Ashes from Dave’s Campfire
As he lay dying two years ago, Dave Foreman instructed several of us to spread his and his late beloved wife Nancy Morton’s ashes in their favorite wild places. Realizing we were losing our elders, Dave also wanted us to honor exploring grounds of other lately departed rewilding leaders, particularly Michael Soulé and Kim Crumbo. These favored places included the Gila and Sandia Wilderness Areas in New Mexico, the Sky Islands and Grand Canyon in Arizona, San Juan and Green Rivers in Utah, San Juan Mountains in Colorado, River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho, North Cascades National Park in Washington, Kalmiopsis Wilderness in Oregon, Ishi Wilderness in California, Yellowstone National Park in Montana, Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota, Five Ponds Wilderness in New York’s Adirondack Park, Cranberry Wilderness in West Virginia, Everglades National Park in Florida, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska…
I suspect part of why Dave asked us to spread his & Nancy’s ashes in their favorite wild places was to get us out there. Dave knew, and preached, the importance of spending time in the places we want to protect. As he and his older friend David Brower were wont to say: We love the places we know, and we protect the places we love.
My Boundary Waters canoe trip this past September reminded me of road trips decades ago when Dave Foreman and Howie Wolke were surveying potential Wilderness for their inventory of road-free areas — as important as any public lands study ever done in the US, yet largely forgotten, sadly — for their landmark book THE BIG OUTSIDE: A Descriptive Inventory of Big Wilderness in the United States. I often accompanied Dave, as did his wife Nancy, when she could take time off from her demanding nursing career, as he drove backroads on western public lands until a road became impassable for passenger vehicles, at which point Dave would rightly declare that the rocky rutted way ahead should not be considered a road and should not disqualify an area from Wilderness designation.
Driving back from Boundary Waters, I was not doing a serious study as Dave and Howie had been, but I was on the road, and taking side hikes in parks and reserves, roughly assessing wildlands and habitat connectivity. My conclusions are informal, but they include these notes for restless young Pumas:
A Note for East-bound Carnivores
Traveling east from the Black Hills — second nearest viable population of Pumas after south Florida to the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada, a region hungry for its missing apex predators — a Puma could find relatively intact habitat with ample prey if he crossed northern Minnesota and Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or better yet, traversed the boreal forest north of Lake Superior. This Puma could find fairly safe going until he’d traversed the northern part of the Algonquin to Adirondack wildway (A2A) and faced the veritable barricade of roads along the Canada/US border, especially on the Canadian side. [See Will Stolzenburg’s heartbreakingly beautiful book HEART OF A LION to read the story of the young male Puma posthumously named Walker, who in 2010-11 successfully migrated from the Black Hills eastward to Adirondack Park before being killed by a car in Connecticut.]
Less happily, a young male Puma lighting out for the territory from the Black Hills might go south of the Great Lakes. Several young Pumas have tried that, and none (so far as is known, anyway) has successfully traversed the now-agribusiness-dominated Midwestern region that once grew Tallgrass Prairie and oak-hickory savanna, where the only remaining natural cover is usually narrow fringes of trees along streams.
So, please, young Puma, take a northerly route eastward, preferably north of Lake Superior, or if you must hurry and think you can survive the industrial mayhem around Sault Saint Marie, cross Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, then island-hop across St. Mary’s River. You should find ample cover and food most of the way from the Black Hills to the US Northeast if you take the northerly route, then somehow successfully cross the trans-Canada highway.
Tragically, you probably will not find a mate eastward from your natal home unless humans gain the generosity of spirit to actively welcome home your kind — especially females, without which a species has no future — to the northeastern US and southeastern Canada. (Female Pumas are unlikely to disperse widely, hence the improbability of successful recolonization of far-away places.) As well, you will face that veritable wall of development near the border on the Canadian side of the A2A connection if you’ve wisely chosen a northern route.
Puma © John Laundré
Advocating for Carnivores
The Rewilding Institute unabashedly advocates active reintroduction of missing species, especially apex predators and other keystone species, where natural recolonization is unlikely and where reintroduction is likely to succeed. We support the active reintroduction of Pumas in wilder parts of the East as soon as social support is strong enough for the cats to prosper; we advocate protecting and restoring wildways sufficiently wide and wild that Wolves might naturally recolonize the US from Canada and also advocate for restricting the killing of Coyotes so that dispersing Wolves will not be mistaken for their smaller cousins and shot.
We fully support Wolf, Jaguar, Grizzly Bear, and Wolverine conservation and restoration wherever they are native and could thrive in the West, particularly for the first three in the Southwest, where Dave Parsons leads our Mexican Wolf recovery work and Turtle Southern leads our Jaguar recovery work. Dave Mattson’s Grizzly Bear habitat suitability study has shown there is plenty of habitat for Grizzly Bear in the Southwest (especially in Mogollon Wildway, one of our focal areas), and the Grizzly Bear reintroduction study in California is receiving a surprisingly welcome reception (hear our podcast with Peter Alagona).
