Whole Earth Discipline

by Brand, Stewart

  Because of climate concerns, forests are now seen as crucial for their role in fixing and retaining carbon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that converting 2 billion acres of farmland to agroforestry (which integrates trees, shrubs, livestock, and row crops) would remove 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The World Agroforestry Centre suggests that “allowing farmers to sell that carbon on global carbon markets could generate as much as $10 billion each year for poor people in rural areas.”

  Forests change climate, and climate changes forests. In America’s Ancient Forests (2000), Thomas Bonnicksen offers a bracing perspective:Modern forests only exist today. They do not look like Ice Age forests nor do they look like forests of the future. Forests represent a loose collection of species that grow together for a time as they pass each other on their way somewhere else. Each species arrives and departs independently from other species. Plants move very slowly; animals move more quickly; but they all continue to move either to escape an inhospitable environment or to take advantage of a new one. If they cannot move, they adapt. If they cannot adapt, they become extinct.

  (That’s what happened to the sweet old idea of “ecological community”—everything is just “a loose collection of species,” densely related for a while, but devoid of cohesion.)

  From his experience restoring cloud forest and tropical dry forest in Costa Rica, Daniel Janzen developed a formula that can be applied to any forest revival:Choose an appropriate site, obtain it, and hire some of the former users as live-in managers. Sort through the habitat remnants to see which can recover. Stop the biotic and physical challenges to those remnants. The challenge is to turn the farmer’s skills at biomanipulation to work for the conservation of biodiversity. Explicit and public agreement on management goals is imperative. Is the goal a low-overhead zoo, botanical garden, gene bank, functioning watershed, teaching laboratory, or some combination of these and other goals?

  In Borneo, which has been severely deforested by logging and fires, two forest restoration projects with interestingly different goals are under way. One is structured around the idea of rebuilding habitat for endangered orangutans. Working closely with six hundred Dayak families, forester Willie Smits is transforming palm-oil plantation land back into rain forest, employing a successional strategy accelerated with intense use of compost. The initial eight-square-mile forest is surrounded by a ring of fire-resistant, income-producing sugar-palm farms. The second grand scheme, called the Planted Forest Project, seeks to establish truly sustainable logging in Borneo. Half of its 1,900 square miles will be devoted to fast-growing acacia tree plantations, and a third to wild forest linked by corridors for wildlife, leaving the rest for the resident indigenous people. How the two projects fare over the coming decades will be fascinating to compare.

  The Scottish highlands, now famously barren, once were covered with a dense forest of Scots pine, birch, juniper, rowan, and alder. In the mid-eighteenth century, when Scotland’s last wolves were killed, the red deer population exploded and devoured all the tree seedlings. Only a few tiny remnants of the old Caledonian forest survived. Now a group called Trees for Life is working to reforest six hundred square miles. In 2008 they acquired a ten-thousand-acre estate, where volunteers are based for restoration chores on the property and in nearby forest remnants. The next stage is to reintroduce wild boars and beavers, absent for centuries. The beavers, if they’re allowed to, will engineer the Scottish ecosystem in their customary fashion, and animal and plant diversity will increase greatly.

  • Ecotrust—a Portland-based conservation group that distills its aims with the words “economy, ecology, equity”—is attempting the most ambitious forest-economy project I know of, embracing the entire temperate rain forest that extends two thousand miles up the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Alaska. Ecotrust’s president, Spencer Beebe, describes it:There is a 5-million-acre marine-terrestrial system unlike any other, where just 7 percent of the landscape is in private industrial ownership. We can make 6-8 percent real rates of return by buying the logged-over land and committing to an investment model that layers ecosystem service revenues (water, carbon, cellulosic ethanol, mitigation banking, conservation easements, etc.) on top of product sales (pulp and sawlogs through thinning practices which mimic natural disturbance patterns).

