Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Sometimes the colonists will not be the species that, aesthetically speaking, we would have chosen.
But that is our doing. We are, wrote Meyer, “making the planet especially hospitable for the weedy spe-
cies . . . that thrive in continually disturbed human-dominated environments.” He meant no disrespect in
calling them weeds. But weeds—the scrappers and generalists, the versatile and opportunist, the cock-
roaches and coyotes, the rats and rhododendrons—seem set to inherit the Earth.
We have to embrace them. We must, along the way, give up some of our romantic ideas about nature
being passive and fragile. We should take heart from the growing realization that nature is actually dy-
namic and can-do. This should change our approach to nature conservation. In fact, conservation as cur-
rently practiced becomes the enemy. By seeking only to conserve and protect the endangered and the
weak, it becomes a brake on evolution and a douser of adaptation. If we want to assist nature to regen-
erate, we need to promote change, rather than hold it back.
In this rebooted vision of nature, species will move around much more than in the past, whether by
deliberate human hand, their own volition, or by accident. Those species that are opportunistic, versat-
ile, aggressive, and prolific will globalize their activities. In the title of a rather ignored topic a few years
ago, journalist Garry Hamilton called these colonists and vagabonds the “super species.” The house
sparrow and Argentine ant, the water hyacinth and wild boar, the kudzu and cat, the rat and zebra mussel
have shown the way.
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Their success represents not nature's degradation but its fighting back against us.
They are the ones that move in when we screw things up. The super species will take charge as what
Meyer called the “relic species” either perish or are confined to conservation's intensive care wards.
All that said, we humans will want to intervene, to preserve what we like and need for our own ends.
We will sometimes need to defend against pests, diseases, inconvenient invaders of our spaces, and des-
troyers of our most cherished natural companions. We will continue to have our favorite species. Many,
like the giant panda, Sumatran rhino, and California condor, already survive only thanks to our constant
protection. There is no harm in that. These living trophies have meaning for us. But we should not kid
ourselves that they are the future of nature. In preserving them we will be serving our own desires, not
nature's needs. Nature is traveling in a different direction.
The new fad among conservationists is re-wilding, the re-creation of large areas of land for nature.
Why not, if we can? But what kind of wild do we hope to create in this way? For many, the ambition
is the re-creation of ancient “pristine” habitats. They want to bring back totemic “native” species like
wolves and bears in the Scottish Highlands and bison herds across the American Midwest. They want to
place them in habitats as close as can be managed to the pristine. This again is a human cultural choice.
In the Americas, it often means reproducing the landscapes before Europeans showed up—1491, in oth-
er words. In Australia it is similar, though the date is rather later. Neither is in any sense pristine. As we
have seen, both landscapes were transformed by their previous occupants.
In Europe, the ambition is to go further back. But how far? Britain probably lost its extensive wild-
loved by environmentalists turn out to have been the result of early farming activity. Go back further and
most of Britain was covered in ice. Before that, during the previous interglacial, it had hippopotamus,
lions, hyenas, and Barbary apes.
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In reality, all efforts at re-wilding are compromises, both with the reality of the wider landscape and
with neighbors. Fairly typical is the Scottish Highland estate known as the Alladale Wilderness Reserve,
a twenty-three-thousand-acre glen bought by Paul Lister, the heir to a flat-pack furniture fortune. He
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