Many-fold, tangled life is better.

Many-fold, tangled life not hobbled by Man’s will is best.

What do I mean?

By “life is good,” I am not writing a television commercial about sitting with your buddies in front of a widescreen TV for a Superbowl party with Budweiser while wives and girlfriends in tight, low-cut tops bring in nachos and other goodies. No, I am laying down bedrock that the coming out of life or living things—chemical molecules that could replicate and do things—was good. As is its further evolution. Both life—this way of being—and living things—the lone packages into which life fleetingly puts itself—are good.

The first step in ethics is to ask what is good. The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on “Ethics” says, “By ‘the good’ here is meant what is intrinsically good (or good-in-itself), not what is good only as a means to something else.” This is what I mean by “life is good.” It is good-in-itself. If there is good-in-itself at all, I would think “life is good” would be self-evident or unmistakable.

Whether the knowing creation of an Almighty or the outcome of a wandering, blind, goalless bubbling-over of chemistry and electricity in the right setting by happenstance, life and living things are good. Life comes together as neighborhoods (or communities as ecologists call them) in which we as dwellers or as wayfarers need to behave as good neighbors to the neighborhood and to each neighbor. Aldo Leopold wrote that the Land Ethic made one a “plain member and citizen” of the land community.I would restate that as being a good neighbor in wild neighborhoods. Being a good neighbor is being good to life, which is good-in-itself. The sign at the National Forest trailhead a quarter-mile from my front door welcomes hikers but warns that we are coming into the home of many kinds of wildlife and that we are “guests in their home.” (Italics on the sign.) When you are a guest in someone’s home, you need to be well-behaved. You do not rule the roost when you are a guest.

By “many-fold” (manifold) and “tangled” life, I mean biological diversity or biodiversity. This is the Tree of Life: many, many kinds of life living in a wealth of jumbled, messy, always-shifting neighborhoods.

By “not hobbled by Man’s will,” I mean wild—wild things, which are Earthlings that are as yet self-willed and not thralls to Man.

These other Earthlings are good because they are and because they are free by being wild. Wild things are good-in-themselves.

“Wild” is a many-fold and tangled word and thought. To understand such a word, we need to go back to its beginning in language—at least as far as we can. It means going back to the Anglo-Saxons coming into Britain as Roman civilization was withering and leaving.  Early Gothonic or Deutsch speakers—warlords (“kings” and “lords” in their high and mighty gall), churls, and bards such as those who wrote down Beowulf and other sagas and poems—struggled with will.  They lived next to wilderness—land not yet settled or plowed—and knew wildlife such as bear, wolf, lynx, wolverine, moose, wisent, eagle owl, snowy owl, golden eagle, white-tailed eagle, and other mighty beings that were untamable.

Please click on the attachment below to read the entire “Campfire.”

All photos © 2012 by Dave Foreman

Though my days as a wilderness trekker seem gone, thanks to fusion surgery, strong pain meds, shoving from my wife Nancy, and some help from my friends, foremost John Davis, I have done several long raft and canoe trips in the Southwest and in Arctic Alaska and Canada.  Nancy and I have begun to scuba dive.   Nonetheless, most of my time is spent working in the living room recliner where our feathered friends who visit our birdbath and spread of feeders endlessly enthrall our fluffy black cat Gila and me.  I’ve tallied sixty-one species in and over our yard.  I cannot overstate how thoroughly I need and love these birds—they are the wild things without which I would not want to live.

Thanks to my living room birding blind, I’ve gotten to know some birds and who they are well.  They have taught me much, five birds most of all, and I think that they can teach my fellow Cannots much, too.  (A Cannot is one like Aldo Leopold, who wrote that there were some who can live without wild things, and others like him who cannot.)

You will see that these birds are not those often held up as beacons of certain virtues such as eagles or owls.  Nor are they bright flashes of many-hued loveliness such as orioles and hummingbirds.  But in their behavior and mood they are anything but drab.  As I have gotten to know them better, their true grit fairly blazes.

So, let’s meet them and hear their tweets of wisdom.

Bushtit—Grassroots

Bushtits are tiny, drab, and gray, but lively, lovable, and winsome in a way that springs out.  They move through our neighborhood in a throng of twenty-five or so, swarming into a piñon tree and cleaning it of bugs and caterpillars, then—zoom—they are off in a straggling, chattering rush to another tree, without a blatant leader.  They are not seedeaters but pack predators.  Were they raven-size, Bushtits would be the fright of Earth.

