Twilight of the Panther: Biology, Bureaucracy and Failure in an Endangered Species Program

Rating:
Summary: an important resource...
Review: Ken Alvarez has written a masterful account of the Florida Panther Recovery program. His exhaustive research, his elegant prose, his penetrating insights make this book a significant contribution to endangered species literature and an indispensable resource for those of us working in panther recovery today. Alvarez has recorded for posterity a blow by blow description of how a recovery effort with massive public support and funding was stalled by agency inertia and infighting and by the relentless development pressure of late twentieth century Florida --the real world counterpart of Carl Hiaasen novels. He chronicles the victories and defeats and tackles the hard questions of how endangered species recovery programs can be made more effective.

His insights into agency bureaucracies that have little interest in endangered species and little knowledge of small population management are as relevant today as when they were written:

"And so it goes...the actors come and go; decisions are reversed, often without explanation; no one is in charge; the different agencies and factions pursue their separate objectives; motives are sometimes discernible and sometimes not; the recovery program is a case of strategic aversion and operational chaos, organized only to the extent that it can avoid any action deemed undesirable by its component factions, as they project an image of industry and purpose while consuming a perennial flow of revenue." Twilight of the Panther, p.171.

Rating:
Summary: an important resource...
Review: Ken Alvarez has written a masterful account of the Florida Panther Recovery program. His exhaustive research, his elegant prose, his penetrating insights make this book a significant contribution to endangered species literature and an indispensable resource for those of us working in panther recovery today. Alvarez has recorded for posterity a blow by blow description of how a recovery effort with massive public support and funding was stalled by agency inertia and infighting and by the relentless development pressure of late twentieth century Florida --the real world counterpart of Carl Hiaasen novels. He chronicles the victories and defeats and tackles the hard questions of how endangered species recovery programs can be made more effective.

His insights into agency bureaucracies that have little interest in endangered species and little knowledge of small population management are as relevant today as when they written:

"And so it goes...the actors come and go; decisions are reversed, often without explanation; no one is in charge; the different agencies and factions pursue their separate objectives; motives are sometimes discernible and sometimes not; the recovery program is a case of strategic aversion and operational chaos, organized only to the extent that it can avoid any action deemed undesirable by its component factions, as they project an image of industry and purpose while consuming a perennial flow of revenue." Twilight of the Panther, p.171.