Wildlife habitat is relatively permeable and intact in the region where our partners at Superior Bio-Conservancy work, but east and south from the Greatest Lake becomes progressively more fragmented until near the Ontario/New York border. Only the bravest or most desperate carnivore will dare cross the busy roads along the border. Habitat restoration and wildlife crossings are urgently needed. Three thousand miles to the southwest, Mexican Wolves can recolonize Mexico, and Jaguars can recolonize the United States if we remove the border wall, install wildlife crossings on busy roads, and help people relearn how to coexist with all our wild neighbors.
(Image from Pixabay)
Reclaiming Our Roots
Of course, rewilding is infinitely more than Dave Foreman, even though he coined the term. Indeed, it is more than all people and is not really about people. It is about the many millions of other species with whom we share planet Earth, and particularly about those who need or want big wild connected habitats.
As evidenced by the ash-spreading, The Rewilding Institute has suffered many sad losses in the last few years. However, as our new development director (and former Earth First! activist, then founder of Predator Conservation Alliance) Tom Skeele observes: TRI’s mourning is now transitioning into a new morning. The Rewilding Institute rises from the ashes to serve wild Nature. Our heritage is Earth First!: No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth. The value of TRI as an institution is not on paper or computer screens but in the places and creatures we help protect and the people we inspire to take action for these wild beings. We start with the assumption — verily, the faith — that all natural creatures are inherently good and that most of the world should be wild, and we will keep working tirelessly to achieve that abundant, diverse future.
For the wild, we welcome your help.
—John Davis, back home in Split Rock Wildway, Adirondack Park
Postscript: As we prepared to post these Wildway Rambles, election results shocked many of us. Political changes may necessitate tactical changes on the part of conservation groups to protect public lands and restore endangered wildlife. We’ll address needed tactical shifts in coming articles and podcasts. Were Dave Foreman still strategizing with us, he’d likely be urging us to take the partisan politics out of protecting public lands and wildlife.
John Davis is executive director of The Rewilding Institute and editor of Rewilding Earth. For Rewilding, he serves as a wildways scout, editor, interviewer, and writer. He rounds out his living with conservation field work, particularly within New York’s Adirondack Park, where he lives. John serves on boards of RESTORE: The North Woods, Eddy Foundation, Champlain Area Trails, Cougar Rewilding Foundation, and Algonquin to Adirondack Conservation Collaborative.
John served as editor of Wild Earth journal from 1991-96, when he went to work for the Foundation for Deep Ecology, overseeing their Biodiversity and Wildness grants program from 1997-2002. He then joined the Eddy Foundation as a board member and continues to serve as volunteer land steward for that foundation in its work to conserve lands in Split Rock Wildway. This wildlife corridor links New York’s Champlain Valley with the Adirondack High Peaks via the West Champlain Hills. John served as conservation director of the Adirondack Council from 2005 to 2010.
In 2011, John completed TrekEast, a 7600-mile muscle-powered exploration of wilder parts of the eastern United States and southeastern Canada—sponsored by Wildlands Network and following lines suggested in Dave Foreman’s book Rewilding North America—to promote restoration and protection of an Eastern Wildway. In 2012, John wrote a book about that adventure, Big, Wild, and Connected: Scouting an Eastern Wildway from Florida to Quebec, published by Island Press.
In 2013, John trekked from Sonora, Mexico, north along the Spine of the Continent as far as southern British Columbia, Canada, again ground-truthing Rewilding North America and promoting habitat connections, big wild cores, and apex predators—all of which would be well served by fuller protection of the Western Wildway he explored. John continues to work with many conservation groups to protect and reconnect wild habitats regionally and continentally.
John is available to give public talks on rewilding, conservation exploration, and continental wildways, as well as to write and edit on these subjects. He is also available for contract field work, particularly monitoring conservation easements, documenting threats to wildlands, and marking conservation boundaries. He can be reached at john@rewilding.org and hemlockrockconservation@gmail.com (for his land-care work).
Perhaps a slight amendment to your advice column for young pumas. Several have found their way down the Missouri River and occupy the wilder parts of southern Missouri. A couple females of unknown origin have even turned up, but oddly no kittens as yet. They often find unforgiving car bumpers or unloving humans as one did last week during deer season. Nonetheless, with some hoped for future expansion of human understanding and a little more habitat protection, a welcome mat might yet be extended to the south.
Very nice, John.
Deep in the Gila
Moon rises and lobos sing
Happy trails, Dave