Where the Wild Things Aren’t

 Species Loss and Capitalisms in Latin America Since 1800

Five mass extinction events and several smaller crises have taken place throughout the 600 million years that complex life has existed on earth. These “Big Five” extinctions witnessed the disappearance of about three out of four of all species in just tens to hundreds of thousands of years. They left such profound imprints on the fossil record that today’s stratigraphers use them to establish the boundaries between geological time units.  Biodiversity required long periods of time—sometimes millions of years—to recover from these events, during which depleted ecosystems were often dominated by a few species, appropriately named disaster taxa, as Paul B. Wignall observes in his book Extinction: A Very Short Introduction.

In the past five centuries, at least 900 species of animals were recorded as extinct, and that’s probably an underestimate. Recent work suggests that 41 percent of described amphibians, 27 percent of mammals, 21 percent of reptiles and 13 percent of birds now face the threat of extinction. At current rates, a sixth mass extinction could overtake us in as little as a few hundred years (as Anthony D. Barnosky and others argue in the March 2011 Nature). This event would occur much faster than any of the previous five extinctions, except for maybe the Cretaceous mass extinction that wiped out almost all the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. It would also be the first one to be caused by a single species: human beings.

Latin America is one of the global epicenters of the current extinction crisis, having lost between 150 and 468 animal species in the past few centuries. According to the latter estimate (which includes species extinct in the wild and possibly extinct), Latin America ranks as the region with the highest number of extinct animal species in the world since 1500. The single most biologically rich region globally, it is home to about one out of every five animals threatened with extinction as of 2021, the most after Asia and Africa. Since 1970, Latin America has also experienced the most severe defaunation—decline and loss of wildlife populations—of any region in the world, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

How did we get here? There is no straightforward answer. Latin America is a vast region with an enormous variety of ecosystems distributed among 22 countries. These countries all share a common and entrenched legacy of European colonialism. But their early status as independent nation states means that their historical, economic, and political trajectories have also diverged significantly over the past two centuries. So what kind of things can we find in common to explain this dire state of affairs?

One way to think about this problem is in terms of the history of capitalisms (in plural), as suggested by Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon in Capitalisms: Toward a Global History .  The destruction of animal life and species loss in Latin America, particularly since 1800, are largely a result of expanding commercial economies and the capitalist commodification of nature. As various forms of capitalism developed in the region, nature was commodified or destroyed. Extinction-by-commodification witnessed a species’ decline when their market value incentivized exploitation beyond recovery. Hunted by Europeans in the sixteenth century for its meat, hundreds of thousands of Caribbean monk seals perished in the next three centuries for their oil, used as industrial lubricant and domestic fuel in Caribbean plantation economies, as Kyle Barker described in his Monachus Guardian article, “So Many Seals, So Little Time: The Rapid Extinction of the Caribbean Monk Seal.” The seal probably became extinct in the middle decades of the twentieth century. On the other hand, many now-extinct species were either incapable of commodification or stood in the way of commodifying another species or landscape. Put simply, these species were deemed useless or obstructive to emerging capitalist economies, especially in agriculture and ranching.

Consider the Mexican grizzly bear. All eight living species of bears evolved from a genus of small, forest-dwelling ancestors known as Ursavus that gave rise to the first true bears about 20 million years ago in Eurasia and North America. During the Pleistocene (2.6 million-11,000 years ago), brown bears (Ursus arctos) became a separate species, with the oldest fossils found in China. The species expanded into Europe about 250,000 years ago and seems to have colonized Alaska during the Wisconsin glaciation (75,000-11,000 BCE). The bears expanded into North America around 50,000 years ago, eventually covering most of present-day Canada and the United States, as well as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where a distinct population evolved. I’ll call this last region the Greater West.

Native Americans’ relationship with grizzlies was complex but relatively sustainable. Some cultures killed grizzlies for their meat, fat, body parts, and for prestige. Others revered bears and thought they were closely related to humans. The Rarámuri of Chihuahua called bears “úmuri,” meaning “great grandmother,” and in their cosmogony bears created the world.

