Andrew Cohen - continued...

Andrew Cohen - Andrew Cohen has served as chief legal analyst and legal editor for CBS News and won a Murrow Award as one of the nation's leading legal analysts and commentators. More Andrew Cohen is a Murrow Award-winning legal analyst and commentator. He covers legal events and issues for CBS Radio News and its hundreds of affiliates around the country and is a frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of the nation's leading newspapers and online sites. From 2000-2009, Andrew served as chief legal analyst and legal editor for CBS News and contributed to the network's coverage of the Supreme Court, the war on terrorism, and every high-profile civil or criminal trial of the decade. He is also a single dad of a great kid, a racehorse owner and breeder, and the winner of several awards for writing about horse racing, including the 2010 John Hervey Award for distinguished commentary and the 2010 O'Brien Award for Media Excellence. Follow Andrew on Twitter at @CBSAndrew.

Amplify’d from www.theatlantic.com

The Quiet War Against Wyoming's Wild Horses By Andrew Cohen Aug 11 2011, 12:00 PM ET How can a state promote its wild horses as a tourist attraction while it seeks to decimate herds? Reuters Listen for the sound of hooves pounding. Look for manes flying in the wind. Feel the rush of awe at the sight of these creatures. The Pilot Butte Wild Horse Scenic Loop Tour is something you and your family will never forget because Sweetwater County's cherished wild horses are living examples of a wide-open landscape and untamed frontier spirit. --Wyoming Tourism Board

