That’s the pattern. Humans invade new places, wreak destruction, then eventually settle down. They invade each other, slaughter, then eventually settle down. Lately we’ve run out of unpopulated places to invade, and we say we’d like to stop invading each other. If we can keep climate change from forcing us back into the invasion game, how would settling down once and for all work? The encouraging lesson from prehistory is that settling down means inhabiting a place with such close attention that the practices of “tending the wild” and agriculture blur into one.
“It is imperative that we come to recognize conserved wildlands for the gardens that they are,” ecologist Daniel Janzen wrote in an essay for America’s National Parks magazine. “They are water factories, amusement centers, grocery stores. They are the globe’s finest research, entertainment, and aesthetic living libraries. They are carbon deposits, biodegraders, recyclers, buffers, ameliorators. They are sandboxes and swing sets. And they have shoplifters, vandals, drunks, speeders, and stupidities.”
Janzen speaks with authority. He and his wife, biologist Winnie Hallwachs, are credited with helping to set Costa Rica on its path as the world’s Greenest nation: The whole country considers itself a national park. To build the famed Guanacaste Conservation Area, now a World Heritage Site, “Janzen and Hallwachs assembled a set of ecological, political, cultural, and financial insights that, used together, constituted a revolution in tropical forest conservation,” writes William Allen in Green Phoenix, a 2001 history of the project.
Janzen’s experience in the tropics around the world told him that “protected” wildlands can’t be protected if the only justification is aesthetic or political. Poachers, loggers, and new political regimes turn the parks into battlefields, and that means annihilation. To protect a wilderness permanently, he insists, it has to be treated not just as a garden, but as a commercial garden. The wildland must pay its way or perish.
A wilderness park like the Guanacaste, Janzen wrote in Science, has “nearly all the traits that we have long bestowed on a garden—care, planning, investment, zoning, insurance, fine-tuning, research, and premeditated harvest.” He considers the 235,000 identified species in the Guanacaste as crops; ecotourists, as “a better kind of cattle.” Janzen points out that “the ecotourist crop in Costa Rica is worth more than the combined coffee crop, banana crop, and cattle crop together, and Costa Rica is the number-two banana producer in the world.” Janzen specializes in finding ways to get financial yield for the Guanacaste from scientific research, from drug bioprospectors, and from contracts for sundry ecosystem services, such as the fresh water that flows out of the protected forest. When the growing park displaces ranching and logging, he makes sure the local people have new and better economic opportunities in and around the park, often as parataxonomists and para-ecologists doing world-class science.
(It annoys Janzen and Costa Ricans when writers like me suggest that one outsider turned a whole nation around. Janzen was the right grain of sand in a very intelligent oyster. According to New Scientist, Costa Rica is “the first tropical nation to reverse deforestation. Thanks to conservation and replanting, its forest cover has increased from 21 per cent in 1987 to 52 per cent today.” Costa Rica did that, not Professor Janzen at the University of Pennsylvania.)
• The benefits of commercializing the wild can be found wherever you look closely. For example, Nature reported that “whale-watching is already employing more people and bringing much greater economic benefits than commercial whaling could ever generate.” The Marin County mountain I hike every week is a patchwork of national park, state park, county open land, and the Marin Municipal Water District. Guess which of those is the best maintained, with the best trails, the best volunteer programs for habitat restoration, the fewest alien-invasive species, and the most reliable decade-to-decade funding. Of course it is the 21,000-acre water district. Its 190,000 customers, including me, gratefully pay the district $55 million a year to protect the watershed. The toll collected on the water we drink pays for the trails we hike. The trees that shade and hold the soil and the mountain lions who manage the deer population are indirect beneficiaries.
Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, articulates a growing realization among environmental organizations: “We have to stop thinking of protected areas as ‘protected from people’ and recast protected areas as resources and assets that are ‘protected for people.’ ” In a 2007 Scientific American article cowritten with Michelle Marvier, Kareiva gives an example of that approach. Florida’s Gulf Coast is vulnerable to storm surges and is losing species-rich marsh and oyster-reef habitat. Nature Conservancy researchers layered maps of the most critical habitats, the densest human populations, and the greatest storm hazard on top of each other and looked for overlaps. Then they directed their effort to the places where habitat protection and restoration could protect the most humans as well as the most wild species. Kareiva urges that “conservationists focus foremost on regions where the degradation of ecosystem services most severely threatens the well-being of people: stands of mangroves in Asia, marshes in the southeastern US, drylands in sub-Saharan Africa, and coral reefs around the world.”
Daniel Janzen argues that you cannot protect a wildland by just leaving it alone. He wrote in Science: The question is not whether we must manage nature, but rather how shall we manage it—by accident, haphazardly, or with the calculated goal of its survival forever? . . . Restoration is key to sustainable gardening. Restoration is fencing, planting, fertilizing, tilling, and weeding the wildland garden: succession, bioremediation, reforestation, afforestation, fire control, prescribed burning, crowd control, biological control, reintroduction, mitigation, and much more.
