This paper represents yet another iteration of my exploration of the transatlantic ambiguity in ‘rewilding’ and its covariate ecological and ethical assumptions. I composed it after chatting with Jack Humphrey for a future episode of the Rewilding Earth Podcast, thinking about all the things I could’ve said more compactly, and all the other things I should’ve made room to say instead…
…and, well, I actually didn’t set out to write the attached paper (even though it might look deceptively formal with those footnotes); it just kinda manifested as I was thinking over how I might reframe and rephrase some things, in conjunction with a bit of further reading I’d been doing on the side.
There is much overlap with my recent long-form essay “On Rewilding (Whatever That Is): Thoughts of a Faux-Expat” (October 2022), and like that one it is geared toward a North American audience. However, I aim to be more direct in illustrating why rewilding advocates in the North American tradition ought to worry about what’s happening in Europe under the heading of ‘rewilding’ (or, otherwise, why they bear the burden of proof in explaining why the practices in Europe are, in fact, consistent with the ecological and moral foundations of rewilding).
SUMMARY
In this paper, I remind the reader of the semantic fact that ‘rewilding’ refers to naturalistic grazing (at least as the term’s prototype or exemplar) in the hegemonic European discourse (§1). Then I draw an important distinction between two types of questions that should be raised concerning practices called ‘rewilding’ in Europe (§§2-3). The first is whether certain projects should becalled ‘rewilding’ despite being limited in their scope and scale (§2). This question is not unimportant; however, I believe that it has garnered too much attention in exclusion of the even bigger question of whether certain projects should be undertaken at all. In the case of European naturalistic grazing, I believe that this is the question that must be asked (§3), not merelywhether the projects should be called ‘rewilding’ in spite of their often small size. I elaborate this claim by invoking topics with which a North American rewilding audience should be familiar: the depletion of vegetation in landscapes with abundance of large herbivores without natural predators (§3.1); the afforestation of abandoned farmland (§3.2); the status of Pleistocene rewilding (§3.3).
Some apologists for European “rewilding” emphasise that Europe cannot accommodate the scale of rewilding possible in the North American continent. That is beside the point, however, because it is a two-way ocean, and naturalistic grazing could be implemented in North America. I challenge North American rewilding advocates to explain why they are not advocating similar practices for their own continent – and, in turn, why these reasons should not apply equally to Europe (§3.4).
But, of course, I couldn’t stop there without revisiting my diagnosis of my own main reasons – the foundational moral intuitions – for my differing attitudes toward the “rewilding” traditions in North America versus Europe. At the end of “On Rewilding (Whatever That Is),” I posed a “double bind” for Rewilding Europe and its agrarian/Pleistocene baselines; I develop that a bit more here (§4).
Download this latest permutation of my work on rewilding (whatever that is) here (only available in pdf format, at least at the moment; note that it does have some embedded links):
The following is some kind of freeform essay written during the summer of 2020. Several updates:
1. Since this time, a captive breeding centre for White Bellied Heron has been completed in Bhutan “to secure an ex-situ gene pool; rear, raise and breed herons, and supplement the wild population by releasing them into safer habitats.” This effort can be supported on GoFundMe.
2. Meanwhile, even fewer numbers of WBH have been counted in the wild in Bhutan in subsequent years: 22 in 2021 and 23 in 2022.
3. In 2022 I finally let go of this mindset that philosophy is useless for saving Nature. Philosophy is useless for saving Nature, but that is beside the point. What I have lately rediscovered is that I enjoy philosophy, and it provides a crucial source of escapism.
A heron stands silent and still on the banks of the Punatsang Chu. She awaits her prey calmly, as most great herons do, the consummate ambush predator. She is the only fish-eating wading bird in sight. There is no competition to chase away today — it is a good day to be a heron.
She is one of only 60, give or take, of her kind, Ardea insignis, white-bellied heron, the rarest heron on Earth, trend decreasing. Her kin have been beleaguered by hunting and deforestation and now hydroelectric dams, a casualty of “green” energy.
She doesn’t know the scarcity of their numbers. She doesn’t know the enormity of the threats. She knows only that she guards her fishing grounds alone, and what more would any heron want?
In February, she will find her mate, and they will nest alone. They will be two among 60, give or take, but they will not know this; they will not notice their numbers decreasing. White-bellied heron has never been the type to nest in crowded heronries.
When summer comes again and the young herons have fledged, the family will disperse, and each heron will take up a life of solitude. And their summer of solitude will give way to an autumn of solitude, and the autumn will give way to a winter of solitude, until breeding season comes again. Such is the life that befits the still and silent heron.
