Maehr, David S, Reed F Noss & Jeffrey L Larkin, editors. Large Mammal Restoration. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001.
Since the glaciation of the Pleistocene era and subsequent human immigration into the Western Hemisphere, North America has witnessed entire categories of megafauna driven to extinction—the mammoths, giant sloths and saber tooth cats being only three of the most easily recognized. Millennia later, the colonization of the continent by European settlers led to another ecological holocaust, more rapid and thorough than that wreaked by the Paleoindians and with results far more deleterious to long-term biologic health. The alteration of the entire American landscape—the felling of the great eastern forests, the plowing up of the prairies, the damming of our mighty rivers, the scabrous development spreading like kudzu over the ruins—has resulted in the regional extirpation, through neglect, carelessness or deliberation, of the majority of the large animals native to America. The movement to bring these populations back to some semblance of biological coherence, fraught as it is with expense and a slight downsizing of our absolutist grip on the land, invokes the most selfless and liberating aspects of our national character.
When we think of “the wilderness”, the images we immediate associate with the term must invariably include a few incontestable traits: unspoiled landscapes, few if any signs of civilization, and the presence of large, untamed animals without which the sublime mountain and trackless forest would seem barren and unnatural indeed. Many may be unaware of how much we’ve lost. The savage bugle of the bull elk in the Rocky Mountain autumn once echoed from the Carolinas’ coastal plain to the Canadian border. The grizzly bear, presently confined to highly precarious remnant populations in the northern Rockies, once roamed at will across the Great Plains, where it ambushed bison calves and scattered (now extinct) prairie wolves from their kills. The wolf, in its various species and subspecies, is the flagship of the crusade for reintroduction of large predators: populations of the three main Canus species once hunted from Quebec to Florida and on into Mexico.
Gathering together the tattered remains of our frayed natural heritage necessarily involves the reintroduction of large carnivores to landscapes in which they once flourished. Those lands have changed, however; our tenure in this country has been marked with the wholesale destruction of ecosystems and the purposeful annihilation of our fellow hunters. The prejudice against predators, inborn in many rural people and particularly acute in the American West, stems from a history of occasional livestock depredations and the personal dread, generally unfounded, of physical harm. This worldview, whether based on hardheaded monetary concerns or on irrational fear, must be confronted and dealt with, for the retention of large predators in any natural ecosystem relies entirely upon the goodwill and tolerance of the protected area’s human neighbors. As the editors of this collection of tales from the field tell us,
“While the bulk of the expertise may still reside within a natural resource agency, its decisions can no longer be made in a vacuum. It is becoming increasingly clear that large mammal restoration has no chance whatsoever without consent from the public and consensus among strategic interest groups. When user groups are affected disproportionately—or their concerns are not considered at all—litigation is often the result. When management decisions are designed to correct the mistakes of past generations—or politics hold sway over common sense—the plan chosen is often the one that allows no change at all.”
In an illuminating and well-written introduction by Reed F Noss, one of the leading lights in conservation biology and an advisor to the visionary Wildlands Project, we are given three general reasons for the restoration of large mammals. Ecologically, large herbivores played a major role in the formulation of the land’s character, from seed dispersal to the alteration of fire regimes; many trees and forbs in what landscapes remain in a seminatural state are today bereft of the unconscious nurture that these animals provided. In turn, predators served as a guide in herbivore evolution, making the deer more fleet and cautious (quite different from the dull-witted hedge hogs currently plauging our non-hunting suburbs), the moose more powerful, and the mountain goat more agile. From a human point of view (there’s always that), when in the darkening woods we smell a troubling feral tang, and hear the rumble and stomping of something bigger than we are, we’re granted an assurance that ours is not the only concern on the planet. As grizzly expert Doug Peacock has said, it ain’t wilderness unless there’s something in there that can kill and eat you. Indeed, large animals may be the only thing holding our immolative sense of self-aggrandizement in check, and may even be thought of as messengers from whatever remote (or ubiquitous) presence (or absence) it was that brought us all together on that first thunderous daybreak. Such airy conceptions are not wholly alien to professional men of learning; as Dr Noss puts it (proving that his represents the truly humanistic and humane face of science):
Biologists should not be too quick to dismiss the aesthetic, emotional, spiritual and ethical arguments for protecting and restoring populations of large mammals—or indeed for protecting nature in general. Scientific facts and techinal information do not move people to change their behavior. Virtually everyone, including scientists, is moved by emotion and sensory experience. Emotion is complimentary to science, not opposed to it.
