Lords Of The Untamed Wild

YORK, England — In front of me, a man is reading a brochure for something called a “pig brig” — “the most effective way to defend your land and livestock from feral hog damage, period.” Two seats away, a man named Erick Wolf introduces himself as the CEO of a company selling “safe sex for pigeons.” A few minutes before, outside the fluorescent-lit lecture hall at the University of York where we now took our seats, he had urged me to speak to a fellow pest management expert he dubbed New York’s “pope of rats.”

We were all of us waiting with cups of bad coffee and tiny, plastic-wrapped biscuits for the start of the Botstiber Institute’s first European workshop on wildlife fertility control. From across the world, experts in animal biology, pest control, pharmaceutical technology and conservation management had come together for two days to discuss ways to interfere with the reproduction of wild animals.

In her opening remarks, Giovanna Massei, Botstiber’s European director, painted a picture of a world where humanity and nature were increasingly in conflict. “People and wildlife are sharing more and more space,” she said. Pigeons and rats bothering New Yorkers, feral horses troubling ranchers in the American West, elephants breaking free from game reserves across Africa, capybaras running riot in South America’s gated communities. In places, agricultural losses and property damage are escalating into the billions and countless diseases — Covid and avian flu among them — originate in animals and spread to people when the two populations come into contact. 

“We are running out of options,” Massei said. “We don’t believe for a second that fertility control is the only way, but certainly, we want people to consider it.”

Massei spoke as a prominent representative for a growing field that purports to offer conservationists a straightforward solution to one of the thorniest questions in their discipline: What do you do when the wilderness is too wild? Refuges untrammeled by humankind are shrinking, and so too the number of animals they can support. The boundaries between humans and wild creatures, ever porous, are becoming even thinner. Hunting or culling wild animals is one option — just kill any problematic species. Or continue destroying their habitat and let them go extinct on their own. 

But experimental new birth control drugs promise to avoid either outcome — and create a new kind of nature where neither human nor animal need suffer.

Wildlife fertility control represents a bold shift in conservation thinking. For the better part of the last century, conservationists have been primarily compelled by the vision of a societal retreat from nature — preserving the places still untouched by relentless human activity where the wilderness can exist in all its natural savagery. But in an era where humanity’s stain is found in even the most isolated parts of the world, saving the wilderness from ourselves seems increasingly like a fantasy of the distant past.

If preserving nature and vulnerable species means policing nonhuman life, from the purity of DNA to the timing of reproductive cycles, very important questions arise: Does saving the world’s “wild” places mean controlling them entirely? And if so, how?

In the Book of Genesis, God brings all the animals of creation one by one before Adam, and “whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” In the Christian West, it is perhaps the clearest blueprint for humanity’s domineering attitude to nature: Since the beginning, the essence of the wild was forever fixed in relation to us.

The Judeo-Christian God may have given Man dominion over the animals, but in many parts of the world the premodern experience of the wilderness was one defined primarily by fear and antagonism. Simply speaking the name of a bear or a wolf could call one into existence. To the extent that the ancients respected untamed nature, it was as the place of dangerous creatures, uncultured barbarians and dark forces, often in league with one another.

Medieval Europeans were no different. Most often, it was man who had to be protected from an untrustworthy, mysterious and dangerous wild world rather than the reverse: perching settlements atop mountains, channeling floods and draining swamps, culling predators to boost hunting stocks in royal game reserves. Clearing a forest and converting it to productive agriculture was no less pleasing to God than converting a savage pagan to Christianity. The creatures of the wood, therefore, were parallel for Satan; rapacious wolves and stubborn bears became symbols of sin, of ignorance, luxury and greed.

This pessimistic view of wild nature endured as late as the 18th century. While Jean-Jacques Rousseau was extolling the virtues of France’s settled countryside, British colonists in India paid dearly to clear “savage” jungles of their “vermin” and remove their people to newly cleared lands for agriculture. In America, too, early settlers viewed the wilderness through their own Puritan lens as the devil’s dominion, densely populated by unchristian “salvages” and voracious wild beasts.

Ironically, it was the depeopling of remote places that first sparked some reverence among the progenitors of what might be dubbed the movement for nature appreciation. It’s no coincidence that Rousseau so elevated nature in the same era that France experienced rapid urbanization. Around this time, the American theologian Jonathan Edwards looked upon a countryside depopulated by genocide and saw God’s divine purity. “By Edwards’s day,” the philosopher J. Baird Callicott wrote. “Sin was to be found in the towns, not in the woods, and the Devil in the souls of sinners. In short, nature in America went from demonized to divinized.”

