Discuss: Taking Wildness in Hand: Rescuing Species

Torreya taxifolia has been rewilded!  On July 30, 11 crew members of Torreya Guardians and documenters gathered in Waynesville NC to undertake the first rewilding (into purported ancestral native habitat) of this highly endangered conifer.  Thirty seedlings were purchased from a nursery in South Carolina, and then assisted in “migrating” into the southern Appalachian Mountains.

Ten of the seedlings were planted in forest habitat at Corneille Bryan Native Garden (Lake Junaluska, 2600 feet elevation).  The remainder were planted beneath full deciduous canopy on private land at 3,400 feet.  Visit a photo-essay of this historic conservation action at:

http://www.torreyaguardians.org/waynesville-rewilding.html

In a recent interview, Professor Terry Root, Stanford University and one of the recipients of the IPCC NOBEL Peace Prize recipients, addressed the issues taken up in your article

Climate change will cause a mass extinction of plants and animals. That’s what biologist Terry Root argues:
-  We’ll have to prioritize which species we are going to save.

She was asked “How is climate change affecting the world’s species?”
-  I have analyzed about 1800 different species and found that about 80 percent of them are changing in the direction that you would expect for global warming. There are two major ways in which species are changing. One is that they start doing things at a different time than before, such as breeding or migrating earlier in the year. On average, behavioural changes have moved about five days per decade in the period 1960 to 2000, that is a total of around 20 days!. The other change is that species move geographically to where it is colder; they move toward the poles and they move to higher elevations. 

In response to the question, “Can there be other explanations for their movement?”, she replied:

“Some have argued that species moved because of habitat destruction, but if that was the case, they wouldn’t all be moving in the same way, toward, for instance, the poles. With elevation it is harder to tell. It might be that species move to higher elevations because human development is at lower altitudes. If I only had data on elevation I couldn’t be drawing the conclusion that I am doing, but because I have the data on migration toward the poles, I think it is pretty safe to say that climate change is the reason.”
 
She was asked, “What is the problem? So, plants and animals are moving due to climate change; it seems as if they are adapting to
it.”
According to her, “The problem is that they have to move across fields and cities and roads and other things that we have put in their way. They may not be able to move; in these cases humans will have to help them move or they will become extinct. Unlike humans, most species have a very narrow space in which they can survive.”
Professor Root believes that we are at the beginning of another mass extinction. Although there have been six mass extinctions so far in the history of the planet, this one will be caused by only one species. If the temperature goes up two degrees Celsius, we will probably lose around 400 000 species, according to her. That is approximately 20 percent of the known species. If the temperature goes up four degrees Celsius, we could lose 50 percent!

She answered the question, “Is two degrees increase a realistic prospect?” with:

“Oh hell no! I don’t think we can keep it at two degrees, given what America is doing. Obama is trying to fix the mess but there is simply too much resistance. But maybe if enough states within the U.S. get serious about it, we might be able to.”

But does it really matter to humans that species become extinct?

She says that “if we lose predators of pests, or major pollinators, that is something very serious. Something like 80 percent of all crops are pollinated by wild insects such as bees, ants and butterflies, and also birds. We have seen that bees are disappearing. They’re dying from a fungus, because heating causes stress. This affects their immune system and makes them susceptible to sickness. Crops would largely die out.”

So what can we do?

“We’ll have to prioritize which species we are going to save. There is no way we can save all – this is not apparently a Noah’s Ark opportunity.  But we can build corridors to help animals move, and we can physically relocate plants, and what I am suggesting is so called “triage”—this is a term used by doctors on a battlefield, when there are so many dying and wounded soldiers that the doctors can’t save all of them. They have to make judgments and only work on the ones that they can save within, say, an hour and a half. What I want to do is to find some generalities, something to help us make such judgments.”
 
“We have to ask: what species are possible to save? We have to focus our resources. We should also ask: what species do we really need? To answer this question we would answer species that provide materials, such as cotton and trees and important pollinators and predators of pests. Species with many similar relatives might not be as important to save as those that are unique. And we should also pay attention to what people like, tigers for instance and other ‘charismatic megafauna”. If we make judgments, we can save some of the species that are now going extinct. We can build corridors for animals to travel and physically move plants. But we can’t save them all.”

In other words, “Noah’s Ark” in our time will have to be a very restrictive one!

She concludes, “I’m sad to say that we’re leaving the next generation with a hell of a planet.”

Max Jerneck (Lund, Sweden) and Tom R. Burns (Uppsala, Sweden)