Where the wild things are

by Martin Oliver August 24, 2015

Human impact is being felt across the vast majority of the planet. Natural ecosystems have been disturbed or destroyed to make way for human settlements, industry, mines, plantations and, in particular, agriculture. Much biodiversity has been lost. Right now, we are in the midst of what is called by some the “Sixth Great Extinction”, the first of its kind to be driven by human activities. Unlike the scientific community, most of us are unaware of this because we are rarely informed by a media that is preoccupied by more trivial concerns and which operates on a daily news cycle.

Beyond natural islands

A couple of centuries ago, humanity began to acknowledge the importance of natural habitat and how difficult it is to replace. The world’s oldest national park, established in 1783, is Bogd Khan Uul, a mountain overlooking the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar.

In the late 19th century, the idea of setting aside special places for protection really took root. The Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming was created in 1872, to be quickly followed in Australia and then other countries.

Recently, with advances in the understanding of ecology, data has emerged to indicate that many protected areas are too small to prevent biodiversity loss. Reduced genetic variability leads to a corresponding lack of resilience across a population because breeding with relatives causes genetic anomalies.

Where an intact area of habitat is further split up into a number of small, separate, protected areas, this is known as “islandisation”. Deficiencies in the ecological value of these fragments have been confirmed by recent findings in the discipline of island biogeography, started in the 1960s by ecologists Robert Macarthur and EO Wilson.

The ideal solution seems to be the protection or restoration of large, functioning ecosystems, with larger wilderness areas as the starting point. In the US, these are generally defined as being roadless and at least 5000 acres (2000ha) in size.

A new model

In 1990, the term “rewilding” was coined by Dave Foreman, founder of the American direct action environment group Earth First!, and was later developed by conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss during the 1990s. Soulé lived in the chaparral outside San Diego, which was becoming fragmented into “islands” by development. His eureka moment came when he discovered that bird populations were higher in islands where coyotes were present; he concluded that coyotes were deterring the domestic cat, a major bird predator.

Today, rewilding has a growing scientific basis from which to make conservation decisions. In its simplest form, it can be summarised as the “three Cs”: cores (reserves), corridors and carnivores.

Where larger reserves are connected up via corridors, this allows animals to make long-distance migrations. The Wildlands Network, based in the US, envisages a network of “wildways” connecting Canada, the US and Mexico that serve as broad channels for wildlife movement. It is anticipated that these would bypass human settlements and safely traverse roads through under- or overpasses. Where these reserves or migratory paths cross national borders, international cooperation is obviously necessary.

For areas with major animal migrations, one of the worst outcomes is for the ecological unit to be broken up by roads or fences. In one publicised case, Tanzania’s plan to build a road crossing the northern Serengeti plain has been put on hold due to international protests.

The importance of predators

Apex predators are large carnivores that as adults have no natural predators of their own. They are of pivotal importance in an ecosystem and tend to require a lot of space in which to roam. At a human philosophical level, their presence makes wilderness a wild place; without them it can feel tame.

An important ecological concept here is the trophic cascade, an ecological pattern where predators reduce the numbers of their prey or restrict their behaviour. Browsing prey animals are more likely to avoid the areas where predators lurk, causing the natural environment to become regenerated in these zones. An ecosystem from which these predators have been removed quickly becomes disordered.

In Yellowstone National Park, wolves were introduced in 1995 after a 70-year absence, causing the condition of the whole park to improve. Elk had been overgrazing and their numbers were reduced by predation, but more importantly they began to avoid the valley bottoms and open meadows where they were most at risk. Vegetation growth took off in these areas, leading to the development of aspen forests. Birds arrived, and beavers, whose dams provided many ecosystem niches.

Where browsing species are in excess numbers and predators are lacking or absent, a limited degree of hunting can balance the ecosystem, but this is a controversial issue that arouses some opposition.

Also important in ecosystems are keystone species, animals that exert a strong influence on their environment while maintaining ecological balance. One example is the elephant, which pushes over trees and prevents them from taking over the plains. Beavers dam rivers, which in turn creates aquatic habitats that support a wide range of biodiversity.

Aldo Leopold, the celebrated early 20th-century American conservationist, was one of the first people to think along these whole-ecosystem lines. His 1949 book A Sand County Almanac, 50 years ahead of its time, conveyed rewilding-orientated ideas emphasising the role of predators. Leopold was also an early exponent of deep ecology, the philosophy that nature should have a place to exist in a human-dominated world.

Rewilding across the globe

A few years ago, American author and journalist Caroline Fraser travelled to distant corners of the world to get an eyewitness view of some inspiring rewilding projects, described in her critically praised 2009 book Rewilding the World.

Such initiatives offer a wide range of benefits. Biodiversity is protected and even increased and the public can access spectacular tracts of land that were formerly privately owned. Tourism thrives and can provide a long-term boost to the regional economy with a negligible impact on the natural environment.

