Issue #9: Rewilding - Letting Land Grow Wild
With just a smidgen of obsessive control by human beings, of course.
Welcome back to the Climate Catalogue Reader. If you’re a new subscriber, you can catch up with us by clicking here. If you haven’t already subscribed to this newsletter and have received it as a forward, do consider subscribing and sharing this newsletter with others using the links below:
“Rewilding” is perhaps one of the most interesting conservation techniques we can currently employ to bring about effective ecological healing. In fact, I’ve been skirting around the idea of rewilding since Issue #1, where we learned about how the introduction of keystone animals into degraded ecosystems helps rebuild these ecosystems. In Issue #3, we talked about the European Bison, and its importance in maintaining biodiversity in the ecotones between forest and grassland ecologies.
Most conservation-related rewilding projects are a bit of a red herring; human beings are, after all, introducing keystone species into an ecosystem from which they’ve gone extinct. Ideally, however, one would leave an ecological system to its own devices and let nature find the right balance. If an invasive weed takes over and the biodiversity of whole area plummets, so be it. Eventually, in a couple of decades or centuries, natural selection would send along a balancing force that can bring more biodiversity into the area by building a trophic cascade based on the weed. It is not the system that existed before, but it is a completely natural system. However, for the purposes of conservation, we want ecosystems to bounce back to their former glory, especially if we are responsible for any ecological imbalance in the first place.
Before we understand the ideas behind rewilding, we need to understand what “trophic cascades” are.
A trophic cascade is a set of complex interactions between several levels of one particular food web. An oversimplified example of this is: the extinction of a predatory cat leads to a population explosion of herbivores who overgraze and inhibit plant growth, leading to gradual desertification and the eventual extinction of the herbivores.
Trophic cascades in natural systems are far more unpredictable, leading to questions like “How Do Wolves Change Rivers” (linked to a great video). A great deal of research has gone into understanding trophic cascades, but it is clear that ecological degradation is triggered by the removal of only one species of the entire food web; it is assumed that there are no other species in that system that can fulfill the role of the missing species, making it a keystone species (as in, if the keystone is removed, the entire structure falls apart).
Keystone species can be fungi, large mammals, small mammals, trees, grasses, wildflowers, insects, birds, reptiles, fish… cascades can consist of creatures of any class or clade.
And now, rewilding:
Purely as a conservation strategy, rewilding focuses of reintroduction of perceived keystone species into the ecosystem. For this, conservationists have to identify the keystone species, boost their numbers in the wild, or introduce specimens from other ecosystems. In some rare cases, where the species is globally extinct, similar species which occupy the same rung of the trophic cascade are used to build stability within the ecosystem.
There are various conservation rewilding strategies employed the world over. The most commonly used strategy may be the introduction of megafauna into a degraded ecosystem. Within this, there are two sub-categories: conservationists would either introduce herds of grazing animals, or they would introduce predatory carnivores, which are assumed to be at the peak of the trophic cascade.
The introduction of carnivores is a system that is widely practiced in the United States of America (most notably, the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park). This system focuses on 3 C’s, i.e., corridors, cores, and carnivores. Create cores of protected forest land; connect the cores in a region with corridors; reintroduce carnivores to degraded systems. It should be noted that carnivores are not added to any ecosystem: only the ones where the carnivores have gone missing due to ecological imbalances or human action, and the herbivores in the system are degrading the landscape because their populations are no longer controlled.
The introduction of grazing herbivores is predominantly practiced Europe and the United Kingdom (the rewilding of the Oostvaardersplassen in The Netherlands is a controversial example of this). This method is often used to rewild land that has been used extensively for monoculture farming or domestic cattle rearing, leading to a steep decline in the floral biodiversity of the region. Introducing wild herbivores into these systems can actually build the biodiversity back. It is suggested that the extinction or reduced numbers of European megafauna over several thousands of years led to tall canopy trees taking over what used to be grassland ecosystems. The introduction of European bison to certain areas in Europe seems to be reversing this change, since the bison graze through the saplings and their movements foster the growth of new grass.
Rewilding has been a practice of ecological conservation and biosphere healing for just under three decades. It is an important area of research to help us understand the ability of natural systems to re-balance themselves when devoid of human attention. This issue (and subsequent issues) will look at media concerning various kinds of rewilding projects, in different contexts and at many scales.
Before we begin: tiny cats.
Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation (SWCCF)
The conservation of any animal is a daunting task; more so when the animals in question are terribly elusive and have not been studied in as much detail as their supersized cousins. The Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation (website linked here) is an organisation that works with and funds partner projects that aim to spread awareness and conserve the habitats of small wildcats the world over. The have projects in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe.
As depicted on the website, there are just seven known big wildcats, whereas there are thirty-three species of small wildcats. However, the conservation efforts lean heavily towards the larger wildcats. In India, for example, there are four kinds of small wildcats in a tiny mangrove forest along the Eastern Ghats of South India; and species of fishing cats in Rajasthan, in the Godavari, and in West Bengal. Although the fishing cat habitats are in a far more critical state, tiger conservation efforts get the lion’s share of funding, resources and attention.
