Wilderness and Wildlife Conservation

(NOTE: Slowly, too slowly, as in glacially slowly—wait: glacially doesn’t work for slowly anymore, does it? Not with self-crafted curse of greenhouse gases, it doesn’t. Well, nonetheless, I have been working on a memoir called “Wildeor: My Wild Life” now and then, when I find a little slice of time, and I might slip a tidbit from it in as an “Around the Campfire” column every so often if Susan lets me. Thus, what follows.)

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

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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.

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From an earlier “Campfire,” Rewilding the East:

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.

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Guest blog by Leon Kolankiewicz, wildlife biologist and environmental planner.

This book review was originally posted August 9, 2011 on NumbersUSA

“How far conservationists and environmentalists have fallen from what now seem to me to be the Golden Years of the 1960s and 1970s.  No wonder I’m such an old sorehead.”

– Dave Foreman, Man Swarm and the Killing of Wildlife (Durango, CO: Raven’s Eye Press, 2011; p. 121)

As a founder of Earth First!, The Wildlands Project, and the Rewilding Institute, as well as the author of Confessions of an Eco-Warrior and other books, Dave Foreman is one of America’s most iconic living conservationists.  Foreman belongs in an elite outfit we might call the Old Guard Conservationists, including such legends as David Brower (one-time Sierra Club executive director and board member, founder of Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Earth Island Institute), Senator Gaylord Nelson (founder of Earth Day, counselor for the Wilderness Society), Captain Paul Watson (founder of Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society), and Stewart Udall (former Interior Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and author of the conservation classic The Quiet Crisis).

It is no exaggeration that these same individuals helped shape the America we live in today.  Our country is a far better place than it might have been without their endeavors, and those of other leaders and their legions of followers.   This is because – in spite of the beleaguered condition and troubled future of the American environment – today our country goes to much greater lengths and expense to protect our shared natural heritage than it used to before these heroes began their teach-ins, protests, organizing, lawmaking, lawsuits, newspaper ads, marches, speeches, direct action, books, and civil disobedience.  And the beneficiaries of all these efforts, awareness, and funding are our treasured wildlife, endangered species, wilderness, clean air and water, open space, public health, national parks, forests, and fisheries.  And of course, the Americans who care about these things.

It is also no exaggeration that the Old Guard Conservationists, those coming of age or already in their prime around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, recognized the role of explosive, unsustainable human population growth in piling ever more pressure on the environment.

In contrast, with precious few exceptions, at least in their public postures, contemporary leaders of the politically correct Environmental Establishment either tend to ignore U.S. overpopulation altogether (their preferred strategy), or when pressed, actively dismiss or minimize its role as a causative agent of greater environmental impacts.  (At the same time, in a hushed tone or whisper, some may tell you that of course population is a huge issue, but it’s also a radioactive one that they and their organization must avoid at all costs.)

By the Environmental Establishment, I mean the well-funded, well-connected, politically potent, big national environmental groups.

Please click on the attachment below to read Leon’s entire article.

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