Rewilding America

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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18747

 

Rewilding America

 

By Chip Ward, tomdispatch.com

May 20, 2004

 

Imagine America in 2104. From the air, what you see is a largely unbroken,

green, and fluid realm with graceful and permeable natural boundaries – all

those geometric grids we were so used to faded away when we tapped out too many

aquifers before we switched over to sustainable farming. There are still dams,

but only a few. Water is stored the way nature stores it in regenerated

wetlands, recharged aquifers, and along recovered flood plains that are also

refuges for wildlife. The restored river valleys also serve as corridors for

cougars, wolves, and bears moving between huge habitat reserves that are spread

from one end of the continent to the other. In the Northwest, salmon teem in

pristine streams that also provide clean drinking water for nearby cities. On

Midwestern plains on a great, restored, natural " commons, " the buffalo roam

again. Across a mostly rural continent, the howling of wolves can sometimes be

heard at night.

 

 

 

Lawns, so popular in the water-wasting days of the twentieth century are rare,

but native plants thrive everywhere, inside buildings and out. Schools have

shaded playgrounds and gardens. Rainwater and storm runoff are harvested to make

it happen.

 

 

 

An urban renaissance went hand-in-hand with the creation of a continental

network of nature reserves. Cities eventually became more attractive than

sprawling suburbs because they offered so many parks, sports fields, libraries,

galleries, restaurants, nightclubs, and museums. After several decades of

explosive growth, sprawl stopped, and then receded, as long and frustrating

commutes, dead lawns, and the social isolation of the burbs lost out in

competition with the easy transportation and diverse cultural amenities of

cities. There are still cars and sometimes even traffic, but clean and reliable

public transportation is generally the preferred method of travel.

 

 

 

Sadly, the urban renaissance was fueled by natural disturbances. Persistent

wildfires caused by global warming and decades of unnatural fire suppression

eventually chased people down from the hills, and the inhabitants of floodplains

were driven off, too, when hundred-year floods became common. Slowly, that old

checkerboard sprawl has been converted back to small farms (the term " organic "

is now assumed) to meet a growing demand from local farmers' markets and from

the popular " slow food " trend. The disruptions of global trade, thanks to

terrorism and pandemics earlier in the last century, opened up a burgeoning

market for more reliable regional food.

 

 

 

On vacation, city dwellers still love to head out to the mega-reserves that run

like a necklace of huge national parks across the entire continent. Created to

conserve vital biodiversity – especially after we understood that life in all

its forms provided us with medicines, foods, and new kinds of building and

manufacturing materials, plus endless models for sustainable production and

consumption – the mega-reserves became as mega-popular as they were

mega-necessary. People go to the reserves to hike, bike, kayak, windsurf, vision

quest, or just relax. Sunbathing, of course, still remains too dangerous as the

ozone layer has yet to completely heal and, in any case, most beaches

disappeared when the melting glaciers inundated them. But people love to sit

under umbrellas and watch wildlife – deer and elk, for instance, and the bears

and the wolves that pursue them – pass under or over the old highways along

specially constructed and landscaped corridors designed to make their passage

from one mega-reserve to the next possible. Almost anyone can tell you when

they saw their first wolf, whale, or condor.

 

 

 

Between the cities and the chain of connected reserves, are buffer zones of

family farms, wind farms, solar farms, retreats, spas, and green belts that are

also outdoor recreational hotspots. After the obesity epidemic led to a

mid-century diabetes die-off and we realized that excessive television and

Internet surfing caused early senility and paranoia, more people headed for the

outdoors. Now that carbon emissions have been cut drastically and the weather is

moderating, the land between city and reserve is being redesigned to accommodate

both people and critters in ways that can be sustained.

 

 

 

This is the world we got when we chose, incrementally in a million fits and

starts, to " rewild " our continent because we finally realized that natural

biological systems which include us are invaluable and irreplaceable. The

ecological collapse of China early in mid-century was certainly instructive. We

got tired of dysfunction and trauma and we could see it was only getting worse.

Global warming had displaced whole populations and caused war and chaos. New

pandemics were emerging. The first incidences of genetic pollution were a shock.

When denial was no longer possible and it became clear that Rapture was not an

option – that we would all be " left behind " – we simply decided there was a

better way; we didn't have to be impoverished, anxious survivors, desperate for

an advantage in a fraying world. As a culture, we finally grasped that

biodiversity was ultimately a better measure of health and well-being than

bell-and-whistle measures like GNP or corporate profit rates. So we

decided to put it all back together – to reconnect and restore our wounded

world until it was reanimated and resilient again. It took us almost a hundred

years to get started, but here in 2104 we're slowly but surely healing the land

– and ourselves as well. Life is better. Hope is widespread.

