Brown - EH and Maintenance - 2016 03 21 [low res]

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Kevin C. Brown1
Carnegie Mellon University
Environmental History and “Maintenance”: The Case of the Devils Hole Pupfish
A Paper for the Maintainers Conference, Stevens Institute of Technology, April 2016
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In November 1970, a fisheries biologist named Robert R. Miller returned to his office at the
University of Michigan distressed by what he had seen during a recent trip to Death Valley
National Monument.2 Sure, the aquifer supporting one of the monument’s endemic fishes,
the Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis), was being driven to the surface by the electric
pumps of a desert alfalfa and cattle operation—that was bad, no doubt. But what really
troubled Miller after this visit was the damage he and his fellow biologists might be been
doing at Devils Hole themselves.
Earlier in the year, as the water level in Devils Hole plummeted, reducing the
amount of spawning territory and even sunlight in the pupfish’s habitat, the National Park
Service (NPS) acted on the advice of
Miller and others, installing electric
lights over the pool (to make up for a
decline in primary productivity) and
suspending a fiberglass shelf in a deeper
part of the pool (to provide replacement
spawning habitat). “Our purpose in
Figure 1: Devils Hole is located in a disjunct portion of
Death Valley National Park, in Nye County, Nevada. The
pool, just 10x70 feet at the surface, is a window into the
aquifer underneath the Amargosa Valley. The Devils Hole
pupfish population currently numbers around 130
individuals—the entire species could fit in a Nalgene
bottle. (Photo: Kevin C. Brown, March 2014).
environmental manipulation,” Miller
explained to another biologist, “should
be to maintain, as nearly as possible, the
status quo of the Devils Hole pupfish.” But was that actually happening? Were the lights
stimulating too much algae production? Were pupfish utilizing the fiberglass sheet to
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The National Park Service, through a contract with the American Society for Environmental History, funded
an environmental history of the Devils Hole pupfish. Material discussed in this paper was discovered as part of
the research for that report.
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In 1994, Congress changed the monument’s name to Death Valley National Park.
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spawn? It was hard to know, especially in the absence of nearly any systematic ecological
monitoring. “[W]e may be harming the fish we are all trying so hard to save,” Miller feared.3
Though he would never have called himself one, Miller was a maintainer. In fact,
much in the canon of conservation history can be grouped under the rubric of maintenance.
The legislation creating the National Park Service, for example, pr0mised to conserve
“unimpaired” iconic landscapes for future generations. The U.S. Forest Service sought to
satisfy demand for timber through “sustained yield” harvesting practices. And after
nineteenth century scientists discovered that extinction could occur, they began thinking
about how species and habitats could be preserved. Whatever pitfalls, contradictions, and
blindspots these institutions and movements embraced—there were many in each case—
they also constituted kinds of early twentieth century environmental maintenance
programs.
As maintenance becomes essential to a broad, on-going corrective to the centrality
of innovation and invention in much of the literature in the history of technology, it is
worth thinking about how this concept can operate in related fields. For environmental
history, its value does not come from slapping a new name on the well-worn, top-down
stories of conservation listed above—even if library shelves full of such books suggest
maintenance has been reflected in some historiographies for a long while. Rather, as
maintenance helps historians of technology set their gaze beyond corporate laboratories and
square it on standards manuals and auto repair shops, building what David Edgerton has
called histories of “technology-in-use,” it can encourage a similar refocusing in
environmental history.4 With histories of endangered species, in particular, maintenance
can shift attention from conservation policies—the creation of NPS, the passage of the
Endangered Species Act, the designation of wilderness areas—to the landscape where these
policies confront the messy realities of agency administrative structure, incomplete
3
Robert R. Miller to Phil Pister, November 22, 1970, FWS-Las Vegas.
David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007), xi.
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knowledge of ecosystems and species, and the ongoing human influence on nature. To
paraphrase Edgerton, maintenance can help produce histories of “conservation-in-use.”