The contrast between town and country was not only spiritual. Appearing in the late 19th century were the first warning signs that industrialization could have devastating consequences. The increasing soot and filth of urban life offered a stark contrast to Europe’s pristine countryside or the vast emptied wilds of North America. Even the still-peopled lands of Africa and Asia offered a desirable alternative to the Victorian gentleman; H. Rider Haggard, the great adventure writer of the era, spoke of a “thirst for the wilderness,” a deep desire to escape “among the wild game and the savages,” and knew many in his audience felt the same.

At the same time, the wonton hunting of birds and big game seemed for the first time to be shifting the balance of power between nature and civilization. Even those who loved killing wild creatures quickly came to realize that there was a certain experience of wilderness at risk of vanishing. Already in the 1890s, the big game hunter Frederick Vaughan Kirby lamented, “the hunting-country and its big game have a past — a past that can never be recalled.” The huntsman and proto-conservationist Edward North Buxton warned that the Empire’s game was a “precious inheritance … something which can easily be lost but cannot be replaced.”

The authorities’ initial response to these challenges was to try to exert more control over remaining wild spaces, applying new tools of scientific management to “natural resources” — a coinage of this era. Gifford Pinchot, a pioneering American forester and the first head of the United States Forest Service, thought of conservation as “sustainable development.” Resources like timber and game animals were “there to be used, now and in the future,” in such a way as would ensure “the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.” “The more it is used, the better,” he wrote in a book aptly named “The Use of the National Forests.”

For the first half of the 20th century, this was the dominant view of conservation among policymakers — effectively, a brake on human rapaciousness and greed. But it was far from the only view of wilderness. At the same time as imperial big game hunters and loggers sought to enumerate and protect the remaining “resources” of their reserves, the writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were articulating a more spiritual — and misanthropic — philosophy of nature, which would come to dominate among the next generation of conservationists.

For these writers and artists, wilderness was a place set against the artifice of human society and its poisonous industry. “Nature,” Emerson wrote, “refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.” It offered a chance to transcend the narrow human perspective and the dominant materialism of the age, a window into a world without humankind and its deleterious influence on the land.

Nature was, also, a spiritual necessity. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life,” the pioneering conservationist John Muir wrote in 1901.

Man could be restored by wilderness, the argument went — but wilderness could only be destroyed by man. Nature existed in an ever-harsher contrast with our fallen, polluting selves. Among a burgeoning movement of “wilderness preservationists,” the idea took hold that nature must be saved — not redeemed but reserved, isolated and, if necessary, depeopled. Vast swathes of land around the world were set aside in this way: Britain’s Waterton Park in 1821, America’s Yellowstone National Park in 1872, Canada’s Banff National Park in 1885, South Africa’s Hluhluwe and uMfolozi Game Reserves in 1895.

Now, mankind was no longer master over nature with God-given rights of dominion. We became a kind of self-conscious parasite, aware that, left to our own devices, we would pillage until nature lost its transcendence. Conservationists argued they needed to save humanity from itself. “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods,” Muir wrote of California’s sequoias in 1897, “but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that.”

When America’s 1964 Wilderness Act was drafted, it was this understanding of wilderness that was enshrined in law, defining it as a place “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Immediately, the U.S. government realized that such places were already rare, if they ever existed at all.

For early conservationists, places like Yellowstone were important precisely because they represented the ideal of an untouched Eden; historian Mark David Spence calls them a “manifestation of God’s original design for America.” But it was all a convenient fiction. Yellowstone’s soil bears the unerasable record of nearly 12,000 years of human hunting, harvesting, mining, trade and habitation. The Tukudika Shoshone, a Native American group, used the area right up until it was set aside by the state for conservation; only active disruption by the U.S. Army and, later, the National Park Service prevented their return.

Everywhere large wilderness reserves were created, the same mythmaking took place. The Stoney Nakoda people of Banff were banned from their homeland after it was designated a wilderness park — except for an annual festival where they could be gawked at by visiting tourists. In Africa, the sociologists Charles Geisler and Ragendra de Sousa estimate as many as 14.4 million people have been evicted so game reserves and parks could be demarcated. So common is this story that the author Mark Dowie coined the term “conservation refugees” to refer to the vast number of people that are, still today, relocated from lands they occupied for centuries so an illusion of an “untrammeled” place can be maintained for tourists.