  Ecotrust calls the region Salmon Nation, for the charismatic species that has long served the area as a traditional native food source and major export and is considered the most sensitive indicator species of the ecosystem’s health. (I’m an adviser to Ecotrust, partly because of my abiding love of Oregon. I did my major tree-hugging there in 1957 as a logger. Choker-setters hug trees for a living, under circumstances where the log can hug you back—squish you flat. I learned an important fact that escapes most Greens: Loggers love the woods. That’s why a vision like Beebe’s might work.)

  Magnificent chestnut trees once dominated the forest that cloaked the continent from Alabama to Maine, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. They grew to 130 feet high with trunks ten feet in diameter, and they rained down an annual harvest of sweet nuts that fed humans, squirrels, deer, elk, turkeys, bears, jays, and mice through the winter. In 1904 an invasive fungus began to kill them. By the 1920s, they were all gone, impoverishing the landscape. Heroic efforts to produce a resistant variety by crossbreeding with the Chinese chestnut (which is immune to the blight) failed utterly.

  In Susan Freinkel’s lovely book on the subject, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree (2007), the rebirth refers to efforts to genetically engineer a blight-resistant American chestnut. Two researchers made a derivative of a frog gene they thought would do the trick, but everyone told them they mustn’t put a frog gene in a plant that people eat. A forest biotech company named ArborGen approached the American Chestnut Foundation, offering to support research on a GE chestnut. They were turned away, of course. But research is going ahead anyway; I bet that an American chestnut 2.0 will be thriving by the 2020s and that Greens will welcome it by the end of that decade.

  In Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet (2006), Denise Caruso frets that “one concern is that the transgenic tree would itself become an invasive species.” Actually, that’s the idea. Invasive is a neutral term in ecology, meaning only that something is on the increase. If chestnuts take off with human help, it won’t be the first time. About two thousand years ago, chestnuts suddenly jumped from 7 percent of the deciduous forest to 40 percent—impelled, it is presumed, by native Americans gardening the woods.

  • Perhaps the most radical restoration scheme of all is a plan to undo the Pleistocene extinctions and restore megafauna to their original keystone role in the North American ecosystem. The motivation is not just nostalgia for big animals. To deduce what happened before and after the extinctions, science journalist Yvonne Baskin studied the work of South African ecologist Norman Owen-Smith, who has been researching what he calls the “keystone herbivore” hypothesis.

  Before the extinctions, Baskin writes in The Work of Nature (1997), “The pollen record indicates that a wide sweep of the continent from the Appalachians to the Rockies was covered by open, parklike woodlands where conifer and hardwood trees were interspersed with stretches of grass and wildflowers.” Apparently that idyllic landscape was created by mammoths and saber-toothed tigers and the rest. Soon after they were killed,open glades would have filled in with unbrowsed shrubs and seedlings, crowding out the grasses and herbs. The ungrazed grasses in the clearings would have grown tall, fueling more intense and frequent fires that killed off the seedlings in their midst. The result, Owen-Smith suggests, was the conversion of those mixed savannas into distinct zones of dense forest and uniform prairies typical of the region today. Without megaherbivores to create and maintain a diverse patchwork of habitats, the populations of many medium-sized and smaller creatures would have been fragmented into isolated and shrinking pockets of suitab
le living space. With escape routes increasingly blocked by open prairie or dense forests, the small mammals would have been at the mercy of a shifting climate, chance disturbances, and even human hunters. Eventually most of these creatures went extinct, too.

  In 1999 the originator of the Pleistocene overkill theory, Paul Martin, was inspired by a conversation with Kenya’s David Western to propose bringing the big tuskers back onto the American landscape as an element of “resurrection ecology” for the continent. Martin elaborates on the idea in Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (2005). He was moved by Western’s description of the Amboseli Park elephants, who browse on trees and shrubs and continually swap places with Masai cattle, who graze on grass. Once the grass is grazed down, shrubs and trees take over; this attracts the elephants, who knock down and eat the woody plants, restoring the area to grassland suitable for cattle. Western described the result as “a patchy mosaic of grass, woods, and shrublands. That’s the whole reason for the savannah’s diversity.”

