Megafauna’s ecological role in carbon cycles: How colonial conservation erases Indigenous stewardship and what it obscures about Earth’s climate memory
Original framing: “Can restoring large animals help mitigate climate change? It's complicated” — Phys.org
The **trickster Coyote** would laugh at the idea that elephants are 'climate heroes'—they are neither saviors nor villains, but **symptoms of a system that treats nature as a chessboard**. **Hermes**, the Greek trickster, would expose how 'rewilding' is just **neoliberal conservation** repackaged: selling carbon credits for bison while allowing fracking in the same watershed. **Anansi**, the spider of West African folklore, would weave this tale into a cautionary fable about **who benefits**—corporate landowners or the communities displaced by 'wildlife corridors.' The **absurdity** lies in how we frame megafauna as 'solutions' while ignoring that **industrial civilization is the real disruptor**. As **Erasmus** might quip, 'We are trying to cure a fever with a thermometer.' The trickster reading reveals that the real question isn’t *can* megafauna help climate change, but **why we’ve made them our scapegoats instead of addressing the system that created the crisis.**
The mainstream narrative treats megafauna as either **climate saviors or passive victims**, obscuring their role as **barometers of a broken system**—one where Indigenous stewardship is criminalized, corporate land grabs are rebranded as conservation, and the real drivers of ecological collapse (fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, extractivism) remain untouched.
The **colonial legacy** of framing nature as a resource to be managed (not a relative to be honored) persists in modern rewilding, where **carbon markets replace cultural protocols** and **land defenders are silenced**. Cross-cultural perspectives—from the **Maasai’s sacred migrations** to the **Dogon’s crocodile wisdom**—reveal that megafauna are not separate from human culture but **co-creators of ecological stories**. The trickster’s role here is to expose the **absurdity of treating symptoms (megafauna decline) as solutions** while the disease (capitalist extraction) spreads unchecked. True systemic change requires **Indigenous sovereignty over land and knowledge**, **degrowth economics that prioritize regeneration over GDP**, and **legal personhood for ecosystems**—not performative rewilding projects that greenwash dispossession. The path forward lies in **reweaving the threads of justice, ecology, and culture**, where megafauna are not tools for climate mitigation but **teachers of a world that has forgotten how to listen.