There are a number of conservation organisations in and around India that are working to study the small wildcats of our subcontinent, all linked in the SWCCF’s Partner Projects page.
You can check out SWCCF’s Instagram page, @smallwildcats. Give them a follow, for cat pictures and to learn more about the conservation efforts being undertaken by them and various partner organisations.
You can also support them by following their channel on Youtube.
[A book]
Rewilding: India’s Experiments In Saving Nature
by Bahar Dutt, published by Oxford University Press in 2019
This book is a 5 HOUR read.
My friends got me this book for my birthday last year (I nudged them rather unsubtly towards this book), because I have been interested in exploring the concepts of rewilding in the Indian context. The author, Bahar Dutt, is a journalist who has covered environmental issues in India extensively. In the beginning of this book, she admits that bringing these largely successful conservation efforts to the fore is drastically different from the doom she generally writes about. Her book is an anthology of rewilding tales from all over India - from grasslands to rivers to mountains to coastlines.
Each chapter of the book focuses on a different organism. Where conservation and rewilding efforts usually focus on megafauna, the author includes reintroduction, breeding and habitat conservation programs for a myriad of smaller creatures, including fish, reptiles, small mammals and birds. While the majority of the projects listed in the book are successful reintroductions and have lead to rebounding wild populations of each organism, almost all projects have hurdles to overcome; put before them by archaic forest management laws, human ignorance, or human greed. In some cases, after a population of a particular animal has been bred successfully, they’ve found that the “reintroduced” animal is displacing similar animals from the trophic cascade, throwing ecosystems into further imbalance. Not all conservation is good conservation.
Importantly, the author notes that rewilding is a very new concept in India, and because human-animal conflict is becoming far more violent, it is not easy to practice the European or American models of rewilding in India. Until state or central governmental policy can incentivise the rewilding of barren farmland, conservation efforts will be surgical.
This book is a great read for anyone who would like to know more about conservation, breeding and reintroduction programmes underway in India. It also identifies the reasons a project was successful, and the challenges we face in starting more such projects or scaling-up the existing projects. Although the projects that the author describes are closer to traditional animal conservation and breeding, these “experiments” set the stage for an entire world of possibilities in nature-driven conservation strategies for Indian wildlife.
[An Article]
Rewilding’s next generation will mean no more reserves full of starving animals
An article by Paul Jepson on The Conversation’s website
This is a 10 MINUTE read.
This article introduces the Dutch rewilding experiment at Oostvaardersplassen (OVP) and talks about why, as a first-generation rewilding project, it has not worked out.
The OVP rewilding project came under fire from European media, the general public and animal rights “activists”, who noted that during the winter, several herds of wild cattle and horses were starving to death near the periphery fences of the grassland. Winter starvation is an ecological process of selection that controls population explosions of species that can potentially disrupt the trophic cascade. However, in a truly wild grassland, these herbivores are free to roam in their search for food - in the OVP, they encountered the perimeter fence, and their carcasses were very apparent to passers-by, which triggered the outcry.
Although this would be happening naturally in the wild, dying animals in nature reserves is not ideal. This article examines subsequent rewilding projects that have since been noted as a success, promoting the idea of “kept wild”, which in essence means that the entire rewilded land is still managed by human beings to an extent - by introducing fodder plants or other aids to ensure that there is minimal animal suffering.
The author, Paul Jepson, has authored a book on the topic of rewilding, examining various rewilding projects around the world (including, to a much deeper extent, the OVP project).
[A documentary]
Rewilding Patagonia: Chile’s Great Conservation Leap Forward | earthrise
A documentary on Al Jazeera’s YouTube channel
This is a 25 MINUTE long video.
An example of the use of the Dutch method of rewilding in South America, this documentary follows the story of how Kristine Tompkins and her late husband, Doug Tompkins rewilded a large area of steppeland in Chile.
The grasslands are denuded by herds of livestock (primarily sheep) which are a source of income for the local ranchers. The Tompkins’ conservation strategy involved a compromise between the practiced, intensive livestock grazing, and the “rewilding” of the ranch land, by taking down fencing and bringing herds of local megafauna such as alpaca. These large herbivores, in turn, attract predators such as the puma; starting a positive feedback loop. The herbivores and the predators establish a balance which restores the grasslands and forests, bringing more fauna such as birds and pollinating insects back into the wild.
While rewilding is great for the environment, Kristine Tompkins does not see these vast rewilded ranchlands turning into a conservation park or tourist hotspot; this would degrade the local culture and economic systems. She imagines an ideal where the ranching is carried out sustainably, and allows space for the rewilded ecologies to become resilient.
The documentary also follows other conservation efforts undertaken by the Tompkins Conservation foundation (website linked here) to safeguard more natural land and educate children about the importance of habitat and ecology restoration.
Thank you for reading through this issue of the Climate Catalogue Reader. If you love all the new things you’re learning from this Reader, you can show it by tapping the little heart at the bottom of the newsletter, or sharing this newsletter with someone you think would find it interesting.