The Once and Future World

by J. B. MacKinnon

  Project Isabela, at the time the most ambitious island restoration ever, began in 1998 with a straightforward goal: to kill the goats. There was no international publicity campaign, no calendar featuring the charismatic tortoises that would be helped. According to Josh Donlan, an American biologist who was the chief scientist on the $3 million project, eliminating the island’s goats demanded “sophisticated funders” who could accept the idea of “killing stuff for conservation.”

  First, 500,000 rounds of ammunition were imported from the United States. Aerial sharpshooters in helicopters eventually put in the equivalent of fifty full days and nights of flying time, killing an average of fifty goats per hour. Mop-up involved hunting dogs, ground troops and “super Judas goats”—sterilized, radio-tagged females that had been drugged into permanent ovulation in order to reel in any surviving billy goats and their herds. By the end of the blitz, the average density of carcasses left behind was fifteen per square kilometre, and the goat population had dropped by more than 99 percent. The meat fed only scavengers and the soil; Project Isabela’s leadership had decided that using the goats as a food source for the island’s small human population would only encourage people to reintroduce the animals after the massacre.

  Goats have been eradicated from at least 120 islands worldwide, and they are not the only targets. Project Isabela also killed 1,200 donkeys. In 2012, twenty-two tonnes of poisoned rat bait was dumped on a pair of Galápagos islands—an unusually large, but otherwise common, campaign to wipe out invasive rats. “Conservationists are turning poisoners,” read a headline in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. On many islands the most damaging introduced species include rabbits and even Felis catus—house cats. Clearly, rewilding will make new and controversial demands on the way we see the world.

  With goats no longer grazing, Isabela’s giant tortoises are once again megafauna, free to do what they did for thousands of millennia: browse foliage, eat and excrete seeds, churn soil. Around them a new landscape, not the same as the one they knew five hundred years ago but surely familiar, right-seeming to a tortoise, is rising. The great beasts can once again take pleasure in a shady waterhole.

  On the opposite end of the spectrum are those places on earth that have, in essence, never known a form of nature without human beings. This may strike you as impossible: even Africa, where our earliest ancestors evolved several million years ago, was once home to nothing but non-human life. But there are much more recent examples.

  At the end of the last ice age, almost all of Canada and the northern United States, as well as northwestern Europe and Asia, was covered with thick glaciers. By then, human beings with the same mental capacities as our own had been present in Europe south of the ice sheets for thousands of years. In North America, whether the first people arrived on a land bridge from Asia and descended an ice-free corridor in the middle of the continent or sailed down the Pacific Coast, or both, the story is much the same: human beings were witnesses as new land was revealed by the retreating glaciers. In fact, that time appears to be remembered. Many indigenous cultures’ origin stories describe landscapes that started out grey, rocky and largely lifeless. An account of the Tlingit people in northern British Columbia and Alaska is especially vivid, describing a journey by canoe down a river that had tunnelled between towering sheets of ice. The passage would have taken as much courage as any ocean exploration in the age of sail or space-race flight into orbit.

  In much of northern Europe, Asia and North America, then, it seems certain that people moved onto the landscape almost from the moment it became habitable, and remained there as our modern ecosystems developed. One such case is in the Rocky Mountains in what is today Banff National Park in Alberta. Banff is the third oldest national park in the world, established in 1885. In the year 2000, Canada’s National Parks Act made “ecological integrity” the number one priority within the country’s parks. Those words have the quietly revolutionary effect of putting nature first, at least in theory; in the U.S. parks system, for comparison, conservation and “human enjoyment” are officially on equal footing. With the shift to a focus on ecological integrity, staff in every park across Canada suddenly had a mission to determine what is “characteristic of its natural region.”

  There was only one place to go looking, and that was the past. In Banff, researchers combed through more than two hundred archaeological studies, five hundred historical photographs and every first-person explorer’s account up to 1872, looking for glimpses into what the Rocky Mountains were like before the fur trade, the railway, the highway, the suburbs, the cellphone towers and all the other accumulated impacts of modernity. What they found was surprising. Twenty-first-century Banff was synonymous with elk—the herds were everywhere, giving visitors exactly the wild plenitude they hoped for from a national park. The research, however, showed that elk were not the most common herbivore in older times. That position was held by bighorn sheep, which were still present in the park, followed by plains bison, which were not. Banff without buffalo was not a “characteristic” state of nature.

  At the time of Banff’s founding, the last bison were being slaughtered on the Canadian Prairies—in the end, not a single plains bison remained alive in the wild in Canada, and just twenty-three survived in the U.S.* As a wild animal, as opposed to the buffalo living on ranches and therefore influenced by domestication and inbreeding with cattle, bison have been slow to bounce back. Wild plains bison now number about 20,500 continent-wide, a figure that has barely budged since the 1930s, and they roam a fraction of 1 percent of their former range.

