Trends in America may portend a global restoration of nature, a rebound. To understand, let’s go into the woods, not in a far-off kingdom, but only about 45 miles northwest of New York City in New Jersey, where a scary side-effect illustrates the American trend to expand nature. In September 2014 a bear killed Darsh Patel, 22, a senior at Rutgers University majoring in information technology, while hiking with friends. Patel’s death in the Apshawa Preserve was the first fatal bear attack recorded in New Jersey in 150 years. Five friends were hiking when they came across the bear, which they photographed and filmed before running in different directions. After regrouping, they noticed one was missing. State authorities found and euthanized the bear, which had human remains in its stomach and esophagus, and human blood and tissue below its claws.  Five years earlier, the state of New Jersey had restored its bear hunt. In 2010 wildlife ecologists estimated that 3,400 bears were living in New Jersey. After five years of hunting, the experts now estimate the population has fallen to 2,500. During the six-day 2014 season, hunters killed 267 bears. Protesters have picketed and petitioned to stop the annual hunt.

Should the re-wilding of New Jersey shock us? I answer “no,” because about 1970 a great reversal began in America’s use of resources. Contrary to the expectations of many professors and preachers, America began to spare more resources for the rest of nature, first in relative and more recently in absolute amounts. A series of decouplings is occurring, so that our economy no longer advances in tandem with exploitation of land, forests, water, and minerals. American use of almost everything except information seems to be peaking, not because the resources are exhausted, but because consumers changed consumption and producers changed production. Changes in behavior and technology liberate the environment.

Jesse Huntley Ausubel is Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University in New York City. Mr. Ausubel spent the first decade of his career in Washington DC working for the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. On behalf of the Academies, he was one of the main organizers of the first UN World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979. Since 1989 Mr. Ausubel has served on the faculty of The Rockefeller University, where he leads a research program to elaborate the technical vision of a large, prosperous society that emits little or nothing harmful and spares large amounts of land and sea for nature. He is closely associated with the concepts of decarbonization, dematerialization, land sparing, and
industrial ecology.

From 1994 to 2012 Mr. Ausubel concurrently served as a program manager in basic research for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In the late 1990s he helped initiate and then lead the Census of Marine Life, an international observational program to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans. Beginning in 2002 he helped found the Barcode of Life Initiative, which provides short DNA sequences that identify animal, plant, and fungal species. During 2006–2007 he served as the founding chair of the Encyclopedia of Life project to create a webpage for every species. Mr. Ausubel is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future (since 1994) and Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (since 1990). In 2014 the Breakthrough Institute awarded him its Paradigm Prize for work on harnessing technology to lighten the human footprint.

This study is available for download at http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/Nature_Rebounds.pdf