Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany

By Stefan Bargheer

At the center of Stefan Bargheer’s account of bird watching, field ornithology, and nature conservation in Britain and Germany stands the question of how values change over time and how individuals develop moral commitments. Using life history data derived from written narratives and oral histories, Moral Entanglements follows the development of conservation from the point in time at which the greatest declines in bird life took place to the current efforts in large-scale biodiversity conservation and environmental policy within the European Union. While often depicted as the outcome of an environmental revolution that has taken place since the 1960s, Bargheer demonstrates to the contrary that the relevant practices and institutions that shape contemporary conservation have evolved gradually since the early nineteenth century. Moral Entanglements further shows that the practices and institutions in which bird conservation is entangled differ between the two countries. In Britain, birds derived their meaning in the context of the game of bird watching as a leisure activity. Here birds are now, as then, the most popular and best protected taxonomic group of wildlife due to their particularly suitable status as toys in a collecting game, turning nature into a playground. In Germany, by contrast, birds were initially part of the world of work. They were protected as useful economic tools, rendering services of ecological pest control in a system of agricultural production modeled after the factory shop floor. Based on this extensive analysis, Bargheer formulates a sociology of morality informed by a pragmatist theory of value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226543963

Book preview

Moral Entanglements

Moral Entanglements

Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany

Stefan Bargheer

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37663-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54382-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54396-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226543963.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bargheer, Stefan, author.

Title: Moral entanglements : conserving birds in Britain and Germany / Stefan Bargheer.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017039380 | ISBN 9780226376639 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226543826 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226543963 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Birds—Conservation—Moral and ethical aspects—England. | Birds—Conservation—Moral and ethical aspects. | Ethics—England. | Ethics—Germany.

Classification: LCC QL676.5.B255 2018 | DDC 333.95/8—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039380

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Marlene

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Prologue: A Bird's Eye View

1  ·  A Pragmatist Theory of Morality

2  ·  Collector’s Items and Viable Means

3  ·  Technology Comes to the Countryside

4  ·  Field Ornithology and Practical Bird Conservation

5  ·  Endangered Birds and Indicator Species

6  ·  Bird Watching as Organizational Strategy

7  ·  Data Power and Geographical Reference Frames

Conclusion: Studying Morality

Appendix 1: Method and Data

Appendix 2: Names and Translations

List of Interviews

References

Index

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

This book was in the making for a long time. If my mentors at the University of Chicago had not talked me out of some of the initial excesses in case selection, I would in all likelihood still be writing it. I thank in particular Andrew Abbott for his unwavering moral support—not to mention his sociological advice—for this project from start to finish. His seminar on historical research methods was the beginning of this project. I have also greatly benefited from working with Andreas Glaeser, who provided crucial feedback throughout the research process. Elisabeth Clemens has assisted with a special field exam that informed the outline of this project. Working with Hans Joas has proven insightful, and his intellectual stimulation found its way into this book. The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin was an ideal place for working on the manuscript. I benefited greatly from presenting at the institute’s colloquium, and Lorraine Daston’s comments on an early version of the entire manuscript were invaluable.

More than anything else, however, I have to thank the people whose work I studied and whom I interviewed for this project. It is a truism that research cannot be done without the help of others; yet more than this, at times I felt that my main purpose was to channel the voices of others out to a larger audience. I found the people I interviewed to produce perfectly clear and plausible narrative accounts of and reflections on how they act, why it matters to them, and what kind of impact it has. Stephen Moss, Norbert Schäffer, and Martin Flade made particular efforts to communicate their experiences with bird watching, field ornithology, and nature conservation to me. It was not only the knowledge of these and many other people that I met but also their enthusiasm for birds that made the research for this project personally gratifying. While conducting this research, I was asked more than once by fellow sociologists Are you a bird watcher yourself? I am not, but this is probably my own loss, since the people I encountered made a convincing case that having a preoccupation one is passionate about can be genuinely enriching. While not passionate about birds myself, I did, however, become very fond of watching bird watchers.

