable tolerances must be set to account for adventi¬
tious presence of GMO. As an example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
currently allows labels to read “fat-free” or “sodium-free.” Does this mean there is 0.0
percent fat or sodium in those products? No, it does not. The FDA allows for a mini¬
mal tolerance level while still maintaining the “-free” label. Second, there will be costs
involved in expanding the grain-handling infrastructure. These costs will be borne by
people at one end or the other of the production/consumption chain. If consumers are
willing to pay a premium for non-GMO products over the long term, identity preser¬
vation procedures and infrastructure plans will begin developing tomorrow morning.
If consumers are not willing to pay a premium for non-GMO products and labeling is
required, the costs will be shifted to producers. Given the current state of low prices
and a weak agricultural economy, will this alternative be palatable? Either way, “label
everything” is not the simple answer some would like to believe it is. isur

John Petty is executive director of the Wisconsin Agri-Service Association, the trade
association for the feed, seed, grain, and farm supply industries in Wisconsin.

He has served in many positions in the commercial grain industry thoughout the
Midwest and has coauthored a standard reference work, The Practical Grain
Encyclopedia (The Commodity Center, Chicago, 1985, revised 1991, 1996).

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University

Ownership of Patents:
The Bayh-Dole Act
and Using Patents for
the Public Good

Carl E. Gulbrandsen and Howard W. Brenner

In the university community there has long been a dichotomy with regard to
whether universities should own patents and engage in licensing (technology
transfer in today’s parlance). Pertinent to the opposing views in that dichotomy
are three questions:

1 . Does patent ownership positively serve or subvert the
university’s mission?

2. Does patent ownership frustrate or encourage creativity in the
university setting?

3. Does patent ownership by the university serve the public good?

An additional, broader question might also be posed:

4. Do the results of university research benefit national industries?

What Is the Bayh-Dole Act?

The Bayh-Dole Act was a seminal piece of legislation that is as pertinent and viable
today as when it was signed into law in 1980. Its terms and provisions indicated, after

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many years of advocacy, that Congress had finally recognized that

1 . imagination and creativity are truly a national resource;

2. the patent system is the vehicle that permits the delivery of that resource
to the public for its use and benefit;

3. placing the stewardship of the results of basic research in the hands of
universities and small businesses is in the public interest; and most sig¬
nificantly,

4. the pre-existing nonuniform federal patent policy was placing the United
States’s role as a technological and economic leader in peril at a time
when invention and innovation were becoming the preferred currency in
foreign affairs.

This recognition is clearly enunciated in the policy and objective section of the
statute itself.

35 U.S.C. 200 Policy and Objective

It is the policy and objective of the Congress to use the patent system to
promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported
research or development; to encourage maximum participation of small
business firms in federally supported research and development efforts; to
promote collaboration between commercial concerns and nonprofit organi¬
zations, including universities; to ensure the inventions made by nonprofit
organizations and small business firms are used in a manner to promote free
competition and enterprise; to promote the commercialization and public
availability of inventions made in the United States by United States indus¬
try and labor; to ensure that the Government obtains sufficient rights in fed¬
erally supported inventions to meet the needs of the Government and pro¬
tect the public against nonuse or unreasonable use of inventions; and to min¬
imize the costs of administering policies in this area.

Of great significance to the universities and other nonprofit institutions as well

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as small businesses, to which the statute is directed, it changed the presumption of
ownership of any invention made by those entities utilizing federally supplied funds
from the government to those entities. That change presaged a new and expanding
relationship between the universities and industry because it assured industry that cer¬
tainty of title to the invention lay with the universities.

The original Bayh-Dole Act, enacted as Public Law 96-517, was later amended
by Public Law 98-620 in 1984, which removed many of the politically expedient
restrictions that were in the original act. The amended act is now part of the United
States Code and may be found at 35 U.S.C. 200-212. Its implementing regulations are
found in the Code of Federal Regulations at 37C.F.R. part 401.

The codified act still contains a preference for U.S. industry as well as a prefer¬
ence for small business, with the latter preference undoubtedly arising from the recog¬
nition that small businesses create the bulk of new jobs. As for the nonprofit sector,
there is a prohibition against assigning rights to an invention created in whole or in
part with federally supplied funds without the permission of the government (except
that such assignment may be made to an entity that has, as one of its primary func¬
tions, the management of inventions). There is also a requirement to share royalties
generated on an invention with the inventor and to use the balance of royalties, after
expenses, for support of scientific research or education.

