The World Is Not A Theme Park

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China's former leader Mao Zedong once declared war against sparrows, believing they were a pest and a nuisance. In response, millions of Chinese took to the streets, banging on woks and pans to terrify the birds. The idea: force them to stay aloft until they dropped dead of exhaustion. They did just that. The campaign was halted after an infestation of caterpillars, now freed of their feathered predators, devoured the crops, enveloped the trees and rained down upon pedestrians. In that same grand tradition of meddling with nature, Alaska has declared an air war against hundreds of wolves in an effort to boost already abundant populations of caribou and moose. And all to impress hunters and tourists. Never mind that when herds swell, starvation is often close by. Even as Alaska prepares to wage its wolf war, conservationists in the Lower 48 mourn the absence of wolves and seek to reintroduce them.

Chalk another one up to mankind's micromanagement of nature. Recklessly arrogant and myopic, Alaska's decision is rooted in special-interest economics, not biology. It's all the more distressing for what it tells us about ourselves as a species and our estrangement from nature. Alaska's folly is the product of a theme-park mentality in which nature exists for our amusement, to be enhanced by adding one species and subtracting another. An indiscriminate assault will kill off pack leaders, leaving wolves in hierarchical disarray, and harm eagles, foxes and wolverines, which dine upon the carcasses wolves leave behind. Such contempt for natural order is nothing new, though it comes at a time when many Americans belatedly question both nature's recuperative powers and the human species' claim to a divine right of subjugation.

So long as our species behaves like a spoiled only child, allowing parochial economic, political and leisure appetites to define the landscape, nature will deny us the thing we crave most -- a sense of belonging. To extend Groucho Marx's line, we would not join any club that would have us. Rarely accorded a standing of its own, nature is forever cast in anthropocentric terms, reduced to a prize in the simplistic consume-or-conserve debate. There is nature as the winsome obstacle to development, as the romanticist's favored tableau, even as the butt of ridicule by sophisticates who fault it for a lack of subtext or irony -- contrivances of the human mind. What value nature has, and it is not our place to say, may be that to its dying day it will be oblivious to our attentions.

Even as we consume and alter, we erect stage sets to mask the loss. Many Americans today mistake as wilderness the ersatz version to which they have become accustomed. Where once there were forests, now there are tree farms, transmogrified by science into monocultural stands of uniform height and genetic stock. In a word, a crop. Many anglers cast into rivers and lakes devoid of native fish. Stocked European brown trout and transplanted rainbows ply our streams, with native brook and cutthroat trout in retreat. Bighorn sheep and other game herds are shunted about for the hunter's delight.