Future Energy

The End of the Wild

Source: Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust

Small books can sometimes make big impressions - one such for me was The Theory of Island Biogeography by Robert MacArthur and Edward Wilson (1967).  When I first encountered it as an undergrad, the math scared me off.  It took a reading of David Quammen's Song of the Dodo to make me want to go back and give it the reading it deserved.  

A more recent contribution to this same lineage of ideas that helps us to understand the full impact that we have had on the world is The End of the Wild by Stephen M. Meyer.  The End of the Wild has been described as a wake up call.  In it, Meyer argues that the race to save biodiversity is over.

“The broad path for biological evolution is now set for the next several million years.  And in this sense the extinction crisis – the race to save the composition, structure, and organization of biodiversity as it exists today – is over, and we have lost.”

In a nutshell, Meyer argues that nothing – not national or international laws, global bio-reserves, local sustainability schemes or “wild lands” – will change the course that has been set.  That is, the loss of half of the earth’s species by the end of the century and a homogenation of what’s left, comprised of only those species that thrive in human-dominated environments.

Despite this negative outlook, Mayer makes a strong argument for why we need to continue to protect and manage biodiversity.  In his view, the end of the wild is not the worst possible outcome.  Doing nothing, i.e. benign neglect, would lead to a collapse of biodiversity and the emergence of a human-selected biosphere that might not be human-friendly.  The surviving ecosystems would not be merely simplified but impoverished to the point that they could fail to provide the ecosystem services essential to human survival.

Meyer argues for four strategies for addressing this crisis:

1. Come to terms with what we have wrought - recognize that the end of the wild is primarily about people and our cultural norms, values, priorities and choices.  It is not primarily about the environment.
2. Invest in research that will allow us to "apply the cold light of a necropsy" to understanding the collapsing processes of natural selection - Meyer suggests a massive and sustained effort over the next two decades to map the earth's biota.
3. Protect the landscape to safeguard evolutionary processes and pathways and preserve ecosystem processes and functions.
4. Recognize the need for intensive management of the wild to emulate natural processes that have been weakened or lost.

Meyer's is a bleak but realistic outlook.  With a  human population that could reach 10 billion within some of our lifetimes, there is no opportunity for us to take the global environment back to where it started.  As much as it pains me to admit it, I believe he is right in concluding that restoration and hands on management will be required.

This book is really short (97 small pages) and more of an essay - but a concise and well written essay.

Restoring the Great Plains

  Source: dailykos.com

I started out a day or two ago trying to track down some information on a new book by a Saskatchewan author I have enjoyed in the past, Trevor Herriot.  What I found instead was his blog, Grass Notes, and in particular a February blog post regarding the "American Prairie Reserve".  Herriot introduces the concept and highlights a book about the concept by Richard Manning, entitled Rebuilding the West -Restoration in a Prairie Landscape.  In Herriot's own words:

"Richard Manning’s big idea is to work with private and public conservation agencies and the people of the northern Great Plains to find a way to draw a border of ecological protection around 3.5 million acres of native prairie centering on the Missouri River passes through the Missouri Breaks National Monument and the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. They call it “The American Prairie Preserve” and estimate that for $250 million (about ten days of the Iraq war expenditure), enough of the necessary private land could be purchased to create “a Yellowstone of the Plains.”"

Richard Manning's "big idea" is in turn, based on a 2004 ecological assessment prepared by the Northern Plains Conservation Network, which identifies key prairie grassland landscapes where opportunities exist to restore large-scale ecological processes and provide habitat for significant populations of native wildlife.  Supported by a consortium of 16 ENGO's (including the Denver Zoo, if you can call them an ENGO), Oceans of Grass: A Conservation Assessment of the Northern Great Plains provides a detailed blueprint for conserving and restoring these landscapes.   

Source: Trevor Herriot's Grass Notes

What I find most interesting about the American Prairie Reserve are the parallels with the Buffalo Commons, a concept put forward by Frank and Deborah Popper in 1987.  I first read about Buffalo Commons in the Wall Street Journal, I think about ten years ago, but the idea was first advanced in 1987 in an article published in Planning.  The Poppers were proposing that the drier portions of the Great Plains, an area totalling 360,000 square kilometres in ten western states, be restored to native grasslands and stocked with buffalo.  The idea was driven by the exodus of people from the Great Plains, which continues unabated even today, and the expectation that the Ogalalla Aquifer was approaching exhaustion.

The American Prairie Reserve and the Buffalo Commons reflect a desire to return a vast and increasingly empty section of North America back to their pre-European settlement condition.  There are those that would step even further back, towards a re-wilding that restored Pleistocene megafauna, or their nearest relatives, to some big landscapes.  I suppose it all depends on what you consider the baseline to be.

It might be easy to take a tongue-in-cheek attitude to these proposals, except that they represent what is likely to become one of the biggest focuses in future environmental management - restoration and human management of wild landscapes.  Certainly thats the premise put forward by Stephen Meyer in The End of the Wild.  His argument is a bit more complex than I can hope to capture in a couple of lines, but it rests on a the belief that "we have lost the wild for now.  Perhaps in five or ten million years it will return."   Meyer's prescription includes:

• Coming to terms with what we have wrought;
• Research to apply "the cold light of a necropsy to dissect the collapsing processes of natural selection";
• Protecting the landscape and the integrity and complexity of ecosystem processes; and
• Intensive management of plant and animal populations.

Its a bleak outlook but probably realistic.  With a human population of six billion growing to, arguably, 10 billion, there will be little no opportunity for the global environment to go back to where it started.  Restoration and hands-on management will almost certainly be required.