Y'all know about Pleistocene Park? If not, or if you do but haven't watched this half-hour documentary on it, I recommend it https://vimeo.com/207624364 
Basically, the project is an experiment to transform an area of permafrost in Siberia back into a more productive grassland, a carbon sink, maintained by reintroducing herbivores, especially megafauna, like horses, bison, etc. They are recreating the mammoth steppe ecosystem.
The underlying assumption driving this project is that the main cause of mass animal extinction and extirpation at the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene was humans, not just changes in the global biosphere, which the species had survived prior.
Humans moved in, hunted the mammoths etc., species went extinct, ecosystems changed (and arguably suffered). There's evidence to support this theory, such as island populations of some of these critters which outlasted the main extinction wave. We live in a depauperate planet...
Humans came onto the scene with a lot more going on, lots of big animals, huge amounts of biomass, vast grasslands, etc. We're working on delving ourselves into a mass extinction, the sixth this planet has experienced, that we know of. But it doesn't have to be like this.
Regardless of the loftiest goal of Pleistocene Park, the reintroduction of de-extinct mammoths (or mammothy elephants, more accurately), we can recreate improved ecosystems like they're already doing, by reintroducing herbivores to restore grasslands, and predators to maintain it
Acceptance of the world around us, which is not functioning as it once did, should, or could, is not the solution. Shifting baselines mean that the world today is different than it was, usually for the worst. Look at bird population or insect biomass declines in recent years.
We think of nature as not-us, but that's a false dichotomy. We can't just sit back, wall shit off, and hope for the best. We need active participation in our ecosystems, from grasslands to forests and everything else, to at least jumpstart a higher complexity to re-naturalize.
Anyway, I mostly just wanted to tell y'all about this neat project that I've been following for a few years and try to frame it a little. Check it out.

tl;dr humans should actively manage and re-engineer ecosystems even if they look different than the original
P.S. if I had the resources I would try to restore the grasslands (etc.) of the southeast with bison and red wolves, wapiti and panthers, and I'd link up everything with habitat corridors a la "Rewilding North America" or the Eastern WildWay

https://wildlandsnetwork.org/wildways/eastern/
follow @wildlandsnetwrk and @PleistocenePark for more of this kinda thing (I'm just a hype man not associated with either)
You can follow @rye_awry.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: