Rewilding, an initial description– Rewilding Post #2
In the Rewilding Post #1, the weakness of Environmental Science, as it is presently done, was described1.
As we look around, it does not take much convincing to see the World is in dire straits. Everywhere we look, we can see accelerating damage to the environmental services we, and every other life-form, depend on. We are not blind, at least many of us are not, so we attempt to mitigate and ameliorate the damage using Environmental Science.
The prognosis for success doing what we have been doing is poor1. We need to do something different and one possible different approach is “Rewilding.” A concept introduced in the 1990s consisting of cores, carnivores (keystone species), and corridors with minimal human management or interference.
The cores would be large chunks of land such as wilderness areas, and national parks. The carnivores would be grizzlies, wolves, and cougars. The keystones would be such as bison, salmon, and beavers. The corridors connecting the cores help prevent genetic exhaustion and bottlenecks. The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone serves as a partial proof of concept but lacking corridors2.
Rewilding comes in two basic packages.
-Passive rewilding is simply leaving an area to restore itself through a natural process of succession. A stunning example of this process is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, most of which was denuded and intensively farmed for about a century. This is basically a “leave it be” process. During the pandemic shut down, wildlife started to rewild cities and towns3,4. The no-go zone around Chernobyl and the no-man’s land between N and S Korea are blossoming rewilding wilderness areas.
-Active rewilding involves removal of human artifacts, removal of invasive species, and the translocation or reintroduction of keystone species. This is a more designed process. The prairie bison are examples2. Trophic rewilding, focuses on the reintroduction of apex predators and leaving the rest to work itself out. Again, the Yellowstone wolves are a good example.
In either case, the goal is to restore an area to “wildness” but what is that precisely? It is unlikely that we can return many places to some pristine state of wildness. We cannot bring back the passenger pigeon. Will the Everglades ever be python-free? And wildness must adapt to climate change.
Is wildness defined as a self-sustaining, self-creating, dynamically balanced environment with little or no human management? If so, how much management is allowable?
Can an area be “wild” if it is managed with the goals of maintaining the ecosystem services defined as provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting?5
Does rewilding always require a big project? Can you rewild a suburban or urban neighborhood or park?
Rather than restoration, can reorganization and substitution create a functional wildness that fulfills the ecosystem services and enhances cultural services?
I guess the appropriate response to these questions is that rewilding is a direction to take rather than a specific process, goal, or outcome, but there are commonalities found in every effort.
-Rewilding increases biodiversity, not always in a predicted or expected manner. A core part of rewilding is that once started, Nature is the architect, not humans.
-Increased biodiversity mitigates the Climate Catastrophe by inherently increasing carbon sequestration, increasing water absorption and availability,6 and enhancing the ecosystem services of regulation and support often beneficial in terms of reduced flooding, pollution, and fire impact.
-Rewilding as a fantasy is always wildly positive. Rewilding on the ground often requires persuasion about a range of issues including, but not limited to, loss of cropland, fear of large carnivores, uncertainty about final outcomes, and loss of local control.
-The primary cost of rewilding is space, an increasingly rare, commodified resource in a competitive world.
-Anecdotally, it seems that rewilding is often an economic boon for locations and areas that might not otherwise thrive with benefits in the form of increased tourism, recreational opportunities, and positive affect.
A plurality of us, perhaps a majority, value access to Nature, biodiversity, and environmental resilience7. Rewilding supports those values in many ways. Not the least of which is just the term “rewilding” feeds our imaginations in a manner that “Environmental Science” never can.
With rewilding, our imaginations can create new stories. Stories where humans are in connection with the World rather than dominant and distant. Stories where we recognize the complexity and uncertainty of the networks that allow us to thrive as pares-inter-pares.
We, as Americans and as world citizens, are in desperate need for a sociocultural, philosophical, moral, and natural rewilding. I leave with a quote that launches the next rewilding post.
“Of all the world’s creatures, perhaps those in the greatest need of rewilding are our children. The collapse of children’s engagement with nature has been even faster than the collapse of the natural world. In the turning of one generation, the outdoor life in which many of us were immersed has gone.”
— George Monbiot, instance unknown
1) https://dexterchapin.substack.com/p/rethinking-environmental-science
2) Corridors are crucial, even when dealing with large areas. https://www.npca.org/advocacy/37-isle-royale-a-unique-island-for-wildlife and https://americanprairie.org/rewilding/ or https://shorturl.at/NJabS
3) https://allthatsinteresting.com/covid-19-animals-reclaiming-earth
https://matadornetwork.com/read/lockdown-cities-animals-taking-vacant-streets/
5) https://earth.org/what-are-ecosystem-services/
6) https://www.wri.org/insights/landscape-restoration-winning-strategy-warmer-world
7) https://natureofamericans.org/findings/valuing-nature
8) Neither the felon, nor his cabinet, nor the scavenger oligarchs have the horsepower to understand the complexity and uncertainty of the World. If that is an arrogant statement, so be it. With our policies and elections, we move the Earth towards Armageddon.