Realising that having it grow back into a forest would ruin it for these animals, we decided to release natural grazers on there, which are wild and which humans cannot interact with.
Odd that your cautionary tale about humans accidentally ruining wilderness includes a story about humans successfully releasing animals into a new environment to keep it safe.
Not a new environment. These animals were native in this environment, and humans had hunted them to regional extinction. We first hunted the wolves to regional extinction, seeing them as evil predators eating our livestock. Then the grazers’ population exploded, and they ate all out food, so we hunted them to extinction. It turns out they had kept the forest at bay, and the whole ecosystem was wrecked, and we lost the reptiles and insects too. Bombing it ironically restored the lack of forest, and the insects and reptiles came back, but as the forest regrew, they were threatened again. And after that point, we basically just reversed our steps to how it had been before we messed with it. Put the grazers back, and a fence around. Monitored from a distance. Saw it had returned to a stable state. Stopped messing with it.
Allowing the large grazers and apex predators back is essential for rewilding. We had a project in the Netherlands where they decided to skip the wolves, and the necessary land for balance. The grazers massively multiplied, and then mass starved, and humans completely lost it.This is beginning to fix itself—the huge amounts of dead grazers seem to be attracting the wolves. They have crossed the border and are reestablishing. The whole return of wolves in Europe was unplanned, just a result of us having fixed the ecosystem so it could support them again, and them crossing back in from a reservoir in the East. But for many of these animals, they have been pushed incredibly far out of their original range, and in that scenario, assisted migration speeds things up a lot. Similar with trees.
Putting the original apex predators and original grazers back is very, very different from “hey, you know what Australia needs? Rabbits!”
And it is not so much a story about humans ruining nature in general. But about the fact that stable natural systems include destruction, and that what looks like optimising from a human’s standpoint often fucks the balance up. This is a valuable lesson to learn for bio-hacking, too.
Odd that your cautionary tale about humans accidentally ruining wilderness includes a story about humans successfully releasing animals into a new environment to keep it safe.
Not a new environment. These animals were native in this environment, and humans had hunted them to regional extinction. We first hunted the wolves to regional extinction, seeing them as evil predators eating our livestock. Then the grazers’ population exploded, and they ate all out food, so we hunted them to extinction. It turns out they had kept the forest at bay, and the whole ecosystem was wrecked, and we lost the reptiles and insects too. Bombing it ironically restored the lack of forest, and the insects and reptiles came back, but as the forest regrew, they were threatened again. And after that point, we basically just reversed our steps to how it had been before we messed with it. Put the grazers back, and a fence around. Monitored from a distance. Saw it had returned to a stable state. Stopped messing with it.
Allowing the large grazers and apex predators back is essential for rewilding. We had a project in the Netherlands where they decided to skip the wolves, and the necessary land for balance. The grazers massively multiplied, and then mass starved, and humans completely lost it.This is beginning to fix itself—the huge amounts of dead grazers seem to be attracting the wolves. They have crossed the border and are reestablishing. The whole return of wolves in Europe was unplanned, just a result of us having fixed the ecosystem so it could support them again, and them crossing back in from a reservoir in the East. But for many of these animals, they have been pushed incredibly far out of their original range, and in that scenario, assisted migration speeds things up a lot. Similar with trees.
Putting the original apex predators and original grazers back is very, very different from “hey, you know what Australia needs? Rabbits!”
And it is not so much a story about humans ruining nature in general. But about the fact that stable natural systems include destruction, and that what looks like optimising from a human’s standpoint often fucks the balance up. This is a valuable lesson to learn for bio-hacking, too.