What on earth does that mean? Well for a better explanation than I can give you in the few short minutes see the following links (http://rewilding-symposium.weebly.com/index.html), (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_rewilding), & (http://www.rewilding.org/pleistocene_rewilding.html). In short, it represents an effort to recreate vanished ecosystems by using closely related "proxy animals" to begin to re-established the diversity that used to roam North America, Asia, and Europe as little as 13,000 years ago. Much has been said and written both pro and against the idea as you will see with a simple Google search of the term "Pleistocene Rewilding". As for myself, I stumbled across it simply by accident conducting a search about the vanished North American Cheetahs of the Ice Age. I was captivated by it immediately and saw the potential right away.
There is really no good reason why such thing as a "Pleistocene Park" (http://www.pleistocenepark.ru/en/) could not exist. And lo-and-behold it has existed sinse 1996. Leave to the Russians to beat us to the punch on this one but I am glad to see it working out. In fact there is some evidence that the presence of the large grazing animals is altering the moss/lichen water logged dominated habitat of northern Siberia to grass land because of the grazing and trampling of the slow growing mosses. Here is an example of suggested proxy-animals on a figure I copied from Geocurrents Web Site. Steve Sanford is responsible for the illustration and I hope he does not mind if I use it here.
I am not sure if they can find a replacement for the mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses though. But other species my be suitably replaced with existing proxies. I know this vision is a bit romantic and some of you may find it crazy, but all we really need is to find existing habitat that is unoccupied or minimally occupied, as in the case of most of the northern hemisphere, then you can start a project of your own if you are a cooperative land owner. As for predators, I will post more about these animals later, I am both for predator reintroduction, and for controlling of their numbers through management (hunting), as in the case of wolves in the lower 48.
This may be where I begin to lose many of you but hold on a second, the ETHICS for doing a thing such as this are based on the fact that the entire northern hemisphere is extremely anemic with regard to large animals and has been for at least 10,000 years. The diversity that we see today in Africa and parts of Asia historically are really the norm, and ancient humans may be partially to blame for the absence of many of those species today. As the ice age waned (geoscientist please for give me - technically we are still in the ice age, we are just in an inter-glacial period between periods of glacial advance) undoubtedly animal populations would have been thrown into a serious flux and numbers greatly reduced as the environment went through massive upheavals. With humans being added to the mix at this critical time (especially in the Americas) we may have been the straw that broke the camels back and tipped many species into extinction.The Pre-Colombian fauna that many environmentalist dream about is in fact a seriously depleted fauna. For example there is very good fossil evidence now that the American Mastodon and the Dire Wolf survived until only about 5-6 thousand years ago at a number sites across the West. This would actually make both species then part of the Pre-Colombian fauna.
So how does all this relate to the Texas-Serengeti Project (TSP), well I feel that the TSP is already conducting this experiment across millions of acres in Texas, mostly on private ranches behind high fences, but some species have escaped and are now free ranging across vast areas, as in the case of the Chital (Axis) Deer, Black Buck Antelope, Aoudad Sheep, and Corsican Sheep. Ths following are examples of free range animals seen commonly across Texas these days.
Inevitably, these animals can become a problem and have to be hunted to keep their populations from getting out of control, and our free ranging mountain lions are simply not dense enough in number to put a serious dent in their populations. The only other alternative is predator reintroduction which I have said I will cover in a later post. So as I see it, we have A LOT of available land with only whitetail deer on much of it. Texas land owners have already become familiar with the benefit to their pocket book by stocking their ranches with exotic animals, why not create a Pleistocene Park or ranch here in the USA. I would love you feed back on this issue, till next time,
St8sh00tr..........
