America Gone Wild
The good news: Wildlife populations in the U.S. have experienced an astonishing resurgence. The bad news: All those animals are now our neighbors.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204846304578090753716856728.html
This article is very interesting in how it describes the ‘reforestation’ of the East. I have personally noted the increasing amount of land going fallow and how fast it reverts to forest (not a climax forest, of course, that takes a century or longer, but one you can’t see very far and can barely walk across), so it jives with my impressions. I have also noted the dramatically increasing incidence of wildlife over the years (the last couple of years I regularly see large birds of prey along I66 on our weekly to-ing and fro-ing). I recall as a kid in high school seeing a beaver damming up a stream and how we all stared out the window as our bus drove by because it was such a rare sight (though I will admit since then I have only seen a handful of beavers since then). Deer, when I was a kid (and I had access to (and spent a whole lot of time on) several thousand acres of undeveloped forest (sadly, all a carpet of houses now)), were incredibly rare and worth standing and staring at since it might be years before you saw another one. Today the damn things are big furry lice and on a routine walk/jog I _expect_ to see several and it is unusual to not notice any. I see more deer near our house in Maryland (just a couple of miles outside the beltway and nearly a perfect carpet of houses) than in Shenandoah where our 23 acres are a small part of hundreds of surrounding acres that are occupied by orchards, corn fields, browsing cows and hardly any houses. One big difference, though, is that in Shenandoah people still regularly hunt deer; something that is pretty much nonexistent where we live in Maryland.
I was pleased to see that there are actually an increasing number of hunters (though still a small number). Since humans have pretty much extincted every other apex predator, if we aim to coexist with nature we are going to have to learn to allow human ‘predation’ to occur to keep the populations enough in check that we don’t wind up with yet another human made ecological disaster. I am too lazy to hunt (though if I catch deer eating my orchard trees they are dead meat!) and don’t care for the ‘gamey’ taste, but I have told the man who runs cows on our property to feel free to nail any deer he sees (he is a regular during hunting season) and that I would get the required permit if necessary (if you can demonstrate that deer are causing economic damage on your property you can get a year-long license to plug the little fuckers).
Of course, the _diversity_ of species is still crashing with all this human activity (why do people obsess about global warming but don’t give a damn that we are sterilizing our oceans?), but I expect for the most part the number of organisms is actually increasing as we eliminate apex predators leaving more room for the prey. Those organisms best able to reach an accommodation with humans are going to have lots of ecological space to occupy and their populations are going to explode. If we don’t provide some throttling of that explosion then we get to deal with the smelly diseased mess that results when the overextended population crashes.