In addition to the people I interviewed, I am particularly indebted to the staff at the libraries and archives of the organizations I studied. At the Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU), Helge May was instrumental in giving me access to his collection of documents on the history of the organization. I also thank the environmental historian Anna-Katharina Wöbse for countless discussions on the history of the NABU and its founder, Lina Hähnle. Hans-Werner Frohn at the Stiftung Naturschutzgeschichte was particularly helpful in providing information on the early history of bird conservation. At the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), I would like to thank Ian Dawson for assistance with locating sources and for sharing his file of archival materials with me. I am further indebted to the librarians at BirdLife International and the Bundesamt für Naturschutz.

Discussing this research at conferences, workshops, and seminars has greatly helped me in formulating my ideas. I thank the students in my courses taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Göttingen, NYU Berlin, and UCLA for their thoughts on morality and nature conservation. For much the same reasons, I owe gratitude to former fellow students at the University of Chicago. I want to thank in particular the members of a writing group, first of all Sida Liu, Maria Medvedeva, Daniel Menchik, Josh Pacewicz, and Xiaoli Tian. I received substantial assistance from Jessica Feldman, Melissa Kew, Zohar Lechtman, Gregory Liegel, Etienne Ollion, and Paki Reid-Brossard. While all errors of fact do, of course, remain exclusively my own, I am more than happy to share the responsibility for all shortcomings in sociological perspective with the people in my graduate department. If faculty and students at this place were not so insistent that Chicago sociology is a worthwhile approach, I might well have overlooked it.

At UCLA, Gail Kligman, Hannah Landecker, Aaron Panofsky, and Stefan Timmermans gave helpful advice on the manuscript and the publishing process. I thank Gabriel Abend and Nicholas Wilson for reading versions of the revised manuscript. I am equally grateful to Doug Mitchell and Kyle Wagner at the University of Chicago Press and to the reviewers, in particular Marion Fourcade, for making the transition from manuscript to book possible. The initial field research for this project was supported by a research grant from the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago and the Andrew W. Mellon Early Career Fellowship Program provided by the American Council of Learned Societies. Despite this assistance, the project would not have been possible without the support of my parents, Karl and Hildegard, as well as that of several credit card companies. I have meanwhile been able to repay my debts to the latter, but I am not certain that I will ever be able to do the same for all of the aforementioned people.

Prologue

A Bird’s Eye View

Heinrich Gätke caused a stir in the world of ornithology in 1891 when he first published Heligoland as an Ornithological Observatory. It included a list of the breeding birds and irregular visitors to this island in the North Sea, as collected by Gätke and reported in the leading ornithological journals of the time (Cordeaux 1875; Hartlaub 1894; Seebohm 1877, 1892). The author had been the prime recorder of birdlife on Heligoland for fifty years, and by the time his observations were published, the number of species on his list was, in fact, astonishing: no less than three hundred and ninety-six species were reported on an island less than a square mile in size. Initially, the wealth of birdlife came as a surprise to Gätke. When he started comparing his findings with the established collections on the mainland it slowly dawned on him what never expected riches of noteworthy items come together at this place, and how infinitely this little rock overshadows the proudest Empires in this respect (Gätke 1891, preface; 1895).

The reason for these remarkable numbers was not hard to find. Heligoland’s location in the middle of the North Sea is a prime spot along the route of birds migrating from northern Europe and Russia to the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. The island, located thirty miles from the German coast and 270 miles from the British Isles, is one of the few high-seas islands in the North Sea, making it a natural resting place and point of orientation for migrating birds. Gätke, a painter and natural historian, had come to the island as a secretary to the British government, under whose jurisdiction the island stood until 1890, when it became part of Germany. Gätke assembled a museum collection in his spare time and began comparing the birds procured on Heligoland to those in standard handbooks on European birdlife. When these publications proved inadequate for birds that came from as far as North America and Siberia, he sought the expert advice of ornithologists on the European continent and the British Isles.

