Ecologist, conservationist, and the public in general have assumed that conservation means to keep things as natural and in place as possible. In Assisted Migration, chapter 5, of the Rambunctious Garden, Marris brings up an issue that changes the way we think of keeping species in their native areas: climate change. Anthropogenic carbon emissions have essentially changed Earth’s atmosphere, making the general climate hotter, and even changing regular precipitation patterns that some flora and fauna cannot survive in. Because of these changes, many species of animals begin to migrate to areas of more favorable conditions. However, there are some species that cannot migrate to another habitat on their own, and helplessly have to live in the environment.
In this chapter Marris begins with the dilemma conservationists face with saving the pika species in an environment that they cannot further survive in because of climate changes caused by humans. She initially sets a tone that persuades the reader that it is ethically necessary to save these “small flower-nibbling mammals” through assisted migration. This may seem like an easy fix; however there are many long-term issues that assisted migration will bring up. First of all, it would disrupt the environment that the species is taken from, and the environment that they are moved to. Species do move around; however the unnatural picking up and dropping off a species in a wild, unknown environment, even if it is similar to their own, is too abrupt for them to adapt to.
This problem creates a huge dilemma in the ecologist and conservationist community. Moving a species from one habitat to another can severely harm both of the environments. However, nobody wants to see a species die out in their own environment because of the mistakes and problems that we made. Looking at climatic changes through an evolutionary and natural selection stand point, it would be assumed that animals will learn to adapt to their changing environments. The pika’s that can are the “fittest” in a hotter climate will survive and become dominant in their species, thus we would have pika’s that are resistant to the heat. But the rate of climatic changes is probably too fast for an entire species to reproduce and have a mutation of pika that can resist heat. And so because of these reasons, I cannot say if assisted migration is a useful scientific tool or not because it has severe pros and cons to it.