A major attraction of the restoration approach is that it brings many people into the process. In Nature by Design: People, Natural Processes, and Ecological Restoration (2003), Eric Higgs points out that “the act of pulling weeds, planting, configuring a stream bank to match historical characteristics, or participating in a prescribed fire that returns an old process to the land helps develop a ferocious dedication to place.” The volunteers bond with the land and with each other, and they make a deep connection to time and history. As Higgs writes, “We restore by gesturing to the past, but our interest is really in setting the drift pattern for the future.” I would add that restoration volunteers also learn humility, because they are joining what Michael Pollan calls “the mostly comic dialogue with other species that unfolds in the garden.” You diligently weed and plant, and then watch the vegetation do something quite different from what you had in mind.
In this century, global warming is forcing preservationists to completely rethink what they do, because their goal of preventing change to an ecosystem is no longer possible. Their job now is to help the ecosystem adapt. To stay in a viable temperature range as the climate warms, species are moving to higher altitudes and higher latitudes. They need protected corridors to do that. Where there’s a barrier, such as a mountain range or body of water, they may need help getting across it. Species once thought of as alien invasive may need to be welcomed; new spontaneous hybrids such as “grizzlars” (a cross between a grizzly and a polar bear) that used to be prevented now should be supported as adaptive.
Populations in some locations, such as near mountaintops, may be impossible to protect; they will have to be abandoned. At the same time, preservationists are scouting for future opportunities. Peter Kareiva at The Nature Conservancy notes that “rising sea levels may turn today’s nondescript inland habitats into tomorrow’s valuable marshes and wetlands.”
• This chapter makes so emphatic a case for tending the wild, for people being densely involved with nature, that I need to include the opposite approach—the leave-it-bloody-well-alone option. In all of Europe, there is just one remnant of truly ancient primary forest. The Puszcza Białowieska, all 380 square miles of it straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, is a World Heritage Site, a Biosphere Preserve, an
d a national park in both countries. “Here,” writes Alan Weisman in The World Without Us (2007), “ash and linden trees tower nearly 150 feet, their huge canopies shading a moist, tangled understory of hornbeams, ferns, swamp alders and crockery-sized fungi. Oaks, shrouded with half a millennium of moss, grow so immense here that great spotted woodpeckers store spruce cones in their three-inch-deep bark furrows.”
Weisman’s guide, a Polish ecologist named Andrzej Bobiec, drew a lesson from the forest that is radical in Europe:As a forestry student in Krakow, he’d been trained to manage forests for maximum productivity, which included removing “excess” organic litter lest it harbor pests like bark beetles. Then, on a visit here he was stunned to discover 10 times more biodiversity than in any forest he’d ever seen. It was the only place left with all nine European woodpecker species, because, he realized, some of them only nest in hollow, dying trees. “They can’t survive in managed forests,” he argued to his forestry professors. “The Białowieza Puszcza has managed itself perfectly well for millennia.”
I heard a similar tale from Jim Lovelock about the Devon farmstead he bought thirty years ago: “When I started this place, I wanted to be good and Green, so I planted twenty thousand trees. It was a mistake, really. They haven’t gone all that well. But the few bits of land that I left untouched, just left to their own devices, are now flourishing ecosystems, with trees and everything else in them. My whole philosophy now is: Leave it alone, don’t touch it. It’s easier, too.”
Where do you suppose is the richest wildlife refuge in northeast Asia? Here’s a hint: it contains (according to an online source):five rivers and many ecosystem types, including forests, mountains, wetlands, prairies, bogs and estuaries. There are over 1,100 plant species; 50 mammal species, including Asiatic Black Bear, leopard, lynx, sheep and possibly tiger; hundreds of bird species, many of which, according to IUCN, are endangered, including Black-faced Spoonbill, Red-crowned and White-napped Cranes and Black Vulture; and over 80 fish species, 18 being endemic. . . . Hundreds of bird species migrate through.
(IUCN stands for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which maintains the authoritative Red List of Threatened Species.)
Of course it is the DMZ—demilitarized zone—separating North and South Korea: 155 miles long, 2.4 miles wide, full of mines and empty of people ever since the armistice of September 6, 1953. Forests grew back in the mountains. Ancient agricultural land returned to prairie and shrubscapes. No one had to introduce wildlife: As at Chernobyl, the animals found their own way to the inadvertent refuge. (An NGO called the DMZ Forum is lobbying to convert the DMZ to a peace park when the two Koreas eventually reunite. Kept as wildland, it could be a perpetual source of national pride and ecotourist revenue. “Think of it as a Korean Gettysburg and Yosemite rolled together,” says Edward O. Wilson, cofounder of the DMZ Forum.)
Similar wildlife sanctuaries can be found wherever there’s barbed wire and paranoia, such as around nuclear plants. “Wildlife is not something most people associate with national labs and military bases,” says preservation lobbyist Corry Westbrook, “but restricted access and high security make them ideal spots for conservation.” These areas are a survival into the modern age of the timeless practice of no-go buffer zones between competing tribes, as described in Steven LeBlanc’s Constant Battles. Typically ranging from a half mile to twenty miles in width, the buffer zones maintained to reduce combat were fortuitously a reservoir and corridor for game animals and a place where worn-out agricultural land could lie fallow while its soil revived.
