We’ve discussed the contradictions, confusion and befuddlement in the rewilding movement before. From the destruction of dams in California in an attempt to save the river fish, only to introduce beavers who then build dams, to the massive solar farms that divert water and kill plant species making for essentially dead deserts, they can’t seem to make their minds up about much of anything except that they hate humans.
The reintroduction of wolves into Colorado has peaked the interest of rewilders everywhere. In fact, it’s practically romantic.
“It was so perfect. You could look around, and it felt like at any moment John Denver was going to show up. It was ‘Rocky Mountain High’ in every direction,” said Joanna Lambert, a wildlife ecology and conservation biology professor at University of Colorado Boulder and director of the American Canid Project. The stars rolled up last: five wolves, silent in their crates but omnipotent in the waft of their musky aroma. It smelled like the wild, Lambert observed.
But why would they care? Well, you see, they think it’s better for the environment.
The return of wolves to the park in 1995 was concurrent with the natural recovery of cougar and grizzly populations. Their absence for nearly a century had significantly altered the park’s landscape and food web, transforming regions rich in willow and aspen along small streams into grasslands due to intense elk browsing.
Too many Elk, they say. But they didn’t think that way when they were throwing bales of hay over the fences to the Elk when they thought they needed feeding in particularly harsh winters, causing the Elk not even to return to Yellowstone (when you’ve got a handout, why leave?).
But why are grasslands bad? The rewilders believe that trees are a more productive means of carbon reduction. But is that correct?
Forests have long served as a critical carbon sink, consuming about a quarter of the carbon dioxide pollution produced by humans worldwide. But decades of fire suppression, warming temperatures and drought have increased wildfire risks — turning California’s forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources.
Well, we’ve discussed the stupidity of fighting forest fires before, but let’s continue.
A study from the University of California, Davis, found that grasslands and rangelands are more resilient carbon sinks than forests in 21st century California. As such, the study indicates they should be given opportunities in the state’s cap-and-and trade market, which is designed to reduce California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
So if the rewilders are wrong, does it matter? Not to them. It’s an evolving religion, you see. And even the most absurd claims can be made on behalf of carbon sinks and the environment.
An unscientific bias against “feral” or “invasive” animals threatens to undercut one of the great stabilizing trends making ecosystems healthier, a new paper argues.
Introduced species such as feral pigs, horses, donkeys and camels represent a powerful force of “rewilding” — the reintroduction of wild animals into ecosystems where humans had eradicated them — according to a study published Thursday in Science.
The study argues against widely held beliefs about whether invasive species are harmful — or what Lundgren described as the quasi-religious perception that some species inherently belong in a given landscape and others don’t.
That belief is the driving force behind a wave of expensive and often futile campaigns since the 1990s that eradicate species including feral hogs in Texas, wild horses across the American West and donkeys and camels in Australia.
We’ve discussed feral hogs at great length here on these pages. Feral hogs adversely affect water quality, attack pets, destroy the environment they are a part of, dig up crops, spread diseases and parasites that only they can carry,
What do wild hogs do that’s so bad?
Oh, not much. They just eat the eggs of the sea turtle, an endangered species, on barrier islands off the East Coast, and root up rare and diverse species of plants all over, and contribute to the replacement of those plants by weedy, invasive species, and promote erosion, and undermine roadbeds and bridges with their rooting, and push expensive horses away from food stations in pastures in Georgia, and inflict tusk marks on the legs of these horses, and eat eggs of game birds like quail and grouse, and run off game species like deer and wild turkeys, and eat food plots planted specially for those animals, and root up the hurricane levee in Bayou Sauvage, Louisiana, that kept Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the eastern part of New Orleans, and chase a woman in Itasca, Texas, and root up lawns of condominiums in Silicon Valley, and kill lambs and calves, and eat them so thoroughly that no evidence of the attack can be found.
And eat red-cheeked salamanders and short-tailed shrews and red-back voles and other dwellers in the leaf litter in the Great Smoky Mountains, and destroy a yard that had previously won two “‘Yard of the Month” awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia, and knock over glass patio tables in suburban Houston, and muddy pristine brook-trout streams by wallowing in them, and play hell with native flora and fauna in Hawaii, and contribute to the near-extinction of the island fox on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, and root up American Indian historic sites and burial grounds, and root up a replanting of native vegetation along the banks of the Sacramento River, and root up peanut fields in Georgia, and root up sweet-potato fields in Texas, and dig big holes by rooting in wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes, and, as the nine-hundred-foot-long pipe advances automatically on its wheeled supports, one set of wheels hangs up in a hog-rooted hole, and meanwhile the rest of the pipe keeps on going and begins to pivot around the stuck wheels, and it continues and continues on its hog-altered course until the whole seventy-five-thousand-dollar system is hopelessly pretzeled and ruined.
Feral hogs have run farmers in Georgia and Texas completely out of business.
But if rewilding is your newfound religion, you can make any claim whatsoever and it’s okay, because mother Gaia. Or something.
But remember what I told you about mother Gaia. “The problem with mother Gaia is that she’s a silent nag, a cruel and uncommunicative bitch. She hasn’t authoritatively spoken like my creator. So while she may expect you to worship her, she won’t tell you how or why. So the advocates of carbon-free footprint, depopulation, and rewilding, just make it up as they go, spending massive sums of money on things that end up doing more harm than good.”
Prior:
Canadian Super Pigs Poised to Wreak Environmental Havoc and Spread Disease in Canada
Can Whitetail Managers Take Back Feral Pig Country?
How You Know That Dummies Are Making Suggestions About Containing The Feral Hog Problem
Hogs in Houston
Hogs Are Running Wild in the U.S.
Feral Hogs in Canada
Woman Killed by Feral Hogs Outside Texas Home
Houston-Area Suburbs Now Suffering from Feral Hogs
Hog Apocalypse in Texas
Save the Planet – Buy an AR!
