The Ministry for the Future

72

The habitat corridor idea was just one early move in the larger Half Earth project, but first things first. With wild animals critically endangered everywhere, it was necessary to do what we could right now, without delay. And habitat corridors had an already-existing tradition of methodologies and legal instruments already worked up. The famous Y2Y corridor, Yukon to Yellowstone, was going great. Not that this was the hardest corridor on Earth to establish, the Canadian Rockies being almost empty down their spine, and including a lot of federal and tribal land protected as parks and the like, on both sides of the border. Not to mention including two of the great remaining ecosystem populations, with the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem animals prospering at the south end, and the Arctic ecosystem animals doing fairly well in the north, if you didn’t count climate change melting their land or ice out from under them. Both populations might start migrating to the middle, but the corridor allowed them to do that. And both ecozones had relatively healthy populations of mammals and birds, in that they were not too poisoned, and big in number and geographical extent. As proof of concept, Y2Y has done wonders for showing people how it all could work. Animals had free passage up and down it, and protection from hunting. Roads still active in the region had been given under- and over-passes. Fences had breaks in them or were torn down entirely. Millions of animals were tagged, and thus now participating in the so-called Internet of Animals, which is basically a gigantic suite of scientific studies. It was not far from true that we had a better census going with the mammals and birds in the Y2Y corridor than we did for the humans in it.

All good! And tacking on a Y2Y-Cal, an east-west corridor from Yellowstone to Yosemite, had not been very difficult either. California was already in the vanguard of animal protection, going back to the days when they had saved the Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep from extinction by an effort now being studied and copied all over the world, and around that same time they had forbidden outright the killing of mountain lions. Connecting that great bio-island to Yellowstone meant getting Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Oregon, and Nevada on board, and though there were political complications in all these states, the truth was they were mostly emptying of humans across huge swathes of their rural land, and if public and private entities were offered a good enough deal, which mainly just meant offering them enough money for conservation easementlike arrangements, they usually went for it. The corridors could be patched together, the interstates finessed by under- and over-passes, the hunting laws changed, and the nights in particular given over to animals, as they mostly always had been. People diurnal, animals nocturnal, this wasn’t entirely just them trying to avoid us. A lot of them lived that way even in the wilderness. So, lots of people were paid for motion-sensitive night photos of animals they sent to us, like bounties in the old days but reversed, people paid for keeping them alive rather than killing them. Local governments were often enthusiastic, sensing tourism, and various federal agencies liked the plan, especially BLM and the Forest Service, which for the purposes of this project were the two agencies that counted most. If we could keep under the radar in Washington, where assholes congregate and bray loudly about the God-given right to kill everything in creation without restraint, we could usually make corridor creation work quite well.

So, fine. Corridors were extended from the south end of Y2Y in multiple directions, southwest to California, then right down the Sierra spine of California to its big deserts, then also west and north to the Cascades and Olympic Range, and then also down the continental divide, down Colorado and New Mexico right to the border. People were talking about a Y2T, meaning Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, just following the great line that forms the spine of both Americas. Most of the Latin American countries involved were already doing things like it, and Ecuador and Costa Rica had been leaders all along. It could happen.

So, but what about going east? Meaning east into the eastern half of the United States, and the eastern half of Canada?

Well, most of Canada is empty, really. Of course they have their wheat belt, and the Highway One Corridor, and their big cities, sure. But most of that is near the US border. And Canada is big. Really, they could lead the Half Earth movement without even changing much; shift two percent of their human population, and over half of their country would be left to the animals. Of course a lot of the world turns out to be like that. But Canada, wow.

The United States, not so much. The farm states have a well-distributed population, and farms occupy every square inch of land that can be cultivated, and they’ve killed off all the wild animals they can, in particular the top predators. So naturally they have a deer infestation, thus a tick infestation, thus a human plague of Lyme disease and so on. Oops! Ecology in action! And it’s true they still have the usual super-competent omnivore scavengers, the coyotes and raccoons and possums and such. But other than that, no. The Midwest has been treated like a continent-sized factory floor for assembling grocery store commodities, and anything that got in the way of that was designated a pest or vermin and killed off. Just the way it was. Part of a long-standing culture. It had been the same in California’s central valley, and it was still in the ag regions of the South.

So when you advocated for wild animals in these old-fashioned parts of the country, it was like advocating for locusts or your favorite plant disease. Even though they were getting it backwards in terms of source of disease. And living in pools of pesticides that were chewing on their hormones and their DNA in ways sure to kill them. But that was a case that had to be made, and for sure there were headwinds. There were people screaming at you at meetings. There were men with guns foaming at the mouth, sick with the anticipation of shooting and killing some animal, any animal, such that their target might easily shift from wolf to man, if they thought they could get away with it. The situation had to be handled with a touch of delicacy.

First, money. Significant applications of money. Then persuasion. Hedgerows often saved soil, they built soil, they were considered worth the land they took. Native plant strips, the same. No-till ag, the same. Habitat corridors had to be seen first as extensions of that kind of agriculture, done to increase soil building and soil resilience. Wide hedgerows were the wedge for this topic, the least objectionable innovation. Then the idea of wild animals had to be brought in as kind of pest control devices. Of course those who grazed domestic animals were not pleased, but since the mad cow disease scare in the previous decade, with its subsequent collapse of beef demand, there were simply far fewer domestic beasts out there to worry about. Hogs were enclosed, chickens were enclosed; those supposedly terrible wolves would now mostly be eating tick-infested crop-eating deer; it was the deer who were the pests, deer who devastated crops! It was a matter of crop protection to have wild predators on the land! And you could even hunt them later on, if some culling was found necessary. Although making this argument was a bit disingenuous, as some of the more hotheaded among my colleagues were all for doing their culling by hunting the hunters. But we who were friendly Midwestern spokesperson types emphasized the pest control aspect of re-introducing wild animals, without going into detail concerning which pests we were talking about.

