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the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession, for they added big chunks to our totality. But I remember balking, and publicly challenging the long-suffering Ms. Stack, at the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Why did I have to know about a sliver of southern Arizona and New Mexico?
    Now I am finally hoist on my own petard (blown up by my own noxious charge according to the etymologies). After a lifetime of complete nonimpact by the Gadsden Purchase, I have become unwittingly embroiled in a controversy about a tiny bit of territory within this smallest of American growing points. A little bit of a little bit—so much for effects of scale and the penalties of blithe ignorance.
    The case is a classic example of a genre (environmentalists vs. developers) made familiar in recent struggles to save endangered populations—the snail darter of a few years back, the northern spotted owl vs. timber interests. The University of Arizona, with the backing of an international consortium of astronomers, wishes to build a complex of telescopes atop Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona (part of the Gadsden Purchase). But the old-growth spruce-fir habitat on the mountaintop provides the central range for Tamiasciurus hudsonicus grahamensis , the Mount Graham Red Squirrel—a distinctive subspecies that lives nowhere else, and that forms the southernmost population of the entire species. The population has already been reduced to some one hundred survivors, and destruction of 125 acres of spruce-fir growth (to build the telescopes) within the 700 or so remaining acres of best habitat might well administer a coup de grâce to this fragile population.
    I cannot state an expert opinion on details of this controversy (I have already confessed my ignorance about everything involving the Gadsden Purchase and its legacy). Many questions need to be answered. Is the population already too small to survive in any case? If not, could the population, with proper management, coexist with the telescopes in the remaining habitat?
    I do not think that, practically or morally, we can defend a policy of saving every distinctive local population of organisms. I can cite a good rationale for the preservation of species, for each species is a unique and separate natural object that, once lost, can never be reconstituted. But subspecies are distinctive local populations of species with broader geographical ranges. Subspecies are dynamic, interbreedable, and constantly changing; what then are we saving by declaring them all inviolate? Thus, I confess that I do not agree with all arguments advanced by defenders of the Mount Graham Red Squirrel. One leaflet, for example, argues: “The population has been recently shown to have a fixed, homozygous allele which is unique in Western North America.” Sorry folks. I will stoutly defend species, but we cannot ask for the preservation of every distinctive gene, unless we find a way to abolish death itself (for many organisms carry unique mutations).
    No, I think that for local populations of species with broader ranges, the brief for preservation must be made on a case by case basis, not on a general principle of preservation (lest the environmental movement ultimately lose popular support for trying to freeze a dynamic evolutionary world in statu quo). On this proper basis of individual merit, I am entirely persuaded that the Mount Graham Red Squirrel should be protected, for two reasons.
    First, the squirrel itself: The Mount Graham Red is an unusually interesting local population within an important species. It is isolated from all other populations and forms the southernmost extreme of the species’s range. Such peripheral populations, living in marginal habitats, are of special interest to students of evolution.
    Second, the habitat: Environmentalists continually face the political reality that support and funding can be won for soft, cuddly, and “attractive” animals, but not for slimy, grubby, and ugly creatures (of