The editors’ framework of deeply felt involvement, typified in the above statement, allows the generally more scientific and policy-oriented text of these essays to exist in a context relevant to the layman. What follows is a play-by-play account of wildlife restoration by the men and women directly involved. We are taken to the Northwest to learn about the feasibility of wolf, grizzly and wolverine restoration, then we learn of the success estimations for wolves in the Adirondacks and in the great North Woods of New England. The Sky Islands of New Mexico and Arizona, where the Sierra Madres and Rockies intertwine in an elevated series of exceptional habitats, have been the scene of recent jaguar sitings and is here the subject of a study on landscape-scale “rewilding” by a team from the Wildlands Project. The tribulations and triumphs of on-the-ground conservation work are related by veterans of the successful restoration of elk to southeastern Kentucky, where the brutal work of mountaintop removal to expose coal seams unwittingly created thousands of acres of grassy mesas, prime grazing habitat for transplanted Rocky Mountain elk from Alberta (the native eastern elk being unhandily extinct, this population is closest in genetic background). The threat of diseases—both to restored wild populations and to the feeble livestock whose presence they must endure (with murderous consequences for bison each winter outside Yellowstone National Park)—is explored in depth, as is the need for a thorough sounding-out of affected communities and stakeholders via the public comment process. The book includes a number of maps and graphs that illuminate the deliberations of the cutting-edge scientific assembly gathered here.
Large Mammal Restoration explores in detail some of the opportunities we have to reinstate the magnificent survivors of our ancestors’ haste and hubris. By acting without delay, armed with adequate funding and with that altruistic sense of what the Founders called “disinterestedness,” we may yet arrive again at a land we’d thought died out long ago.
Since the glaciation of the Pleistocene era and subsequent human immigration into the Western Hemisphere, North America has witnessed entire categories of megafauna driven to extinction—the mammoths, giant sloths and saber tooth cats being only three of the most easily recognized. Millennia later, the colonization of the continent by European settlers led to another ecological holocaust, more rapid and thorough than that wreaked by the Paleoindians and with results far more deleterious to long-term biologic health. The alteration of the entire American landscape—the felling of the great eastern forests, the plowing up of the prairies, the damming of our mighty rivers, the scabrous development spreading like kudzu over the ruins—has resulted in the regional extirpation, through neglect, carelessness or deliberation, of the majority of the large animals native to America. The movement to bring these populations back to some semblance of biological coherence, fraught as it is with expense and a slight downsizing of our absolutist grip on the land, invokes the most selfless and liberating aspects of our national character.
When we think of “the wilderness”, the images we immediate associate with the term must invariably include a few incontestable traits: unspoiled landscapes, few if any signs of civilization, and the presence of large, untamed animals without which the sublime mountain and trackless forest would seem barren and unnatural indeed. Many may be unaware of how much we’ve lost. The savage bugle of the bull elk in the Rocky Mountain autumn once echoed from the Carolinas’ coastal plain to the Canadian border. The grizzly bear, presently confined to highly precarious remnant populations in the northern Rockies, once roamed at will across the Great Plains, where it ambushed bison calves and scattered (now extinct) prairie wolves from their kills. The wolf, in its various species and subspecies, is the flagship of the crusade for reintroduction of large predators: populations of the three main Canus species once hunted from Quebec to Florida and on into Mexico.
