The success of the first “Community-Wide Read” last year inspired the Haston Free Public Library to sponsor a second series of programs this year. This month the Library is hoping that many North Brookfield residents and friends will read and discuss a new book on an important aspect of the conservation revolution, Rewilding the World. Tonight, the author herself, Caroline Fraser, an old friend of North Brookfield’s Harbor Fraser Hodder, spoke to a diverse and respectful audience on this topic.
Ms. Fraser first exhorted us not to feel discouraged by what may seem like the inexorable decline in the quality of our environment. Although in her years of research she encountered apathy, incompetence, venality, and greed, she also found an outpouring of generosity, compassion, and intelligent striving. Her book’s epigraph is “Only connect,” and she reminded us that even in our small town, we can be connected to the larger world.
I started reading the book last week but only finished the first few chapters, so much of what Ms. Fraser talked about was new to me. In between listening and looking at the PowerPoint slides, I managed to scribble some notes, and what follows is a summary of what I learned.
So what is “rewilding”? Ms. Fraser described it as the solution to a problem, the problem of the biodiversity crisis. In all of Earth’s history, there have been five mass extinctions, and we may be on the brink of the sixth. This extinction appears to be different from the others, in that it is caused by one species, Homo sapiens, and of course it is the first that our species has experienced. The causes are various, including conversion of land to agriculture and industry and climate change. Scientists who keep track of these numbers have estimated that within a hundred years or so, we may lose up to half of all species, including 70% of plant species.
So why should we be concerned? Species diversity has many benefits: for example, our food, fuel, and medicine are derived from plants and animals, which also provide regulatory services. Though the benefits that accrue to us from the natural world are difficult to quantify, economists have estimated that they are on the order of two to five trillion dollars annually.
The scientific basis for our current understanding of species diversity was developed about forty years ago by mathematician Robert MacArthur and biologist E O Wilson; their seminal work was published in 1967 as The Theory of Island Biogeography. In this work, they argued that the number of species populating an island is related to both its size and distance from the mainland. It didn’t take long for scientists to realize that these same principles would apply to larger areas like continents, insofar as continental habitats are now mostly fragmented and are thus island-like.
A second issue which became critical to the debate over protecting tracts of land in order to preserve species diversity concerned the importance of predators. While human beings react almost universally with fear and hatred to predatory carnivores, these animals stabilize ecosystems by exerting top-down control of the food chain. Aldo Leopold’s reflections in the 1920s on the importance of predators proved to be eerily prophetic when the re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park began to transform the environment: aspen, beaver, and trout came back, as well as raptors, songbirds, and amphibians.
Rewilding, with its focus on the “three Cs,” or Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores, was controversial from the start. Even environmental organizations like The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund were not enthusiastic supporters, in that their emphasis at the time was on saving pristine landscapes, not trying to fix degraded ones. But the advocates of rewilding pressed ahead. The first large North American project, named Y2Y, for Yellowstone to Yukon, was intended to establish corridors for wildlife migration. One of the major problems for wildlife turned out to be the Trans-Canada Highway; building structures that would allow animals to move over or under the highway proved to be enormously successful.
From North America the movement spread around the world, to Central and South America, to Europe, to Africa, and to Southeast Asia. Ms. Fraser talked about a number of projects, but the two that I found fascinating were the European Green Belt, which will eventually run over 5,000 miles through twenty-two countries, and the Korean DMZ. Due to ideological conflicts, the border areas between these hostile states became a kind of no-man’s land and wildlife flourished.
The example of the DMZ, with its 2700 species, led rewilding advocates to propose establishing transboundary peace parks, which would not only enhance biodiversity but help normalize relations between warring countries. The pairing of conservation with development, or addressing problems of systemic poverty in countries wracked by the legacies of colonialism and civil war, created obstacles that scientists were not trained to deal with. Nevertheless, between 1988 and 2005, the number of transborder protected areas grew from 59 to 818.
Ms. Fraser ended her talk with descriptions of a few rewilding project successes. In Kenya, the Lewa Reserve was developed in collaboration with the indigenous Maasai. In Costa Rica, the Área de Conservación Guanacaste became a striking example of the country’s commitment to conservation. In Australia, tens of thousands of acres have been reforested in the Gondwana Link.
Closer to home, the project called A2A, or Algonquin to Adirondacks, has as its goal to connect and improve habitat in the region that extends from southern Ontario to New York State. Even here in Massachusetts, various organizations, including the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation, are working on projects like dam removal and restoration of grasslands. Rewilding can start in our own backyards, Ms. Fraser concluded.
Thank you to the event organizers, librarian Ann Kidd and Friends of the Library president Ellen Smith, and to the program’s sponsors, the North Brookfield Cultural Council, Country Bank, and Friends of the Haston Library.