Rewilding North America

A Vision For Conservation In The 21St Century

Dave Foreman

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781559630610, 9781559630603
• eBook ISBN: 9781610911559
• Subtopic: Zoology

In Rewilding North America, Dave Foreman takes on arguably the biggest ecological threat of our time: the global extinction crisis. He not only explains the problem in clear and powerful terms, but also offers a bold, hopeful, scientifically credible, and practically achievable solution.

Foreman begins by setting out the specific evidence that a mass extinction is happening and analyzes how humans are causing it. Adapting Aldo Leopold's idea of ecological wounds, he details human impacts on species survival in seven categories, including direct killing, habitat loss and fragmentation, exotic species, and climate change. Foreman describes recent discoveries in conservation biology that call for wildlands networks instead of isolated protected areas, and, reviewing the history of protected areas, shows how wildlands networks are a logical next step for the conservation movement. The final section describes specific approaches for designing such networks (based on the work of the Wildlands Project, an organization Foreman helped to found) and offers concrete and workable reforms for establishing them. The author closes with an inspiring and empowering call to action for scientists and activists alike.

Rewilding North America offers both a vision and a strategy for reconnecting, restoring, and rewilding the North American continent, and is an essential guidebook for anyone concerned with the future of life on earth.

PART I

BAD NEWS

Soon a millennium will end. With it will pass four billion years of evolutionary exuberance. Yes, some species will survive, particularly the smaller, tenacious ones living in places far too dry and cold for us to farm or graze. Yet we must face the fact that the Cenozoic, the Age of Mammals, which has been in retreat since the catastrophic extinctions of the late Pleistocene is over, and that the “Anthropozoic” or “Catastrophozoic” has begun.

—MICHAEL SOULÉ

Let me warn you. There be monsters here.

This first part of Rewilding North America—“Bad News,” is depressing—”depressing as hell,” according to John Davis after he read it. Nonetheless, we must understand the problem before we can craft the solution. Here I set out the evidence for a worldwide mass extinction and explain its causes.

“Bad News” unfolds like this:

Chapter 1, “The Extinction Crisis”—A general overview of the extinction crisis, explanation of biodiversity, early awareness of extinction, and causes of extinction.

Chapter 2, “The Pleistocene-Holocene Event: Forty Thousand Years of Extinction”—The three waves of the current extinction crisis: the First Wave, which began with the spread of modern humans (Stone Age); the Second Wave, which spans the period of European exploration and exploitation; and the Third Wave, occurring now, which is globalization. The chapter explains how each wave caused or is causing extinctions.

Chapter 3, “The First Wave”—How modern humans evolved and spread out from Africa fifty thousand to forty thousand years ago, causing the extinction of most large mammals, birds, and reptiles in Australia, northern Eurasia, North and South America, and remote islands.

Chapter 4, “The Second and Third Waves”—The evidence of past and ongoing extinctions from habitat loss (species-area relationship), specific examples, and human population growth and appropriation of net primary productivity.

Chapter 5, “Ecological Wounds of North America 1: Direct Killing and Habitat Loss”—An overview of seven general wounds humans have caused in North America, and details about wound 1 (direct killing) and wound 2 (habitat destruction).

Chapter 6, “Ecological Wounds of North America 2: Fragmentation, Loss of Ecological Processes, Exotic Species, Pollution, and Climate Change”—Provides in-depth discussion of wound 3 (habitat fragmentation), wound 4 (loss of natural ecological and evolutionary processes), wound 5 (invasion by exotic diseases, plants, and animals), wound 6 (pollution poisoning natural habitats), and wound 7 (global climate change).

I hope that you, the reader, can persevere through these chapters. Should you begin to feel suicidal or murderous while reading Part 1, I suggest you quit and move on to Part 2, “Good News,” in which I explain the scientific and historical research that is key to the solution for halting this mass extinction: protecting and restoring an enduring resource of wilderness. In Part 3, “Taking Action,” I propose on-the-ground solutions to our ecological crisis. Despite the grim beginning, I think you will find Rewilding North America to be positive and hopeful—hopeful as a wilderness-forever future, I believe. As Ed Abbey admonished us: “Joy, shipmates, joy!” And what could be more joyful than halting a mass extinction?

CHAPTER 1

The Extinction Crisis

The Crisis

The most important—and gloomy—scientific discovery of the twentieth century was the extinction crisis. During the 1970s, field biologists grew more and more worried by population drops in thousands of species and by the loss of ecosystems of all kinds around the world. Tropical rainforests were falling to saw and torch. Wetlands were being drained for agriculture. Coral reefs were dying from god knows what. Ocean fish stocks were crashing. Elephants, rhinos, gorillas, tigers, polar bears, and other “charismatic megafauna” were being slaughtered. Frogs were vanishing. Even leviathan—the great whales—were being hunted down in their last redoubts of the Antarctic and Arctic seas, and their end was in sight. These staggering losses were in oceans and on the highest peaks; they were in deserts and in rivers, in tropical rainforests and Arctic tundra alike.

