Canaries in a Coal Mine: The Global Decline of Wildlife since 1970

Despite the advent of significant wildlife protection laws since the early 1970s such as the 1973 Endangered Species Act in the United States, global populations of wildlife have fallen precipitously in the last 50 years. In the United States, for example, the population of birds has declined by almost 30 percent since 1970. This talk explores three related questions: why wildlife populations have declined in the last 50 years; why wildlife protection laws have proven to be ineffective against that decline; and why narratives of successful wildlife protection have persisted despite overall population declines and the near-extinctions of many species.

About the speaker

Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University fo Kansas.  He is the author of several books, including The Destruction of the Bison:  An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2020); and, with his co-author James Morton Turner, The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2018).  He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Erfurt in 2001-02 and a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich in 2009-10.