The Rediscovery of the Wild

We frequently benefit from the advantages of connecting with within reach, domesticated nature -- a urban park, a yard backyard. yet this e-book makes the provocative case for the need of connecting with wild nature -- untamed, unmanaged, now not encompassed, self-organizing, and unencumbered and unmediated by way of technological artifice. we will be able to love the wild. we will worry it. we're reinforced and nurtured through it.

As a species, we got here of age in a flora and fauna some distance wilder than today's, and masses of the necessity for wildness nonetheless exists inside of us, physique and brain. The Rediscovery of the Wild considers how you can have interaction with the wild, guard it, and get better it -- for our mental and actual overall healthiness and to flourish as a species.

The participants provide various views at the wild, discussing such subject matters because the evolutionary underpinnings of our want for the wild; the wild inside of, together with the primal passions of sexuality and aggression; birding as a portal to wildness; children's fascination with wild animals; wildness and mental therapeutic; the transferring baseline of what we think of wild; and the real paintings of conservation.

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These dynamics leave powerful imprints. In areas where wolves have been extirpated, for example, no new aspens are able to grow above browse height (about seven feet). Where wolves have returned, aspens are once again able to grow above the reach of hungry elk due to the ecology of fear. In such cases this creates a gap in tree ages, with lots of old aspens, no middle-aged aspens, and lots of young ones. To document the indirect effects of wolves, I have been measuring elk vigilance behavior (how much time they spend with their heads up scanning for predators versus with their heads down, eating) tree ages and stand dynamics, and songbird biodiversity.

Quickly we saw evidence that we had traveled in the right direction— wolf scats deposited tellingly every hundred feet or so as bold territorial markers. Occasionally we found enormous, dinner-plate-size grizzly scats. Above the sweet music of riverwater flowing over stones we heard the unmistakable braid of wolfen voices, and around the next bend in the trail heard something big crashing through the woods. This place was not Quantifying Wildness 11 for the fainthearted. Hooting and hollering to let the animals know we were there, we cut upslope.

For some long moments we stood speechless at being vouchsafed a glimpse of a trophic cascade in action. My friend wanted to check out the carcass, but I told him no, that it could mean disturbing the wolf and causing it to abandon its meal. Soon ravens would be homing in on the kill. Grizzly bears and cougars would arrive soon after, drawn by raven calls and the coppery scent of fresh blood. And so we left on that fine autumn morning, talking spiritedly about the eloquent demonstration of the ecology of fear the wolves had provided.

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