Re-Wilding: Welcome to Pleistocene Park

When I saw this, I couldn’t help thinking of Paul Shepard, and the Ghost Dance vision of Leslie Marmon Silko.

Cornell scientists have come up with a wild idea. The Guardian describes it:

A bold conservation plan dubbed "Pleistocene Park" could see lions, cheetahs and elephants roaming America's Great Plains, it was revealed today.

Scientists have put forward a serious proposal to repopulate parts of North America with modern ancestors of wild animals that became extinct there about 10,000 years ago.

During the Pleistocene era, between 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago, North America's ecosystems were far more diverse than they are today.

Big cats such as the American cheetah (Acinonyx trumani) and American lion (Panthera leo atrox) once roamed the plains, as did mammoths, mastodons, wild horses and the first camels.

The plan envisaged by scientists at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, would see these lost creatures replaced with present-day counterparts, including Asian and African elephants, lions, cheetahs, Bactrian camels, feral horses, and wild asses.

Harry Greene, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell, said: "If we only have 10 minutes to present this idea, people think we're nuts. But if people hear the one-hour version, they realise they haven't thought about this as much as we have.

"Right now, we are investing all of our megafauna hopes on one continent - Africa."
The "rewilding" scheme, outlined in the journal Nature, would unfold in several phases. To start with, small numbers of animals, including elephants and lions, would be released on private land.

Each step would be carefully guided by the fossil record and scientific assessments of the environmental impact. Ultimately, one or more "ecological history parks" covering vast areas of economically depressed parts of the Great Plains would be opened up.

As in Africa, perimeter fencing would limit the movement of elephants and large carnivores that might endanger human settlements.

It’s an amazing idea. I’m not sure if the late human ecologist Paul Shepard would have approved of the specifics, but he’d have to be smiling at the general intent and the boldness of it.

Shepard believed that our species not only became human in the Pleistocene, but that we are still Pleistocene beings, and we need what they needed. Moreover, so does the planet.

Except for collections of essays, Paul’s last book was Coming Home to the Pleistocene, edited by his widow, Florence Shepard. We later collaborated on a web site dedicated to his work, which you can find here.

“Coming Home” was something of an updating of the first of his prophetic and earth-shaking trilogy (as I think of it) The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, after which followed Thinking Animals and Nature and Madness. All are available in new paperback editions from the U. of Georgia Press.

“Tender Carnivore” was published in the early 1970s, a time of big ideas, and part of what Shepard proposed as an ecologically and psychologically sound future for the US was to keep most of the human population on the coasts and allow the interior of the continent to return to wildness.

Towards the end of Leslie Marmon Silko’s great novel, Almanac of the Dead, a contemporary Native scholar talks about the Ghost Dance vision of a continent returned to its pre-conquest state. Although this is usually interpreted as a vain dream if not a kind of sacrilege against progress, he pointed out that in many ways it’s already happening. Vast areas of the American west are depopulating, and the landscape that hasn’t been severely damaged is returning to wildness.

I'm sure there are reasons not to do it this way, but Pleistocene Park has a ring to it. (Why do I hear Freddie Cannon singing the theme?) As the Guardian points out, it sounds a lot like “Jurassic Park” and so this is probably a selling name. But maybe there’s a part of it that could be named the Paul Shepard Prairie, and another the Ghost Dance plains.