In all cases the government retains a royalty-free, nonexclusive license to prac¬
tice the inventions for governmental purposes and also reserves march-in rights in the
event of abuse or when the contractor (university or small business) has not taken
effective steps toward practical application of the invention, or the invention is neces¬
sary to alleviate health or safety needs not satisfied by the contractor or its license.

The passage of the Bayh-Dole Act may be viewed as the ultimate culmination of
a Wisconsin Idea that began with Professor Harry Steenbock and the formation of the
Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) in 1925. Professor Steenbock’s
vision was to develop a plan to make use of patentable inventions generated by the fac¬
ulty that would

1 . protect the individual taking out the patent,

2. insure proper use of the patents, and at the same time

3. bring financial help to the university to further its research effort.

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Subsequent efforts by and on behalf of the University of Wisconsin and WARF
led to the first breakthrough on reversal of the policy that most government agencies
had adopted, which was to take title to all inventions made in whole or in part with fed¬
eral funds. Under that title policy, the government held title to some 30,000 patents,
fewer than 5 percent of which were even licensed for commercialization, and fewer
than 1 percent of which found their way into the marketplace.

The breakthroughs represented by the first new institutional patent agreement
with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1 968 and an agreement with
the National Science Foundation in 1973 (the first such agreement issued by that foun¬
dation) were highly significant milestones on the road to ultimate negotiation and pas¬
sage of the Bayh-Dole Act. One might, in fact, view the act as a codification of the
terms and provisions of the institutional patent agreements.

Benefits of the Bayh-Dole Act

The benefits the university sector derived from the Bayh-Dole Act are numerous and
far-reaching. The number of patents issued to universities has increased dramatically
so that of all U.S. patents, the university sector now receives about 3 percent.
Moreover, those patents, since they arise primarily from the results of basic research,
can often afford the basis for whole new products or even industries, as in, for exam¬
ple, the biotechnology industry. The certainty of title in the universities has permitted
a closer relationship with industry. That certainty of title also provides the assurance
that the underlying research cannot be frustrated because the rights are given away to
industry. There is an opportunity to share in the commercial success of a licensed
invention, and in particular an opportunity and basis for start-up companies based on
basic research observations and results are provided.

At the same time, university-owned patents protect academic freedom to con¬
duct research. Incentive is provided inventors in that they share in any royalties gen¬
erated. Any excess over the inventor’s share and expenses are utilized to support fur¬
ther research or education. Patents, when issued (or, now, when published as applica¬
tions), comprise a form of scientific publication for the inventor and therefore con¬
tribute to an inventor’s scientific recognition in the university community. Through

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responsible licensing arrangements, university-owned patents serve the public interest
by guarding against abuse.

With regard to serving the public interest, in 1980, the same year in which the
Bayh-Dole Act was passed, a Supreme Court decision had far-reaching consequences
and effect on the patent system as well as on the patenting of ‘living” things
(Diamond, Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks v. Chakrabarty, 206 USPQ 193).
The essence of the decision was that merely because something was alive (in this case,
a bacterium) it was not disqualified from being patentable subject matter — to para¬
phrase the court’s ruling, it considered that “anything under the sun in which the hand
of man had intervened” was patentable. This opened the door to the patenting of many
life forms and provided the fundamental basis for the biotechnology industry. It also
ultimately led to the ability to obtain a utility-type patent on genetically modified
organism (GMO) plant products as well as other genetically modified life forms, with
the exception of humans.

Patents Serve the Public Good

University-owned patents serve the public good by offering a means to control the
irresponsible application of the patented technology. One should not, however, equate
such type of control with monopoly. A patent gives the right to exclude others from
practicing the invention claimed in the patent document itself. It does not convey an
absolute right to practice the invention claimed. There may be other extant patents that
may dominate the claimed invention. Thus to practice the claimed invention, a license
under the dominant patents would also be required.

