The New Wild: Why invasive species will be nature's salvation

by Fred Pearce

By elevating the conservation status of supposedly pristine parts of nature, and disregarding the rest – the new wild – conservationists end up complicit in forest destruction and biodiversity loss. *

At its most ambitious, rewilding extends to bringing back extinct megafauna. Jurassic Park may be science fiction, but the idea of a Pleistocene Park is real. There is already a park with that name way up in the sub-Arctic steppes of north-eastern Siberia, not so far from the Bering Straits. It is the creation of Russian scientist Sergey Zimov, director of the Northeast Science Station in Cherskiy.