Environment and Society. Paul Robbins

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1 Introduction The View from a Human-Made Wild

      Keywords

       Anthropocene

       Ecological novelty

       Political ecology

       Reconciliation ecology

       Rewilding

      Source: Tribune Content Agency LLC/Alamy Stock Photo.

      Chapter Menu

      What is This Book?

      The Authors’ Points of View

News headlines from forests, fields, rivers, and oceans suggest we are in a world of trouble. Storms ravage the coasts of Asia and the Americas, with more looming as sea levels slowly rise. Fresh water is increasingly scarce around the globe, owing not only to heavy water use but also widespread pollution; there is not a single drop of water in the Colorado River in the United States or the Rhone River in France that is not managed through complex dams and distribution systems, or affected by city and industrial waste along their paths to the sea. Agricultural soils are depleted from years of intensive cropping and from the ongoing application of fertilizers and pesticides in the search for ever-sustained increases of food and fiber; in North India, after decades of increasing production, yields of wheat and rice have hit a plateau. Global temperatures are on the rise and, with this increase, whole ecosystems are at risk. Species of plants and animals are vanishing from the Earth, never to return. Perhaps most profoundly, the world’s oceans – upon which these global systems rest – show signs of impending collapse. The accumulation of these acute problems has led observers to conclude that the environment may be irreversibly lost or that we may have reached “the end of nature” (McKibben 1990).

      And yet on Isle Royale, a nearly untouched wilderness located in the middle of Lake Superior, these complications only invite harder thinking about what, if anything, people must do to achieve and foster thriving ecosystems. Consider that Isle Royale, a 544-square-kilometer island near the coast of Ontario Canada, is the least-visited of all the National Parks in the lower 48 states of the United States, and is an officially designated wilderness area. Set aside as a natural experiment to see how predators and prey interact, the island is a fantastic scientific instrument to show what nature does when “untouched” by people. Wolves (Canis lupus) and moose (Alces alces) have been studied here for six decades, and the rise and fall of each population reveals the complex interactions between species in the wild.

      The nature of global change, however, leaves no part of the world truly beyond interactions with people. Isle Royale is no exception (Mlot 2013). First, a deadly disease accidentally arrived in the early 1980s, brought by domesticated dogs. Canine parvovirus (CPV), crossed over from human-domesticated animals to their wild relatives, and caused a crash in the wolf population from which it never fully recovered.

      Second, the winter ice-bridge that has historically existed between the island and the mainland has all but disappeared. This vital connection allowed wolves in search of prey to cross the ice, and support and diversify the local wolf population. As winters have warmed, a result of human-caused climate change, and the ice cover of Lake Superior has become less reliable, this crucial connection has now failed, further endangering the wolves of Isle Royale.

      Just as inevitably, the Canadian shores across from Isle Royale have undergone significant development investment in recent decades. With more human activity in the vicinity of historic winter migration, the movement opportunities for the wolves are even worse.

      Finally, the small size of the population has encouraged genetic bottlenecks, a condition where genetic diversity plummets, further reducing the changes of the population’s survival. Sings of inbreeding, stillbirths, and blindness have set in.

This apparently grim news reflects what ecologists increasingly refer to as ecological novelty, a condition where whatever ecological systems occurred in the past have been swept away by new conditions, as where the climate changes, new species interact with earlier ones, and invasion and diseases introduce new and complex dynamics, owing to migration or introductions. “Novelty” is technically “the degree of dissimilarity of a system, measured in one or more dimensions relative to a reference baseline” in “the present or a time window in the past” (Radeloff et al. 2015, p. 2051). Put simply, it is a condition of change, relative to whatever we have seen before, often reflecting a kind of “one way ticket” to a situation from which there may be little hope of natural return. Whether it is domesticated cats running amok and eating wild birds, or the ice melt that imperils the polar bear, this is the condition of many treasured places and wildlife around the world.

      Ecological Novelty An ecological condition where human-caused alterations of biotic or abiotic conditions lead to changes at different ecological levels, from organisms and populations to communities, ecosystems, and landscapes

      Ecological processes never go away, of course. Ecology’s rules, laws, and flows continue, only under radically altered conditions, and with whole new sets of players. This means that despair would be insanely premature at Isle Royale. Instead, all of the human-caused forces and changes on Isle Royale invite us to think about what people might do to restore, reimagine, and foster wildlife. Wolf reintroductions could be launched from other land-based populations to the island. More radically, genetic rescue might sample and bank the genes of the existing wolf pack and work to diversify the gene base. Moose populations, which have grown to a potentially disastrously high level, with implications for the land base, might be culled. In short, people could put their hands on the land and guide it to a place where wolves and moose continue to thrive.

      Doing so, however, would more of an effort at rewilding than letting nature “take its course.” Rewilding refers to efforts by people to return landscapes and lost ecosystems by tinkering heavily with them or crafting them from whole cloth, in order to reclaim – or create – landscapes as they might have been before human influence (Kolbert 2012).

Rewilding A practice of conservation where ecological functions and evolutionary processes, which are thought to have existed in past ecosystems or before human influence, are deliberately restored or created; rewilding often requires the reintroduction or restoration of large predators to ecosystems

There is plenty of precedent for such activities. In the sand hills of Nebraska, for example, along the Platte River, hundreds of thousands of migrating Sandhill Cranes (Grus Canadensis) congregate every spring, on the migration south to the Gulf Coast, using the sandbars of the river as nightly perches and protection from predators (Figure 1.1). This stretch of the river is a critical habitat for a booming population of the elegant, strong, and giant birds, and a destination for visitors from around the world every year.

      Figure 1.1 Sandhill cranes of the Platte River. A half million of these birds congregate annually. Source: Diana Robinson Photography/Moment/Getty Images.

      But this is by no means a “natural” condition. Owing to the century-old human damming of the river, the Platte lost its powerful ability to flood, and so its sandbars