Brown - EH and Maintenance - 2016 03 21 [low res]
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Brown - EH and Maintenance - 2016 03 21 [low res]
1 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 *** 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 1 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. 2 In 1994, Congress changed the monument’s name to Death Valley National Park. 2 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. 4 3 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. 6 The Devils Hole pupfish are finicky breeders—virtually all of the efforts to reproduce the species in aquaria have failed. 4 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 5 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?
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