This is how we need to start thinking about large scale conservation:
In order to maintain ecosystems with the full complement of species, we need to dedicate very large areas. We don't have to lock them up so that they're not used by humans, but we have to balance the uses so that human uses are compatible. And we need to allow for dispersal and migration of wide ranging animals between those large areas.
As I said, this is just a first step. It's just a rough outline of what is possible. What we've been doing now is trying to focus on a finer scale in critical areas. We've been working with one of Ted Turner's ranches to try to develop a reserve design on his ranch. There are quite a few private land owners that are conservation minded about putting their lands into conservation easements and balancing their ranching business with the needs of wildlife.
One of the best ways to provide connectivity between areas that are blocked off by major highways, I think, is to provide elevated highways like you see on Interstates and at intersections, where animals could walk directly underneath. If the highway is 20 feet overhead they would be much less disturbed by it. Caribou in Alaska walk under pipelines and the higher the pipeline is, the easier it is for them to cross under it.
SOne of the most important regions for this type of large scale conservation
planning, in my opinion, is coastal British Columbia. There are still a few
large intact watersheds there, with grizzlies, wolves, salmon, and even the
white spirit bears or Kermode black bears. There may be enough undisturbed
habitat to maintain entire ecosystems with a viable population of grizzly
bears that can persist through the coming human population explosion, global
warming, and industrial-scale resource extraction, if we can persuade the BC
government that biodiversity is more valuable than maintaining "fibre-flow",
which is what they call logging nowadays. Several conservation groups are
working on this vision as part of the Canadian Rainforest Network, including
the RainCoast Conservation Society, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee,
The Valhalla Wilderness Society, and Round River Conservation Studies.
An even wider vision is embodied in the Wildlands Project which, if you
haven't heard of that, is a grassroots effort to map critical habitat and
linkages all across North America. These, I think, are going to be the scale
of the nature reserves of the future.
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