Further, the right to exclude others from practicing the invention of a patent
extends for a limited time, after which anyone having a desire to practice the invention
is free to do so. This was the compromise reached in establishing the constitutional
authority for the U.S. patent system. Thus, after patent expiration the invention
becomes part of the pool of scientific knowledge available for others to use.

In addition, the protection patents offer, namely, the right to exclude others from
practicing the claimed invention, is a strong inducement for the patent holder or its
licensee to expend the risk money necessary to develop a given invention for the mar-

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ketplace. Because the bulk of university-generated inventions arise during the course
of basic research, they tend to be embryonic in nature, requiring substantial investment
in technical development for commercial application. Also, market development needs
to be addressed after technical development has been achieved. The latter two activi¬
ties, technical development and market development, are generally recognized as
requiring substantially more money than the making of the invention itself (although
the cost assessment of an invention generally ignores the cost of bringing the inventor
to the state of mental preparedness for making the invention).

Before Professor Steenbock’s formation of WARF, others at the University of
Wisconsin had experienced the pitfalls of not protecting the public through the patent
systems. Around 1890, Professor Stephen Babcock at the University of Wisconsin had
developed a test and centrifugal machine for determining the butterfat content of milk.
He did not seek a patent but merely published his invention, in effect abandoning it to
commercial interests. The result was that without the university’s ability to exercise
control of commercial development for widespread use, commercial development
efforts were at best uneven and lacked standardization. In fact, some of the centrifu¬
gal machines marketed for conducting the test were so shoddily constructed that they
posed a hazard to users. These facts supported the proposition that a patent on an
invention that gave the inventor some control over its commercialization seemed
appropriate and in the public interest.

University-owned patents in the rapidly expanding field of GMO products may
be highly beneficial for the public good. The university researcher has the opportu¬
nity to seek the answer to open-ended basic questions, and university-owned patents
can help assure that that opportunity remains available. In contrast, industry may not
have that luxury, being driven primarily by a product orientation — despite government
requirements to test GMO products before their introduction into the marketplace.

These considerations were of vital importance with regard to a particular dis¬
covery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (technology developed by Jerry
Kermicle in 1 999), and the kind of protection, if any, that should be sought on it. The
discovery involved a traditionally bred cross-pollination barrier for corn. With mere
publication of the discovery and release of the germ plasm, it could be used by any-

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one for any purpose, including the preparation of GMO products, in which case the
projected special utility of the invention — the value of the technology — would likely
be destroyed. If the plant variety protection (PVP), without more, had been sought,
again the special utility of the discovery may have been lost because PVP allows free
breeding. Seeking utility patents on the discovery was chosen as the mode of protec¬
tion. This type of patent permitted prohibition of the germ plasm’s use in GMO corn
while promoting its use as a barrier against convection pollination from GMO corn¬
fields to non-GMO cornfields, since the barrier would prevent pollination by GMO
corn pollen. Thus, the patent system gave the means by which both GMO growers and
non-GMO growers could be accommodated while permitting the public interest in
both kinds of crops to be served.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison and
the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation

The mission of the university is to discover and transmit knowledge and provide ser¬
vice to the public. WARF enhances those endeavors of and by the university through
the management of the intellectual property discovered or developed at the university
to support research at the university, and by moving inventions and discoveries result¬
ing from university research to the marketplace for the benefit of the university, the
inventor or discoverer, and society as a whole.

WARF was established in 1925 based upon the vision of Professor Harry
Steenbock, who had discovered and filed patent applications on a method for produc¬
ing vitamin D in food and drugs by exposing them to ultraviolet radiation. Professor
Steenbock offered his patents to the university but the university declined to accept
them. He then envisioned, as opposed to selling his right to a commercial entity, that
whatever patents might issue from his applications should be administered and regu¬
lated in the public interest by an entity independent of and separate from the univer¬
sity. The fruition of his vision was the formation of WARF as a tax-exempt, not-for-
profit corporation to administer inventions made at the university and voluntarily
brought to WARF by the inventors. Even today, submission of inventions to WARF by
university employees (faculty, staff, and students) is voluntary, since the university

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does not assert any right to title of inventions made on or in association with its cam¬
pus. The exception to this position is that for any inventions made in whole or in part
with federal funds, the university as the contractor may in the first instance elect to
retain title in accord with the terms and provisions of the Bayh-Dole Act. The univer¬
sity has officially designated WARF as its intellectual property manager under that act.

