Rewilding in the Face of Climate Change

In general, most evolution occurs through earlier developmental stages.
Adaptation, if not always quickly selected through mutation, over time occurs correlated to the diversity existing in a genome. Much of the epigenetic variation (and transcriptional, sometimes microevolutionary molecular process) that happens in response to stresses can either grant time for genetic variation to either supplant or enhance nongenetic adaptive response.
These are arguments for maximal preservation, as response to human habitat conversion and other effects, e.g. molecules that have no other production outside human fabrication may induce selection, as the microplastics we now understand as persistent and pervasive.

(Certainly all species co-evolve, but this does not itself mean that humans dispersed for a few thousand or few tens of thousands of years is itself valid as selective force in evolution. What our niches were as indigenous, differ significantly fro present high levels of habitat conversion and species-excluding cultures. Thus critical examination of claims of validity can be an exclusively self-serving cognitive bias, which may not be consistent with any effort to restore climate-resilience, as just one example of conflationary ideation. The extremely varied cultures of herding cultures across Asia , induced extinctions, local extirpations, and other influences diminishing not only biodiversity, but cultural diversity, forcefully extinguishing or diminishing some cultures whose remnants are both scattered and distorted due to what we can call syncretism. But arguing demands for any human control of habitat is not my intent here)

Dr. Carroll has adapted the rewilding/evolutionary exigencies to the (also natural – self-serving bias is an essential pressure and behavior of organisms for three billion years or more, after all!) rhetorical clamor in response to perceived threat so common to our symbolic vocal species, quite well, noting the valid habitat-relevant critiques, and adjusting the biogeographical issues in response.

Politicization, I’d only remind listeners, comes from the Greek for city or community. humans make coalitions to control, just as insects evolved pheromones, for individual and related group reproductive success, an evolutionary process. We coalesce absorbing cognitive rage similarly to other communicable disease, to make atrocious and tragic war.

Some cultures , such as many North American sought honesty and inclusive pan-species recognition of relationship, certainly the most urgent cognitive candidate for syncretic absorption and prominence by the dominant culture. We are aware of some exploitative utilitarian beliefs in some North American cultures, which, when combined with technological acquisition, also have threatened other species of diverse life.

This caution is directed at any who would expand automatic validity without criticism.

More than most surviving cultures of other continents, we find a N. A. indigenous practice of requiring essential consensus (perhaps 95% excluding only the incompetent and psychopathic) to proceed with community action.

This , along with that cultural prizing of honesty and inclusion of all life around may be the only real way to deflect and avoid the Anthropogenic Extinction Event, often mistermed “Anthropocene “Epoch” by those who misunderstand the difference between the extended and often multicausal past extinction events, and the demonstrable short memory and hubris of our species.
(and I hope you will excuse my language here; it is expressed this way due to the accelerating and compelling urgency experienced over the decades of half a century of observation)