'Rewilding the World,' by Caroline Fraser
Eric Simons, Special to The Chronicle
sfgate.com
Friday, January 8, 2010
Rewilding the World
Dispatches From the Conservation Revolution
By Caroline Fraser
(Metropolitan Books; 400 pages; $28.50)
It's tough to sell a rancher on the idea that the world needs more wolves. In controversial attempts to restore the predators to various parts of North America, ranchers - with livestock at stake - generally have fought every step of the way against biologists and environmentalists.
The problem is that wolves are a crucial part of the ecosystem and affect the entire landscape. Biologists know we need them around and that the only way to have them serve their proper role in nature is to have them running wild over large areas. Wolves need state-size space to maneuver, and efforts at restoring them - or any kind of apex predator - run into the same problem: Those huge spaces are also occupied by people.
In "Rewilding the World: Dispatches From the Conservation Revolution," Caroline Fraser digs into the histories of landscape-level conservation and predator-reintroduction efforts around the globe, and finds the same themes emerging: politics, funding, covering the interests of all the various local stakeholders, balancing people and animals.
"Conservation," one African park manager tells her, "is about managing people. It's not about managing wildlife."
It often seems that the more inspirational the park, the less effective the implementation. But even the inspiration-only efforts are necessary, Fraser argues, to stem the greatest man-made disaster in Earth's history: the world's Sixth Great Extinction. Plants and animals are disappearing at an unbelievable pace, and we're to blame.
In a bleak opener, Fraser lays out the stakes: a crisis bigger and more threatening than climate change, "the disappearance of nature itself," a "human and natural catastrophe on an unprecedented scale," a "demographic winter" that threatens to "erase the process of evolution."
The solution, she writes, is conservation - "rewilding" - on a grand scale. Parks connected by wildlife corridors stretching the length of entire continents, breathtaking efforts to set aside such huge amount of land that entire ecosystems, with even wide-ranging crucial predators given enough space to live normally.
The book covers six continents and the life history of 21 conservation projects: pronghorn antelope in Wyoming; wolves in New Mexico; jaguars in Arizona and Sonora; crocodiles, elephants and lions in Africa; rhinos in Nepal, bears in Europe; and critters galore in Costa Rica, Brazil and Australia. Fraser has done an almost unimaginable amount of reporting, and each of these places is presented as its own case study, with an emphasis on numbers, development history and how conservation work has succeeded or failed. If there isn't yet a textbook on the conservation practice of rewilding, "Rewilding the World" will probably become it.
In the book's most intense scene, set in a land trust in Kenya, Fraser returns to a lion kill at night with a group of men, sitting quietly in a van in the darkness while three lions polish off an elephant. It's oddly moving, not just for the amazing visual, but for the way the Samburu men with her - like American ranchers, traditionally tough converts to the value of ecotourism - react to the scene.
"Watching Samburu men watching the lions," Fraser writes, "I could see a transition in progress. If the Samburu came to know and value these lions in the same way that Namibian communities were beginning to value theirs, then a new era of coexistence might be on the horizon."
That scene is unfortunately isolated, as Fraser's emphasis on background and history tends to overwhelm first-person travelogue and storytelling. It's tough to force a story onto these disparate places.
This is a serious book, about a serious subject, so the absence of narrative sparkle is true to its overall purpose. But there's still one curious omission. Fraser gives a great many reasons to care about extinction: Biodiversity is important for medical research, important for local economies, important for human agriculture, important for access to water, important in ways we don't even know are important yet. But these are all rational, academic reasons, without emotional appeal, in an issue that for many people is emotional.
In the late 1980s, Douglas Adams, the author of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," traveled around the world with World Wildlife Fund zoologist Mark Carwardine to document some of the world's disappearing species, for a book called "Last Chance to See." There is a kind of similarity in the basic idea in the two books, but they take a radically different approach. Adams and Carwardine give you some science, but they also pack a much more inspirational punch.
At the end of "Last Chance to See," Carwardine lists the various academic reasons for conservation, but adds something else: "There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them."
This may be the language that motivates biologists, average readers and donors to the World Wildlife Fund. But "Rewilding the World" offers a different take, which is this: Cost analysis may not be motivating to you and me, but it might represent the best way to sell wolves to a rancher. And that, in the end, may be more necessary than anything else.
Eric Simons of San Francisco is the author of "Darwin Slept Here: Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America." E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/08/RVLB1B6824.DTL#ixzz0c7dzMNHa
