A Work of Hope - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 141

noceros, which is likely to fill a similar ecological niche. The Asian elephant
might be a good proxy for its relative the straight-tusked elephant.
Reintroducing elephants to Europe would first require a certain
amount of public persuasion. To find enough forage, wild elephants
would have to make long migrations, especially in the winter. Garden-
ers, farmers and foresters are unlikely to applaud the proposal, though
it would take our minds off the slugs and aphids with which so many
of us are obsessed. But if very large areas of land are allowed to rewild
as farmers depart, it would be a pity not to remember and at least
consider the most powerful of our missing species.
The Pleistocene Park being established in north-eastern Siberia by
Sergey Zimov and other visionary ecologists is, most of the time, less
contentious. The rewilders began, in 1988, by releasing Yakutian
horses - believed to be closely related to the wild horses that lived in
the region towards the end of the Ice Age - into a park of 160 square
kilometres (the size of Liechtenstein). Reindeer, moose and wild snow
sheep (similar to the North American bighorn) already lived in the
area, as well as lynx, wolves, bears and wolverines. Since then, musk
oxen, forest bison and red deer have been reintroduced. 57 At some
point the park will be expanded by a further 600 square kilometres,
becoming a little larger than the island of Minorca.
Zimov and his team are either considering or being urged to con-
sider the introduction of several other species which once lived in the
region or which are closely related to those that did. Among them are
saiga antelope, Bactrian camels, Amur leopards, Siberian tigers and
lions. Already, as Zimov's experiments predicted, the new grazers are
turning the moss and lichen tundra into grassy steppe. The question
of whether this transition will accelerate climate change needs to be
carefully examined. His assumption that the restoration of grassland
will reduce global warming could be optimistic, 58 and has been partly
contradicted by no less an authority than, er, Sergey Zimov,* lead
author of a paper written ten years earlier. 60
* Zimov and colleagues now argue that because the steppes are drier than mossy tun-
dra, they are less likely to generate and release methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Being paler, they also absorb less heat. 59 But these effects will be at least in part counter-
acted by the effect he documented in 1995: moss insulates the soil much more effectively