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Those of us who are really enthusiastic about Pleistocene rewilding risk living a frustrating life, born too late for the last wild mammoth and too soon for the first genetically modified hairy Asian elephant. It doesn’t have to be that way. Don’t wait for a mammoth. Don’t wait for the mammoth to make your mammoth steppe.
Because if you take the number of years until a critical mass of people realize they need a wooly mammoth, plus the number of years until they are able to get one, plus the number of years until there is a self-sustaining population of those mammoths, plus the number of years until that self-sustaining population can impact any area sufficiently, plus the number of years it would take for that impacted area to reach wherever you are… well, it might add up to more years than it you have left on this planet. Never mind how long it takes for the methane to go into the atmosphere.
So, I suggest that if you find a way to turn an acre into something that has all the characteristics of a megafauna-modified savanna, it will have a higher impact on your well-being than if there was a “mammoth” living in a zoo somewhere. And you have all the agency. Take your chainsaw, your weed whacker, and your pet sheep named Dolly, and do your best to make it the way that this world once was. Will it be perfect? Of course not, but it will be better than anything around it. Better than anything else anywhere. And I really think that we need to put people and their feelings at the center of what it is to rewild. If we are going to make this movement a success, that is.
Then, with your acre, you could see things that no one else has seen, at least in ten thousand years. You could ask questions here to tap the knowledge of other people. You could share things with us that are not the scavenged pseudo-knowledge of someone else on the internet but real first-hand knowledge about the world of megafauna. That sort of knowledge is going to be invaluable in the coming years.
You would find that in order to do this, you would have to do some things that would make you feel energized and excited. You would see some things that would make you feel like your ancestors felt. You will have to learn a lot of things that you didn’t think you wanted to know about, and it will be very uncomfortable at times, but you will do it because of how it feels to turn something that is not Eden into Eden.
Then, when you’ve done that, find a way to turn that acre into ten acres, and those ten acres into a thousand acres, and those thousand acres into a hundred thousand acres. At some point along the way, you will have to trade in Dolly the sheep for some more substantial herbivore power, and you will have to up your game on all those other skills. It will be worth it.
And as you go along, pretty soon your acres would start to butt into my acres, and our acres would bump into the other people in this group, and we could come together in a way that is different than we do right now when we cheer or jeer someone’s comments on Facebook. Pretty soon, we would realize the flip side of being born right now. We have the opportunity that no generation has ever had before. While there have been many people born into Eden that grew old in the modern world, we can be the first generation that was born into the modern world and grew old in Eden.