Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Private herds are emerging on private land throughout the state. Media magnate Ted Turner, one of
the largest landowners in the United States, with over a million acres, gets his bison from surplus an-
imals at Yellowstone National Park. But the animals are only half-wild. Most contain many genes from
domestic cattle. And the land on which they graze is fenced. When I asked to visit Turner's spread, I
was refused. This is privatized nature, and the creatures are, in effect, farmed. Turner has opened a chain
of restaurants in which to sell his “bison burgers.” That's fine. I don't object. But it is not wilding; it is
taming.
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At its most ambitious, re-wilding extends to bringing back extinct megafauna.
Jurassic Park
may
be science fiction, but the idea of a Pleistocene Park is real. There is already a park with that name
way up in the sub-Arctic steppes of northeastern Siberia, not so far from the Bering Strait. It is the cre-
ation of Russian scientist Sergey Zimov, director of the Northeast Science Station in Cherskiy. The park
already contains musk oxen and Yakutian horses, but Zimov would dearly like someone to genetically
re-create woolly mammoths, which existed there until some ten thousand years ago. It may be possible,
by harvesting fragments of DNA from museum relics and fleshy fragments of mammoth occasionally
unearthed from melting Siberian permafrost. The trick would be to reassemble the DNA sequences and
implant them in the animal's modern-day cousin, the Asian elephant.
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The Californian resurrection guru Stewart Brand—former hippie hero of the
Whole Earth Catalog
and now proprietor of the Long Now Foundation—proposes the mammoth for revival, along with other
more recently extinct species like the great auk, quagga, thylacine, and Steller's sea cow. Brand argues
that, in this way, “the conservation story could shift from negative to positive, from constant whining
and guilt-tripping to high fives and new excitement.” I have some sympathy with that. I agree too with
Brand that “nature is not broken, nor is it particularly fragile.” But his project seems more like creating
a very expensive novel ecosystem than re-wilding.
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Whatever the hopes of their founders, these engineered landscapes will only keep going in a rapidly
changing world if they are constantly tended, like outsize gardens. Whatever they become, they will not
be wild. And why the constant tug backward? The new wild will not be the same as the old wild. Let's
stop pretending otherwise.
The great American ecologist Edward O. Wilson predicts that restoration ecology will become a major
activity for conservationists in the twenty-first century. It already is. Rivers are being restored, along
with forests and wetlands and natural grasslands. Some scientists are outright in their condemnation of
this. Arthur Shapiro of UC Davis, a butterfly expert, is among them. He wrote an open letter in 2011
to the San Francisco Planning Department complaining about its plan to set up natural areas in the city.
“I am frankly appalled that San Francisco is considering major expenditure directed towards 'restora-
tion ecology' . . . a euphemism for a kind of gardening informed by an almost cultish veneration of the
'native' and abhorrence of the naturalized, which is commonly characterized as 'invasive.'” Shapiro ac-
cused the planners of trying to re-create “a simulacrum of what is believed to have been present at some
(essentially arbitrary) point in the past.” The result, he said, will “almost never be capable of being self-
sustaining without constant maintenance. The context has changed, the climate has changed, the pool
of potential colonizing species has changed, often drastically.” This kind of re-wilding, in other words,
won't be wild at all.
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Existing ecosystems, he said, “are freeze-frames from a very long movie. Eco-
logical change is the norm, not the exception. The ideology that informs restoration ecology basically
seeks to deny evolution and prohibit change.” It would, he said, be a “Sisyphean” task—referencing the
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