Managing the Landscape of Fear
3/23/23 – Some thoughts on a notable Anthropocene news day
Hello everyone:
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
Last Monday, March 20th, was a notable day. It was the first day of Spring, a traditional day of hope and renewal. Also, the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 synthesis report came out, offering what U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres called “a survival guide for humanity.” And then, much less advertised, Monday was also World Rewilding Day.
That’s a solid playlist for the Anthropocene: 1) the optimism of Spring amid 2) an acknowledgement of an existential planetary crisis and 3) the need to renew the more-than-human world. Let’s talk, then, about an ecological concept that for me binds all this news (and much more) together: the “landscape of fear.” There’s some good news in it, I promise.
The fine science writer Ed Yong defines the landscape of fear as “a psychological topography that exists in the minds of prey.” Think of it as a mental map of your neighborhood, marked with the places you fear to tread. Ecologically, it’s the difference between the wary behavior of rabbits on an island inhabited by wolves and the easy living of rabbits on an island without them. How this plays out in diverse, healthy ecosystems is complex, but the gist is that predators shape ecosystems merely by being present and creating risk for their prey. Given that diverse, healthy ecosystems are increasingly rare in the Anthropocene, it’s worth asking what our role is in the landscape of fear.
Humans now shape every landscape on Earth. At the very least, in the most remote places, we’ve turned up the temperature and changed weather patterns. Elsewhere, we’ve radically altered or diminished entire regions, reducing animal and plant populations to scattered fragments. Chemical and industrial production, agriculture and its poisons, urban and suburban sprawl, ocean noise and overfishing, etc. are making changes so severe that they’ll leave a permanent trace in the geologic record millions of years from now.
The ecologists among you will have to forgive me as I broaden this idea of the landscape of fear into Anthropocene metaphor. In our unsustainable resource extraction and extraordinary population growth we’ve established a predatory presence across the globe that has left the community of life little place to hide. (To be clear, I’m not comparing humans to wolves, which like any apex predator are a healthy part of a happy ecosystem. Four legs good, two legs bad…)
In my thousands of miles of hiking and canoeing I’ve often felt like the wrong end of a magnet, watching most wild animals I encountered run, swim, or fly away. The pandemic revealed what happens when people shelter indoors for months at a time: wildlife moves into our neighborhoods and begins to live fuller lives. From the earliest days of humanity, we’ve been an omnivorous predator that spooked our edible neighbors, sure, but our impact now is far greater than that. It’s existential and pervasive across the tree of life.
Plants, insects, fungi, and microbes are all on the chopping block too. If they sensed us the way animals do, they’d run away too, I reckon. We’re learning that plants have consciousness, insects have consciousness, slime molds are intelligent, and probably microbes too. So while oak trees, mushrooms, and nematodes might not swear at us like a squirrel and skitter away when we enter the woods, we know that they know a threat when they perceive one, each in their own way. So the Anthropocene landscape of fear is not necessarily a fear of us specifically, but a world of manmade stresses that life is adapting to, or failing to adapt to.
In a typical example of the landscape of fear, the mere presence of a predator changes its prey’s behavior, which then impacts the food web shaped by that prey. In my simplified example, the wary rabbits keep moving, eating less of the plants in any one part of the wolf-inhabited island, which means the plants (and associated species) tend to flourish, reshaping the ecosystem.
In my global landscape of fear metaphor, our fragmentation of ecosystems and habitats leaves far too little room for most animals and plants to properly live their ancient lives. It’s death by 10,000 cuts. To cite one of a billion examples, the longleaf pine ecosystem in the southeastern U.S. once stretched across 92 million acres, from Texas to Florida to Virginia, but now exists as a remnant 5 million acres.
To fully imagine the scale of losses where you live, create two mental satellite maps, one with your current array of cities, roads, neighborhoods, industry, pollution, and deforestation, and one without any of it, ever. Picture forest and field, full of life, vibrant with a deep, stable diversity of predator and prey relationships. I’m not talking about some notion of inhuman wilderness, since wherever you live was likely managed for thousands of years by indigenous peoples.
There’s an excellent argument to be made that the Anthropocene is really just a management problem. It’s traumatic and planetary-scale crisis management, of course, but management nonetheless. The argument is rooted in a few fundamental truths:
People have shaped the natural world for at least the last 12,000 years.
The knowledge of how to live in a non-catastrophic relationship with the community of life is in our DNA, because we did it for nearly all of human history.
We know now, in deep detail, how to shift the direction of civilization back toward sustainability. It’s only a matter of doing it.