Gätke and his bird observatory (Vogelwarte) in Heligoland gained a reputation in the process. The most venerable ornithologists at the time came to visit his collection and reported enthusiastically about the riches in their writings (Blasius 1890; Naumann 1846; Rohweder 1905; Schulz 1947; Stresemann 1967; Vauk 1977). Gätke and other ornithologists pointed out that the reason for the high number of species recorded on this little island was not only due to its location but also a result of the copious attention the birds were beginning to attract. Once the ornithological status of Heligoland became apparent, ornithologists such as Gätke were willing to pay high prices for newly acquired birds, and they became duly sought-after by the islanders, who had previously collected migrating birds mainly for food. With the arrival of Gätke, collecting rare migrants turned into a minor industry, and few migrating species that crossed the island escaped the guns, nets, and traps of the islanders. The number of noteworthy observations from Heligoland continued to grow and filled the pages of the major ornithological journals in Britain and Germany. Gätke’s long-awaited book (published in German in 1891) was soon translated into English and included the addition of two new species discovered since the first edition. A second German edition, published posthumously in 1900, added yet another species.

One of Gätke’s early ornithological surprises, brought to him by a local hunter, was a specimen of what was in all likelihood a collared dove, called Türkentaube in German and sometimes also identified as Lachtaube. The collared dove had first been named in 1834 by the Hungarian ornithologist Frivaldszky as Columba risoria, variation decaocto, now Streptopelia decaocto, based on a specimen from a region in Turkey, today part of Bulgaria. At first Gätke thought the bird—which at the time had a breeding range from Turkey to southern China and from India to Sri Lanka—must be an escaped cage bird, but eventually he came to the conclusion that it was a stray migrant that had been blown off course by unfavorable weather conditions. The record was reported in Gätke’s publication and stood on its own for almost half a century. Within the first half of the twentieth century the species became an unprecedented example of species dispersion. The spread can be traced in hundreds of reports in popular and professional ornithological journals (Fisher 1953; Nowak 1965; Stresemann and Nowak 1958; Vauk 1957).

The first breeding pairs of collared doves outside their known range were recorded in Hungary in 1928, the Czech Republic in 1938, Austria and Poland in 1943, West Germany in 1945, East Germany in 1946, Italy in 1947, Denmark in 1948, the Netherlands and Switzerland in 1950, Sweden in 1951, France in 1952, Belgium, Great Britain, and Norway in 1955, Luxembourg in 1956, and Ireland in 1959. Thus followed an extensive proliferation, which, by the end of the twentieth century, stretched north beyond the Arctic Circle in Norway, east to the Ural Mountains in Russia, and southwest to the Canary Islands and northern Africa from Morocco to Egypt. Its eastern spread had also reached most of central and northern China and Japan. The collared dove was introduced into the Bahamas in the 1970s and spread from there to Florida by 1982. Its stronghold in North America is the Gulf Coast, and it is found as far south as Veracruz, as far west as the Carolinas, and as far north as Alaska, the Great Lakes, and Nova Scotia. The collared dove has transformed from a true rarity on Heligoland at the time of Gätke to one of the most common birds all across the globe (Bezzel 1985; Roselaar 1985).

The data on the spread of the collared dove has been compiled by passionate bird collectors such as Gätke. Over the period of the species’ global spread, the initial collection of such records with guns, traps, and nets has given way to their collection with binoculars, cameras, and notebooks. These records are submitted to local bird-watching societies, their authenticity is judged by national rarity committees, and the records are then compiled by international ornithological organizations. Birds account for 10,027 species out of about 1.7 million total animal and plant species identified so far, while the estimate for all species living on earth ranges from 3 to 30 million (R. May 1988, 1990). The rate of new discoveries indicates that only in the case of birds, mammals, and amphibians can there be relative certainty that almost all living species have already been discovered and named. In the case of insects, on the other hand, most species are still expected to be unknown. This uneven distribution in attention paid to different taxonomic groups is not restricted to new discoveries, but also reflected in the amount of data available on population size. In the 2010 Red List of Threatened Species compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, birds and mammals are the only taxonomic groups for which population totals and trends have been assessed for all named species. Fungi rank last in this regard, with only one out of 31,496 species assessed in 2010 (IUCN 2010).

