Rewilding, according to Marris’ book, is described as a conservation effort aimed at designing or redesigning brand new ecosystems, focusing less on what the area would have looked like had humans never stepped foot on it, but more on what it looked like even further into the past. Because of all the animals that have since gone extinct, ecologists would use “proxies” for those lost species, animals taken out of other habitats and put into these new ones the essentially play the role of the extinct species.
Not surprisingly, the idea is quite controversial, and in my opinion, pretty hypocritical coming from ecologists who constantly argue that humans have degraded nature by interfering with it too much. This idea of “rewilding” takes the concept of human intervention to the extreme, with humans essentially engineering and creating their own ecosystems. As one of the critics cited in Marris’ book says about the idea, it has humans playing god, which we have no right to do.
Additionally, aside from the questionable ethics that come along with this idea, there are also a number of scientific and logical questions that arise. As ecologist Josh Donlan pointed out in Rambunctious Garden, nobody was around to document how the ecosystems shifted back then as a result of the extinction of various large species that advocates of rewilding want to re-introduce or simulate (page 66). Similarly, we have no way of knowing what would happen if we were to introduce these “proxies” again, and it is very possible that negative side effects could arise that we would not be prepared to deal with. For example, they could result in the arrival of invasive pests or even themselves become invasive to the habitat they are introduced to. Furthermore, the program’s advocates’ response to those claims, saying “we killed ‘em once, we can kill ‘em again” (page 69), is very insensitive and unprincipled, especially coming from an ecological point of view.
While I support and agree with the idea that is it a futile task to try to preserve nature as it was before humans interfered, I think it is just as fruitless to take it one step back and try to emulate even older ecosystems, especially by interfering with existing ones. Doing so only pushes the divide between humans and nature further apart, since it is highly unlikely that humans will live in areas where the giant carnivores Marris talks about in her chapter will be introduced and it is just as unlikely that those carnivores will live in areas inhabited by humans. The answer to the question of how to preserve nature in this human-dominated and ever-changing world may still not be fully known, but I definitely think that engineering our ecosystems is not that answer we are looking for.
