stagnation downhearted: Battling nature in your backyard

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Battling nature in your backyard

Phil McKenna, contributor

(Image: Shattil & Rozinski/Naturepl.com)

Your yard is the new frontier as wildlife returns to the suburbs. In Nature Wars, Jim Sterba calls for a shift from conservation to culling to win back territory

BEARS are at the bird feeder and gangs of turkeys terrorise the suburbs. In Nature Wars, author Jim Sterba takes readers on a fascinating journey to the front lines of the human versus wildlife conflicts erupting in backyards across the US.

What makes Nature Wars a must read, however, is that it brings to light one of the greatest environmental success stories ever told. We are bombarded with dire environmental reports - the disappearing Amazon or dwindling tiger populations - creating what Sterba calls a "mental narrative of loss". Yet from the vantage of a cottage on the edge of New York City, he finds the opposite problem. On a wooded lot that was once a family farm, he encounters a menagerie of turkeys, Canada geese and herds of deer so thick he can hardly step outside. If anything, Sterba argues, we are suffering from too much of a good thing.

A reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Sterba digs into dramatic yet largely overlooked changes in the landscape of the US over the last several hundred years.

Prior to the arrival of European settlers, Sterba tells us, the largest tree-covered landscape in what is now the US was the Great Eastern Forest, an area stretching from Maine to Alabama that made up an estimated 75 per cent of the nation's tree cover.

Settlers cleared the woods for farming and fuel until the prospect of running out of trees threatened national stability. Marginal land once cleared for farming was abandoned, oil and coal were discovered as replacements for firewood, and a slow, almost imperceptible regeneration of woodlands began. Today, trees cover two-thirds of the original Great Eastern Forest.

Mirroring the decline and regrowth of the nation's forests was a mass extermination and subsequent rebound of wildlife. By 1890 white-tailed deer were reduced to an estimated 350,000 individuals, just 1 per cent of the population thought to exist before the arrival of Europeans. Today, thanks to forest regeneration and intensive conservation efforts, deer in the US number around 30 million. Turkey and black bear populations have followed a similar arc.

Burgeoning wildlife populations are an extraordinary environmental success but the spread of suburbanites across the landscape means animals now have to contend with new denizens. By 2000 the majority of people in the US lived not in cities or on farms but in the vast area in between.

So how does the convergence of so many wild creatures and humans play out? Sterba offers as an example the community of Princeton Township in New Jersey, home to Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. The woods surrounding both institutions were so overrun with deer that vehicle collisions and Lyme disease posed serious risks to human health.

When the township employed a team of sharpshooters to cull the deer population, candlelight vigils ensued. The local animal control officer started wearing a bulletproof vest after his cat was crushed to death and his dog was poisoned. Deer guts were splattered on the mayor's car, but the cull continued.

The idea of wildlife overabundance may be difficult to accept. But accept it we must, says Sterba. Environmentalists must shift from a mindset of preservation to one of wise use. This includes selective logging, culling and even embracing a long-standing taboo - fur clothing. After a century of conservation, wise use will be a tough sell, but Nature Wars makes me want to pick up a gun and learn how to hunt.