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Reintroduction & Rewilding
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  *This image is copyright of its original author IBERÁ REWILDING UPDATEIn August of 2018 Rewilding Earth posted Conservation Land Trust Argentina’s article, “Rewilding Argentina, Park by Park,” which appeared as Part 1 and Part 2. Then, in December of the same year, Tompkins Conservation announced the establishment of Ibera’ National Park by the Argentine Congress. And now, Conservation Land Trust Argentina has sent the latest news from their rewilding projects. ~ editors Jaguar In Iberá, Juruna and Mariua -the two Brazilian jaguars that we received last month – were moved to the Jaguar Reintroduction Center in Iberá, after successfully finishing their quarantine period. They have been really active since the beginning, and they already hunted their first live capybara inside the 1.5 hectare enclosure where they are living now. Below are some pictures of the arrival of the jaguars and their first activities in the Reintroduction Center.  *This image is copyright of its original author Travelling through the Carambola stream to San Alonso © CLT
 *This image is copyright of its original author Arriving to their enclosure in the Jaguar Reintroduction Center © CLT
 *This image is copyright of its original author Juruna and Mariua Exploring their new ‘territory’ © CLT
 *This image is copyright of its original author Meeting their new neighbours; Aramí, Mbareté and Tania © CLT
Meanwhile, Jatobazinho, the male jaguar we expect to bring to Iberá from Brazil, is going through an acclimatisation and training period in the Oncafari center in Brazil. He will stay there the next 3 or 4 months to train on hunting live preys and to be without direct contact with humans before coming to Iberá. For the first time we could see the two jaguar cubs Mbarete and Arami assisting their mother Tania on hunting a capybara. This is good news and progress toward their future release in the wild. 
Welcome to Pleistocene Park
In Arctic Siberia, Russian scientists are trying to stave off catastrophic climate change—by resurrecting an Ice Age biome complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths.  *This image is copyright of its original author Kevin Tong Nikita Zimov’s nickname for the vehicle seemed odd at first. It didn’t look like a baby mammoth. It looked like a small tank, with armored wheels and a pit bull’s center of gravity. Only after he smashed us into the first tree did the connection become clear. We were driving through a remote forest in Eastern Siberia, just north of the Arctic Circle, when it happened. The summer thaw was in full swing. The undergrowth glowed green, and the air hung heavy with mosquitoes. We had just splashed through a series of deep ponds when, without a word of warning, Nikita veered off the trail and into the trees, ramming us into the trunk of a young 20-foot larch. The wheels spun for a moment, and then surged us forward. A dry crack rang out from under the fender as the larch snapped cleanly at its base and toppled over, falling in the quiet, dignified way that trees do. I had never seen Nikita happier. Even seated behind the wheel, he loomed tall and broad-shouldered, his brown hair cut short like a soldier’s. He fixed his large ice-blue eyes on the fallen tree and grinned. I remember thinking that in another age, Nikita might have led a hunter-gatherer band in some wildland of the far north. He squeezed the accelerator, slamming us into another larch, until it too snapped and toppled over, felled by our elephantine force. We rampaged 20 yards with this same violent rhythm—churning wheels, cracking timber, silent fall—before stopping to survey the flattened strip of larches in our wake. “In general, I like trees,” Nikita said. “But here, they are against our theory.” Behind us, through the fresh gap in the forest, our destination shone in the July sun. Beyond the broken trunks and a few dark tree-lined hills stood Pleistocene Park, a 50-square-mile nature reserve of grassy plains roamed by bison, musk oxen, wild horses, and maybe, in the not-too-distant future, lab-grown woolly mammoths. Though its name winks at Jurassic Park, Nikita, the reserve’s director, was keen to explain that it is not a tourist attraction, or even a species-resurrection project. It is, instead, a radical geoengineering scheme. “It will be cute to have mammoths running around here,” he told me. “But I’m not doing this for them, or for any other animals. I’m not one of these crazy scientists that just wants to make the world green. I am trying to solve the larger problem of climate change. I’m doing this for humans. I’ve got three daughters. I’m doing it for them.” Pleistocene Park is named for the geological epoch that ended only 12,000 years ago, having begun 2.6 million years earlier. Though colloquially known as the Ice Age, the Pleistocene could easily be called the Grass Age. Even during its deepest chills, when thick, blue-veined glaciers were bearing down on the Mediterranean, huge swaths of the planet were coated in grasslands. In Beringia, the Arctic belt that stretches across Siberia, all of Alaska, and much of Canada’s Yukon, these vast plains of green and gold gave rise to a new biome, a cold-weather version of the African savanna called the Mammoth Steppe. But when the Ice Age ended, many of the grasslands vanished under mysterious circumstances, along with most of the giant species with whom we once shared this Earth. Nikita is trying to resurface Beringia with grasslands. He wants to summon the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem, complete with its extinct creatures, back from the underworld of geological layers. The park was founded in 1996, and already it has broken out of its original fences, eating its way into the surrounding tundra scrublands and small forests. If Nikita has his way, Pleistocene Park will spread across Arctic Siberia and into North America, helping to slow the thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Were that frozen underground layer to warm too quickly, it would release some of the world’s most dangerous climate-change accelerants into the atmosphere, visiting catastrophe on human beings and millions of other species. In its scope and radicalism, the idea has few peers, save perhaps the scheme to cool the Earth by seeding the atmosphere with silvery mists of sun-reflecting aerosols. Only in Siberia’s empty expanse could an experiment of this scale succeed, and only if human beings learn to cooperate across centuries. This intergenerational work has already begun. It was Nikita’s father, Sergey, who first developed the idea for Pleistocene Park, before ceding control of it to Nikita. Quote:Sergey Zimov says the park would be “the largest project in human history.” The Zimovs have a complicated relationship. The father says he had to woo the son back to the Arctic. When Nikita was young, Sergey was, by his own admission, obsessed with work. “I don’t think he even paid attention to me until I was 20,” Nikita told me. Nikita went away for high school, to a prestigious science academy in Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city. He found life there to his liking, and decided to stay for university. Sergey made the journey to Novosibirsk during Nikita’s freshman year and asked him to come home. It would have been easy for Nikita to say no. He soon started dating the woman he would go on to marry. Saying yes to Sergey meant asking her to live, and raise children, in the ice fields at the top of the world. And then there was his pride. “It is difficult to dedicate your life to someone else’s idea,” he told me. But Sergey was persuasive. Like many Russians, he has a poetic way of speaking. In the Arctic research community, he is famous for his ability to think across several scientific disciplines. He will spend years nurturing a big idea before previewing it for the field’s luminaries. It will sound crazy at first, several of them told me. “But then you go away and you think,” said Max Holmes, the deputy director of Woods Hole Research Center, in Massachusetts. “And the idea starts to makes sense, and then you can’t come up with a good reason why it’s wrong.” Of all the big ideas that have come spilling out of Sergey Zimov, none rouses his passions like Pleistocene Park. He once told me it would be “the largest project in human history.” As it happens, human history began in the Pleistocene. Many behaviors that distinguish us from other species emerged during that 2.6-million-year epoch, when glaciers pulsed down from the North Pole at regular intervals. In the flood myths of Noah and Gilgamesh, and in Plato’s story of Atlantis, we get a clue as to what it was like when the last glaciation ended and the ice melted and the seas welled up, swallowing coasts and islands. But human culture has preserved no memory of an oncoming glaciation. We can only imagine what it was like to watch millennia of snow pile up into ice slabs that pushed ever southward. In the epic poems that compress generations of experience, a glaciation would have seemed like a tsunami of ice rolling down from the great white north. One of these 10,000-year winters may have inspired our domestication of fire, that still unequaled technological leap that warmed us, warded away predators, and cooked the calorie-dense meals that nourished our growing brains. On our watch, fire evolved quickly, from a bonfire at the center of camp to industrial combustion that powers cities whose glow can be seen from space. But these fossil-fueled fires give off an exhaust, one that is pooling, invisibly, in the thin shell of air around our planet, warming its surface. And nowhere is warming faster, or with greater consequence, than the Arctic. Every Arctic winter is an Ice Age in miniature. In late September, the sky darkens and the ice sheet atop the North Pole expands, spreading a surface freeze across the seas of the Arctic Ocean, like a cataract dilating over a blue iris. In October, the freeze hits Siberia’s north coast and continues into the land, sandwiching the soil between surface snowpack and subterranean frost. When the spring sun comes, it melts the snow, but the frozen underground layer remains. Nearly a mile thick in some places, this Siberian permafrost extends through the northern tundra moonscape and well into the taiga forest that stretches, like an evergreen stripe, across Eurasia’s midsection. Similar frozen layers lie beneath the surface in Alaska and the Yukon, and all are now beginning to thaw.  *This image is copyright of its original author Kevin Tong If this intercontinental ice block warms too quickly, its thawing will send as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere each year as do all of America’s SUVs, airliners, container ships, factories, and coal-burning plants combined. It could throw the planet’s climate into a calamitous feedback loop, in which faster heating begets faster melting. The more apocalyptic climate-change scenarios will be in play. Coastal population centers could be swamped. Oceans could become more acidic. A mass extinction could rip its way up from the plankton base of the marine food chain. Megadroughts could expand deserts and send hundreds of millions of refugees across borders, triggering global war. “Pleistocene Park is meant to slow the thawing of the permafrost,” Nikita told me. The park sits in the transition zone between the Siberian tundra and the dense woods of the taiga. For decades, the Zimovs and their animals have stripped away the region’s dark trees and shrubs to make way for the return of grasslands. Research suggests that these grasslands will reflect more sunlight than the forests and scrub they replace, causing the Arctic to absorb less heat. In winter, the short grass and animal-trampled snow will offer scant insulation, enabling the season’s freeze to reach deeper into the Earth’s crust, cooling the frozen soil beneath and locking one of the world’s most dangerous carbon-dioxide lodes in a thermodynamic vault. To test these landscape-scale cooling effects, Nikita will need to import the large herbivores of the Pleistocene. He’s already begun bringing them in from far-off lands, two by two, as though filling an ark. But to grow his Ice Age lawn into a biome that stretches across continents, he needs millions more. He needs wild horses, musk oxen, reindeer, bison, and predators to corral the herbivores into herds. And, to keep the trees beaten back, he needs hundreds of thousands of resurrected woolly mammoths. In Mammoth, a short documentary by Grant Slater, Sergey and Nikita Zimov explain the vision behind Pleistocene Park. As a species, the woolly mammoth is fresh in its grave. People in Siberia still stumble on frozen mammoth remains with flesh and fur intact. Some scientists have held out hope that one of these carcasses may contain an undamaged cell suitable for cloning. But Jurassic Park notwithstanding, the DNA of a deceased animal decays quickly. Even if a deep freeze spares a cell the ravenous microbial swarms that follow in death’s wake, a few thousand years of cosmic rays will reduce its genetic code to a jumble of unreadable fragments. You could wander the entire Earth and not find a mammoth cell with a perfectly preserved nucleus. But you may not need one. A mammoth is merely a cold-adapted member of the elephant family. Asian elephants in zoos have been caught on camera making snowballs with their trunks. Modify the genomes of elephants like those, as nature modified their ancestors’ across hundreds of thousands of years, and you can make your own mammoths. The geneticist George Church and a team of scientists at his Harvard lab are trying to do exactly that. In early 2014, using crispr, the genome-editing technology, they began flying along the rails of the Asian elephant’s double helix, switching in mammoth traits. They are trying to add cold-resistant hemoglobin and a full-body layer of insulating fat. They want to shrink the elephant’s flapping, expressive ears so they don’t freeze in the Arctic wind, and they want to coat the whole animal in luxurious fur. By October 2014, Church and his team had succeeded in editing 15 of the Asian elephant’s genes. Late last year he told me he was tweaking 30 more, and he said he might need to change only 50 to do the whole job. When I asked Beth Shapiro, the world’s foremost expert in extinct species’ DNA, about Church’s work, she gushed. “George Church is awesome,” she said. “He’s on the right path, and no one has made more progress than him. But it’s too early to say whether it will take only 50 genes, because it takes a lot of work to see what each of those changes is going to do to the whole animal.” Even if it takes hundreds of gene tweaks, Church won’t have to make a perfect mammoth. If he can resculpt the Asian elephant so it can survive Januarys in Siberia, he can leave natural selection to do the polishing. For instance, mammoth hair was as long as 12 inches, but shorter fur will be fine for Church’s purposes. Yakutian wild horses took less than 1,000 years to regrow long coats after they returned to the Arctic. Quote:Church hopes to deliver the first mammoth to the park within a decade. “The gene editing is the easy part,” Church told me, before I left for Pleistocene Park. Assembling the edited cells into an embryo that survives to term is the real challenge, in part because surrogacy is out of the question. Asian elephants are an endangered species. Few scientists want to tinker with their reproductive processes, and no other animal’s womb will do. Instead, the embryos will have to be nurtured in an engineered environment, most likely a tiny sac of uterine cells at first, and then a closet-size tank where the fetus can grow into a fully formed, 200-pound calf.  *This image is copyright of its original author Kevin Tong No one has yet brought a mammal to term in an artificial environment. The mammalian mother–child bond, with its precisely timed hormone releases, is beyond the reach of current biotechnology. But scientists are getting closer with mice, whose embryos have now stayed healthy in vitro for almost half of their 20-day gestation period. Church told me he hopes he’ll be manufacturing mice in a lab within five years. And though the elephant’s 22-month gestation period is the longest of any mammal, Church said he hopes it will be a short hop from manufacturing mice to manufacturing mammoths. Church has been thinking about making mammoths for some time, but he accelerated his efforts in 2013, after meeting Sergey Zimov at a de-extinction conference in Washington, D.C. Between sessions, Sergey pitched him on his plan to keep Beringia’s permafrost frozen by giving it a top coat of Ice Age grassland. When he explained the mammoth’s crucial role in that ecosystem, Church felt compelled to help. He told me he hopes to deliver the first woolly mammoth to Pleistocene Park within a decade. Last summer, I traveled 72 hours, across 15 time zones, to reach Pleistocene Park. After Moscow, the towns, airports, and planes shrunk with every flight. The last leg flew out of Yakutsk, a gray city in Russia’s far east, whose name has, like Siberia’s, become shorthand for exile. The small dual-prop plane flew northeast for four hours, carrying about a dozen passengers seated on blue-felt seats with the structural integrity of folding chairs. Most were indigenous people from Northeast Siberia. Some brought goods from warmer climes, including crops that can’t grow atop the permafrost. One woman held a bucket of grapes between her knees. We landed in Cherskiy, a dying gold-mining town that sits on the Kolyma River, a 1,323-mile vein of meltwater, the largest of several that gush out of northeastern Russia and into the East Siberian Sea. Stalin built a string of gulags along the Kolyma and packed them with prisoners, who were made to work in the local mines. Solzhenitsyn called the Kolyma the gulag system’s “pole of cold and cruelty.” The region retains its geopolitical cachet today, on account of its proximity to the Arctic Ocean’s vast undersea oil reserves. Cherskiy’s airstrip is one of the world’s most remote. Before it became a Cold War stronghold, it was a jumping-off point for expeditions to the North Pole. You need special government permission to fly into Cherskiy. Our plane had just rolled to a halt on the runway’s patchy asphalt when Russian soldiers in fatigues boarded and bounded up to the first row of the cabin, where I was sitting with Grant Slater, an American filmmaker who had come with me to shoot footage of Pleistocene Park. I’d secured the required permission, but Slater was a late addition to the trip, and his paperwork had not come in on time. Nikita Zimov, who met us at the airport, had foreseen these difficulties. Thanks to his lobbying, the soldiers agreed to let Slater through with only 30 minutes of questioning at the local military base. The soldiers wanted to know whether he had ever been to Syria and, more to the point, whether he was an American spy. “It is good to be a big man in a small town,” Nikita told us as we left the base. Nikita runs the Northeast Science Station, an Arctic research outpost near Cherskiy, which supports a range of science projects along the Kolyma River, including Pleistocene Park. The station and the park are both funded with a mix of grants from the European Union and America’s National Science Foundation. Nikita’s family makes the 2,500-mile journey from Novosibirsk to the station every May. In the months that follow, they are joined by a rotating group of more than 60 scientists from around the world. When the sky darkens in the fall, the scientists depart, followed by Nikita’s family and finally Nikita himself, who hands the keys to a small team of winter rangers. We arrived at the station just before dinner. It was a modest place, consisting of 11 hacked-together structures, a mix of laboratories and houses overlooking a tributary of the Kolyma. Station life revolves around a central building topped by a giant satellite dish that once beamed propaganda to this remote region of the Soviet empire. I’d barely stepped through the door that first night when Nikita offered me a beer. “Americans love IPAs,” he said, handing me a 32-ounce bottle. He led us into the station’s dining hall, a warmly lit, cavernous room directly underneath the satellite dish. During dinner, one of the scientists told me that the Northeast Science Station ranks second among Arctic outposts as a place to do research, behind only Toolik Field Station in Alaska. Nikita later confided that he felt quite competitive with Toolik. Being far less remote, the Alaskan station offers scientists considerable amenities, including seamless delivery from Amazon Prime. But Toolik provides no alcohol, so Nikita balances its advantages by stocking his station with Russian beer and crystal-blue bottles of Siberian vodka, shipped into Cherskiy at a heavy cost. The drinks are often consumed late at night in a roomy riverside sauna, under a sky streaked pink by the midnight sun. Nikita is the life of the station. He is at every meal, and any travel, by land or water, must be coordinated through him. His father is harder to find. One night, I caught Sergey alone in the dining room, having a late dinner. Squat and barrel-chested, he was sitting at a long table, his thick gray rope of a ponytail hanging past his tailbone. His beard was a white Brillo Pad streaked with yellow. He chain-smoked all through the meal, drinking vodka, telling stories, and arguing about Russo-American relations. He kept insisting, loudly and in his limited English, that Donald Trump would be elected president in a few months. (Nikita would later tell me that Sergey has considered himself something of a prophet ever since he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union.) Late in the night, he finally mellowed when he turned to his favorite subjects, the deep past and far future of humankind. Since effectively handing the station over to his son, Sergey seems to have embraced a new role. He has become the station’s resident philosopher. Nikita would probably think philosopher too generous. “My dad likes to lie on the sofa and do science while I do all the work,” he told me the next day. We were descending into an ice cave in Pleistocene Park. Step by cautious step, we made our way down a pair of rickety ladders that dropped 80 feet through the permafrost to the cave’s bottom. Each time our boots found the next rung, we came eye to eye with a more ancient stratum of chilled soil. Even in the Arctic summer, temperatures in the underground network of chambers were below freezing, and the walls were coated with white ice crystals. I felt like we were wandering around in a geode. Not every wall sparkled with fractals of white frost. Some were windows of clear ice, revealing mud that was 10,000, 20,000, even 30,000 years old. The ancient soil was rich with tiny bone fragments from horses, bison, and mammoths, large animals that would have needed a prolific, cold-resistant food source to survive the Ice Age Arctic. Nikita knelt and scratched at one of the frozen panels with his fingernail. Columns of exhaled steam floated up through the white beam of his headlamp. “See this?” he said. I leaned in, training my lamp on his thumb and forefinger. Between them, he held a thread of vegetable matter so tiny and pale that an errant breath might have reduced it to powder. It was a 30,000-year-old root that had once been attached to a bright-green blade of grass. For the vast majority of the Earth’s 4.5 billion spins around the sun, its exposed, rocky surfaces lay barren. Plants changed that. Born in the seas like us, they knocked against the planet’s shores for eons. They army-crawled onto the continents, anchored themselves down, and began testing new body plans, performing, in the process, a series of vast experiments on the Earth’s surface. They pushed whole forests of woody stems into the sky to stretch their light-drinking leaves closer to the sun. They learned how to lure pollinators by unfurling perfumed blooms in every color of the rainbow. And nearly 70 million years ago, they began testing a new form that crept out from the shadowy edges of the forest and began spreading a green carpet of solar panel across the Earth. For tens of millions of years, grasses waged a global land war against forests. According to some scientists, they succeeded by making themselves easy to eat. Unlike other plants, many grasses don’t expend energy on poisons, or thorns, or other herbivore-deterring technologies. By allowing themselves to be eaten, they partner with their own grazers to enhance their ecosystem’s nutrient flows. Temperate-zone biomes can’t match the lightning-fast bio-cycling of the tropics, where every leaf that falls to the steamy jungle floor is set upon by microbial swarms that dissolve its constituent parts. In a pine forest, a fallen branch might keep its nutrients locked behind bark and needle for years. But grasslands are able to keep nutrients moving relatively quickly, because grasses so easily find their way into the hot, wet stomachs of large herbivores, which are even more microbe-rich than the soil of the tropics. A grazing herbivore returns nutrients to the soil within a day or two, its thick, paste-like dung acting as a fertilizer to help the bitten blades of grass regrow from below. The blades sprout as if from everlasting ribbon dispensers, and they grow faster than any other plant group on Earth. Some bamboo grasses shoot out of the ground at a rate of several feet a day.  *This image is copyright of its original author Kevin Tong Grasses became the base layer for some of the Earth’s richest ecosystems. They helped make giants out of the small, burrowing mammals that survived the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. And they did it in some of the world’s driest regions, such as the sunbaked plains of the Serengeti, where more than 1 million wildebeests still roam. Or the northern reaches of Eurasia during the most-severe stretches of the Pleistocene. The root between Nikita’s thumb and forefinger was one foot soldier among trillions that fought in an ecological revolution that human beings would come to join. We descended, after all, from tree-dwellers. Our nearest primate relatives, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, are still in the forest. Not human beings. We left Africa’s woodlands and wandered into the alien ecology of its grassland savannas, as though sensing their raw fertility. Today, our diets—and those of the animals we domesticated—are still dominated by grasses, especially those we have engineered into mutant strains: rice, wheat, corn, and sugarcane. “Ask any kid ‘Where do animals live?’ and they will tell you ‘The forest,’ ” Nikita told me. “That’s what people think of when they think about nature. They think of birds singing in a forest. They should think of the grassland.” Nikita and I climbed out of the ice cave and headed for the park’s grassland. We had to cross a muddy drainage channel that he had bulldozed to empty a nearby lake, so that grass seeds from the park’s existing fields could drift on the wind and fall onto the newly revealed soil. Fresh tufts of grass were already erupting out of the mud. Nikita does most of his violent gardening with a forest-mowing transporter on tank treads that stands more than 10 feet tall. He calls it the “mama mammoth.” When I first laid eyes on Pleistocene Park, I wondered whether it was the grassland views that first lured humans out of the woods. In the treeless plains, an upright biped can see almost into eternity. Cool Arctic winds rushed across the open landscape, fluttering its long ground layer of grasses. On the horizon, I made out a herd of large, gray-and-white animals. Their features came into focus as we hiked closer, especially after one broke into a run. They were horses, like those that sprinted across the plains of Eurasia and the Americas during the Pleistocene, their hooves hammering the ground, compressing the snow so that other grazers could reach cold mouthfuls of grass and survive the winter. Quote:“Give me 100 mammoths … You won’t recognize this place.” Like America’s mustangs, Pleistocene Park’s horses come from a line that was once domesticated. But it was hard to imagine these horses being tamed. They moved toward us with a boldness you don’t often see in pens and barns. Nikita is not a man who flinches easily, but he backpedaled quickly when the horses feinted in our direction. He stooped and gathered a bouquet of grass and extended it tentatively. The horses snorted at the offer. They stared at us, dignified and curious, the mystery of animal consciousness beaming out from the black sheen of their eyes. At one point, four lined up in profile, like the famous quartet of gray horses painted by torchlight on the ceiling of Chauvet Cave, in France, some 30,000 years ago. We walked west through the fields, to where a lone bison was grazing. When seen without a herd, a bison loses some of its glamour as a pure symbol of the wild. But even a single hungry specimen is an ecological force to be reckoned with. This one would eat through acres of grass by the time the year was out. In the warmer months, bison expend some of their awesome muscular energy on the destruction of trees. They shoulder into stout trunks, rubbing them raw and exposing them to the elements. It was easy to envision huge herds of these animals clearing the steppes of Eurasia and North America during the Pleistocene. This one had trampled several of the park’s saplings, reducing them to broken, leafless nubs. Nikita and I worried that the bison would trample us, too, when, upon hearing us inch closer, he reared up his mighty, horned head, stilled his swishing tail, and stared, as though contemplating a charge. We stayed low and headed away to higher ground to see a musk ox, a grazer whose entire being, inside and out, seems to have been carved by the Pleistocene. A musk ox’s stomach contains exotic microbiota that are corrosive enough to process tundra scrub. Its dense layers of fur provide a buffer that allows it to graze in perfect comfort under the dark, aurora-filled sky of the Arctic winter, untroubled by skin-peeling, 70-below winds. Nikita wants to bring hordes of musk oxen to Pleistocene Park. He acquired this one on a dicey boat ride hundreds of miles north into the ice-strewn Arctic Ocean. He would have brought back several others, too, but a pair of polar bears made off with them. Admiring the animal’s shiny, multicolored coat, I asked Nikita whether he worried about poachers, especially with a depressed mining town nearby. He told me that hunters from Cherskiy routinely hunt moose, reindeer, and bear in the surrounding forests, “but they don’t hunt animals in the park.” “Why?,” I asked. “Personal relationships,” he said. “When the leader of the local mafia died, I gave the opening remarks at his funeral.” Filling Pleistocene Park with giant herbivores is a difficult task because there are so few left. When modern humans walked out of Africa, some 70,000 years ago, we shared this planet with more than 30 land-mammal species that weighed more than a ton. Of those animals, only elephants, hippos, rhinos, and giraffes remain. These African megafauna may have survived contact with human beings because they evolved alongside us over millions of years—long enough for natural selection to bake in the instincts required to share a habitat with the most dangerous predator nature has yet manufactured. The giant animals that lived on other continents had no such luxury. When we first wandered into their midst, they may have misjudged us as small, harmless creatures. But by the time humans arrived