How Rewilding Works

forecast for the future which is not all that great. Yeah, we talked about picking apart the web of life and what happens and how it unravels and affects humans and other species and other flora around the world. So we're talking about trying to weave that web of life back together in this episode, specifically with something called re wilding. And the reason why it's so important is because we

have definitely squarely entered into something called the anthroposyne. Yes, UH, this is of course the age of man UH and this is when we did a whole episode on this UH, which you can certainly go back to and find a link to on the landing page for this podcast episode. But this is the idea that in the past UH vast changes in the world have been caused by uh, you know, changes in the global climate, ecological changes. But in this age of man, we see the world being

changed by humanity. Yeah, is the first time a species has become a greater force than the elements of nature. And just to call back to the episode real quick, um, we're talking about the Holocene period previous to us ending about two hundred years ago with the steam engine. And this is according to Ken Caldera, who is a climate

scientists of the Carnegie Institute of Science and California. Data retreat from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a growth in the atmosphere, a concentrations of several greenhouse gases in chickul our CEO two and h four, which coincide with the invention of the steam engine in seventeen eighty four. We can look at these ice cores and be like, oh, hey, that's evidence right there that this is when it began.

And there's plenty of other evidence that there's all sorts of man made strata out there, but this is a good example of how humans are are shaping the course of the earth. Yeah. I mean, agriculture is another huge area, right, you go back twelve thousand years in history, you see the rise of agriculture. We stopped being hunter gatherers. We stopped you know, going out here to get our plants and going over here to try and catch or hunt an animal. We said, hey, we can grow the crops

right here. And to do that, we have to change the environment. We have to to take what was once a a field, what was once afar us, which was once you know, a bunch of shrubs, and turn it into a one crop environment that is that is tightly control by the humans that have made it, and then eventually just pave over that, yeah, right, and build something

on top of it. So the idea here is can we reverse the course of our actions, and can we do this through something called rewilding, which we'll get to in a moment, but before we should talk about human rewilding. You know, in looking at this topic, uh, and and the previous one, I keep thinking back to Daniel quinn book Ishmael, which I know a number of our listeners have probably read. Uh. The basic cell on the book, of course, is a man talks to a talking gorilla.

But it's a it's a deep ecological philosophical work about where where we are and where we're going, and and and indeed, if we can do anything to stop what we've done. Just to read a quick quote from it, um Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done. Almost he hasn't quite made it, and it looked as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the

world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've obtained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world or to repair the devastation we've already wrought. There's a part in the book where Ishmael describes human culture and the rise of technology as this this this pilot in an airplane. It's been pushed off, you know, like that's sort of like the experimental aircraft

of old. You know, you've all seen the footage they pushed it off the top of building, off the side of a cliff, and it ultimately is just plummeting. But inside the aircraft, the individual is, you know, pumping hard of the controls, pedaling the petals as fast as they can, even though it's falling. It's falling, and it's just falling, you know, faster and faster, And but we keep doing all the things that we're doing. We keep trying to pilot this aircraft that simply is not going to fly.

It's not going to to prevent us from crashing into the ground. So in this podcast, we're we're we're asking that question, can we stuff the plane from crashing and crashing the ground? What are some of the things we can do to avoid devastation? First we have to get out of the plane. Yes, Yeah, that's clear. They're right,

it's not working for us. And that's really what we're talking about, like that that some of what we're doing, uh, particularly from a technological angle, is not working for us. And how do we get back to a solution that does work for us? Well, rewilding in nature is certainly a solution, and we'll talk about that in a moment, But before we talk about re welding and nature, you've

got to talk about rewilding humans because that's where it begins. Yes, and uh, as with a lot of things, rewilding, the term already has various definitions, and it can already be sort of taken to mean one thing or another um in this In this sense human rewilding though is on one level, it's about reconnecting with nature. Um, it's about integrating. It's about combining time and nature with conscious living. It's about it's not necessarily about just completely abandoning your life.

It's because it easily brings to mind, you know, the idea of someone quitting their job, throwing their smartphone into the ocean, and then trekking off into the woods to eat you know, berries and field mice all day. But but but it's about integration. It's about saying, all right, what are some aspects of my life that I can that I can bring back to nature. Uh, places in my life where I can reconnect with nature and reconnect with with the with the survival skills that that that

