Re-wilding North America

Re-Wilding North America

By now this idea under this title has gained a certain level of popular currency. First appearing in the 18 August 2005 issue of Nature it proposes the gradual reintroduction of camels, elephants and the like onto the Great Plains of America.

It has been greeted with a general expression of "Just when we thought we had heard of everything..." even among other scientists, and perhaps it is a wacky idea. One thing one comes to appreciate in subscribing to Nature is the intense competitive pressure that that publication experiences from its American rival Science, pressure no less intense despite the presumed rigorous vetting before publication in the premier science journal in the world.

Scientist/scholars of course also feel that "publish or perish" pressure. Even Darwin rushed his "Origin of Species" into print upon receiving a letter from a callow amateur asking for his thoughts on precisely the evolutionary theory Darwin had been working through for years.

Acknowledging all of that, that this re-wilding idea may turn out to have all the staying power of Pons and Fleischman's cold fusion idea twenty years ago, one does not come away from a reading of the article itself with the thought that this is junk science.

The authors, principally Josh Donlan of Cornell, lay the pedalogical groundwork for their proposal in simple terms. "Megafauna" were indigenonous to North America as we all know from the discovery of mastadon, t-Rex, and other dinosaur fossils.

Two, they're already here on private land in other parts of North America. "For example, 77,000 large mammals (most of them Asian and African ungulates, but also cheetahs, camels and kangaroos) roam free on Texas ranches..."

Three, the Great Plains is empty, with all sincere respect to our fellows in the Dakotas, Kansas, et al. This proposal would be irresponsible if the venue were almost anywhere else. These animals are obviously going to need their space both for their sake and ours and the Great Plains is available.

The re-wilding would start with wild horses and asses, then move to large tortoises, then to camels and large cats such as cheetahs then to elephants and would conclude with the largest cats of them all, lions. All of this phasing in, from start to finish, could be done in only fifty years.

Donlan writes modestly seeming to sense the ridicule that he's inviting and he's scientist enough to anticipate the legitimate objections: the stress put on the current animal population, the potential for species-jumping diseases, the logistical difficulties of fencing the reserves, and so on. He properly terms his proposal a "vision" rather than a detailed programme.

But here's to visionaries. It's a breathtaking idea and we need more people who dare the ridicule and the dismissal to see far. It says here that this is going to happen if for no other reason than Donlan has got another visionary on his side.

Ted Turner, who had the chutzpah to turn an ignored cable television station in Atlanta into a "superstation," and then build on that and found the Cable News Network, laughingly dismissed by it's initial critics as the "Chicken Noodle Network," Ted Turner is the largest private land owner in the United States and has been approached by the proponents of this re-wilding vision. He is enthusiastic.

America's astonishing creativity has to be in part a product of the sheer size of our continent. Our geography has made a virture of the necessity to see far even if all we wanted to see was our family and friends. We have gotten used to the idea and we have produced and continue to produce visionaries like Leland Stanford, the Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Bill Gates and Ted Turner.

We can also thank Josh Donlan for getting Turner's attention and perhaps sparing us
another $1 billion gift to the U.N. Sheesh, talk about wacky ideas.

-Benjamin Harris