Around the Campfire

Wild Earth Magazine Ends

John Davis and I planned a new conservation periodical in late 1990.  The first issue of Wild Earth was mailed in the spring of 1991.  Now, the Wildlands Project board of directors has decided that it is financially impossible to continue publication.  It is not known at this time whether or not the last issue of Wild Earth (Winter 2004/2005) will even be mailed.  I am sure that shutting down Wild Earth was a heart-wrenching decision.  I am also convinced that the Wildlands Project board had no choice but to do so.

The Rewilding Institute is exploring how this website might be able to fill some of the void left with Wild Earth’s passing.  Your thoughts would be welcome. 

An initial step to filling the void is that I will continue my “Around the Campfire” column on The Rewilding Institute website.

Around the Campfire, Winter 2004
By Dave Foreman

Rewilding North America

(Note: This piece is taken from the “Introduction” to Dave Foreman’s new book, Rewilding North America.)

     From my earliest days, I have been drawn to the heart of wildness, to wild lands and wild rivers and wild things, to the places and beasts outside the rule of humankind. Long before I learned the ancient English meaning of wilderness—“self-willed land,” I looked up at the Sandia Mountains, rising above the city of Albuquerque, and saw a world where we were not masters of all. Long before I heard of the Beowulf-time word wildeor—“self-willed beast,” I watched the horny-toads and bluetails scurry through the grama grass and rabbitbrush of the high desert and knew that they ran their errands on their own time in their own way, not on human-time or in human-way.

     As I grew older, I began to sense a loss of what was no more, of once-upon-a-time wildernesses and once-upon-a-time wild animals, as I read Ernest Thompson Seton and Mark Twain, as I read about Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill. Unlike many other boys, I did not yearn for the smoking buffalo gun in my hands, but for the buffalo vast as summer cloud-shadows across the land.

     Older still, I watched the high desert between Albuquerque and the Sandias gradually disappear under a carpet of asphalt and buildings. As a young man, I saw raw roads ripped into the wilderness, forests buzz-cut, rivers dammed, coal torn from the badlands—all where I sought will of the land. And I knew that if my wilderness—no, not mine, but its own—was to endure I had to fight for it.

     Aldo Leopold called the essays in A Sand County Almanac “the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot” “live without wild things.” Rewilding North America is no Sand County Almanac, but it is the horror and the hope of another who cannot live without wild things.

     Doug Scott, a peerless strategist and campaign leader for the wilderness movement for over thirty years, begins his inspiring and authoritative A Wilderness-Forever Future: A Short History of the National Wilderness Preservation System with a vision:

     Here is an American wilderness vision: the vision of “a wilderness-forever future.” This is not my phrase, it is Howard Zahniser's. And it is not my vision, but the one I inherited, and that you, too, have inherited, from the wilderness leaders who went before.

     Scott quotes Zahniser, “The wilderness that has come to us from the eternity of the past we have the boldness to project into the eternity of the future.” The 1964 Wilderness Act, largely written by Zahniser, embodies this vision in Section 2:
 

In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.

     As settlement and mechanization yet grind away at wildlands forty years after the passage of the Wilderness Act, the challenge for conservationists in the twenty-first century still is to protect an enduring resource of wilderness. But before we can boldly project wilderness from the eternity of the past into the eternity of the future, we must understand what an enduring wilderness is. What are its characteristics? What must be done to ensure that wilderness is enduring?

     Since the Wilderness Act became law in 1964, our knowledge of what makes wilderness enduring has grown, as has our knowledge of what destroys the eternity of wilderness. And, thus, the task of Wilderness Areas and other protected areas has evolved. This deepened understanding comes from the ecological research and theory that, after 1978, became known as conservation biology.

     Of all ecology has learned since 1964, the most important lesson is that Earth is now clearly in a mass extinction event—the Sixth Great Extinction in the last five hundred million years. Although this mass extinction began forty thousand years ago when behaviorally modern humans spread out from Africa, it has reached catastrophic proportions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Unlike previous mass extinctions, which were caused by physical forces (asteroid strikes and geological events), this Sixth Extinction is caused wholly by the activities of Homo sapiens. Biologists widely recognize that direct killing by humans, habitat destruction and fragmentation, disease, pollution, and invasion and competition by alien species are the general causes of current extinctions. Stemming this alarming tide of extinction demands conservation vision and action at local, regional, continental, and global scales.