Maintenance assists in this shift by highlighting both the creative and routine labor
often embedded in conservation programs. The Devils Hole pupfish, for example, has been
the subject of more than 45 years of intensive management efforts to keep this isolated
species from extinction. Since the 1970s, artificial
refuges for the pupfish have served as a key tool for
managers from NPS and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service (FWS). Refuge populations of Devils Hole
pupfish would be, as the 1980 Devils Hole Pupfish
Recovery Plan later described, “the only source from
which to reestablish the Devils Hole pupfish in its
natural habitat following either a natural or maninduced catastrophy [sic].”5 This approach guaranteed
the preservation of the pupfish genome even if Devils
Hole itself failed to maintain the species.6 Between
1970 and 1972, the agencies transplanted pupfish—
more than 200 individuals in all—to five different
springs and artificial habitats. The first four of these
efforts failed, including one that biologists named
“Purgatory Spring,” but the fifth succeeded when 27
Figure 2: Managers collect pupfish for
transplant, August 1970. The artificial
lights and shelf can be seen behind the
biologists. The stilling well for the water
recorder (lower right of image) had to be
placed in a deeper part of the pool after
the water level dropped and rendered it
useless. (Photo: Phil Pister).
pupfish began reproducing in a 10,000 gallon concrete tank near the base of the Hoover
Dam. Eventually, biologists built two additional refuges closer to Devils Hole, providing a
total of three backup populations for C. diabolis. Between 2002 and 2006, however, all three
of these refuges failed for a variety of reasons—from mismanagement by the agencies, from
5
James Deacon, et al., Devils Hole Pupfish Recovery Plan (Portland, OR: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Region 1,
1980), 17, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015024955752.
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The Devils Hole pupfish are finicky breeders—virtually all of the efforts to reproduce the species in aquaria
have failed.
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invasive species in the refuges, and from bad luck (a related pupfish species managed to
infiltrate one of these refuges and hybridized with the Devils Hole pupfish). Facing critically
low pupfish population numbers in Devils Hole during the 2000s—estimates of the
population in 2006 reached just 35 individuals—FWS and NPS doubled down on the refuge
strategy. In 2014, FWS opened a new $4.5 million refuge, the Ash Meadows Fish
Conservation Facility. This new refuge can mimic conditions in Devils Hole, including
insolation, temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen.
The history of the refuges illustrates that maintaining a species can be hard work.
This example also shows how maintenance is
uncertain work. The refuge populations have
repeatedly failed to serve the purpose for which they
were intended. Despite the best laid plans of
scientists, managers, and field technicians,
maintenance may not succeed or be possible.
Additionally, as Robert Miller feared in 1970, it is
always conceivable that efforts to maintain a species
will actually harm it. Devils Hole has realized this
fear recently. In 2004, a flash flood in the Devils
Hole watershed flushed a box of improperly stored
fish traps—present because of ongoing work to
understand the habits of larval pupfish—into Devils
Figure 3: Hoover Dam Refuge, November
1974. Fed from a spring above the refuge,
the refuge contained pupfish from 1972 to
1986, when a water supply failure caused
the extirpation of the population.
Subsequent populations were introduced,
but in 2006 an invasive snail colonized the
pool and contributed to decisions by
managers to pull the remaining fish from
the refuge. (Photo: Phil Pister).
Hole, with the traps killing approximately 80
pupfish over a period of 10 days before being noticed
by NPS employees.
I have described Devils Hole pupfish
maintenance efforts without much reference to the context swirling around the species.
The development of ichthyology and ecology, the growth of an environmental state
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apparatus, and the changing political economy of southern Nevada all help explain why
action was taken, as a popular bumper sticker from the 1970s put it, to “Save the Pupfish,”
and why the federal government had employees on the payroll to focus on endangered
species in the first place. Highlighting maintenance does not deny this historical context or
negate long run habitat degradation as the result of climate change or the accidental (or
intentional) introduction of a non-native species. A history of maintenance can actually
underscore and explain why such broader historical and environmental developments are
important.
At the same time that this approach gets us down to the nitty-gritty of pupfish
habitats and management techniques, it can also take us back to big picture questions of
maintenance. Are there more maintainers out there than historians of technology have
assumed? Do standards engineers at telecoms and wildlife technicians at the National Park
Service have more in common with each other than we realize? What happens when we
begin to write the history of the standards engineer and the pupfish manager together?