Gathering together the tattered remains of our frayed natural heritage necessarily involves the reintroduction of large carnivores to landscapes in which they once flourished. Those lands have changed, however; our tenure in this country has been marked with the wholesale destruction of ecosystems and the purposeful annihilation of our fellow hunters. The prejudice against predators, inborn in many rural people and particularly acute in the American West, stems from a history of occasional livestock depredations and the personal dread, generally unfounded, of physical harm. This worldview, whether based on hardheaded monetary concerns or on irrational fear, must be confronted and dealt with, for the retention of large predators in any natural ecosystem relies entirely upon the goodwill and tolerance of the protected area’s human neighbors. As the editors of this collection of tales from the field tell us,
“While the bulk of the expertise may still reside within a natural resource agency, its decisions can no longer be made in a vacuum. It is becoming increasingly clear that large mammal restoration has no chance whatsoever without consent from the public and consensus among strategic interest groups. When user groups are affected disproportionately—or their concerns are not considered at all—litigation is often the result. When management decisions are designed to correct the mistakes of past generations—or politics hold sway over common sense—the plan chosen is often the one that allows no change at all.”
In an illuminating and well-written introduction by Reed F Noss, one of the leading lights in conservation biology and an advisor to the visionary Wildlands Project, we are given three general reasons for the restoration of large mammals. Ecologically, large herbivores played a major role in the formulation of the land’s character, from seed dispersal to the alteration of fire regimes; many trees and forbs in what landscapes remain in a seminatural state are today bereft of the unconscious nurture that these animals provided. In turn, predators served as a guide in herbivore evolution, making the deer more fleet and cautious (quite different from the dull-witted hedge hogs currently plauging our non-hunting suburbs), the moose more powerful, and the mountain goat more agile. From a human point of view (there’s always that), when in the darkening woods we smell a troubling feral tang, and hear the rumble and stomping of something bigger than we are, we’re granted an assurance that ours is not the only concern on the planet. As grizzly expert Doug Peacock has said, it ain’t wilderness unless there’s something in there that can kill and eat you. Indeed, large animals may be the only thing holding our immolative sense of self-aggrandizement in check, and may even be thought of as messengers from whatever remote (or ubiquitous) presence (or absence) it was that brought us all together on that first thunderous daybreak. Such airy conceptions are not wholly alien to professional men of learning; as Dr Noss puts it (proving that his represents the truly humanistic and humane face of science):
Biologists should not be too quick to dismiss the aesthetic, emotional, spiritual and ethical arguments for protecting and restoring populations of large mammals—or indeed for protecting nature in general. Scientific facts and techinal information do not move people to change their behavior. Virtually everyone, including scientists, is moved by emotion and sensory experience. Emotion is complimentary to science, not opposed to it.
The editors’ framework of deeply felt involvement, typified in the above statement, allows the generally more scientific and policy-oriented text of these essays to exist in a context relevant to the layman. What follows is a play-by-play account of wildlife restoration by the men and women directly involved. We are taken to the Northwest to learn about the feasibility of wolf, grizzly and wolverine restoration, then we learn of the success estimations for wolves in the Adirondacks and in the great North Woods of New England. The Sky Islands of New Mexico and Arizona, where the Sierra Madres and Rockies intertwine in an elevated series of exceptional habitats, have been the scene of recent jaguar sitings and is here the subject of a study on landscape-scale “rewilding” by a team from the Wildlands Project. The tribulations and triumphs of on-the-ground conservation work are related by veterans of the successful restoration of elk to southeastern Kentucky, where the brutal work of mountaintop removal to expose coal seams unwittingly created thousands of acres of grassy mesas, prime grazing habitat for transplanted Rocky Mountain elk from Alberta (the native eastern elk being unhandily extinct, this population is closest in genetic background). The threat of diseases—both to restored wild populations and to the feeble livestock whose presence they must endure (with murderous consequences for bison each winter outside Yellowstone National Park)—is explored in depth, as is the need for a thorough sounding-out of affected communities and stakeholders via the public comment process. The book includes a number of maps and graphs that illuminate the deliberations of the cutting-edge scientific assembly gathered here.
Large Mammal Restoration explores in detail some of the opportunities we have to reinstate the magnificent survivors of our ancestors’ haste and hubris. By acting without delay, armed with adequate funding and with that altruistic sense of what the Founders called “disinterestedness,” we may yet arrive again at a land we’d thought died out long ago.