I originally had. I've also seen it described in terms of of modern humans as being domesticated. You know, we're the we're the were the house cats that have been in the house so long that if we're suddenly outside in the backyard, we're going to die within an hour because we we we we we don't know how to

survive anymore. We've gotten away from our roots. Well, I mean much of that is true because if you had to go out and survive on your own in a forest, it would be very difficult today, right unless someone had passed down the skills to you or had paid to get those skills, like through rewild Portland actually, which offers a six month long rewilding immersion program you for the for the low cost of five thousand dollars, you could learn every sort of do it yourself thing, from metal

smith ing to hunting wild game and foraging skills. And foraging skills I think are hugely important something that we overlook because for for millennia, ancestors have been foraging for food and that's how they largely subsisted. We tend to think about, you know, this sort of paleo diet where it's you know, a bunch of meat, punks of meat. But the truth of the matter is that we subsisted

on vegetation. So we've talked about this before. We've talked about foraging and even into mafagey eating bugs as ways to subsist um in ways that actually would have less of an impact on environments and ecosystems. So the whole human rewilding thing is hearkening back to a simpler time

and less of a reliance on technology. Yeah, and it's it's easy to get the to get caught up in the language of it too, because you know, we're saying things like reconnect with nature and your past, and just the mere fact that it sounds like the pitch for an ongoing skit in the next season in Portlandia. You know, it's easy to sort of dismiss the missilliness of it, but but it is at heart about reconnecting with what it is to be human of sort of relearning how

to be a human organism. Um. And a lot of this is stuff that we we do feel a craving towards,

like the hunter gatherer thing. Most of us don't do any kind of hunting and gathering, but I wonder to what extent we end up scratching that itch when we say get coupon crazy and we're looking for deals like we're sort of we're sort of trying to recapture the hunter gather or certainly I mean I grew up in a in rural Tennessee and there are plenty of hunters in that area, and uh, you know, in a large part I feel A lot of that comes from a

culture of you know, you're reconnecting with with your past. You know, this part of your heritage hunting for meat, and even though you're not depending upon that dear meat to feed your family as much anymore, you're you feel pulled to the past. You feel like this is a part of what you are as a as a as a being, as an organism, and therefore you engage in it,

you know. I was recently in Taos, New Mexico, and I visited the Taus Pueblo Settlements, which is um one of the oldest Native American settlements UM in the United States. And one of the things that one of the TAUSE members was talking about is growing up in that village which still practices the same sort of rituals, um and day to day operations as they did a thousand years ago.

And there's no running water electricity there. And so she said that as a child, she would run around, she would go and get the water, she would bring it home. She would be taught by the other children how to fish with her hands right um. And they also played up in the mountains. She said that was her backyard, and they respected nature and they understood how to communicate with nature. So she said mountain lions weren't a problem.

They weren't getting eaten by mountain lions because they were so much more in tuned and had the information passed down on how to deal with you know, these species around them, and how to cultivate the flora around them. And I thought this was it was such an amazing place to visit, to see that people were still I suppose you would say human rewilding, although all they were

doing is just following their ancestors way of living. As with a lot of human endeavors, it's it's one of those areas where we we end up complicating things several times over because you see the mix of of ecological responsibility here the the idea that if we all behave just a little more in tune with with the environment than than our than our individual footprint is less and their overall environmental footprint is less, and and it can

all roll down to positive change. But then on the other hand, it's a lot of this is is caught up in heritage and culture and and and wanting to

reconnect with our past. Yeah, And the interesting thing about that is that the flower I believe was her name, who led the tour, was saying that for seventy years, tas Pueblow Settlement UH had an ongoing lawsuit with the government to reclaim lands, including Blue Lake, which is nearby, and they were saying that because the government had taken over national park land and they were giving it to commercial entities, that a lot of their drinking water began

to get tainted and as a result, they began to see their environment change. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today, this impact, this this web of life. UM that you just change one little thing and there's

a cascade of events that follow. So this, to me was such a good example of here's this group in place, and little do we know here in the United States, but their affecting change for the Clean Water Act right and the Clean Air Act in the nineteen seventies, UM, A lot of that was the movement from Native American tribes saying we need to respect the land and act with it. YEA, Even even though re wilding is relatively new term, it is it's already kind of a big tent.

But just bear in mind when thinking about it that it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna go live off the grid in the woods. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna, you know, build a bunker and prepare for the apocalypse and for you know, the hunt and gather amid the shattered ruins of human civilization or anything like that. It can be as simple as reminding yourself that nature exists,

taking the time too. And again, it's so easy to fall in the traffic, making it just sound like hippie feel good to read to some listeners, but just to reconnect with nature and to realize that you are a biological organism, and you are a part of the psychology, and you do not stand outside of it, no matter how unnatural the environments are that we've built for ourselves, and the and and the structures that we depend on,

both the UH informational and physical UH. It can be just as simple as as thinking about your choice is a little more and in making those choices a little more in step with the natural world. Yeah, definitely, it's all about choices when you really think about it, and perhaps even installing a Komodo dragon in your backyard. We'll talk about that idea when we get back from mis

