Over the years, readers have asked us to highlight Phil Pister, a retired California Department of Fish and Game biologist who has been instrumental in protecting game and nongame fish species in the eastern Sierra Nevada and the arid lands east and south. Lisa Cutting, an ardent fly fisher who is also the Eastern Sierra Policy Director for the Mono Lake Committee (she was profiled in this column in our January/February 2017 issue), knows Phil’s work and volunteered to conduct the interview.
Phil Pister retired in February 1990 following 38 years as a fisheries biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game. He studied wildlife conservation and zoology under A. Starker Leopold at the University of California, Berkeley, and has spent virtually his entire career supervising aquatic management and research in an area encompassing approximately a thousand waters of the eastern Sierra and desert regions of California, ranging from the 14,000-foot crest of the Sierra Nevada to the floor of Death Valley below sea level. He founded and serves as executive secretary of the Desert Fishes Council and is involved in desert ecosystem preservation throughout the American Southwest and adjoining areas of Mexico. He holds special interests in the fields of conservation biology and environmental ethics and has served on the board of governors of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and the Society for Conservation Biology. He also serves on the President’s Advisory Committee of the University of California’s system-wide White Mountain Research Station. He conducts environmental ethics workshops at the National Conservation Training Center (US Fish and Wildlife Service) in West Virginia, has lectured at 81 universities in North America and the United Kingdom, and has authored more than 80 published papers and book chapters.
I first met Phil in August 1999 at the Crooked Creek Station, part of the White Mountain Research Center just east of Bishop, California. We were both attending the first week-long UC Summer Symposium in Conservation Biology — I as a new UC Davis graduate student and Phil as a conservation biology presenter. I remember Phil’s presentation to this day. It grabbed me hard and turned my life solidly toward the policy work that I have been doing for almost twenty years.
Phil has influenced many people throughout his lifetime — colleagues, academics, agency staff, and decision makers. His principles are rock strong, his ethics unwavering, and his dedication to a variety of finned species in the eastern Sierra complete.
Every now and then I’ll bump into Phil at some event in Bishop or have some reason to contact him, and it always feels as though we pick up right where we left off, just like that time up at Crooked Creek so long ago now, talking and philosophizing about conservation and protection and how to make it all work. That small dose of Phil will then carry me through the next challenging issue — inspiring me to always do my best and make a difference.
Lisa: Phil, you have traveled a fascinating and rewarding life journey. Let’s start with your basic background.
Phil: I was a kind of normal kid with great parents. I was born in 1929 and grew up during the Great Depression prior to World War II. My parents were both high school teachers in Stockton, California, who continually emphasized the need for higher education. This led me to Berkeley following high school and the many marvelous doors that opened for me there. Dad was a UCSB grad, and Mom was in Berkeley’s Class of 1914. They created a great atmosphere, enhanced by my brother Karl, who, following his time at Berkeley went on for a PhD at the University of Illinois. He later became dean of the College of Engineering at Berkeley, then chancellor at UC Santa Cruz. This set a good example for me to do grad work at Berkeley in the new field of wildlife conservation led by A. Starker Leopold, a new Berkeley professor and son of Aldo Leopold, who wrote A Sand County Almanac. My high school biology teacher, Harry J. Snook, had fired my interest in wild things.
Each year, our family would spend the entire summer in Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows. Karl and I began backpacking there and pretty much traversed the Sierra. This launched me into my career of working with wild things in wild habitats. I learned early on the fragility of these wild things. This showed up later in working with endangered species.
When we camped in Tuolumne Meadows in the 1930s, we had to come to Lee Vining to buy food and gasoline. They were building and improving the road at that time. It was really scary. I recall once when driving back to Tuolumne Meadows and going uphill, Dad was driving the old Buick and I was in tears lying on the floor of the car. My brother was reading a funnybook, Dad was tight lipped, driving hunched over the wheel, and Mom was reading the Bible.
Lisa: Were you interested in angling when you were a child, and did this interest help lead you into your career with the CDFG?
Phil: Since early childhood I have had an interest in fishing and would wait eagerly for Dad to show up after visiting places such as Helen Lake, Gaylor Lakes, even Elizabeth Lake — all in the Tuolumne Meadows area of Yosemite. However, it was not until later, when I was perhaps 11 or 12 years old, that I began doing much angling by myself. I have never been what people might call a devoted or dedicated angler. Despite that, I am not a total loss in that respect. I have made a couple of fly rods from glass blanks, and I like to tie my own flies. I mostly built my own rods to meet my needs as a backpacker: shorter and lighter.
Lisa: Can you describe your time with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (then the Department of Fish and Game) and what projects and responsibilities you had?
