Review of Crimes Against Nature by Karl Jacoby

Review of Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation by Karl Jacoby

In 1899 a letter appeared in the pages of Forest and Stream magazine from Edwin Daniel, a wealthy business man from Chicago. It described a new and curious poaching practice he discovered while hunting in Wyoming, close to Yellowstone National Park. He reported that a large number of elk had been shot and killed, only to have their upper canine teeth or “tusks” removed, leaving the carcass to rot or be eaten by wolves.

While readers of the magazine were unable to figure out the purpose of such acts, there was a logical explanation. Since its establishment in New York City in 1868, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elk had established a fashion among club members for wearing elk tusks as watch fobs, rings, cuff links and hat pins and so forth. This greatly increased the price of elk tusks and for those people living near Yellowstone, home to one of the last great herds of elk, provided a potential source of extra revenue. However, the administration of the recently established Yellowstone National Park sought to prevent such poaching, inevitably resulting in another conflict between locals and the enforcers of the new state directive of conservation.

It is this conflict between local residence and conservation agents of the state in three famous Parks, New York State’s Adirondack Mountains Park, Yellowstone National Park and Grand Canyon National Park, which Karl Jacoby focuses on in his book Crimes Against Nature. Jacoby seeks to challenge the traditional historiographical narrative of conservation, which he describes as, “…a triumphant tale of the unfolding of an ever-more enlightened attitude toward the environment.” Instead Jacoby posits that the narrative of conservation is far more nuanced and fluctuating. Rather than simply portraying the local inhabitants as a destructive force, retarding the states efforts at conservation, he instead seeks to demonstrate the complex interactions between local residents and nature. This interaction and the local practices associated with it have been termed moral ecology. Examples of such a concept include Adirondacks local David Merrill arguing that netting fish, despite being illegal under new game laws, was a more humane and ecologically conscious way to fish for it allowed fish to be killed quickly and ensured only mature specimens were killed. Similar examples are provided of attempts by locals in Yellowstone National Park to restrain shepherds and elk poachers and the Havasupai Indians hunting practices in Grand Canyon National Park.

Jacoby documents how the coming of conservation radically changed the lives of the local inhabitants. He highlights how local use and common use rights, while not being legally enshrined, were viewed to exist by many rural Americans, especially regarding resource use for basic subsistence. The coming of conservation generally resulting in the erosion or elimination of these rights. While examples of Yellowstone locals being allowed to gather deadwood and grazing animals within the park show how locals attempting to enforce their rights from below, these attempts were mostly unsuccessful.

One interesting transformation which Jacoby does not focus on to as great an extend, despite its importance, is how the growth of the conservation movement radically altered the economies of the three areas and saw the transition from a subsistence economy to one based on wage labour. Jacoby states that “By impeding [Adirondack] residents’ access to the local environment, conservation inevitably magnified the importance of wage labour as an alternative means of support.” Similarly, in describing the life of the Havasupai Indians in Grand Canyon National Park, he writes, “As early as 1890s, male tribe members had experimented with temporary wage labour as a way to supplement a subsistence cycle diminished by the loss of game and the tribes increasingly unstable trading situation. In subsequent years, the Havasupais’ need for the cash and supplies that wage labour brought had only increased.” While the author accurately describes the slow shift from a subsistence economy to a wage based economy for the residence of the Grand Canyon, his description of a similar transition for residence of the Adirondacks is lacking and non-existent in regards to Yellowstone.

There primary focus of the predominance of wage labour in the Adirondacks is his description of the rise of guides and their associations, such as the AGA. However while it is evident that guides were paid for their services, the accounts serve as an example of how guides influenced national or state conservation policies based on their own local expertise. The AGA is an excellent example of how the idea of moral ecology and “micro-loyalties” governing resource use came to exert some influence, yet serves only as a limited example of the transition to wage labour. In order to expose such a transformation, he should have discussed the experiences of workers in logging camps or dish washers in newly built hotels and lodges.

Part of the reason for such a limitation is the availability of sources to the author. Many of the people most affected by the conservation movement were poor and frequently illiterate, leaving very few written records. The illegal nature of acts such as poaching, timber theft and squatting also led the perpetrators to seek to minimize or eliminate any records of their acts. The author acknowledges such limitations when he writes of, “the difficulty involved in illuminating the rural demimonde …there exists few sources produced directly by those who engaged in acts such as poaching and timber stealing.” Despite such an admission, the book still suffers from an undue reliance on particular sources for the majority of research. Of note is the use of sporting magazines such as Forrest and Stream and Garden and Forrest as well as a reliance on official government reports. Despite attempts to read into the subtext of such documents, the author’s account inevitably is shaped by sources which mostly portray the local inhabitants as criminals and deviant.

One particular result of this is Jacoby’s willingness to be more sympathetic to the views of locals, as represented by his sources. In regards to the concept of subsistence hunting and logging, he is willing to accept a clear demarcation between the subsistence hunting practices of locals and the wasteful sport hunting practices of rich visitors to the park. Yet as Jacoby later admits, such a distinction was almost impossible to make and many Adirondack residents often relied on a combination of subsistence hunting, market hunting and wage labour.

Overall, Crimes Against Nature is an excellent book which is clearly written and logically organized. Each of the three sections tells a coherent narrative which feeds into the broader narrative of conservation in America. Jacoby manages to highlight how the traditional historic narrative of conservation has served to marginalize and misrepresent the views of the rural inhabitants of the newly protected areas. He convincingly argues for the existence of a local “moral ecology” which governed the use of natural resources. Despite neglecting to sufficiently examine the transition of the local labour force into the wage economy, he still manages to overcome limitations imposed by his source material to provide a previously unheard of account of how conservation affected many inhabitants of America. This book serves an important function as it serves to unify environmental history with social history in a engaging and informative style.