Over the time of such data’s existence, very few bird species have seen an increase in range and population size comparable to that of the collared dove. In 2010 there were 1,240 bird species considered to be endangered to various degrees, and 132 bird species have become extinct since the year 1600. More than a hundred of these are considered to have been lost in the last two centuries alone (Lawton and May 1995; Luther 1986). Throughout the same period, bird-conservation organizations have been founded across the globe, legal measures for their protection have been established, and nature reserves have been organized to conserve the more endangered species. Almost half of Heligoland, for instance, is currently legally designated as a bird reserve and is administered by a local bird-conservation organization (Jordsand 2007; Meise 1957).

The work of national bird-conservation organizations is coordinated by BirdLife International, which represents more than 2.5 million people and 111 national organizations in its global partnership for conservation (BirdLife International 2010). Although focused exclusively on birds, the organization rivals Friends of the Earth International’s (2011) more than 2 million members, Greenpeace International’s (2011) 2.8 million members, and the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (2011) more than 5 million global supporters (McTaggart and Hunter 1978; Groth 2003; Powell 2004; Russell 1996). BirdLife has a partner in virtually every country that has a voluntary organization involved in the conservation of birds. Concern for bird conservation, however, is distributed unevenly: The three largest partner organizations as reported in the early 2000s—the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in Great Britain with 1,050,000 members; the Audubon Society in the United States with 550,000 members; and the Naturschutzbund (NABU) in Germany with 420,000 members—account for four fifths of the global membership (BirdLife International 2010). Only one additional organization in the global partnership has a membership of more than one hundred thousand, the Dutch Vogelbescherming Nederland with 125,000 members. Only three other partner organizations, those in Belgium, Israel, and Switzerland, count more than fifty thousand members. The smallest partner organization is to be found in Bahrain, where Dr. Saeed A. Mohammed is the BirdLife affiliate. Organized bird conservation in Britain stands out no matter which measure is chosen—total membership or membership in proportion to the population. Although Luxembourg’s Lëtzebuerger Natur- a Vulleschutzliga (LNVL) ranks higher in proportional membership, it counts no more than 14,000 members and therefore does not exert the same influence in the international arena as the RSPB, which accounts for more than 40 percent of the global membership of BirdLife International and is considered the lead partner of the organization.

Formulating the Question

The way in which birds are valued differs over time and between countries. Of the three major partner organizations of BirdLife International the contrast in the valuation of birds is most pronounced between the British organization, founded in 1889 (Clarke 2004; Samstag 1988), and the German organization, founded in 1899 (Hanemann and Simon 1987; H. May 2003). This study analyzes the emergence and transformation of bird conservation in these two countries from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was little noteworthy concern for the conservation of birds, in sharp contrast with the high concern visible during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Using life-history data derived from written narratives and oral histories, I follow the development of bird conservation from the point in time at which the greatest declines in birdlife took place to the current efforts in large-scale biodiversity conservation and environmental policy. In doing this I address three interrelated questions: first, why are birds the most popular aspect of nature, second, what accounts for the differences in the value attributed to birds in the two countries, and, finally, how do we explain the timing of the emergence of organized bird conservation and its transformation over time?