Phil: I started with the California Department of Fish and Game out of Berkeley’s grad school. My first work was routine, checking anglers and their catches. This soon lost its appeal, and I took a transfer to study salmon and steelhead on California’s North Coast (Eel River). But I longed for the mountains and desert and took a transfer back to Bishop in 1957, where I have now lived and worked for more than sixty years. The essence of my job was to assure the biological integrity of about a thousand lakes and streams from the Nevada border to the north and extending southward to the Kern Plateau south of Mount Whitney. This assignment included aquatic species ranging from desert pupfish to golden trout.
Lisa: No interview would be complete without an opportunity for you to recount the famous “Species in a Bucket” story.
Phil: Pupfish, named for their playful behavior, are not game fish. You can’t catch a pupfish without a dip net. A real whopper comes in at fewer than three inches long. They are some of the last living inhabitants of the lakes that covered the Great Basin during the Pleistocene era. They can survive in water as hot as 113 degrees Fahrenheit and in pools up to three times as salty as the ocean. Certain species have been around for forty-four thousand years or more.
Prior to water diversions by Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the fish swam freely in Owens Valley marshes and wetlands. By 1948, Owens pupfish (Cyprinodon radiosus) were believed to be extinct. In 1964, I took Robert Rush Miller and Carl Hubbs out to Fish Slough outside of Bishop to see if by chance they were still there. I remember vividly Dr. Hubbs yelling, “Bob, they’re still here. We’ve still got them.” That day changed my life forever.
Flash forward to 1969, when late one afternoon in August, a grad student rushed into my office. “Phil, if we don’t get out to Fish Slough immediately, we’re going to lose the species.” We grabbed buckets, dip nets, and aerators and raced out there. We relocated the pupfish to a place that we thought was safe and secure. But being a worrier, I decided to make one more check on the pupfish. Good thing I did. The fish were stressed in their new location, and the water flow wasn’t sufficient. It was clear they needed to be moved again. I ran to my truck to get the buckets and dip net. I netted all the surviving fish into the buckets and lugged them to a better location. It was dark, and I was walking over uneven terrain fraught with obstacles like gopher holes and strands of barbed wire. I was scared to death. In my hands was the existence of an entire species. If I drop these things, they’re gone. There was no backup plan at the time. It was the only population we had.
That night was a humbling experience for me. The principles of biogeography and evolution that I had learned at Berkeley under Starker Leopold taught me why the pupfish was here; it took the events of that night at Fish Slough to teach me why I was here.
Lisa: When did you first realize your strong, principled conservation ethic?
Phil: I began to realize my ethical obligations in the mid-1960s when I realized that most of our current conservation problems bear an ethical rationale, a concept that took about a decade for my department to accept. Many of my colleagues have a hard time accepting this, but they are gradually coming around. When I would work on pupfish, I was often asked, “Why?” “What good are they?” My favorite response was, “What good are you?” At least that gets them thinking. This is a reasonable question.
Lisa: How has that ethic shaped your life in ways not related to work?
Phil: Ethics is essentially an analysis of what is right and wrong. Most people intuitively know the difference. The remainder are in jail.
Lisa: What is your first memory of this notion of right and wrong?
Phil: I was in the eighth grade in Stockton when World War II started. There were three of us who kind of hung together during recesses and lunch time. We got to know each other real well. In addition to myself, there were Joe Bacigalupi from a nearby farming family and Kiyoko Kamidoi, a Japanese girl whose family raised strawberries near the small town of Lodi. Kiyoko was a real doll, and her mother would often dress her in a silk kimono. We all fell in love with Kiyoko.
These were frightening times, right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and in political response to these fears, President Franklin Roosevelt invoked a program requiring all Japanese residing on the West Coast to be moved inland. Kiyoko came to school one morning devastated and in tears. “Kiyoko honey, what is the trouble?” “We have to move.” “Why?” “We do not understand why.” People were scared, and perhaps justifiably. Kiyoko and her family were relocated to Arkansas. President Roosevelt’s directive included all Japanese, among them some of our best citizens: doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, teachers, and so on. Financially, they lost nearly everything.
Manzanar, about an hour’s drive south of Bishop, is one of these relocation camps. It is now under National Park Service administration as a National Historic Site. The Park Service maintains a roster of all Japanese who were relocated during this tragic time. When Kiyoko was relocated to Arkansas, this was the last that I heard of her. She has likely passed away. I, as one of her peers, am now nearly 90 years old. This episode has stuck with me ever since elementary school. I will never forget it. A good lesson in applied ethics.
Lisa: In this era of climate change and political dismantling of environmental protections, what advice or recommendations do you have for the California Fly Fisher readership?
Phil: Recommendations for fly fishers concerning matters of the environment: push hard to elect politicians who are objective in their environmental views and who place truth above political considerations. Adherence to the truth is always preferable to political considerations, recognizing that “Nature bats last.”