Every heron must die in the end, and it is proper and fitting for a heron to die alone, apart from others of her kind. For the alternative, after all, is that the heron dies while still raising chicks or preparing a nest in which to do so. All herons must die, and it is no special tragedy when a heron dies in solitude. What differs, then, when the lone fallen heron happens also to be the last of her species? From the heron’s perspective, perhaps, not so much at all.
* * *
We imagine the endling, the last of a species, as heartbreakingly lonely. Think of Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, and humanity’s failed quest to find him a lady Pinta Island tortoise for his mate. Perhaps it’s for the best that we engage in such projection. We are more compelled to save those with whom we can empathize, and perhaps empathy is engaged most effectively through the projection of the only sort of loneliness that the mass of humanity has yet understood and acknowledged: the loneliness of estrangement from others of one’s own kind.
I am human too, but the loneliness I dread is a different loneliness, a deeper loneliness; it is the existential loneliness of a world engulfed by a human monoculture, a single species confined in its own prison of concrete and steel. I fear that humanity will recognize this existential loneliness too late, if it ever does at all, the majestic white-bellied heron one of a million casualties. How many humans will even notice? Who will shed a tear or offer a prayer? What is another’s extinction to a solitary species like ours?
* * *
Eight-thousand miles from the last scattered white-bellied herons, a great blue heron perches on the branch of a dead oak, where he preens and looks down upon the river and the swallows and the mallards and the people as they pass: people chatting with their running mates; people walking with eyes fixed to their screens; people cycling with bodies on autopilot and minds absorbed into the world between their earbuds; people outside for no other reason than that a pandemic forced the closure of the air-conditioned world they know so well. The tall heron stretches on his prominent perch and is unseen by hundreds of human eyes.
I crouch in a clearing amidst the invasive honeysuckle, the most secluded place I can find, and I watch the heron. This is his territory, and he is an anchor in a chaotic world for any who will stop to notice. He is one among ten of thousands of his kind, but he is the only great blue heron here; he sees to this with jabs and squawks and chases on the wing. I admire him, my beloved local heron, but my mind drifts to Bhutan, Myanmar, India — places I’ve never visited and most likely never will — and I wonder, and I worry, about the fate of Ardea insignis. I have lately been reading too much about conservation efforts hampered by COVID-19, surges in poaching, and governments casting environmental regulations to the side for sake of mitigating economic loss; so much for the short-lived fantasies of Nature reclaiming her own. What fate will befall the white-bellied heron? The mainstream news media has not addressed this particular question.
I am not immune from romanticizing the loneliness of the endling. But it is peculiar, when I think about it, for this must be a projection of someone else, not me. When I have personally felt loneliness as long as I can still seek and find the company of the myriad and diverse non-human denizens of this land? Not in recent memory. Certainly not during the pandemic. I have felt as connected as ever despite months without a face-to-face human conversation; it is nature that completes me, not a human companion. Those who go deep into the forests and marshes to find solitude are either fools or imperceptive. There is no loneliness there, not yet. It is instead the cloistered human world that breeds loneliness with each ritual greeting, each shallow attempt at small talk, each reminder that so few of my own kind value what I value, love what I love. If I were ever to be the last human alive on Earth, dare I say some part of me would feel relief.
The great blue heron flies southward from his branch and out of my line of sight. I watch the swirling tree swallows swoop and weave above the river, dining at the aerial buffet of insects invisible to the human eye. For all I know, the last heron on Earth will be a heron most happy and content — but would a lone heron miss the swallows if they were to vanish from Earth? Would a heron miss the cyclists and the joggers and the yapping dogs if these oblivious travelers were to cease to pass by? If the world’s forests were all managed as real estate for sprawling heronries, and if the world’s freshwater bodies were all managed for heron fisheries, would the world’s herons long for some wild place to go to escape heronkind? It is not so hard to imagine. Yet for all my empathy for these silent and solitary birds, I cannot speak for them. Only the heron knows the heron’s needs.
* * *
It is the proper order of things that each species must vanish in time, making way for new adaptive radiation, new forms of life. We must accept this fate of our species too, as surely as we must make peace with the inevitability of our own deaths, and we must accept this fate of each of the 64 species of heron with whom we currently share this Earth. Should we accept that the time of the white-bellied heron is now? Rats and roaches and house sparrows have proven their resilience in the face of the new evolutionary pressure of human domination; Ardea insignis has not. Perhaps this is all there is to it. C’est la vie. C’est la mort. Still I fear, and still I grieve, and still I hope for this critically endangered heron I’ll never see, 8000 miles away, in a land I most likely never will visit.