In analyzing these questions I aim to contribute to the sociology of morality. I advance a pragmatist theory of valuation that shows how the value attributed to birds derives from their relational position within a set of practices and institutions as social forms. This theory contrasts with one of the most famous approaches in the social sciences to the question of how meaning is attributed to objects in nature, which provides a useful heuristic for highlighting the central argument of the pragmatist approach. Claude Lévi-Strauss coined the now classic dictum that animals are good to think with (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 1963; Lévi-Strauss [1962] 1966). Following this dictum, the meaning attributed to animals and nature is considered to be a mirror image or projection of the meaning given to the relations between human beings. Nature, in short, is a social phenomenon. The central assumption of this school of thought is that, as far as the emergence or origin of meaning is concerned, society is a primary and nature a secondary or derivative category. Nature—and the way human beings act in it and experience it—does not produce meaning in its own right but merely serves as an empty screen onto which meanings originally attributed to social relations are projected.

The most famous and clear-cut example of this line of thought is Clifford Geertz’s work on Balinese cockfights. According to Geertz, the Balinese see a reflection of themselves and their social order in the fighting cocks. Like a written text, the cockfight has the benefit of rendering ordinary, everyday experiences comprehensible by presenting them in terms of acts and objects that have their practical consequences removed and are reduced to a level of sheer symbolism, and thus their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more accurately perceived. For Balinese men, fighting cocks depict how social life is perceived to be; that is, they provide what Geertz calls a vocabulary of sentiment or a metasocial commentary. In this view, only people’s relations to their fellow human beings have true substance and meaning; the relations of human beings to nature are merely a reflection or enactment of these more genuine social relations. Or, as Geertz puts it, the cockfight is ‘really real’ only to the cocks (Geertz 1973, 443).

Based on the example of the status of wild birds in Great Britain and Germany, it can be shown that the process by which meaning is attributed to objects of nature is far from exhausted by such a one-dimensional explanation. Nature is not merely an empty screen on which social relations are projected, but the experience of nature is itself a source of the meanings and valuations attributed to it. These meanings and valuations differ with the social forms of practices and institutions that guide the experience of nature. Work and play were the most crucial social forms in the development of conservation in Britain and Germany. In Britain, birds derived their meaning in the context of the practices and institutions of the game of bird watching. Here birds are the most popular and best-protected taxonomic group of wildlife due to their particularly suitable status as toys on the playground of nature. In Germany, by contrast, birds were part of an economic set of practices and institutions in the world of work. They were initially protected as labor birds for their usefulness in agriculture and forestry. The study looks at the interaction between conservationists in these two countries that resulted in a gradual adaptation to each other over time and ultimately informed the recontextualization of bird conservation within the legal framework of the European Union.

By tracing this development, this study contributes to the sociology of morality. Debates in this field have changed substantially since the demise of structural functionalism that dominated the topic in the mid-twentieth century. Recent debates have addressed the questions of how morality relates to nonmoral valuations, how widely it is shared, how stable it is over time, and last but not least how it relates to bodily practices, material objects, and geographical space. I elaborate and extend on the pragmatist theory of valuation of John Dewey in order to contribute to these debates. The aim is to make this pragmatist tradition relevant to the recent rejuvenation of research on the sociology of morality. This approach resonates with many of the theoretical considerations and empirical case studies produced by scholars associated with the Chicago school of sociology, whose work was temporarily neglected due to the dominance of structural functionalism. The central argument of this study is that moral valuations are embedded in practices and institutions. I show that changes in moral valuations follow from the transformation of practices and the way these practices become institutionalized, not from innovations in moral discourse, with discourse understood as a text. Such a model of culture as a text informed Geertz’s account of Balinese cockfighting and was heavily indebted to the structural functionalism of his mentor Talcott Parsons.