A few biologists—including geneticist Michael Soulé (who later founded the Society for Conservation Biology) and Harvard’s famed E. O. Wilson—put these worrisome anecdotes and bits of data together. They knew, through paleontological research by others, that in the 570 million years or so of the evolution of modern animal phyla there had been five great extinction events. The last happened 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous when dinosaurs became extinct. Wilson and company calculated that the current rate of extinction is one thousand to ten thousand times the background rate of extinction in the fossil record.¹ That discovery hit with all the subtlety of an asteroid striking Earth: right now, today, life faces the sixth great extinction event in earth history. The cause is just as unsettling and unprecedented: eating, manufacturing, traveling, warring, consuming, and breeding by six billion human beings. For the first time in the history of life on Earth, one species is killing countless others. For the first time, one species, Homo sapiens—that’s us—is waging a war against nature.

The crisis we face is biological meltdown. Wilson warns that the proportion of species driven to extinction “might easily reach 20 percent by 2022 and rise as high as 50 percent or more thereafter.”² Soulé has said that soon the only large mammals left will be those we consciously choose to protect; that “[the twentieth] century will see the end of significant evolution of large plants and terrestrial vertebrates in the tropics.” ³ He writes, “The end of speciation for most large animals rivals the extinction crisis in significance for the future of living nature. As [Bruce Wilcox and I] said in 1980, ‘Death is one thing, an end to birth is something else.’”⁴

I wish Soulé and Wilson could be brushed away as crackpots hanging off a far edge of science, but not only are they among the most lionized biologists of our time, their dismal views are commonplace in the scientific community. In 1998, the American Museum of Natural History commissioned the Louis Harris poll to survey the nation’s leading biologists. “Nearly seven out of 10 of the biologists polled said they believed a ‘mass extinction’ was underway, and an equal number predicted that up to one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years.”⁵

However, few members of the public are aware of the crisis. “Sixty percent of the laymen polled professed little or no familiarity with the concept of biological diversity, and barely half ranked species loss as a ‘major threat.’”⁶ A Newsweek Earth Day poll in 2000 found that a mere 5 percent of Americans thought that endangered or vanished species was the most important environmental problem.⁷ Even among members of nature conservation groups, most seem unaware of the magnitude of species loss, and few conservation organizations are forthright in putting the extinction crisis at the top of their agendas and sounding the alarm about the dead-end road down which humanity is hurtling. The crisis is made worse by this ignorance.

Considering the biological catastrophe we are in, it is gut-wrenching to find that only a small percentage of people are aware of the crisis and our responsibility for it. There may be several reasons for this head burying. First, scientists and conservationists have not done the best job of publicizing and explaining the extinction crisis, nor has the media given it due heed. Second, the money and research time given to the problems facing nature are so small that we do not even know how many species there are. That alone makes accurate analysis difficult. Third, anticonservationists have fogged the issue so well that the public and mainstream media have been turned away from the core issues regarding extinction. Fourth, extinction events happen in time and territorial scales that are hard to comprehend. After all, humans have evolved to react to short-term and close-range stimuli. Fifth and closely related, much of the devastation is slow and incremental. Many of us are blind to that which is not sudden. Sixth, the mere thought that we are causing a mass extinction is so soul shattering that most people who hear of it refuse to even consider it. Finally, the values we place on nature make it easy for us to exploit it for our personal economic gain.⁸

The Diversity of Life

Before we can understand the extinction of species, we must know what species are and what their significance is. And before we can understand the extinction crisis, we must know something about biological diversity, or biodiversity.

It seems that we humans are adapted to classifying things. Even the act of collecting baseball cards or porcelain figurines comes from this fancy. From our earliest times, we have named, numbered, and classified life forms. Genesis recounts the old Middle Eastern myth where Yahweh brought all the animals before Adam to be named. Not only are we driven to classify things, but we seem to be pretty good at it. We also seem to be consistent at it. Ornithologist Jared Diamond has shown how the classification of bird species by traditional New Guineans is almost exactly that of modern ornithology.⁹ Michael Soulé writes that “the taxonomies of aboriginal societies are virtually always the same in structure as those of modern, scientific cultures (both are hierarchical and consist of nested sets of exclusive categories); moreover, aboriginal taxonomies typically recognize the same entities as species as do modern taxonomists.” ¹⁰

Modern scientific classif...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I - BAD NEWS
• PART II - GOOD NEWS
• PART III - TAKING ACTION
• For More Information
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Island Press Board of Directors