On August 7, 2015, the body of a hiker was found about half a mile from the Elephant Back Loop Trail in Yellowstone National Park. The Park Service announced that the hiker had been mauled and partially eaten by a grizzly bear. A hunt for the responsible bear quickly yielded a mother and two cubs loitering in the area. The mother was trapped, and after DNA evidence revealed that she was responsible for the hiker's death, she was euthanized. The two cubs were moved away from Yellowstone to live the rest of their lives in an Ohio zoo.
The hiker attacked by the bear, Lance Crosby, was an employee of one of the medical clinics located in the park. He had worked in the park for five summers and was familiar with the country and the risks it contained. Crosby was well liked by his coworkers. At the time of the attack, it appears he might have been going for a quick hike to test out the strength of an ankle he had injured the previous week. Friends told Park Service authorities that Crosby often hiked alone and never carried bear spray. Even though he would have known that this was not recommended in the park, Crosby had plenty of experience in Yellowstone and felt like he knew what to look out for.
Crosby's wife reported that her husband loved the Yellowstone landscape and had always fostered a deep interest in bears. Because of his interest in natural history, Crosby no doubt understood some of the evidence that Yellowstone was in the process of becoming a different landscape. He knew that climate change had altered the seasonal rhythms of the park and was beginning to create shifts in some of the park's vegetation. He had experienced the unusually early beginnings of the summer tourist season and had worried about the increasing risks of wildfire during late summer and fall.
Crosby also appreciated that the park was in many respects a carefully constructed landscape, with Bannock and Shoshone Indians being forced to make way at the Park's creation in 1872. He knew that park biologists were busy removing nonnative trout from Yellowstone Lake. He was aware that the bison were being intensively managed during the winter months through hunting and culling to diminish the risk of transferring brucellosis to Montana's cattle herds. He had seen wolves in the park wearing bulky radio collars so they could be studied by an endless parade of ecologists and wildlife biologists. He had also no doubt watched Park Service employees towing around the giant culvert traps used to capture and relocate problem bears from various high traffic areas.
A great deal of hands-on management—“gardening,” as Marris calls it—goes into keeping up the appearance of Yellowstone Park in the manner that its visitors have come to expect. If Crosby had read any writings by Emma Marris or Gaia Vince, he might have been tempted to think of the beautiful landscape in which he spent his last five summers as postnatural or postwild. Certainly, he would have known that today's park in its heavily manipulated form lacked the naturalness it possessed ten thousand or even a hundred fifty years ago.
Yet when that sow bear came to within a few feet of him, Crosby probably understood for a terrifying few seconds that Yellowstone was far from postwild—not now and not ever. Many of the processes that gave the ancient caldera and its ecologies their shape remain present and operational. Blizzards still rake the landscape in winter. Fires still burn ferociously in summer. Evolutionary pressures still operate on the biota. Photosynthesis and respiration continue without pause. Predation is still present, and defensive behaviors are still passed on between generations of the park's fauna. The bear that attacked Crosby was still driven by powerful urges that had been fine-tuned by its species’ fifty thousand years of inhabitation of the North American continent. These are urges that no practices or interventions by wildlife biologists or park managers have any chance of quelling. Wildness, in other words, retains its place in Yellowstone, still lurking in the cracks of an increasingly managed system.
Wildness is, in fact, the riddle that will inhabit every element of a synthetic future. It will continue to reside not only in ecological landscapes and in the predators they contain but also in every practice and technology that we will try to develop. It will be found in the nanobots that Drexler was worried might run out of control and convert the earth into a grey goo. It will exist in the synthetic organisms that Venter recognizes must be prevented from escaping from the lab or from turning pathogenic. It will continue to course through the veins of the species optimistically relocated whose number might come up in the game of ecological roulette being played by ecosystem managers. It will burst forth from more intense monsoons that will unexpectedly shift five hundred miles east and come a month later as the unanticipated result of a well-intentioned, but misguided, attempt at solar radiation management. It will prowl within any human genome that is synthesized in the lab. Every technology and practice will contain important traces of wildness that will remain callously indifferent to our plans and our desires.
Wildness will continue not only as a property of the technologies we build; it will persist as a property of the builders themselves. As spontaneous social and biological beings constantly evolving new patterns of behavior in response to changing circumstances, both individuals and societies will be eternally in wildness's thrall. Swirling and unpredictable throngs will rapidly coalesce around charismatic individuals. Extensive cultural behaviors will take unexpected turns, whether in the form of radical political movements, the rapid adoption of a new technology, or the scourge of fundamentalism. An elderly woman, years into a routine of walking to a local store, will abruptly turn left instead of right. The spontaneity within us all will continue to produce both spectacular human successes and terrifying political and economic failures in ways that cannot be anticipated.
Wildness, then, is a perpetually mixed blessing. On the one hand, it ensures that the beauty, the spontaneity, and the enchanting unpredictability of the world outside of our grasp will always exist alongside our inventions. In relentlessly evolving species and ecologies, in the lotteries constantly won and lost between predator and prey, in unexpected downpours and luminescent rainbows, and in the unceasing physical and thermodynamic forces that have always shaped the home planet, wildness will ensure that there will always be mystery and wonder to behold in whatever sort of Plastocene we choose to create. The autonomy and indifference to our goals that wild animals and wild landscapes display will remain vital for keeping our projects and our dreams in perspective.
However, there is another side to this wildness that it would be foolish to forget. In its fickleness, its unpredictability, and its capacity continually to exceed our expectations, wildness will ensure that remaking the earth will always remain a game of high chance. When we insert ourselves so deeply into the workings of a planet, we are unlikely to be able to predict all of the consequences of our actions. There are serious risks to letting ourselves be seduced by the sublime beauties of technology.
The gears of geological epoch naming are already turning, and before long, stratigraphers may decide to rename our time “the human age.” If that happens, we might take that opportunity to inhale deeply, survey what lies around us, and reflect. The renaming will say something important to us about who we are and what we might become. But in that moment of reflection, our species would do well to hesitate for as long as possible before moving ahead. The pause will offer a chance to take on board the fact that, despite our best intentions, nature and the billions of fast-changing lives it contains are not likely to lay down and entirely do our bidding. Not even after the monks and philosophers of the earth sciences have named the next epoch our own.