Pleistocene America.(rewilding North America )

There are no cheetahs running wild in Arizona. For ecologist C. Josh Donlan of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, that's a problem. Going far, far beyond any previous vision for rewilding North America, Donlan and his collaborators have begun arguing for "Pleistocene re-wilding," in which "megafauna" that have been absent from North America since the end of the last Ice Age are reintroduced. In the November 2006 issue of the journal American Naturalist, Donlan and his 11 coauthors write: "we advocate Pleistocene rewilding--reinstituting ecological and evolutionary processes that were transformed or eliminated by megafaunal extinctions--as a conservation priority in North America."

According to author William Stolzenberg, writing in the January-March 2006 issue of Conservation in Practice, the idea for Pleistocene re-wilding began to come together for Donlan and his partners in 2004 at, of all places, Ted Turner's ranch. According to Stolzenberg, the group gathered at "Turner's Ladder Ranch in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. Over easels and PowerPoint and after-hours beers, they discussed the rewilding idea and broke it down to its factual nuts and bolts, its practical challenges and criticisms, its societal costs and benefits." The group, which included Earth First eco-terrorist Dave Foreman, came up with what Stolzenberg ...