Wildlife Right of Way: How to keep big mammals from being a casualty of modern society.

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:



Wildlife Right of Way
Big mammals shouldn't be a casualty of modern society. They could make a comeback—if we give them what they need most: room to roam.

by Sarah Kuck
posted Apr 28, 2011


Vast as Yellowstone National Park is, it’s not big enough for grizzlies. Before European settlement, an estimated 50,000 grizzlies lived in North America. They ranged from Alaska to Mexico, and across the Great Plains. Since then urban sprawl, deforestation, pollution, and climate disruption have destroyed almost all of their historic habitat. Researchers estimate that in the lower 48 states only 2 percent of the mountains, forests, and prairies that grizzlies once called home still support their seasonal diets and migration patterns. Now there are scarcely 1,000 grizzly bears in the contiguous United States, confined to a few pockets of protected wilderness in Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming.

But biologists like Michael Soulé and Reed Noss say grizzlies, wolves, and other big mammals shouldn’t be a casualty of modern society. They could make a comeback—if we give them what they need most: space. Soulé and Noss presented a new method for conservation in their 1998 paper, “Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation.” They discussed how the expansion of national parks and protected lands is necessary but only part of the answer. To piece back together the vast ecosystems that once stretched across North America, rewilding suggests an additional focus on reconnecting the scattered pockets of remaining wilderness, and on re-establishing predator populations. These methods have now evolved from conservation idea to practice and have become promising tools for fighting biodiversity loss.

Conservation is often about saving one dwindling population, one small remnant. Rewilding asks us to think big—to envision a continent-wide conservation strategy, with large core areas of protected land linked by lush, safe passageways for migrating species. Rewilding says that, although saving big spaces is critical, linking the spaces is just as crucial to stem rapid species loss.

Predator Power

Each creature plays a role in creating and maintaining the complex ecosystems we all live in. But Soulé and Noss found that carnivores are most often the head engineers that keep systems in balance. Without carnivores, Soulé says, ecosystems have a tendency to collapse. The gray wolves of Yellowstone, for example, helped regulate elk populations, which protected young plants like cottonwood saplings from overgrazing. But wolves were systematically hunted down in Yellowstone and disappeared from the park in 1926. Seventy years later, the ecosystem was collapsing: The elk population had exploded; young trees rarely made it to adulthood; birds, bugs, and other small animals had to compete for space; and soil was rapidly eroding, clouding streams and damaging fish habitat. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/can-animals-save-us/wildlife-right-of-way

[tabatha]

1. K&R

[bhikkhu]

2. Such as wildlife bridges:

http://happypontist.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-70-wildlife-bridge-finalists.html



The notion of wildlife bridges is supposed to have come from France originally, back in the 50's when the first were built. Simply the ability to move from place to place without having to traverse interstates would be a big improvement; animals moving from one area to another typically encounter natural "bottlenecks" which concentrate their numbers, and these tend to coincide with our own roadbuilding habits. Which is to say - they funnel through areas where we have built roads, and die in numbers. There are two roads I bicycle on that are lined with corpses, but most people in cars are probably moving too fast to notice the remains.

Access to water is often overlooked as well, and we shouldn't forget that controlling access and ownership of water is usually done without concern for animals. There is a very large natural lake where I live; the whole east bank is bordered by a railroad line and protected by a high fence. On the west bank, a busy road follows for the whole length. So essentially the lake is inaccessible, and smaller bodies of water aren't any easier to access.