Donlan quoted in New Yorker article about "rewilding" places
For most of the past several millennia, Flevoland, a province which sits more or less at the center of the Netherlands, lay at the bottom of an inlet of the North Sea. A massive drainage project in the nineteen-fifties allowed Flevoland to emerge out of the muck of the former seafloor. Now, Flevoland is home to the Oostvaardersplassen, a wilderness that was also constructed, Genesis-like, from the mud. The reserve occupies fifteen thousand almost perfectly flat acres, and biologists have stocked it with the sorts of animals that would have inhabited the region in prehistoric times, had it not at that point been underwater. In many cases, the animals had been exterminated, so they had to settle for the next best thing; for example, in place of the aurochs, a large and now extinct bovine, they brought in Heck cattle, a variety specially bred by Nazi scientists. The cattle grazed and multiplied, along with red deer, horses, foxes, geese, egrets, and other animals. With a certain amount of squinting, the herds of large mammals could be said to resemble the great migratory herds of Africa. Visitors now pay up to forty-five dollars each to take safari-like tours of the park. Such is the success of the Dutch experiment that it has inspired a new movement. Dubbed Rewilding Europe, the movement takes the old notion of wilderness and turns it inside out. Perhaps it’s true that genuine wilderness can only be destroyed, but new “wilderness,” what the Dutch call “new nature,” can be created. Every year, tens of thousands of acres of economically marginal farmland in Europe are taken out of production. Why not use this land to produce “new nature” to replace what’s been lost? Writer visits the Oostvaardersplassen to learn more about rewilding, and tours the preserve with Frans Vera, one of the biologists who argued for its creation. Mentions some of the surprising ways in which the animals have behaved since settling there, and discusses the concerns raised by animal-welfare activists, who have objected to the widespread starvation that has occurs in the preserve, and which provides gruesome images for Dutch TV. (Often the dying animals are shown huddled up against the fences of the Oostvaardersplassen, a scene that inevitably leads to comparisons with the Holocaust.) Describes the efforts to “back-breed” today’s cows, creating a new animal that approximates, in its physical characteristics, the now-extinct aurochs. Describes the origins of the idea of rewilding in a paper written by Michael Soulé and Reed Noss, two American professors, and the ways in which Europeans have adopted and changed the meaning of the term. (Among other things, the idea of rewilding has become more gastronomically appealing: it is expected that visitors to the continent’s rewilded regions will be able to enjoy not just the safari-like tours but also the local cuisine.) Writer visits a rewilded preserve in Spain, the Campanarios de Azaba, where she encounters vultures.
Read more (subscribers only)
