Soulé argues that relaxed selection may also be weakening our bond with nature. Research into the methods hunter-gatherers use to classify plants—which might, for example, allow them to determine whether a newly encountered berry is closely related to known edible or poisonous varieties—has turned up surprising similarities to the systems applied by professional botanists. The anthropologist Richard K. Nelson, who spent years among the indigenous people of northern Alaska, notes that “the expert Inupiaq hunter possesses as much knowledge as a highly trained scientist in our own society, although the information may be of a different sort.” Since the dawn of agriculture, such knowledge has been less and less useful. A predisposition for multi-tasking or an innate capacity to endure the stress of urban life is more important to survival today than the ability to inhabit the mind of a tiger or predict a storm through the behaviour of birds.
It’s possible, Soulé says, that this explains why many biologists, including himself, feel so profoundly alienated from mainstream society. The thought came to him over a lifetime—Soulé is in his seventies—of trying to inspire people to care for the natural world. As a scientist, his research helped explain the cascade of impacts that can result when predators are removed from ecological systems, yet hunting and habitat destruction continue to empty the world of predators. He’s a long-time Buddhist, but sees no globally influential religious practice that consistently instills an appreciation of nature in its followers. In 1991, Soulé helped establish the Wildlands Network, the first major environmental group to focus on large-scale rewilding; he describes efforts to date as “a failure.” It isn’t that these various approaches—the scientific, the spiritual, the activist—have accomplished nothing at all, but that in every case those who put the living planet as a whole ahead of short-term human interests remain a small minority.
“Those of us who are biocentric or ecocentric don’t understand why people can callously and gratuitously go around destroying nature,” Soulé says. “We say, ‘How can they do this?’ But we’re different. We’re wired to love different things than other people are.”
The degree to which we are or are not genetically inclined to care for nature remains largely unmapped territory. If Soulé is correct, and the ability to empathize with the rest of the living world is now thinly scattered and weakly felt at the level of the human genome, then the future of nature would seem very bleak indeed. A more optimistic possibility is that ecocentric thinkers like Soulé represent the continuation of our innate bond with nature in the same way that piano prodigies embody our capacity to make and enjoy music. We don’t say that the rarity of gifted musicians represents the slow fade of rhythm and melody from human culture—the world is still home to a lot of church choirs and kitchen-party guitarists. But music is more accessible than ever, while our relationship to nature is increasingly distant and disconnected. Picture a world in which the history of music is largely forgotten, songs are heard less and less often and musical instruments are poorly understood by the vast majority of people.
When it comes to the natural world, this is us, the global economic human of the twenty-first century. Whether by nature or by nurture, Soulé’s warning is the same: when we choose the kind of nature we will live with, we are also choosing the kind of human beings we will be. We shape the world, and it shapes us in return. We are the creator and the created, the maker and the made.
* Stoermer had coined the term in the 1980s.
* People have held their breath longer (though still nowhere near as long as a seal), but only by first hyperventilating a gas mixture with a much higher oxygen content than is ordinarily found in the atmosphere.
Chapter 10.
THE AGE OF REWILDING
The twentieth century was the golden age of conservation. When the first calendars of the year 1900 were hung, only a handful of countries on earth—including the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Mexico and Russia—had national parks. One hundred years later, a United Nations survey found more than 100,000 protected areas in 125 countries, almost all of them established since 1962, the date of the first international parks congress and, incidentally, the year that Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and helped catalyze environmentalism as a mass movement.
Similarly, the 1900s began with the first ever multilateral agreement to save species from extinction—a one-year moratorium on sea otter and fur seal hunting that, like so many treaties today, was more impressive on paper than in practice. An informed observer from that time would be surprised to learn that many species that seemed doomed to extinction have instead survived through dedicated human efforts on their behalf. We have the twentieth-century conservationist to thank for the continuing presence, however tenuous, of a long list of species including the plains buffalo, café marron tree, Amur tiger, California condor, Montserrat orchid, blue whale, Saint Helena boxwood, mountain gorilla, the wild horse now known as the takhi,* several species of rhinoceros, the world’s smallest water lily, and, yes, the sea otter and fur seal.