I have had wonderful meetings with wildeors from leopards to wolves in sprawling, deep wilderness over the world.  In the summer of 2010, I narrowly dodged being trampled and gored by a cranky bull musk ox on the banks of the Noatak River above the Arctic Circle.  But one of my greatest wildlife run-ins was that same summer in my yard with a Bushtit.  I was watering a little patch of Rocky Mountain Penstemons and went to scoot the sprinkler to a dry spot.  As I lifted the hose with the sprinkler head drizzling down, I glimpsed a sudden flash of gray from a nearby New Mexico Locust.  I looked down and there was a Bushtit winsomely perched on my toe and showering under the sprinkler.  It fluffed and fluttered and flapped its wings for half a minute then flew off.  I was in wild-bliss for what was left of the day.

As I wrote, Bushtits have no out-and-out leader.  For all I know, some (grandma and grandpa?) may show leadership now and then thanks to knowledge, age, or wisdom, but overall their might is in the flock.  They teach the strength of grassroots work.  Historian Stephen Fox sees two traditions in conservation: Amateur and Professional (to wit: John Muir/Sierra Club and Gifford Pinchot/Forest Service).  These pathways are not split by whether or not one is paid to do conservation work, nor do they have anything to do with how good one is.  The cleavage is in feeling, with amateurs working for wild things out of love and professionals working to manage land and resources because it’s their job. Some of us who have worked for conservation outfits all our lives are yet amateurs . . .

Please click on the attachment below to read the entire “Campfire”

Desert Marigolds © Dave Foreman

Now, when I write conservative I do not mean so-called “movement conservatives,” shills for big business, or Tea Baggers, but the many folks who still have the values of “traditional conservatism,” which more or less lost its seat in the Republican Party in the Reagan years.  Indeed, some of the bedrock values for traditional conservatives, but not for today’s highly partisan right-wingers, are also bedrock values for wilderness and wildlife conservation—such as piety, prudence, and posterity.

I think that if we wildlovers would talk more about these values, we would find that we could better reach folks we are not reaching now because they think we are all left-wingers.

Dr. John Bliese, formerly Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, has done more than anyone since the 1970s to show not only that conservatism and conservation can be like-minded, but also that the intellectual leaders of conservatism from the end of World War Two to the Reagan Revolution, most of all Russell Kirk, Richard M. Weaver, and Clinton Rossiter, were foes of landscalping. In 1953, Kirk wrote The Conservative Mind, likely the foremost conservative work of the last hundred years. In a 1996 article for Modern Age, Bliese writes, “If we go back to the ‘Founding Fathers’ of American traditionalist conservatism, we will find a solid philosophical basis that would lead conservatives to be environmentalists.” Conservatives and conservationists alike should read his book, The Greening Of Conservative America.  True conservatism has deep ties to conservation through the following thrusts: Antimaterialism, Piety, Prudence, Posterity, Values, and Responsibility.

I go into all these in my forthcoming book, Take Back Conservation, from which this “Campfire” but I’ll only write here about piety, prudence, and posterity.

Before we look at these principles, however, let’s go to writings by Russell Kirk on conservation and pollution.  Most of the work by Kirk (and Weaver) was before widespread heed was given to how we were wounding Earth.  Nonetheless, Kirk did not shun the land in his syndicated newspaper column in the 1960s and early 1970s.  In 1962, he wrote about pesticides and how they harmed wildlife.  He told his readers to read Rachel Carson’s newly released Silent Spring.  This is a big deal since Carson’s book led to a bitter wrangle among the directors of the Sierra Club, with some pooh-poohing any harm from pesticides. In your wildest dreams, can you see any leading conservative today telling folks to read a book like Silent Spring?

Bliese writes:

In 1965, [Kirk] deplored the fact that “rare, strange and beautiful animals are shrinking toward extinction in much of the world.”  He argued that “preservation of the multitudinous animal species has been enjoined by religion since the dawn of human consciousness,” with specific reference to the story of Noah.  He wrote this piece in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, but added that “we Americans have done our despicable share in decimating the animal kingdom.”

I write to ask you to once again or for the first time send as big a check or PayPal donation as you can to The Rewilding Institute.

