Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
mythical king of Corinth doomed to eternally rolling a rock up a hill, only for it to fall back to the bot-
tom every time he neared the summit. Ouch.
Many ecological restorers and conservation scientists think this criticism is a gross caricature of
what they intend. “Restoration ecologists do not aim to recreate the past, but rather to re-establish the
historical trajectory of an ecosystem before it was deflected by human activity,” says Simberloff.
31
But
it is hard to see how that happens without massive and continued environmental engineering. Even a
world suddenly without humans would be hugely changed. And we are stuck with one degree of glob-
al warming even if we turned off every fossil fuel burner tomorrow. I don't agree with Shapiro, even
though I am sure much of what he says is right. The people of California have the perfect right to at-
tempt to create a Lost World of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's imagining, complete with dinosaurs if they
can find the DNA. But it will require constant tending. It won't be natural. And it won't be wild.
Re-wilding efforts meet a human desire to see more nature on a larger scale than we have been used
to. But if such efforts are to become something other than large zoos or theme parks for scientists, if they
are to be nature “red in tooth and claw,” open to evolutionary change and able to contribute to genuine
ecological revival, then we have to let go and let nature take its course, however novel, however di-
vorced from what we might like to think of as pristine nature.
More interesting to me than a big zoo on a polder—or even refilling the Great Plains with herds of
bison—is the return of wolves across Europe. They are arriving under their own steam and in their own
time. And they are not “returning” to traditional habitats or anything created especially for them. Now
largely safe from hunters, wolves are mooching back onto abandoned farmland and into the suburbs.
This, to me, is genuine re-wilding. The new wild.
There are now an estimated twelve thousand wolves migrating from old refuges in eastern Europe to
as far as France and Spain. Joining them are around nine thousand lynx, spreading out from the Carpath-
ians and Balkans, seventeen thousand brown bears, jackals, wolverines, Alpine ibex, and European
bison—all returning from near-extinction half a century ago to travel across the most urbanized, indus-
trialized, and farmed continent on the planet. Hundreds of thousands of beavers are gnawing away at
riverbank trees. Millions of wild boars are everywhere.
These “returns” are mostly into inhabited landscapes. And that is the way it will mostly be. In the
Anthropocene era, fortress conservation is a doomed enterprise. Humans are an inescapable part of the
landscape. There are no pristine ecosystems and no blueprints for what they might be. Any vision of the
pristine past that we choose will require constant tending.
The old wild is dead. But the new wild is flourishing, and it will do better if we allow it to have its
head. It is there in hybridizing rhododendrons; in rare bees and spiders appearing amid the badlands of
the Thames estuary; on Ascension Island's Green Mountain; in Chernobyl's exclusion zone; across the
bush of tropical Africa and the regrowing rain forests of Borneo; along the creeks of San Francisco Bay
and the lava flows of Hawaii; in the cinnamon forests of the Seychelles; among the advancing wolves
of suburban Europe and the birds flocking to keep up with climate change; on Surtsey and Krakatoa;
among the
Caulerpa
beds of the Riviera; in the Great Lakes; and amid the call of the coqui across the
abandoned plantations of Puerto Rico. Nature never goes back; it always moves on. Alien species, the
vagabonds, are the pioneers and colonists in this constant renewal. Their invasions will not always be
convenient for us, but nature will re-wild in its own way. That is the new wild.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search