During the last half of the past century, however, serious questions began to emerge about the kind of world conservationism was creating with its endless rearguard battles for the planet’s last patches of wilderness. In the 1960s, American biologists Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson began to study island biogeography, or the science of what lives on islands, and how and why they do so. The two determined that the size of an island and the number of species that live on it are correlated: all else being equal, bigger islands have more species and smaller islands have fewer. This “area effect” was first shown experimentally on small mangrove hummocks off the Atlantic coast of Florida, but later research showed that the phenomenon could also be landlocked—parks, for example, are often islands of wild surrounded by countryside that has been totally converted to human uses. In 1995, biologist William Newmark showed that the number of species in each national park in western North America declines in an almost perfect line according to its size. Almost every protected area Newmark surveyed, among them such globally celebrated wildernesses as Banff and Yosemite, has lost not only small and little-known species, but large mammals ranging from caribou to wolves. The world’s original national park, Yellowstone, lost its grey wolves in the 1930s, resulting in a cascade of effects. Elk and other grazing and browsing animals boomed, until no young willow or aspen trees were surviving to replace the old ones; the number of large willow and aspen eventually declined by 95 percent. Competition for saplings also drove down the population of beavers, and with them went the rich aquatic habitats they create with their dams. Beginning in 1995, wolves captured in Canada were released in Yellowstone, which is now home to one hundred of the animals divided between ten packs, and the forests and beavers began to recover. Most if not all other parks have been similarly transformed in ways that cannot be reversed without hands-on intervention by human beings.
Some 60 percent of the planet’s terrestrial protected areas, meanwhile, are islands of green no more than ten square kilometres in size, amounting to parcels small enough to cross in half an hour on foot. Of those tiny parks, fully one-third cover one square kilometre or less, a span that even a tortoise could cover before lunchtime. In 1996, nature writer David Quammen warned that modern nature preserves could be compared to a Persian rug cut into pieces: the result is not a collection of small but complete rugs, but rather a scattering of tattered fragments.
Conservationism is not dead. Even in its iteration as a protector of last-chance landscapes and endangered species, conservation still has urgent goals to meet. The idea is also evolving: proposals now exist on every continent but Antarctica to reduce the island effect by creating corridors of wild land between parks, preserving spaces large enough for even the farthest-roaming species. Examples include the Yellowstone to Yukon project, which would stretch 3,200 kilometres up the Rocky Mountains from Wyoming to the Yukon Territory; the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, which would connect and expand protected areas along five
hundred kilometres of border country between South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique; and the European Green Belt, which would turn the former no-man’s-lands of the Soviet-era Iron Curtain—a human exclusion zone that became an unanticipated refuge for wildlife—into a continent-spanning network of nature reserves.
But conservation is not and has never been enough. Its most fatal flaw, perhaps, has been to encourage the separation of people from nature: parks here, humans there, and there, and there. To date, none of the continental-scale conservation campaigns can be said to be a success; as the fraction of the earth set aside for the preservation of non-human life approaches 15 percent and bumps up against growing global populations and material wants, resistance to human exclusion will only increase. The struggle to live with a wilder nature is sure to continue, but it won’t resemble conservationism as we’ve known it. It will be different enough that it only seems fair to call it by another name. Ours will be an age of rewilding.
The quickest criticism of ecological restoration is that it is a nostalgic science, as foolishly romantic a notion as any other form of time travel. It’s true that we can’t live with nature today in the same way we did on a planet loosely peopled by hunter-gatherers. It is likewise hopeless to want to roll back the clock on every introduced plant and animal, returning each to its native continent. Picture the scale of the task just on Ascension Island, a British territory in the South Atlantic west of Africa, where 83 percent of the known plants are introduced species. Or, for that matter, Canada, where nearly a quarter of plant species have arrived in the past five hundred years. For the state of New York, the figure approaches one-third. In New Zealand, more than six hundred new plants arrived in a single fifty-year period in the nineteenth century, introduced species were once encouraged on the landscape by “acclimatization societies,” and thirty-one species of mammal—all of the islands’ furbearing creatures save for seals and bats—are non-native.
But it’s also true that nature is not historical in the way that cultural artifacts can be. An elephant is not a horse-and-buggy, made obsolete by technological progress. A hermit crab is not a rotary telephone. A rainforest is not a fashion that can be left behind by new tastes or ideas. Every species still in existence is exactly as contemporary as you or I, and nature’s potential—its capacity to sustain abundance and variety—remains unchanged. It is this potential, rather than some replica of the past, that awaits restoration. Nature is still with us, constantly available. We need only to remember, reconnect and rewild: to remember what nature can be; reconnect with it as something meaningful in our lives; and start to remake a wilder world.
In a very few places, it really is possible to revisit something like the prehuman past, and the rarity of such opportunities is argument enough in their favour. A standout example is the Galápagos Islands, positioned directly on the Equator nearly a thousand kilometres off the west coast of South America. Most people are familiar with the Galápagos as the place that inspired the British naturalist Charles Darwin to develop his theory that species evolve through a process of natural selection. It’s easy to imagine that Darwin must have had his great insight in some pristine sanctuary, but no. The islands were among the last places on earth to be discovered by human beings, but that discovery had taken place in 1535. Darwin arrived exactly three hundred years later.
