#conservation movement

The conservation movement was born in loving memory of a good boy

Book review: Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature From the Conservationists by Dyana Z. Furmansky

This is a biography of Mable Rosalie Edge, a former suffragette turned early conservationist. She was the daughter of John Wylie Barrow, a wealthy accountant who was the cousin of Charles Dickens. She grew up knowing the Vanderbilts, often relying on their charity because when her father died he failed to give his wife part ownership of his company, and the wealth of the family dramatically declined. She showed no particular interest in birds or nature as a child. She later traveled to Japan to marry her fiancé Charles Noel Edge, at an age older than most women of her time married. As they traversed through Asia, she appreciated some of its areas of wilderness, but again gave no indication of being a full-blown nature lover.

After years of traveling, she convinced Charles to move to New York rather than England. They bought a summer estate by the sea, and there she began to get into bird watching, and stopped hunting them with Charles. After 11 years of marriage, she then discovered that Charles had been cheating on her, and left him after he broke her arm when she confronted him about a certain letter she found. They remained legally separated for the rest of their lives. However, she was still very much in love with him, and never found anyone else. 

Her work as a conservationist did not begin until she reached her 50s. She was moved by a pamphlet she received in the mail co-authored by someone named Willard Van Name, an ornithologist who became concerned with the amount of bird hunting and corruption within the Audubon Society. The Audubon Society was taking vast amounts of money from hunting groups, some of which went directly to the salary of its director, and was only interested in preserving species that could be hunted. The predators of species commonly hunted, such as bald eagles, were allowed to be ruthlessly  hunted on their so-called wildlife reservations. The organization was also trapping animals like minks and selling their furs, while lying to the public about it.  Van Name worked for the Museum of Natural History, and was essentially silenced when his bosses with connections to the Audubon Society threatened to fire him if he ever published something similar to the pamphlet again. With him as a mentor, Rosalie Edge took on the fight to change the Audubon Society. The Christian Science Monitor described her as, “...that peculiarly powerful being, an individual who has private means, who accepts no salary, no expenses, no gifts, and whose independent social position helps her to speak fearlessly and to act uncompromisingly.” 

Some of the many things Edge accomplished over the span of 30 years were founding the Emergency Conservation Committee, creating Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the first sanctuary formed with private funding, publishing pamphlets that exposed the corruption within various groups like the Audubon Society, U.S Forest Service, and National Parks Service, leading campaigns that led to the creation of the Olympic National Park and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, persuading congress to restore big trees to Yosemite National Park after they had been illegally traded, and preventing Yellowstone Falls in Yellowstone National Park from being diverted. She also sounded early warnings against DDT and kept hawk counts that were integral to Rachel Carson’s later research, and prevented trumpeter swans from going extinct.

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Lawsuit Challenges Government’s Large-scale Wildlife Killing in Idaho

From:  The Wildlife News

Killing Thousands of Animals Each Year Violates Environmental Laws

BOISE, Idaho— Five conservation groups filed a lawsuit today over the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s failure to fully analyze and disclose the impact of its “Wildlife Services” program in Idaho, which kills thousands of wolves, coyotes, foxes, cougars, birds and other wild animalseach year at taxpayer…