in southern Europe, we’d figured out how to fan out across grasslands in small, fleet-footed groups. And we were carrying deadly projectiles that could be thrown from beyond the intimate range of an animal’s claws or fangs. Most ecosystems have checks against runaway predation. Population dynamics usually ensure that apex predators are rare. When Africa’s grazing populations dip too low, for instance, lions go hungry and their numbers plummet. The same is true of sharks in the oceans. But when human beings’ favorite prey thins out, we can easily switch to plant foods. This omnivorous resilience may explain a mystery that has vexed fossil hunters for more than a century, as they have slowly unearthed evidence of an extraordinary die-off of large animals all over the world, right at the end of the Pleistocene. Some scientists think that extreme climate change was the culprit: The global melt transformed land-based biomes, and lumbering megafauna were slow to adapt. But this theory has weaknesses. Many of the vanished species had already survived millions of years of fluctuations between cold and warmth. And with a climate-caused extinction event, you’d expect the effects to be distributed across size and phylum. But small animals mostly survived the end of the Pleistocene. The species that died in high numbers were mammals with huge stores of meat in their flanks—precisely the sort you’d expect spear-wielding humans to hunt. Climate change may have played a supporting role in these extinctions, but as our inventory of fossils has grown, it has strengthened the case for extermination by human rampage. Most telling is the timeline. Between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago, during an ocean-lowering glaciation, a small group of humans set out on a sea voyage from Southeast Asia. In only a few thousand years, they skittered across Indonesia and the Philippines, until they reached Papua New Guinea and Australia, where they found giant kangaroos, lizards twice as long as Komodo dragons, and furry, hippo-size wombats that kept their young in huge abdominal pouches. Estimating extinction dates is tricky, but most of these species seem to have vanished shortly thereafter. It took at least another 20,000 years for human beings to trek over the Bering land bridge to the Americas, and a few thousand more to make it down to the southern tip. The journey seems to have taken the form of an extended hunting spree. Before humans arrived, the Americas were home to mammoths, bear-size beavers, car-size armadillos, giant camels, and a bison species twice as large as those that graze the plains today. The smaller, surviving bison is now the largest living land animal in the Americas, and it barely escaped extermination: The invasion of gun-toting Europeans reduced its numbers from more than 30 million to fewer than 2,000. The pattern that pairs human arrival with megafaunal extinction is clearest in the far-flung islands that no human visited until relatively recently. The large animals of Hawaii, Madagascar, and New Zealand disappeared during the past 2,000 years, usually within centuries of human arrival. This pattern even extends to ocean ecosystems. As soon as industrial shipbuilding allowed large groups of humans to establish a permanent presence on the seas, we began hunting marine megafauna for meat and lamp oil. Less than a century later, North Atlantic gray whales were gone, along with 95 percent of North Atlantic humpbacks. Not since the asteroid struck have large animals found it so difficult to survive on planet Earth. In nature, no event happens in isolation. A landscape that loses its giants becomes something else. Nikita and I walked all the way to the edge of Pleistocene Park, to the border between the grassy plains and the forest, where a line of upstart saplings was shooting out of the ground. Trees like these had sprung out of the soils of the Northern Hemisphere for ages, but until recently, many were trampled or snapped in half by the mighty, tusked force of the woolly mammoth. It was only 3 million years ago that elephants left Africa and swept across southern Eurasia. By the time they crossed the land bridge to the Americas, they’d grown a coat of fur. Some of them would have waded into the shallow passes between islands, using their trunks as snorkels. In the deserts south of Alaska, they would have used those same trunks to make mental scent maps of water resources, which were probably sharper in resolution than a bloodhound’s. The mammoth family assumed new forms in new habitats, growing long fur in northern climes and shrinking to pygmies on Californian islands where food was scarce. But mammoths were always a keystone species on account of their prodigious grazing, their well-digging, and the singular joy they seemed to derive from knocking down trees. A version of this behavior is on display today in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, one of the only places on Earth where elephants live in high densities. As the population has recovered, the park’s woodlands have thinned, just as they did millions of years ago, when elephants helped engineer the African savannas that made humans into humans. Quote:The mammoth’s extinction may have been our original ecological sin. I have often wondered whether the human who first encountered a mammoth retained some cultural memory of its African cousin, in song or story. In the cave paintings that constitute our clearest glimpse into the prehistoric mind, mammoths loom large. In a single French cave, more than 150 are rendered in black outline, their tusks curving just so. In the midst of the transition from caves to constructed homes, some humans lived inside mammoths: 15,000 years ago, early architects built tents from the animals’ bones and tusks. Whatever wonderment human beings felt upon sighting their first mammoth, it was eventually superseded by more-practical concerns. After all, a single cold-preserved carcass could feed a tribe for a few weeks. It took less than 50 millennia for humans to help kill off the mammoths of Eurasia and North America. Most were dead by the end of the Ice Age. A few survived into historical times, on remote Arctic Ocean outposts like St. Paul Island, a lonely dot of land in the center of the Bering Sea where mammoths lived until about 3600 b.c. A final group of survivors slowly wasted away on Wrangel Island, just north of Pleistocene Park. Mammoth genomes tell us they were already inbreeding when the end came, around 2000 b.c. No one knows how the last mammoth died, but we do know that humans made landfall on Wrangel Island around the same time.  *This image is copyright of its original author Kevin Tong The mammoth’s extinction may have been our original ecological sin. When humans left Africa 70,000 years ago, the elephant family occupied a range that stretched from that continent’s southern tip to within 600 miles of the North Pole. Now elephants are holed up in a few final hiding places, such as Asia’s dense forests. Even in Africa, our shared ancestral home, their populations are shrinking, as poachers hunt them with helicopters, GPS, and night-vision goggles. If you were an anthropologist specializing in human ecological relationships, you may well conclude that one of our distinguishing features as a species is an inability to coexist peacefully with elephants. But nature isn’t fixed, least of all human nature. We may yet learn to live alongside elephants, in all their spectacular variety. We may even become a friend to these magnificent animals. Already, we honor them as a symbol of memory, wisdom, and dignity. With luck, we will soon re-extend their range to the Arctic. “Give me 100 mammoths and come back in a few years,” Nikita told me as he stood on the park’s edge, staring hard into the fast-growing forest. “You won’t recognize this place.” The next morning, I met Sergey Zimov on the dock at the Northeast Science Station. In winter, when Siberia ices over, locals make long-distance treks on the Kolyma’s frozen surface, mostly in heavy trucks, but also in the ancestral mode: sleighs pulled by fleet-footed reindeer. (Many far-northern peoples have myths about flying reindeer.) Sergey and I set out by speedboat, snaking our way down from the Arctic Ocean and into the Siberian wilderness. Wearing desert fatigues and a black beret, Sergey smoked as he drove, burning through a whole pack of unfiltered cigarettes. The twin roars of wind and engine forced him to be even louder and more aphoristic than usual. Every few miles, he would point at the young forests on the shores of the river, lamenting their lack of animals. “This is not wild!” he would shout. It was early afternoon when we arrived at Duvanny Yar, a massive cliff that runs for six miles along the riverbank. It was like no other cliff I’d ever seen. Rising 100 feet above the shore, it was a concave checkerboard of soggy mud and smooth ice. Trees on its summit were flopping over, their fun-house angles betraying the thaw beneath. Its aura of apocalyptic decay was enhanced by the sulfurous smell seeping out of the melting cliffside. As a long seam of exposed permafrost, Duvanny Yar is a vivid window into the brutal geological reality of climate change. Many of the world’s far-northern landscapes, in Scandinavia, Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, are wilting like Duvanny Yar is. When Nikita and I had driven through Cherskiy, the local mining town, we’d seen whole houses sinking into mud formed by the big melt. On YouTube, you can watch a researcher stomp his foot on Siberian scrubland, making it ripple like a water bed. The northern reaches of the taiga are dimpled with craters hundreds of feet across, where frozen underground soil has gone slushy and collapsed, causing landslides that have sucked huge stretches of forest into the Earth. The local Yakutians describe one of the larger sinkholes as a “gateway to the underworld.” As the Duvanny Yar cliffside slowly melts into the Kolyma River, it is spilling Ice Age bones onto the riverbank, including woolly-rhino ribs and mammoth tusks worth thousands of dollars. A team of professional ivory hunters had recently picked the shore clean, but for a single 30-inch section of tusk spotted the previous day by a lucky German scientist. He had passed it around the dinner table at the station. Marveling at its smooth surface and surprising heft, I’d felt, for a moment, the instinctive charge of ivory lust, that peculiar human longing that has been so catastrophic for elephants, furry and otherwise. When I joked with Sergey that fresh tusks may soon be strewn across this riverbank, he told me he hoped he would be alive when mammoths return to the park. The first of the resurrected mammoths will be the loneliest animal on Earth. Elephants are extremely social. When they are removed from normal herd life to a circus or a zoo, some slip into madness. Mothers even turn on their young. “Playing God doesn’t bother me in the least. We are already doing it.” Elephants are matriarchal: Males generally leave the herd in their teens, when they start showing signs of sexual maturity. An elephant’s social life begins at birth, when a newborn calf enters the world to the sound of joyous stomping and trumpeting from its sisters, cousins, aunts, and, in some cases, a grandmother. Mammoth herds were likewise matriarchal, meaning a calf would have received patient instruction from its female elders. It would have learned how to use small sticks to clean dirt from the cracks in its feet, which were so sensitive that they could feel the steps of a distant herd member. It would have learned how to wield a trunk stuffed with more muscles than there are in the entire human body, including those that controlled its built-in water hose. It would have learned how to blast trumpet notes across the plains, striking fear into cave lions, and how to communicate with its fellow herd members in a rich range of rumbling sounds, many inaudible to the human ear. The older mammoths would have taught the calf how to find ancestral migration paths, how to avoid sinkholes, where to find water. When a herd member died, the youngest mammoth would have watched the others stand vigil, tenderly touching the body of the departed with their trunks before covering it with branches and leaves. No one knows how to re-create this rich mammoth culture, much less how to transmit it to that cosmically bewildered first mammoth. Or to an entire generation of such mammoths. The Zimovs won’t be able to slow the thawing of the permafrost if they have to wait for their furry elephant army to grow organically. That would take too long, given the species’s slow breeding pace. George Church, the Harvard geneticist, told me he thinks the mammoth-manufacturing process can be industrialized, complete with synthetic-milk production, to create a seed population that numbers in the tens of thousands. But he didn’t say who would pay for it—at the Northeast Science Station, there was open talk of recruiting a science-friendly Silicon Valley billionaire—or how the Zimovs would deploy such a large group of complex social animals that would all be roughly the same age. Nikita and Sergey seemed entirely unbothered by ethical considerations regarding mammoth cloning or geoengineering. They saw no contradiction between their veneration of “the wild” and their willingness to intervene, radically, in nature. At times they sounded like villains from a Michael Crichton novel. Nikita suggested that such concerns reeked of a particularly American piety. “I grew up in an atheist country,” he said. “Playing God doesn’t bother me in the least. We are already doing it. Why not do it better?” Sergey noted that other people want to stop climate change by putting chemicals in the atmosphere or in the ocean, where they could spread in dangerous ways. “All I want to do is bring animals back to the Arctic,” he said. As Sergey and I walked down the riverbank, I kept hearing a cracking sound coming from the cliff. Only after we stopped did I register its source, when I looked up just in time to see a small sheet of ice dislodge from the cliffside. Duvanny Yar was bleeding into the river before our very eyes. In 1999, Sergey submitted a paper to the journal Science arguing that Beringian permafrost contained rich “yedoma” soils left over from Pleistocene grasslands. (In other parts of the Arctic, such as Norway and eastern Canada, there is less carbon in the permafrost; if it thaws, sea levels will rise, but much less greenhouse gas will be released into the atmosphere.) When Beringia’s pungent soils are released from their icy prison, microbes devour the organic contents, creating puffs of carbon dioxide. When this process occurs at the bottom of a lake filled with permafrost melt, it creates bubbles of methane that float up to the surface and pop, releasing a gas whose greenhouse effects are an order of magnitude worse than carbon dioxide’s. Already more than 1 million of these lakes dot the Arctic, and every year, new ones appear in nasa satellite images, their glimmering surfaces steaming methane into the closed system that is the Earth’s atmosphere. If huge herds of megafauna recolonize the Arctic, they too will expel methane, but less than the thawing frost, according to the Zimovs’ estimates. Science initially rejected Sergey’s paper about the danger posed by Beringia’s warming. But in 2006, an editor from the journal asked Sergey to resubmit his work. It was published in June of that year. Thanks in part to him, we now know that there is more carbon locked in the Arctic permafrost than there is in all the planet’s forests and the rest of the atmosphere combined. For my last day in the Arctic, Nikita had planned a send-off. We were to make a day trip, by car, to Mount Rodinka, on Cherskiy’s outskirts. Sergey came along, as did Nikita’s daughters and one of the German scientists. Rodinka is referred to locally as a mountain, though it hardly merits the term. Eons of water and wind have rounded it down to a dark, stubby hill. But in Siberia’s flatlands, every hill is a mountain. Halfway up to the summit, we already had a God’s-eye view of the surrounding landscape. The sky was lucid blue but for a thin mist that hovered above the Kolyma River, which slithered, through a mix of evergreens and scrub, all the way to the horizon. At the foot of the mountain, the gold-mining town and its airstrip hugged the river. In the dreamy, deep-time atmosphere of Pleistocene Park, it had been easy to forget this modern human world outside the park’s borders. Just before the close of the 19th century, in the pages of this magazine, John Muir praised the expansion of Yellowstone, America’s first national park. He wrote of the forests, yes, but also of the grasslands, the “glacier meadows” whose “smooth, silky lawns” pastured “the big Rocky Mountain game animals.” Already the park had served “the furred and feathered tribes,” he wrote. Many were “in danger of extinction a short time ago,” but they “are now increasing in numbers.” Yellowstone’s borders have since been expanded even farther. The park is now part of a larger stretch of land cut out from ranches, national forests, wildlife refuges, and even tribal lands. This Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is 10 times the size of the original park, and it’s home to the country’s most populous wild-bison herd. There is even talk of extending a wildlife corridor to the north, to provide animals safe passage between a series of wilderness reserves, from Glacier National Park to the Canadian Yukon. But not everyone supports Yellowstone’s outward expansion. The park is also home to a growing population of grizzly bears, and they have started showing up in surrounding towns. Wolves were reintroduced in 1995, and they, too, are now thriving. A few have picked off local livestock. Sergey sees Pleistocene Park as the natural next step beyond Yellowstone in the rewilding of the planet. But if Yellowstone is already meeting resistance as it expands into the larger human world, how will Pleistocene Park fare if it leaves the Kolyma River basin and spreads across Beringia?  *This image is copyright of its original author Kevin Tong The park will need to be stocked with dangerous predators. When they are absent, herbivore herds spread out, or they feel safe enough to stay in the same field, munching away mindlessly until it’s overgrazed. Big cats and wolves force groups of grazers into dense, watchful formations that move fast across a landscape, visiting a new patch of vegetation each day in order to mow it with their teeth, fertilize it with their dung, and trample it with their many-hooved plow. Nikita wants to bring in gray wolves, Siberian tigers, or cold-adapted Canadian cougars. If it becomes a trivial challenge to resurrect extinct species, perhaps he could even repopulate Siberia with cave lions and dire wolves. But what will happen when one of these predators wanders onto a city street for the first time? “This is a part of the world where there is very little agriculture, and very few humans,” Sergey told me. He is right that Beringia is sparsely populated, and that continuing urbanization will likely clear still more space by luring rural populations into the cities. But the region, which stretches across Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, won’t be empty anytime soon. Fifty years from now, there will still be mafia leaders to appease, not to mention indigenous groups and the governments of three nations, including two that spent much of the last century vying for world domination. America and Russia often cooperate in the interest of science, especially in extreme environments like Antarctica and low-Earth orbit, but the Zimovs will need a peace that persists for generations. Sergey envisions a series of founding parks, “maybe as many as 10,” scattered across Beringia. One would be along the Yentna River, in Alaska, another in the Yukon. A few would be placed to the west of Pleistocene Park, near the Ural mountain range, which separates Siberia from the rest of Russia. As Sergey spoke, he pointed toward each of these places, as if they were just over the horizon and not thousands of miles away. Sergey’s plan relies on the very climate change he ultimately hopes to forestall. “The top layer of permafrost will melt first,” he said. “Modern ecosystems will be destroyed entirely. The trees will fall down and wash away, and grasses will begin to appear.” The Mammoth Steppe would spread from its starting nodes in each park until they all bled into one another, forming a megapark that spanned the entire region. Humans could visit on bullet trains built on elevated tracks, to avoid disturbing the animals’ free movement. Hunting could be allowed in designated areas. Gentler souls could go on Arctic safari tours. When Sergey was out of earshot, I asked Nikita whether one of his daughters would one day take over Pleistocene Park to see this plan through. We were watching two of them play in an old Soviet-military radar station, about 100 yards from Rodinka’s peak. “I took the girls to the park last week, and I don’t think they were too impressed,” Nikita told me, laughing. “They thought the horses were unfriendly.” I told him that wasn’t an answer. “I’m not as selfish as my father,” he said. “I won’t force them to do this.” Before I left to catch a plane back to civilization, I stood with Sergey on the mountaintop once more, taking in the view. He had slipped into one of his reveries about grasslands full of animals. He seemed to be suffering from a form of solastalgia, a condition described by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht as a kind of existential grief for a vanished landscape, be it a swallowed coast, a field turned to desert, or a bygone geological epoch. He kept returning to the idea that the wild planet had been interrupted midway through its grand experiment, its 4.5-billion-year blending of rock, water, and sunlight. He seems to think that the Earth peaked during the Ice Age, with the grassland ecologies that spawned human beings. He wants to restore the biosphere to that creative summit, so it can run its cosmic experiment forward in time. He wants to know what new wonders will emerge. “Maybe there will be more than one animal with a mind,” he told me. I don’t know whether Nikita can make his father’s mad vision a material reality. The known challenges are immense, and there are likely many more that he cannot foresee. But in this brave new age when it is humans who make and remake the world, it is a comfort to know that people are trying to summon whole landscapes, Lazarus-like, from the tomb. “Come forth,” they are saying to woolly mammoths. Come into this habitat that has been prepared for you. Join the wolves and the reindeer and the bison who survived you. Slip into your old Ice Age ecology. Wander free in this wild stretch of the Earth. Your kind will grow stronger as the centuries pass. This place will overflow with life once again. Our original sin will be wiped clean. And if, in doing all this, we can save our planet and ourselves, that will be the stuff of a new mythology.  *This image is copyright of its original author Aurochs (Bos primigenius f. taurus), Horse (Equus ferus f. caballus) and Fallow Deer (Dama dama) auf der größten Weide in Tierpark Tierpark Sababurg
Loss of large land mammals could change landscapes forever
Quote:Large land animals such as elephants, wildebeest and other big plant-eaters are worth preserving in part because their disappearance could have permanent effects on the plants and animals they coexist with, according to an analysis of past large-mammal extinctions in North and South America.  *This image is copyright of its original author With their prodigious appetites and ability to uproot or trample trees, elephants play a major role in shaping the environment, and their loss could radically change the landscape. (Anthony Barnosky photo) UC Berkeley paleontologists and colleagues at Stanford University, the University of Chile and California State University Sacramento investigated the ecosystem impacts of large animal, or megafauna, extinctions in the Americas since humans moved in about 15,000 years ago. They found long-lasting changes in the local landscape after the largest of the land animals — among them mammoths and mastodons — disappeared. Recent studies, for example, point to the loss of mammoths, native horses and other large animals in Alaska and the Yukon as the reason a productive mix of forest and grassland turned into unproductive tundra that dominates the region today. Similarly, mammoth and mastodon extinctions in the Pacific Northwest and the northeastern United States seemed to have changed the vegetation and, in the western United States, decreased the diversity of small mammals, said study leader Anthony Barnosky, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. “Ecological studies have shown that if you pull out a top predator or a key herbivore today, you get dramatic change in the ecosystem,” he said. “Our study makes it clear that in the past, such changes have lasted for thousands of years. These extinctions really do permanently change the dynamics. You can’t go back.” Yet not all extinctions left major changes in the ecosystem, the researchers found. Ground sloth and glyptodont extinctions in South America had no noticeable effect on the vegetation of Patagonia and the Pampas, for example. “It’s not a simple story, where if you pull out a big beast you see major changes in the landscape,” Barnosky said. “It’s actually dependent on how big a beast you pull out, and also how that beast interacts with the plants and animals in the area, and what other plants and animals are there. It depends on what the animal does for a living.” Elephant browsers Large browsers like mammoths, mastodons and today’s elephants, for example, eat small trees and shrubs and uproot or break down trees, as well as trample and churn the soil. Other large herbivores, such as bison and moose, also keep shrubs in check and change soil structure and nutrients as they feed, defecate and urinate. As a result, such large-bodied plant eaters play a key role in keeping forests from overrunning grasslands, as the group found happened in North America.  *This image is copyright of its original author Young trees destroyed by roving elephants. (Anthony Barnosky photo) “You see the impact of defaunation today in Africa, where the removal of elephant populations has led to these shrubby, scraggly acacias filling the savanna landscape,” said co-author Charles Marshall, a professor of integrative biology and director of the UC Museum of Paleontology. “Africa today, with its elephant populations, seems to fit the model of North America with its mammoths and mastodons.” In the Pampas of Argentina, however, the disappearance of the South American mastodon had no observable effect on the flora and fauna, probably because the weather and rainfall are not conducive to forests. Understanding these relationships can be important today in targeting conservation efforts, said co-author Emily Lindsey, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow. “This information could be useful to conservation biologists in pinpointing which types of ecosystems are likely to be affected by global climate change, and which would be most responsive to conservation and restoration efforts,” she said. Barnosky, Lindsey and their colleagues will publish their study this week in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Barnosky cautioned that the current study captures only the grossest environmental changes resulting from large-mammal extinctions, since not all ecosystem changes leave traces in the fossil record. “The fact that we saw the impact we saw is a pretty robust conclusion that these ecosystems were changed forever by the disappearance of these animals,” he said. “Anytime you pull a big animal out of an ecosystem, there are some pretty huge effects, as demonstrated by ecologists today. But they might not be recognizable in the fossil record.” Extinctions followed human invasion of New World Barnosky said the current study was sparked by ecological studies today of the impacts of adding or subtracting large mammals such as deer and elk from American landscapes, or removing wildebeest and elephants in Africa. He and his colleagues decided to look for traces of ecosystem change resulting from the loss of about three-quarters of all large land mammals that roamed North and South America after humans arrived from Siberia about 15,000 years ago. About 60 large mammals died out in North America about 12,000 years ago, probably due to a combination of hunting and changing climate. Mammoths and mastodons, as well as horses, elk, moose and carnivores such as the saber tooth cat and the dire wolf, disappeared.  *This image is copyright of its original author Three elephant ancestors: the mastodon, mammoth and gomphothere. When these animals went extinct, vegetation and small mammal populations radically changed. (Sculptures by Sergio de la Rosa) It took longer for South American species to go extinct, but the continent eventually lost about 99 species, including giant armadillos, saber-toothed cats, mastodon relatives called gomphotheres and two entire orders of endemic South American ungulates. The latter included the hippo-like Toxodonts in the order Notoungulata and the camel-like Macrauchenia in the order Litopterna. In three areas of North America — northwestern and northeastern America and Alaska/Yukon — fossils showed not only a change in plant communities with an increase in fire frequency, but also a decrease in diversity of small mammals. A study conducted by co-author and Stanford University professor Elizabeth Hadly, for example, documented a decrease of small rodent diversity in California after these extinctions, allowing the most widespread “weedy” mouse species to dominate the landscape. “The take-home message from western North America is that grazing and browsing by extinct megafauna such as proboscideans favored open-habitat mosaics,” Hadly said. “When these ecosystem engineers became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, denser deciduous forests established. The loss of the mosaic Pleistocene habitats in western North America led to a decrease in the diversity of small mammals.” “If we lose some of these big-bodied animals that are threatened with extinction today, we lose a lot more than those animals, we lose the entire ecosystems of which they are part,” Barnosky said. “We are moving into new territory in terms of what the planet will look like.” Hence, Big Herbivores and "Top Carnivores" should be Rewilded and "Reintroduced" in their lost Historic Ranges to Restore the ecosystems and Biomes.  *This image is copyright of its original author China has imported a herd of 33 more reindeer (caribou  ) from the Netherlands to boost the number of the species in the country, authorities said Saturday (16 March 2019). The reindeer arrived in Beijing on Thursday and will be shipped to a breeding base in Aoluguya township in the city of Genhe in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region after a quarantine period, according to the city's forestry bureau People's Daily, China
Reintroduction of Gaur to Bandhavgarh from Kanha
Bandhavgarh National Park had a small population of gaur, but due to disease passed from cattle to them, all of them died. The project of reintroduction of gaurs dealt with shifting some gaurs from Kanha National Park to Bandhavgarh. 50 animals were shifted by the winter of 2012. This project was executed by Madhya Pradesh Forest department  , Wildlife Institute of India, Taj Safaris and Conservation corporation of Africa by technical collaboration.