In the year 2000, WARF celebrated its seventy-fifth year in its role as manager of
intellectual property on behalf of the university through the patenting and licensing of
technology generated at the university to the private sector. That WARF has been an
unqualified success in that activity is clear from WARF’s consistent position among the
top five or ten universities engaged in technology transfer in the United States as meas¬
ured by its royalty income. With regard to the number of life-saving and other inven¬
tions that have contributed to the betterment of the health, welfare, and safety of the
public, it is firmly believed that WARF has no peer. Many such inventions generated at
the university are still being practiced today, long after the royalty flow from them has
ceased, and therefore are still contributing immeasurably to the public benefit.

As a result of WARF’s technology-transfer activities and because of the fore¬
sight, policies, and management of its trustees, WARF’s contributions to the univer¬
sity have been highly significant and have been instrumental in establishing and main¬
taining the University of Wisconsin as one of the world’s premier universities.

Conclusion

Federal support for research in the university sector is essential to the technological
leadership of the United States in a global economy. Every indication exists that this

WARF's total grants and commitment to the university since its first grant of
$1,200 was made in 1928 through June 30, 2001, are as follows:

General research grants

$400,000,000

Buildings, land, major equipment

60,000,000

BioStar building initiative

80,000,000

Other

80,000,000

$620,000,000

142

Transactions

is a recognized fact, evidenced by that sector’s leadership in performing the bulk of
basic research in the country. Protection of the intellectual property generated during
the course of that research and transfer of the technology that it represents for public
use and benefit is viewed as an obligation under the Bayh-Dole Act. The university
sector has responded to both the opportunities and the obligations presented by the act,
and its performance has reinforced the following perceptions:

1 . University-owned patents encourage innovation by providing an incen¬
tive to inventors and facilitating publication.

2. University-owned patents support the research function in the university
sector by protecting academic freedom to conduct the research; generat¬
ing royalty income; providing further support for research; and providing
an incentive to the researchers.

3. University-owned patents serve the public good by guarding against
abuse by irresponsible parties and insuring the opportunity to maximize
the transfer of technology that is developed during the course of research
conducted at the university in the interests of the health, safety, and wel¬
fare of the public, w

Howard W. Bremer is currently affiliated with the Wisconsin Alumni Research
Foundation (WARF) in a consulting capacity. He served as patent counsel to WARF
from 1960-1988. He holds degrees in chemical engineering and law from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Carl E. Gulbrandsen has been the managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni
Research Foundation (WARF) since January 2000. Prior to that he was the director
of patents and licensing and in private law practice. Gulbrandsen received his B.A.
from St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota; his PhD degree in physiology from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison; and his J.D. degree from the University of
Wisconsin Law School.

Volume 89 2001

143

Appendix

Fall Forum 2000 Agenda

8:30 Welcome Address

Mary Lynne Donohue — Wisconsin Academy Council President

Ben Brancel— Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture,
Trade and Consumer Protection

Morning Plenary: Overview and Perspective

Philipp Simon— Professor of Horticulture,

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Genetic Modification of Plants: Progress , Processes , and Products

Jeffrey Burkhardt— Professor of Ethics and Policy,

Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida
The Roles of Differing Ethical Paradigms in Determining the
Acceptability of GMOs/GM Foods

10:00 Concurrent Discussion Sessions

I. Farming: Conventional to Organic
Bradford L. Barham — Professor,

Agriculture and Applied Economics, UW -Madison

Adoption Patterns of Agricultural Biotechnology by Wisconsin Farmers:

Recent Evidence

Gary Goldberg— CEO, American Corn Growers Foundation
Genetically Modified Crops and the American Farmer: Matching the
Rhetoric With the Realities

Steve Pincus— Organic Farmer, Tipi Organic Produce, Fitchburg
Risks , Rewards , & Realities: An Organic Farmer's Perspective

Facilitated by Bradford L. Barham

II. International Dimension: Trade, Technology, World Needs
Lori P. Knowles— Associate for Law and Bioethics,

The Hastings Center, Garrison, New York

Patenting Life: Preserving Biodiversity and Justice in International Trade

Appendix

145

Richard Manning — Environmental Writer
Food's Frontier: The Next Green Revolution

