The Once and Future World

by J. B. MacKinnon

  Response to the idea was explosive. Opposing scientists pointed out that the rewilding article appeared in the same issue of Nature as a study showing that lion attacks on humans in Tanzania had risen 300 percent in fifteen years—a testament to the risks of living alongside megafauna. Good Morning America broadcast a brief interview with Pleistocene rewilding’s proponents, followed by a clip from the film Jumanji of elephants crushing cars. Several threatening letters were turned over to police, while surprise offers of rewilding habitat rolled in from ranch owners in Texas, Arizona, Kansas. Then Hurricane Katrina began to gyre toward the U.S. coast, and the Pleistocene was soon forgotten amid the horrors of that storm’s landfall in New Orleans. The excitement over rewilding had lasted less than a month, but was nonetheless unprecedented; one supporter called it “the largest ecological history lesson in American history.”

  The meaning of “rewilding” has continued to evolve, and its most widespread definition today is simply “to make wilder.” The term is increasingly used to acknowledge that it may not be possible to achieve some specific natural condition from the past, the way a team of heritage experts might restore an old cathedral, and instead describes attempts to bring back species and ecological processes that have been shunted aside—to give nature fuller expression in a world in which it is muted. Under this banner, rewilding could refer to the campaign to release endangered California condors in Oregon, an effort that involves the restoration not only of the birds but of the cultural memory that condors are not creatures of the desert—the only place they are found today—but once also soared through the fog-bound forests of the Pacific Northwest coast, where they fed on the carcasses of whales. In Europe, rewilding often refers to the gradual return of bears, wolves and other animals to the landscape as rural people continue to move to the cities, though the land itself remains indelibly marked by thousands of years of human presence. Perhaps the best-known example of European rewilding is the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve in the Netherlands, where herds of wild cattle, horses and deer run free on a savannah that, were it not for dams and dikes built in the twentieth century, would be an ocean inlet; at sixty square kilometres, the reserve is tiny by modern conservation standards and so far lacks any large predators. Even efforts to clone extinct species such as the passenger pigeon and thylacine could be considered rewilding, though only one clone of a vanished animal—the Pyrenean ibex, a subspecies of wild goat that went extinct in 2000—has ever been born, and survived just a few minutes before dying of physical defects in its lungs. A member of the team working on thylacine cloning once placed the odds of success at 30 percent over the next two hundred years.

  Few people are aware that a first step in the Ladder Ranch group’s Pleistocene rewilding proposal is also underway. Not with a lion, no, nor even a camel, but rather a tortoise. It seems an appropriate choice. With their slow pace and self-contained habits—some tortoises spend 90 percent of their lives inside or within a few steps of their burrows—it is hard to believe that tortoises still share the modern world with you and me. Have they no interest whatsoever in living large? In running with the bulls or falling in love on a beach under unfamiliar stars? Their defensive strategy of hiding in plain sight seems to make the argument that certain species really are doomed to extinction by the imperfections of their nature. On the other hand, the tortoise as a life form has been on earth roughly 200 million years longer than the human model.

  In 2006, conservation biologists transferred twenty-six bolson tortoises from a captive colony in Arizona to Armendaris Ranch, another Ted Turner property in New Mexico. The tortoises are unexpected beauties, with carapaces coloured jet black and topaz yellow. Although they remain fenced in at the ranch, the barriers will eventually be taken down and the tortoises will once again roam free in an area they haven’t called home for ten thousand years. The bolson tortoise is making prehistory.

  Out on the range at Armendaris, it seems hard to believe that the bolson tortoise could ever have been eradicated even from the single, sprawling valley that houses the ranch. The sere and shelterless landscape gives the immediate impression that humans never lingered here long, and in fact the desert basin is so inhospitable that it has been known since the days of the Spanish conquistadors as the Jornada del Muerto—the “journey of the dead man.” Yet at their peak after the ice age, bolson tortoises likely roamed from at least Arizona to western Texas and southward to central Mexico—an area of perhaps a million square kilometres. Today, they exist only in a few desert basins, known as bolsons, north of the Chihuahuan Desert city of Torreón, Mexico.

  The slow fade probably began with the very first encounter between a human being and a bolson tortoise, many millennia ago—the tortoise would have retreated into its shell, forelegs covering its eyes; the human would have carried it away for an easy meal. That pattern has repeated itself endlessly, beginning with the indigenous cultures, represented today by the Apache and Uto-Aztecan tribes that lived off the desert as hunter-gatherers and salt traders for thousands of years. Then came the Spanish, feeding their expeditionary parties, and sometimes whole armies, off the landscapes they moved through. They were followed by settlers—the shepherds and ranchers who, with the coming of cool weather each fall, manned signal fires on the highest summits to warn of Comanche and Kiowa raiding parties. When a rail crew of three hundred badly paid men began to move north from Mexico City into the desert basins, they were happy to find tortoises to roast over their fires. The expansion of railways and roads opened the desert to the Great Wax Rush of the early 1900s, when demand for waterproofing for military tents and ammunition sent thousands of candelilleros out to harvest the waxy candelilla plant, the men living off the land, eating jackrabbits, eating tortoises. In the 1920s, many bolsons were razed for farming, the mule-driving teams culling ten or more big tortoises for Saturday-night fiestas and saving the largest for their breakfast. Then came Mexico’s Highway 49, and the oil survey roads, and again the hungry construction crews. Truckers would stop at the roadside to pick up campesinos’ ox-cart-loads of tortoises, southbound for Mexico City or north to California, where “turtle” soup was in fashion.