Reintroduction of Barasingha: Kanha National Park – Satpura Tiger Reserve
An exciting conservation effort is about to take place and every moment of it will be documented right here as it all develops. I’m about to jet off to India to start working on a relocation operation of both Barasingha and Gaur from Kanha National Park. The Barasingha will be relocated to Satpura Tiger Reserve and the Gaur will be moved across to Bandhavgarh National Park. This is a very exciting development in conservation management in India and I look forward to taking you along on the journey with me. April 2017, a batch of Barasinghas was shifted from Kanha to the Satpura National Park, where they were found until the late 19th century. They are currently being reared in an enclosure, pending release. Until this shift, Kanha was the only habitat in the world to have the Hard-ground Barasingha (Cervus duvauceli branderi). "The existence of a single population source, as Kanha is for the Barasingha, is a cause for concern. What if an epidemic strikes? The entire population is at risk of being wiped out. Translocation addresses this threat as well," says Pabla. Gir Lions are in debt.  Barasingha Reintroduction The objective of any reintroduction of wildlife within National Parks or Reserves is to restore a species to an original habitat where it has become or is rapidly approaching extinction mainly due to habitat deterioration. Currently Kanha National Park has a population of nearly 500 Barasingha in 8 – 9 different locations (Sonf, Ronda, Kisli Sondhar, Kanha, Bishanpura, Mukki Sondhar, Adwar, Ladua and Piparwada) and we are about to capture and relocate 20 animals from Kanha National Park to Satpura Tiger Reserve (Hoshangabad District, Madhya Pradesh State, Central India). Capturing Barasingha: The Reintroduction Operation The operation for capture aims to relocate these 20 Barasingha with a male to female sex ratio of 1:3. This will be followed by a supplementation of animals with the same ratio of 1:3 during the course of the next five years. The animals shall initially be selected from within a fenced off area of approximately 50 hectares. Only Barasingha between the ages of 2 and 3 years old which have already reached sexual maturity will be considered for the reintroduction. The capture team will not approach any animals in their old age, females who are in advanced pregnancy or any fawns. The rutting period of Barasingha starts from mid November to end of January every year. An average daytime temperature during the month of February and March in this part of the area varies from between 20-25 degrees Celsius. Now that the rutting period is over we can begin the operation to capture our targeted amount of animals. Once captured, the animals will be sedated and immobolised before being transported to their new home at Satpura Tiger Reserve. The objective of this project is to introduce about 500 barasingha in this national park to eight or nine different locations. The capture process is an intricate and detailed one, and every effort will be taken for both safety of the animals and the capture team. Below is a short overview of the process:
Although the physical reintroduction and capture process is yet to begin, the preparation and planning process is already in full swing. Depending upon the availability of ideal animals for selection, the team will make use of the following three plans of action during the capture process:
Boma Structure
Two sliding gates have been erected, made of a 50 mm X 50 mm hollow square tube with 3 rollers. The gates are solid with 2 mm pressed steel. Provisionhas been made for a solid shade cloth above the gate to the same height as the rest of the Boma. Walkways have also been attached to every section as well. The crates have been made of plywood fixed with galvanized perforated steel. On the outer side along the length of the crates, provision has been made for fixing of the hollow rings at two of the places so that the removable hollow pipes can be inserted and the crate can be lifted with the help of 6 men. The gap at the top has been created for sufficient ventilation and holes on the floor have been made to facilitate the draining of urine. Let the Barasingha Reintroduction Begin I will be flying out to India on Wednesday 29 February 2012. The on the ground work will effectively begin as I arrive and I can’t wait to get going with this incredible conservation effort. Watch this space for updates on our progress from Thursday 1 March 2012. Join me in my experience on the ground and be a part of the difference that’s going to make a difference!
A project to capture about "20" tigers and relocate them to Satpura Tiger Reserve.
 *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author Barasingha and Gaur; (bottom) A tranquilised tiger being translocated to the Panna National Park Photo: Shubhranjan Sen
Scottish Furniture Heir plans to bring Wolves and Bears back to Scotland
Paul Lister, self-professed animal enthusiast and heir to the MFI furniture fortune, is taking a big leap to bring back wolves and bears to Scotland. He plans to create the unusual wildlife reserve on his 23,000 acres of land in Sutherland just 60 miles west of Inverness. After buying his estate ten years ago, Lister has overseen the planting of more than 800,000 native trees. He has also launched conservation programs to protect native species which are under threat such as the Scottish wildcat and red squirrel. His latest and more ambitious wolf and bear plans involve building a massive fence enclosing a 50,000-acre plot where the animals would be free to roam. He explained all this recently by saying, "We're going to do a feasibility study on the big vision and the vision is to have a minimum area of 50,000 acres, have a fence around it, and bring back wolves and bears into that area." "We'll assess the socio-economic impact that will have and also the environmental impact. The presence of these large predators really changes the landscape for the benefit of nature. We're talking about maybe two packs of 10 wolves, maybe a dozen bears. These animals create the environment. It's not humans who create the environment, it's nature." But Lister will either need to buy more land or enlist the support of other local landowners to make his dream of creating the massive enclosure a reality. However he has faced opposition from farmers, walkers and legal experts over his new plan of bringing in wolves and bears. He could also face legal challenges over the plan. But Paul Lister plans to forge ahead undeterred in bringing wolves and bears back to Scotland. Native wolves were driven to extinction in Scotland by the 18th century. Lister sums it all up by saying, "If you don't have an ideal to die for you have nothing to live for. My ideal is that I want to hear the wolf howl again in Scotland."  *This image is copyright of its original author
About Russia's teaching of siberian tiger cubs to hunt in rehab centers when their mothers were sent to zoos due to it's dangerous actions... So that, they can be reintroduced in wild again after maturity.
Russia's 'fairy tale' Siberian tigers beating long odds for a comeback Quote:Conservation efforts and crackdown on illegal hunting help Amur tigers claw their way back.  *This image is copyright of its original author Amur, perhaps Russia's best-known Siberian tiger, lives in a safari park near the far eastern city of Vladivostock. He's a popular attraction for tourists who want to see a tiger up close. (Pascal Dumont/CBC) Deep in the frozen forests of Russia's far east, one of nature's most elusive — and surely most majestic — predators has been staging a quiet comeback. Siberia's tigers, also known as Amur tigers, are the largest subspecies of the great cats of Asia. They have survived wars, poaching and extensive habitat loss to claw their way back from just a handful of animals to a renewed position of viability. In a football field-sized enclosure, about an hour from the city of Vladivostok, Elena and Pavlik are good examples of why that's happening. The 15-month-old male and female siblings are, for the moment, the only residents of the Amur Tiger Center near the village of Alekseevka.  *This image is copyright of its original author Rehab centre director Viktor Kuzmenko keeps tabs on the progress of the two young adult tigers through a series of cameras and monitors. (Pascal Dumont/CBC) The centre includes a large natural area that imitates tiger habitat, with typical trees, shrubs and landscape. It's fenced in, with the outside world obscured by a green tarp. "They have learned how to hunt down prey, to catch and kill, and most importantly, they completely avoid humans," said Viktor Kuzmenko, who oversees the unique facility. It was established with a grant by the Russian government and other non-governmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund in 2013 to preserve, study and increase the Siberian tiger population. Tiger rehab The young tigers were taken in by wildlife officials last summer after their mother repeatedly visited a local village and ate people's pets. Killing problem tigers in Russia is illegal, so the only option was to capture her and relocate her to a zoo.  *This image is copyright of its original author This image taken from a camera monitoring a young tiger at the Amur Tiger Rehabilitation Centre, shows the aftermath of a successful hunt. (Pascal Dumont/CBC) "At this age, the cubs wouldn't have survived without their mother," Kuzmenko told CBC News, so they were brought to the centre. Since then, the goal has been to teach them how to hunt and survive on their own. At meal time, usually in the late afternoon, a deer, boar or other creature is released into their area and the tigers instantly snap to attention. On TV monitors, it's possible to see the young carnivores creep up on the unsuspecting animal and pounce with lightning fast reflexes, sinking their teeth into its neck and waiting for the stricken animal to bleed out. "Their behaviour is almost perfect," said Kuzmenko, who expects the pair will be released into the wild this spring and will have a strong chance of making it on their own. Shrinking habitat A century ago, Siberian tigers ranged as far west as the Caspian Sea and across the vastness of Russia and China to the shores of the Pacific. But they were hunted relentlessly for their furs and body parts. By the end of the Second World War, just a few dozen of the animals were left in the wild.  *This image is copyright of its original author Conservation officer Andrey Zakharov leads one of 14 anti-poaching teams that patrol tiger habitat. (Pascal Dumont/CBC) The Soviet Union brought in strict rules on hunting and the population recovered somewhat before falling again after the collapse of communism in the 1990s, when hunters were able to more easily cross the border with China and a lucrative black market re-emerged. Since 2010, the Russian government has cracked down on poaching and implemented a host of conservation measures that have helped Russia's Far East tiger population grow to around 500 adults and perhaps 100 cubs, according to a 2018 census done by Russia's Ministry of Nature. While hardly robust numbers — Siberian tigers are listed as endangered, according to the World Wildlife Fund — the trend line is increasing. Russian authorities believe within four years, the tiger population will grow to more than 700 animals. Worldwide, about 5,000 tigers remain in the wild, including the population in Russia as well as other sub-species in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and South Asia, according to the WWF. Mythological beast In Russia's Primorye region, where China borders to the west and North Korea to the south, the beasts are treated with near mythological reverence. "Entering a forest in the Far East, you feel a fairy tale and a sense of the unknown because this is the home of the tiger," said Sergei Aramiliev, a biologist who is the director the Amur Tiger Centre, the agency that operates the rehabilitation centre and undertakes other conservation activities. "He is invisibly present everywhere — everywhere there are traces of his energy."  *This image is copyright of its original author In Russia's Far East, tigers are revered. A cluster of statues greets visitors leaving Vladivisotok's airport. (Corinne Seminoff/CBC) In and around Vladivostok, there are murals, billboards and statues of tigers, emphasizing the connection the animals have with the region's identity. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who's often photographed in Russia's wilderness in the company of wild animals, has posed frequently for photo ops with Siberian tigers, most of which were associated with the rehab centre. Russia's government has paid for many other conservation measures, including a half-kilometre-long so-called Tiger Tunnel, which was opened on the highway to the city of Khabarovsk two years ago. It allows tigers to cross over top of the road that dissected important tiger habitat. Poaching threat But perhaps the most important efforts have focused on illegal hunting, which continues to be the animals' greatest threat, said Aramiliev.  *This image is copyright of its original author A conservation team using a military-style vehicle patrols an area near the Russian border with China, watching for illegal hunting. (Pascal Dumont/CBC) "The laws have tightened," he told CBC News, noting that eight years ago, between 50 to 70 tigers a year were lost to poaching. Now, he said, the number is closer to 15 to 20. The market for their furs and body parts, used in traditional medicines and ceremonies, is almost exclusively China, he said. "If the family in China has a skin, it is considered prestigious. But understand, [China has] had this culture for 3,000 years and it can't be changed in a day." China has also enacted legislation to halt the trade in such animal parts but Russian authorities say illegal cross-border transactions continue.  *This image is copyright of its original author Tiger centre director Sergei Aramiliev displays a tiger pelt destined for China. (Corinne Seminoff/CBC) More than 14 Russian conservation teams, made up of more than 100 full-time members, now patrol key tiger habitats in military-style armoured personnel carriers, looking for poachers. On a recent trip, Andrey Zakharov, the leader of one group, told CBC News his officers will often camp out overnight deep in the forest, watching for tiger tracks in the snow or suspicious vehicles. "The tiger is something unearthly," he said. "He can be only 50 metres from us but we won't see him till he moves. It's a very secretive animal." Tiger outreach As the tiger population recovers, another part of Zakharov's job has also grown in importance: that of doing community outreach as part of a so-called "conflict group."  *This image is copyright of its original author Scientists and vets from the Amur Tiger Rehabilitation Centre examine the body of Tikhan, a 13-year-old male Siberian tiger that died unexpectedly in February. (Corinne Seminoff/CBC) Russian TV routinely covers stories of villagers in the Primorye region who have had their pets killed by tigers or been stalked themselves. Over New Year's, one woman from a village near Khabarovsk showed a TV crew the blood stains from where a tiger tried to drag her pet through a fence before the fortunate dog escaped. The mother of the two young tigers now at the rehabilitation centre was captured after she repeatedly returned to a village, eating a total of 10 family pets. "As the human population has grown, we have occupied [the tiger's] territory," said Zakharov. To deter people from taking matters into their own hands when conflicts occur, local authorities now offer monetary compensation for any livestock or pets killed. "There are cases where tigers attacked cows, horses, dogs, but if a person has all the proper documents, we will reimburse everything. People will receive financial compensation without delay," said Zakharov. Unfortunate death Still, there have been setbacks. CBC News was initially invited to the Tiger Rehab Centre to witness a medical examination of an older tiger named Tikhan.  *This image is copyright of its original author Authorities determined that Tikhan died of natural causes, likely exhaustion and dehydration. (Corinne Seminoff/CBC) The 13-old-male had been acting unusually in early January, coming near a Russian border office and attacking the soldiers' dogs. After biologists tracked and tranquillized him, they discovered Tikhan had problems with his teeth, so they performed dental surgery. That was expected to allow him to return to the wild. But by the time the CBC crew arrived at the Tiger Centre after a long flight from Moscow, Tikhan had died suddenly. Instead, we witnessed his autopsy. "It's a pity," said Aramilev. "What happened was very much unexpected."