And to tell the truth, the upper Midwest, and the states west of it all the way to Seattle, were hurting bad. They were emptying out anyway. People could make more money ranching buffalo and tending wildlife sanctuaries than they could by farming. Those upper plains were never meant to be farmed, and people had learned that the hard way right from the start. Now all the young people were taking off and never coming back.

What would make them stay? Wildlife protection! Especially when you could make a good living at it, better than the debt-ridden drought-stricken winter-blasted poisonous hardscrabble farming that people had been attempting for the previous two centuries. All that effort had gotten them nothing but a dust bowl and mounting debt, and kids moving away, and early death. A category error from the start, an ecological illiteracy. Time for a change.

So, we would go to county supervisors, and town council meetings, and church meetings, and state legislature meetings, and county fairs, and trade shows, and school assemblies, and every kind of meeting, all the meetings no one ever thinks to go to and deeply regrets going to the moment they do, and we would make our case and show the photos and the figures, and see what we could do. Offer them woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers if that’s what it took, although to tell the truth people in the upper Midwest seldom go for that. Their idea of charismatic megafauna is their chocolate Lab.

It was working pretty well, when we ran into a snag. A militia group with a burr up its ass declared that even though we had the right to cross the state border from Montana into North Dakota, leading a herd of buffalo as the vanguard of a suite of animals that included, yes, lions and panthers and bears, oh my!—they were going to stop us. It was their God-given right as Americans to stand their ground and kill trespassers of any kind, animal or human. And some private property owners along the state border were willing to let these guys congregate and block our passage when we crossed the state line. They organized a mob who all drove to these properties in their fat pick-up trucks and prepared to meet us with their guns blazing. It was a flashpoint, a media event.

Well, fine. Media events can be good. The trick is to handle them right. Which of course includes not getting killed.

So, we could send in a herd of ten thousand buffalo and crush them underfoot, like in that movie. Very satisfying, but not really serving the larger purpose. Not a good hearts and minds kind of move. Or we could walk in front of the animals with our families, put the kids in the vanguard holding their pet ducks and raccoons, and overwhelm them with love and kindness and puppies. Uncertain that, and dangerous. A great media image, and yet not a good idea.

We ended up going with cowboys wrangling a herd of wild horses. Also some sheep and sheepdogs, as if to reconcile the old Western fight between those two competing ways of wrecking the land. And these were wild horses, and wild sheep and wild mountain goats. The sheepdogs were domestic of course, they were just there to get dogs involved. Not that they aren’t great at sheepherding, because they are. But they were useful for more than that. They were the Midwest’s emotional support animals, their link between man and beast.

Then, behind that vanguard of cowboys and sheepdogs, the whole parade. Buffalo, elk, moose, bears—it was like an old-fashioned circus come to town. We kind of wished we did have a woolly mammoth or two. And we lowballed the wolves and the mountain lions; they didn’t like to keep company with us anyway, and they could sneak in later at night, in their usual way. It wasn’t natural to even see a mountain lion, they like to lie low and are extremely nocturnal. In my whole life I’ve only seen one once in the wild, and in truth it was terrifying. I thought I was done for.

So the day came, and we alerted the press, and people showed up from all over the world. So many people wanted to march with us that there were more people than animals, and the animals were getting spooked, naturally. But we started up anyway, right after dawn, and hit the state line across a ten-mile front, like a World War One over-the-top assault. And it did look kind of over the top.

Those poor animal murderers never had a chance. Actually quite a few of them stood their ground and shot a bunch of animals. Mostly deer, it turned out, as we had sent them out as scouts, poor guys. The first wave. Deer are the sad sacks of American wildlife, so beautiful, so defenseless, so numerous, so dim. Their chief predator is cars. They never seem to get it, about cars or anything else; or maybe they do, but they don’t have a good way to transmit what they learn to their kids, if they happen to get lucky and live past their youth. It’s important always to remember that even if they’re as common as rats, some kind of mammal weed, they are still beautiful wild animals, getting by on their own in a dangerous world. I always say hi when I see them, and try to remember to get the same thrill I would if I were to see someone unusual, like a wolverine. It’s hard, but it’s a habit you can build. Love your deer! Just fence your veggie garden really well.

So, the day went about as well as we hoped. A few deer were killed, a few animal murderers and all-round jerks were embarrassed by the lame ways they had to stand down or slip away and pretend it had never happened. We even got good film of pick-up trucks driving away at speed, also of a duck hunter’s blind demolished in a charge of buffalo who didn’t even notice they had run something over. Cowboys did figure-eights and stood in their saddles and twirled their lassoes, sheepdogs nimbly nipped sheep through gates, and the images and stories went out worldwide. It was just one moment of the storm, but after that, habitat corridors were more of a thing. E. O. Wilson’s great books shot to the top of the non-fiction bestseller lists, and we could continue the work with more understanding and public support.

On to the Half Earth!