(credit: Debs)
We humans have altered our planet's surface, atmosphere, and its flora and fauna so dramatically that our impact is the defining feature of our geographical age, the Anthropocene. One school of thought regarding how to best fix, or at least halt, some of the damage we've caused to various ecosystems is to “rewild” them—to meddle even more by (re)introducing species to a landscape in order to help it revert to a healthier, pre-human-impact state. But the technique is controversial, and we're just starting to try to understand its impacts.
In many ecosystems, we've killed off the apex predators but left a variety of herbivores around (see most wolf populations in the US). Trophic rewilding involves introducing an apex predator into an ecosystem in order to cull the herbivore population and allow megafauna to bounce back.
The rationale is that these big carnivores (and some of the larger herbivores) are at the helms of trophic cascades: they control the density of their prey and their competitors and thus shape their entire ecosystems. So when they disappear—largely because of us—there are myriad negative effects, culminating in a lack of biodiversity. Reintroducing such species could hopefully bring balance back to their environments, much like the banks were bailed out in 2008 to bring balance back to our economy.
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