Paper short abstract:

From 1890 to 1920, farmers plowed the wetland ecosystem of the North American Prairie Pothole Region, contributing to the extirpation and decimation of the whooping crane. Kristen Greteman examines the near-extinction of the species, and the efforts to conserve it, through a transnational lens.

Paper long abstract:

One-hundred seventy-six years ago, land use decisions put into motion the extirpation of the Whooping Crane in Iowa. By the turn of the twentieth-century, nesting cranes in Iowa were virtually nonexistent. Prior to this, the northern Iowa Prairie Pothole ecosystem was the historic breeding center for the species in North America. Over the course of a few decades, Euro-Americans changed the prairie wetland ecosystem into some of the highest functioning agricultural land in the world. In the process, they ousted the Whooping Cranes from the most important place in their historic habitat range. This land use change resulted in the almost-extinction of the species. By 1941, there were twenty-two left in North America. Today, the Whooping Crane is one of the rarest North American birds and an endangered species.

Using scientific and historical primary source data, this paper constructs a spatial narrative about the systems that worked for and against the whooping crane species. Some systems were deemed more valuable than others, and the decisions of a few changed the course for so many human and nonhuman beings. Only the coalition of multiple groups of people led to conservation efforts to protect the species from extinction.

Paper short abstract:

The creation of Big Lake Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas in 1915 was crucial to the survival of a narrow corridor along the Mississippi River Flyway. This paper traces the surprising fragility of the flyway over ten centuries of earthquakes, floods, and, finally, development-oriented drainage projects.

Paper long abstract:

For centuries the swamps and lakes in Eastern Arkansas served as a life sustaining stopover for many species of migratory birds long the Mississippi River Flyway from Central Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. One of four such flyways across the United States, it narrows considerably when it reaches Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, literally forcing birds into a funnel and creating a great density of avian species. Intense logging and drainage activities in the early twentieth centuries threatened this important flyway’s collapse within a mere fifteen years. Little opposition arose until plans emerged to drain Big Lake, a feature of the landscape since at least the ninth century. A group of local settlers were the first to resist development, and together with a consortium of out-of-state sports hunters they secured the establishment in 1915 of the Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge – the first in the nation. The historiography on the Big Lake refuge focuses on the politics of its creation, but this paper will use a variety of documentary and geo-scientific data to trace the lake’s origins and the formative importance of more than nine centuries of periodic earthquakes, droughts, and indigenous interaction with the river. While it challenges the political narrative on certain points, the paper’s goal is to introduce geoscientific evidence to better understand its long history and surprising fragility. The flyway is already experiencing challenges because of Climate change. Will history repeat itself?

Paper short abstract:

The Tongue River Valley in Montana, USA and the Río Lempa in El Salvador were valleys that fostered both resource conflict and solidarity. In both locations, farmers and ranchers worked their land for generations and knew the value of water was higher than the economic promises of gold and coal.

Paper long abstract:

In the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, farmers in Chalatenango, El Salvador organized to ban metal mining in their communities and eventually the entire nation, becoming the first country in the world to put an outright ban on all mining exploration and exploitation. Around the same time, approximately 4,000 kilometers to the north, rural ranchers in Montana, USA fought coal development along the Tongue River Valley by preventing the construction of a coal-hauling railroad along the Tongue River on the eastern border of the Northern Cheyenne reservation. Both of these stories were the result of over three decades of grassroots organizing that relied heavily on forming strategic relationships on multiple levels. Using oral history, traditional archival research, and private archives, this paper unpacks the layers and complexities of these relationships. From neighbors talking to neighbors, to communities partnering with communities, to transnational solidarity that crossed many politically-charged borders, each alliance brought with it a new set of power dynamics and tensions, while also playing a key role in the successful prevention of large-scale mining projects.

Paper short abstract:

When the monarch butterfly migration was confirmed in 1975, Canadians, Mexicans, and U.S. Americans came together to protect habitat along the transnational route. This presentation examines the power asymmetries, internally and externally, that helped and hindered international collaboration.

Paper long abstract:

A transnational network of citizen-scientists through the Insect Migration Association confirmed the monarch butterfly migration in 1975. At three conferences in 1981, 1986, and 1997, state officials, lepidopterists, campesinos, journalists, and others gathered to discuss threats along the migratory route and to propose solutions. Because of the Mexican debt crisis of the early 1980s, they settled on neoliberal solution for the overwintering grounds: meager payments to ejidatarios for conserved forest and harsh fines for illegal logging. Due to these shortcomings, non-governmental organizations tried to fill the void. While successful in building meaningful partnerships, they lacked the purse strings of the federal largesse. When Roundup Ready crops became implicated in the disappearance of the host plant milkweed and other pollinators in the 1990s, Monsanto executives blamed conservation problems in Mexico as justification to continue spraying Roundup herbicide on fields of the U.S. Midwest and Canada. The presentation focuses on how to leverage transnational relationships for national resources.

Paper short abstract:

A 20th century transnational group of scientists jointly examined analogous mediterranean-type ecosystems (MTEs) in Chile and California. This MTE network engaged in science and conservation projects informed by both shared concerns and the disparate interests generated by grassroots organizations.

Paper long abstract:

During the Cold War era, biologists from Chile and California collaborated to comparatively study mediterranean ecosystems. These seemingly equivalent systems shared remarkable similarities of climate, of plant life; they also appeared to host scientific communities that shared similar ambitions and faced comparable conservation challenges. At first glance, this collaboration between Chilian and Californian scientists would appear to be directed by top-down mechanisms: it was coordinated under the umbrella of the International Biological Program (1964-1974) and funded by the U.S.-based National Science Foundation. But the subsequent development of the field of mediterranean ecology did not quite follow suit. The emerging mediterranean-type ecosystem (MTE) network was informal and steered by mutual interests, not institutional dictates. This paper explores how members of the network engaged in science and conservation projects by analyzing traditional archives and oral histories. How did the initiative and support for California- and Chile-based projects differ or continue to be alike? Although California-based ecologists regularly worked in close cooperation with government agencies, Chile-based work often at the behest of grassroots, rather than state-led, organizations.