brading all right, we're back. We've been talking about rewild ng in the human sense, uh and in the idea of undomesticating ourselves, about reconnecting with nature, uh and and making better choices in our lives, all the things that kind of fall under the semi ambiguous term of human rewild Yeah. And now we're going to talk about re

wilding nature, which is a huge topic. So we could talk about all the various projects going on with real wilding, but we chose to really focus on something that George Mombiante talked about in his TED talk. And we're talking about re wild ing with wolves. But before you can talk about real wilding with wolves, you have to talk about how there was a mass extermination effort of wolves for a very long period of time, at least in

the United States. Yeah. And it's a it's a it's rather involved and fascinating topic when you get into it, because there's several different layers to it. I mean, there's the basic human fear of wolves, which is generally unfounded. This is not a species that praise on humans. I feel like we've discussed this in the past. Uh. The wolf is is it's easy to build a wolf up in your mind as this thing that it is not, and so part of it is the fear of the wolf.

Part of it it also has to do with uh, with the ways that we were already changing the world and altering the environment and therefore altering the behavior of the wolves. You know, suddenly we're trying to keep a whole bunch of gray animals out here unmolested from you know, basically trying to set the sheep or whatever apart from the rest of the natural world. And then you get upset when the wolves come to eat the sheep. Right, So, I mean the right. There's part of this is agriculture.

Part of this is folk tale um. In fact, we even talked about I think it was in New Mexico there was a bus stop that was a caged bus stop for children because the ridiculous fear that the wolves were just out there ready to eat American children. Yeah, there was a group that installed these because they were against um, the protection of these subspecies of the gray wolf. I believe so if you look at the fact that before Europeans settled in the United States, there were two

hundred and fifty thousand wolves roaming in the country. And then you look at the fact that by the new conceemnities only a few hundred wolves remained in the lower forty States. You get that um that wolves had been hunted and exterminated to to quite a degree. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about putting up poison traps for them, putting out of physical traps. Often they would put out two physical traps so that they wouldn't just catch them with

one pot, catch them with two. Therefore, in trying to ensure that this animal would be captured and killed rather than just escaping injured. Now, the effected that can be in something called the tropic cascade, which is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain

and tumbles all the way down to the bottom. And nothing illustrates this better than wolves, as told by George Mombiat during his TED talk on rewilding, because he says that after seventy years of wolves being absent in Yellowstone, when they were reintroduced, there was a huge effect, Okay.

And the reason that they were reintroduced is that the numbers of deer had just escalated and went crazy, and because there was nothing to hunt them, Uh, they had reduced the vegetation to mil They were just grazing all over the place. So they thought, let's bring in a couple of wolves, knocked down the population of deer, and that'll that will help things, right, But really, it was this whole wilderness that seemed to have sprung from the

reintroduction of these wolves. Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty impressive, because again, you you expected the wolves to kill the deer. You it was just in a situation. Oh well, the bath water is a little too hot. Let's add a little cold water and that will balance it out. But as we've as we've made clear in our previous episode, nature is more complicated than that. They're they're far there's far much more going on. It's not just hot water

and cold water. Uh so, uh, what else happened? We You see the deer starting to avoid the valleys and gorges where they could be easily killed by the wolves. So suddenly these areas are deer free. And so since the deer are no longer there to munch everything down to the ground, stuff starts growing up again. And so very quickly you see these uh what had previously been

you know, bear valleys are growing up into the forests again. Yeah, Momba says that the high of trees quintippled in just six years, and then you had forests of aspen and willow and cottonwood. And then as soon as that happened, all of a sudden, there was a whole neighborhood of birds that moved in. And then the number of beavers started to increase, because beavers like to eat trees, right,

and beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers. We talked about that in our last episode, about these keystone species affecting oversized changed in their environment. Yes, so they're they're building the rivers, they're providing habitats for otters and muskrats and ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians, and they're moving it. And then also you see that the wolves are not only eating the deer, right, they're also preying on coyotes.

And then because of that, the number of rabbits and mice they begin to rise because we're not being killed off by coyotes, which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes, more badges, ravens, and bald eagles came down to feed on the carrion that the wolves had left behind. Then bears, they're like they got in on the game too, in a large part because there's more shrubs growing, more berries. I mean, they're they're, they're they want to hunt and gather,

and now there's more to hunt and gather from. But now this is the thing that's not even the craziest of changes, the fact that all these animals sprung up once the wolf was reintroduced. The crazy thing is that the behavior of the rivers, the actual landscape begins to change. Indeed, because suddenly you're seeing it means changing the traffic alongside the river. You know, what's walking around there is changing, what's growing around the river, and is the vegetation changes.

