[BCNnet] RE: `Re-wilding North America'

[Randi Doeker - Chicago]

FYI:  This is an EDITORIAL in the Chicago Tribune.
Randi Doeker
Chicago

-----Original Message-----
--------------------
`Re-wilding North America' 
--------------------

September 6, 2005

Back in 1987, two city slickers from Rutgers University in New Jersey discovered an efficient way
to be denounced as latter-day Hitlers or Stalins: Tell millions of rural Americans that the life
they lead, and love, in open reaches of the central U.S. will soon be history.

Frank Popper, a professor of urban studies and a native of Chicago's Uptown, and his wife, Deborah,
a geographer, torched a scorching response with a six-page article in a professional journal called
Planning. The Poppers' proposal for resuscitating America's Great Plains came to be known as the
Buffalo Commons--and to this day mention of it can provoke angry snarls in the dry, sparsely
settled expanse from the Dakotas to west Texas.

In essence, the Poppers argued that even the immense flow of federal subsidies that prop up dying
farms, ranches and prairie towns was doomed to fail because of inexorable forces: shrinking
population and dwindling economic viability. The Poppers proposed letting much of the land return
to its natural state, circa Lewis and Clark, and creating a vast wildlife refuge, ecological park
and historic preservation district.

One chief attraction: reconstitution of the buffalo herds that once roamed the plains, as well as
elk, lynx, bobcats, foxes and cranes. The Poppers envisioned an economic renewal, with tourists
flocking to a massive Buffalo Commons--a range where, literally, the deer and the antelope play
alongside the American bison.

Some of what the Poppers envisioned did materialize, with a relative few plains landowners erecting
lodges for hunters or raising, yes, buffalo. Now, though, comes a proposal even more ambitious, and
potentially more controversial, than the Buffalo Commons.

An August issue of the science journal Nature includes a fascinating proposal, "Re-wilding North
America." The idea is to introduce to the plains "beasts of old": lions, wild Bactrian camels,
cheetahs, feral horses, black and gray elephants--now loping resolutely toward extinction in Africa
and Asia.

Establishing those animals in huge fenced reserves would be an intercontinental homecoming: Many of
the species that would be relocated to the Great Plains are kissing cousins of the megafauna--large
vertebrates--that roamed North America until our predecessors overhunted them at the close of the
Pleistocene Epoch some 13,000 years ago. At that time, according to one researcher promoting the
re-wilding plan, this continent lost more than 60 species of animals that weighed more than 100
pounds.

Today the relatives of many of these animal groups remain intact and free only in Africa or Asia,
where they are imperiled by hunting, agriculture, warfare or shrinking habitats. Some probably face
extinction in this century. Reintroducing them to areas of the central U.S. where the human
population continues to dwindle--a "Pleistocene re-wilding"--could give them genuine opportunities
to survive and thrive as more than antiquities in zoos.

This plan, like the Buffalo Commons proposal, does carry the pedigree of academia: The list of
authors includes biologists, ecologists and geoscientists from such universities as Cornell,
Colorado, Fordham, Arizona, New Mexico, New Mexico State and California-Santa Cruz. What may buy
them added credibility is their optimistic emphasis on creature conservation--an appealing
alternative, they acknowledge, to the frequent dourness of environmentalists "easily caricatured as
purveyors of doom and gloom."

Elephants in Oklahoma? Camels in Montana? Cheetahs in Nebraska?

'Twas ever thus. Five species of elephants, including mammoths and mastodons, once roamed here.
Camels did too--alongside wild horses that originated in North America 50 million years ago. And as
one of the Nature authors, evolutionary biologist C. Josh Donlan of Cornell, writes in a companion
article on the online magazine Slate: "For more than 4 million years before its extinction, the
American cheetah preyed on the deerlike pronghorn, a relationship that helped engender the
pronghorn's astonishing speed." Re-wilding North America, Donlan argues, would promote more of
these natural collisions that empower biodiversity, forcing species to adapt and strengthen their
traits.

As economic rehabs go, the cost of repopulating the plains with megafauna wouldn't rise much beyond
the rental of an ark and the erection of perimeter fencing, the pragmatic barrier that keeps wild
animals in African game preserves from devouring their two- and four-footed neighbors. Even then,
U.S. stockmen will complain, with justification, that welcoming lions to ranch country is sure to
cost them some lambs and calves. Proponents of re-wilding suggest a phased relocation, with careful
management to ensure the animals' welfare and lessen the possibility of transmitting disease.

Americans have welcomed the reintroduction of other scarce animals to promising habitats, notably
wolves and peregrine falcons. If re-wilding North America is the most ambitious such proposal to
date, it's also the one likeliest to promote surging tourism on the Great Plains. Wildlife buffs
eagerly flock to Alaska's Denali National Park, knowing they may encounter wildlife no more exotic
than Dall sheep.

Because its benefits are so promising and its costs so predictable, the re-wilding proposal
deserves a hearing, first in scientific circles and then in the halls where public policy is
written.

Without some sort of reawakening--be it the Buffalo Commons, the re-wilding of an American
Serengeti or another scheme equally bold--the Great Plains face more of the steady depopulation
that the Poppers presciently saw as a peril to the region's long-range health.

And without some new and hospitable expanse to call their own, many of the large and mortally
threatened vertebrates of Africa and Asia face a future that is even more bleak.


Copyright (c) 2005, Chicago Tribune