Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 12
CALL OF THE NEW WILD
I first came across ecologist Chris Thomas a decade ago. He had written a paper that was taking climate
change science by storm. It warned that global warming would wipe out a quarter of the world's species.
Just two degrees of warming by 2050 would see millions of species, if not gone, then, as he and eighteen
coauthors put it, “committed to extinction.” It was the gloomiest prediction yet on the fate that awaited
nature as we turned up the planet's heat.
1
Thomas's team had analyzed the climate zones within which species are currently found, figured
out from climate model predictions how fast the zones would move, and made estimates about which
species could keep up. The finding that only three-quarters could do so made it as a headlined finding
of the next report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The paper has
been hugely influential, with Google Scholar finding thirty-three hundred citations—more than almost
any other paper on climate change.
Thomas was so alarmed by his findings that he and his colleagues began trials to physically move
species to help them keep up. They took five hundred Marbled White butterflies (
Melanargia galathea
)
from York in northern England, the northernmost limit of their current range, and released them from
the back of a car hundreds of miles further north at a quarry in Durham.
2
The Marbled Whites are doing
well. But not everyone likes interfering with nature in this way. Daniel Simberloff, the guru of invasion
biologists, called this forced migration “tantamount to ecological roulette.” He noted that it “signals the
emergence among some conservationists of a new philosophy . . . at odds with the traditional objective
of preservation.” His fear was that “even species that are threatened in their native ranges could become
invasive in a new evolutionary context.”
3
Even in the face of climate change, species should be kept
where they belong.
Thomas counters that there are equal and perhaps greater risks from inaction. He thinks that in an era
of rapid climate change, organized translocation of species will be “the only realistic way to maintain
wild populations of some species.”
4
If we are messing with the climate, we should at least try to help
nature keep up.
Thomas's initial assessment of the ecological meltdown likely to accompany climate change is
surely far too gloomy. It rests on the idea that species occupy their strict climatic and ecological zones
and cannot prosper if that environment changes. Many species may turn out to be much more versatile
and pushy. They may, where necessary, find their ways to new environments—without waiting for a lift
in Thomas's car.
Climate change is certain to be a major driver of species migrations, whether Simberloff welcomes
them or not. In Britain there is already a trickle of arrivals crossing the English Channel from France and
then pushing north. Taking advantage of warmer climes, the little egret (
Egretta garzetta
) first showed
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