Tests determined Tikhan was 142 kilograms at his death, far less than the usual 300-kilogram weight for a healthy male. As it turns out, scientists learned that his body was badly dehydrated and he was suffering from exhaustion. The final cause of death was ruled as being from natural causes. Even so, Aramilev said Tikhan played a key role in ensuring the survival of his species. "In this case, the only thing that reassures us is that the tiger has lived a long life and should have left many offspring." So, what India should learn from this? 1. In India, when man eater spotted, it shouldn't be killed at any cost and it shouldn't be the last thing to do acc to law and order. All the efforts should be put only to capture it live and transfer to zoo. 2. In India, if it is a tigress separated from cubs for some reason like man eating, then cubs should be sent to rehab to train them not to "zoos". 3. Above all, India should know what exactly MAN EATER term refers to... and should be dedicated authorities should be recruited without corruption like Russia.
The Iberian lynx: No longer a whisker from extinction
Quote:At the start of the century there were only 94 examples left in the wild. Fifteen years later, a conservation effort has boosted numbers to 547  *This image is copyright of its original author Ver fotogalería The release of a lynx into the wild in Jaen. PACO PUENTES Agustín Navarro will never forget the first time he saw an Iberian lynx. “It was sitting there,” he says, pointing to an abandoned construction site that is currently being used for breeding the rabbits that will help these elusive predators to thrive. Navarro was born just five minutes from here in a house on a hillside covered with winter oaks in Vilches, Jaén. A cattle farmer with a herd of 200, Navarro recently became active in helping this endangered species survive as one of more than 30 beef farmers around the River Guarrizas who have signed agreements allowing the conservationists access to their land. “What did we get in return?” asks fellow farmer Pedro López. “The satisfaction of knowing that you are helping with the survival of the lynx.” Quote:The lynx’s success story is extraordinary if you consider that scientists believe the Earth is in the early stages of its sixth mass extinction At the turn of this century, the Iberian lynx was a whisker away from disappearing from the face of the Earth. In 2002, there were only 94 of these animals in the wild, prowling the national parks of Doñana and Sierra Morena, both in Andalusia. After 15 years of concerted effort to bring them back from the brink of extinction, numbers reached 547 last year, with new populations in Badajoz, Toledo and Ciudad Real and in the Valle del Guidiana in Portugal. Much of the credit has to go to biologist Miguel Ángel Simón who designed the first conservation program and is still directing the European scheme Iberlince, in which there are now around 20 active members.  *This image is copyright of its original author A lynx is sedated so that a collar can be fitted. P. P. The lynx’s success story is extraordinary if you consider that scientists believe the Earth is in the early stages of its sixth mass extinction. “It’s excellent proof that acts of conservation yield concrete results,” explained Urs Breitenmoser, a feline specialist from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Commission of Species Survival, in 2015. That was just prior to the IUCN deciding that the Iberian lynx was no longer critically in danger of extinction. It is now categorized as “in danger.” But if its current trajectory continues, it may be reassessed as simply “vulnerable” by 2025. Quote:The lynx had little variety in its gene pool, so those lynx most likely to increase genetic diversity are chosen Almost €70 million has been invested in the Iberlince conservation program since 2002, half of which has come from the EU and the other half a combination of funds from local authorities and private members. “We were lucky to get the funds,” says Simón. “Unfortunately, other less attractive species don’t get them.” The Iberlince got one of the biggest grants of all the European conservation programs from the EU’s LIFE program, which finances environmental, nature conservation and climate action projects. The funds have been used to reintroduce the animals into the wild to reinforce existing populations but also to create new populations such as the one around the Guarrizas River. The first reintroduction in this area of Jaen took place in 2010. “A study was undertaken to choose the area,” says Maribel García Tardío, who is in charge of the Guarrizas Iberlince program. The key was the proliferation of rabbits, which are the main food source for the lynx. “Rabbit accounts for almost 90% of its diet,” says Simón. “The success of the program is due to the careful selection of the places where they can be reintroduced.” Diverse gene pools The last two lynx to be reintroduced to the wild in Guarrizas – known as Olavide and Ofelia – were released last Wednesday in front of a crowd of conservationists, politicians and school children. They are both female and just one year old, the ideal age for release. Olavide and Ofelia were both born into captivity in a breeding center in Silves, Portugal, one of four on the peninsula that have over 200 lynx between them. The reason the conservationists went to the trouble of bringing these two females from Portugal is a matter of genetics. “They are chosen according to their genes,” says vet Guillermo López. After their numbers were drastically reduced, the lynx had little variety in its gene pool, so those lynx most likely to increase genetic diversity are chosen. A week before the two females were released into the wild in Jaén, the conservationists from Iberlince put them to sleep to check them out and fit them with collars with radio-trackers to monitor their movements. Around 20% of the lynx in the wild have these collars, which are fundamental if conservationists are to pinpoint locations where the lynx can thrive. The current EU LIFE program comes to an end this year and Simón is already preparing the next to present to Brussels. One of the main goals now is to consolidate the connection between the different areas where the lynx is surviving and establish connecting routes between populations. (Every country reintroducing their captive population into wild to improve conservation. India should learn.)
Is American Prairie Reserve Taking The West Back To The Future?
With a grand vision for rewilding native species in eastern Montana, APR is spurring a huge debate over bison, private property rights, federalism and the survival of rural communities by Shawn Regan  *This image is copyright of its original author While some portray the debate over American Prairie Reserve as being about federal over-reach, many observers say it's really about recognition of private property rights. Photo courtesy Shawn Regan [EDITOR'S NOTE: This essay originally appeared in the Breakthrough Journal, a publication of the Breakthrough Institute. Republished here with permission.] “Save the Cowboy, Stop American Prairie Reserve.” The banners first appeared in the small ranching community of Winifred, Montana (population 206). Then they started popping up elsewhere — along highway roadsides, at a local bar and grill, and even as bumper stickers. They depict a father and a son, both wearing cowboy hats, sitting on a fence looking out over the Big Sky Country of eastern Montana as the sun sets on the horizon. The statements were there to protest the efforts of the American Prairie Reserve, or APR, a nonprofit conservation organization based in Bozeman, Montana, whose mission is to “create the largest nature reserve in the continental United States.” The reserve, when it’s all said and done, would encompass 3.5 million acres of private and public lands along the Missouri River in northeastern Montana, an area larger than Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks combined. The group seeks to remove the livestock that roam much of the landscape today and replace them with bison, elk, pronghorn antelope, prairie dogs, and other wildlife that Lewis and Clark saw when they passed through the region in 1805. APR is doing so in an ambitious and unique way: by buying up private ranches one by one. While other organizations, such as The Nature Conservancy, have long acquired land for conservation purposes, none have done so at the scale proposed by APR, and few have had the goal, as APR does, of retaining ownership and management authority of the land. APR is stitching together a landscape that has been fragmented, fenced, and grazed for more than a century and, along the way, stress-testing an innovative new model of rewilding in America. Quote:The reserve, when it’s all said and done, would encompass 3.5 million acres of private and public lands along the Missouri River in northeastern Montana, an area larger than Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks combined. The group seeks to remove the livestock that roam much of the landscape today and replace them with bison, elk, pronghorn antelope, prairie dogs, and other wildlife that Lewis and Clark saw when they passed through the region in 1805.Founded in 2001, APR has quickly transformed from a lofty vision into a reality. The reserve now totals 405,200 acres — it has purchased 94,600 acres of private lands and acquired grazing leases on more than 310,600 acres of public lands. It’s a work in progress: a 5,000-acre parcel here, a 20,000-acre parcel there. But the group is well on its way to stitching together an “American Serengeti” of uncultivated native prairie for the benefit of wildlife and the public. The reserve is already home to almost 900 bison, which were first reintroduced by APR in 2005 after a century-long absence from the region. The idea of an American Serengeti in northeastern Montana, however, doesn’t sit well with everyone. APR’s efforts are controversial, to say the least, especially in the state’s rural communities, which have relied on agriculture and ranching for generations. Drive the dirt roads throughout the reserve area and that controversy becomes clear: “Don’t Buffalo Me,” reads one homemade billboard. Below, it says, “No Federal Land Grab.” APR, a nonprofit funded entirely by private donations, only purchases land from willing sellers at market value and uses no public funds or coercive power of government. But that does little to ease the concerns of some local ranchers. “If you have nothing but wild bison and antelope, then you might as well take the town out,” a rancher from the nearby town of Malta recently told a local public radio station. “They’re destroying not only a way of life,” said another rancher. “They’re destroying a very vital economic base which is a foundation of America.”  *This image is copyright of its original author Map courtesy American Prairie Reserve The controversies over APR illustrate the challenges facing efforts to rewild large areas of the United States — even when those efforts are voluntary, decentralized, and seek to work with the communities most impacted by rewilding. As the experience of APR demonstrates, if large-scale rewilding projects are to succeed, they must adapt to or overcome significant cultural, economic, and legal barriers that make rewilding complex on the ground. In an important sense, APR is acting as the grassroots agent of change that is bringing nature back to areas that are no longer needed for agriculture or livestock production, and they are doing so in a region that is already one of the least populated places in the Lower 48 states. Technological innovations now allow us to produce more output while using less land and fewer people, and one result has been to reshape the western United States from a region dependent on natural resource extraction to one more focused on conservation, natural amenities, and recreation. APR is seizing on these trends to return a large swath of prairie back to nature by restoring native grasses, reintroducing bison, and providing important wildlife habitat. The work is innovative and important, but also incredibly messy and complicated. APR is working to overcome those challenges and, along the way, provide a proof of concept for pragmatic rewilding in the 21st century. It’s a case study that offers useful lessons for conservationists of all stripes — from those who call for top-down political and regulatory efforts to set aside protected areas or impose regulatory mandates, to others (like myself) who favor bottom-up approaches and market-based incentives over political conflicts and regulatory restrictions. The story of APR offers important insights and counterpoints for both perspectives to consider, and it forces us to grapple with how large-scale conservation can and should be accomplished in a way that addresses the needs and concerns of the communities it most directly impacts. ° ° ° The focus on this region of Montana is no accident. Even after centuries of settlement in North America, the rolling plains above the Missouri River in northeastern Montana remain one of the largest areas of uncultivated prairie in the world. For more than a century, ranchers have grazed cattle and sheep on the land — the ancestral home of the Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Sioux, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, and other Native American tribes — but little of it has been plowed under. In 1999, The Nature Conservancy identified this part of the Northern Great Plains Steppe ecoregion as a top priority for conserving grassland biodiversity, calling it “one of the largest intact landscapes in the Great Plains.” Shortly after, APR was formed with the explicit goal of protecting it. Quote:This mosaic of land ownership across the prairie underscores a significant quirk of US history: the federal government simply never granted homestead claims large enough to support a viable agricultural operation in the arid American West. A 160-acre farm may have been viable in Ohio or Virginia, but it was ill-suited for the arid landscape of eastern Montana.Prairies like this were generally overlooked during the great wave of national parks, national forests, and other federal land designations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such designations were generally limited to mountainous areas that were relatively unproductive for western settlement, or to forest reserves that could provide the nation a steady supply of timber. Prairies, after all, were meant to be settled and farmed. And, indeed, many of them were. Throughout the era of westward expansion, millions of acres of prairie land were put to the plow. For much of the 19th century, US land policy encouraged this western expansion by disposing of vast amounts of federal landholdings to states, railroads, and settlers. One of the primary means was through homesteading. The Homestead Act of 1862 first limited land claims to 160 acres and required settlers to occupy the land for five years and make it productive. Ultimately, millions of acres were settled through homesteading and other land grants. These land disposal policies continued until the early 20th century, when the US government reversed course and began retaining its remaining public lands to be managed by federal agencies. Today, as a result of this half-completed land disposal process, northeastern Montana is a patchwork of public and private lands. The region is comprised of relatively small parcels of private property (lands that were deeded to settlers under the Homestead Act and other grants) surrounded by larger acreage of public lands (either areas that were not viable enough to be claimed by homesteaders, or failed homesteads that the government later reacquired). Most of these public lands are now managed for multiple uses by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), part of the US Department of the Interior. This mosaic of land ownership across the prairie underscores a significant quirk of US history: the federal government simply never granted homestead claims large enough to support a viable agricultural operation in the arid American West. A 160-acre farm may have been viable in Ohio or Virginia, but it was ill-suited for the arid landscape of eastern Montana. Even the expansion of homestead claims to 640 acres in 1916 was not enough in many parts of the arid West to sustain livestock on a year-round basis. Thus, with land claims too small to support an agricultural or livestock operation, many homesteads failed. Those that succeeded did so by grazing livestock on large amounts of nearby public lands, a practice that continues today.  *This image is copyright of its original author "The Bison Trail," a painting by legendary Montana artist Charles M. Russell who has a national wildlife refuge named after him along the Missouri River Breaks and in close proximity to the American Prairie Reserve. Some of Russell's murals adorn the state capitol building in Helena. Russell mourned the loss of wildness on the prairie, in particular the decline and near extinction of bison. Public domain photo courtesy WikiArt This interconnectedness of private and public lands creates several unique challenges, as well as opportunities, for APR. One is the longstanding use of public lands in this region for livestock grazing, first by custom and later under formal leases granted by the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act. Under this system, ranchers own relatively small private “base properties” — the lands claimed as a result of the homestead process — but have permits to graze livestock on nearby public land allotments, often comprising thousands of acres. This ability to graze livestock on public lands is essential to the viability of ranching in this region of Montana and much of the American West. APR purchases base properties and, by doing so, secures the grazing leases to large expanses of adjacent public lands as well. In all, the group aims to acquire 500,000 acres of private lands that are connected to 3 million acres of public lands. It then seeks to tear down many of the fences that delineate the boundaries, as well as the interior fences that traditionally separated pastures, to re-create a vast landscape through which wildlife, especially bison, can travel uninhibited. Today, bison are considered by some scientists to be ecologically extinct on much of the Great Plains. The populations that do exist are small and thus no longer play a foundational role in shaping the biodiversity of the prairie. APR intends to restore as many as 10,000 bison to its lands. In addition, the reserve aims to support the reintroduction of other wildlife that were decimated after European settlement. And some of those species are already on their way. Grizzly bear populations are rapidly expanding out of Yellowstone and the Rocky Mountain Front and onto the farms and ranches of the Great Plains, where they once roamed in great numbers. Wolves are on their way as well, if not already there. Last year, a rancher shot and killed a female wolf near Denton, Montana, just 30 miles from one of the reserve’s properties. It’s only a matter of time before these species expand farther, much to the concern of some local ranchers.  *This image is copyright of its original author Home, home on the range: pronghorn are among the habitat beneficiaries found on the American Prairie Reserve. APR is dedicated to restoring and rewilding what was once one of the most biologically rich ecosystems in the West. Photo courtesy American Prairie Reserve. Ranchers’ suspicion of APR is understandable. Viewed within the context of ongoing rural depopulation trends, the whole effort can be seen as a parting shot at ranchers’ way of life, bankrolled by wealthy, mostly out-of-state, environmentally-minded donors. The population of Phillips County, Montana, where most of APR’s landholdings are, has declined by 10 percent since 2000 and by more than 50 percent since 1920. Nearby counties have experienced similar declines. To the extent that the creation of a nature reserve exacerbates these trends, some ranchers fear the effort may be the final straw for many of the region’s small agricultural communities. Every ranch APR buys is seen as a loss by these agricultural communities — fewer kids in the local schools, fewer parents serving on the school board, fewer church members and volunteer firefighters. Every property taken out of agriculture also means fewer sales of tractors are other equipment, which could result in fewer people supporting local businesses. These trends, to be fair, have been going on for a long time, and APR is not the sole — or even the primary — cause of them. There is a case to be made that APR is simply bearing the brunt of the blame for broader economic forces that have frustrated these regions for decades: from the mechanization and intensification of agricultural and livestock production to global trade policies. But there’s also a growing sense in the rural communities of eastern Montana that wealthy environmentalists and coastal elites — with the help of the federal government — are eager to kick them off the land. That fear is not without justification. In 1987, two academic urban planners from Rutgers, Frank and Deborah Popper, gained national attention for their proposal to create what they called “the Buffalo Commons” — a 139,000-square-mile natur preserve on the Great Plains. The plan would, in their minds, rectify the past wrongs of the homesteading era that caused so much of this great land to be plowed under and developed. Settlement of the region, they wrote, was “the largest and longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history.” They proposed that the region instead be “returned to its original pre-white state” and “in effect, deprivatized.” Buffalo would roam free across the plains, which would “become almost totally depopulated” over the next generation. The proposal was, unsurprisingly, not well received by residents of the Great Plains, who saw it as a top-down scheme to wipe them off the map. And the Poppers essentially said as much: “The federal government’s commanding task on the Plains for the next century will be to recreate the nineteenth century,” they wrote. This task would require extensive land-use planning, government land acquisitions, and new federal agencies devoted to fulfilling the mandate — similar to the BLM “but with much more sweeping powers.” The sweeping government efforts on the scale envisioned by the Poppers didn’t come to fruition, but some heavy-handed decisions were forced upon the region. In 2001, in the final days of his administration, President Bill Clinton designated the 377,000-acre Upper Missouri River Breaks as a national monument in northeastern Montana. The land was designated under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows presidents to single-handedly declare monuments on existing public lands and restrict current and future land uses, with little or no local input. The monument was — and still is — widely opposed by many ranchers in the region. And although the designation allowed for the continuation of existing grazing permits, some ranchers viewed it as a “federal land grab” that was designed to ultimately displace them. It’s not surprising, then, that ranchers in the Great Plains are skeptical when environmentalists march in and tell them how the land in their region should be managed. Debates over land use in much of the American West have often pitted environmentalists against ranchers. Environmental groups have advocated to cut or weaken ranchers’ federal grazing privileges without compensation, and some groups pursue relentless strategies of litigation to reduce grazing on public lands in favor of environmental protection.  *This image is copyright of its original author The Judith River is one of the many high plains tributaries of Upper Missouri River and one of many hidden scenic gems rewarding those who venture out onto the prairie. Photo courtesy Gib Myers And while other factors have contributed to ranching’s decline — including technological innovation, agricultural intensification, globalization, and greater efficiencies and consolidation in the beef industry — these confrontational approaches have contributed to a 55 percent decline in the number of livestock permitted to graze on public lands since the 1950s. Because public land grazing is so critical to ranching in much of the American West, including northeastern Montana, these tactics have understandably been perceived as an assault on ranchers’ way of life. APR’s project, however, is fundamentally different. Instead of lobbying or litigating to reduce grazing, APR is acquiring land voluntarily from willing sellers. The group has raised more than $75 million in private donations to simply buy land in the region, not to forcibly seize it through political or legal means or to restrict ranchers’ existing grazing rights. Along with those purchases, APR is gaining access to large public grazing allotments on which to graze their bison. Although ranchers pay relatively low fees to graze livestock on federal lands (the fee in 2018 was $1.41 per animal unit month), the value of grazing permits is capitalized into the sale price of the private base property. When APR acquires base properties, it also receives the public grazing permits that are tied to that particular base property, and the value of those permits is reflected in the sale price. “We just have a different value system for the land,” says Pete Geddes, a managing director of the reserve. “We don’t think it’s better. We don’t think it’s worse. It’s just different.” The group has also launched an innovative program designed to work with ranchers to offset the costs of wildlife in the region and to encourage greater wildlife tolerance. Wild Sky Beef, a for-profit company started by APR and now led by my former PERC (Property and Environment Research Center) colleague Laura Huggins, sells grass-fed beef throughout the country and uses its profits to provide payments to ranchers in the region who implement certain conservation practices. Values are attached to each conservation-oriented management practice. For example, ranchers who install wildlife-friendly fencing receive a payment. Ranchers who agree not to shoot or poison prairie dogs and coyotes get another payment. Agreeing not to till the soil earns yet another payment. The program also encourages ranchers to coexist with large carnivores. Enrolled landowners can earn per-species payments for images captured by motion-sensing camera traps set up on their properties. Every image captured of a cougar, black bear, or other predator earns ranchers a payment. It’s a creative program that has the potential to influence ranchers’ tolerance of carnivores and other wildlife across the region. Since 2014, Wild Sky has provided Montana ranchers with more than $200,000 in conservation incentive payments.  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author Photo, top, of a rancher participating in the Wild Sky Beef program that helps market grass-fed beef and offers rewards for those who advance wildlife conservation.Immediately above, a camera trap using motion sensors documents a black bear strolling across a ranch in the vicinity of APR. Through APR's innovative Wild Sky Beef program, ranchers are given incentives if they show their property is being used by certain prairie species. Photos courtesy Wild Sky Beef and Alex Newby Those efforts, while important, are not enough to ease the concerns of some rural residents about APR’s expansion. One persistent fear is the specter of free-roaming “wild” bison, which has long been a controversial topic in Montana. The threat of brucellosis — a disease carried by bison (and also elk) that can be transmitted to livestock — has also been an ongoing concern for the state’s ranching industry, especially near Yellowstone. Concerns over the damage that could be caused by wild bison crossing onto other private lands have also been raised by many ranchers (hence, the “Don’t Buffalo Me” signs found throughout the APR target region). Although APR’s bison are managed as wildlife, as a legal matter, they are privately owned domestic livestock and subject to the same rules and regulations as other livestock in Montana. As such, all of the reserve’s bison have been sourced from certified brucellosis-free herds and are vaccinated and disease-tested like other livestock in the state. APR has also gone to great lengths to install proper fencing to keep bison contained within the reserve, including a solar-powered electric wire strung across all exterior fences. Overall, some ranchers feel overwhelmed by the radical changes to the landscape envisioned by APR. And many feel they are already good stewards of the land. “We’ve done such a good job apparently we’ve drawn a big target on ourselves,” a rancher from Winifred told the local newspaper last year. Then, finally, there is the fear that they will eventually be forced into becoming willing sellers. “If APR succeeds, local farms and ranches may have no choice but to sell,” wrote one rancher in the Billings Gazette in 2018. “Large predators and free-roaming bison cannot coexist with production agriculture, and eco-tourism would be a poor replacement for this area’s economy and communities.” ° ° ° Rewilding began as a niche conservation movement several decades ago and has gained popularity in recent years. The idea is straightforward: to restore native plants and animals (or the closest living approximations to them) to landscapes where they once thrived. The more ambitious rewilding projects envision the return of the large mammals that inhabited the land centuries ago, such as wild horses, wolves, and elephants — with some even contemplating the revival of woolly mammoths, mastodons, and giant armadillos. As a bold and ambitious conservation idea, however, it lacks real-world proofs of concept. Moreover, such projects are often envisioned as top-down schemes to be implemented by federal agencies, with only vague mention of accommodating the needs and desires of the local communities that would most directly bear the costs. The experience of APR suggests that for rewilding to succeed, it likely needs to come not from the top down, but from the bottom up — and even then, it will face significant challenges. It requires active management, innovative contracting arrangements, and local outreach and community engagement. And all the while, it must navigate complex socioeconomic challenges that have the potential to thwart even the best-laid rewilding plans. Writing for the Breakthrough Journal in 2015, Martin Lewis noted that “successful, broad-based rewilding probably requires the abandonment of the idea that it should be imposed on the basis of grand schemes concocted