The Wyoming Tourism Board wants you and your family to come see the wild horses in Sweetwater County, but you better go quick. Beginning next month, federal officials and local contractors will roundup and remove approximately 700 of those horses (about 70 percent of the herd) to satisfy the complaints of the cattle and sheep ranchers in the area who don't want to share land with federally-protected horses. The "cherished," "living examples" of Wyoming's western heritage will be penned in and then given up for adoption or sold at auction. Many will soon die. Some may even be slaughtered for meat. All will likely be gone from view in Sweetwater County. You and your family, having traveled to southwestern Wyoming, may be plum out of luck. This is my third take on these Wyoming horses in just the past few weeks, and I again beg your indulgence. First, I wrote about a failed federal plan to round up the horses, geld the stallions, and return some back to the herds to decrease natural procreation cycles. When the government was sued in federal court in Washington to stop the removal and castration, the feds backed off and came forward with a new pitch. The horses would leave, but none of the stallions would be castrated. This plan appears to be going forward. I wrote about that, too. The number of horses in two vast "herd management areas," located in a desolate part of the state, would again dip below 300, making it much less likely that a tourist family would see a wild horse in Sweetwater County. The reason for my persistence isn't difficult to explain. Each time I write something about these horses, I learn something more about the politics of their plight that is worth sharing to a broader audience. This time, the story is not just about the hypocrisy evident in Wyoming's attitude toward these horses -- the state is both marketing them as tourist attractions and actively conspiring to get rid of them. It's also about the curious conduct of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which, again, has done the bidding of an industry that it is supposed to regulate. With friends like the BLM and Wyoming state officials, the horses and their human supporters don't need any enemies. The cattle and sheep industries want the horses gone from the rangeland -- even though the ranchers reap the benefits of having their herds graze upon public land at low cost. To support their position, the ranchers cite a 1981 consent decree, overseen by a local federal judge, which limits the number of wild horses that are to be left in the Little Colorado and White Mountain herd areas to approximately 300. To the ranchers, the horses are a nuisance, not an asset, a point Wyoming doesn't happen to mention in its breathless tourism campaigns, which feature television ads of thundering herds. "That our government is unwilling to find these horses room -- or even consider doing so -- contradicts the spirit, if not the letter, of federal law" Meanwhile, the BLM and Wyoming seem more intent on justifying ways to get rid of the horses rather than upon figuring out how to preserve and protect them. Wyoming cites a 2003 agreement between state officials and the Bush-era Department of the Interior, which places legal pressure on the BLM to rid Wyoming of excess wild horses -- and the BLM itself gets to determine what constitutes "excess." These officials say they have history and the law on their side. But the facts seem to support those who support the horses. When you have the law going one way and the facts going another, it's typically time to go to court. And that's not the worst thing that could happen here. Wyoming Earlier this week, I asked Chuck Coon, Media Relations Manager at the Wyoming Office of Tourism, how he squared the evident contradiction of Wyoming's policies. How can you be advertising to tourists to come see the wild horses of Sweetwater Country while Wyoming's lawyers are in federal court endorsing the BLM policy to rid the area of most of its horses? Here is Coon's response: As you know, management of wild horse herd sizes in Wyoming is under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management. No matter what decision is rendered in terms of herd reductions there will remain ample opportunities for visitors to see wild horses in several parts of this state. And we'll continue to help local tourism entities in the open landscapes where those horses still roam in Sweetwater County, Park County, Carbon County and Big Horn County as part of our overall marketing of the state as a tourism destination. Coon understandably wants to reassure Wyoming's tourists that they still have "ample opportunities" to see the horses of Sweetwater County. We'll see. But the state didn't merely defer the question to the BLM, as Coon suggests. Instead, Wyoming weighed in heavily via litigation on behalf of its ranchers, one of whom, Matt Mead, happens to be the state's governor. No small wonder. The ranching lobby in Wyoming (and Washington) is powerful. The wild horse lobby is not. When it comes to these horses, might makes right under cover of law. Through a spokesman, and via email, Gov. Mead dodged the question of how Wyoming could market its wild horses with one hand and decimate its wild horse herds with the other. "The Governor's approach, which follows the approach of past governors, is to ensure there is balance on the range and right now with the number of wild horses in this herd there is an imbalance." When pushed, the spokesman wrote: "The State of Wyoming has an interest in defending its consent decree. That agreement allows for horses on the range, but also prevents overpopulation that damages the public lands for other uses, which are equally important for tourism and other industries, like ranching and hunting." When the governor's office uses the word "balance" to describe how Wyoming's vast range lands ought to be used, what it really means is "imbalance." Cattle and sheep dominate the Wyoming range when compared to wild horses. And when the governor's office uses the word "imbalance" to describe the current situation, what it really means is the growing "balance" between and among species when wild animals are left to their own