If we want to reduce the new pervasive human landscape of fear, and rewild some version of the healthy, diverse, and ancient landscape, we need to become better managers.
Enter the U.N., the IPCC, and their latest report on the climate crisis. (See also the recent U.N. work on the Global Biodiversity Framework and the High Seas Treaty.) This report is actually a synthesis and summary of the several Sixth Assessment Reports (AR6) issued over the last few years about how our greenhouse gas emissions are upending planetary systems. (You can read all of the AR6 reports here. They are Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis from August of 2021, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability from February of 2022, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change from April of 2022, and now Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report.)
For those paying attention, there are no surprises in the synthesis report. Emissions need to be slashed soon and hard. Fossil fuels need to be left in the ground, starting now. A wealthy minority are responsible for a ridiculous percentage of the globe’s pain and suffering. Feeding future humans will be increasingly difficult. Populations across the tree of life will diminish or disappear. Many environmental changes will be irreversible. Spending must increase several-fold if we’re to shift energy, agricultural, and transportation systems, and to build resilience to the coming changes, especially for poorer nations. The response needs to be immediate and comprehensive, fair and equitable.
This is the last IPCC report that will come out before we hit the 1.5°C threshold that scientists fear will mark a much more rapid descent into climate chaos. (Or as the Times put it, “A 1.5-degree world might still have coral reefs and summer Arctic sea ice, while a 2-degree world most likely would not.”) Noting this, the Guardian rightly lays out both the heroic effort behind the AR6 reports and their final, basic message:
The comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages, but boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late.
And U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, as always, puts a well-articulated and media-savvy exclamation mark on the report:
This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.
The new summary, like all IPCC reports, tends to bury its best sentences in the text rather than use them as large-type headlines. Here’s one of them:
There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).
The IPCC is also quick to note that the climate crisis is really a life-on-Earth crisis rather than merely one about thermometers and people. We’re the problem and the solution, but the longer we wait the greater the collateral damage in the community of life will be, as this graphic indicates.
It’s worth pointing out at this point that the IPCC reports, and the rational fears of climate chaos they engender, highlight our own landscape of fear. Whatever our level of optimism about our ability to manage the Earth’s future, any intelligent assessment of the threats that face our grandchildren and their descendants should terrify us. We are both predatory wolf and frightened rabbit, and akin to both as the environment we share with them becomes less hospitable.
It’s a reminder too that the Anthropocene is an era in which humans and the community of life have been retreating from each other. We’ve fallen back increasingly into our fossil-fueled boxed-in lives (home, car, office, store, screen) even as we force other species’ retreat from our doors. It’s fear moving in both directions, as we grow less familiar or comfortable with the natural world, and they with us.
One obvious reason for their fear is that there’s so few of them in relation to the number of us and our domestic animals. I’ve often mentioned in the Field Guide the shocking fact that wild mammals make up only 4% of the mammal biomass of Earth, the other 96% being humans and our livestock. But as a new study found, that number is actually only 2%. Humans alone outweigh wild mammals 9 to 1. The numbers get weirder: domestic dog biomass nearly equals the weight of all wild land mammals, while pigs nearly double it, and domestic cats weigh twice as much as all remaining African savanna elephants.
The image below is a different view of the tree of life, one in which our place is rightfully hard to distinguish from the countless other species and lineages that have defined an incredibly rich and turbulent history of life over the last 3.7 billion years. The image makes it clear that most of our ancestors and companions here on Earth are microbial, and suggests that the future will be theirs as well. But in this human moment, my main thought as I look this over is of the scale of the crime – and tragedy – of the Anthropocene.
Which brings me finally to World Rewilding Day. It’s a new mark on the calendar, first established in 2021, and meant to bring attention to the vital, beautiful task of rewilding. Here’s a good working definition from Rewilding Europe:
Rewilding is an innovative way of restoring wild nature. It’s about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea and restore degraded landscapes.
We can give it a helping hand by creating the right conditions – by removing dykes and dams to free up rivers, by allowing natural forest regeneration, and by reintroducing species that have disappeared as a result of human actions. Then we should step back and let nature manage itself.
I don’t have the space here to talk about the introduction of animals and plants to diminished landscapes. It’s an exciting topic that deserves an essay or three on its own. If you’re intrigued right now, though, check out Rewilding Europe and take a very deep dive on the very grand plans expressed in the Global Charter for Rewilding the Earth.
For my purposes here, I’ll simply note that rewilding is about shrinking the landscape of fear. The idea is simple. Increase the size of the real world – what in our isolation we’ve learned to call the natural world – by protecting and replenishing as much of the planet as we can so that the community of life can build resilience and adaptation to the new Earth we’ve made. In doing so, we’ll be paying enough attention to reduce our own fear as well as that of other species.