Lisa: On a lighter note and given your knowledge of trout in the southern Sierra, what advice would you give to anglers who might be interested in fly fishing there?
Phil: There are many special places on the east side that are reliable places for fly fishers to visit: Hot Creek, the East Walker River, the upper Owens River, and more. About any water is reliable as dusk approaches. Another one that stands out is Crowley Lake, especially the north shore in the evening from a float tube.
Lisa: Can you talk a little bit more about your time at Cal, especially how Starker Leopold influenced you?
Phil: My experiences as a Cal Berkeley student were enormously important in the shaping of my career and views of environmental matters. Starker Leopold provided a wonderful example to follow. He and his father, Aldo, provided the basis for my later life. Perhaps the best bit of advice I ever received is found in A Sand County Almanac where Aldo advised us that “non-conformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.” Nonconformity is basic to evolution.
Lisa: In addition to the Owens pupfish, you have worked to protect other at-risk species, including trout in Mexico, golden trout, and Colorado cutthroats by way of Williamson Lakes. Can you briefly describe those efforts?
Phil: Although I am known primarily as a guy who works on conservation of desert fishes and life forms, this is only part of the story. My job took me to the mountains of Mexico, where I worked with Mexican colleagues in studying their native fishes, primarily the San Pedro Martir trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss nelson), first studied by naturalist E. W. Nelson over one hundred years ago. The golden trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss aguabonita) is the California state fish, having evolved in streams of the upper Kern River since its geographical isolation from steelhead rainbow trout in late Pleistocene times. It is a beautiful creature, deserving of the attention given it by those of us entrusted with its care.
Native populations of golden trout began to be threatened by hybridization with rainbow trout and by habitat destruction from unwise cattle grazing. Introduced beavers added to the habitat destruction by building dams that frequently tended to destroy their gravel spawning beds. I spent most of my career working to save the golden trout. This has required a lot of hard work, more than sixty years of it. We now appear to be on top of the problem, but eternal vigilance is the price of preservation, and the CDFW will always need to give golden trout a lot of attention.
In 1932, California and Colorado exchanged eggs of their native trout, golden trout in California and Colorado cutthroats (Oncorhynchus clarki) in Colorado. The Colorado fish were stocked in barren lakes in California’s Williamson Creek basin. Mount Williamson, in the southern Sierra, is California’s second-highest peak at 14,375 feet. The three lowest lakes were planted with Colorado cutthroat, and they have done well. In more recent years, Colorado’s native fish (the cutthroat) were found to have been hybridized somehow, leaving the only pure ones in California. In 1987, we hiked into the Williamson lakes and helicoptered several hundred adult fish to Bishop, where they were loaded into the CDFG Beechcraft Kingaire and flown into the Ptarmigan Creek drainage in Rocky Mountain National Park. Colorado now has its native trout back. This was a big project, requiring the cooperation and approval of California, Colorado, Sequoia National Park, Inyo National Forest, and various local agencies.
Lisa: What other successes during your career come to mind?
Phil: The Inyo National Forest and adjoining regions of Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service lands (Death Valley National Park) form one of the nation’s most heavily used recreation areas. This is especially evident at night. From my home in southeast Bishop I can look south and get a good view up and down US 395. All night long during the recreation season, I can see nothing but headlights and taillights coming from and going to Southern California.
About thirty years ago, during the Reagan and Carter administrations, Congress passed the Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA), which allowed entrepreneurial interests to file on our extremely valuable recreational and angling streams to obtain water rights and permission to construct small hydroelectric projects on our streams. There are approximately 45 eastern Sierra streams, from Olancha Creek on the south to the Walker River on the north, that support huge recreation and angling use. In effect, these projects would dry the stream up in affected areas. At one time, we faced more than one hundred applications to build projects on these streams.
We fought this thing viciously, especially where the projects would dry these streams up. After several years, we succeeded in winning these battles. Only one permit was issued, this one on a small stream flowing westward off the White Mountains north of Bishop. This was a retrofit of an existing project, which was the main intent of Congress to allow when they passed the PURPA law.
Lisa: What was the most pivotal point in your career with the CDFG?
Phil: I have been fortunate to live and work out of Bishop, which has turned into the Mecca of rock climbers, boulderers, hikers of all types and stripes, campers, and tourists from all over the world. Recently, while grocery shopping, at the bread counter I heard six different languages being spoken. There are no deserts in Europe or in much of the Orient. People fly to Las Vegas, where they climb into tour buses, drive to Death Valley (the temperature last week hit 130 degrees), then to Yosemite and finally to San Francisco, where they fly back home. The eastern Sierra is indeed a remarkable place to live, if you and your family do not need big-box stores to survive. The nearest Costco stores are in Lancaster and Carson City. About halfway into my career, my boss retired, and the big boss asked me to drive to the Long Beach office, where he would formally offer me my boss’s former job. I did so, he offered me the job, and I walked downstairs to my car in the state garage.