Because you are getting this plea from The Rewilding Institute:

• It is the only plea for donations you will get from The Rewilding Institute until fall of 2012 (other than the mailed version of this plea if you are on our mailing list).  Unlike other non-profits, including most conservation groups, we don’t fill your mailbox with one professionally written and packaged fundraising letter after another all year long.  We send just this one, but of course, you have the opportunity to contribute to TRI any time of year by check and mail or by PayPal.

• This letter is not carefully disguised as an action alert on a critical issue that you must act on right away or all hell is going to bust lose, but you then find that the only action you need to take is to send a check to us so we can take care of it for you.  No, if you ever get a plea from us to act, it will ask YOU to do something and not just send The Rewilding Institute money.  In fact, those of you who get “Around the Campfire” have gotten just such a request from us by email to back a sweeping new Wilderness Area for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—but it wasn’t a disguised fundraising letter.

• Moreover, in this letter The Rewilding Institute is not going to brag that it has saved this and that and give the impression that we were the only team involved.  When conservation has a victory or stops something awful, it is usually thanks to much of the whole conservation network—individual lovers of wild things and many groups—not thanks to the work of one group alone.

Nonetheless, we have made a significant difference and I think you know what The Rewilding Institute does, so I won’t boast.  We do need your help, though, to keep working.  Remember that most of our tiny staff is wholly volunteer.  However, our other staffer (besides me), Christianne Hinks as associate director, has made all the difference in the world for The Rewilding Institute and for me.  I truly don’t know how we could have gone on without hiring her.  She’s only paid for half-time, but puts in much more than that.  Although they are not formally staffers, Roxanne and Monica Pacheco at Bosque Accounting take care of bookkeeping, mailing lists, and fulfilling book orders at a fee that almost makes them volunteers.  And without our selfless, generous, hard-working volunteer staff, foremost Susan Morgan, Jack Humphrey, and John Davis, we would have a hard time doing anything.  We know your money is hard-earned and The Rewilding Institute will be tight, not extravagant, with it.

By the way, my next book in the For the Wild Things series is entitled Take Back Conservation and it looks at what is wrong with our conservation groups and network because of too much professionalization, institutionalization, co-option, money-chasing, shying away from talking about deep values, and so on.  We’re very happy, by the way, that Man Swarm and the Killing of Wildlife is selling well and getting high praise.

As always, all donors of $250 or more may pick a complimentary book, which I’ll be most happy to sign.  Information is on the reply sheet.

Thanks so much for your support.  The Rewilding Institute has only 110 or so regular donors and help from two or three foundations at this time, so your check—whatever the amount—goes a long way to helping us meet our budget of about $140,000 for 2011-12.  Following this letter is a list of the books The Rewilding Institute sells and then an order/donation form with instructions on how to back TRI.

But thank you even more for what you do personally to keep, shield, and bring back the wild things with which we share the lovely and tangled Tree of Life we call Earth.  You are the grassroots, and the grassroots are the conservation network, not organizations or even hired staff like me.

Happy Trails
Dave Foreman
Executive Director and Janitor

Please click on the attachment below to read the entire “Campfire,” which includes the complete list of books for sale by TRI and a donation and order form.

Conservationists know the Arctic Refuge mostly for the 1.5 million-acre Arctic Coastal Plain so coveted for oil and gas industrialization by the energy industry, their eager politicians, and the Alaska growth establishment, along with some of the Inupiat (Eskimo) folks who want development.  The Coastal Plain is yet wilderness, but not designated.  It’s one of the most wonderful places on Earth (I’ve been there and know).  For more than a score of years we’ve fought to keep drilling out and to designate most of the Arctic Plain as Wilderness.

But the Arctic Coastal Plain isn’t the whole story—not by far.  The 1980 Alaska Lands Act enlarged the Arctic National Wildlife Range from 8.9 million acres to 19.1 million acres and renamed the whole area the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (almost the size of Ohio).  Eight million acres of the eastern Brooks Range in the original Range was designated as Wilderness.  The 10 million acres added to the Arctic Refuge was more of the Brooks Range to the west and the Porcupine Plateau to the southeast.  These lands were as wild as the original Range and brought in much greater diversity of landscapes, wildlife, forest, wetlands, and rivers.