by conservation biologists or government agencies.” He called instead for a “more ad hoc, from-the-ground-up vision” in which “the stewardship of wildlife and wild areas would necessarily vary tremendously from place to place, reflecting local cultural predilections as well as demographic and economic realities.” APR’s efforts are just that. By acquiring land through voluntary acquisitions and working with other ranchers in the region to increase wildlife tolerance, the group is forging a pragmatic approach to rewilding a great American landscape. And, of course, they are adapting as they go. Sometimes that has meant working with Native American tribes in the region who also have an interest in bison restoration, hosting community meetings to address concerns, providing hunting opportunities for nearby residents, and even sponsoring local rodeos. Lewis urged that “bottom-up methods are better suited to accommodate the diverse needs and desires of multiple constituencies.” Citing the success of South Africa’s Kruger National Park and its adjoining regions, which combine a similar mix of interconnected public and private management, he noted that “private land ownership does not run intrinsically counter to the restoration of nature on a truly grand scale.” Like APR, the Kruger region was also once made up of marginally viable cattle ranches that are now managed as private nature preserves. In fact, it is the more flexible, creative management that is possible on private lands that can lead to more effective approaches to rewilding. Quote:APR’s project is possible thanks to the fact that bison are considered a form of livestock in Montana, and therefore can satisfy the livestock grazing requirements of the group’s federal grazing leases. When APR acquires a property with a public grazing lease, the group applies for a change-of-use permit from the BLM to allow bison to graze there instead of cattle.Even so, despite the advantages of bottom-up rewilding projects like APR, challenges remain — and some of them have little to do with the cultural or economic realities of the region. One of APR’s primary challenges is navigating the morass of federal laws and legal institutions that govern the use of public lands in the region. These institutions can present myriad obstacles to pragmatic rewilding of the American West — particularly to the extent that they limit the legally acceptable uses of the remaining public lands in the region. History helps illustrate why. In the American West, the institutions that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries to manage natural resources centered around the assumption that the resources would be put to productive uses. Rights to natural resources were generally defined and maintained based on "use" of the resource— for example, by using water to irrigate crops, by making the land productive to “prove up” a homestead claim, or by extracting oil and gas or mineral deposits. “Use it or lose it” is a common phrase associated with western water law, which requires that water-rights holders put water to a legally defined “beneficial use.” What constitutes a “beneficial use,” however, has traditionally been limited to extractive or consumptive activities. Federal grazing policy is no different. The grazing leases that APR acquires when it purchases private base properties come along with a use-it-or-lose-it provision. Permit holders must graze livestock to maintain the leases, which otherwise could be transferred to a rancher who would make use of the lease. The Taylor Grazing Act, which provides the foundation of the BLM’s grazing program, even states that permits are limited to those who are “engaged in the livestock business.” For the longstanding historical reasons described above, the institutions that govern grazing on federal lands were designed to provide access to forage on public rangelands for one narrow purpose: to feed domestic livestock. Such a requirement is clearly an obstacle for innovative environmental groups such as APR that seek to replace livestock with other rewilded species. If they can’t acquire the leases and use them to support the new species, they’re out of luck. APR’s project is possible thanks to the fact that bison are considered a form of livestock in Montana, and therefore can satisfy the livestock grazing requirements of the group’s federal grazing leases. When APR acquires a property with a public grazing lease, the group applies for a change-of-use permit from the BLM to allow bison to graze there instead of cattle. Often, the group also applies for greater permit flexibility, such as permission to graze year-round instead of seasonally and to remove interior pasture fences on the allotments. The BLM then determines the appropriate amount of “use” authorized on each allotment. Given the nature of this federal grazing system, the question is whether APR’s model is scalable to other regions. In practice, the use-it-or-lose-it requirement of federal grazing permits likely limits the scope and form of rewilding that can be accomplished through private land acquisition or creative contracting with landowners. For example, it is unlikely that a similar bottom-up rewilding model would work in, say, Nevada — which is also a mix of private and public rangelands — if the goal is to recover desert tortoises or other wildlife species. And even though APR is grazing bison, the group is still experiencing challenges and delays to this change-of-use permitting process. The group is currently awaiting approval to expand its bison herd onto 18 of its leased allotments of federal land — a process that has taken several years of paperwork, public comment, and bureaucratic assessment from the BLM — with no end in sight. In short, the success of pragmatic, bottom-up rewilding efforts may require reforms — or creative adaptations — to the legal institutions that govern natural resources in the West. Entrepreneurial environmental groups generally cannot simply purchase federal grazing leases, buy out active energy leases, or outbid loggers on federal timber sales — nor can they wrest management authority over wild animals from state wildlife agencies, which are more focused on managing wildlife populations for social tolerance than on fulfilling the ambitious goals of today’s rewilding advocates. (With the exception of bison, the wildlife within APR’s borders are ultimately owned and controlled by the state of Montana.) These issues ultimately must be resolved in the political arena rather than negotiated locally, and in practice, they present serious barriers to pragmatic rewilding efforts like APR’s.  *This image is copyright of its original author On its holdings, APR is undertaking scientific research with partners like the Smithsonian Institution and it provides public access, including opportunities for hikers, mountain bikers and hunters who can also rent yurts or pitch tents. Today there remains passionate discussions about whether the appeal of wildlife watching and outdoor recreation in this remote corner of the West can create commerce and job opportunities to sufficiently offset the economic hardships affecting traditional ranching and farming communities. Photo courtesy American Prairie Reserve. Rewilding is a relatively new endeavor, and we’re still learning how to do it. Thanks to technological innovation, economic growth, and agricultural intensification, we are taking pressure off large swaths of land. As a result, the opportunities for rewilding are increasing. Although APR doesn’t describe it in these terms, these broad forces are ultimately what make projects like theirs feasible. In essence, by decoupling economic growth from our use of natural resources, we are making it possible to rewild large expanses of the United States as well as other parts of the world. But it’s one thing for the forests of New England to return on their own, as they did after many farms were abandoned in the region in the 19th century. It’s quite another for bison, grizzlies, wolves, and other large species to return to the northern Great Plains. For that to become a reality, regions like northeastern Montana need to be actively rewilded. Native grasses need to be planted. Bison need to be reintroduced. And wildlife tolerance needs to be promoted, often requiring creativity. The people who will bear the consequences of rewilding need to be included in the effort, and somehow compensated in innovative ways. And, crucially, lands that have been traditionally used for agriculture or ranching will have to be acquired or otherwise managed in different ways. The fundamental challenge for pragmatic rewilding efforts, then, will be to find ways to turn wildlife into an asset instead of a liability for the landowners and communities that bear the costs of rewilding. Some creative conservation groups have made progress on this issue in recent years. APR’s Wild Sky Beef initiative — making incentive payments to landowners who engage in wildlife-friendly management practices — is one innovative model, though it is still in its early stages. Defenders of Wildlife, another conservation group, has compensated ranchers in the Greater Yellowstone region whose livestock were killed after wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in the 1990s. The Nature Conservancy pays rice farmersin California’s Central Valley to provide migratory bird habitat. And the Environmental Defense Fund has developed a habitat exchange programin several states that pays farmers to enhance habitats for monarch butterflies — a species that, after decades of population declines, needs to be “rewilded” in vast areas of the United States. But for efforts like those of APR to work on a large scale, they will require not only creative entrepreneurship but also policy changes that enable more voluntary, exchange-based solutions. The institutions that govern many state and federally-managed natural resources in the American West were developed at a time when “use” was the basis for defining and maintaining rights, creating obstacles to the voluntary acquisition of ranchers’ grazing permits for conservation purposes. If rewilding entails the reintroduction of wild bison, camels, horses, or even Asian elephants (a close relative of the American mastodon), then these institutions will have to evolve to allow for other forms of valid use. Simply put, if such rights cannot be acquired for rewilding-oriented conservation, then the bottom-up approach is not feasible in many regions of the United States. The key question is whether rewilding will (or should) come from the top down or the bottom up? For a libertarian, market-oriented environmentalist like myself, who favors voluntary, rights-based solutions to disputes over environmental and natural resources, the APR story is instructive for several reasons. First, it powerfully illustrates the potential to achieve landscape-scale conservation by embracing voluntary exchange instead of zero-sum political or regulatory conflict. APR’s success to date is proof that these forces can be channeled to achieve a large-scale land use transition that recognizes the property rights of local people, accomplishes its goals through market-based exchange rather than regulatory or political means, raises funds from a broad base of supporters, and taps into people’s deeply rooted passions for conservation to achieve meaningful, on-the-ground environmental restoration. Conservationists have underappreciated, and underestimated, the potential for such strategies to succeed at a landscape scale. Yet the story is also a cautionary one for proponents of environmental markets. Despite APR’s free-market approach to acquiring land rights and to compensating other local ranchers for the impacts of wildlife, its project remains remarkably divisive. Whereas an environmental economist might emphasize the welfare-enhancing benefits of a simple market exchange in which an individual rancher sells land to a conservation organization, the experience of APR paints a more complex picture of the broader distributional consequences. That is, even when such rights are traded voluntarily, the gains can seemingly be swamped by external factors that have more to do with preserving agricultural heritage, traditional ways of life, and the social fabric of the region’s small ranching communities. Quote:Despite APR’s free-market approach to acquiring land rights and to compensating other local ranchers for the impacts of wildlife, its project remains remarkably divisive. Whereas an environmental economist might emphasize the welfare-enhancing benefits of a simple market exchange in which an individual rancher sells land to a conservation organization, the experience of APR paints a more complex picture of the broader distributional consequences. Nonetheless, there are plenty of reasons to hope that rewilding can come from the bottom up instead of being imposed from the top down: APR’s model is more nimble and adaptable to the needs and concerns of the local region. By compensating and working with neighboring landowners, it can help reduce concerns about the impacts of rewilding and offset some of the costs it imposes on ranchers. By acquiring land directly through the marketplace — instead of lobbying or litigating to reduce grazing in the region — it is pursuing a positive-sum strategy that does not increase the federal government’s footprint in the region. (Unlike federal land acquisition, which takes lands off local tax rolls, APR pays property taxes on all of its deeded lands.) And despite all of the yard signs, overheated rhetoric, and local opposition it engenders, the reality is that many ranchers arechoosing to sell to APR, suggesting that bottom-up rewilding efforts can succeed in spite of controversy. (It may also suggest that certain ranchers behave differently at a private real estate closing than at a public town hall meeting.) Moreover, as a bottom-up endeavor, the best strategy — at least initially — may be for rewilded species to not actually be “wild” in the eyes of the law. In many cases, private ownership of rewilded animals may be necessary for acceptable management, especially for large and potentially destructive species. For example, the notion of “wild” bison in Montana is controversial and widely opposed by ranchers. However, APR owns its bison, which are legally classified as domestic livestock while being managed by the group as a wild herd. As a result, APR incurs the costs of managing the bison and bears responsibility for any costs the bison impose on neighboring landowners, whether broken fences, crop damage, or trespass. This arrangement gives APR the right incentives to be good neighbors and wise stewards of the species, and it minimizes the risks for neighboring landowners. While that may not fulfill the most romantic visions of rewilding that some have hoped for, it’s likely the most practical way forward for such efforts. If rewilding is going to work, it will likely have to look a lot like APR’s pragmatic model — with its awkward and sometimes messy combination of public and private management, its innovative incentives for conservation and wildlife tolerance, its commitment to acquiring rights voluntarily through market exchange, and its bottom-up, nongovernmental approach. And even then, this much is certain: it will still be incredibly controversial.
Reintroduction of Tassies into Mainland.
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