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Where Wild Things Were FEATURE WHERE THEWILD The recent NatureTH paper INGS proposing to bring cheetahs, lions, and elephants to North America raised a wild rumpus. But are the critics missing the point? WERE by William Stolzenburg 28 Conservation In Practice • Vol. 7 No. 1 | January-March 2006 Illustration by Carl Buell Vol. 7 No. 1 | January-March 2006 • Conservation In Practice 29 HE CONJURED IMAGES were sur- nent already plundered of its greatest beasts. real, lions prowling Nebraska Why not raise the standard, to that more glori- corn fields, elephants stomping ous and decisive moment some 13,000 years across North Dakota. From ago, when people first set foot in North there the visions grew frightful, America? It was a profoundly optimistic invita- Texotic and dangerous beasts swarming the Great tion—to elevate the very goal of conservation— Plains, slaughtering livestock, spreading disease, that somehow got muffled amid a chorus of ruining rural livelihoods as far abroad as Africa. scorn. Maybe it was all just a misunderstand- When, last August, a group of 12 conservation- ing arising from the little paper’s herculean task minded scientists and scholars aired a provoca- of explaining such a giant vision in so few words. tive proposal in the prestigious journal Nature Maybe the authors—who do indeed see a (1), the journalists who reported it and the col- need for elephants and lions one day to wander leagues who publicly pummeled it couldn’t help the plains of North America—had simply lost letting their imaginations run wild. Which was their marbles. Or could it be that the would-be at least part of the idea. rewilders—in so nakedly challenging the status Under the audacious heading “Re-wilding quo of conservation—had unveiled a flaw too North America,” the paper’s authors—among fearsome to face? them some heavyweights in the field of conser- vation biology—called for restoring “large wild HATEVER THE REASON, no one could vertebrates into North America,” meaning those say the rewilders hadn’t offered fair that disappeared at the end of the last ice age. Wwarning. The idea of restoring In the two pithy pages that followed, those large America’s fauna to something more closely re- wild vertebrates were spelled out in the more- sembling prehuman times—when sabertooths familiar terms of camels, horses, tortoises, and— prowled and mammoths thundered through as if to make sure no one was nodding off in an places that would later be called Los Angeles armchair—cheetahs, lions, and elephants. Yes, and Newark—has a far deeper history than its in the United States. For real. latest splash in Nature. Paul S. Martin, a coau- The paper was partly meant to jostle a con- thor of the rewilding paper and an outspoken servation community suspected of falling asleep paleoecologist from the University of Arizona, at the wheel. At that it succeeded. In the first has been unabashedly promoting such Pleis- week following publication, the two lead au- tocene visions in print and in public lectures thors received more than 1,000 letters and for 40 years. Even as the Nature bombshell was phone calls from three continents. They saw hitting the streets, a book-length version of their proposal aired on network TV and dis- the rewilding proposal was quietly headed to cussed in national newspapers and magazines. press in Martin’s magnum opus, Twilight of the Some of the comments were congratulatory, a Mammoths (2). good many of them were disparaging, a hand- Twilight is the autobiographical odyssey of ful of them were downright hateful. Martin’s renowned “overkill” hypothesis, which But too few of the naysayers, to the authors’ lays the brunt of the blame for the late Pleis- disappointment, offered much beyond wet- tocene extinction—the abrupt disappearance of blanket dismissals. None seemed willing to ven- some 40 species of horses and camels, ture near the soul of their proposal. In their glyptodons and ground sloths, lions and bears, paper they had politely pointed out that the mammoths and mastodons—in the spear- 1492 arrival of Columbus—long considered wielding hands of North America’s first big- North America’s standard of ecological excel- game hunters, the Clovis culture. Infused lence—was in fact the “discovery” of a conti- throughout with Martin’s admiration for 30 Conservation In Practice • Vol. 7 No. 1 | January-March 2006 The journalists who reported on the paper and the colleagues who pummeled it couldn’t help letting their imaginations run wild. Which was at least part of the idea. America’s missing megafauna, Twilight’s con- namics, invasive species, grassland ecology, the cluding chapters are dedicated to their return. politics of conservation. Among them, of course, “I believe it is time to take an approach that was the chief messenger of overkill, Paul