Now the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is doing a new Comprehensive Conservation Plan (CCP) for the Refuge and is weighing whether the rest of Refuge should be recommended for Wilderness Area designation.  Right now, the 10 million acres of non-Wilderness Area on the Refuge are managed better as wilderness than most Wilderness Areas.  But without legal designation as Wilderness that could change and development—roads, logging, tourist developments, overhunting and trapping, predator “control” of wolves, and other landscalping—could happen to the Western Brooks Range and Porcupine Plateau.  Indeed, there is organized opposition to more Wilderness, including some development-oriented Native Alaskans.  Because of this, some of the key Alaskan and national conservation groups have shamefully backed down and turned their backs on the great wilderness of the Arctic Refuge except for the Coastal Plain.

Other conservationists, such as the Center for Biological Diversity and Wilderness Watch, have stayed steadfast for Wilderness.  I will write another Campfire later on the ins and outs of this controversial deal.  For now, though, I want to bid all of you to email the Arctic Refuge as soon as you can to support the maximum Wilderness recommendation for the Refuge.  This is Alternative E.  In addition to the 8 million acres of Wilderness already set aside, Alternative E calls for recommending 1.4 million acres of the Arctic Coastal Plain for Wilderness, 5.4 million acres of the Western Brooks Range for Wilderness, and 4.4 million acres of the Porcupine Plateau for Wilderness.  This would make a single Wilderness Area of 19 million acres—the biggest designated Wilderness Area in the United States (the Gates of the Arctic National Park/Noatak River National Preserve Wilderness Area in the central and western Brooks Range is now the biggest at 12.8 million acres).

Wilderness Watch has a comprehensive, succinct alert on the Arctic Refuge Plan and Wilderness Recommendation.  Instead of doing our own, The Rewilding Institute endorses the Wilderness Watch call to action.  We reprint key parts of it below.  Most of all, though, get an email in right away backing Alternative E—Wilderness recommendation for all qualifying lands in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  That recommends 11 million acres to be added to an 8-million-acre Wilderness Area for a grand total of a single 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness Area.  Doing so will be an inspiration to Earth-loving people the world over, and will keep a vast and tangled wilderness as a place for evolution in all its unfathomable mystery to roll on forever.

Read the attachment below and ACT!

Happy Trails

Uncle Dave Foreman,

Dreaming of my three-week canoe trip in the Western Brooks Range and Coastal Plain Wilderness Study Areas and a return to the Porcupine Plateau WSA

Draft CCP Summary Booklet

The strand of pink sand sweeps away like a cat’s claw or—this week in school we are studying King Richard the Lionhearted and Saladin in the Crusades—a Saracen’s sword striking at black ragged stones coming down to the turquoise sea. Stone also hems in the half-moon beach from behind. Beyond where the stone tongues thrust themselves into the Atlantic is a froth of white as the surf hits the girdling coral reef. Today the surf is bigger and louder than I’ve ever seen it. The eye of a hurricane roved over Bermuda a day ago and the water is still roiled. Being in a hurricane thrilled me and I am yet all-atwitter.

I’m in my flippers with mask and snorkel, though today I won’t be going to the reef. First, my dad isn’t with me. Mom is sitting on the beach reading under an umbrella. She doesn’t swim. It’s okay for me to swim by myself out from the beach, where it’s shallow and there are lifeguards, but not to go out to the reef. The reef is a dream of bright fish and odd, wonderful beings; just outside it, the bottom falls away. White sand gleams sixty feet down. The water is so sheer that the ripples in the sand look as near as your hand. But I’m also not going to the reef. After a big storm the lifeguards tell everyone not to go beyond the reef inasmuch as sharks come nigh to the islands afterward.

I’ve heard my dad tell tales about sharks he’s seen while diving. I haven’t seen one while snorkeling yet, but the ones at the outside aquarium that you can look down on from the bridge that goes over their pool fill me with wonder and happiness—and maybe a little bit of dread. Something that big that doesn’t fear us is beyond wonderful to me. Back home in Albuquerque at my Grandma’s, I stretch my eyes to look for mountain lions six miles away in the Sandia Mountains. In bed at night there, I run with Lobo and his pack over the flowing grassland sea of Carrumpaw. And here—out in middle of the Atlantic Ocean—I swim in the same water as do sharks….

Just as I am getting my feet wet, shouts break into how the sand feels underfoot and how the water sloshes over my anklebones. I look out to where folks are craning their necks to look. Yelling and overwrought splashing just beyond the reef drift back to those of us on the strand. My mother sprints up and grabs my hand to drag me from the water. I’ve never seen her dash so fast. The lifeguards are already nearly out to the reef in their rescue boat. I hear the word whispered by the grownups about me.

“Shark.”