 

 

 

A Froggy Love-Tunnel World

 

 

 

Now, drop back to America in 2004 and we have a long way to go. Consider the

froggy love tunnel in Germany.

 

 

 

A local radio show in Salt Lake City where I live has a " stupid story " contest

every morning. Three tales of incredible foolishness are pulled from the back

pages of the news and conveyed by laughing DJs. Commuters caught in traffic jams

then pick up their cell phones and vote for the " stupidest story of the day. "

They choose, for example, among a kidnapper who writes his ransom note on the

back of a personal check, a woman who burns her house down to get rid of ghosts

in her bathtub, and a robber who turns himself in for the reward money. On one

recent morning, German bureaucrats were thrown into the mix for, " get this, " the

DJ said, building a tunnel under a highway so local frogs could get from the

woods to a lakeshore where they mate. The show's hosts had a blast imitating

German accents and yelling, " Froggy love tunnel! "

 

 

 

Nuts, huh? No. What's seen here as the perfect opportunity for ridicule is

actually a fine example of ecological enlightenment. The new scientific

discipline of conservation biology has vividly demonstrated that biologically

diverse ecosystems have a better chance of surviving our assaults on them, and

that biodiversity is being lost at alarming rates. The principal reason that

species die off is human hegemony – we are degrading and fragmenting their

habitat. Among other things, there are too many human-made barriers in the way

when animals need to migrate, or to regenerate a population decimated by natural

disturbances like fire or disease. Populations of species cut off from one

another suffer a lack of genetic variation that severely reduces their viability

over the long run. Creatures have always faced challenging natural barriers like

rivers and mountain ranges, but add a zillion interstates featuring diesel

trucks with flat raccoons on their bumpers and the balance is tipped.

 

 

 

A key, then, to conserving biodiverse life on earth is to make our human-built

world more " permeable " for creatures that hop, lope, and crawl. A froggy love

tunnel is a cheap means to save a species that may play a critical ecological

function we do not yet appreciate, or perhaps contain the key to a medicine we

have not discovered – better to play it safe and build that tunnel. Or maybe,

like me, you just like frogs and think the world would be lonely without their

rough music. In the West, we are already starting to provide landscaped bridges

and tunnels across highways for deer because the alternative – hitting them – is

dangerous and expensive. Removing barriers, then, is hardly a stupid story.

 

 

 

All the froggy love tunnels or deer overpasses in the world, however, won't

solve our most basic problems. Removing barriers is not enough. In the 1970s, an

obscure discipline called " island biogeography " discovered that islands were the

globe's extinction hotspots and that, generally speaking, island populations do

better the bigger the island is or the nearer it is to another island. The

larger the populations of a species that an island can support, or the easier

access is to other populations of the same species elsewhere, the better the

chances that a healthy population can rescue a depleted one and the more genetic

variation is available to draw on in times of stress. For North America, this

means we have to take a second look at our system of national parks and

designated wilderness areas. Cut off from each other, they function as " islands "

on the mainland and most are too small or too isolated to assure the survival of

many of the creatures they harbor over the long run. We

like to think we are conserving bears and moose so our grandkids can see them.

Whether their kids will be able to do the same, however, is in doubt.

 

 

 

A Country Raised by Wolves

 

 

 

Enter a wild idea – rewilding. In 1991, Michael Soule, a renowned professor of

biology at UC Santa Cruz and the midwife of the new multi-disciplinary science

of conservation biology, got together with Dave Foreman, the legendary activist

who founded Earth First! to shake up a lethargic conservation community, and the

Wildlands Project was born. Over the next decade, the Project translated

conservation biology's key concepts into land-use principles and designs.

Ecological criteria for deciding what lands are crucial to set aside – like

identifying " keystone " and " umbrella " species important to other species because

they are " highly interactive " – were explained in ways that made them useful to

local activists and advocates. Smaller numbers of big reserves, for example,

were deemed more ecologically advantageous than larger numbers of small ones.

Species in big, interconnected core reserves surrounded by buffered areas are

more viable than those in cores that bump up against cities

and suffer " edge effects " or those not linked to others. Add such empowering

new ideas to a technological revolution that included satellite positioning

devices and new mapping software that can show patterns of flora and fauna on

conventional topographic maps, and the academic concepts of conservation biology

got legs. Across the nation, its influence on land-use planning is now being

felt – from land-trust meetings to university classrooms where a new generation

of land-use managers is being trained.

