Conservation as a Matter of Managing People a review by Dwight Garner

Conservation as a Matter of Managing People
- a review by Dwight Garner

REWILDING THE WORLD

Dispatches From the Conservation Revolution

By Caroline Fraser

400 pages. Metropolitan Books. $28.50.

About three-quarters of the way through her new book, “Rewilding the World,” Caroline Fraser introduces us to Bhadai Tharu. A “cheerful, round-faced 43-year-old man” from Nepal, Mr. Tharu lost his left eye in 2003 when he was attacked by a tiger.

That’s the kind of event that can make a person hold a grudge. The next morning Mr. Tharu might have invested in a big gun and a bigger box of ammunition. Instead, he began giving interviews that made him a hero to conservationists.

“Tigers are ornaments of our forest,” Mr. Tharu declared. “We humans have to give them space and learn to coexist.”

Mr. Tharu wasn’t attacked just anywhere. He lost his eye in the so-called Khata corridor, a mile-wide finger of land that conservationists have developed to help large animals move between smaller wildlife sanctuaries in India and Nepal. That this tiger leapt on Mr. Tharu was a sign that the Khata corridor was, well, working.

Mr. Tharu’s story takes up only a few pages of “Rewilding the World,” but it neatly underlines some of the central tensions this book explores. Proponents of rewilding — a relatively new ecological idea that stresses the restoration of animal habitats and the importance of migration corridors — argue that healthy ecosystems need large carnivores.

The people who’ve got to co-exist with these beasts tend to be less enthusiastic about this prospect. Mr. Tharu’s sanguine response to losing his eye made him a rare specimen indeed.

Ms. Fraser’s book is a continent-hopping examination of the rewilding movement in action, a movement she calls “the great project of conservation in recent years” and “a Marshall Plan for the planet.” The three central requirements of rewilding, she notes, are sometimes called the three C’s: “cores, corridors and carnivores.”

Cores are national parks and wildlife refuges that already exist. Corridors are links among these cores, Ms. Fraser writes, vital “because isolation and fragmentation of wilderness erode biodiversity.” And carnivores? “Because large carnivores regulate other predators and prey, exercising an influence on the ecosystem far out of proportion to their numbers, their protection and reintroduction is crucial.”

One better-known example of a rewilding project is the so-called Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y. It proposes to provide corridors between those two areas in the United States and Canada, allowing wolves and other animals to travel freely between them.

“Rewilding the World” examines Y2Y and many other projects, and it’s a thoughtful examination of rewilding and its discontents. The benefits of corridors to the natural world are fairly obvious. The problem is the human aspect.

People are hard-wired to be fearful of large carnivores. What’s more, it’s hard for the poor to see the economic advantage of rewilding. Humans don’t like conservationists telling them what they can and can’t do with the land that surrounds them. As one conservationist counterintuitively points out to Ms. Fraser: “Conservation is about managing people. It’s not about managing wildlife.”

“Rewilding the World” is an important book but it’s never an interesting one. You know what this meal will taste like by the fifth page, and no surprise courses await. Ms. Fraser visits project after project, racking up frequent-flier miles like a khaki-wearing extra from “Up in the Air.”

But Mr. Tharu aside, few interesting characters emerge. No narrative tension builds. All the faces, names and worthy-sounding endeavors begin to blur in your mind. There’s also virtually no playfulness or wit in “Rewilding the World.” It’s a data-spitting machine, full of the kind of prosaic nature writing that gives the genre a bad name.

About a project in Brazil, Ms. Fraser emotes, in a not atypical passage: “I saw mutual respect between cattlemen and biologists; I saw a committed corps of volunteers helping to compile fauna census data, radio-tracking data, data on the health parameters and behavior and territories of rare, endemic wildlife. I saw passion and conviction and the will to make rewilding happen.” I saw my Earnest-O-Meter explode and frighten my dogs.

The memorable insights come from other writers. She paraphrases David Quammen, for example, on why linking wildlife areas is essential: “What do you get when you take a beautiful Persian carpet, he asked, and cut it into 36 pieces? Thirty-six separate carpets? Or 36 worthless, fraying scraps? Substitute ecosystems for carpet, he suggested, and you begin to see the problem.”

There are scattered nice moments in “Rewilding the World.” Ms. Fraser describes how the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea inadvertently became perhaps the ultimate wildlife corridor. “It only took a million land mines to do it,” she writes.

And it’s painful to read how the relationship between humans and elephants in southern Africa has deteriorated, thanks to the trauma inflicted upon the animals by poachers and habitat destruction. One park official calls them “elephants with grudges.”

Ms. Fraser — she previously wrote “God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church” — convinces you that genuine progress is being made on the rewilding front, even if the early steps are necessarily small ones. She has learned, as have politicians, that it’s easier to undertake feasibility studies and sign memorandums of agreement than it is to make real change happen.

Ms. Fraser’s observation that rewilding has an “existential” value that may supersede its ecological and economic values hits home. She quotes the always eloquent E. O. Wilson: “Isn’t it morally wrong to destroy the rest of life?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/books/22book.html?ref=books