Samuel Matlack writes:

On the Galápagos island of Floreana, a giant tortoise went extinct some 150 years ago, after human settlement. Conservationists are now working to bring its descendants, discovered on nearby islands, back to Floreana. But there is a problem: Rats, which came with the settlers and eat tortoise eggs and babies, run rampant there. If you could help bring back the tortoise by poisoning all of the island’s rats, would you do it?

Here is an important detail: The poison is brodifacoum, which kills through bleeding from internal organs and from eyes, nose, and mouth; the rats slowly stop moving but remain conscious until they die. The process takes about a week, which is important because this prevents the rats from associating the poison pellets with sickness.

The scenario is not hypothetical — the group Island Conservation plans to see it through — and it is just one of many that Emma Marris presents in her 2021 book Wild Souls. Australia kills hundreds of thousands of cats annually to save birds. Alberta has shot over a thousand wolves from helicopters to save caribou.

These scenarios illustrate a point the historian William Cronon makes in his 1995 book Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Wilderness, he notes paradoxically, is “a human creation.” The ideal of nature as it used to be before human intervention and before we introduced what we now call “invasive species” is one that Western urbanites created in the late nineteenth century, chiefly as a foil for their own modernity. Their signature achievement was to designate large swaths of the American landscape as national parks, intended to be as free as possible from human interference, which often meant expelling native peoples who had long been cultivating that land. Cronon describes this as a “dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural.” His aim is to show how this vision still permeates much of environmentalism and stands in the way of responsible action toward nature, particularly in the places where we actually live. [Continue reading…]