  Where they stand tall is in myth and memory. Walk through the Banff townsite and you’ll see bison everywhere, from the stuffed heads in the museums off Buffalo Street to the bison carpaccio served at the Bison Restaurant in the Bison Courtyard. And though Banff lost its wild bison more than a century ago, the park has maintained a special relationship with the species. Beginning in 1898, Banff was home to a fenced pasture that came to be known as the Buffalo Paddock. Established to give a home to three critically endangered wild buffalo originally from Texas, the pen later housed a mishmash of the last animals salvaged from across North America. Only in the late 1990s was the Buffalo Paddock taken down and the bison auctioned off to new owners—though not before one lone bull had escaped and survived through a winter, helping to show that wild buffalo could live year-round in the park without being fed or cared for by people.

  In a sense, bison have been gone from Banff barely more than a decade, which might help explain why opposition to a plan to restore them has been muted. Hoofs could hit the ground before the end of 2013, but the project has never stirred the kind of divisive debate that surrounds the animals in Yellowstone National Park, the species’ greatest redoubt in the United States. There, public opinion tends to fragment along two lines: the human versus the wild. Inside Yellowstone, bison are a much-loved symbol of the wilderness; when they wander outside the park boundary, they are treated as a potential vector to spread disease to cattle. The buffalo kills that control the Yellowstone herds when they leave the park—in some years, more than a thousand bison are shot or slaughtered—play out at times like skirmish warfare, with government agents cloaked in secrecy while animal-rights activists run guerrilla interference.

  “Yellowstone is still caught up in this idea of what is natural,” says Cliff White, a former Banff park warden who is now a consultant and irrepressible advocate for bison restoration. “But you have these compromises you have to make because the modern landscape is not the landscape of ten thousand years ago.”

  In Yellowstone, despite being home to wolves, cougars and grizzly bears, bison are easily the most dangerous animal. Get gored by a bison, and you can end up with a wound as wide as a cleaver and deep as a chef’s knife, all while getting tossed so high in the air that many of the worst bison-attack injuries come from, as one medical researcher delicately puts it, “encountering sudden deceleration on impact with the ground.”* In Banff, even the
potential safety issues have not shaken the locals, and support for the bison reintroduction is widespread, even among ranchers. Most people who live and play in the park and along its boundaries have already come to accept that mountain living has its hazards. “Almost everyone here has had the bejesus scared out of them by grizzlies, but they still want them in the valley,” one lifetime resident told me. Bison, he said, will be “just another gnarly species in the environment.” The question of living with a wilder nature may have less to do with risks and challenges than with the degree to which people identify with the idea of wildness. Rewilding is a matter of nature, but also of culture. In Banff, people want bison; the presence of the animals fits with the locals’ understanding of themselves and the reasons they live where they do. One bison advocate described the restoration effort as “less an environmental campaign and more of a social movement.”

  That’s the simple telling of the Banff bison story—a classic tale of the wild despoiled by humankind, and an opportunity to heal the wounds. There’s another version, though, that asks us to go deeper in the relationship between man and beast. When the Banff researchers combed through the bone digs and explorers’ journals, they not only turned up definitive evidence of the past presence of buffalo, they also found that hoofed animals in general were nowhere near as numerous as they would have expected. The most likely explanation for this historical paucity of wildlife proved to be the abundance of one other species: Homo sapiens. In the centuries before Columbus discovered his New World, the iconic hanging valleys that run between Banff’s lofty peaks were effectively walled-in corridors for native hunters. Indigenous people not only hunted the region’s big mammals to low numbers, but also took steps to manage those populations, such as regularly burning the land to create better pasture. Having studied the layout of pit houses at some archaeological sites, White believes that native people may even have herded bison into the mountains from the plains, then blocked them into narrow canyons to be killed off as needed—a form of ranching long before the first cowboy.

  In other words, it’s possible that bison only established themselves in the Canadian Rockies because the mountains’ human inhabitants invited them to the party. On the other hand, it’s equally possible that the presence of people prevented bison from freely inhabiting the landscape and from spreading across the Rockies into eastern British Columbia and beyond. What is fair to say, at least, is that when it comes to Banff, Bison bison and Homo sapiens have been bound together for millennia.

  As a species, bison represent the human-animal relationship as well as any wild animal on earth. According to Valerius Geist, a specialist in ice-age mammals and professor emeritus with the University of Calgary, the buffalo as a species is in many ways a product of human influence. When people first arrived in the Americas, bison were giant, long-horned beasts that stood their ground against predators—easy pickings for hunters with spears and bows and arrows. To survive into our era, the animal evolved to be smaller, warier and fleeter of foot.

  Such realizations can be hard to stomach—the old ideal of wilderness as a place untouched by our hands has been one of the most treasured notions of the past 150 years, and helped put a stop to the genocidal scale of hunting in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that threatened the existence of every living thing large enough to shoot, trap or catch on a fish hook. Without the wilderness ideal, Banff might never have been founded.