Mar- includes not only creatures traditionally con- tin. There, too, was Michael Soulé, one of the sidered ‘at home on the range’ but also some of spearheads of the modern discipline of conser- those not seen roaming the Americas by any vation biology; marine ecologist James Estes, humans since the Clovis people,” writes Mar- whose unveiling of the sea otter as a key archi- tin. “The Bering Land Bridge should not be tect of Pacific kelp forests had become one of shut down forever in the interest of imagined the classic studies in ecology; and Dave Fore- faunal purity.” man, former congressional lobbyist and founder of the Rewilding Institute, a think tank for re- OT EVERYONE HEARD heresy in Martin’s storing large carnivores to vacant niches of Pleistocene preachings. In a 2004 is- North America. Nsue of Conservation Biology, Martin In September 2004, they gathered for a and Cornell doctoral candidate Josh Donlan long weekend at Ted Turner’s Ladder Ranch in published a paper called “Role of ecological his- the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. Over tory in invasive species management and con- easels and PowerPoint and after-hours beers, servation” (3). In it they prodded their col- they dissected the rewilding idea and broke it leagues to rethink more seriously the pristine down to its factual nuts and bolts, its practical myth of 1492. Their paper was peppered with challenges and criticisms, its societal costs and Pleistocene ambitions: “In the process of return- benefits. ing the California condor . to the Grand Can- The Ladder group agreed on several sober- yon, should we also return the kinds of animals ing premises: That human influence had utterly the bird once fed on: equids, camelids, moun- pervaded the planet. That what qualifies for tain goats, and proboscideans?” wildness today is a paltry façade of the awesome Donlan’s advisor at Cornell was the evolu- Pleistocene bestiary we stumbled upon only tionary biologist Harry Greene, by coincidence 13,000 years ago. That the difference between a friend and kindred spirit of Martin. Greene then and now is at least partly, if not princi- and Donlan often found themselves wonder- pally, our own doing and therefore our duty to ing about rewilding and how such a seemingly repair. legitimate goal for conservation had apparently gone nowhere. “Most people dismissed it as sil- EGARDLESS OF WHO or what was to liness,” says Greene. “The more we talked about blame, they concluded that the large it, Josh and I decided it’s not silly. Let’s put to- R animals’ absence was to be ignored at gether a working group. Let’s thrash it out.” great peril. Forests, grasslands, and savannas had The two assembled an eclectic team of evolved in step with the Pleistocene megafauna. twelve—experts in paleoecology, large mam- Their soils had been turned by trampling mals, community ecology, predator-prey dy- hooves, their seeds widely ferried and judiciously Vol. 7 No. 1 | January-March 2006 • Conservation In Practice 31 fertilized in herbivore dung. All but the very meted in stepwise fashion. From there, the eco- biggest of those herbivores had in turn been logical cascade rumbled all the way to the bot- shaped in body and habit by their large preda- tom of the sea. As sea otters disappeared, their tors. Were there no repercussions for such whole- prey proliferated. Sea urchins marched en masse, sale megafaunal erasure? Reports from the field mowing down coastal kelp forests across the were already suggesting the feared answer. Aleutians and reducing one of the Bering Sea’s There was northern Siberia, where about most productive ecosystems to barrens. 10,000 years ago 1 million km2 of vibrant grass- The megafauna’s most shining endorse- lands had suddenly vanished. They had been ment is now on public display in the dramatic replaced by infertile mossy tundra—a transfor- greening of Yellowstone National Park under Are there no repercussions for wholesale megafaunal erasure? mation that ecologist Sergey Zimov attributes the reinstated reign of the gray wolf. For 70 to the disappearance of a great menagerie of years following the wolf’s extermination from Pleistocene grazers. Zimov and colleagues argue the park, Yellowstone’s oases of aspens, cotton- that the grassy Siberian steppe that once fed woods, and willows had been browsed to stubs musk oxen, mammoths, and wild horses was by the world’s largest herd of elk. Within five fed in return by the megafauna. (4) Their ma- years of the wolves’ return in 1995, the elk were nure fertilized the grasses, and their hooves running scared and willows were sprouting three trampled the competing mosses. meters high. With the willows’ return, the bea- The legacy of the missing mammoths may ver followed—from one colony before wolf re- run deeper still, to the frozen ground.
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