Here is an inconvenient truth: our forebears used the unrestrained free market to effect a staggering destruction of continental wildlife, an unforgivable crime against evolution in America. They believed all life was created by a deity, and therefore extinction was impossible. Biblical ideas about the utility of animals encouraged them to think of creatures like beavers, sea otters, bison, passenger pigeons, and many others as simple market commodities, without value except for the money they might bring. The end result was myopic, almost casual obliteration of one ancient species after another. As a 2018 article in the National Academy of Sciences put it, since the start of the colonial age, here and elsewhere, we have destroyed half a million years of Earth’s genetics, a near “worst case scenario.”
Enacting that history, many Americans enriched themselves. Southerners who slaughtered snowy egrets on their nests for fashion industry feathers, westerners who shot down entire bison herds for tongues and hide leather, “wolfers” who poisoned predators on behalf of the livestock industry—for their efforts, many of them joined the middle class. In a single year, market hunters in Bozeman, Mont. shipped out the body parts of about 7,700 elk, 22,000 deer, 12,000 pronghorns, 200 bighorn sheep, 1,680 wolves, 520 coyotes, and 225 bears at the time. It was a haul of wild animal parts that netted them $1.6 million in today’s dollars. They told Yellowstone’s superintendent that so long as the government stood aside, they planned to continue doing exactly as they wished. To be sure, the unrestrained freedom to destroy the country’s wild legacy for money bought many of these people houses, islands, and ranches. John Jacob Astor, one of the country’s first millionaires, became a famous and wealthy celebrity through the near eradication of beavers and otters and the vital, ancient ecologies they created.
During the years after the Civil War, America embraced an economic philosophy called laissez-faire, celebrating the notion that government should stand aside and let capitalism work. Both political parties believed in it so ardently that the federal government failed to act to save bison (now our National Mammal) or passenger pigeons, both among America’s most numerous and iconic species. In the 1870s, Congress twice considered bills to make the non-Native market hunt for female bison illegal. Neither attempt became law. The first successful federal law the U.S. established to halt the slaughter of wildlife was place-specific when Congress created the country’s first national park, Yellowstone, and banned hunting in the area.
In an environment so regulation-free, America’s bison population plunged from roughly 30 million in 1800 to fewer than 10 million in 1865. At that point, railroad transport and new uses for bison leather ramped up a post-war, industrial level of animal destruction. In a too-late effort to halt the mayhem, General Philip Sheridan enlisted the departments of War, Interior, and Indian Affairs to drive market hunters off Indian lands. But few animals of any kind were left to save. In 1885, an estimate of 1,000 bison remained alive in the West, so few it was a scramble to preserve enough genetic diversity to save the species at all. When Congress in 1894 imposed stiff fines for killing bison and other animals in Yellowstone, Sheridan’s troops were the only protectors a weak government could muster.
Then there’s the pigeon story. Of all the grim capitalist crimes against American animals (and there is competition), among them are the 1840s extinction of our northern hemisphere penguin, the great auk, and an 1886 sale in London of the skins of 400,000 American hummingbirds. But the passenger pigeon’s fate occupies a special place on the shelf of historical horrors. Having thrived on the continent for 15 million years, pigeons couldn’t survive a mere three centuries of the free market. By 1914, they were entirely erased. Extinction is one of those non-ideological “objective facts” and “truths” it’s hard to deny. While I’d love to see passenger pigeons de-extincted, that wouldn’t change the historical lesson.
Until Congress passed a mild federal law called the Lacey Act in 1900, which banned interstate shipment of some market-killed animals and their body parts, America never stepped up to rein in capitalism’s assault on the natural world. We allowed the Singer Sewing Machine company to log down the last habitat with a verified ivory-billed woodpecker population as late as the 1940s! Destroying species for money was an American freedom. Some argued it was part of our “franchise.” In truth, it was the best example of what we mean now when we say something is “Like the Wild West,” a place where human nature goes entirely unrestrained.
Economists have long used the fate of America’s bison and pigeons in particular to argue that, sans effective regulation, market forces inevitably diminish nature’s diversity. The truth is, if you’re an American, an often unacknowledged result of our past of unfettered capitalism is to diminish the world you get to experience. As early as the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau lamented all the species already gone from his time: “I should not like to think some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.” The past does not remain in the past for us, either. A great many charismatic creatures are missing from 21st-century America because of the actions of our ancestors.
Read More: How the Endangered Species Act Saved America
Yet as part of the Trump administration’s blizzard of executive orders and business-friendly policies, in March, Lee Zeldin, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reframed the purpose of his agency, announcing “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history.” President Trump followed that with an executive order, titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, that accused historians of “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” Both these signal an effort to reframe our national story, emphasizing a return to the kind of unbridled economic freedom that once characterized the country’s history, and coincidentally compromised many of America’s most dramatic wild spectacles.
Much of this history, however, is in danger of being scrubbed, canceled, or banned from libraries. If that were to happen, it would leave future generations perplexed about why a half-century ago the U.S. needed to pass legislation like the Endangered Species Act in 1973. It would also create a public consciousness that is unable to understand our country’s long practice of extending rights to those who lack them. While a new, politicized version of history is bound to deny it, expanding the circle of moral inclusion and compassion has long characterized Americans as a people. It is who we are.
Is this story ideological? I don’t think so. It calls on an undeniable history to point out how nature will fare when governments are missing in action with respect to environmental regulation. It’s an American story that urges us to be very suspicious of a future of unregulated capitalism. The purpose of history, after all, is not to make some look good and others bad. Its purpose is, or should be, to let us consult the past so we can create the future we want.
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