We have a program!

...and you can find it here.

Rewilding... (?)

Did anyone else catch Elizabeth Kolbert's recent New Yorker article, "Recall of the Wild"?  It's fascinating stuff about creating these "new wildernesses" in Europe that are meant to replicate Pleistocene-era ecosystems.  Here's the abstract:

ABSTRACT:DEPARTMENT OF ECOLOGY about the Rewilding Europe movement. For most of the past several millennia, Flevoland, a province which sits more or less at the center of the Netherlands, lay at the bottom of an inlet of the North Sea. A massive drainage project in the nineteen-fifties allowed Flevoland to emerge out of the muck of the former seafloor. Now, Flevoland is home to the Oostvaardersplassen, a wilderness that was also constructed, Genesis-like, from the mud. The reserve occupies fifteen thousand almost perfectly flat acres, and biologists have stocked it with the sorts of animals that would have inhabited the region in prehistoric times, had it not at that point been underwater. In many cases, the animals had been exterminated, so they had to settle for the next best thing; for example, in place of the aurochs, a large and now extinct bovine, they brought in Heck cattle, a variety specially bred by Nazi scientists. The cattle grazed and multiplied, along with red deer, horses, foxes, geese, egrets, and other animals. With a certain amount of squinting, the herds of large mammals could be said to resemble the great migratory herds of Africa. Visitors now pay up to forty-five dollars each to take safari-like tours of the park. Such is the success of the Dutch experiment that it has inspired a new movement.