European arrival and the introduction of cattle marked a turning point in the environmental history of the Greater West and grizzlies. By the 17^th century, the Spanish hardy breeds had become feral across Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico, Arizona and (by the 18^th century) California. In the late 1820s, James Pattie encountered vast herds in the mountains of northwestern Chihuahua and northeastern Sonora, the center of the grizzly population in northern Mexico, noting in his Personal Narrative to the Pacific and Mexico, June 20, 1824-August 30, 1830, that the woods around Tepache, Sonora, were “full of wild cattle and horses.” Large herds of feral cattle seemingly benefitted grizzly populations in the Greater West. In fact, the end of range cattle on the U.S. side of the border by 1900 partly explains the grizzly’s earlier extinction there compared to Chihuahua, where large-scale fencing only occurred after the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920.

Despite some hunting by Native Americans, Mexicans, and the occasional foreigner, grizzlies remained abundant across the Greater West until 1850. Expert estimates suggest 2,500 Mexican grizzlies in the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico (see David E. Brown’s The Grizzly in the Southwest: Documentary of an Extinction). In different regions, grizzlies enjoyed different foods, ranging from grassy meadows in the Southwest to evergreens and juniper in northern Mexico. Abundant natural vegetation along with game species and cattle meat (mostly in the form of carrion) appear to have supported unusually large grizzly populations. Indeed, the mid-19th century may have marked a peak in the demographic history of grizzlies in the Greater West.

This peak, however, preceded a steady decline following the massive influx of U.S. trappers, hunters, ranchers, farmers, and miners into the region after the Mexican-American War, particularly because of the 1862 Homestead Act and the 1873 Timber Culture Act. Many newcomers capitalized on every chance to shoot a grizzly, either for bounty or the sale of meat, fat, and hide to railroad workers and mining camps. Compounding the pressure of expanding capitalist economies, state policies sought to rid the entire western United States of predators. The creation of the Predatory Animal and Rodent Control branch of the Biological Survey of the Department of Agriculture in 1915 initiated a campaign of carnivore extermination that included hiring hundreds of hunters and setting out thousands of strychnine poison stations. Grizzlies have one of the lowest reproductive rates of any terrestrial mammal. They do not reach sexual maturity until they are four or five years old, sometimes even later, and have a mean litter size of two cubs per female, with up to seven years between litters. Killing even a few bears, especially females, can devastate a local population. By the end of World War I, the Southwest was largely settled and grizzlies numbered 50 or 60 individuals.

The enormous pressure on grizzlies in the U.S. Southwest had its counterpart, albeit on a smaller scale, in northern Mexico during the Porfiriato, when General Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico as president in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. U.S. hunter and conservationist Charles Sheldon, who spent four years in Chihuahua at the turn of the 20th century, explained in an article published in Hunting and Conservation in 1925 how “mines were discovered and worked in the game country, both in the desert and in the mountains; lumber industries were started, railroads were extended, and numerous natives obtained the rifles which before they had lacked.” Sheldon also blamed the decline of wildlife and grizzlies in Chihuahua on new technologies like cars, which gave hunters greater access to bear country. He viewed the Mexican Revolution as another factor, claiming that the armed phase of the revolution witnessed revolutionaries killing large numbers of cattle. Grizzlies in Chihuahua relied on the carcasses of range cattle that died every spring from recurrent drought and overstocking. The breakup of some of the enormous cattle estates gave thousands of peasants (many of them now armed) access to the land and its wildlife, once the hunting prerogative of a few foreigners and wealthy Mexicans.

Grizzlies tried adapting to these rapidly changing conditions. Multiple sources indicate that before the mid-19th century grizzlies were either more aggressive or behaved indifferently towards human beings. With the arrival of humans armed with repeating rifles to the Great West around 1860, grizzlies learned to flee humans and became mostly nocturnal. Apparently, Teddy Roosevelt himself thought that grizzlies were “far more dangerous in the days when small-bore, muzzle-loading rifles, carrying a light ball, were used” than in the late 19th century. Changing technologies led to what one a hunter described as a “wholesome fear of man,” as quoted in Dwight Williams Huntington’s Our Big Game: A Book for Sportsmen and Nature Lovers (1904).

Despite cultural adaptations, grizzlies had disappeared from the U.S. portion of the Greater West by the 1930s. Their situation in Mexico also became increasingly dire. In 1932, a hunter killed the last known grizzly of the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua, dealing the death blow to a species whose habitat was overrun by loggers, miners, and ranchers in the preceding decades. By 1940, the bears were gone from most of their original range in Mexico and the Sierra del Nido in Chihuahua had become their last stronghold.

