Rewilding America

By Chip Ward, Tomdispatch.com. Posted May 20, 2004.

Imagine America in 2104. From the air, what you see is a largely unbroken, green, and fluid realm with graceful and permeable natural boundaries -- all those geometric grids we were so used to faded away when we tapped out too many aquifers before we switched over to sustainable farming. There are still dams, but only a few. Water is stored the way nature stores it in regenerated wetlands, recharged aquifers, and along recovered flood plains that are also refuges for wildlife. The restored river valleys also serve as corridors for cougars, wolves, and bears moving between huge habitat reserves that are spread from one end of the continent to the other. In the Northwest, salmon teem in pristine streams that also provide clean drinking water for nearby cities. On Midwestern plains on a great, restored, natural "commons," the buffalo roam again. Across a mostly rural continent, the howling of wolves can sometimes be heard at night.

Lawns, so popular in the water-wasting days of the twentieth century are rare, but native plants thrive everywhere, inside buildings and out. Schools have shaded playgrounds and gardens. Rainwater and storm runoff are harvested to make it happen.

An urban renaissance went hand-in-hand with the creation of a continental network of nature reserves. Cities eventually became more attractive than sprawling suburbs because they offered so many parks, sports fields, libraries, galleries, restaurants, nightclubs, and museums. After several decades of explosive growth, sprawl stopped, and then receded, as long and frustrating commutes, dead lawns, and the social isolation of the burbs lost out in competition with the easy transportation and diverse cultural amenities of cities. There are still cars and sometimes even traffic, but clean and reliable public transportation is generally the preferred method of travel.

Sadly, the urban renaissance was fueled by natural disturbances. Persistent wildfires caused by global warming and decades of unnatural fire suppression eventually chased people down from the hills, and the inhabitants of floodplains were driven off, too, when hundred-year floods became common. Slowly, that old checkerboard sprawl has been converted back to small farms (the term "organic" is now assumed) to meet a growing demand from local farmers' markets and from the popular "slow food" trend. The disruptions of global trade, thanks to terrorism and pandemics earlier in the last century, opened up a burgeoning market for more reliable regional food.

On vacation, city dwellers still love to head out to the mega-reserves that run like a necklace of huge national parks across the entire continent. Created to conserve vital biodiversity -- especially after we understood that life in all its forms provided us with medicines, foods, and new kinds of building and manufacturing materials, plus endless models for sustainable production and consumption -- the mega-reserves became as mega-popular as they were mega-necessary. People go to the reserves to hike, bike, kayak, windsurf, vision quest, or just relax. Sunbathing, of course, still remains too dangerous as the ozone layer has yet to completely heal and, in any case, most beaches disappeared when the melting glaciers inundated them. But people love to sit under umbrellas and watch wildlife -- deer and elk, for instance, and the bears and the wolves that pursue them -- pass under or over the old highways along specially constructed and landscaped corridors designed to make their passage from one mega-reserve to the next possible. Almost anyone can tell you when they saw their first wolf, whale, or condor.

Between the cities and the chain of connected reserves, are buffer zones of family farms, wind farms, solar farms, retreats, spas, and green belts that are also outdoor recreational hotspots. After the obesity epidemic led to a mid-century diabetes die-off and we realized that excessive television and Internet surfing caused early senility and paranoia, more people headed for the outdoors. Now that carbon emissions have been cut drastically and the weather is moderating, the land between city and reserve is being redesigned to accommodate both people and critters in ways that can be sustained.

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