Photo by WolfmanSF Wikimedia Commons
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I’ve talked about “re-wilding” ecosystems before. In Signs of Spring 8 (April 6, 2017) I discussed George Monbiont’s book Feral and his proposal to re-wild as much of the Earth’s ecological spaces as possible! The basic idea of a re-wilding plan is to return a human-degraded ecosystem back to its natural state. Re-wilding involves some substantial ecosystem engineering and re-modeling and, typically, the re-introduction of quite a few species.
In a paper recently published in Nature (October 14, 2020) an international team of scientists from Brazil, Australia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Canada, Argentina and Austria quantified the potential benefits of re-wilding one-third of Earth’s most degraded ecosystems. They also generated a list of specific ecosystems around the world where ecological intervention and remediation would have the greatest impacts. Diverse terrestrial ecosystems from forests to savannas to peatlands to wetlands were all included in their comprehensive plan for “nature-based restoration.”
Photo by D. Sillman
The paper’s authors explained that the most commonly applied method of nature-based ecological remediation involves simply planting trees. Trees, they explain, although they do fix carbon-dioxide carbon and have a cascade of impacts throughout their biotic communities, may not always be the best solution to repairing a damaged ecosystem. “If you plant trees,” the paper’s lead author explained, “in areas where forests did not previously exist, it will mitigate climate change but at the expense of biodiversity.” Each type of ecosystem must be dealt with in its own, unique way!
Restoration of these damaged ecosystems, the paper predicts, will prevent 70% of predicted future species extinctions. It will also generate natural systems that will store an amount of carbon equal to 50% of all of human-generated carbon dioxide-carbon released into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution! Further, restoring wild areas around farms and also the degraded farmland themselves will enable the establishment of high yield agroecosystems that will sustainably produce food for humans on into the distant future.
The scale of the ecological rehabilitation proposed by these scientists is unprecedented. They contend, though, that the cost is minimal compared to the long term consequences of inaction!
Most “re-wilding” plans are much simpler than the above proposal. Most of them, in fact, involve the re-introduction of one species into an ecosystem with just enough preparation work to make sure that the introduced species has a good chance of surviving and reproducing in the receiving ecosystem. The following discussion of elk re-introduction involves a species being able to return to an area adjacent to part of its former range but only after a relatively pristine landscape had been destroyed and then reconfigured into a new form! This story first appeared in the New York Times last summer (June 30, 2020).
Bull elk. Photo by Mongo, Public Domain
Elk (Cervus canadensis) once ranged all across North America. The impacts of European settlement of the continent, though, (habitat loss, intensive hunting), drove elk into their current, more limited distribution in the mountains and plains of the west (see Signs of Spring 11 (May 10, 2018) for a more extensive discussion of elk and their responses to humans).
In Kentucky, a place described by Daniel Boone in the 1700’s as teeming with wildlife including great herds of elk, the last wild elk was killed before the Civil War. In the 1990’s, though, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation offered to finance a multimillion dollar, six year plan to transplant 1500 Rocky Mountain elk to Kentucky.
The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife worked for almost ten years to prepare for the arrival of the elk. Elk had once been abundant in the grasslands of the western part of the state. Western Kentucky now, though, was densely occupied with farms and there was little room for, nor desire to make room for, one thousand pound elk that would eat, on average, forty pounds of forage a day!
The eastern part of Kentucky was not ideal elk habitat and had not, historically, had extensive elk populations. The rough, rocky, stream bisected, mountainous terrain was deficient in forage and quite restrictive to elk herd movements. There was, though, little resistance by eastern Kentucky residents to having elk introduced into their counties.
Mountain top removal. Photo by L. S. Eiler, PICRYL
The primary economic activity of eastern Kentucky is coal mining. In particular, the type of mining practiced here is an extremely destructive form of strip mining called “mountain top removal.” Mountain top removal is exactly what its name describes: entire mountain tops are blasted and bulldozed away in order to get to the coal seams buried below the rocks. This practice devastates landscapes, destroys watersheds and annihilates entire ecosystems. It is also a cost effective way to get the coal out of the ground and the perception of economic necessity allows it to continue.
After a mountain top has been removed, reclamation and restoration of the landscape typically involves the extensive leveling of peaks and the equally extensive filling of valleys. This process turns a formerly complex, mountain and valley terrain into broad, sloping plains that are then frequently planted with grasses. It turns out that these human-made, grassy plateaus are perfect habitat for elk.
Elk from Kentucky. Photo by B. Stansberry, Wikimedia Commons
The first elk were transported from the Rocky Mountains into eastern Kentucky in 1997, and the initial, 1500 transplanted elk now number 13,000 individuals! They are thriving in their human-generated habitats. All of these elk are living on the grassy, reclaimed plains in sixteen counties in the eastern part of the state. A tourist industry has grown up around these elk herds which adds, according to the Department of Fish and Wildlife, five million dollars a year to the local economies. Limited hunting tags are also sold each year to keep the herds from overgrowing their habitats.
Kentucky, then, is in the midst of a very odd and very selective process of re-wilding. The elk herds of eastern Kentucky are thriving in regions where formerly they could not live, and they are living on the remains of ecosystems that were destroyed in order to sustain our society’s nearly insatiable hunger for fossil fuels. I am glad that the elk are doing well, but I wish that the mountains and valleys and streams and forests were still there!
Next week, more “re-wilding” reports! We’ll talk about European bison coming to Great Britain, California condors flying over the Sierra Nevada’s again, and lake sturgeon returning to Ohio!
Wonderful. Thanks. Always await your next “issue”