  There are advantages, though, to seeing the line between the wild and human as blurry—it can make it an easier line to cross. If bison are brought back to Banff, the first herd will be human-manipulated in almost every way. They will be the descendants of another captive herd, and fences will limit their movements. Where the fences aren’t enough—“you can herd a bison anywhere it wants to go,” as the saying goes—a suite of other measures will have to be considered, ranging from hazing the herds on horseback to culling. If Canadians can learn to live with wild bison in Banff, White says, then they might be prepared to try doing so in other places, even outside of parks. The first Banff bison herd will number in the tens, but given time, White pictures them up and down the Canadian Rockies, and possibly beyond, onto the plains themselves. It will be the rewilding not only of a vanished species, but of something lost in ourselves. Only then might we finally be able to say that the wild plains bison has begun to recover.

  In 2010, workers restoring Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel discovered a beehive built into the stonework of the rooftop pinnacles. A beehive might seem ordinary enough, but there was a critical difference between the Rosslyn hive and most others: it was not designed to gather honey. Instead, it was apparently made simply to allow bees and churchgoers to live alongside one another, for reasons yet unknown. Though the hidden beehive had long been forgotten by its congregation, humans and bees have lived together at Rosslyn for more than five hundred years.

  Scientists acknowledge that much of what will surround us in the future will be “novel ecosystems”—new arrangements of species and natural systems. In places, historical context will have little relevance: former species will have been driven extinct, new species introduced, the landscape dramatically altered and even the climate significantly changed. Newness is a modern talisman, but in ecology it is not the most desirable condition. Another maxim: that which is old has proven itself, and that which is very old may contain wisdom. It’s anyone’s guess how untried forms of nature will function. Nonetheless, a majority of people on earth already live in novel environments: cities. And while many people in urban areas debate the consequences of issues like rainforest logging and species extinction, the ecological losses that occur when a city replaces a natural landscape are, in the words of University of Nevada conservation biologist Dennis Murphy, “well documented and inarguably immense.”

  The Rosslyn hive is an example of what we might call habitecture—the integration of habitat for other species into structures designed for human purposes. We live with habitecture all the time, though it’s almost always unintended. In a few cases—think barn swallows and barn owls—species turn out to adapt brilliantly to the things we build.* More typically, the animals among us are unwelcome stowaways, from skunks that hole up under backyard decks to pigeons that roost, ever so cannily, on anti-pigeon devices. With rare exceptions, wildlife-friendly structures continue to be accidental. Perhaps the greatest example is the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, where crowds gather every summer sunset to watch Mexican free-tailed bats burst forth from beneath the deck—“an umbrella is a good idea,” advises a local tourist guide. The bats chose Austin, not the other way around. In fact, the organization Bat Conservation International has roots in an early-1980s battle to persuade Austinites not to exterminate what has since become the world’s largest urban bat colony, with more than a million animals.

  Rosslyn’s hive represents the key principles that could make habitecture possible: it was designed to allow beasts and people to live separately but together, to keep the animals from destroying the structure, and to function without human interference. We might want to add a fourth principle: Rosslyn’s beehive happens to be beautiful, with the bees coming and going through holes in the centres of graven stone flowers. Britain, that island of eccentricity, is also home to other models of early habitecture. “Bee boles,” or niches built into outside walls to shelter honey-producing hives, may date back in human history as far as 2000 BC; nearly 1,500 are still known to exist, mainly unused, in the United Kingdom. Dovecotes, often built directly into the walls or gables of houses, including those of the wealthy, housed pigeons that were used for meat, eggs and messaging services. Pigeon droppings, which today infuriate condo dwellers and tattoo the foreheads of forgotten politicians immortalized in bronze, were prized as fertilizer. Beyond dovecotes there were deercotes, elaborate shelters for wild deer, while Culzean Castle in Scotland includes a house for wild ducks along with customized tidal pools. There’s even a temple for turtles that dates from the 1820s just
south of London.

  The most familiar modern habitecture is the birdhouse, though the concept has been extended. Today there are woodpecker houses, owl houses and tree duck houses, and also bat houses, butterfly houses and squirrel houses. England has hedgehog houses. The people of Poland traditionally revered the white stork and in the past mounted old cartwheels on their roofs as nesting platforms; today, ready-made stork kits are available. In a strangely heartening gesture, the official Polish government website refers to the country as a “stork superpower.”

  That habitecture has its limitations is clear. Many species, from the common loon to the Iberian lynx, share space with human beings reluctantly or not at all. Go ahead and construct a perfectly appointed wolverine den for the walls of your suburban rancher—if you build it, they will not come. No matter how inviting we make an urban landscape, it will not recreate a living world that is the equal to what was erased to make way for the city. We’re left with possibilities that are far from such ideals—visions of nature that are incomplete, engineered, regulated and in which our hands are muddy indeed. So why rewild the metropolis? Why not let cities and towns be wholly human places with whatever crows, rats and cockroaches are willing to eke out a living between the bright lights?

  The answer may be that wild animals and plants don’t need to live among us so much as we need to live among them. Many people understand this when it comes to the diversity of human beings: it’s one thing to ogle exotic tribespeople in a vintage copy of National Geographic, and quite another to live in a neighbourhood of Somali immigrants. Making daily contact with even one other culture deepens our ability to appreciate cultures as a whole. Yet the idea of putting out the welcome mat to other species remains a curiously radical concept, so much so that it is artists, not architects or city planners, who are leading the way.