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by Stewart Truelsen

In "Jurassic Park," the blockbuster movie and best-selling Michael Crichton novel, scientists clone dinosaurs for a theme park on a remote island. The whole idea turns out badly with meat-eating dinosaurs hunting down people.

While no one seems to be suggesting that dinosaurs be cloned from prehistoric DNA and redistributed across the United States, there is a growing "conservation" movement that has remarkably similar designs. In fact, one has to wonder if Jurassic Park was an inspiration for some of the plans.

The rewilding movement grabbed headlines recently in an article that first appeared in Nature magazine. In the article, Cornell University biologist and ecologist Josh Donlan wrote of his vision to restore large animals to North America that disappeared 13,000 years ago during the Pleistocene Epoch.

The original animals, such as the American lion and mastodon, have long been extinct so "proxy" animals would be substituted. The proxies would include African elephants, lions, cheetahs, camels and other large vertebrates.

Where would they roam? Donlan suggested large reserves in parts of the Great Plains where human population is declining. This would likely include farming areas hard hit by years of drought. The remaining good citizens of these communities might be persuaded to leave, too, if lions are stalking deer in their fields and elephants are trampling their corn.

While acknowledging that ranchers may want to find an alternative to what they are doing, Donlan said, "Managed elephant populations could similarly benefit ranchers through grassland maintenance and ecotourism." He proposed fencing to reduce any elephant-human conflicts.

Call it a crackpot scheme or a noble experiment, depending on your point of view, but rewilding is not something agriculturalists should ignore.

In his book, "Rewilding North America," Dave Foreman, director of an Albuquerque, N.M., think tank, has proposed continental-scale conservation aimed at establishing large carnivores in corridors all the way from Canada to Central America. Mountain lions and wolves are at the foundation of his rewilding plan, which focuses on the East and West coasts and upper Great Lakes in the United States.

Foreman spends half of his book doling out blame for the loss of species, and most of it falls on humankind, from caveman to modern man. He is critical of farmers for altering the landscape to grow crops and raise livestock. He seems to forget that agriculture was and remains the foundation for the economy of this nation. We’d all be out hunting animals and gathering wild berries and nuts without it, and so would the rest of the world.

Farmers and ranchers support cooperative conservation and an upgrade of the Endangered Species Act to make it work for both landowners and the species. As agriculturalists and environmental caretakers, farmers and ranchers want to continue to produce food, fiber and fuel. They don’t plan on also becoming caretakers at a Pleistocene park.

Stewart Truelsen is a contributing writer to the Focus on Agriculture series.