REWILDING

“The wilderness that has come to us from the eternity of the past we have the boldness to project into the eternity of the future.”
—Howard Zahniser,
author of the 1964 Wilderness Act.

When veteran environmental activist and founder of Earth First! Dave Foreman looks into the future, he sees a wild and green North America. A continent where grizzly bears, wolves and mountain lions roam free, where native plants and insects flourish.
It’s an outrageous vision.
Absurd.

I mean, the outlook isn’t pretty. Any serious biologist will tell you we’re entering the sixth great extinction in Earth’s history, one uniquely wrought by the eating, manufacturing, traveling, warring, consuming and breeding of six billion of us. In 2003, Edward O. Wilson wrote in The Future of Life that at current consumption rates, half the planet’s remaining species will be gone by mid-century. But Foreman is inspired by a radical take on conservationism: rewilding. Modern humans, he wrote in his 2004 book, Rewilding North America, are “the most important generation of human beings who have ever lived because we’re determining the future, not just for a hundred years, but for a billion years.” Rewilding is a blueprint for making that future a green one.

The concept was first developed in the early nineties by conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss. Alarmed by the current extinction crisis, they began to ask why North America’s extensive parks and protected wilderness areas had failed to save native species. They found the answer in a relatively new branch of science called island biogeography. While North America had some of the largest protected wilderness areas in the world, most, they found, were “islands of ecological integrity surrounded by human-dominated lands.” Animals in these wildernesses – like animals on islands at sea – faced shrinking gene pools and changing habitats, and no way to migrate or intermingle with other subspecies in order to adapt. Rewilding takes traditional conservationism to a new level.

Protecting museum pieces of scenery and pockets of key species isn’t enough. Saving the biodiversity of a continent requires not only conserving what’s left, but restoring huge swaths of the land back to its original state. To borrow one writer’s interpretation, a Noah’s Ark for the twenty-first century. Foreman’s book takes that vision and sets out a practical plan for putting it into practice. At its core is the North American Wildlands Network, a web of four continent-scale wilderness corridors: the Pacific MegaLinkage, extending from Baja California to Alaska; the Spine of the Continent MegaLinkage, from Central America north along the Rockies to Alaska; the Atlantic MegaLinkage, from Florida north along the Appalachians to New Brunswick; and the Arctic-Boreal MegaLinkage, which would cross the north of the continent from Alaska to the Canadian Maritimes. At the core of each MegaLinkage would be an archipelago of already-existing parks and wilderness areas. The Spine of the Continent MegaLinkage, for example, would see Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks connected with Canada’s Banff and Jasper National Parks to create one large corridor over which animals can freely roam. Connecting these core areas requires creating a network of permeable land: landscaped under- and over- passes for animals to cross roadways, unfenced private land, and shared recreation corridors.

Obviously, this won’t be easy on a continent permeated with human development. But even trickier may be the Wildlands Network commitment to reintroducing large carnivores like grizzly bears, wolves and mountain lions – animals traditionally exterminated as threats to humans and livestock. The map of the Wildlands Network is in fact, based on their natural habitat. The idea – called top-down ecology – being that if these fragile, far-roaming species are healthy and reproducing, then the rest of the ecosystem will be too. But rewilding goes beyond just protecting wilderness. It may be a last chance to save our souls.

“Wilderness and wildlife, both as natural realities and as philosophical ideas, are fundamentally about human humility and restraint,” writes Foreman. “It is only by rewilding and healing the ecological wounds of the land that we can learn humility and respect.” Giving the land back to the wild would mean re-learning a seemingly long-forgotten lesson: that humans are only a small part of a bigger whole.

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Reprinted with permission from Adbusters.org

Also for more information on Rewilding projects in Australia, check out the Wilderness Society's Wild Country campaign.