Highlands: A Wildlife Corridor, Green but Imperiled

[pmbryant]

From the NY Times: July 8 2003

A Wildlife Corridor, Green but Imperiled

By JAMES GORMAN

It stretches from the forests of the North to the farmlands in the South, from woodlands where bobcats scream and cerulean warblers warble to lawns where deer and groundhogs graze.

More than 4.5 million people drink water drawn from its aquifers. Fourteen million people use it each year for recreation, more than visit Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon combined. Twenty-five million people live within an hour's drive.

It has been mapped, studied and reported on. Conservationists are trying to preserve as much of it as possible. And the Forest Service says much of it could be gone in a few decades.

Still, it does not have much of an identity in the public consciousness. To geologists, it is the Reading Prong, a wide swath of hills and ridges that are the nubs of the ancient Appalachian Mountains, worn down by 250 million years of wind and rain and now facing the final insult of having McMansions with 10-acre lawns built on their flanks.

It is the Highlands region, stretching from northwestern Connecticut through New York and New Jersey and on into Pennsylvania — about two million acres of public and private land, developed and undeveloped, dotted with reservoirs and parks, but under intense development pressure.

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A bill being considered in House and Senate committees may create the first national stewardship area. Not a national park or a national forest, the Highlands Stewardship Area, if approved, would be a new sort of preservation entity created for a region where no wilderness is left, where the sweeping actions that created vast protected parks and forests are impossible.

(snip)

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/science/earth/08CORR.html