The lifeguard boat pulls up on the sand. There is someone inside. Blood is all over. “A shark took off his legs,” I hear.

We later learn that he is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He was swimming past the reef on a dare. Three days later he died in the hospital.

I was almost eight years old that day. My dad was stationed at the U.S. Air Force base in Bermuda where we lived  for two years. That day shines brightest and most alive in my childhood recall. The next day when I went into the water—I had to—I told my mom, the salt in my mouth tasted like blood and I thought of sharks. It still does and I still do.

Dave Foreman
Home, but with briny tides sloshing in my skull

©2011 by Dave Foreman

Lisa Hymas, senior editor at Grist, features an excellent series on human overpopulation. Look for her nicely done summary of Man Swarm and the Killing of Wildlife, “Stop the ‘man swarm,’ save the wild world” appearing in Grist’s “7 Billion” series.

“A Few Things We Can Do to Freeze and then Lower Man’s Population”

“Do not let us be blamed by our descendants for not trying.”
–Sir Charles Galton Darwin

I’m happy with the welcome my new book Man Swarm and the Killing of Wildlife has gotten in sundry fields.  For those of you who haven’t yet read it, I’d like to show that while it has doom and gloom galore, it is also full of steps we can take to bring our population down to what Earth can house without gobbling up everything wild.  What follows in this “Campfire” are a few of these steps.  I may lay out others in a later “Campfire.”  This list of steps is not all my doing, by the way; I had help, most of all from Phil Cafaro of Progressives for Immigration Reform.

SET A GOAL OF ZERO POPULATION GROWTH BY THE EARLIEST DOABLE DATE.  SET A POPULATION CEILING FOR THE UNITED STATES THAT WE WILL NOT GO BEYOND (325 MILLION?).  THE SAME NEEDS TO BE DONE FOR OTHER COUNTRIES BY THEIR CITIZENS.

Setting goals comes first.  This is run-of-the-mill planning.  Making up our minds to stop population growth by a set time at a set number leads to the need to lower births and to cap immigration.  For the sake of some kind of target, I’ll call for a population of the United States of no more than 325 million (we are now at 310 million), with zero population growth gained by 2025.  It would be better if it could be lower than this.  And we should work to lower it after 2025.  How about a goal for a U.S. population of no more than 200 million by 2100?  With such goals, we can better reckon what we need to do to gain them.

CALL ON YOUR GOVERNMENT TO SET A CAP ON POPULATION

National commissions should be set up in every country to set what the highest population should be, and Earth lovers need to watchdog them to keep the population cap low.  Rosamund McDougall of the Optimum Population Trust writes, “At the end of 2008, Britain became the first country in the EU to set a cap on population growth, with a ministerial pledge not to allow it to grow beyond 70 million.”  The United Kingdom now has 61 million inhabitants and is growing by 400,000 a year thanks to immigration and a too-high birth rate.  McDougall warns that the pro-growth policies of British governments “look like a catastrophic environmental error.  It is hard to see how the country will be able to sustain 70 million people in 2050.”  The Optimum Population Trust is calling for “numerically balanced immigration” and “stopping at two children.”  They believe such a path could cut population to 55 million by 2050. The United States and other countries need to follow the lead of the Trust.

CALL FOR LONG-TERM LOWERING OF WORLD POPULATION TO NO MORE THAN TWO BILLION

Outrageous and outlandish though it will seem to many, some of us need to begin calling for lowering Man’s population and gathering the facts behind such a need.

And when we get right down to it, freezing world and U.S. population is not nearly enough.  Stout-hearted, free-thinking J. Kenneth Smail, an anthropology professor at Kenyon College in Ohio, has shown that there is truly no choice but to sharply lower the population of Man over the next one or two hundred years.

Early landscape architect and regional planner Benton MacKaye, who also was a founder of The Wilderness Society in 1935, called for a foot-trail along the highline of the Appalachians in the early 1920s. After reading an article by Aldo Leopold with his thoughts on Wilderness Areas in the West, MacKaye rethought his Appalachian Trail as a string linking Wilderness Area “pearls.”

With the making of The Appalachian Trail and with Wilderness Areas along the AT at last being set aside by the 1975 Eastern Wilderness Areas Act, much of MacKaye’s dream has been brought to life. But there is more to do, foremost rewilding and getting more and bigger Wilderness Area pearls set aside along the AT and bringing home at long last the American lion to its matchless haunt of the Appalachians.