It's it's affecting the stability of the waterways. Uh, there's less erosion, less erosion, Yeah, it's it's actually changing the earth. Yeah, and it's regenerating force which are stabilizing the banks that the banks don't collapse as often as well, and then they become more fixed, they meander less. And so really what you have is this this more stabilized even kind of moving in. Yeah. Now, of course it's worth noting that there still is a golf course in Yellowstone Park.

I don't I don't want anyone to forget that when when thinking about the nature reclaiming this, Uh, this is beautiful, but and it is a beautiful park. I've been there and it's it's fabulous, but there's still very much a human footprint there. But but this really does uh, just how the the the reintroduction of this one species. It's like we we we we as humans have this tendency we don't we don't realize the value of things until they're gone, and this is kind of an example of that.

And by by putting something back, we begin to see just how important it was to begin with. And I love how this, like this should be a children's story because it has that kind of role to it. You put one thing back and then there this comes back, and this comes back. It's it's kind of like a more positive version of fig the big hearted nukes with all of these, with the with the cascading effect. Well yeah, I mean it's the reversal of the domino effect, and

it's amazing to see it unfold like this now. Mombott also brings up an example of whales not necessarily rewilding them, but understanding that whales provide an entire ecosystem unto themselves as well and are a good example again of what

happens when you disrupt a species. And the Japanese government, he says, had rationalized killing whales for a long time because they thought, hey, the number of krill and fish will rise if you remove the main predator, right, which is again very hot water cold water understanding of how nature works. It's far more complicated. It's far more complicated,

and it's really reliant poop. It turns out, specifically whale poop in the oceans, because, as Mambiat says, they produce what biologists politely call large fecal plumes when they come to the surface. These are huge explosions of poop right across the surface up in the photo zone where there's

enough light to allow photosynthesis to take place. And then those big plumes of poop are basically fertilizing or stimulating the growth of phytoplankton, and the plant plankton at the bottom of the food chain is stimulating the growth of zooplankton, which feeds the fish and the krill and all the rest of it, which which ends up producing more and more sea life for humans to eat. So without taking them away, without reducing their numbers, you're already getting the

same results you're trying to achieve by their removal. Yeah, if you remove them, you're actually reducing the amount of fish and krill, which, to be fair, it does sound counterintuitive, right. You would think you'd take the predator away, you'd have more of a thing, But the predator poop is actually the life force for the thing. Yeah, I mean it's you can quote me on that. So that this this raises the question, then is it Is it this simple?

Is there it? Could this be done in various environments around the world. Could we just simply reintroduce a missing keystone creature, a missing predator and therefore make the difference, Like I can't help think of where my mom lives out in the in rural Tennessee. Deer everywhere. It's just just lousy with deer. You can hardly drive down the road without almost hitting one. You just you look out the window and they're like six out there looking through

at you because there's nothing to eat them. Even the human hunters, who are you know, doing all they all they can, they still can't kill enough to keep the numbers down. Yeah, and in a national park setting, I feel like this is a more straightforward proposition. But George Mombiance says, hey, um, let's just go crazy with paleo ecology,

which is the study of past ecosystems. He says, why not reintroduced introduce some of our lost megafauna, or at least species closely related to those which have become extinct everywhere? Why shouldn't all of us have a serengetti on our doorsteps? And yeah, and this is where he gets into at

times controversial areas. That's certainly areas where they're playing people who disagree with them, because on one level, you can say, yes, let's reintroduce species that were lost to this particular area, and in many cases you can. You can make those efforts as well. Discuss there are there are some ongoing

rewilding efforts to do just that. Okay, so before we get into some more of the wilder animals extinct animals, let's talk about commodo dragons, because there are proponents of rewilding the argue that commodo dragons may fill the gap in Australia's ecosystem left by Megalania, which was a giant lizard like species that disappeared thousands of years ago, and

this was a keystone species like the wolf. And so their idea is that a bunch of roaming commodo dragons could restore important ecological functions like controlling the population size of native and introduced herbivores. So if you have a bunch of herbivores that are just going to town on the vegetation, you don't have enough vegetation there and that's creating that trofic cascading effect and a negative of way.

