To Take Wildness in Hand Abstract

Claim: Assisted migration may be a more effective alternative way to help plants and animals that are currently living in an unsuitable habitat.


Statement of Claim: "But climate change calls all this into question. If rising temperatures and changing weather patterns make restoration difficult or impossible, new brands of meddling may sometimes be the only alternative to extinction."


Subclaims: Although steps are being taken to relieve the stress on the environment which creates the unfavorable living situations for many plants an animals, it is currently not enough.

Assisted migration, which sounds good to many (yet disastrous to some), does not always use favorable allocation of many of the related resources. It also comes dangerously close to crossing the line of too much human involvement and control in nature.


Support: "Conservationists, in response, have offered more ambitious versions of familiar strategies. Bigger nature reserves. More protected corridors for wildlife migration and movement. More regulations, incentives, and ingenuity in service of greenhouse-gas reductions. But even the most expedient tactics could leave some species—especially those as tightly circumscribed as the Florida torreya—marooned in habitat too hot, dry, wet, or stormy."

"Yet the suggestion of assisted migration, of planting Torreya taxifolia trees outside these Panhandle steepheads, makes Printiss’s face tighten. Such efforts, he says, threaten to take attention and funding away from the work in the preserve, and make an already bad situation even worse."

"But while we’re welcome to restore, redesign is frowned upon; that sort of tinkering crosses an invisible line between humans and capital-N Nature, and risks making things much worse."

"Perhaps the most disturbing implication of assisted migration is that the traditional conservation notion—call it an illusion if you like—of a place to get back to will disappear for good. Yet with or without assisted migration, that pristine place is already slipping out of reach."


Warrant: Michelle Nijhuis assumes that the readers of her article have at least a minimal grasp of several environmental problems our world is currently facing. She also writes to an audience that cares about natural preserves and may be interested in exploring options on how to fix the problems within them.