Tending the wild and leaving the wild alone are not contradictory strategies. They both work fine, and they blend well. In any project, it’s a good idea to try some of both, in different areas, so that each is a scientific control for the other. Race them.
Restoring the wild is the most rewarding of all Green activities, at every scale from window box to biome. Let me give some examples from cities, agricultural lands, forests, and prairies before moving on to the really large scale.
Thanks to a fluke of bridge engineering, the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, is home to 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats. Every summer evening, as a thousand tourists and locals look on, the bats swarm into the twilight to devour their nightly twelve tons of mosquitoes and agricultural pests such as corn earworm moths. An Austin totem animal of sorts, the free-tails earn the city an estimated $8 million a year. Bat Conservation International, based in Austin, has produced a publication showing how to make any bridge bat friendly.
Recent ecological studies in American suburbs have turned up three reasons for the alarming decline in wild bird populations. As I mentioned before, one is cats, who kill 100 million birds a year in the United States. Conservation biologist Michael Soulé discovered that in places where coyotes are on the increase, birds are returning as well, because the coyotes eat or intimidate the cats. Meanwhile, researchers in Pennsylvania found that wherever there are more than twenty deer per square mile, the bird population goes down by a third, because the excess deer eat up the understory where the birds live (along with chipmunks, squirrels, and other small mammals). Again the problem is the absence of large predators. We need bird-watchers and gardeners with a taste for venison. A number of cities now offer licenses for urban deer hunting with bow and arrow. A third cause of bird decline is the popularity of “pest-free” exotic plants in gardens and yards. Local insects haven’t learned that the alien plants are food; so the insects dwindle, and the birds starve. The solution there is simple: Plant natives.
That’s pretty rewarding. If you tolerate the singing of coyotes, eat the beast that vaults an eight-foot fence to devour your garden, and rid your yard of plasticlike ornamentals, you get the birdies back.
• Environmentalists are used to thinking of cattle as the great destroyers of land, and indeed they often are. But if they’re managed right, livestock can be grassland preservers, standing in for the missing megafauna. The trick is to keep the animals moving, with cowboys replacing the large predators of old. The guru of enlightened cattle ranching, biologist Allan Savory, realized from field work in his native Zimbabwe that “relatively high numbers of heavy, herding animals, concentrated and moving as they once did naturally in the presence of predators, support the health of the very lands we thought they destroyed.”
Savory’s now-classic book, Holistic Management (1999), shows how to employ grazing animals as tools of land restoration. Got some bare ground that’s eroding away? Concentrate the herd on it with bales of hay; once the cattle have broken up and dunged the ground, the plants will come. Got a fast-eroding gully with steep banks? Let the herd flatten out the banks; vegetation will finish the work. Need a firebreak through a brushy area? Spray some dilute molasses or salt solution on the strip you want cleared, and the cattle will bulldoze your firebreak.
Among the ranchers paying attention to Savory are the one hundred member families of the Malpai Borderlands Group, which oversees 1,250 square miles of wild country on the Continental Divide in southern New Mexico and Arizona. The ranchers came together in the 1990s to figure out a way to restore fire to their landscape, because woody plants were taking over the grasslands. That led to bringing in scientists and figuring out other projects they could collaborate on. Pretty soon a book about the Malpai Group described what they have asa working wilderness: a place where wildness thrives not in the absence of human work or in spite of it, but because of it, and where thriving wildlands in turn sustain the human community that lives and works there. Superficially, this work is the same as it has been for five generations—the work of ranching, of raising cattle on the range—but it has grown to include scientific research, communications and outreach, real estate, law, wildlife biology, planning, and fire management as well. Not to mention politics.
The Malpai Group hired as a consultant the African-born conservationist David Western, famous for protecting Amboseli National Park by allying its interests with those of the surrounding Ma
sai cattle herders. Then head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, Western arranged for the American ranchers and the Masai to visit each other. For a further thrill, now that Mexican jaguars have been sighted in the Malpai area, the group is working to restore that spectacular animal to at least part of its former range in the American southwest.
Imagine how satisfying it is for ranchers who used to be harassed by government officials and scorned by environmentalists to now have both coming to study their techniques. Plus, they get to party with the neighbors, play with fire, identify with jaguars, and hang out with scientists and Masai warriors, all while improving their grasslands and watercourses and selling ever more grass-fed beef.
• Forests have often been full of people. The medieval forest of Europe, Roland Bechman writes in Trees and Man (1990), was populated with “basket-weavers, charcoal-burners, hoop-makers, potters, loggers, etc., as well as shepherds, herdsmen, and swineherds.” By studying satellite images of the dry forest in Madagascar—one of the world’s most important ecological areas—Thomas Elmqvist of Stockholm University discovered that while much of the forest was being lost, in some places it was intact and even increasing. “We were surprised to find that areas that were suffering most from deforestation had the lowest population density and were far from markets,” he told New Scientist. The robust areas of forest were protected by their local villages: “If an outsider wants to use the forest, the only way to get permission is to marry into the clan.”
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