The Galápagos are, however, notable as one of the few corners on the globe where the landscape as seen by the earliest human visitors was actually recorded in writing. What captured these observers’ attention was the same creature that fascinates us today: gigantic tortoises, or in the Spanish of the times, galápagos. The lumbering reptiles dominated the archipelago—even islets too small to have permanent sources of fresh water were crowded with the beasts. “We lay here feeding sometimes on land-turtle, sometimes on sea-turtle, there being plenty of either sort,” said the adventurer and buccaneer William Dampier, who in 1684 wrote the first detailed report on the tortoises, “but the land-turtle, as they exceed in sweetness, so do they in number; it is incredible to report how numerous they are.” There were so many that even after a century of butchery by pirates, whalers, explorers, navy men and other sailors, ships were still stopping in to bring as many as eight or nine hundred tortoises aboard as fresh meat for their long, slow voyages.
The scale of such historical slaughters shocks us today, but until the advent of canned goods and refrigeration, tortoises were a miracle food. Not only did they contain flesh so vitamin rich that it prevented scurvy, but also large amounts of fat, which could be spread like butter or, when heated, was said to be as light and flavourful as olive oil. The meat was apparently delicious—“after once tasting the Galápagos tortoises, every other animal food fell greatly in our estimation,” wrote one visiting sea captain—and it was always fresh; the tortoises could be stacked like barrels and kept alive without food or water, in some cases surviving for more than a year. In the first weeks after capture, tortoises were even a source of fresh water themselves, which could be drained from their bladders, though it was said that the best came from the membrane that enclosed their hearts.
Early accounts of the tortoises are by no means limited to thoughtless killing and cruelty. Sailors came to know the creatures well, and many admired them. The animals’ strength was legendary: large males were commonly more than a metre in length, width and height, and weighed nearly two hundred kilograms; one observer described how a tortoise carried two men on its back “and never regarded the weight.” Even Darwin gave in to the urge to ride them.
Worldly men admitted feeling fear when they first encountered a truly huge tortoise, while others remarked on their intelligence—on board ships they were easily trained to come when called or to stay in some parts of the boat and not others. Even an apparent capacity for joy was not overlooked—the beasts reportedly showed unmistakable delight in a cool rain shower or visit to a mud wallow. Above all, the tortoises were—and are—a mystery. No one has yet explained exactly how a breeding population ended up on an incredibly remote jumble of volcanic islands that boiled straight up from the South Pacific sea floor and have never been linked by any land bridge to the mainland. The best available answer simply relies on the fact that tortoises live a long time—the first to arrive could have waited a century for a mate—and that while they swim poorly or not at all, they do float. The latter fact was discovered when ship crews that had visited the Galápagos Islands threw their tortoises overboard to clear the decks in preparation for battle; one American navy captain found fifty tortoises floating around his vessel the morning after a skirmish.*
However they managed it, genetic research indicates that large tortoises were present on the Galápagos archipelago for more than a million years before their first encounter with human beings. By the time Darwin stopped in aboard the curiously named HMS Beagle, it was already too late to return the Galapágos to their exact prehuman state. Goats, cattle, pigs, dogs, rats and a handful of other animals, as well as some two dozen plants, had already been introduced to the islands, and several unique species of rodent were probably already extinct, along with two of the islands’ distinct races of giant tortoise. Darwin himself ate tortoise meat, even noting flavour differences between the subspecies, though his palate doesn’t appear to have kindled his thoughts on natural selection. These were inspired first by the islands’ four species of mockingbirds, which he concluded must have descended from a single ancestral species; the much richer variety of tortoises played only a supporting role in developing his theory. He recalled that each subspecies had a different shape of shell. The largest of the islands—boot-shaped Isabela—was home to five types of tortoise, most of which foraged at ground level and had simple, dome-shaped shells. On drier islands, the tortoises had a saddle-shaped rise in the forward edge of the carapace, allowing them to stretch their necks high to feed on cactus pads. It was as though in the Galápagos some higher power had created a natural laboratory in which to reveal the theory of evolution.
Ironically enough, in the years after Darwin’s visit, the Galápagos rapidly underwent evolution in reverse. Oil hunters began to kill tortoises for nothing but their fat, leaving the flesh to rot, while collectors of rare species swooped in to hunt down the survivors. Darwin had noted that feral pigs and goats seemed to be everywhere, and these invaders rapidly began stripping the islands’ unique ecosystem to its skeleton. The Galápagos tortoises were finally protected in the early twentieth century, and populations rebuilt in part through captive breeding programs around the world; today, giant tortoises in the islands are approaching 10 percent of historical numbers. Traditional conservation—protecting the tortoises and setting aside their habitat—was not enough, however, to bolster anything like a full recovery for the animals. On Isabela, for example, the lush subtropical forest on which the tortoises thrived did not come back; new growth was being mown down by introduced livestock, especially goats. First domesticated in the highlands of western Iran, goats are famously able to eat almost anything and can survive on drought rations of water. By the end of the twentieth century, the goat population on the Galápagos Islands had swelled into the hundreds of thousands. The tortoises could not compete. The islands required rewilding.
The Once and Future World Page 14