Locust (41 page)

During the four years of this depression, homesteading became an ever more viable alternative to urban life. Most farmers could provide their own subsistence during this time, so low farm prices were not a matter of life and death. Fite maintained that farmers suffered more from locusts than from the Panic. They had not yet been drawn into the commercialization of agriculture, in which the complexities of
commodity prices, rather than the simple production of food, would determine success and failure. Between the 1870s and the 1890s, the face of the West changed dramatically, as Americans sought the independence, security, and stability that came with the ownership of land.

The states conspired with railroads and newspapers to promote immigration, and the cry of “Go West, young man, go West” rang out with a fervor greater than the original call twenty years earlier. By the mid-1880s the Dakota Boom was in full swing, and a land rush was sweeping across western Nebraska and Kansas along with eastern Colorado. At precisely noon on Monday, April 22, 1889, the Oklahoma Land Rush was on—and within days thousands of “Boomers” would claim more than two million acres of land. Entire towns of 10,000 inhabitants were created in a single day.

In the midst of these agricultural transformations, mining was becoming the driving force of settlement in the Rockies. The discovery of gold, silver, and other valuable minerals in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming created the demand for commodities. Just as the fortunes were made by the railroaders in selling land, rather than in owning railroads, so wealth in the mountains would come from selling goods to the miners, rather than from the mines themselves. Plowing the fertile soils of the placid river valleys was more profitable (but less romantic) than panning for gold in the swollen creeks. And so farmers armed with plows and cows found themselves in the midst of their ancient mortal enemy at precisely the time of the locust’s greatest vulnerability. The rush of humans to strip the precious metals from the Rockies and the concomitant surge of shopkeepers, hoteliers, tavern owners, shippers, and farmers can be seen as an entangled story of virtue and vice, of hope and greed.

T
HREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, VOLTAIRE SET THE stage for the modern scientist’s reaction to new ideas and discoveries: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.” My “habitat destruction theory” accounting for the Rocky Mountain locust’s extinction met with keen interest, intense scrutiny, and gradual acceptance. It has become the working hypothesis of this marvelous creature’s demise. In science there is always doubt, especially when we are unable to replicate an event. Scientists greatly prefer firsthand observations and definitive cause-and-effect explanations. But in the end, subtle coincidences, qualitative reasoning, and circumstantial evidence proved compelling in the “court of science.” A critical and anonymous jury of one’s peers renders verdicts in this court. The Entomological Society of America’s journal
Environmental Entomology
(the publication, but not the editor, that rejected my first paper on Grasshopper Glacier) published my account of the Rocky
Mountain locust’s disappearance, thereby closing the case on perhaps the greatest ecological mystery of modern times.

Of course, the nature of science is such that every case is perpetually open to appeal on procedural grounds or in light of new evidence. This chronic uncertainty is what irritates many of the observers of science—and it is precisely what excites the practitioners. If the judgment of my predecessors had been immune to challenge, we would have settled for a nebulous explanation alluding to vague large-scale forces, and the incredible story of the Rocky Mountain locust would never have been told. Perhaps there are further chapters lurking on dusty shelves, in glacial cores, and within biological molecules, but the gavel has fallen on the case as we know it. And we have been found guilty of causing the locust’s demise.

The notion of guilt, however, implies a certain culpability and an admission of responsibility. One of the most trite bumper-sticker phrases in environmentalism must be “Extinction Is Forever.” As clichéed as this might be, it touches on an important truth. We can’t bring back
Melanoplus spretus
. But what we can’t change, we can learn from. The story of the lost locust offers some valuable lessons.

 

By conservative estimates, typical Rocky Mountain locust swarms contained several billion insects. Such a vast quantity is disconcertingly similar to the current human population. The simplest and most unambiguous lesson that we can learn from this locust is that numerical abundance does not ensure future survival. Having reached 6 billion people, we need only look back at the locusts that blackened the skies of North America to realize that our future as a species is no brighter for our quantity.

But, one might legitimately contend, humans are not like locusts. We are far more clever and adaptable.
Homo sapiens
is the ultimate generalist, capable of rapidly adapting to an immense range of environmental challenges and occupying new habitats. However, the Rocky Mountain locust might quietly remind us that it consumed no fewer than fifty kinds of plants from more than a dozen families (as well as leather, fabric, paper, and wool when hunger demanded), whereas the overwhelming proportion of our diet is derived from just three species—corn, wheat, and rice—found in a single family of plants.

And our mobility is no greater than that of the Rocky Mountain locust, if we account for the differences in size. If we multiply the two-inch locust by a factor of thirty-six, we end up with a six-foot human-sized creature. Now then, we must also proportionately increase the distance that the two-inch locust traveled during its lifetime. Swarms could travel a thousand miles, and extrapolating this journey for our magnified locust yields a distance of 36,000 miles. This is the same distance that our ancestors traveled in the process of circumnavigating and eventually colonizing the planet. It appears that being a highly mobile generalist is no insurance against extinction.