devices. Meanwhile, as you will see below, reasonable people disagree about what constitutes an "overpopulation" of wild horses in or near Sweetwater County. According to statistics compiled by Jonathan Ratner, of the Western Watersheds Project, one of the plaintiffs who initially filed suit to block the Wyoming removal/castration plan, Wyoming and the BLM currently allocate nine times more forage for livestock than for wild horses in the two herd management areas from which the horses soon will be taken. There are approximately 850,000 acres of public land in those two areas -- and the ranchers won't tolerate more than approximately 300 wild horses there. You do the math. There is plenty of room for all of Wyoming's four-legged creatures. The BLM If Wyoming is not a neutral player here, state actors like Gov. Mead have plenty of company. The BLM, the statutorily-mandated stewards of the horses, also have made clear on which side of the saddle they sit. Even the new plan to remove Wyoming's wild horses is full of circular logic and unanswered questions. What justifies such a low limit for wild horses on the wide expanses of the two herd management areas? Don't wild horses affect grazing lands far less than livestock do? Has the federal government asked the ranchers, benefits of so much public land use, to ease off their pursuit of the wild horses? More than that, now there are now allegations -- made by the ranchers themselves -- that the Bureau of Land Management actually advised them on how best to maximize their position vis-a-vis the horse groups. The solution? The BLM told the ranchers to sue the federal government (advice, I am sure, that is simply appalling to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department has to defend those lawsuits). Here are the specific allegations contained in a complaint filed on July 27th by the Rock Springs Grazing Association (the RSGA) which acts on behalf of ranching interests in the area: 69. RSGA also met with Deputy Assistant Secretary Sylvia Baca to deliver its demand that BLM remove all of the wild horses on RSGA lands, to explain its rights under the 1981 order, and to formally request removal of all of the stray wild horses. RSGA also presented a copy of its letter to the U.S. Marshal officially asking for removal of all wild horses that have strayed onto the RSGA lands in light of repeated failure on the part of BLM to manage and control the wild horse numbers. 70. The Assistant Secretary attributed the failure to comply with external influences on the Department and Congress, and the lack of funding due to the need to contract for sanctuaries. The Assistant Secretary stated that litigation would be necessary to secure additional funding for wild horse gathers (my emphasis). I have asked the BLM to comment upon these allegations, but I don't expect the Bureau's lawyers to allow anyone to say anything insightful about the topic. Assuming these allegations are true, they are another black mark upon the Interior Department. Here is a federal official, sworn under at least two federal statutes to guard the welfare of the wild horses, telling ranchers to sue the federal government to prompt quicker political action against the horses. And even if the BLM now backs away from Baca -- "she wasn't authorized to make those representations" -- the allegation itself is compelling insight into the atmosphere that surrounds the BLM's attitude toward these horses. Like the ranchers, the BLM seems to consider them pests and certainly not "cherished" symbols protected by law. The BLM is part of the Interior Department. The Secretary of the Interior is a man named Ken Salazar and, although his Wikipedia entry strangely is silent on the matter, he is part of a long-time ranching family from Colorado. Salazar's brother, John, who recently represented Colorado's 3rd Congressional District (it's Western Slope), also is a rancher. Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R), who alone represents Wyoming in the House of Representatives, evidently raised Heifers when she was younger. These are some of the people who are judging the competing interests that clash over the fate of the herds. What chances do you reckon those horses have? The Facts On The Ground If Wyoming were the size of Delaware, a battle over what to do with federal land might make more sense. But Wyoming contains vast tracts of land owned by the federal government and, to a lesser extent, by the state. If we were talking about a huge number of wild horses and a relatively small number of sheep and cattle then the dynamic of the argument might differ as well. But the number of sheep and livestock in Wyoming now grazing on public land is far greater, orders of magnitude greater, than the number of wild horses who cross over between public and private land. And if the horses were, indeed, as destructive to the rangelands as the ranchers assert, perhaps the mass expulsions might be justified. But the horses aren't nearly as destructive as the cattle and sheep who roam the range. If you don't believe me, just ask the BLM. The Bureau's own statistics tell the story of the "imbalance" the government and the ranchers want to maintain. Livestock grazing in the United States is authorized on 157 million acres of BLM land. For wild horses, it is restricted to 26.9 million acres of that land (and, as we have seen, there are limits within the limits). There may be over one million cattle and sheep now grazing public land in many western states. At the same time, there are approximately 38,000 wild horses and burros stuffed into only 11 percent of all BLM land. And even this relatively small figure is too high for the BLM; the feds say only about 26,000 wild horses should remain on public land. Focusing upon Wyoming alone, the "imbalance" between land uses is pronounced. A 2007 article in the Wyoming Business Report indicated that the Rock Springs Grazing Association alone had between 50,000-70,000 sheep and 5,000 head of cattle on its grazing lands (that figure may be more or less four years later). By contrast, the BLM allows only 2,100 wild horses total in the five herd management areas of interest to the RSGA, a swath of land that encompasses