Dave Foreman

By STEVE RASMUSSEN

To save the planet from the mass extinctions of species that human overpopulation and climate change are causing, human beings need to “rewild” it, EarthFirst! co-founder Dave Foreman told about 75 people in his keynote lecture at UNC Asheville’s Earthfest celebration in the Humanities Lecture Hall on April 28.

But before describing the worldwide efforts he is helping lead to create networks of wildlands and return wolves, cougars, and other big carnivores to their native habitats, he thanked “everybody here for getting rid of ‘Timber Charlie’” — Charles Taylor, the former Brevard congressman and a powerful logging advocate who was voted out of office in 2006.

Foreman, a onetime saboteur of bulldozers and logging trucks who helped make “monkeywrenching” a household word in the 1970s and ‘80s, referred only once to his eco-radical roots, muttering while he struggled to get a slide projector to work: “I’m used to having technology fail — sometimes even helping it!”

He focused his talk instead on “what we can do on the ground to deal with the catastrophic problems facing us.” He started by describing the purpose of the 1964 Wilderness Act — “one of, I think, the most ambitious, farsighted, wise and poetic pieces of legislation ever” — as to “secure for the American people the enduring resource of wilderness — enduring.”

Since then, he said, science has discovered much about mass species extinctions over the past 500 million years. But “not since the dinosaurs went extinct have we seen an extinction period like today. And this one ... we can’t blame it on a comet hitting Earth. This one is due to us. It’s due to six and a half billion human beings on the planet manufacturing, warring, traveling, doing all the things we do.”

Foreman detailed a tragic parade of past manmade extinctions caused by overhunting and overdevelopment — the dodo bird, the bison, the prairie dog, the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet — and continued through the present day with the destruction of the great forests of the Amazon, Canada, and the American Southeast, the depletion of the oceans and the imminent loss of the polar bear because of global warming.

Pointing to a slide of an Arizona billboard urging consumers to “buy a house in the wilderness before it’s too late,” he remarked, “You realize how many subdivisions are named after what they destroy, just like how many college football teams are named after the critter that’s been wiped out in that state?

“The best way to protect species from extinction, the best way to protect intact habitat,” he asserted, “is through protected areas, such as wilderness areas and national parks in the United States.”

He described two principles as key to that protection: Large or interconnected habitats are better than small or fragmented ones, and large carnivores — panthers, wolves, sharks, and so on — need to be protected or reintroduced.

Reintroducing large carnivores is especially controversial, he noted, given mankind’s long history of hunting and eradicating “untamable” wild beasts. “They’re OK in a zoo where we have them under control, but we won’t tolerate them in the wild,” he observed, citing the Anglo-Saxon legend of Beowulf. “But we need them.”

He described a study by Michael Soulé of small wild patches of grassland that were surrounded by the suburbs of San Diego, Calif. The patches that still had populations of coyotes also had thriving populations of songbirds, “but when the coyotes disappeared, the birds disappeared. Why was that? Mesocarnivores!” he exclaimed, showing a picture of his own pet cat.
“Where there are no coyotes about,” he explained, “cats will boldly go where no cat has ever gone before” — and decimate wild bird populations. But the presence of coyotes scares cats away, and coyotes also keep the populations of other bird-hunting animals such as skunks and possums in check.

In Yellowstone National Park, Foreman continued, the National Park Service exterminated wolves in the last century to allow the elk to flourish. But the elk, he said, became “fat, lazy meadow potatoes,” overgrazing aspen and other saplings to the point of endangering the survival of several tree species. After wolves were reintroduced a decade ago and began hunting them, the elk fled back to their traditional deep-forest habitat, and new generations of trees were able to grow once more.

“Healthy ecosystems really need the presence of large carnivores,” he said. “If we wipe out the guys with big teeth, we see the ecosystem begin to unravel in lots of ways. If we put the large carnivores back into an ecosystem, we see the ecosystem beginning to heal itself. But large carnivores, whether they’re red wolves, or Eastern cougars, or jaguars, need habitat. They need roadless habitat, and lots of it. And because there’s not enough of that habitat, outside of the boreal and arctic regions of North America, they need secure wildlife movement linkages between their core habitats. This is called ‘rewilding.’”

The need for rewilding is now accepted all over the world, he noted, and efforts to expand existing protected areas and connect them with corridors of wilderness are being carried out by groups such as the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition and through efforts including the Sky Islands Wildlands Network, the Spine of the Continent Initiative and his own Rewilding Institute.

“We need to think big in terms of space. But we also have to think big in terms of time — we have to think long term,” he said, comparing the effort to the building of the medieval cathedrals. “And we have to think big in terms of vision. We need to practice conservation on the scale of the continent.”

“Obviously, most of North America can’t be rewilded,” he conceded. But on a map of the continent, he pointed out four “megalinkages” — interconnected corridors of still-intact wilderness running across its northern region from Alaska to Newfoundland, and down along the mountain ranges of the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies into Mexico, and the Appalachians through Georgia.

The original vision of the founder of the Appalachian Trail in 1924 was that it would be a “wildway,” Foreman asserted. Foreman envisions the reintroduction here of the Eastern cougar — “the keystone predator of the Appalachians” — and the extending of a wildlands network down to Florida.

“This is a vision — a possible one,” he said.

“With global climate change,” he continued, “we’re going to see species move up, move north” into higher latitudes and elevations. In the past, there were no barriers to such migrations, but “this time, it could happen very, very quickly, and we’ve got all these barriers, and all our stuff, in the way.”

But the work of rewilding is already underway. “Within my lifetime, we could see wolves from the Canadian Rockies to Mexico. It could happen” because of the reintroductions of wolves being carried out. Black-footed ferrets are another nearly extinct species that is now rebounding, he noted, after conservationists including Foreman reintroduced them.

The Fish and Wildlife Service a decade ago came up with 20 possible sites for reintroducing the Eastern cougar, including many in the Southern Appalachians — but the studies are buried, Foreman claimed. “We need to dig those (site recommendations) up (from the libraries) and start agitating for them again. Because we aren’t going to have a healthy Southern Appalachian forest unless we have cougars back again, to help control the overabundant white-tailed deer, and also to help control some pigs. This is what we need as our flagship for rewilding the Southern Appalachians and indeed, the whole Appalachian spine, the Appalachian wildlands.”

The purpose of saving the wilderness is not just for economics, and not just to feel good about oneself, he said. “I think there is a recognition that has been the bedrock of the conservation mind, though we haven’t always talked about it publicly — a recognition that things don’t live for us, that they exist for themselves. That they are. That the Earth’s product is this deep dance of life, and that they exist for their own sake ... and it is our responsibility to protect these other species that are endangered by our actions ... and bring (them) back for their own sake.

“Aldo Leopold, the great 20th-century naturalist, said, ‘The last word in ignorance is the person who asks about an animal,

“What good is it?”’ And my rejoinder to that is, ‘What good are you?’ I don’t say that in certain bars, mind you!”  

Foreman ended by discussing the need to get back to the “ethical basis for conservation — to a value base. To the recognition that we have been causing this huge problem here on Earth and we have a deep, deep responsibility to right that problem ... to do whatever it is that we can do to save the building blocks of evolution, so that there is some future, some eternity of wilderness that’s out there in the unimaginable future.

“So join with me — let’s welcome the wild back in every way we can,” Foreman concluded. Then he led the audience in a wolf howl.