Nature Wars

We're used to news of the natural world being dominated by stories of decline, loss and extinction, and those trends are undoubtedly very real. But we also have problems of super-abundance, and those are all the more difficult when they stem from perfectly valid programmes to save rare species. Jim Sterba, from the Wall Street Journal came to Harvard Forest a few weeks back to give a talk on this topic through his new book 'Nature Wars - how wildlife comebacks turned backyards into battlegrounds'. It's a great read, and I recommend it - full of eye-watering facts and appalled realisation of the size of unanticipated problems.

White-tailed buck

What particularly struck me was the chapter on deer - the white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginiana. By the end of the 19th Century, habitat loss and hunting had reduced the population to 350000 across the whole US. In a century or so, they have rebounded to 40 million or so, and despite an 'informal army' of hunters as numerous as the ten largest armies in the world, and an annual kill of more than 6 million deer, are still rapidly increasing in numbers. Some of the consequences of this super-abundance are familiar to us in Scotland – hollowed-out woodlands deprived of understorey, regeneration and non-deer wildlife, people and deer injured and killed in collisions with cars, damage to farm crops, and a ‘mass transit system for ticks carrying Lyme disease’.  Some of the causes are familiar to us as well – hunting lobbies intent on maintaining high populations for their sport, and a focus on shooting bucks rather than does. But Sterba emphasizes a new factor – the regrowth of the great north-eastern forests, and their new residential use.

From the diorama pictures in my last post, you’ll have picked up on the trajectory of the forests here – the massive transformation by European settlers from a mosaic of old forest and beaver/native American maintained open areas to open farmland. The Erie Canal and later railroads opened the much better soils of the MidWest to export-led agriculture, and New England and the rural east emptied – and the trees returned – but so did the people. What’s not obvious – especially to summer visitors – is actually how many houses there are behind the green walls of roadside trees. Not until the leaves fall do you see a forest perforated by houses everywhere. In Massachusetts houses can be built without restriction anywhere which has a frontage on any ‘Town’ road – which includes all the rough tracks and dead-end dirt roads on which I regularly get lost while out cycling. The dean of the Yale School of Forestry, John Gordon, made a great observation:

“If you looked down at Connecticut from on high in summer, what you’d see was mostly unbroken forest. If you did the same thing in late fall, after the leaves had fallen, what you’d see was stockbrokers.”

This Perforated Forest is essentially a massive deer sanctuary. Residences have a kind of petro-ecology of nutritious lawns and shrubs, mown and fertilised, and are often undisturbed except during the periods when cars hum with commuters or kids at the beginning and end of working days. Not only that, but this perforated forest is largely off-limits to the deer’s principal predator – humans. For example, restrictions on firearm use near roads or houses make about 60% of Massachusetts safe for deer apart from vehicle collisions – and make even the task of stabilising deer numbers almost impossible. Add to this mix a range of public attitudes which include energetic anti-hunting attitudes, and the ‘almost impossible’ has in many places moved to ‘impossible’.

It’s fascinating that, throughout ‘Nature Wars’,  there is no coherent conservation philosophy of how we should manage these novel landscapes or runaway species management ‘successes’. Here, as in Scotland, we have no coherent vision, just advocacy from partisan groups promoting their species or habitat or land use at the expense of others. In a crowded world, with space at a premium, perhaps this is understandable. But I don't think that conservation philosophy has really accepted that we’re in a post-Eden world, and that we need a new mental architecture to help us manage messy issues like this – novel, widespread, and where an objective of ‘make it more natural’ becomes both unattainable and meaningless.