BOOK REVIEW: Rewilding the World

Author Caroline Fraser Stresses Connectivity in Ecosystem Restoration

The environmentally aware know the grim litany: Overdevelopment. Overgrazing. Overfarming. Deforestation. Desertification. Habitat loss. Climate change. Loss of biodiversity.

We also know that the changes, once they've reached a critical point, can't be reversed.

Or can they? Caroline Fraser's perceptive, trenchant and readable 'Rewilding the World' is both optimistic and realistic in depicting the possibilities and problems involved in not only maintaining species but in some cases restoring ecosystems to a more pristine past.

Rewilding, which she sees as revolutionary, involves restoring habitats and creating wildlife migration corridors. It seems almost like a romantic vision, going well beyond being satisfied with stopping the trend of species loss and attempting to restore areas to their gloriously wild past.

In many cases the key is to keep a healthy population of predators, which are almost always hated by local residents. By killing off such predators as wolves, lions and crocodiles, we've devastated ecosystems.

'Biologists have begun to understand that nature is a chain of dominoes: If you pull one piece out, the whole thing falls down. Lose the animals, lose the ecosystem. Lose the ecosystem, game over,' she writes, adding, 'There are no spare parts.'

By killing wolves and other North American predators, we've created a situation where deer overbrowse, hurting species below them on the food chain. When Africans kill crocodiles, they're hurting their own fishing industry - crocs kill catfish, which have been wiping out the highly prized tigerfish.

And, perhaps strangest, killing off prairie dogs on the Great Plains has affected our water availability. Huh? Well, it seems that prairie dogs' digging increases the amount of water that percolates down to the groundwater. That's now a crucial problem in the Southwest. Fraser, who sees the dire necessity of changing perceptions, stresses one word: connectivity. 'Rewilding is about making connections. Forging literal connections through corridors. Creating linkages across landscapes and responsible economic relationships between protected areas and people. Forging links between ourselves and the intact ecosystems we need to survive.' This involves, for example, creating wildlife corridors, especially for megafauna. Sometimes all it takes is bridges for animals to cross. It turns out this is good for the bottom line - deer-car collisions cost billions a year, and the wildlife bridges and other structures reduce the losses. Insurance companies like wildlife bridges. Fraser's worldwide tour of wildlife corridors, transboundary sites and sites for restoration is wonderful and depressing. There are successes - Costa Rica, Indonesia, Namibia. There are just as many failures. She stresses that it's not nearly enough for conservation groups to raise billions and buy land. Success restoring habitats and halting species loss requires several essential ingredients:

(1) Community support. Local residents must be consulted, first of all, and must learn to see that conservation can benefit them. For countries that are desperately poor, this means jobs.

But conservation can mean more than that. It can involve various incentives and rewards. When jaguars were seen in the Southwest, cash was given for photos of them. A Brazilian program awarded money to those who lost cattle to jaguars.

Still, there can't be a quid pro quo. Wildlife can't be expected to pay their way. Conservation must be a value in itself, she stresses.

(2) Law enforcement. Someone has to make sure that poachers don't gain the upper hand. You can't play nice - you have to have the numbers to deal with people who stand to gain more money from poaching than they could possibly make from any other way of living.

Nepal was doing well in conservation until a civil war initiated by a Maoist party there. Then poachers took over. African sites have had terrible problems with poachers.

(3) Education. The Maasai tribe in Africa learned, for example, that they could make as much or more money from ecotourism as from raising cattle - and they won't use up their land doing so. As Fraser puts it: People had to see that 'Lions were buying schoolbooks, rhinos were putting up health clinics.'

Tourism is the biggest world industry, and ecotourism can be big business. For parts of the world whose unemployment is more like 40 percent than the 10 percent in this country, this isn't rocket science. Native peoples can benefit from ecotourism, and they know it.

But it's not just poorly educated tribesmen in the developing world who need an attitude adjustment. We all do.

We all need to overcome our atavistic hatred for predators and see that they play a key role in ecosystems - and that we kill them off at our own peril.

We all need to look at the long term of the planet and not the short term of making money. We need to see the big picture and make the connections. We need to see species in wilderness areas as a 'bank,' she writes, and a 'lifeline.' Food productivity and new sources of medicine, among other things, depend on biodiversity. We must learn to see other species not as adversaries but as 'partners.'

Fraser writes: 'We are realizing that conservation is not about managing wildlife as much as it is about managing ourselves - our appetites, fears, our fundamental avariciousness.'

There's plenty of cause for hope. Australian farmers, who turned the southwest part of their country into a Dust Bowl after World War II far quicker than Americans did during the Depression, are showing a willingness to let pieces of land become 'bush' again.

The Okavango Delta in Botswana has been a big success story, as local people have gotten on board the cause of conservation.

People, nations and organizations across the world have shown that they can get it. Land can be restored, as Seattle's Lake Washington was. Species' numbers can be restored, as wolves have been in the Yellowstone area.

And it's not just biologists. One of the fascinating aspects of the book is showing what a diversity of people have played crucial roles in the cause of biodiversity.

The stakes are huge. Fraser notes that we're in the middle of a huge die-off of species. Eminent biologist E.O. Wilson says the extinction rate is running 100 to 1,000 times normal, and the estimates are that about half of the planet's species will be gone by the end of this century.

It's depressing to think that cures for cancer or other diseases could exist in the Amazon or in a tropical coral reef - and we may never find them because of the imminent extinction of millions of species.

Maybe our 19th-century forbears didn't know what they were doing when they slaughtered wolves, bears, bison, prairie dogs and just about anything else wearing fur. Perhaps farmers in the Great Plains didn't know what they were doing when they plowed all the land under and created a Dust Bowl.

We don't have those excuses. We know that climate change and biodiversity loss are happening.

Costa Rica has put 25% of its land into conservation protection compared to our 6%, according to Fraser. Can't the richest country in the world do better?

Fraser's right. Biodiversity is compulsory. We must all our will, creativity and resourcefulness to solve this conundrum that looms ahead menacingly like the climate-change crisis.

Rich Martin, a member of Angeles Chapter's media team, has worked as editor, reporter, reviewer and free-lance writer for numerous print publications and websites for the past 25 years.