Community science led recovery of locally rare species is the best and most accessible metric or unit of organizing a resilient climate for all.
Everybody wants and needs the utilitarian value of ecosystem function. Measuring the recovery of intrinsically valuable extirpated species is how we get there.
Herbiciding and nitrating tree plantations is proving to be a carbon credit nightmare. Nature based solutions is the road forward.
Clearly restoring entire foodwebs of historic ecosystems is the lowest cost, highest gain strategy for robustly stabilizing flood, fire and drought cycles that loom imminent within the climate discourse.
The metrics for how we measure and talk about restoration are both functional, hydrology, soil carbon etc and in terms of intrinsic value, i.e. rare species recovery etc. How scientists define a species and thus extinction, is important and can be very political.
So species end up going extinct while the lobbyists and lawyers spend years duking it out. 2/3 of planetary wildlife has been wiped out in the last 50 years of extractive agriculture, industrial forestry and overgrazing.
Everyone wants to drink pure water, breathe clean air, eat healthy food and live amidst the biodiverse magic of an untrammeled paradise and in that sense everyone is an environmentalist. Through sheer editorial cunning, modern journalism (or rather PR agents, news editors end up copy/pasting) has built an entire “objective” frame that some people are “environmentalists” and others are not. This unfortunate perversion of basic humanity has installed a cognitive dissonance deep into the psyche of our modern condition.
If you trace back the food web of big box consumerism you arrive at the spearhead of industrial extraction, followed by throngs of biologists sweeping reams of policy papers to mop up the blood baths of extinction. Thank goodness for them. I envy not this work. For it is a fine line of mental health balancing to graduate the academy with massive loans, a high cost of living and then realize that apparently the only jobs are working for the extractivists; and as the old saying goes the mouth doth not bite the hand that feedeth.
This is how we arrived at what Daniel Shmactenberger has called the “pseudo-religion” of big bureaucracy with its high priests interpreting the nuances of words and policies at the highest levels of government and suddenly we have continental scale ecosystems being managed by ministers of commodity production, rather than stewards of bioregional community.
Extirpation is a fancy word for local extinction, and important if you are trying to communicate specific details about the life story of a particular species, like when arguing about the relative merits of a new mega-dam or giga-factory or tree plantation getting funded by the World Bank.
Bioregionally, or from an indigenous lens we can say extinct instead of extirpated, as in “salmon are extinct in the watershed of my ancestors ” See what happened there? We re-positioned extinction into a cultural (place-based) context. In our policy centric wonk-itude we de-contextualize the deeper meaning of extinction, which is the epidemic collapse of historic food webs across most of the planet.
We reduced the inextricably intertwined biological and cultural diversity across continents to a sad collateral damage of scorched earth agriculture policies that ostensibly “feeds the people” but in reality maintains monopolies of behemoth food companies filling up big box stores with “flavor-packed” empty calories.
I write this from the San Juan Islands, hallowed lands for me, as twas the place of my conception. Elk, wolves and beavers went extinct here during the recent colonial era. These keystone species would have maintained nutrient cycles and floodplains and consequently a consistent supply of protein and plant carbohydrates that fed nations of Samish, Lummi and Saanich and equally important the wild food webs that inspired the art and stories that binds them to the land and water.
The old mythology of America asks us to kneel before the lords of nitrate and glyphosate and rejoice with gratitude while the ivory halls of the academy debate the rates of extinction.
Our new mythology, embraces restoration forestry, restoration agriculture, and restoration grazing.
These can be un-greenwashable because it’s very hard to fake the complete return of historically present species, and it doesn’t take an endless paper trail of highly paid professionals to validate. This can be validated by community scientists.
And….hierarchical expert-led validation is arguably an important secondary mechanism for checks and balances.
Be fruitful and multiply… wildlife.