A pragmatist approach is well suited to provide answers to the three questions listed above. Regarding the first question, a pragmatist account of the practice of play (as opposed to work) explains why wild birds are currently the most popular and best protected taxonomic group of wildlife. The key to an understanding of the appeal of birds is its embeddedness in the practices and institutions of bird watching as a game. What constitutes bird watching as a game is not the mere incidence of witnessing the presence of a bird, however far or remote, but the coordinated effort to spot, identify, and record wild birds on a regular basis. As such, bird watching is a form of fieldnote collecting and record keeping. Being part of a game, it is not the symbolic status of birds within a wider system of social relations but their peculiar pattern of diversity and distribution that gives meaning to them, as exemplified by Gätke’s bird collection at Heligoland. Birds, in other words, are so popular not because they are good to think with but because they are good to play with.

What makes bird watching such a good game has to do with birds’ material, that is, their biological characteristics. It is the fact that birds can fly, are distributed unevenly in space, and are available in fairly high yet manageable numbers. In these characteristics birds differ from other species. In both Britain and Germany, beetles are available in thousands of species, and mammals only in a few dozen. Collecting species that belong to these taxonomic groups can be either overburdening or boring. Birds, by contrast, offer just the right amount of challenge. In addition, birds, unlike for instance trees, do not stay put. Their ability to fly makes their exact whereabouts unpredictable and adds to the excitement of spotting them. Bird migration, often coupled with the effects of severe weather events, can furthermore produce complete surprise sightings, such as the collared dove at Heligoland during Gätke’s days. This is not to deny that a rich symbolic meaning can be attached to birds: if one wants to understand why a pub is called the black swan, symbolic meaning is the way to go. If, however, one wants to account for why millions of people watch birds, it is not first and foremost birds’ symbolic meaning, but their ambiguous status of being not too few and not too many and being neither here nor there that provides an explanation. It is this ambiguity of birds, their twofold in-between status, that fuels the game of bird watching.

The argument holds true for the past as much as for the present. Bird collectors continue to be among the most frequent visitors to Heligoland. Today, these collectors are bird watchers who collect sight records with binoculars and notebooks, rather than museum ornithologists who collect specimens with guns. A busy period is fall migration, when many rarities—that is, species that do not breed in the country—can be seen. The influx of bird watchers during migration season is in fact so high that the number of rarity records reported from other parts of Germany drops during this time. Field ornithologists dub the phenomenon the Heligoland effect. So many records are collected at Heligoland that the island established its own branch of the German Rarities Commission, the Heligoland Avifaunistic Commission (Helgoländer Avifaunistische Kommission). The commission establishes what counts as a legitimate ornithological sight record and what does not. Watching birds is not about the experience of nature as such. What makes it so interesting is that these field-ornithological observations, which collectors tick off their lists, constitute game scores that they can compare to records collected by others.

Conservation organizations use this game to turn people into bird watchers. The NABU, for instance, organizes field outings at Heligoland as part of the World Birdwatch event, organized annually by BirdLife International. The aim of the event is to attract people to the game of bird watching, with the expectation that those who become bird watchers will likely join bird conservation organizations. These organizations thus do not try to gain new members by teaching people abstract moral lessons about the environment but by engaging people in practices that will produce emotional attachments to birds.

The attachment to birds produced in this way derives from their status as collectibles in the game of bird watching. Collecting as a game is different from the simple amassing of objects. In a collection, objects are valued according to diversity and rarity. All collections have in common that they aim for a full or complete set of collectibles. Within this full set special emphasis is put on those items that are difficult to obtain. Bird collectors such as Gätke did accordingly try to obtain as many different species as possible and displayed particular pride in those that were rare.

Differences in practices make it possible to answer the second question, what accounts for the differences in value attributed to birds in the two countries? When birds are not part of a collecting game, their value usually derives from other practices. At the time when Gätke was collecting specimens for his museum, the local population at Heligoland used birds largely as food. Rarity did not make a species exempt from use. Among the birds used as food by the locals was the only colony of common guillemots breeding in the country. While this species was treated with much care to ensure sustainable use, residents initially harvested migrating birds free from any restriction. No regulation limited how many birds one could shoot, trap, or lime for the simple reason that local practices did not affect the availability of this food supply. No special emphasis was put on rare species until Gätke and other bird collectors began to offer high prices for specimens in their role as collectibles.