Stories like these illustrate the paradox at the heart of this model, known to its critics as “fortress conservation” — in practice, “locking up parts of the planet and highly regulating activities there,” as Faisal Moola, a professor of conservation at the University of Guelph, told me. The problem, he said, is not only that it invariably privileges tourists gawking at nature over native inhabitants using it; it is that it assumes it is possible at all to “remove our fingerprint from the landscape and let the system go back to some primordial, ancestral state.”

Such a philosophy of conservation has enjoyed a renaissance of late in certain conservation circles, particularly in Europe, under the new name of “rewilding.” Like the Romantic progenitors of the wilderness movement, rewilding advocates believe that erasing humanity’s imprint from the world is as much a process of spiritual renewal as it is an ecological one. “It’s about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world,” the journalist George Monbiot wrote in his “Manifesto for Rewilding the World.” Rewilding Europe, an environmental charity leading the charge on the continent, is less grandiose. “Rewilding is about moving forward, but letting nature itself decide much more,” their website’s old FAQ once read, “and man decide much less.”

The problem is: Which nature is wild? Even in the relatively young history of rewilding as a term, it has been a slippery question to answer. The historian Dolly Jørgensen found that when the movement began with the U.S.-based Wildlands Project in 1991, it largely meant the reintroduction of large carnivores across connected but depopulated “cores,” like the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park.

By the following decade, it meant an altogether more ambitious “return” to the state of nature at the end of the Pleistocene, around 13,000 years ago. To accomplish this monumental feat, it would seem that every non-native species from the last 13 millennia would need to be exterminated, and species that had not been seen since the extinction of North American megafauna — coinciding with the arrival of the first humans to the continent — would also need to be recreated and restored to their original number. That would mean the intentional introduction of new foreign invaders — African lions, Asian elephants — as substitutes for extinct, ancient megafauna, or perhaps the original animals themselves, their DNA back-engineered from samples buried in glacier ice, as scientists are now attempting with the wooly mammoth.

It quickly becomes evident that “rewilding” does not really mean removing human agency from the landscape — if anything, it means increasing it in service of nostalgia for a place we’ve never been. Many of these projects suffer from the same paradoxes as fortress conservation. They try, in Jørgensen’s words, to create a world with “more animals and less people (or at least, much less intrusive people)” — in the process minimizing the fact that people are animals too, with a long environmental history that cannot simply be erased.

And yet, even still, they cannot escape the curse of Adam, to behold creation and immediately subsume it to our own idea of it. Rewilding Britain, an advocacy group, promises rewilding will deliver “nature-based jobs and businesses” and commits to improving access to conservation areas until “wild nature [is] a right for all.” They should heed what the American conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in “A Sand County Almanac”: “All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

Arguably the most prominent public failure of the rewilding movement, and one often discussed at the Botstiber Institute’s workshop, was the attempted rewilding of less than 23 square miles of land in Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. Using dikes to push back the sea, they created an artificial marshland and sowed it with reed seeds scattered by aircraft. By the 1970s, Oostvaardersplassen had already become an important refuge for wildlife — in particular, marsh-dwelling birds — in the intensively cultivated Dutch landscape.

By the 1980s, however, Dutch conservationists were increasingly concerned that willow trees and other saplings would colonize the area, suppressing the more delicate vegetation on which waterfowl relied. Under the leadership of the biologist Frans Vera, Oostvaardersplassen became an important test case for a new theory of land management. It was rewilding before any such term existed.

In theory, the governing principle of the reserve would be “do nothing, unless …” In other words, intervene only when the health of the overall system is in danger. Nature, the reasoning went, could be trusted to take its course; human intervention could only diminish its value as a refuge. In reality, however, to trust nature in this way required first deliberately reconstructing a primordial state of balance that Vera theorized had existed before humankind entered the picture. That meant introducing the closest surrogates for the large herbivores that had since gone extinct or been domesticated. Soon, conservationists were trucking in red deer from Scotland, semi-feral ponies from Poland and Heck cattle, a breed developed in 1930s Germany to resemble the extinct aurochs of prehistory.

At first, the program was a success — the large animals did indeed maintain the kinds of environments necessary to produce the reserve’s coveted biodiversity. Left to their own devices, they were able to propagate into great (and photogenic) herds and sustain a small population of carnivorous scavengers — ravens, hawks, eagles, vultures and foxes. The reserve became a poster child for a philosophy that held that the world before humans existed was, in fact, Edenic — a self-sustaining paradise.