Rewilding doesn’t just happen in remote areas. The more green spaces built into cities, and the more we rewild our own yards and neighborhoods and roadsides to invite in pollinators and birds, among others, the better life on Earth becomes. Nor is rewilding about “fortress conservation,” in which preserves are set up and people – even Indigenous people – are unwelcome. Nor should rewilding be about some idea of landscape purity. As noted above, humans have always modified the landscape, and Indigenous peoples still have the humility and knowledge to live on the land, preserving its health, far better than modern societies do. And anyway, the scale and depth of the Anthropocene transformation mean that the exact wildness our ancestors experienced can be approximated but not rebuilt.
The ultimate goal of planetary rewilding these days is the 30x30 conservation initiative (protecting 30% of land and sea by 2030) and, more ambitious yet, the Half-Earth Project. The great E.O. Wilson, who conceived the Half-Earth idea, described it this way:
The Half-Earth proposal offers [a solution] commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: …only by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or more, can we save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.
Currently, about 16% of the terrestrial Earth and 8% of the oceans are protected, though “protection” means different things in different places. Still, though, there’s a flurry of activity around the globe to set aside biodiverse landscapes and ocean habitats.
The Biden administration has been busy. Just this week it announced two new national monuments: Avi Kwa Ame in Nevada and Castner Range in Texas, which together protect nearly 514,000 acres. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will soon designate a 770,000 square mile (that’s larger than Alaska) marine sanctuary around the Pacific Remote Islands, southeast of Hawaii, for monument status. Last fall the administration created the Camp Hale–Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado. In 2021 they restored protection to three national monuments delisted by the Trump administration: Bears Ears, Grand Staircase–Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts.
Looking around the globe, Sam Matey at the Weekly Anthropocene lists some other recent conservation successes: The one-million-acre Thurloo Downs National Park in New South Wales, Australia, and the 31,000 acre Vjosa Wild River National Park in Albania. Elsewhere, Mongabay reports a new 247,000-acre marine protected area in the northern Patagonia region of Chile. The goal there is to protect blue whales and other cetaceans.
And so the good work continues, a daily dose of optimism amid the landscape of fear.
Finally, then, welcome to Spring! Plant your gardens, rewild your yard, get out of your boxes and take a walk into the lushness of life, and please, join me in raising a glass to all of your efforts to better manage the landscape of fear. To quote IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee, “let’s hope we make the right choices, because the ones we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands, of years.”
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
From Columbia Climate School’s State of the Planet, a smart, comprehensive, and thoughtful list of 35 ways to reduce your carbon emissions.
From CNN, the discovery of plastiglomerate stones on Trindade, a remote and volcanic island far off the coast of Brazil. This is a remarkably early example of the geologic future being created by humans – which is what we now call the Anthropocene – as our plastic waste dominates Earth’s sedimentary layer. “This is new and terrifying at the same time, because pollution has reached geology,” said Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Parana.
From Berkeley News, our deep-rooted belief in “speciesism” underlies our destructive attitude toward life on Earth. Speciesism is the belief that species are uniquely real and that some species are more important than others. A new book, Speciesism in Biology and Culture: How Human Exceptionalism is Pushing Planetary Boundaries, explains 1) that species are actually an inaccurate measure of the tree of life, 2) that lineages – the branches on the tree – offer a better map, and 3) that our attachment to species is what allows us to imagine that humans are somehow superior to other forms of life, in a species-specific analogue to racism.
From Anthropocene, the humble mussel builds up salt marshes at remarkable speed, something we should be encouraging as sea level rises.
From Reasons to be Cheerful, a good reporter’s story of her desperate search to recycle batteries. She’s a native of Germany, where such recycling is mandatory and common, but in her new home of California the once-ordinary activity has turned into an absurd quest.
From the Times, we’re extending the landscape of fear to the last (relatively) untouched region of the planet: mining the deep sea floor. The head of the International Seabed Authority is accused of rushing the process and mocking environmental concerns, and the agency itself – which is still drawing up rules for seabed mining – has quietly shared data on potential mining areas with the most aggressive of the potential mining companies.
We can start by rewinding our imagination and your writing reflects this.
Thank you for this essay. I'm a new writer on Substack and am inspired to find a community around the things I care most about, that is, restoring habitat in a small part of midcoast Maine and making art that reflects the abundance of the living earth. I believe each of us can effect change, and one of the ways I hope to do that here is by sharing and cross-posting information.