thousands of square miles. But, again, even that relatively small number of horses is too great for the ranchers. While the horse advocates were suing the BLM for being too quick to get rid of the herd, the RSGA was suing the BLM for being too slow to remove the horses. There are costs incurred by the federal government in allowing ranchers to use public lands (at low costs). From a 2008 Congressional Report on grazing fees: BLM and the FS typically spend far more managing their grazing programs than they collect in grazing fees. For example, the GAO determined that in FY2004, the agencies spent about $132.5 million on grazing management, comprised of $58.3 million for the BLM and $74.2 million for the FS. These figures include expenditures for direct costs, such as managing permits, as well as indirect costs, such as personnel. The agencies collected $17.5 million, comprised of $11.8 million in BLM receipts and $5.7 million in FS receipts. Receipts for both agencies have been relatively low in recent years, apparently because western drought has contributed to reduced livestock grazing. Other estimates of the cost of livestock grazing on federal lands are much higher. For instance, a 2002 study by the Center for Biological Diversity estimated the federal cost of an array of BLM, FS, and other agency programs that benefit grazing or compensate for impacts of grazing at roughly $500 million annually. Together with the nonfederal cost, the total cost of livestock grazing could be as high as $1 billion annually, according to the study. Finally, in just the past few days, questions have arisen about the factual bases for the most commonly-stated reason given for removing the horses -- that they mess up the range lands for other users and uses. The American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign, another one of the plaintiffs fighting wild horse removals all over the West, recently commissioned a study from Robert Edwards, a range scientist who worked for 30 years for the BLM before becoming an independent consultant. With the legal battle joined in Washington over the fate of the herds, the horse advocacy group asked Edwards to go to the two Wyoming range lands in question, check out the horses, and evaluate the impact they have upon the land (and the impact the land has upon them. Here is a link to the Edwards's August 4th Report. It's main findings: All areas observed and/or documented were found to be in only fair grazing range condition, which is typical of what is found on BLM range lands throughout the west. Removing a large percentage of the wild horses is not likely to result in an improvement of range condition since the percentage of forage allocated to wild horses is very small compared to the amount of forage allocated to livestock (the forage allocation for wild horse use is only 2% to 3% of the total forage allocation for the [two herd management areas]. Information from the BLM indicates that there are well water sources in these HMAs which are turned on and off to accommodate livestock use. If true, this would reduce the number of water sources available for wild horse use in the summer months. Limiting the number of water sources forces the wild horses to congregate in areas where water is available, and consequently increases the negative impact they are having on the range areas they are using. There is no emergency situation in the area that would cause significant damage to the range or harm to the wild horses if they are not removed. The forage resources needed to support the wild horse population are more than adequate and the horses observed are in good condition. In other words, the land can sustain a much larger number of wild horses than the BLM, Wyoming, or the ranchers have been willing to admit. Not only that, but the land (the water, actually) is evidently being manipulated by ranchers and/or the BLM in a way that is detrimental to the horses (by denying them water and by pushing the herds toward livestock areas, which which gets them in more trouble with the ranchers). Soon, the BLM, Wyoming, and the RSGA will unleash their own experts to discount Edwards' conclusions. They will likely say that the BLM's calculations are reasonable, supported by evidence, and that the law is settled by consent decree. This war is eternal and the horses almost always lose. Even if Edwards' conclusions don't hold up in court -- federal judges are required by law to give deferences to the findings of administrative agencies like the BLM -- they have common sense on their side. Blaming the relatively tiny number of wild horses in Wyoming for tearing up the trail, when there are tens of thousands of sheep and cattle roaming around, is like blaming the lifeboats for the sinking of the Titanic. It was a weak argument even before Edwards' findings cast doubt upon it. As I wrote in my first piece on this topic, I recognize that this is a complicated issue; that the ranchers and government officials don't always wear the black hats in our western tale. There should be reasonable limits on the number of wild horses on public land. What strikes me about this story, however, is how little protection the wild horses of Wyoming really have, despite federal laws and regulations designed to protect them. What jolts me, too, is the strength and ferocity of the political forces arrayed against the horses. There are millions of acres upon which these horses can roam without materially interfering with livestock. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of such room in Sweetwater County alone. That our government is unwilling to find these horses room -- or even consider doing so -- contradicts the spirit, if not the letter, of federal law. The governor of Wyoming is a rancher. The Secretary of the Interior is a rancher. The lone member of the House of Representatives grew up around cattle. And today ranching interests are routing the wild horses of Sweetwater County. That's an angle you won't see pitched anytime soon by Wyoming's tourism board. It wants you to come to Wyoming to see all the pretty horses, for sure, but it wants you to remain oblivious to what is being done to those horses, and why, in your name.

