“We are not trying exactly to reconstruct the mammoth steppe ecosystem, because we don’t have the mammoth,” Zimov told me recently by phone from St. Petersburg. “But we are trying to reconstruct the highly productive steppe ecosystem.” Zimov brought in reindeer and a breed of very cold-hardy horses known as Yakutians. A few years ago, he imported five European bison to the park, but only one—a male—survived the second winter. “Now we are looking for girlfriends,” Zimov said. Several musk oxen were also brought in, but they, too, were all males. “We also search females for them,” Zimov told me. The Pleistocene Park, which is in northeastern Siberia, is so remote that almost no one who isn’t conducting research there has ever visited it.
As Europeans have taken up the term, “rewilding” has shifted its meaning yet again. The concept has become at once less threatening and more gastronomically appealing: it is expected that visitors to the continent’s rewilded regions will be able to enjoy not just the safari-like tours but also the local cuisine. (One park in Portugal in the process of “rewilding” offers its own brand of olive oil.)
Rewilding Europe, the group that is pushing the concept most vigorously, was founded three years ago by two Dutchmen, a Swede, and a Scot. One of the Dutchmen, Wouter Helmer, lives not far from the field where Manolo and Rocky are pastured, and the day after I visited the bulls I went to meet him at his house, which is at the edge of a park, in a small clearing that made me think of Goldilocks.
Helmer explained that the goal of Rewilding Europe was, in effect, to create giant versions of the Oostvaardersplassen, each at least fifteen times as large. “Frans Vera always says, ‘If the Dutch can do it, everyone can do it,’” he told me. To get the project started, the group has raised more than 6 million euros—roughly $7.5 million dollars—much of it from the Dutch postcode lottery, which might be compared to the New York State lottery, except that the proceeds go to charity. Last year, after receiving twenty applications from organizations across the continent, the group chose five regions to serve as what it calls “model rewilding areas”—a part of the Danube delta spanning the border of Romania and Ukraine; an area in the southern Carpathian Mountains, also known as the Transylvanian Alps; and areas in the eastern Carpathians, the mountains of Croatia, and the western Iberian Peninsula. One quality these areas share is that fewer and fewer people want to live in them.
“There’s no economy in big parts of Europe,” Helmer told me. “We think it’s a window of opportunity.” The idea is to rewild the areas by connecting existing reserves with tracts of abandoned land and working farms whose owners can be persuaded to let a herd of aurochs (or tauroses) wander across their property. (The lure for landowners is supposed to be an influx of tourists, who will come and open their wallets.)
Helmer stressed to me that Rewilding Europe was not particularly concerned about whether the new landscape that would be created would resemble the ancient one that had been altered or destroyed. “We’re not looking backward but forward,” he said at one point.
“We try to avoid too much discussion of wilderness,” he observed at another. “For us, that is not the most important thing—at the end will this be a wilderness or not? It will be wilder than it was, and that’s what matters.”
One morning not long after this, I found myself sitting in a small hut, staring at a pile of dead chickens. The chickens had pure white feathers that were matted with blood, and they lay with their half-severed heads and rigid legs tilted at grotesque angles. After a while, a half dozen Griffon vultures settled into a nearby tree. Griffon vultures are large birds with light-colored faces and dark bodies, and the group in the tree resembled a gathering of harpies. A little while later, a pair of black vultures showed up and began circling overhead. Black vultures are even larger than Griffons, with wingspans that can reach ten feet. They are majestic, funereal-looking birds, and watching them feels like a premonition of one’s own death. The chickens had been laid out as part of a supplementary feeding program for the birds, who, it seemed, were not hungry. The black vultures continued to circle, the Griffon vultures continued to sit in the tree, and the small hut grew stuffier. After a few hours, my companion, Diego Benito, decided that the spectacle we had come to see was not going to take place, and so, disappointed, we left.
Benito runs a 1,300-acre nature preserve in far western Spain called the Campanarios de Azaba. The preserve is part of the Rewilding Europe “model area” in western Iberia, and of the five areas it’s the easiest to get to. Nevertheless, the trip there involves a four-hour drive from Madrid, through the provinces of Ávila and Salamanca.
