The Ministry for the Future

97

There are about sixty billion birds alive on Earth. They’ve been quicker than anyone to inhabit the rewilded land and thrive. Recall they are all descended from theropods. They are dinosaurs, still alive among us. Sixty billion is a good number, a healthy number.

The great north tundra did not melt enough to stop the return of the caribou herds to their annual migrations. Animals moved out from the refuge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and repopulated the top of the world. In Siberia they’re establishing a Pleistocene Park, and re-introducing a resuscitated version of the woolly mammoth; this has been a problematic project, but meanwhile the reindeer have been coming back there, along with all the rest of the Siberian creatures, musk oxen, elk, bears, wolves, even Siberian tigers.

In the boreal forests to the south of the tundra and taiga, wolves and grizzlies have prowled outward from the Canadian Rockies. This is the biggest forest on Earth, wrapping the world around the sixtieth latitude north, and all of it is now being returned to health.

It’s the same right down to the equator, and then past the equator, south to the southern ends of the world. Certain inhospitable areas everywhere had been almost empty of humans all along; now these have been connected up by habitat corridors, and the animals living on these emptier lands are protected and nourished as needed. Often this means just leaving them alone. Many are now tagged, and more all the time. There is coming into being a kind of Internet of Animals, whatever that means. Better perhaps to say they are citizens now, and have citizens’ rights, and therefore a census is being taken. Watersheds upstream from cities are adopted by urban dwellers who observe their fellow citizens from afar, along with making occasional visits in person. Wild animals’ lives and deaths are being noted by people. They mean something, they are part of a meaning. Not since the Paleolithic have animals meant so much to humans, been regarded so closely and fondly by we their cousins. The land that supports these animals also supports our farms and cities as well, in a big network of networks.

What’s good is what’s good for the land.

There are fewer humans than before. The demographic peak is in the past, we are a little fewer than we were before, and on a trajectory for that to continue. People speak now of an optimum number of humans; some say two billion, others four; no one really knows. It will be an experiment. All of us in balance, we the people, meaning we the living beings, in a single ecosystem which is the planet. Fewer people, more wild animals. Right now that feels like coming back from a time of illness. Like healing, like getting healthy. The structure of feeling in our time. Population dynamics in play, as always. Maybe that makes us all living together in this biosphere some kind of supra-organism, who can say.

In a high meadow, wild bighorn sheep. Their lambs gambol. When you see that gamboling with your own eyes, you’ll know something you didn’t know before. What will you know? Hard to say, but something like this: whether life means anything or not, joy is real. Life lives, life is living.