But by the early 2000s, animal rights groups became dismayed by the mass winter die-offs that troubled Oostvaardersplassen’s herds. Fenced in the park and unable to roam in search of food, they argued, managers had a duty to care for them; it was morally repugnant to let them suffer and starve as if they were in a real wilderness. In the 2010s, authorities adopted a strategy of “early-reactive culling” — shooting the weakest and sickest animals before winter — but they still could not satisfy Oostvaardersplassen’s critics. Dutch politicians drew comparisons to Nazi concentration camps; animal rights activists broke in to feed the animals, prompting responses from riot police. “It is clear,” the historian Bert Theunissen wrote in 2019, “that the wilderness ideal has lost public support, and has been officially relinquished by the authorities.”

The reality, Theunissen concluded, is that despite their rhetoric, Dutch authorities never actually convinced anyone that Oostvaardersplassen was a real wilderness. Without that belief, the cruelty inherent in uncontrolled nature is largely unpalatable to us. We may accept that mass death is ecological justice when it occurs without our involvement, but as soon as it becomes the inevitable conclusion of a management strategy, it seems more like violence inflicted by human hands.

At the Botstiber Institute, Oostvaardersplassen was often suggested as a use case for fertility control. Public discomfort would never have reached such fever pitch if the herds had not grown so large and overstretched the reserve’s capacity to sustain them. “People have got to recognize that there will need to be management of certain species, and they are very adverse to killing,” Matt Heydon, a wildlife advisor to the U.K. government agency Natural England, said at the conference. “Fertility control does offer an option.”

But the failure at Oostvaardersplassen goes deeper than public discomfort with killing. In reality, it exposed one of our oldest myths — as Theunissen writes, “that nature is self-regulating and strives for equilibrium.” “Even though it has been discredited by biologists, [that] assumption,” he continues, “is still deeply ingrained in popular and sometimes even in professional conceptions of the biological world.”

In reality, Oostvaardersplassen’s harmonious “wilderness” was no more real than the geometric lines of a Regency garden. And yet, for many at the Botstiber Institute, satisfying the desire for this vision of nature had become a kind of raison d’etre for the discipline. “Our emotional connection with nature, to nature, is the rock bottom of conservation,” Maarten Jacobs, a cultural geographer who spoke at the conference, explained. “Excluding emotion, in my view, is a threat to conservation.”

Facing the reality of increasingly urban societies, intolerant of culls but intensely desirous of unpeopled spaces, conservationists may indeed need fertility control to conceal the role of human stewardship and create the primordial balance we have learned to expect. Humans are, it would seem, to become gods again — not gods of the Old Testament, meting out cruel justice, but Aristotle’s prime mover, the invisible logic of nature, with a finger gently pressed on the scale.

The problem, of course, is that nature has its own designs. Just before the Botstiber Institute’s workshop, I was tailing conservationists across Italy and Slovenia while researching a piece on a troubling new trend: the hybridization of gray wolves with feral dogs.

One of conservationists’ great victories in the last few decades has been the resurgence of the European gray wolf, hunted to near extinction in southern Europe by the turn of the 20th century. In the Alpine regions of Italy, Slovenia and France, the return of healthy wolf packs has been widely celebrated as a victory for biodiversity — even if it has drawn the ire of rural activists and politicians who resent living alongside them. But the increase in wild hybrids has posed a serious challenge to the project. Hybrids can travel long distances, integrate with full-blooded packs and dilute the DNA of future wolves with phenotypic traits and worrying behaviors typical of domesticated dogs. “We’re talking about the first urban wolves,” Francesca Marucco, the lead scientist on the project that oversaw the reintroduction of Alpine packs, told me. “That is the new challenge that we have.”

On one hand, this kind of hybridization has been happening for millennia everywhere there are wolves and dogs. But in the context of a project to resurrect the majestic glory of Europe’s gray wolf, hybridization poses an uncomfortable question: Just how impure can a “natural” wolf be? Is what is happening to Europe’s gray wolves evolution — or is it pollution, from an ultimately human source?