Read more at www.theatlantic.com

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Where The Wild Things Were from Conservation In Practice

Cover via Amazon
 Where The Wild Things Were from Conservation In Practice, a publication of the Society for Conservation Biology


This is not a new article, but still timely except for a few things that have been discovered since it was written in 2006 where I have entered a notation. I've also highlighted the sections that are pertinent to the issue of horses being North American natives - which everyone seems to know except those who wish to profit from not knowing. I decided to highlight these sections because this is a long - but interesting - read, and I've learned from experience that those who don't want to learn will not wade through a long piece to find something they don't want to see anyway. So, I decided to make seeing this information impossible to miss. "

Whatever you think about the "re-wilding" issue itself, you must admit, these top flight scientists certainly have no doubts about the horse as a native American species!
  
Feature

Where the Wild Things Were
 
THE RECENT NATURE PAPER proposing to bring cheetahs, lions, and elephants to North America raised a wild rumpus. But are the critics missing the point?

By William Stolzenburg
January-March 2006 (Vol. 7, No. 1)

The conjured images were surreal, lions prowling Nebraska corn fields, elephants stomping across North Dakota. From there the visions grew frightful, exotic and dangerous beasts swarming the Great Plains, slaughtering livestock, spreading disease, ruining rural livelihoods as far abroad as Africa. When, last August, a group of 12 conservation-minded scientists and scholars aired a provocative proposal in the prestigious journal Nature (1), the journalists who reported it and the colleagues who publicly pummeled it couldn’t help letting their imaginations run wild. Which was at least part of the idea.
Under the audacious heading “Re-wilding North America,” the paper’s authors—among them some heavyweights in the field of conservation biology—called for restoring “large wild vertebrates into North America,” meaning those that disappeared at the end of the last ice age. In the two pithy pages that followed, those large wild vertebrates were spelled out in the more-familiar terms of camels, horses, tortoises, and—as if to make sure no one was nodding off in an armchair—cheetahs, lions, and elephants. Yes, in the United States. For real.
The paper was partly meant to jostle a conservation community suspected of falling asleep at the wheel. At that it succeeded. In the first week following publication, the two lead authors received more than 1,000 letters and phone calls from three continents. They saw their proposal aired on network TV and discussed in national newspapers and magazines. Some of the comments were congratulatory, a good many of them were disparaging, a handful of them were downright hateful.
But too few of the naysayers, to the authors’ disappointment, offered much beyond wet-blanket dismissals. None seemed willing to venture near the soul of their proposal. In their paper they had politely pointed out that the 1492 arrival of Columbus—long considered North America’s standard of ecological excellence—was in fact the “discovery” of a continent already plundered of its greatest beasts. Why not raise the standard, to that more glorious and decisive moment some 13,000 years ago, when people first set foot in North America? It was a profoundly optimistic invitation—to elevate the very goal of conservation—that somehow got muffled amid a chorus of scorn. Maybe it was all just a misunderstanding arising from the little paper’s herculean task of explaining such a giant vision in so few words.
Maybe the authors—who do indeed see a need for elephants and lions one day to wander the plains of North America—had simply lost their marbles. Or could it be that the would-be rewilders—in so nakedly challenging the status quo of conservation—had unveiled a flaw too fearsome to face?

***
Whatever the reason, no one could say the rewilders hadn’t offered fair warning. The idea of restoring America’s fauna to something more closely resembling prehuman times—when sabertooths prowled and mammoths thundered through places that would later be called Los Angeles and Newark—has a far deeper history than its latest splash in Nature. Paul S. Martin, a coauthor of the rewilding paper and an outspoken paleoecologist from the University of Arizona, has been unabashedly promoting such Pleistocene visions in print and in public lectures for 40 years. Even as the Nature bombshell was hitting the streets, a book-length version of the rewilding proposal was quietly headed to press in Martin’s magnum opus, Twilight of the Mammoths (2).
Twilight is the autobiographical odyssey of Martin’s renowned “overkill” hypothesis, which lays the brunt of the blame for the late Pleistocene extinction—the abrupt disappearance of some 40 species of horses and camels, glyptodons and ground sloths, lions and bears, mammoths and mastodons—in the spear-wielding hands of North America’s first big-game hunters, the Clovis culture. Infused throughout with Martin’s admiration for America’s missing megafauna, Twilight’s concluding chapters are dedicated to their return. “I believe it is time to take an approach that includes not only creatures traditionally considered ‘at home on the range’ but also some of those not seen roaming the Americas by any humans since the Clovis people,” writes Martin. “The Bering Land Bridge should not be shut down forever in the interest of imagined faunal purity.”

