The development of wildlife biology in America: Maintaining nature on the Kaibab Plateau

Historians of the American conservation movement typically suggest that science provided fundamental knowledge about nature for more efficient conservation and resource management. These historians generally assume scientists developed "pure" knowledge that conservationists subsequently "applied" to practical human concerns. In my dissertation, I analyze the historical relationships between so-called pure ecology and applied wildlife management by describing the development of wildlife biology in connection with the most famous of early wildlife management episodes, a textbook example that has come to be known as the "Kaibab deer controversy."; The story begins with Theodore Roosevelt's establishment of a game preserve on the Kaibab Plateau in 1906. Within the preserve, the government prohibited hunting and killed predators. The deer population increased rapidly until food ran short. In 1924, government officials convened a special committee of experts to investigate the conditions on the plateau. While government agents, wildlife biologists, and conservationists disagreed over specific policies that would protect the deer, virtually all agreed that those policies should fall under the designation of "scientific management." Agreement on this general point created an image of consensus.; Subsequent generations of historians have used that consensus to explain the features of the controversy in terms of pure and applied science. While ecologists assume that a fundamental lack of knowledge created the initial crisis, historians explain the controversy by pointing to the many extra-scientific factors that interfered with proper application of fundamental knowledge. They blame this interference on governmental politics and social beliefs about nature. Because of their general acceptance of the notions of pure and applied science, historians often fail to recognize that management efforts were not based on pre-existing scientific principles that could simply be applied to environmental problems. Rather, those scientific principles were developed as part of the process of learning to manage wildlife. Looking beyond the dichotomy of pure and applied science, one begins to understand how scientific practice and knowledge production were interwoven. At the same time, the interactions between science and society emerge to provide a better picture of the history of the American conservation movement in general.