 

 

 

Two things are becoming apparent. First, conservationists in the past have paid

too little attention to ecological criteria. All too often, our national parks

and wilderness areas were " conserved " for their appealing scenery or the

recreational opportunities they offered. We got a lot of rock and ice as a

result, but not much ecosystem integrity. We need to pay much more attention to

landscapes and species that do not look great on those brochures used to raise

money for environmental groups or to lure vacationers into " the wild, " but may

play important ecological roles. Second we need to think of preservation and

restoration on a much grander scale. Why? Because ecologically we are raised by

wolves.

 

 

 

The " top-down " view of predators developed by conservation biologists stands in

stark contrast to the old " bottom-up " model that said you could remove a big

predator like the wolf from the food chain with minimal results. Until recently,

being at the top of that food chain meant you were seen as expendable because

your role was considered superfluous. We knew, for instance, that wolves were

dependent on the relationships beneath them – eliminate forage and you got less

prey and less prey naturally meant fewer wolves. But it didn't work the other

way around (or so we thought). Eliminate wolves and the forage and grazing prey

would be largely unaffected.

 

 

 

The recent natural history of Yellowstone National Park, however, demonstrated

just how limited that old model was. After wolves were exterminated within the

park boundaries, Yellowstone filled with fat, lazy elk that hung out by streams

and ate the aspen and willow seedlings down to their nubs. With no aspen and

willow to eat, beavers disappeared and so stopped creating wetland habitats for

myriad other species. Stream banks eroded and native fish couldn't feed or breed

in silted waters. When the tall grasses were chewed away by the elk, birds and

small mammals lost nesting areas. They were also eaten up by smaller predators

like foxes and coyotes that had no wolves to fear or to limit their own

populations. Here was a vast and supposedly self-willed landscape that was

slowly unraveling, all because we took out an evolutionary player and assumed it

wouldn't be missed. We were wrong and so in the last ten years, wolves have been

successfully reintroduced into the parkscape.

 

 

 

The reintroduction of wolves to Western landscapes would have been unfathomable

to our grandfathers – as unimaginable as those scenes of a rewilded future

America are to us. Our complete misunderstanding of the role played by big

carnivores in healthy ecosystems is only one of many mistakes that, thanks to

conservation biology, now seem obvious to many of us.

 

 

 

To take an example, we built thousands of big dams across the globe, taming

almost every river on the planet. Now we know that dams are great fun for

someone with jet skis and are convenient for barges, but they destroy habitats

and compromise whole ecosystems downstream. So we struggle to undo the damage.

The same is true of wetlands: We spent a hundred years draining them without a

second thought and now find ourselves having to spend vast sums to restore

places like the Everglades. Conservation biologists are showing us the

importance of all sorts of species we thought were ecologically insignificant to

the integrity and health of the ecosystems that sustain our world. Hug that tree

for dear life.

 

 

 

At the conceptual heart of rewilding is the notion that nature may not only be

more complex and dynamic than we thought, but more complex and dynamic than we

can think. Rewilding, rooted in humility and patience, signals that the era of

hubris is over. We can dance with natural systems but not drive them. Once that

lesson is learned, the era of piecemeal conservation as we've known it since the

days of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt will be over too, and a new era of

wholesale restoration and reconnection will begin. Ecological restoration will

not only save us, it will redefine us in ways we can hardly imagine today.

 

 

 

Sound like a pipedream or froggy love-tunnel madness? Look around. People across

the nation are restoring habitats, removing dams, setting aside land, and

planning to link reserves together. In the Southwest, the Sky Islands Alliance

is puzzling together national parks, wilderness areas, ranch lands, state lands,

and wildlife refuges across Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico in an attempt to

reverse a century of fragmentation and degradation. If they are successful,

someday we may again see jaguars and parrots within the boundaries of the United

States. Farther north, a coalition of conservation organizations, land trusts,

and government agencies is patching together wildlife corridors meant to extend

from Yellowstone to the Yukon. In the East, citizens are working to create a map

with protected wildlife linkages that will reach from New York's Adirondack

Mountains through Maine into Canadian Quebec.

 

 

 

Similar efforts are going on without much fanfare in hundreds of communities.

People simply aren't waiting for a new federal mandate – something like a

National Biodiversity Protection Act – they're just doing it. Like all cultural

shifts, some get it and some still don't. But, since the biodiverse services of

nature are irreplaceable and non-negotiable, eventually we will all be on board

or we will be desperately diminished. So, make way for the froggy love tunnel,

coming soon to a habitat near you.

 

 

 

Chip Ward is the author of Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the

American Land and co-founded the grassroots organizations Families Against

Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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