For many of the wolf conservationists I spoke with, hybridization was thought of in these latter, more negative terms. “We are speeding up a process that might have occurred naturally,” said Valeria Salvatori, a wolf researcher at Italy’s Institute of Applied Ecology. “It’s like global warming. … We do have a duty to mitigate such an impact.” It’s the same impulse that drives the conservationists trying to eradicate invasive species the world over, even beloved presences like Britain’s invasive gray squirrel. “For me, it is solving a problem that we have caused,” said Kay Haw, director of the U.K. Squirrel Accord, which is experimenting with using birth control to reduce the impact of gray squirrels on England’s native red squirrel populations. “I do often hear people say, ‘It’s fine, let nature deal with it’ — but nature cannot continue to cope with the level of destruction and problems that we have caused.”

Seen in this way, fertility control is not so different from the “sustainable development” philosophy of Pinchot and the U.S. Forest Service — it’s a way to apply a brake on humanity’s runaway environmental impacts. Only now, the problem is not rationing how much we consume; it’s containing the effects we have already set in motion, the genetic “pollution” relentlessly reproducing in the wild.

But any idea of nature that involves a notion of purity involves aesthetic considerations — preferences for a certain type of nature that cannot help but center human desires. “If tomorrow I see an animal that is black and white with floppy ears and a long tail, and you tell me it is a wolf, I am disappointed,” Luigi Boitani, one of Italy’s leading wolf experts, once said to me. “I don’t want to see wolves in that way.”

Inevitably, this results in some uncomfortable parallels between the priorities of conservationists and the obsessions of society at large. “Always we see that nature conservation is reflecting the major trends in society,” Michael Jungmeier, the UNESCO-Chair for Sustainable Management of Conservation Areas, told me. “You have romanticism in literature, and you have romanticism in nature conservation. You have nationalism in the policy debate, you have nationalism in nature conservation. … You see all these debates about these neophytes coming in and destroying our species. This was the exact same time as we were having all these debates about the Schengen [Area] and migration. The same debates play out in both places.”

It’s no coincidence that in our age of techno-optimism, the technological solutions posed for ecological problems are growing ever more ambitious — and invasive. Fertility control for wildlife is hardly the only example; scientists are already releasing swarms of genetically modified insects to combat disease and seeding the sky with silver iodide to modify the weather. Among proponents of these technologies, it is rarely considered that we may simply be introducing a new kind of pollution — an intervention whose effects we do not understand well enough to be certain that we will not be trying to undo them in half a century’s time.

But if a heavier hand is not the solution, what is? Is there another way to approach nature — one that does not frame it solely as a scientific problem to be solved or a romantic ideal to be reconstructed?

Not long after Muir articulated his philosophy of fortress conservation and Pinchot produced his utilitarian formula for sustainable development, Leopold, the author of the paradigm-shifting “A Sand County Almanac,” was trying to define a third way, one grounded in a different conception of humanity’s relationship to nature. “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land,” he wrote in his 1949 book. “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

Leopold’s alternative, grounded in the emerging science of ecology, was to seek “a state of harmony between men and land.” In reality, he was only articulating an ecological worldview that had existed in many Indigenous communities for millennia. Moola, who has spent his career working with Indigenous groups to develop and implement conservation plans, says Indigenous worldviews tend to recognize that human communities have an essential role in creating and preserving biodiversity — in fact, they are an irreplaceable part of it. “In many cases, what we think of as the ecological baseline is in fact the outcome of human agency,” he told me. “Much of the biodiversity we covet is actually the result of thousands of years of human stewardship.”

One could argue that today’s high-tech solutions — fertility control, weather modification and genetic engineering — are simply an upgrade on the stewardship strategies of Indigenous people who have long maintained ecosystems through controlled burns, strategic culls and other deliberate interventions. But the difference, Leopold appreciated, is not in technique, but perspective. Indigenous knowledge systems acknowledge the role of human beings in creating our shared landscape, but they do not make us uniquely privileged to command and marshall its future. Put another way, as Callicot writes, “Human beings are not specially created and uniquely valuable demigods, any more than nature is a vast emporium of goods, services, and amenities. We are, rather, very much a part of nature.”

In some ways, at the same time as our technological advances are making it easier to tame the wilderness, our power over nature is rapidly diminishing. Look at the floods, storms and fires of the last decade alone, and it is evident that nature’s strength is gathering — at least, we seem to find ourselves ever more desperate for its mercy.

It’s not a new thought, but one that always bears repeating: If we cannot help but wall ourselves off from wilderness or imagine it as an imperfect mirror for our desires, we may find ourselves forever enemies with the nature that sustains us — losers on the wrong side of a long and brutal war. In the end, we will be not gods but exiles again, yearning for our own time as a better kind of Eden.