Rewilding Vancouver
At the Museum of Vancouver until September 1

Most mornings, as the sun comes up, I lie in bed listening to the plaintive cries of gulls and the raucous cawing of crows. Until I visited Rewilding Vancouver, it hadn’t wholly occurred to me that before this city was built, I would have heard another dawn chorus altogether, one that included the keer keer keer of the marbled murrelet, the hollow knocking sounds of the raven, even the whuffing of humpback whales as they surfaced in English Bay. Like most people, I’ve thought about the creatures that abound in my neighbourhood—the pigeons, starlings, raccoons, and skunks, together with those glaucous gulls and common crows—and I’ve also marvelled at how adaptable they are to human habitation. But I haven’t thought about what fauna flourished here before—before European settlers moved in, cleared the forests, drained the wetlands, and paved over the streams. Before they slaughtered the elk, the beavers, the wolves, and the whales. And I certainly hadn’t tried to imagine, as I do now, the sounds that huge, helpless Steller’s sea cows might have made as they browsed the kelp beds near what we call Prospect Point, many thousands of years ago.

Rewilding Vancouver is guest-curated by J.B. MacKinnon, best known as the coauthor (with Alisa Smith) of The 100-Mile Diet. The show is a spinoff from his most recent book of nonfiction, The Once and Future World, and demonstrates which animals (and plants) once abounded in the Vancouver area, on land and in the sea. More radically, it asks us to consider what it would be like if they were to share the city with us in the future. The multimedia displays include video projections, soundscapes, and digitally altered photographs, along with taxidermy specimens, life-size models, and curious tableaux (a coyote on a bunk bed, fishing tackle at a bus stop, black brant clustered on a dining-room table). When I visited Rewilding Vancouver, it was thronging with school kids—the ideal audience for the information and ideas it conveys.

At the show’s entrance are a brief history of whaling in the Vancouver area and a video of the semimiraculous appearance of a solitary grey whale in False Creek in 2010. (The show had already been installed when a pod of white-sided dolphins chased herring into False Creek a few weeks ago.) The suggestion here—and, again, the overarching premise of the exhibition—is that just as human beings have wiped out once-abundant local species, we are also capable of rehabilitating our urban environment, of “rewilding Vancouver” to include them again. (Salmon-spawning streams in Mount Pleasant? Yes! Sounding whales in Burrard Inlet? Yes! Meeting grizzly bears while walking in Stanley Park? Well, uh, not entirely my idea of a good time.)

The show not only introduces us to the “Before” and “After” of urbanization but also speculates on the way-way back, on whether paleo-hunters had a role in the extinction of Ice Age megafauna such as woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats. It also compares the size of a contemporary “micro-apartment” (250 square feet) and a large beaver lodge (300 square feet); looks at the mindless slaughter of many animals during the 19th and 20th centuries; and highlights some of the invasive species that European and Asian immigrants brought with them to this place. (Earthworms? Really? I had no idea.)

Most engaging, for me, are the gorgeous photo-mural that has been digitally altered to imagine a “daylighted” salmon stream in a residential neighbourhood, and a complex soundscape titled a time traveller’s sonic meditation. This work, designed by Teresa Goff, begins in an underwater archipelago uninhabited by humans, breaks the surface of the sea as a canoe paddles by, lands on a beach, and travels into the forest. Then, as you would imagine, it records the arrival of Europeans, the felling of trees, the roar of a train, the lament of a foghorn, and the busy building, building, building of this city. Throughout, wild creatures of the air, land, and sea call out to us—ghosts of the past that we must somehow conjure into our future.