Showing posts with label re-wilding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label re-wilding. Show all posts

Monday, August 12, 2013

"There is more life in dead trees than there is in living trees."

So says George Monbiot in his new book Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life (Allen Lane, 2013).

Monbiot (like Mary Ellen Hamilton who in her book The Spine of the Continent, promotes the protection of the entire Rocky Mountain chain from northern Alaska to Mexico as a wildlife corridor), wants a criss-crossing of Earth by areas re-wilded for nonhuman species. He wants not only micro-managed "stewardship" of these areas however, but also a reduction of human interference, a chance to "allow the land to find its own way." That means not removing some species (by "bashing" them or otherwise) so as to make room for others, and allowing that climate change means the range of plants and animals is changing, and that what is "native" to where, which birds migrate where, which plants cover which landscapes, is something in perpetual transition and something that Nature should decide on. Monbiot takes us through the history of humanity on Earth, showing us that nature never didn't change, and that we humans, as soon as we came out of Africa, never didn't affect it. The "anthropogenic era" of climate change is not new; it is as old as we are. All animals affect and are mutually affected by nature's transformations.

The myriad inter-relationships involved are too intricate for our minds to grasp in their detailed entirety. But one thing we should be able to grasp is that if some can envision a wildlife corridor extending un-disturbed from Alaska to Mexico, we should be able to create space for wildlife corridors within a single town. It should not be beyond our ingenuity or our ideals to protect landscape and habitat across the CRD where deer and other creatures can live unmolested and a tree can fall down in peace -- thereby becoming even more alive hosting all the species it then nurtures into abundance (its own cells taking up to a hundred to die off).

Monbiot uses examples from Britain and elsewhere of misguided rejection of one species in favour of another, even in "protected areas." The current fashion of dividing Victoria's bird life into "good birds" and "bad birds" is very inappropriate, an endless road of one lethal interference opening up space for the next. The plentifulness of gulls downtown, said to be due to eagles crowding them out of the dwindling natural habitat, is a mirror of the behaviour of deer also becoming habituated and fleeing loss of ex-urban habitat. It is our job to make room for them, to build around them rather than thoughtlessly over them, to adopt a principle of (and space for) "re-wilding", and to recognize when the city is (in terms of its human population) "full".

As far as the seagulls go, we could begin by re-wilding our shoreline so that shellfish, bullheads and the like can come back. That would mean scaling back development along the shoreline which is altering beach shape and tidal action with concrete barriers. And of course, on the provincial-federal level we need to stop fishing out our fish stocks, whether by commercial, sport or native fisheries.

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