Reindeer on the Run
Tipping points and wildlife translocations in a warming world
Reindeer on the Run: An Illustrated History will examine the history of reindeer and caribou (Rangifer tarandus) translocations across the globe. Translocating reindeer and caribou—and other large wildlife--to viable habitats will become critical as warming traps wildlife in places they can’t survive. Yet how do we move large animals in a rapidly changing world with complex geopolitical boundaries?
We have 250 years of experience at moving reindeer around the world, and we can learn a great deal from these histories. Moving wildlife about the world has never been just about taking an individual or herd and putting it somewhere else. Wildlife translocation has always involved questions of power, social relations, and visions of a desired future. Close attention to the historic successes and failures of earlier reindeer translocations will improve the chances that climate-change motivated translocations will succeed.
Why reindeer? They’re more than just adorable stars of Disney Christmas specials. With their long migrations and their resiliency to past climate change, reindeer and caribou have been central to human life across the global north for millennia. Thousands of years ago, as glaciers retreated following the end of the most recent ice age, reindeer enabled people to expand into Arctic regions. Now they are crucial partners in the fight against Arctic climate change, because their browsing can keep shrubs at bay, thus cooling regional climates. But across the boreal and the Arctic, reindeer and caribou populations are now crashing. They have retreated from roughly half their 19th century range, and their populations have dropped by 56% in the past decade. Are they indeed doomed by climate change, as many policymakers assume? Or can restoration techniques help protect their future?
This richly illustrated book aimed at a broad public weaves together scholarly research with personal memoirs of the author’s journeys to Mongolia, Svalbard, Scotland, Sweden, Iceland, and cold regions of North America in search of lessons we can learn from reindeer and caribou.
Each print portrays a tipping point captured at the moment of massive change. In climate models, tipping points are critical thresholds that, if crossed, can lead to self-perpetuating, runaway warming in an ecosystem. Scholars have recently suggested that societies may contain social tipping points, where small changes in behavior can trigger runaway warming. One core social tipping point may become our increasing distance from other species, which can lead to beliefs that other animals and ecosystems are mere tools, instruments for human projects. As people lose their connections to ice, snow, and fish, they also lose the connections to other species that are critical for our willingness to restore threatened species and habitats in a warming world.
We are living in a time of rapid environmental change. What will future environmental historians think of us? How will we respond to tipping points in ways that make the future more sustainable? Or will we fail to respond?