Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

There had also been lots of industrial development around the dunes in the years after World War II, though, according to Powell, the last straw for Harry Lange’s generation would be the construction of the gypsum plant in 1956. Not only did it sprout up in the middle of the habitat, splitting the dunes in half, but it also cast white dust over the place. It felt—in a very visceral way—like an atrocity. It was all a matter of age and perspective, of course—all part of the same cycle of disillusionment that had been going on in San Francisco. The Lepidopterists’ Society trip was the first time Jerry Powell had ever been to the dunes, and he and the other students were just as excited by the place as Harry Lange and his contemporaries had been twenty years earlier. Just as Cottle loved the city that Behr wrote off, and Lange loved the city that Cottle wrote off, Powell now loved the dunes that Lange’s generation wrote off. Powell didn’t see a landscape sapped of life. He saw a “terrific variety” of insects. And he was sufficiently captivated to study the ecosystem on and off for decades as a professor at Berkeley.