Since the vultures weren’t cooperating, Benito suggested we tour the rest of the reserve. Until fairly recently, the place had been a farm, and it was dotted with oak trees whose acorns had gone to fattening pigs. It was hot and dry as we crunched along through the underbrush. Even though I knew the nearest town wasn’t more than a few miles away, the terrain seemed empty enough to get lost in, and I was reminded of a time in the New Mexico desert when I’d read a trail map wrong and found myself walking in circles. We encountered some very handsome horses, which, Benito told me, belonged to a rare and ancient Spanish breed known as Retuertas. Farther on we came to a fenced-in area filled with a network of small but clearly man-made tunnels. These, Benito explained, had been dug for the benefit of rabbits, which in Spain—and, indeed, throughout Europe—have been decimated by a disease known as myxomatosis. The myoma virus was purposefully introduced on a private estate in France as a rabbit-control measure in the 1950s and has since spread across the continent. (The loss of rabbits has led to a decline in animals that prey on rabbits, like the Iberian lynx, which is now considered to be critically endangered.) The fences were supposed to protect some reintroduced rabbits from foxes, but the rabbits had refused to stay put, so now the enclosures were empty. The same was true of a series of circular platforms that had been erected in some oak trees as nesting sites for black storks. The black storks hadn’t been interested in them.
“You can’t be a hundred percent sure of success, because wild animals are wild animals,” Benito told me. We went looking for some Sayaguesa cows that had recently been purchased with Rewilding Europe money, but they seemed to be avoiding us. Sayaguesas are another primitive breed of interest to the TaurOs program, an enterprise that Benito told me he was eager to get involved in. “If you want to sell a product, you have to have a story,” he said.
That afternoon, after a lunch of local (and quite tasty) pork cutlets, we drove out of the reserve to the top of a nearby mountain. Along the way, we passed through a couple of villages that, Benito explained, were in the process of disappearing; the schools had closed for lack of children and only the old people remained. In one of the towns, La Encina, we stopped to meet the mayor, a slight, elderly man named José Maria. According to Maria, the number of residents in La Encina had dropped by more than 50 percent in just the past fifteen years. He was enthusiastic about the idea of rewilding, he said, because it had “a lot of potential to bring tourists.” From the top of the mountain, we could see across to Portugal, some fifteen miles away. The valley was a patchwork of brown fields, pine forests that had been planted during the Franco era, and evenly spaced oaks of the sort I’d seen at the preserve. According to a brochure that Wouter Helmer had given me, the entire region was ripe for rewilding, owing to “rural depopulation”; the aim was to transform at least 1,000 square kilometers, or 250,000 acres. I tried to imagine the whole valley converted into an Iberian version of the Oostvaardersplassen. Certainly it was a lot less populated than the outskirts of Amsterdam. Still, I realized, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be envisioning. The pine plantations could never be considered wild: would they have to go? What about the pruned oaks, and the pigs that were still snuffling around them for acorns, and the brown fields, and all the tiny, dying towns waiting for an influx of tourists?
One of the appeals of rewilding is that it represents a proactive agenda—as Josh Do
nlan and his Pleistocene rewilding colleagues put it, a hopeful alternative to just sitting around, mourning what’s been lost. In a rewilded world, even extinction need not be considered irrevocable; the aurochs will lie down with the lynx, and the deer and the elephants will roam. On a planet increasingly dominated by people—even the deep oceans today are being altered by humans—it probably makes sense to think about wilderness, too, as a human creation. The more I saw, the more I understood why Europeans, in particular, were attracted to the idea, and the more I wanted to be convinced that it could work. But, as I looked back toward the Campanarios de Azaba, I thought of the vacant rabbit tunnels and the empty platforms built for the storks, and I wasn’t at all sure.
It was dusk by the time we headed down the mountain. Benito got a call on his cell phone from a local farmer who had a dead pig he thought the vultures might be interested in. On our way back, we stopped by to see what had happened to the chickens. Every one of them was gone, including the bones.