The initial focus on the economic utility of birds as food was not peculiar to the local population at Heligoland. It was widespread throughout the country and much of continental Europe at the time. In turn-of-the-century Germany birds were part of an economic set of practices and institutions in the world of work (as opposed to play). Ornithological handbooks frequently reported on the practical or economic utility of birds, including their taste and the dishes they were commonly used for. Not diversity and rarity but utility and abundance mattered most, and those species that were particularly suitable as food were accordingly the most cherished. These two forms of valuation of birds—that is, diversity and rarity in the world of play, and utility and abundance in the world of work—persisted over time and account for major differences in bird conservation between Britain and Germany.

Despite this major difference in the form of valuation of birds, both Gätke and the local population at Heligoland contributed to the destruction and decline of birdlife. Whether collected or utilized, birds had first of all to be captured and killed. This was to change over time: the very same people who initially killed birds and contributed to their extinction were also the first to protect them. This seeming contradiction becomes understandable if one looks at the motivation for conservation not as something that springs from internalized moral ideals or abstract ethical principles but as something that is embedded in concrete practices and their larger institutional settings.

This insight makes it possible to answer the third question, how to explain the timing of the emergence of organized bird conservation and its transformation over time. The way bird conservation develops over time differs depending on the peculiarities of the practices and institutions in which it is embedded. Bird conservation in Germany developed in the context of economic practices and institutions in agriculture and forestry. Habitats for birds decreased in the wake of the large-scale industrial rationalization of both agriculture and forestry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With the decline of suitable habitats came the decline in species abundance, which in turn made the negative side effects of a diminished birdlife apparent: it became increasingly recognized that songbirds played a vital role in the destruction of so-called insect pests. The transformation of agriculture and forestry did in consequence also transform the economic status of birds: they were initially valued as units of consumption (i.e., as food), and subsequently as units of production (i.e., as pest control).

Organized bird conservation as promoted by the NABU grew out of this concern for birds as units of production. Practical bird conservation aimed for the discovery of ever more effective ways to increase the number of useful birds through the mass production and distribution of nest boxes and bird feeders. The organization heralded these tools as a solution to the loss of natural habitats. Bird conservation in Germany was thus part of an economic arrangement of practices and institutions. Nature was a factory that produced food, and the countryside was accordingly not treated as a playground, as in those instances in which the practice of play dominated, but as a shop floor. Birds were accordingly used as tools, not as toys.

Economic ornithology was almost completely absent in turn-of-the-century Britain. In this country, it was a transformation of the practice of collecting birds in the field that had the most decisive impact. The valuation of rare birds as collector’s items displayed in private showcases and public museums gradually gave way to the concern for the conservation of bird species living in nature. The transformation was brought about by changes in technology, most importantly improvements in cameras and binoculars, that made it for the first time possible to collect reliable sight records and take pictures of moving objects such as birds. Collectors who went into the field with guns tried to get a hold of bird bodies, while collectors who now used binoculars and cameras were interested in collecting records of living birds. The mass production of improved binoculars and cameras toward the end of the nineteenth century thus literally made the difference between life and death for birdlife. The focus of this collecting practice remained on diversity and rarity. The RSPB established nature reserves as spaces akin to outdoor natural-history museums, selecting islands and coastal areas that, like the German island of Heligoland, displayed a particularly large diversity of species.

It is against this background that one should evaluate the developments that took place in the time from the 1960s to 1980s, the period frequently credited with the emergence of environmental activism. Viewed from a long-term perspective, the events during this time were actually nonevents. All major components of contemporary environmentalism were already fully institutionalized by the 1930s. The available membership numbers of the major organizations, albeit with certain gaps and variations in the data, illustrate the continuity of the development (see also appendix 1).

Figure 0.1 Membership RSPB and NABU, 1889–2010.