Maybe you bring back the Commoto dragon, is the idea. Yeah, it's kind of like in an office environment, you have an employee that leaves and he suddenly realized, whoa, they really played an important role here. We can't get them back, but maybe we can get something else like them, such

as a Commoto dragon in the office place. Right. And then there are some other ideas that I guess you could say are a bit more along the wooly mammoth uh bring back wagon, yeah, and really sort of going more into the way back machine in terms of humanity's impact on the environment and saying, uh, well, hey, we used to have mega fauna everywhere. We used to have not just elephants in Africa and in Asia, but we had large pack of germs in Europe, UH, in the

in North America. So what the what can we do there? Should should we bring We can't bring those creatures back. As romantic as that idea is and it's fascinating as the possible science of it is, it's it's not feasible for the immediate future. So can we just take African or Asian elephants and introduce them into modern day Europe, into UH North America and and have them fill this

long lost role to revitalize the environment. Now, of course this would require that we set aside land or even reclaim land to do it, So that would certainly be one of the things that comes up in terms of logistics and criticism um and they're often also or critics that say, this is this would be a monumental effort, and you're better off focusing on restoring the existing environment and helping to maintain that, you know, actual species that

live in the environment. And if you're worried about because the other side of it is that this would also help out African and Asian elephants. Uh, And the critics would argue, well, helping out African and Asian elephants, if you're gonna do that, those efforts are best restricted to Africa and Asia where where they naturally live, right. So, yeah,

there's all sorts of religious stickle problems. You were talking about transporting the animals, talking about exotic diseases, and then as you had kind of already alluded to a poor trek record of introducing or even keeping species that we already have. So the idea is that you you start rewilding and you take away, um the attention from from the species that are already going extinct and need help, and instead you're spending all your money in your attention

on these different parts in different species. Yeah, but it's also worth pointing out that Mombat's ted talk is a ted talk, and ted talks are are generally it's it's you can think of in terms of of a lighted beacon on the top of the hill, would be understanding that humans are not actually going to follow that beacon to the top of the hill. They're gonna maybe climb it halfway. And if they climb it halfway, that's great. Just by by seeing the beacon there, it gives us

a frame of reference. And yet we need that beacon, right because we know that that is an example of something that can be done in In fact, in her book Rewilding the World, Caroline Fraser list twenty one rewilding sites throughout the world in which habitats are intentionally being rewild and species are reintroduced. And again let's think about that wolf example again. You know that's the best case scenario um in this sort of closed system already, but

you see a huge positive effects. So perhaps these projects can bring about the same sort of change. See change really And there are also a couple of other rewilding projects of note, and you can definitely check these out more if you want to find out more. Rewilding Europe and Rewilding Siberia. Yeah, the Siberia one I found particularly interesting because they're they're dealing in part with reintroducing wild horses, which they can say could possibly save us from the

effects of global climate change. They say that in the winter, the animals trample and flatten the snow that would otherwise insulate the ground from cold air, and so that helps prevent the frozen ground or permafrost from thawing and releasing powerful greenhouse gases. So and again you see that cascading effect, right, I mean, just to hammer the nail home again. I mean, over millions and millions and millions of years, life on

Earth evolves into a system that works. Events occur and it has to uh, the settings have to adjust, but then it finds its level again. But then humans come along and just start messing with all the settings, turning all the dials around. So rewilding in a large sense is about saying, hey, what were the what were the factory settings before humans came along? And even though we can't go back to all of those factory settings, there

are things we can do. There are things we can say, well, as humans as a culture, we don't really need this. Maybe we can stop doing this. We can take this away. Or here's something that we took away without any reason at all. Why do we take all the wolves away? What if we what do we give them back? And and everybody and everything can reap the positive benefits of that reintroduction. Yeah, I mean I think in a way

it's reframing our role in the anthropos syne. If we know this is the age of man, and we know that we're now creating the strata of man made materials. The nuts should be empowering enough to say that we could do something as simple as this, which is to turn back the clock a bit and to reclaim some of these lands and see these trophic cascadings in effect. And David Biello, writing for Scientific American I think, had a really good thought about this. He said, quote in

the end, wilderness is a state of mind. The natural world can only persist now as a deliberate act of human will that will require firm human purpose, as a gesture of humility, yes, but also a form of self protection. In other words, we don't really have a choice in the matter. Yeah, the airplane is plummeting, it's not flying. At some point you have to realize we need to stop peddling and figure out something else that works, and and there's never a better time than now. Indeed, A right,

So there you have it. As always, be sure to check out the land Ding page for this podcast episode. You'll find that at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com you don't include links out to some of the stuff that we've talked about here, including that Ted Talk, which you'll probably want to check out as well, and the homepage includes all of our blog posts, all of our podcast episodes, all of our videos, anything and everything stuff to blow your mind you will find right there.

And what are your thoughts on this? Do you think were Wilding could work? Do you think it's could work in just certain areas of the world? Let us know and you can send your thoughts to blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.