  Western observed that “with elephants and cattle transforming the habitat in ways inimical to their own survival but beneficial to each other, they create an unstable interplay, advancing and retreating around each other like phantom dancers in a languid ecological minuet playing continuously over decades and centuries.” Import some elephants, Paul Martin thought, and “in the New World we can see if bison and elephants too will dance this minuet, to the benefit of the American range.”

  Pieces of herbivore restoration ecology are already in place. Laws now protect the wild horses and burros that wander the West. “Because horses evolved here, flourished for tens of millions of years, and vanished around 13,000 years ago,” Paul Martin notes, “their arrival with the Spanish in the 1500s was a restoration, not an alien invasion.”

  Buffalos—American bison—were reduced by 1890 to just 500 animals. Now their population is back up to 500,000, and they’re paying their way. There’s a good market for their lean, tasty meat, and they offer some savings over regular cattle. “Since buffalo evolved on the prairies,” writes Alice Outwater, “they are far hardier than cattle and can be raised without antibiotics, hormones, or artificial growth stimulants. . . . They survive temperatures that freeze cattle solid.” Ted Turner has 50,000 buffalo on his ranches (and he’s reinstating prairie dogs, bless him). Some fifty-seven Indian tribes in nineteen states are members of the Intertribal Bison Cooperative, which helps restore buffalo to tribal lands to promote “cultural enhancement, spiritual revitalization, ecological restoration and economic development.” Montana State University has a Center for Bison Studies. As people move out of the high plains “buffalo commons,” bison are moving back in.

  • Paul Martin’s rewilding vision joins a similar one that has been promoted since 1991 by Dave Foreman, a founder of Earth First! Foreman’s version of rewilding, inspired by ecologist Michael Soulé, is based on keystone carnivores instead of herbivores. In Rewilding North America (2004), Foreman writes, “Wolves, cougars, lynx, wolverines, grizzly and black bears, jaguars, sea otters, and other top carnivores need to be restored throughout North America in ecologically effective densities.” Like many others, he is impressed by the results of reintroducing wolves to Yellow-stone National Park in 1995. Elk had overrun the park, eating the riparian aspens, willows, and cottonwoods down to the point that beaver could no longer build dams, and wetlands were being lost. Now that wolves have reentered the picture, Foreman writes, “Elk have become elk again. They’re awake! They’re moving. They’re looking over their shoulders. They aren’t loafing in big herds in open river valleys.” And the beaver are back.

  Conservation biologist Josh Donlan has blended the Martin and Foreman visions, saying it is time to reverse the “Pleistocene overkill” with a “Pleistocene rewilding.” As lead author (with Foreman, Soulé, Paul Martin, and others) of a 2005 paper for the American Naturalist, Donlon proposes to introduce “surrogate” replacements for the lost North American megafauna. African cheetahs, along with some African lions, would replace the long-vanished American cheetah that made our pronghorn antelopes so speedy. Bactrian camels, endangered in their own Mongolian range, would stand in for their ancient counterparts here. Our present wild horses and burros would be joined by Europe’s primeval-looking Przewalski’s horse and Asian ass (both endangered in their home territories). African and Indian elephants would take up where our mastodons left off. For a long period of research, the animals would be contained within very large fenced parks, which would pay part of their way with ecotourism.

  One flaw in the plan is that while elephants can substitute for mastodons (they both browse on trees and shrubs), there is no animal that can really replace the grass-eating mammoths. Our only option is to revive the mammoths themselves, something that is rapidly becoming feasible. A 2008 article in the New York Times estimated that “a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million.” Researchers at Pennsylvania State University are sequencing the mammoth genome from samples of mammoth hair. New GE techniques developed by George Church at Harvard and Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University would allow skin from an elephant to be reprogrammed to an embryonic state, then injected with multiple mammoth genes until one had what was effectively a mammoth embryo that could be brought to term in a mother elephant. It appears that Neanderthals could be brought back to life by the same technique, but they belong in Europe. Other resurrectable candidates for rewilding North America are the saber-toothed tiger, the short-faced bear, the giant ground sloth, the giant beaver, and the armadillo-like glyptodon.