***
Not everyone heard heresy in Martin’s Pleistocene preachings. In a 2004 is-sue of Conservation Biology, Martin and Cornell doctoral candidate Josh Donlan published a paper called “Role of ecological history in invasive species management and conservation” (3). In it they prodded their colleagues to rethink more seriously the pristine myth of 1492. Their paper was peppered with Pleistocene ambitions: “In the process of returning the California condor . . . to the Grand Canyon, should we also return the kinds of animals the bird once fed on: equids, camelids, mountain goats, and proboscideans?”
Donlan’s advisor at Cornell was the evolutionary biologist Harry Greene, by coincidence a friend and kindred spirit of Martin. Greene and Donlan often found themselves wondering about rewilding and how such a seemingly legitimate goal for conservation had apparently gone nowhere. “Most people dismissed it as silliness,” says Greene. “The more we talked about it, Josh and I decided it’s not silly. Let’s put together a working group. Let’s thrash it out.”
The two assembled an eclectic team of twelve—experts in paleoecology, large mammals, community ecology, predator-prey dynamics, invasive species, grassland ecology, the politics of conservation. Among them, of course, was the chief messenger of overkill, Paul Martin. There, too, was Michael Soulé, one of the spearheads of the modern discipline of conservation biology; marine ecologist James Estes, whose unveiling of the sea otter as a key architect of Pacific kelp forests had become one of the classic studies in ecology; and Dave Foreman, former congressional lobbyist and founder of the Rewilding Institute, a think tank for restoring large carnivores to vacant niches of North America.
In September 2004, they gathered for a long weekend at Ted Turner’s Ladder Ranch in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. Over easels and PowerPoint and after-hours beers, they dissected the rewilding idea and broke it down to its factual nuts and bolts, its practical challenges and criticisms, its societal costs and benefits.
The Ladder group agreed on several sobering premises: That human influence had utterly pervaded the planet. That what qualifies for wildness today is a paltry façade of the awesome Pleistocene bestiary we stumbled upon only 13,000 years ago. That the difference between then and now is at least partly, if not principally, our own doing and therefore our duty to repair.