It was raining in LA, and as I drove northward on Interstate 5, there was nothing ahead of me but taillights and headlights all the way home. It is about a three-hundred-mile drive from our Long Beach office to Bishop, and I had traffic much of the way.
That same early September storm had brought a light snow to the Owens Valley, and the next morning, it was clear, and the cottonwoods were just gorgeous. I had photographed both scenes — the traffic and the cottonwoods — (I always carry my Nikon), and I made prints from them. I addressed an envelope to the big boss and enclosed two photos without explanation or any narrative. His response to me was equally cryptic: “Wise bastard.” He told me later that he fully understood my decision.
Lisa: In reviewing the UC Berkeley oral history interview conducted in 2007 and
2008, Edwin Philip Pister, Preserving Native Fishes and Their Ecosystems: A Pilgrim’s Progress, 1950s–Present, I was struck by the number of times you were reprimanded by superiors for your actions. It appears as though this is where the “rubber met the road” for you — the notion of Leopold’s nonconformity, your strong ethical obligations, and your dedication to species conservation. How did you repeatedly navigate between the competing demands of the CDFG and your personal values?
Phil: In many instances, I simply went underground, driving my own car and paying my own way to avoid being told what I couldn’t do. This had to be carefully done, especially in the Devils Hole case. Our very conservative director then was Ray Arnett, a disciple of Reagan. I could just imagine his reaction, having one of his California employees testifying during Supreme Court proceedings on a matter that was largely in the state of Nevada.
Early on, having served as chairman of Desert Fishes Council for several years, it came time to change. The guy who would follow me was Dale Lockard from the Nevada Division of Wildlife, a great guy.
The states were scared to death to have the US Fish and Wildlife Service get involved in state affairs and were very slow breaking with tradition. I attended a meeting of the American Fisheries Society (AFS) in Portland, Oregon. Dale was on vacation. California DFG was reluctant to allow me to attend, so I went on my own time and at my own expense. When I walked into the hotel, I was met by our deputy director. His first comment was: I hope you aren’t going to talk to us about pupfish. This is why I had been asked by AFS leadership to attend. I gave my talk.
The keynote speaker was Nat Reed, a highly respected wildlife guy from Florida who was high up in the US Fish and Wildlife Service. His talk could not have been better. He told the state directors: “Please take care of all your fish and wildlife resources. If you do not, the feds will have no alternative but to do this for you.” Great news! When I got home, I wrote him a letter thanking him for having such a broad approach to his view on fish and wildlife matters.
Dale was still on vacation, but I sent him a copy of my letter to keep him apprised of what I had been doing. Apparently the Nevada Division of Wildlife has a policy where all mail is opened by secretaries and distributed to the addressees. My letter ended up on the desk of Frank Grove, their director. He immediately called Arnett in Sacramento and accused me of “colluding with the enemy.”
A few days later, I received a phone call from Sacramento asking if I was going to be in the Bishop office later in the week. “There is something we need to talk to you about.” They called me to their room at the Vagabond Motel. I walked in, and the scene was not much different from a grade B movie, complete with a single straight chair positioned under a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The deputy director slid a copy of my letter across the table and asked me what I knew about the letter. “I wrote it!” “We want you to know that this has been very embarrassing for us.” I responded: “Please tell me if you found any inaccuracies.” This did them in. I feared that they might disallow me from doing my work on pup:fsh, but they did not. They just said, “Be careful what you do in the future.”
Jeez! The job was hard enough to do under the best of circumstances. I found that there is a great deal of strength one gains if he or she knows that he or she is right. Their view of all this was political; mine was biological.
Lisa, what I just related was perhaps the most difficult that I had to contend with. There were many other times of lesser contention. I was very fortunate to have an understanding boss. He caused me absolutely no trouble and often helped me at Fish Slough. My big boss in Sacramento phoned my lesser boss in Long Beach, demanding that I stop working on these fish, which the anglers (and license buyers) could not use. Great response from Long Beach boss: “What Phil does on his own time and expense is neither my business nor yours.”
In summary, my independence was a result of being at the tip of an isosceles triangle, and being three hundred miles from both Sacramento and Long Beach.
Lisa: Oh, and there is a tradition for the interview. Everyone has to answer the following question at the end of the interview. If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be and why?
Phil: I think I would choose a five-thousand-plus-year-old bristlecone. Lacking this, I would choose an old cottonwood growing along the Owens River, so that people might admire me in the fall and tell me how beautiful I am! Although this should be readily apparent.
