Where deer and lions play Nicholas D. Kristof
December 13, 2005 Tuesday - NY Times
Late Edition - Final
The pronghorn antelope is North America's speediest animal, capable of
running 60 miles per hour -- but why? Its predators don't run nearly that
fast, so why would the pronghorn evolve such a capability?
The answer is probably the cheetah. We think of cheetahs as African, but
America had its own cheetahs, along with elephants, lions, camels and wild
horses. Since cheetahs can run 60 or 70 m.p.h. for short bursts, and enjoy
antelope steak, the pronghorns adapted.
Now comes one of the craziest -- and appealing -- ideas in the biological
world: reintroducing species to the Americas. Eventually, this could allow
Americans to go on camera safaris in this country and see scenes that humans
haven't witnessed on this continent since about 11,000 B.C.
The genesis for this idea is the growing realization that Native Americans
were not the fine ecological stewards we imagine. In the Americas, hunters
began using effective spears about 13,000 years ago, and in only about four
centuries nearly three-quarters of the large animal species had disappeared.
Something like that also happened in Australia.
So today we think of lions as African, but similar lions were once integral
to the ecosystem of North America. So were five species of elephant-like
creatures, along with ancient wild horses and the camelops -- a Bactrian
camel with an American accent.
So in a commentary in Nature in August, a handful of scientists led by Josh
Donlan of Cornell University suggested a ''Pleistocene re-wilding'' -- the
introduction of species from elsewhere that would closely resemble those in
the ecosystem of the Pleistocene era, from about 1.65 million years ago
until about 10,000 years ago.
The proposal provoked gasps of horror, some from Americans who did not wish
to look out their back window and see a cheetah devour a camel -- or, worse,
their child. There's been such a furor about reintroducing wolves in
Yellowstone that I doubt this column will go over well with Montana and
Wyoming ranchers.
But the idea is not for a Jurassic Park. Things would start slowly with less
threatening creatures like the Bolson tortoise, which can weigh 100 pounds.
It is now found only in Mexico but was once common in the U.S.
The next step would be to find a 200,000-acre ranch in the Southwest that
saw an economic opportunity in working with scientists to recreate a
Pleistocene ecosystem and then charging tourists to come and gawk. And, yes,
such a game reserve would have a strong perimeter fence.
Something similar is being tried in Siberia. As the journal Science
recounted in May, biologists in the Russian region of Yakutia are trying to
create a Pleistocene Park by reintroducing species similar to the ones that
humans killed off there long ago.
''Right now when people think of conservation, 1492 is the de facto
benchmark,'' Mr. Donlan said. But he noted that if we really wanted to
recover part of the wilderness that existed before humans helped muck up the
ecosystem, we might want to go back to what is a heartbeat away in cosmic
time: say, 13,000 years ago.
Whether here or in Russia, one aim is to restore checks and balances.
American grasslands suffer from an encroachment of woody shrubs, for
example, perhaps because elephants no longer keep them at bay. Another goal
is to save endangered species (as a result, the game reserves would be
populated by cheetahs already in this country, not by newly captured ones).
To me, as an avid backpacker, another advantage is that this re-wilding
might entice Americans away from their televisions and connect them with
nature. This might also provide a new economic base -- safari tourism -- for
sparsely populated areas of the Great Plains. More than 1.5 million people a
year visit Wild Animal Park in San Diego, and even more might visit a
Pleistocene reserve on, say, private land in North Dakota.
There are a million reasons why none of this may be feasible, and it's
always ecologically dangerous to tinker with nature. But some of the biggest
human tinkering came when we helped to exterminate large animals 13
millenniums ago, and it's reasonable to explore whether to bring some of
their relatives back.
This proposal could also be a boon for environmentalism. At a time when
environmentalism defines itself largely by what it is against, re-wilding
provides a positive vision. What could be bolder than giving our children
the first glimpse in 13,000 years of an America as it was before humans
introduced high technology like spears?
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