Mark Ritchie — President,

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis
International Trade Issues

Facilitated by Karl Nichols, Research Scientist,

Third Wave Technologies, Madison

III. Environmental Benefits/Concerns

Bob Giblin — Morgan & Myers, Public Relations Firm in Jefferson
Biotech Public Relations: Art and Science

John Kaufmann — Science Fellow and Agronomist,

Monsanto Company, Middleton
Ecological Assessment of Biotech Crops

Frederick Kirschenmann — Director,

Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Iowa State University
Genetic Engineering in Agriculture: Some Underlying Questions

Michelle Miller — Pesticide Use and Risk Reduction Project,

UW Center for Integrated Ag Systems

GE Food ' Pesticides , and the Environment: Issues for Developing Public Policy

Facilitated by Craig Trumbo, Professor,

Life Sciences Communication, UW-Madison

IV. Seed to Store

M. Troy Flanagan — Grocery Manufacturers of America
Biotechnology in the Real World

Hemanth Shenoi — Product Manager in Molecular Diagnostics,
Promega Corporation

Methods for GMO Detection: How Do We Determine What's In What
We Eat?

John Petty — Executive Director, Wisconsin Agri-Service Association:
Off the Farm: Transportation , Storage and Handling Issues

Facilitated by Frederick H. Buttel, Chair, Rural Sociology, UW-Madison

146

Appendix

V. Corporate vs. Public Ownership of Technology and Crops
Kristin Dawkins — VP for International Programs,

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Ownership of Life: When Patents and Values Clash

Carl E. Gulbrandsen — Managing Director, Wisconsin Alumni Research
Foundation

University Ownership of Patents: The Bayh-Dole Act and Using Patents
for the Public Good

Charles Sara — Partner and Chair of the Intellectual Property Practice Group,
DeWitt Ross & Stevens, S.C.

The Private Side of Patent Ownership: The Risks, Rewards and Realities
of Intellectual Property Ownership from a Private Business Perspective

Facilitated by Elizabeth Bird, Outreach Specialist, UW Center for
Integrated Ag Systems

12:00 Luncheon

Daniel Charles — Science Writer

The Story Is Mightier Than the Data: Instructive Tales From the Brief
History of Genetically Modified Crops

1:30 Afternoon Plenary: Risks, Rewards, and Realities: Searching for
Common Ground

John Kaufmann — Science Fellow and Agronomist,

Monsanto Company, Middleton

Richard de Wilde — Organic Farmer, Harmony Valley Farm

Kristin Dawkins — VP for International Programs,

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Richard Manning — Environmental Writer

Facilitated by Jeffrey Burkhardt, Professor of Ethics and Policy,
Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida

4:00 Closing

Robert M. Goodman — Professor of Plant Pathology, UW-Madison

Appendix

147

'

Brad Barham
Norman Borlaug
Jeffrey Burkhardt
Dan Charles
Carl Gulbrandsen
Fred Kirshenmann
Lori Knowles
Richard Manning
John Petty
Vernon Ruttan
Lydia Zepeda

What is the promise and what are the dangers of
genetically modified foods? Like it or not, such foods are
already in our lives. More than half of all foods produced
in the United States now contain genetically modified
ingredients. Whether you see such foods as a godsend
that could end world hunger or a "Frankenfood"
leading to disastrous outcomes, it is vital for all members
of the public to be informed about genetically modified
foods: their risks, rewards, and realities.

This book arose out of a public forum on genetically
modified foods that brought together a wide range of
leading thinkers from across the nation — scientists,
policymakers, conservationists, industry and agriculture
representatives, educators, and more — to share their
perspectives on the subject. Their diverse viewpoints are
reflected in this volume, which provides a sophisticated
yet accessible presentation of one of the most complex
issues of our time.

Edited by Frederick H. Buttel, Ph.D.,

Professor and Chain Department of Rural Sociology

and

Robert M. Goodman, Ph D.,

Professor of Plant Pathology
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

1922 University Avenue
Madison, Wisconsin 53705
www.wisconsi n acad emy.o rg

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