Make Way for the Movable Beast

We have long been accustomed, in a world of ever-shrinking natural habitats, to the practice of fencing off patches of wilderness to save the wildlife within. But at a time of drastic climate change and rapid loss of species (some scientists now estimate that the extinction rate is as much as 1,000 times greater than at any other point in human history), a number of ecologists and conservation biologists are talking about extending the concept of human stewardship to what could be considered either a radically new or a hauntingly familiar extreme. 

In 2005 a group of conservation biologists writing in Nature suggested that endangered animals, including elephants, camels, even African lions, could be safely relocated to the American Great Plains, where their biological ancestors once roamed. Two years ago in Conservation Biology, the Notre Dame ecologist Jessica Hellmann noted that less flamboyant attempts at wildlife recombination are already under way and spelled out their potential challenges. "Assisted colonization," as the strategy is called, represents a kind of last-ditch search for habitable realms within the confines of our increasingly inhabited and hobbled planet.

Many ecologists are concerned that such schemes will only wreak further havoc: Arctic polar bears feasting on unsuspecting Antarctic penguins; lions devouring the newly restored bison.  Still, subtler permutations of assisted colonization are already gaining attention and support. Recently in Science, a team of biologists suggested that the endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly, fast being squeezed toward extinction by the combined sprawl and smog of San Diego and Los Angeles, could be moved to nearby mountain ranges. A similar kind of lifesaving transplantation is under way in the Florida panhandle, where the indigenous spindly pine, a victim of global warming and disease, is being moved to more hospitable northerly climes. Several marine biologists, meanwhile, are proposing to extend the range of heat-resistant staghorn corals to replace their dwindling counterparts elsewhere in the earth's warming seas.

The idea of such willful realignment remains anathema to many. Unintended consequences aside, the mere promise of a quick fix could distract us from the harder task of preserving existing habitats and combating climate change. "Perhaps the biggest worry with solutions like these is that they take the focus off the source of the problem," says Gay Bradshaw, a conservation biologist at Oregon State University and executive director of the Kerulos Center, which studies animal psychology and trauma. "There's no mention of the ways in which human behavior can be changed rather than having to change the animals'. Suddenly ‘assisted colonization' starts to sound like ‘assisted colonialism.' It's part and parcel of the same old legacy."

There is as well an abiding squeamishness over tampering with the original state of things -- to the extent one dares to define "original." "We're destroying any semblance of the idea that a place has its own biota and history," the Duke University biologist Jason McLachlan has said. "It's not just saving a couple of whooping cranes; it's redesigning the entire biota of earth. And that's incredibly creepy to me."

For many proponents of assisted colonization, however, such notions are passé, and we ourselves have rendered them so. "The concept of natural," the biologist Michael Soule wrote in Conservation Biology as far back as 1990, "is already anachronistic due to the pervasive influence of humans." Jessica Hellmann expressed the same sentiment in Wired last year: "You can find signatures of humanity in the deepest jungles and remote locations. This idea of pristine nature doesn't apply. If assisted colonization will have benefits, it seems strange not to cross some arbitrary line."

It may be that, at its heart, the assisted-colonization strategy contains an idea more significant than any actual application: at a time when all animals, including humans, are becoming "cosmopolitan," there truly is -- and in a way that Dorothy never meant it -- no place like home.