MacKaye first wrote about his dream of an Appalachian Trail in 1921. I bid that we mark the One Hundredth Anniversary of his great dream by meeting some key steps for rewilding the Appalachians by 2021, foremost bringing home the cougar to at least three landscapes in the Appalachians: northern (Adirondacks State Park), middle (Monongahela National Forest), and southern (Great Smoky Mountains National Park). The other key markers to be met by 2021 should come out of the steps I bring in below.

What follows in this column is nuts and bolts. These are the nuts and bolts that will build an Appalachian Wildlands Network from Canada to Georgia. But before that let’s quickly look at what I think are the two underlying goals of such a Network. Goal One should be to have a healthy and hearty cougar clan from the Gaspe Peninsula to northern Georgia that is healthy and hearty enough to be ecologically effective. Goal Two is to rewild the Appalachians on the ground and in agency management plans so that they become an even better and more-out-of-harm’s-way neighborhood for this clan of cougars by making the Appalachians a linkage of big and smaller roadless areas its whole length. What I am laying out here is not wholly science, but it is much more workable and straightforward than the more scientific wildlands network visions I worked on in the Southwest ten years ago. The kind of Appalachian Wildlands Network I offer here is a conservation plan to keep and rebuild wild things along this great, old, ecologically tangled, long row of mountains.

For any rewilding east of the Rockies and maybe even more so for the Appalachian Range, one step is needed above all others. And that step is to bring cougars home to wild neighborhoods in the old cougar-prowling grounds. Given what we now know about cougar behavior, I think there is a lot of good cougar homeland in the Appalachians (and in many landscapes elsewhere in the East ). Cougars need food—and the too-many white-tailed deer of the East fill that bill of fare. Cougars also need wild neighborhoods where they can hide out and be unseen by Man—the way black bears have spread in the last fifty years tells us that there is much of that kind of wildland. And—as I wrote in my earlier Campfire on rewilding the East—thanks to more meat by the acre than in the West, big cats don’t need as big homelands.
Once a wrangle, the ecological theory of top-down regulation is now widely trusted. The Great Eastern Deciduous Forest, coming-back piney woods, swamps, bottomlands, and other kinds of land and water cannot be hale and hearty without the foremost top-down regulator, which in the East is the big cat: puma, cougar, mountain lion, panther, painter, catamount. Dave Maehr, whose friendship I liked as much as anyone’s, knew cats and knew eastern U.S. ecology, and he told me that the cougar was bigger than the wolf as the top-down regulator for the Appalachians and much of the East. I am sorry as hell that we lost him way too soon, but at least he went out doing what he loved to do.

For an Appalachian Wildlands Network to work we need linked breeding clans of cougars all along the ridges, “hollers,” hills, and dells from Nova Scotia and the Gaspe Peninsula south to northern Georgia and Alabama. Bringing the big cat back to her rightful home and work in the East is so much of a key step that I’ll write about it in an upcoming Campfire on the cougar. For now, let’s look at the other big steps we need to take to rewild an Appalachian Wildlands Network of big (big as we can get them) clusters of core Wilderness Areas and other kinds of wild havens linked together by Wildways big and little.

Appalachian Rewilding Steps

Please click on the attachment below to read the entire “Campfire” which includes an introduction and the twelve key steps to Rewilding the Appalachians.

Adapted from Man Swarm by Dave Foreman

Forty years and three billion Men ago, conservationists and most everyone else understood that we were in the middle of a population explosion.  Today, it seems that many conservationists and most other folks don’t give it much thought.  If we ask “Why?” much of the answer is that we’ve let ourselves become sure that our population explosion is over.  Why, some even worry about populations dropping.  But take another look at the first line: Forty years and three billion Men ago. In 1974, world population snapped the four billion wire.  We will snap the seven-billion wire in another month or two if we haven’t already.  So, while we were talking ourselves into believing that the population explosion had been stopped, we crammed another three billion of us onto Earth and took over millions and millions of acres of wildlife homes.  With this little slice from Chapter One in my new book, The Man Swarm and the Killing of Wildlife, I’d like to show you that the population explosion is not over in any way, that in truth it is even worse than we thought.

I was spurred to put this edition of “Around the Campfire” ahead of the “Steps to Rewild the Appalachians” thanks to the lame-brained special section on Population in the 29 July 2011 issue of Science. If anyone needs a hint that even our brightest are blind to the upshots of ongoing growth, this issue of Science should be more than enough.  Their writers seem to think that Man’s growth happens only in a world of Man, that there is no tie between it and the Sixth Great Extinction.