Enter Aldo Starker Leopold, the son of the famous forester, philosopher, and wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold. A distinguished academic and zoologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Starker Leopold became a leading specialist on Mexico’s wildlife in the mid-20^th century. He began fieldwork in Mexico in 1944 and spent fifteen years collecting information from Mexican scientists, local informants, and more than 50 camp study sites that extended from Yucatán to Sonora. This effort culminated in his magnum opus, The Wildlife of Mexico: The Game Birds and Mammals, published in 1959. While doing field work in Mexico, Starker Leopold learned from ranchers, guides and U.S. hunters that grizzlies still inhabited the Sierra del Nido. He organized his first trip to this range in 1957 and gathered indisputable evidence that grizzlies subsisted there. For the next decade, he and Mexican biologists like Rodolfo Hernández Corzo became vocal advocates of grizzly conservation, urging the Mexican government to protect the species and establish a national park in the Sierra del Nido, as described by Robert A. McCabe in “Aldo Starker Leopold, 1913-1983: A Biographical Memoir.” Interestingly, while Leopold and Hernández Corzo sought to protect grizzlies, their motivations were very different. While Leopold saw the mountains of northern Mexico as one of the last bastions of wilderness in North America and grizzlies as the quintessential symbols of that wilderness, Hernández Corzo, who served as director of Mexico’s Bureau of Wildlife between 1962 and 1970, pursued the survival of grizzlies as a revenue-generating game species.

For Leopold, the Nido grizzlies escaped what he described as the “sequence of persecution and depletion” seen in the Greater West because the range was of little value to ranchers, miners, or loggers. The Nido’s broken topography and scarce water made it unattractive for commercial cattle raising or mining. Hunters represented the biggest threat. While indirect evidence suggests local bears had become good at avoiding human beings, some still perished at the hands of hunters.

Hunter and Grizzly Bear, Sierra del Nido, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1935. Source: Aldo Starker Leopold Papers, Grizzlies of the Sierra del Nido (Pacific Discovery, BANC MSS 81/61c, Carton 6, UC Berkeley Bancroft Library Manuscript Collections.

Social and environmental conditions, however, changed over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s. The Sierra itself, previously part of the vast landholdings of the Terrenates family, was divided into smaller ranching operations in the 1950s as part of Mexico’s land reform. The range was opened to the public and, subsequently, an increasing number of hunters. Prolonged and severe drought in the area between 1949 and 1962 forced some bears to attack cattle for the first time in decades. Some ranchers waged an all-out war against the bears, establishing 1,080 poison stations. Recurrent drought also concentrated the small population of local Mexican grizzlies (about 30 in 1957) into the few remaining areas with enough resources, making them extremely vulnerable to a “clean sweep.” The last Mexican grizzly, the “Martha” of the population, was probably killed sometime between 1960 and 1962.

When it comes to addressing the current biodiversity crisis afflicting Latin America and the world, stories like that of the Mexican grizzly offer insight into how extinctions have played out in the modern era. Within Latin America, Mexico has lost the highest number of species since 1500. In many cases, the incorporation of new territories into expanding commercial economies is to blame. Grizzly habitat reduction due to commercial logging and ranching in the late 19th century across the Greater West left isolated bear populations in fragmented “islands” of territory. In the first half of the 20th century, a binational extermination campaign against “harmful” predatory species (among them grizzlies) sought to protect commercial ranching on both sides of the border, further reducing bear numbers. Prolonged drought diminished food and water supplies, concentrating remaining bear populations in a small area in northern Mexico, where desperate bears frequented lower elevations and attacked cattle, prompting further extermination efforts. By the 1960s, these combined pressures finally pushed the Mexican grizzly over the brink.

The past few centuries have been marked by the extinction and extirpation of an increasing number of animal species and populations worldwide. The rate of historic and current extinctions is catastrophically higher than background rates. If this rate persists in the following decades, the planet may experience its sixth mass extinction—the disappearance of a majority of all species—in its 4.5 billion-year history. By studying the economic, political, cultural, and environmental conditions of past extinctions like that of the Mexican grizzly, we may help elucidate what it will take to mitigate today’s crisis—and head off a sixth mass extinction.