Abstract for Michelle Nijhuis's "To Take Wildness in Hand"

Claim: Assisted migration may save species that are dying from climate change.

Subclaims:
1.) Barlow thinks that the species Torreya taxifolia would benefit from a move to a cooler climate than Florida.

2.) Conservationists think that bigger nature reserves, stricter greenhouse-gas emissions will work better than assisted migration but they will not.

3.) While some people think that assisted migration is dangerous, sometimes we have no other option.

4.) Torreya taxifolia is capable of growing in other areas besides Florida.

5.) Other species besides Torreya taxifolia may benefit from assisted migration.


Support:
1.) “When Barlow looked up at the branches of the Florida torreya, she made an impulsive commitment to the species. She’d spent years thinking and writing about evolution and ecology, and was aware of the implications of climate change. She decided the species needed to move north, to cooler, less diseased climes. And since it couldn’t move fast enough alone, Barlow would move it herself.”

“Despite years of study, no researcher has conclusively identified the disease or its source, and some speculate it may even be a suite of diseases.”

“Since T. taxifolia has separate male and female plants, any trees that managed to persist through adolescence would need the added good fortune of growing near a mate. Only then could the pollen ride the wind to a female tree and produce the species’ distinctively hefty seeds. On top of those difficulties is the Southeast’s record-breaking drought, which shrank water supplies to dangerously low levels last fall, making the oncoming stresses of climate change difficult to ignore.”



2.) “Captive breeding without hope of reintroduction is an expensive and indefinite custodial project, an ark with no gangplank.”




3.) “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.”



“that sort of tinkering crosses an invisible line between humans and capital-N Nature, and risks making things much worse. We’ve good reason to distrust ourselves, after all. Until the 1950s, we thought planting kudzu was a good idea.”



“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.”


4.) “Paleoecologist Paul Martin, loved the idea of moving T. taxifolia north. The Florida torreya is widely believed to be an ice age relict, “left behind” after the last glacial retreat and very possibly better suited for cooler climates, with or without global warming. So why not return it to the southern Appalachians, where it grew during the Pleistocene?”



“Lee Barnes… has so far collected and distributed about 120 seeds to about a dozen people and gardens north of Georgia, including amateur gardeners in Ohio, New York, England, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Some recipients have reported their successes and failures; some have not.”




“Jack Johnson, a sleepy-eyed emergency-room nurse and amateur horticulturist, started growing Florida torreya after meeting Connie Barlow at a dinner in North Carolina. On the steep ground behind his house, on terraces that legend has it were used for growing corn for white lightning in the 1930s, Johnston is cultivating a half-dozen Torreya taxifolia seedlings he bought, legally, from a nursery in South Carolina. Each is about two feet high, five years old, and healthy.”




“Bill Alexander, forest historian for the estate, has lived on these grounds for twenty years, and he walks along the curving path through this cultivated forest, pointing out each Florida torreya in turn. These trees, all apparently free of the disease that scourges the Panhandle populations… some graze fifty feet, a height now unimaginable in Florida. Despite freezes and hurricanes, the Florida torreya has done itself proud in North Carolina: one of the trees at Biltmore, Alexander believes, is the second-largest of the species. The largest stands on a farm in northeastern North Carolina, surrounded by rusting farm equipment.”




5.) “The Florida torreya isn’t the only species that might benefit from immediate assisted migration. The Quino checkerspot butterfly has blinked out on the southern end of its range, in the Mexican state of Baja California, while the northern end of its range, in Southern California, has been transformed by development. In South Africa and Namibia, rising temperatures on the northern edge of the range of the quiver tree are killing the succulent plants before the species has a chance to shift south.”




Warrant: This article is aimed at those who are concerned about the effects of climate change.