Conservation Goes Buck Wild, Again

We are in the midst of the greatest mass extinction since the untimely demise of the dinosaurs. Fully half of the world's species of plants and animals — from cuddly tigers to freakish blob fish — will be gone by the close of this century. The bewildering variety of ecosystems that sustain these living things are also being degraded or destroyed. What scientists have blandly labeled the "biodiversity crisis" actually amounts to the collapse of nature, and we are the prime culprit.

Plants and animals are being wiped out for many reasons: habitat destruction, over-hunting, invasive species, pollution, and climate change. These drivers are all byproducts, in one way or another, of the runaway growth of our species and industrial economies.

Traditional conservation efforts, which rely on nature preserves, have failed to stop the ecological bleeding. The parks are often too small and too isolated to support key predators, and too few in number to put a dent in overall extinction rates.

Enter rewilding, a bold, innovative, and sexy-sounding new approach to conservation. According to Caroline Frasier, who just wrote a book about rewilding across the world, the approach boils down to "cores, corridors, and carnivores."

Rewilding is post-park, continent-scale conservation: The idea is to vastly expand core wilderness areas by bringing private and community-owned lands into the game. Ecotourism and bioprospecting (the gathering of specimens for their usefulness in medicine, cosmetics, and engineering) can be attractive revenue streams for the impoverished people that live on the fringes of the world's remaining wild places.

These wilderness "cores" are then linked to provide natural corridors for predators. Predators often act as keystones for their surrounding ecosystems. Unfortunately, they can have huge ranges that press up against encroaching human settlements.

This is why predators - the "carnivores" - end up hunted or trapped in pockets of habitat too small to support them. Rewilding tackles this problem by reintroducing and protecting the predators. This requires making nice with the neighbors: In Mexico, rewilding programs are paying ranchers to shoot panthers with cameras instead of rifles.

Conservation is inherently political because it depends on government action to establish reserves and enforce laws protecting endangered species. It is therefore subject to the vagaries and injustices of the political process. Setting up new reserves has always been an uphill battle for conservation advocates.

On this front, rewilding's biggest selling point is its potential for green job creation: Ecotourism, ecological restoration, and bioprospecting all bring livelihoods to the poverty-stricken communities that generally straddle the edge of wilderness.

Rewilding programs also feature innovative financing - ditching the never-ending cycle of short-term fundraising in favor of long-term endowments that sustain themselves.

Developed in 1998, the conservation approach has spread to all continents and been adopted by most international conservation organizations. But to prevent the collapse of nature, rewilding programs must be expanded quickly and dramatically. Governments — working ambitiously and in concert — are the only players with the muscle to do so.

Hilary Benn, the U.K.'s Secretary of State for Environment, recently said that we are "approaching a point of no return" on biodiversity.

In large part, this is because climate change will ravage ecosystems and the species in them, piling on to the damage already being done by humans on the ground. The problems — and their solutions — go hand in hand: ending deforestation is a key part of curbing climate change.

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. It's high time that we push for a solution to the biodiversity crisis that is as big as the crisis itself.

Click here to read an excerpt of Caroline Frasier's "Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution."

Worldislandinfo.com