From Chapter One, Man Swarm and the Killing of Wildlife:

Sixty-five thousand years seems like forever, yet it is a finger-snap in geological time.  Maybe our handicap comes from having a lifespan of only seventy or so years.  But walk with me as I slog back 65,000 years.  Then there were more than ten kinds (species) of great apes: in east and southeast Asia, two kinds of orangutans, two or more kinds of Homo erectus offspring, and tiny little folks (Hobbits) on Flores and other islands; in Africa, two gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and likely two hominin kinds, one of which was becoming us—Homo sapiens; and, in Europe and western Asia, Neandertals. Also, in central Asia, another kind of Homo, not us and not Neandertal. Of the species in this great ape clade, who do you think was fewest?

It was likely our forebears.  Genetic and other scientific work shows that there were fewer than 10,000 of the elder Homo sapiens living 65,000 years ago—maybe only 5,000. Fifty thousand years later, we had spread out of Africa to Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas.  Only Antarctica and a few out-of-the-way islands were yet without us. In a few more thousand years we were building yearlong settlements and starting to grow wheat and lentils.  We had already brought some wolves into our packs and would soon tame goats and sheep.  Some little desert cats would tame us.  Our tally had climbed to a million or so by then, about ten thousand years ago.  By that time, our nearest kin—the three to six other Homos—were gone, and we likely had much to do with their going.  The Sixth Mass Extinction was going full tilt with the killing of big wildeors wherever we newly showed up.

Another way to look at it is that 50,000 years ago, there were more tigers than Homo sapiens. More gorillas, more chimpanzees, more orangutans, more blue whales, more jaguars, more white rhinos….  Today, for every wild tiger on Earth, there are two million human beings.

For nigh onto fifteen years, I’ve been talking and writing about a North American Wildlands Network anchored by four Continental Wildways (at first named MegaLinkages).  The North American Wildlands Network is rooted in the conservation pathway of Rewilding, an offshoot of the scientific theory of Rewilding crafted by Michael Soulé, Reed Noss, and others.  Rewilding stands on three legs.  One is that protected areas—or wild havens—(a) are the foremost work of conservation, (b) are the best tool in our conservation toolbox, and (c) best shield wildlife when roadless or nearly; ––in other words, wilderness.  Two is that in North America outside of the far north, no wild havens are big enough for wide-roaming wildeors; so we need to link havens together by wildways which wildlife can use for daily and yearly wandering, dispersal (looking for new homes and mates), and, now, shifting homes owing to climate change.  Three is that ecosystems—wild neighborhoods—will wither and crumble without “highly interactive species in ecologically effective populations” such as big hunters (wolves, cougars, and so forth), pollinators, and landscape crafters such as beavers and prairie dogs. Soulé early on called these legs the Three C’s: Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores.  I’ve started calling them the Three W’s—Wilderness, Wildways, and Wildeors—as more geared to on-the-ground conservation work by grassroots conservation clubs.

The North American Wildlands Network is anchored in four great, continent-spanning Wildways.  They are the Arctic-Boreal, from western Alaska to the Canadian Maritimes; the Pacific, from south-central Alaska’s Kenai down through the Chugach, Coast Range, Cascades, and High Sierra; the Spine of the Continent, from the Brooks Range in Alaska, to the MacKenzies in the Yukon, the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States, and the Sierra Madre in Mexico; and the Appalachian-Atlantic, from the Canadian Maritimes through the Appalachians and Adirondacks south to northern Georgia or even all the way through Florida to the Everglades.  The last three Wildways run south to north and tie in to the first.  A network of conservation clubs and conservation biologists brought together by Wildlands Network (the new name for The Wildlands Project) have been working on the Spine of the Continent Wildway for a few years now.

The first three Wildways seem doable to most conservationists, but many shake their heads at the thought of rewilding swaths of the eastern U.S. and Canada.  Lands east of the Rocky Mountains are just too built-up and heavily settled to be rewilded, think some conservationists upon first hearing about an Appalachian Wildway.  So, my first step in writing about rewilding the East is to show that it is not too farfetched a dream to cobble together a Great Wildway along the Appalachians and to bring back key wildlife such as cougar, red wolves, Algonquin wolves, bison, elk, wolverines, lynx, and other missing wildeors.

Click on the attachment below to read the entire “Campfire.”