Conservation Letter 3
Grizzlies, Wilderness,
and the Detroit News
and the Detroit News
I sent the following letter to the Detroit News on 30 August 2005. The column to which the letter responds appeared in the Sunday 28 August News and was titled "Grizzly Man's Descent into Ecological Madness." To access it, click here. The movie referred to is the recently released Werner Herzog documentary. This is a local conservation issue only in that the anti-environmental attitude of the column is characteristic of this Michigan newspaper.
To the Editor:
I see that the Thomas Bray column about the documentary movie "Grizzly Man" has been "corrected" in the online edition of the Detroit News. It was corrected by altering the purported name of the subject of the movie from Lance Craighead, a respected conservation biologist who has studied bears (but has not been killed and eaten) to the actual name of the subject of the movie, Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell was a well-intentioned flake who spent his summers camping among and admiring the grizzlies in Alaska. In 2003, he was attacked and killed by a grizzly, just as everyone had been predicting would happen for the last dozen years
Thomas Bray's writing ricochets from Treadwell's obsession with wild bears to a claimed FBI statistic of "more than 1,200 cases of eco-terrorism in recent years," and lands on a familiar anti-conservation message: "There is a reason that wilderness was once viewed as a deep, dark, dangerous place, while clearing the land was viewed as a sign of progress."
It may be that Timothy Treadwell was a nutcase, as Bray suggests, but I think Treadwell may not be the only nutcase associated with the Bray column. And as to the so-called correction, it informs us that "it was Timothy Treadwell, not Lance Craigwell (sic), who was killed by a grizzly." Ah, poor Lance Craigwell, whoever he may be, how unfortunate he is to be drawn into this mess. I'm not sure what to call the mess, but it's certainly not journalism.
--Richard Brewer
Thus ends the letter sent to the Detroit News. I haven't seen the movie and don't know much about Timothy Treadwell, other than that Lance Craighead isn't him. Lance Craighead is the son of the late Frank Craighead. Frank along with his twin, John, studied grizzly bears in Yellowstone from 1959 to 1971, establishing much of the basic information on life history and ecology of the species. Earlier, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the two had studied populations and food habits of hawks and owls in Michigan and both received PhDs from the University of Michigan. Lance Craighead is director of the Craighead Environmental Research Institute.
My main interest in the Bray column was its use of the story of "Grizzly Man" as an excuse to beat up on conservation and conservationists. "At its craziest," the columnist wrote, "this point of view leads to forms of terrorism in the name of animals and wilderness." I object to everything about this sentence, but especially (1) the jump from Treadwell, who seems to have been a gentle soul, to terrorism and (2) the casual coupling of wilderness protection with the animal rights movement.
The column went on, "Wilderness, and wildness, is deep, dark, and dangerous." This timorous, field-mouse view of nature holds sway over many anti-conservationists. Without getting into etymology (The second edition [1973] of Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind is a place to start for persons interested in such things), wilderness in the sense of a pristine landscape was dark and deep mostly for northern Europeans. In much of the rest of the world, wilderness could be open and sunny in such forms as deserts, grasslands, and savannas.
There is much to be learned about the genetic basis for human landscape preferences. If the preference is still as encoded in the earliest Homo sapiens, we may all be predisposed to settle in or create savanna. On the other hand, some of the human lines that went off here and there over the earth might have evolved an appreciation for steppes or forest or something else.
But I have a feeling that most anti-conservationists wouldn't like hearing about the evolution of human landscape preferences any more than about wilderness protection.
Detroit is one of the few American cities where two daily newspapers are still published, the News and the Free Press. This month, in a complicated deal that also involved newspapers in other cities, Knight Ridder sold the Free Press to Gannett, and Gannett sold the News to a third publisher. The News has had a heavily conservative editorial viewpoint, the Free Press less so. Ten years ago, employees of both papers went on strike. Although both papers continued to publish through the long strike, circulation plunged. The decline continues. Each was selling more than 600,000 copies per day before the strike, but current circulation is down to 350,000 at the Free Press and only 220,000 at the News
As part of the deal, the News will quit publishing a Sunday paper in 2006. If they'd already given up on it, we might have been spared this particular Descent into Ecological Madness.