  Finally, in 1959, the same year NASA selected its first astronauts for human space-flight, biologists “discovered” the bolson tortoise—the largest terrestrial reptile in North America was almost extinct before it was even known to science. Efforts to save the species followed, and in 1977, the last wild bolson tortoises were protected in a UNESCO biosphere reserve, the core of which is so remote it is known as the Zona del Silencio, the “zone of silence.” Humans continue to encroach on the area, however, and today the reserve is home to more than seventy thousand people. The tortoises turn up as pets in ranch houses or as bones in the ashes of cowboys’ campfires, and every year, new and illegal roads are pushed into their habitat. The tortoise today exists in 1 percent or less of its prehistoric range. The miracle is not that they have disappeared from so much of the world they once inhabited, but rather that they have survived at all.

  The bolson tortoise reintroduction at Armendaris Ranch will test a number of things. The animals’ success or failure in the northern Chihuahuan Desert may help to finally answer the vexing question of whether ancient climate change or the spread of human beings led to the disappearance of the world’s Pleistocene megafauna. The experiment has encouraged debate about whether to measure today’s nature against the relatively recent past of recorded history, or to reach back through the millennia to account for every human impact. But stand in the presence of a bolson tortoise, and the living, breathing animal itself seems valuable enough. The beast is nothing short of a miracle, able to survive months without food or water and to live more than a hundred years. Its greatest contribution is its burrow—no other creature in the Chihuahuan Desert digs as big a hole. Bolson tortoise burrows plunge six feet into the earth and often extend to the length of a stretch limousine; inside, the temperature stays relatively steady through the extremes of summer
wildfire and clear, cold nights beneath the picked-out winter stars. One study found 362 other species making use of tortoise excavations; in New Mexico, burrowing owls,* box turtles and skunks promptly moved in. Rainwater feeds into the water table through tortoise holes, and the mouths of the burrows—which resemble bomb craters—are made up of nutrient-rich soil dredged up from the depths. Mounds used by tortoises for years exhibit a much greater diversity of plant life than surrounding areas. The result is a more varied landscape, with more niches to be filled by more species—a strengthening of the functional fabric of nature. The rewilding of the tortoise in its ancient habitat represents not only the species’ slow drift away from extinction, but an overall movement toward a more plentiful world. What the bolson tortoise reminds us is that it is ultimately less important to choose a baseline than it is to choose a direction. The direction the tortoise points to is the opposite of apocalypse.

  * In reality, many of these protected areas have been hard hit by commercial and industrial activities, both sanctioned and unsanctioned.

  * Taste is another reason that passenger pigeons may not have turned up in bone heaps until historical times—some Native American commentators compared the flavour of pigeon meat to skunk, and it was only after other game was scarce that it became a preferred food among European colonists.

  * This is famously echoed in Aldo Leopold’s 1949 book A Sand County Almanac, in which he refers to a Sauk county cemetery as a “yard-square relic of original Wisconsin.”

  * Rabbits are an introduced species in many parts of the world, though they often did not immediately succeed. After their initial introduction to England in the 12th century, they fared poorly and struggled to burrow in the dense soils. A special tool was designed to help “warreners” dig the rabbits’ burrows for them, or they were offered “pillow mounds” of loosened earth in which to dig themselves.

  * The saiga still exists as a critically endangered species in Central Asia.

  * An endangered species in Canada; they very rarely dig their own holes.

  Fig. 2

  THE NATURE

  of

  NATURE

  How, then, am I to find you,

  if I have no memory of you?

  ST. AUGUSTINE

  Chapter 5.

  A BEAUTIFUL WORLD

  Not long ago, I sat down with my father to ask about his boyhood on the North Atlantic shore. We were at my kitchen table; a bottle, increasingly empty, stood between us, and every few minutes we would hear the distant howl of the city’s monorail. Dad was remembering the smelt that used to run up a creek near his family’s home to a pool the locals called MacGillvary’s Pond. Those were days of celebration, he said, when every kid in the district—it had the unpromising name of Low Point—would turn up with a basket or a bucket to fill with the little silver fish, and by evening smoke from the oil dripping into cooking fires would be hanging over the bay. He doubted the smelt still spawned there, and I replied that ours was an age of emptiness—“an ugly world,” I called it. He looked at me then with the fierce eyes that used to turn me to stone as a child. “I don’t live in an ugly world,” he said. “I live in a beautiful world.”

  It’s an easy truth to lose sight of. A few days later, I made my way from that same apartment to a patch of green in the heart of the city of millions where I’ve lived for more than a decade. A small lake is tucked away in the park, and though I had walked around it many times before, this day would be different. I had resolved to spend sixty minutes, just a single hour, giving nature my fullest attention.