  Too far-fetched? Ecologist Sergei Zimov has been assembling a Pleistocene park in northeast Siberia since 1989. In a sixty-square-mile fenced preserve he is introducing reindeer, moose, Yakut horses, musk oxen, and American bison, soon to be followed by saiga antelope, yaks, wolverines, Asiatic black bear, and Siberian tigers. Japanese and Russian scientists are collaborating on cloning the woolly mammoth and possibly the woolly rhinoceros for him. Zimov’s theory, expressed in a 2005 essay in Science, is that the moss and forest tundra of the region is an artifact of the killing of the ecosystem’s megafauna, and when they are restored, the grass-dominated “mammoth tundra-steppe” will return. His hope is thatby learning how to preserve and extend Pleistocene-like grasslands in the northern latitudes, we could subsequently develop means for mitigating both the progress and effects of global warming. The amount of carbon now sequestered in soils of the former mammoth ecosystem, and that could end up as greenhouse gases if released into the atmosphere by rising global temperatures, surpasses the total carbon content of all of the planet’s rain forests.

  Back in North America, Dave Foreman also thinks at continent scale. His rewilding vision is based on the idea that “nature reserves must be big and connected.” Existing parks, wildernesses, and roadless areas, he insists, need to be linked by protected corridors—four “continental mega-linkages” going up the Pacific mountain ranges, the Atlantic mountain ranges, the continental divide, and across the Arctic-Boreal far north. It strikes me that his three north-south corridors are worth establishing for climate reasons alone. The Malpai jaguars may need to get to Canada.

  Nothing is as instructive as a worthy enemy.

  My preferred start time is well before dawn. I like to be on the mountain before first light, finding my way across the terrain with skills and delight left over from Army night patrols. Wearing oiled pants to handle the chaparral, I’ll have a minimalist pack with breakfast makings and survival oddments, plus work gloves, a large serrated military knife, and a pick mattock. When I get to the work area, I’ll brew some coffee, munch granola with yogurt, and watch the world take light. Who meets the dawn owns the day.

  My specialty is pampas grass, an alien invasive from Argentina and Bolivia, flamboyantly ornamental with its high blond plumes, long ago escaped from nurseries and people’s yards into the national park west of the Golden Gate Bridge. In fact, it’s not really pampas gr
ass but its evil twin, jubata grass—identical except that it reproduces asexually: Every one of the million or so seeds blowing off each plant is fertile, and they can travel for miles on the wind. My goal is to eradicate jubata from the watershed. My technique is violent personal combat, using knife and pick mattock to dismember and uproot a plant that can be as big as a Buick.

  Each session provides a half day of productive toil: finding the remote places where the foe takes root, bushwhacking my way there, uprooting the invader, admiring the improved landscape, and moving on. This is what I do instead of thrashing uselessly in a gym or pounding around a track. It particularly promotes upper-body strength, which makes the older male proud and therefore happy. I find fighting smart alien plants more engrossing than going after a wily trout or noble stag. Invasive plants are intensely skilled at what they do. It took me years just to master jubata-fu.

  I’m a biobigot, a native-plant nazi. We are legion. Every state in the United States has a native plant society. Search for native plant organizations on Paul Hawken’s WiserEarth database and a thousand listings come up. Innumerable native-plant nurseries serve our mania. State by state we are persuading our highway departments to stop mowing the 12 million acres of roadside and median strips and to plant local native plants, “so when you’re driving around Delaware, you know you’re in Delaware, not in the tropics,” as one proponent put it.

  • I regard the native-plant movement as an entirely wholesome phenomenon, much like bird-watching in that it grounds people in their local terrain and turns them into para-ecologists, enriching science. And it does improve the health of ecosystems. Among the growing number of restoration and native-plant professionals, many have adopted as routine some practices and ideas that surprised me and might surprise most people. Let’s pretend they are secrets and reveal them here.