2312

Extracts (16)

It was never the official policy of any unit larger than the individual terrarium, and even those would seldom say anything explicit about their animals—where they were sending them, how many, by what transport, why—nothing. The assumption is that the coordination that obviously had to have happened was all kept offline, and is still not properly documented. Looking back, such an absence of public statement does not seem so surprising, because we are used to it now; but at the time it was a relatively new phenomenon, and there were widespread complaints that the disappearance of public policy statements meant they lived in sheer chaos. No order obtained in the solar system, the balkanization was complete; the story of humanity had for a time disappeared like a stream of meltwater on the surface of a glacier, falling into a moulin and running thereafter invisibly under the ice. No one controlled it; no one knew where it was going; no one even knew what was happening

from the very beginning there were people who argued that it was wrong in many different ways: that it was an ecological disaster, that most of the animals would die; that the land would be devastated, botanical communities wrecked, people endangered, their agriculture ruined. The images of the animals’ return could resemble World War II parachute attacks or alien invasion movies, and the fear of similar casualty rates created trauma in several places. During the descent some animals were shot out of the sky like shooting-range skeet. And yet on the whole down they came, landed, survived, endured. For a few weeks or months, therefore, it was all anyone spoke about, and all shouted at the tops of their lungs. And the massive flood of images was ambiguous, to say the least. Some cried invasion, but others cried reunion. Rewilding, assisted migration, the revolt of the beasts; and at some point it was called the reanimation, and that term got capitalized and gradually stuck and spread, superseding all the rest. And in the end it did not matter what name people gave it: the animals were there

many accused the terraria of fomenting revolution on Earth. Others called it an inoculation, and there were microbiologists who spoke of reverse transcription. The introduction of an inoculant into an empty ecological niche does indeed cause a revolution in the biome. Rapid change can be chaotic, traumatic. In this case animals did often die; their food was all eaten and then there were population crashes, scavengers did well, always predator and prey fluctuated wildly, and the plant life metamorphosed under their impact. Fields changed, forests changed, suburbs and cities changed. Eradication campaigns were met with fierce resistance and fierce support efforts. Sometimes it came to a kind of war of the animals, but people always led the charge on both sides

even in the moment of balkanization, Earth was central to history. An estimated twelve thousand terraria had been raising endangered animal populations for more than a century, strengthening genomic diversity as they did, and the whole point of the exercise had been to serve as a dispersed zoo or ark or inoculant bank, waiting for the right moment to reintroduce these creatures to their wounded home. That the moment had come struck some in the terraria as an overoptimistic assessment, but in the end almost all had agreed to heed the call, and they mounted a formidable armada

much of the organizational work for the reanimation was later traced to a working group associated with the seventh Lion of Mercury, who had died a few years previous to the event. Some Terran governments had been contacted, and those friendly to the idea had provided permits. Assisted migration was already a familiar concept, and invasive species had already rearranged the world anyway; people had struggled against the mass extinction without success, and much of Earth was now occupied by the toughest weeds and scavengers. There was talk of a coming world of seagulls and ants, cockroaches and crows, coyotes and rabbits—a star thistle world, depopulate and impoverished—a big broken factory farm. Reintroducing lost species was therefore welcome to many Terrans. That there would be inevitable political consequences was only to say it was a collective human action; those always have consequences

the twelve thousand terraria and a few score Terran states apparently agreed to execute the plan in the first half of 2312, but as most agreements were off the record, this is anecdotal only. For the most part the oral records of participants, made years later, are the only account

After the reanimation, problems on Earth became ecological and logistical, and focused on transport, dispersion, mitigation, compensation, and legal and physical defense. The reanimation itself was not the end of the story; indeed many decades were to pass before it was understood to have been a key moment in the eventual