There are three noteworthy things about the membership graphs. First, they indicate the continuity of the two organizations over time. Second, they show a sharp rise in membership in the time from the 1960s to 1980s. Finally, one can see that while the RSPB has by far more members than the NABU in the second half of the twentieth century, the relation was the exact opposite for most of the first half of the century. These three aspects indicate that there is truth to the story that major changes took place in the second half of the twentieth century, yet these changes took place within an organizational framework that had already been established many decades before. All too often nature conservation of the past is compared with environmentalism of the present. Yet nature conservation is not a thing of the past—the organizations founded in the late nineteenth century have their high time at the present. Environmental organizations joined the picture, but they did not replace what had already been established. The membership numbers of nature conservation organizations rose throughout the same period in which new environmental organizations were created, such as Friends of the Earth International in 1971 and Greenpeace International in 1979.

In Britain this rise in membership stands out for being particularly steep, and there is the accompanying danger of reading this finality into the past—that is, of ignoring the fact that when both organizations were still relatively small the NABU was for a considerable period of time more successful than the RSPB. There was accordingly nothing in the first half of the twentieth century that indicated that the RSPB, rather than the NABU, would turn out to be the more successful organization in the long run.

The different degrees of success of these two organizations over time is not accidental but a central element of the development analyzed in this study. The difference is explained by the fact that bird conservation in Germany and bird conservation in Britain were not about the same thing. The valuation of wild birds was embedded in different practices and institutions and flourished or declined in conjunction with these practices and institutions. This also holds true if one compares bird and nature conservation to environmentalism. The various concerns for nature and the environment are worlds apart if viewed from the point of view of the practices and institutions in which they are embedded. There are no nature conservation parties to match Green political parties just as there are no pollution watchers that would give environmentalism a base in amateur science comparable to the role played by bird watching in conservation. Looking at this development from the point of view of the constitutive practices and institutions thus highlights the futility of any effort to attribute this development to a generalized set of environmental values.

What truly changed from the 1960s through the 1980s was not a set of abstract values or attitudes toward nature and the environment held by the population at large but the number of people who watched birds. The RSPB was not more successful during this period than the NABU because it was more progressive. The reason that the RSPB’s membership exploded while the NABU’s membership stayed stagnant and even declined was not a change in organizational direction but the fact that bird watching became increasingly popular. Economic ornithology (the use of birds for pest control), on the other hand, lost importance after World War II due to the large-scale use of pesticides such as DDT in agriculture, which, in addition, produced problems for birdlife that had not existed before. In response, the German organization began to copy the by then far more successful British example. Throughout this period bird conservation in Germany moved from the world of work to the world of play.

European environmental policies are an additional reason why bird conservation in the two countries looks more similar at present than in the past. The RSPB and other national bird-conservation organizations, the NABU included, were crucial in creating the EU Birds Directive in 1979, one of the most effective transnational environmental policies ever enacted. In 2010, 11.4 percent of the total land of the European Union was protected under this legislation, including about half of Heligoland. The international umbrella organization BirdLife International grew out of the almost dormant International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP; initially founded in 1922) to provide the field-ornithological data needed for the implementation of the Birds Directive. The fact that nature conservation policies in most European countries look so similar at present does not reflect a common underlying social structure or an identical set of overarching cultural values; it is a consequence of the widening of the arena in which the peculiarities of a British concern for birds play out. The British model turned into the European model. By analyzing this development with a pragmatist theory of valuation, I am able to show that these changes were possible not because of any high-flying cultural values but for the very mundane reason that birds are good to play with.

Chapter Outline

The analysis of this development in the chapters to follow proceeds in a chronological order, beginning with the late eighteenth century and ending with the early twenty-first. The chapters are not neatly divided into decades or periods. There is a substantial amount of temporal overlap between chapters. In accordance with the argument that the development under investigation is a gradual transformation that unfolds along multiple dimensions of practices and institutions, the story cannot be divided into sharply demarcated time periods. While one element in