     Both the traditional conservation movement and the recent science of conservation biology have recognized that protected areas are the best way to safeguard species and habitat. In 1980, conservation biology pioneers Michael Soulé and Bruce Wilcox wrote that protected areas were “the most valuable weapon in our conservation arsenal.” Protected areas, such as National Parks, Wilderness Areas, and National Wildlife Refuges, have been cornerstones for conservation strategy in the United States, as have comparable areas throughout North America and the world for more than one hundred years. Although the goals of protected areas have included the preservation of an enduring resource of wilderness and of self-regulating ecosystems, we now understand that protected areas systems in North America have not fully safeguarded all species and ecosystems, because of:

• Direct killing of native species, especially highly interactive species, inside and outside of protected areas
• Poor ecosystem representation in protected areas, and degraded ecosystems both within and outside protected areas
• Isolation of protected areas and fragmentation of habitat between protected areas
• Loss or degradation of ecological processes, especially fire, hydrology, and predation
• Invasion by disruptive exotic species and diseases
• Pollution
• Global climate change

     Drawing on Aldo Leopold’s words, I call these causes of extinctions wounds.
It is important to understand that national parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges have done much to protect and restore nature. Without existing protected areas systems in North America and the rest of the world, the state of nature would be far bleaker. The problem is that not enough land has been protected, and political and economic forces have thwarted and weakened the establishment of protected areas. And, let's face it, science has only recently understood the depth of ecological problems and even more recently given guidelines for how to solve them.

     To make protected areas more effective, conservationists must now (1) work on very large landscapes, probably continental in scope, and (2) undertake ecological restoration based on rewilding. Instead of the island-like protected areas currently in place, we need a continental wildlands network of core wild areas, wildlife movement linkages, and compatible-use lands to meet the habitat needs of wide-ranging species, maintain natural disturbance regimes, and permit dispersal and reestablishment of wildlife following natural events such as fires. Moreover, this network must be based on the scientific approach of rewilding, which recognizes the essential role of top-down regulation of ecosystems by large carnivores, and the need that large carnivores have for secure core habitats, largely roadless, and for landscape permeability (habitat connectivity) between core areas. Fully protected cores such as wilderness areas are at the heart of this strategy. The Wildlands Project summarizes this approach in its slogan, “Reconnect, Restore, Rewild.”

     Although such a continental vision is bold and visionary, it follows in the footsteps of other conservation visionaries. In the 1920s and 1930s, eminent ecologist Victor Shelford and the Ecological Society of America called for a careful inventory and planning for a United States system of natural areas protecting all ecosystem types. Wilderness Society founder Benton MacKaye based his vision for the Appalachian Trail on regional planning. In developing the Wilderness Act, Howard Zahniser planned for a national system of wilderness areas cutting across agency boundaries. The peerless system of national parks, national wildlife refuges, national wild and scenic rivers, and wilderness areas in Alaska came from years of careful planning by government professionals, scientists, and citizens to protect entire ecosystems and represent all habitats in Alaska. More recently, conservation groups have undertaken huge, detailed, statewide inventories of potential wilderness areas in western states.

     Much conservation work is urgent, responding to immediate threats to wildlands and wildlife, and opportunistic, taking advantage of new political alignments and such to protect certain areas. However, this work needs to be based on an overarching vision and careful long-term planning to be most effective. For example, Reed Noss proposed a conservation area network for the state of Florida in the mid-1980s. Florida state agencies and The Nature Conservancy then carried out detailed planning to refine the network. With this solid, scientifically defensible vision in place, the Florida state legislature was convinced to appropriate $3.2 billion to buy wildlife habitat. Without vision and careful planning, this would not have happened. Similarly, the 2000 release of the Sky Islands Wildlands Network Conservation Plan in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico by the Wildlands Project, Sky Island Alliance, Naturalia, and other groups has led to conservation groups, outdoor recreationists, landowners, ranchers, and federal, state, and county agencies working together to protect and restore biological diversity across the region. Without the kind of detailed citizen conservation work that has pulled together wilderness area proposals since the 1960s, the current 106-million-acre National Wilderness Preservation System would be far smaller and less ecologically representative.

     In Rewilding North America, I propose both a vision and a strategy to reconnect, restore, and rewild Four Continental MegaLinkages that will tie North American ecosystems together for wide-ranging species and ecological processes, and to accommodate climate change. These MegaLinkages are (1) the Pacific MegaLinkage, extending from Baja California to Alaska; (2) the Spine of the Continent MegaLinkage, extending from Central America to Alaska through the Rocky Mountains and other ranges; (3) the Atlantic MegaLinkage, extending from Florida north through the Appalachian Mountains to New Brunswick; and (4) the Arctic-Boreal MegaLinkage, extending from Alaska across Canada to the Canadian Maritime Provinces on the Atlantic coast. They are the basic architecture for a bold, scientifically credible, practically achievable, and hopeful vision of an enduring wilderness for North America—a vision that embodies the primary message of Rewilding North America.

--Dave Foreman, Sandia Foothills

(From Rewilding North America by Dave Foreman. Copyright © 2004 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C. Rewilding North America may be ordered from The Rewilding Institute website. Footnotes in the book have been deleted here.)
 

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