This thought provoking book – The New Wild by Francis Pearce – is already 10 years old, published in 2015, but feels fresh and provocative. Written by a journalist, easy to read, it makes its points clearly. So called invasive species are not the bad guys but the good guys who help restore what humans have destroyed. The book consists in three parts: Alien Empires (On Green Mountain, New Worlds, All at sea, Welcome to America, Britain: A Nation Tied in Knotweed), Myths and Demons (Ecological cleansing, Myths of the Aliens, Myths of the Pristine, Nativism in the Garden of Eden), and The New Wild (Novel Ecosystems, Rebooting Conservation in the Urban Badlands, Call of the New Wild).
 
Here are a few quotes that made me turn the corner of the page:
 
“Conservationists, it seems, are dedicated to protecting the weak and vulnerable, the endangered and the abused. Nature generally promotes the strong and the wily, the resilient and versatile.” (Pearce 2015, 102)
 
“All this [rinderpest and the development of national parks in Africa] tells us three things. Firs, of course, it tells about the danger of alien diseases in communities with no immunity – though I doubt that anything on the remotely similar scale still awaits unsuspecting ecosystems today. Second, it tells us that nature is good at growing back. Third, it shows us that our attitudes about pristine nature are often founded on false perceptions. Most of what we regard today as virgin wilderness is far from untouched by humans.” (Pearce 2015, 133)
 
“Conventional conservation … operates ‘on the grossly mistaken belief that we can halt ongoing extinctions, [which] fuels our preoccupation with saving relics and ghosts’. What conservationists should really be doing… is ‘turning our attention to the new assemblages of organisms that are emerging’ as a result of our activities.” (Pearce 2015, 160)
 
“Traditional wild lands – the old-growth forests and other historic habitats – will in the future be the places most dependent on human intervention for their survival. In a world of climate change, where the old wild is hemmed in by human activity, these ecosystem islands will increasingly resemble museum pieces, time capsules, and experimental labs for scientists. They will not be wild in any true sense. On the other hand, the novel ecosystems, the make-do-and-mend places, will be the ones able to stand on their own two feet. They will be the new wild. (Pearce 2015, 186)
 
I am not so sure about old-growth forests being museums that need human maintenance, human protection from logging for sure, but the argument for looking at all the new collaborations and hybridisations taking place when species from all over the world meet in semi-urban areas or ‘badlands’ is convincing. The strange new ecosystems developing in places destroyed, disturbed or abandoned by humans – and between them -surely are a new wild.
 
 
Fred Pearce, The New Wild – Why Invasive Species will be Nature's Salvation. Boston: Beacon Press 2015.