Maybe I should compose a rational response. I am a philosopher by training. I have come to make a living in the ethics industry. Maybe I should ply my trade.
“In virtue of what (if anything) is it morally wrong to knowingly cause or allow the extinction of a species?” State your thesis and defend it. You will be graded on the cogency, clarity, and consistency of your argument. Be concise. Stay relevant. Avoid digressions that do not clearly bolster the thesis. Whatever you do, do not begin your essay “Since the dawn of time…”
But what good is ethics itself for all that is truly good? Philosophical training is quite useful if one’s goal is to analyze the structure of arguments or to purge one’s writing of the sentiment and emotion that one needs actually to be ethical in any manner more robust than that of the psychopath, who must rely on logic and reason in the absence of empathy. I cleave to the belief that mastery of the norms of philosophical writing is useful for something, but it’s something other than cultivating compassion, humility, wonder, love, or the impassioned desire to share this Earth and our lives with other species.
Some say that, morally, human needs must take priority over the needs of other species. Yet I am a human too, the last I was told, and I am quite certain that my most basic needs include the need for daily acquaintance with individuals of other species, and the need to know that the worlds’ diverse non-humans are healthy and thriving on their own terms. Have you ever thought that you’d rather not live at all than live a life fated to loneliness? Have you ever felt that you’d rather be die yourself than witness the suffering and death of one who is dear to you? Is this a sentiment that humans can grasp? Yet this is how I feel, as a human myself, when I picture a world stripped of wilderness, a forest patch devoid of birdsong, or a river bereft of its herons.
In virtue of what is it morally wrong to knowingly cause or allow the extinction of a species? Is it only this, the injustice done to those other humans who suffer the pain of this existential loneliness? Or does the more basic answer lie outside of us — in the intrinsic worth of the more-than-human world itself? I have my intuitions, yet I would be insincere to pretend to know the most fundamental moral reasons. Perhaps it is a category mistake to situate the question in the domain of moral theory at all.
I believe that it is first a receptivity to beauty — beauty of that higher gamut beyond the reach of words, as Leopold once said of the crane — that impresses on us an awe and fascination with life in all its wondrous diversity. When we are open and receptive, we cannot help but to mourn the loss of any part thereof. When our sentiments are attuned to this Earth, we cannot feel otherwise. Yet it is natural too that some losses weigh more heavily than others. The most impassioned proponent of human equality may be forgiven for feeling more sorrow at the death of a soulmate than the death of a stranger. The most committed ecocentrist may likewise find that some extinctions cut the soul more deeply.
* * *
A heron ascends from the banks of the Punatsang Chu, her long neck tucked in, her long legs outstretched behind, her shadow passing over the water. Deep and soundless wingbeats carry her into the pine forest — a forest shrinking, diminished, yet expansive enough still for the world’s second largest heron to disappear from sight. Time alone will tell of her return.
Her species is one among one million, give or take — one million species slated for eternal removal from the living gallery of biological diversity, all due to a single species that demanded too much from this Earth and yet noticed too little of what the Earth freely offered.
Each one is a loss. Each loss reduces the beauty of this Earth. Each loss is blood on our hands. Yet I can’t help but think that a bioregion deprived of its heron is incomplete in a most strikingly sorrowful way. Leopold conjectured that the sadness of some marshes arose from their once having harbored cranes. I’ve little doubt that his conjecture was correct. But I myself am not sufficiently gregarious to find my more-than-human soulmate in a crane; I am of heron blood. And it was a great blue heron that alighted in an urban park upon one early summer day, a heron who first taught me that a life exhausted by humanity is bound to be a life that’s incomplete, and that the only solitude to fear is the solitude of a life limited by the bounds of one’s own kind.
I still hope for Ardea insignis. Sixty remain, give or take. It is a population bottleneck, but it is enough — if we have the will. The black robin recovered, for now, after its population of breeding females had been reduced to just one, Old Blue, a new Eve of black robins. But we must have the will, the will to share our world, their world.
REFERENCES
The inspiration for this essay was Rohan Menzies, Megha Roa, and Rohit Naniwadekar, 2020, “Assessing the Status of the Critically Endangered White-bellied Heron Ardea insignis in north-east India,” Bird Conservation International.
The references to the crane marsh draw from Aldo Leopold’s “Marshland Elegy” published in A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1949).
The statistic that one million species are threatened with extinction comes from the 2019 Global Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), eds. E. S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Díaz, and H. T. Ngo.