Wild nature is colonising surprising places. Wolf numbers are steadily increasing in Western Europe, while in Eastern Europe nearly every country is experiencing negative human population growth. In the eastern part of the US, forest cover has increased as farming and logging have gone into retreat.

In Europe, land is being abandoned due to young people’s rejection en masse of a peasant lifestyle characterised by isolation, hard work and a low income; instead they are moving to the cities. In Portugal alone, this syndrome affects about two million hectares of farmland.

Rewilding Europe is working towards the goal of buying up one million hectares of this unused land as a home for species such as the lynx, wild boar, bison, bear and beaver. Its loan arm, Rewilding Europe Capital, is issuing modest loans to facilitate the establishment of nature projects across the continent.

The border between the former Western and Eastern Blocs was formerly closed to public access and its rare insects preserved via a ban on pesticide spraying. Today, it is home to a number of high-biodiversity areas, including the strip dividing Finland and Russia and where Germany was split into West and East. On a map, this line, known as the European Green Belt, follows a roughly north-south axis. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a grassroots nature conservation vision for the Belt has been slowly evolving and has recently been signed off by Russia, Finland and Norway.

North America is home to the northern Rocky Mountains, the world’s last intact mountain ecosystem of its size. This has inspired the US-Canada partnership known as the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, often shortened to Y2Y. One obvious challenge is the vast scale of a migration route stretching over 2000 miles (3200km). The original idea dates back to 1993 and Y2Y, which began in 1997, is working to a long implementation timescale.

Further south, a group known as the American Prairie Foundation has a vision of restoring the prairie of north-eastern Montana, to the north of the Missouri River. It hopes to recreate the wildlife-filled landscape that was observed by transcontinental explorers Lewis and Clark in 1805. Its vision is to create the largest wildlife reserve in the continental US, with a mixture of deeded and leased land. Bison and pronghorn antelopes have already been reintroduced.

In southern Africa, the Peace Parks Foundation oversees 10 projects in a range of countries including South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia and Botswana. Some of these cross national borders and, in the case of one trans-frontier park known as Kgalagadi, where South Africa meets Botswana, the border has been removed, resulting in a unified park featuring species such as lions, gemsbok antelopes, bat-eared foxes and honey badgers.

Rewilding in Australia

While New Zealand appears not to be planning any rewilding initiatives, the sheer size of Australia provides scope for long corridors.

One project, known as the Great Eastern Ranges corridor (formerly Alps to Atherton), stretches for 3600km down the east coast of Australia, from the Victorian Alps to Far North Queensland. Such a corridor would involve linking up existing state forests and national parks and would serve as an important lifeline for species affected by climate change that would otherwise have nowhere left to go.

Challenges faced by this ambitious undertaking include the anti-environment orientation of the three conservative state governments through which it passes: Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Queensland has signalled an interest in de-gazetting some protected areas and has even carried out logging within the Bunya Mountains National Park. Both Queensland and Victoria have opened up their national parks to development and increased recreation and have recently permitted grazing in these areas. Coal-seam gas mining represents a further threat.

Australia’s southwest corner is one of the world’s major biodiversity hotspots but will be facing challenges in future decades, including falling levels of rain due to climate change. Gondwana Link is another corridor running roughly west-east between the Margaret River area and the Great Sandy Desert. It takes in tall, wet karri forests, mallee and the Great Western Woodlands bordering the Nullarbor Plain.

Since the project began in 2002, Gondwana Link organisers have successfully secured 900km of intact habitat along a 1000km stretch, often through purchasing abandoned farmland. Western Australia’s wheatbelt is suffering from land degradation and salinisation; to reverse this trend, it has been estimated that 30–40 per cent of all agricultural land needs to be covered with perennial woody vegetation.

Megalania is the name of a giant goanna that disappeared from Australia about 40,000 years ago. One controversial suggestion is to fill this ecological niche by introducing the komodo dragon, a giant lizard found on a few Indonesian islands. It would have the benefit of controlling populations of feral pigs (concentrated towards the northeast of Australia) and buffalo (in the Top End of the Northern Territory.)

Thinking wild

For these initiatives to be successful, it is necessary to evolve beyond the idea frequently held by farmers that wild animals, particular carnivores, are the enemy. Such an attitude nearly wiped out the wolf from the lower US. Today, in both the US and Europe, those farmers who lose livestock to wolves are eligible for compensation, although proving that a wolf was responsible is sometimes difficult. In some parts of Europe, anti-wolf sentiment runs fairly strong.

Many predator species rarely attack humans but are frequently killed anyway; one example is the leopard in South America. A vital aspect of rewilding is for human populations to find ways to coexist with predators and environmental education is an important dimension to this.

Rewilding is not just a philosophy. It is being gradually implemented across the world, with success in one place serving as a role model elsewhere. For its supporters, it represents the decisive course of action required to reverse the extinction crisis.