 

There does, however, seem to be a major difference between our condition and that of the Rocky Mountain locust. Although it could invade vast regions, this species was periodically restricted to limited areas. The serendipitous overlap of human activity and the remnants of the Rocky Mountain locust demonstrates the hazard of such ecological bottlenecks. As with the monarch butterfly, whose populations stretch across North America only to collapse back into a few pockets of overwintering habitat each year, the long-term viability of the Rocky Mountain locust was only as great as its most vulnerable link. A handful of loggers armed with chain saws could eliminate the monarch butterfly across most of North America by destroying its winter grounds in western Mexico—just as a small contingent of settlers equipped with horse-drawn plows and simple implements effectively eliminated the locust across the continent by transforming the fertile river valleys of the Rockies. Industrial pollution, earth-moving machinery, and 3,000-mile swaths of concrete are the modern tools of habitat conversion, but extinction does not require technological sophistication.

For a species to become wholly reliant on a place or a habitat, it must sacrifice other options, accepting the risks of being profoundly and deeply linked to a landscape. When in the course of evolution such an ecological setting is found, the species comes to flourish in this place. For the Rocky Mountain locust, the fertile river valleys of the mountainous West represented a sanctuary, a habitat where it could always find what it needed and persist in the face of adversity.

We have such places, too: churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues, along with hallowed groves, stone monoliths, and forested
cathedrals. These sacred spaces comprise less than a millionth of the earth’s surface but host three-quarters of the human population each year, and they are vital to our well-being, particularly in these troubled times, when humans increasingly seek solace. Just as the locust was able to find a safe refuge where it could rest and revitalize, we need our sanctuaries.

The concept of the sacred has the same etymological origin as sacrifice, which is an act that engenders holiness through loss, suffering, denial, or pain. Holiness, in turn, is a special condition that is associated with transcendent meaning, so that a place of sacrifice is imbued with importance greater than its physical context. In Western society, sacrifice is usually avoided, as we seek security, comfort, and pleasure. However, the existence of suffering is inescapable, and we continue to struggle with the nature, meaning, and necessity of suffering—the “great mystery of life.” And so, our places of worship often reflect stories of sacrifice.

Places of momentous loss often become sacred, such as the battlefields at Gettysburg and Little Big Horn, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the North Bridge in Concord, the World Trade Center in New York, or a simple roadside cross adorned with flowers. We also honor places of sanctuary where we have found safety amid a world of turmoil and trouble, such as the hiding place of Anne Frank, Thoreau’s cabin site at Walden Pond, or our childhood home. Our most sacred spaces both remind us of suffering and offer us sanctuary. But what of other species? Does sacrifice or sanctuary define the extraordinary places in their lives? Do these spaces need to be consciously and intentionally chosen, or can a sacred space emerge in the context of evolution and ecology?

 

We are reluctant to call the habitats of other species sacred because their sacrifices are not volitional and their seeking of sanctuary is unconscious. But we did not plan for a grassy knoll in Dallas to be the place to lose President Kennedy; we did not intend for a buck-and-rail fence east of Laramie to be the site where Matthew Shepard would be sacrificed to our fear of differences; and we did not design the basements and attics of the houses along the underground railroad to be sanctuaries for runaway slaves. As self-aware animals, we do what we can to honor and protect our sacred spaces, and, perhaps, we should not deny other creatures their own ways of knowing and keeping deeply valued places insofar
as they are able. All species have stories of suffering and sanctuary in ecological and evolutionary times. To have arrived in this world is to have risked, lost, groped, huddled, and grasped, using those capacities that one’s form and function provide. These stories and places of loss and triumph are encoded in all beings. Are they less real or less important if they are not maintained by thought or word?

The Rocky Mountain locust, the Native Americans, and the early European settlers of the West found that the serene and lush river valleys provided fresh water, abundant food, and reliable protection from severe weather. Each made sacrifices and struggled to establish their hold on these fertile valleys, and each understood that these havens would provide a sanctuary in times of difficulty. The locust sacrificed the life of the grasshopper—a more stable, safe, and mundane existence—for the chance to reach levels of abundance that we can barely fathom. As with the Native Americans, whose cultures eroded with their displacement from sacred lands, the Rocky Mountain locust could not change fast enough to adapt to changes wrought by the settlers.

The complex and intimate connection between the land and native species is difficult—and perhaps impossible—to express in objective scientific terms, but sacred places are central to the well-being of many creatures. Even with all of the “right” conditions of temperature, light, humidity, and diet, animals often languish in zoos. They are unable to express what is missing, and perhaps we would be unable to understand, unless we, too, had experienced the soul-wrenching loss of being forced from a farm or ranch that had been in the family for generations or being driven from a homeland that defined our traditions, stories, and hopes. Even if we had managed to conserve the last of the Rocky Mountain locusts in a zoo, they would be no more their original species than the condors that can never again know the vast, unbroken expanses of land in the California foothills. Unless these insects could once again blacken the skies, they would, in fact, become the Rocky Mountain grasshopper.

 

The loss of biological diversity in the world is proceeding at a startling pace. Although the details can be endlessly debated, we are undoubtedly losing species a thousand times faster than the normal rate of extinction. In other words, a species disappears about every thirty minutes. Most of
these losses are in the tropics, where humans are destroying vast swaths of forests. From our vantage point in North America, it is easy to shake our heads, cluck our tongues, and mutter about the senseless destruction. How can these people justify exchanging the biological legacy of our planet for a few more acres of crops, which will soon degrade to low-value grasslands? But then, how did our agrarian ancestors rationalize the destruction of species? The answer is the same—there is no justification. Both events are tragic accidents induced by socioeconomic pressures, without the actors having malice or forethought.