KEITH GESSEN
Polar Express
FROM The New Yorker
THE ICE-CLASS BULK carrier Nordic Odyssey docked at the port of Murmansk, Russia, just after six in the morning on July 5, 2012. It had a green deck and a red hull, and was 738 feet long, 105 feet wide, and 120 feet from top to bottom; empty, it weighed 14,000 tons. It was an eighty-story building turned on its side and made to float. The Odyssey had come to pick up 65,000 tons of iron ore and take it to China via the Northern Sea Route—through the ice of the Arctic seas and then down through the Bering Strait.
Murmansk, which rises along one bank of a fjord thirty miles south of the Barents Sea, is the world’s largest city north of the Arctic Circle, and yet as soon as a visitor got past harbor security at the gate, the city disappeared. The pier was covered by huge mounds of coal and iron ore. Train cars kept pulling in with more; tall yellow cranes dipped into them and deposited the ore onto the mounds, and then the train cars pulled out again. It was as if Russia were coughing up her insides. The cranes’ grabs could barely squeeze into the railcars. The deep, rumbling sounds of steel on steel echoed in the quiet of the fjord.
The Odyssey is owned by a Danish shipping company called Nordic Bulk. In 2010 the company was asked to get a load of ore from Norway to China. The normal route would be either south through the Suez Canal or even farther south, around the Cape of Good Hope, but the Suez route would take you by the coast of Somalia, home to the world’s most enterprising pirates, and the Cape Hope route would take too long. Mads Petersen, the cochairman of Nordic Bulk, wondered if there was another way. As it happened, the shortest route from Norway to China was through the Arctic. “And I thought, Maybe the Northern Sea Route has opened up, because of global warming,” Petersen said, recounting his thought process two years later in Murmansk. He is just past thirty, gregarious, and big—six-foot-two and 260 pounds. I said, “You started going to the Arctic because you read an article about global warming?”
Petersen shook his head. “In Denmark, you do not ‘read an article’ about global warming,” he said. “You hear about it, all the time.”
Petersen contacted Rosatomflot, the state company that owns Russia’s six nuclear icebreakers (the largest such fleet in the world), and made a deal to send his cargo through the Arctic with an icebreaker escort. The price was $300,000, but the projected savings in fuel and time would make up for it and then some. Moreover, it was an adventure, and it even had a patriotic appeal. Vitus Bering, the man who in 1728 discovered the strait between Russia and America, was a Dane.
While in port, the Odyssey was less an intrepid ship and more of a floating warehouse. A metal gangway connected it to the pier and was watched at all hours by two members of the crew. It was important that nothing extra be allowed to get on board (drugs, for example, or tanks) but that all the proper things (maps, food, cigarettes) did. Most important of all was the iron ore. It had to be loaded as efficiently as possible in the ship’s seven deep cargo holds, but also as evenly as possible: nothing can take a ship down faster than its cargo, improperly loaded. There was also the depth of the water to keep in mind. Fully loaded, the Odyssey would have a draft—the plumb distance from the waterline to the keel—of 43 feet; at the pier, the water at low tide was 42 feet. Thus the ship had to load up at high tide and then leave.
Petersen spent two days in Murmansk and then flew back to Copenhagen. The responsibility for loading the Odyssey fell on its chief mate, Vadim Zakharchenko. He was a short, broad-shouldered man with red hair and freckles; in his dark jumpsuit, he resembled a small bear. A native of the old port city of Odessa, he spoke Russian with a surprising Yiddish lilt—a legacy, he said, of his many Jewish classmates. On the early morning of July 9, the Odyssey’s last day in port, he was in a foul mood. The stevedores had told him that they weren’t going to get to 65,000 tons of iron ore in time. In fact, Zakharchenko reported to Igor Shkrebko, the captain of the Odyssey, “They say we’ll be lucky to reach sixty-four.” At current shipping prices, a thousand fewer tons would put Nordic Bulk down between $20,000 and $30,000: an inauspicious start to the trip.
The captain was a tall, thin man, still youthful in his midforties, with curly, graying hair and black eyes. During the stay at Murmansk, his young wife had come up from their hometown of Sevastopol to visit; while most of the crew stayed on board, the Shkrebkos had walked around town and taken lots of photographs. In any case, cargo loading was the chief mate’s job. “Akh!” Zakharchenko finally said. “They’ll throw what they throw!”
For the rest of the morning, he scampered among the cranes and dockworkers, balancing two conflicting imperatives: that the cranes load the ship at record speed and that the hills of iron ore remain evenly distributed throughout the holds. The tall yellow cranes worked with urgency, picking up 6 or 7 tons of ore from the mounds piled on the dock, swinging over the cargo holds, then releasing the ore with a swoosh. As a light rain began to fall, Zakharchenko several times climbed down a rope ladder to the lee side of the ship to check how far it had descended into the water. Each centimeter represented 67 tons; incredibly, this was the only way to measure how much ore the Odyssey had taken on.
High tide was at noon, and the ship could not stay at the pier any longer. At eleven-thirty the cranes stopped loading, and fifteen minutes later all was done. According to an eyeball measurement of the ship’s displacement, taken by both Zakharchenko and a surveyor hired by the Russian company that was shipping the ore, and a somewhat hurried calculation of the water density in the harbor, the Odyssey was now filled with 67,519 tons of ore: 2,500 tons more than the target. The stevedores had underestimated themselves. Those stevedores now ran down to the dock and removed the ship’s thick ropes from the bollards; then three small tugboats came alongside the Odyssey, two to push and one to pull the ship into the harbor. That night, as the sun dipped toward the horizon (though it would not set), we entered the Barents Sea. You could tell it was the sea because right away our ship, despite now weighing more than 80,000 tons, started listing from side to side atop the waves.
Ahead of us, to the north and to the east, the ice was melting. This was normal. At its maximum extent, in mid-March, the ice covers the entire Arctic Ocean and most of its marginal seas for about 15 million square kilometers, twice the land area of the continental United States. During its minimum extent, around mid-September, the ice cover traditionally shrinks to about half this size.
In recent years, it has been shrinking by much more than half. In September 2007, the ice shrank to 4.3 million square kilometers, the lowest extent in recorded history. In subsequent years, it reached its second-, third-, and fourth-lowest-ever extents. The thickness of the ice—more difficult to measure but also more telling—is also decreasing, from an average thickness of 12 feet in 1980 to half that two decades later. The primary cause of this decline is warmer air temperature in the Arctic, an area that has been more affected by global warming than any other place on Earth.
The estimates vary, but
scientists agree that at some point in this century the minimum extent, at the end of the summer season, will reach zero. At that point you’ll be able to cross the North Pole in a canoe. But it won’t be just you and your canoe, because the resource grabs have already begun. Denmark and Canada are engaged in a territorial dispute over Hans Island, which a recent congressional research report describes as a “tiny, barren piece of rock” between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island, because territorial claims will lead to resource rights. Similarly, Russia has filed a claim with the United Nations that the Lomonosov Ridge, which spans the Arctic underwater from the coast of Siberia to Ellesmere Island, gives Russia rights to the sea above it, including the North Pole. All this is being done in anticipation of a thaw. Oil companies, armed with new technology and lured by less menacing winter conditions, will be able to establish drilling platforms in latitudes that were previously off-limits, and shipping companies will be able to save time and money through the Arctic shortcut. Shell has already announced plans to begin drilling exploratory wells off northern Alaska. Last year, Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company, signed a joint-venture agreement with ExxonMobil to proceed with oil exploration in the Kara Sea—once called Mare Glaciale, the “ice sea.” Meanwhile, the Odyssey’s trip was a test case for the proposition that the Northern Sea Route, formerly known as the Northeast Passage, could be reliably traversed.
The water of the Barents was a handsome dark blue, the sky was clear, and the temperature outside, though gradually dropping, was a balmy 50 degrees. Captain Shkrebko set our heading east for the southern tip of the archipelago Novaya Zemlya; this put the ship at a better angle to the waves, and it stopped rocking. We were proceeding at an unimpressive speed, 13 knots, but then again we never stopped. Three bridge crews of two men each, an officer and an able seaman, carried out four-hour shifts throughout the day and night.