***
Regardless of who or what was to blame, they concluded that the large animals’ absence was to be ignored at great peril. Forests, grasslands, and savannas had evolved in step with the Pleistocene megafauna. Their soils had been turned by trampling hooves, their seeds widely ferried and judiciously fertilized in herbivore dung. All but the very biggest of those herbivores had in turn been shaped in body and habit by their large predators. Were there no repercussions for such wholesale megafaunal erasure? Reports from the field were already suggesting the feared answer.
There was northern Siberia, where about 10,000 years ago 1 million km2 of vibrant grasslands had suddenly vanished. They had been replaced by infertile mossy tundra—a transformation that ecologist Sergey Zimov attributes to the disappearance of a great menagerie of Pleistocene grazers. Zimov and colleagues argue that the grassy Siberian steppe that once fed musk oxen, mammoths, and wild horses was fed in return by the megafauna. (4) Their manure fertilized the grasses, and their hooves trampled the competing mosses.
The legacy of the missing mammoths may run deeper still, to the frozen ground. There, some 500 gigatons of carbon—more than twice the tonnage stored in tropical forests—lies tenuously locked in ice. As the climate now warms at breathtaking rates, Zimov foresees the permafrost melting and those gigatons of carbon being released skyward, feeding runaway greenhouse heating. It helps explain the urgency with which Zimov has been leading a government-backed rewilding experiment in Siberia. Grasslands maintain colder soils than moss-bound tundra. By restocking the tundra with horses, musk oxen and bison, he is hoping to win back the grasslands, to buy time against Siberia’s 500-gigaton time bomb of carbon. 
Signs of megafauna importance have also been coming from the sea. Most notoriously, there is an  ongoing collapse of marine mammal populations in the North Pacific, quite possibly stemming from the decimation of great whales (the ultimate megafauna) by industrial whalers. This hypothesis, championed by Alan Springer and Jim Estes, followed from corroborating lines of evidence. (5) The great whale’s disappearance forced its chief predator, the killer whale, to seek smaller game in the form of sea lions, seals, and sea otters, whose numbers plummeted in stepwise fashion. From there, the ecological cascade rumbled all the way to the bottom of the sea. As sea otters disappeared, their prey proliferated. Sea urchins marched en masse, mowing down coastal kelp forests across the Aleutians and reducing one of the Bering Sea’s most productive ecosystems to barrens.
The megafauna’s most shining endorsement is now on public display in the dramatic greening of Yellowstone National Park under the reinstated reign of the gray wolf. For 70 years following the wolf’s extermination from the park, Yellowstone’s oases of aspens, cottonwoods, and willows had been browsed to stubs by the world’s largest herd of elk. Within five years of the wolves’ return in 1995, the elk were running scared and willows were sprouting three meters high. With the willows’ return, the beaver followed—from one colony before wolf reintroduction to ten colonies at last count. With the new beaver ponds have come more fish and with the streamside groves more songbirds. The list of beneficiaries goes on, from ravens and grizzlies fattening on wolf leftovers to the encouraging number of surviving pronghorn fawns now that the lurking coyotes have been scattered by territorial wolves. (6)
These are part of a growing body of portents to the ecological costs of doing nothing, not to mention the esthetic bankruptcy foreseen in a world overrun with weeds. In short, the megafauna matters. Which brought the Ladder 12 to a rather imposing quandary, that of resuscitating a graveyard of deceased species.
Their answer was, in a word, proxies—close relatives and ecological equivalents that would serve as megafaunal stand-ins, that might rekindle what the mass extinction had extinguished. The country was already well stocked with potential candidates. Not too far from where the Ladder 12 were sitting, some 77,000 large mammals were roaming the Texas hill country within the expansive confines of game ranches. Among them were camels, cheetahs, and myriad species of African antelope. Surviving cousins of mammoths and mastodons were living in zoos across the U.S., and there were some 16,000 working elephants in Asia.
Here was a means of not only restoring North America’s megafauna but also providing a fail-safe for endangered megafauna of the world. Wild Bactrian camels, on the verge of extinction in their last holdout in the Gobi desert, might find new refuge in the prickly scrublands of the Southwestern U.S.
Here, also, was a way to essentially resume evolutionary roles, wherein cage-bound cheetahs and lions might once again hone their speed and wits in open pursuit of North America’s repatriated herbivores.
If all went well with the trial runs, perhaps one day the fences could be moved back to accommodate grander arenas—Pleistocene parks—in the widest unpeopled spaces of the Great Plains. Such was the essence of the rewilders’ ultimate vision.
Word went out in the Nature paper, and word quickly came back, setting Greene and Donlan’s phones ringing and email boxes pinging. News bureaus on both sides of the Atlantic swooped in, smelling blood. Amid the few tepid nods of approval from the professional ranks, the jeers resounded. “Pure fantasy.” “A terrible and absurd idea.” “Impossible.”
African critics savaged the American rewilders for threatening to take away not only their animals but also their ecotourism dollars. One even suggested they were fronting for big-money sport gunners who shoot fenced animals. “It’s not a stretch to say that they mostly thought we were going to come dump a bunch of ele-phants on the suburbs of Topeka,” says Greene.
It was as though the rewilders had floated a handful of trial balloons and nobody had noted the blimp among them. There was no serious scientific challenge to the rewilders’ new Pleistocene restoration benchmark.

***
A 12-minute talk gains us no converts, says Greene. “Sometimes people’s first reaction is we must be stupid. But it turns out when we give the 50-minute talk, people realize they haven’t thought about this as much as we have. They say ‘Huh? I didn’t know there was a holarctic lion or that cheetahs lived here 11,000 years ago. I didn’t know there were five species of horses.’”
Five weeks after the 12-minute version of “Re-wilding” appeared in Nature, Greene was invited to give the full 50 minutes to a roomful of curious biologists and conservationists in the vertebrate zoology wing of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Greene began by passing around a fibrous sphere of dried plant bits the size of a softball. “It is what it looks like,” said Greene. Its original owner was a creature with the bulk of a grizzly bear, ambling about the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon 11,000 years ago.  “It’s a Shasta ground sloth turd and it’s not a fossil.”
This, explained Greene, was his favorite response to those suggesting the Pleistocene was such an irrelevantly long time ago.  “Ten thousand years ago is only a hundred centuries. It’s twice the lifespan of the longest-living plant on Earth today. Yes, 10,000 years ago is a lot longer than I’ll live, but it may not be so long in some other contexts.”
For the next 50 minutes, Greene serves up more metaphorical handfuls of sloth dung, irreverently bursting conservation’s most precious myths, chiding the media’s worst-informed critics, and repeating his blasphemy: Why not Pleistocene rewilding?
To the notion that wild horses are pests of the North American range, Greene offers this answer. “When I moved to Berkeley in 1978, I bought into the prevailing wisdom there, which is that [wild horses] are the scum of the earth, that they tear up wetlands, and we should all be given old-Model 94s and go out and shoot burros,” says Green. “It never occurred to me to wonder why, if they’re so bad now, they weren’t bad 100 centuries ago?” It turns out the animal the Spaniards brought to North America in the 1500s is very closely related to the animal that once played a key role in dispersing seeds of Pleistocene savannas, says Greene, which makes today’s wild horse literally the native returned. (Ed. note: Recent DNA discoveries have revised the date of the last horses in North America to about 7,500 years ago and possibly even later. New DNA studies have proven that the last North American horses were Equus caballus - the same species as the Spaniards returned.)
To one of the more resounding objections, that the African lion doesn’t belong here, Greene suggests that the African lion is a myth. DNA tests show that the king of beasts that so famously presides over African savannas is likely a subspecies of a more cosmopolitan cat—let’s call it the holarctic lion—that once ranged across the northern hemisphere. If conservationists can restock the U.S. with seven subspecies of peregrine falcon from around the world, why can’t they reinstate the holarctic lion?
 “Here are some other common criticisms,” Greene says, flashing a quote on the screen.
“Haven’t you people heard of rabbits and cane toads?” (Referring to the textbook catastrophes that followed introduction of South American cane toads and European rabbits to Australia, both of which ended up sweeping the continent like plagues.)
Greene adopts a comically incredulous tone: “I’m astonished to hear biologists say this to me. I know that there were no placental mammals in Australia, let alone rabbits, until very recently. And not only were there no cane toads in Australia, there were no bufonids ! We’re not talking about something like that, we’re talking about organisms whose very close relatives or conspecifics were in this country 100 centuries ago.”
Throughout his presentation, Greene conveys a bittersweet mix of vindication and disappointment with regard to the lameness of his colleagues’ objections, their blindness to rewilding’s inherent optimism. But even as he struggles to explain how the scientific discussion has so uncannily skirted the science, it soon becomes clear that science was never really the issue.
Greene flashes another  familiar doubt on the screen: “People won’t tolerate wolves and grizzlies; they surely won’t tolerate elephants and lions.” Here Greene has finally run out of hopeful retorts. “It might be this is an insurmountable problem.”
It turns out rewilding has laid far more than science on the table. It has challenged the topmost survivor among the megafauna to consider lightening up its 13,000-year death grip on dominance. It has opened new and frightening territory.
When all is done, Greene asks for questions. Nothing but softballs are returned. The conversation is courteous, playful, apparently supportive of bringing home the Pleistocene megafauna. But then again, this is the National Museum of Natural History, where all the elephants and lions down the hall are stuffed.
Literature Cited
1. Donlan, J. et al. 2005. Re-wilding North America. Nature 436(7053):913-914.
2. Martin, P.S. 2005. Twilight of the mammoths: Ice age extinctions and the rewilding of America. University of California Press.
3. C. J. Donlan and P.S. Martin. 2004. Role of eco-logical history in invasive species management and conservation. Conservation Biology 18(1):267-269.
4. Zimov, S.A. 2005. Pleistocene park: Return of the mammoth’s ecosystem.  Science 308:796-798.
5. Springer, A.M. et al. 2003. Sequential megafaunal collapse in the North Pacific Ocean: An ongoing legacy of industrial whaling? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100:12223-12228.
Smith, D.W., R.O. Peterson, and D.B. Houston. 2003.  Yellowstone after wolves. BioScience 53(4):330-340.
About the Author
William Stolzenburg is a freelance journalist researching the ecological impacts of top predators.

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