#the state of our ecosystem is practically postapocalyptic

[spontaneousmusicalnumber]

A lot of the comments are to the effect of “just put the predators back!” like it’s so obvious but I feel I need to repeat that “our landscape cannot support” them.

In my state, Iowa, there is nowhere for them to go.

Wolves, bears, and mountain lions have huge home ranges. They NEED large swaths of undeveloped land to live and breed. In the mountains where there’s lots of areas too steep to plow, or out west where the land’s too dry to farm it all and it’s better served by grazing, that could be possible! There’s lots of space that animals can use.

That just. Doesn’t exist here anymore.

Just under 80% of Iowa used to be tallgrass prairie: rich grasslands supporting hundreds of plant species with plants keeping perennial roots up to 20 feet down. Those perennial deep roots created an incredibly rich and fertile soil.

Over 99.9% of that ecosystem was destroyed, plowed under to use that soil for corn and soybeans. Let me repeat that: Less than one-tenth of one-hundredth of that ecosystem remains today. What does remain is usually small and scattered: fifty acres here, a hundred way over there.

In the neighboring state of Wisconsin, a wolf pack’s territory covers an average of 50 to 60 square miles. The largest prairie in the entire state of Iowa, Broken Kettle Preserve on the Nebraska border, is under 5 square miles. It’s over 10 times the size of the second largest prairie, less than half a square mile. The third largest scrapes 1/3. (1 sq mile = 640 acres)

Technically, we have black bears in the state. That number is anywhere from 0 to 3. They travel along the Mississippi river basin between Missouri and Wisconsin or Minnesota. There is nothing stopping them from staying in Iowa, except for the fact that there is nowhere with enough wilderness for them to live. At an extremely generous estimate, they might kill two dozen deer a year out of our 450k.

"If we just put the predators back there wouldn’t be a need to hunt” is so far outside the current realm of possibility that it’s almost insulting.

A frustrating part of the mainstream vegan “love all animals and protect the environment” mindset is the fact that things need to die in real-life ecology all the time but deer hunting season makes icky feelings and carp culls aren’t cottagecore