  The results were immediate. I’d always noticed that the pond was home to that most familiar of ducks, the mallard. Now I carefully examined every bird on the water, and was surprised to count ten other species, among them geese, mergansers, coots, cormorants and the northern shoveller with its oversized, spoon-shaped bill. It was a peaceful scene, the ducks push-pushing across the surface or dunking their heads to feed in the shallows. Then the lake exploded. Every bird was in motion, scrambling for the reeds, diving, bursting upward into flight. In the trees along the shoreline, the songbirds spiralled down into the undergrowth, and the air rang with chittering and honking and squawking. I saw the shadow first—a dark triangle rippling over the unquiet water, and then the eagle itself, sweeping downward as fast as I could lower my eyes.

  A bald eagle hunting ducks. It tipped its wings uncertainly, then bore down with terrible speed on three dabblers, which desperately laved the water with their wings and piped a call that spoke to me more of dignified effort than of terror. At the last instant the raft of ducks split apart, and the eagle weaved at one, then another, and in that moment of indecision all three ducks disappeared into the reeds. The eagle glided upward, talons empty. Then it circled back the way it had come and settled in again to watch the pond from a line of trees.

  Life, death, the great wheel of eternity! Here it all was, in the heart of the city. Yet one observation stood out above all others. Dozens of people surrounded the pond—women jogged, children played, men threw sticks for their dogs to retrieve. Not one of them showed the slightest sign of having noticed the drama that had just played out before their eyes. If I considered that I had walked around the water’s edge perhaps a hundred times, then ninety-nine times out of those hundred I had been just as oblivious as everyone else.

  The crisis in the natural world is one of awareness as much as any other cause. As a global majority has moved into cities, a feedback loop is increasingly clear. In the city, we tend not to pay much attention to nature; for most of us, familiarity with corporate logos and celebrity news really is of more practical day-to-day use than a knowledge of local birds and edible wild plants.* With nature out of focus, it becomes easier to overlook its decline. Then, as the richness and abundance of other species fade from land and sea, nature as a whole becomes less interesting—making it even less likely we will pay attention to it.

  It has become possible to lose sight of nature almost entirely. At least as remarkable, however, is the fact that many people retain a hunger for nature against the odds. The author Italo Calvino made a memorable character of this impulse in 1963. His Marcovaldo, an Italian labourer who spends his days unloading boxes at the fictional Sbav and Co., possesses “an eye ill-suited to city life”:

  Billboards, traffic lights, shop windows, neon signs, posters, no matter how carefully devised to catch his attention, never arrested his gaze, which might have been running over the desert sands. Instead, he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a roof-tile …

  Marcovaldo is a romantic, even a heroic character—but he is also a fool. He eats mushrooms that he finds in the city and ends up in hospital having his stomach pumped. He longs to trap one of the wild woodcock that fly over his city in autumn, but captures only a pigeon as domesticated as he is. When he tells his children about the forest that lies at the edge of town, they think he must mean the billboards that line the superhighway, and cut them down for firewood. Marcovaldo longs for the natural world, but he knows next to nothing about it. Its specific meanings have been lost to him.

  When it comes to nature, our current global generation is the most blinkered of all time. History has left behind thousands of traces of a former attentiveness to the living world that can only seem alien to us now. One of the great mysteries of the early cave paintings in Europe and Australia, for example, is the way they represent details of large and dangerous animals. You might suggest that these long-ago artists extrapolated from the corpses of the animals they hunted, but this explanation isn’t equal to the evidence. Cave art is practically defined by its extraordinary power to transmit the living energy of animals; it is hyper-real, in the same way that a watercolour painting can sometimes show a scene more truthfully than a photograph. One wall of Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche Valley, France, features thirty-thousand-year-old portraits of lions that convey the most subtle and fleeting of the animals’ facial expressions: moments of conte
ntment, apprehension, uncertainty. To witness such intimacies before the age of zoos or telephoto lenses would have demanded long hours watching the animals at close range. More than that, it would have required a human being to be just another species on the landscape, in the same way that, in moments of truce, lions and their prey are often seen resting nearly side by side.

  The English language once had a word for the characteristic impression that a plant or animal offers to the eye. We called it the “jizz,” and the adoption of that term as sexual slang is unfortunate, as it seems unlikely we’ll come up with a replacement. It is the jizz, for example, that allows a skilled birdwatcher to know a bird by its silhouette alone, or by some quality of movement or the way it holds its head. The strangely unsteady flight of the turkey vulture, the flat forehead of the Barrow’s goldeneye, the endless headlong running of sanderlings on a mud flat—each of these is the jizz. It is so pure an essence that, if captured in a few rough lines drawn with charcoal, it can express an animal more authentically than a portrait by a trained artist who has never carefully watched the creatures he paints. It’s the jizz that ancient art so often represents. While looking at Egyptian treasures in a museum, I felt a rush of nostalgia when an engraving of a scarab beetle reminded me that I used to see a related species, the tumblebug, or Canthon simplex, roll balls of dung across my home prairie. I had completely forgotten; it took a 3,500-year-old artifact from another continent to make me remember.