Rewilding
josh donlan | September 2, 2008Nature's Emma Jones recently wrote about Moving On Assisted Migration in Nature Reports. "Experts who once disregarded it as a nutty idea are now working out the nuts and bolts of a conservation taboo: relocating species threatened by climate change." This will certainly raise some eyebrows and some ulcers in the coming decade.
josh donlan | July 17, 2008In this month's issue of Search Magazine (formally Science and Spirit), Chris Hallman writes about Pleistocene Rewilding and talks to conservation luminaries Michael Soule, Paul Martin, and Dave Forman. Hallman concludes that sometimes even science needs to take a leap of faith. Soule elegantly agrees by adding, "We're damned if we do, and damned if we don't...I'd rather be damned for careful doing than for doing nothing."
josh donlan | June 26, 2008In this month's issue of Orion Magazine, I wrote a brief piece on the idea of bringing back North America's charismatic megafauna, and its potential benefits to society along with the challenges involved. Click here to read the article.
josh donlan | June 22, 2008In some conservation circles, there has been a lot of talk lately about the newly planned damns in southern Chile. In some ways, its a classic debate: finding a balance between energy needs and preserving wild places. But a different kind of damn is a much larger threat to southern South America: beaver damns. North American beavers were introduced to Tierra del Fuego island back in the mid 1950s; today they have spread throughout the island and onto the mainland - covering more than 14 million hectares, and causing widespread ecosystem damage. Over the past year, I have been part for a…
josh donlan | May 25, 2008Back in 2005 when my colleagues and I proposed using closely related species to ecological replace extinct large North American animals, there were many who cried foul. Too risky, won't work, impossible to measure - were among the top of the list.
Danish ecologist Dennis Hansen and his colleagues just provided some data to suggest otherwise - at least on islands. Using giant tortoises from a nearby island to replace extinct tortoises on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, Dr. Hansen found that the tortoises increased the survivorship of a critically endangered plant by dispersing its…
josh donlan | March 25, 2008Thanks to everyone who participated in the short survey - all 286 of you. Below shows the percentage of folks that were in favor of reintroducing our case studies under a scientific framework. Interesting indeed, although one person made the comment that the questions were slightly loaded to encourage positive responses. Perhaps the questions did unintentionally prime the respondents toward a positive response. Nonetheless, I find the results interesting. (See Dan Ariely's great new book Predictably Irrational on some very interesting science on priming and other facets of behavioral…
josh donlan | March 19, 2008Ok, I would really like people to weigh in on this one. Jennifer is in the Galapagos, so I figured I might as well write about them. And what better topic to write about than rewilding the Galapagos. Here's the scenario: the Galapagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation has spent the last 8 years or so removing feral goat and pig populations from a suite of the islands. I was the Science and Conservation Advisor for this massive project which was a huge success. One of the islands we restored was Pinta Island, where we removed a couple thousand goats. The island is now free of non…
josh donlan | March 17, 2008So I think this is the first-ever Shifting Baselines survey. I hope you're keen, and I hope you will forward the survey to friends and colleagues far and wide.
Here's a bit of background.
In 2005, my colleagues and I published a paper proposing that we should consider reintroducing large animals - megafauna - back to North America. Large animals around today that could potentially act as analogs to the animals that were present in North America some 10,000 years ago. North America once had multiple species of giant tortoises, horses, camels, and - brace yourself - elephants and lions. Closely…
josh donlan | March 2, 2008I'm lying. But here I am blogging on Shifting Baselines. Over the past six years or so, I've spent a decent part of my energy thinking and writing about ecological history and its role in biodiversity conservation and society. That thinking and writing has included proposals that toy with the idea of bringing lions and elephants back to North America. Bring Back the Megafauna! a group of us proclaimed. To no surprise, our proclamation was met with gasps and groans (more about that later). When not pondering bringing the big stuff back, I spend much of my time restoring islands around the…