EnglishBy Jason G. Goldman
This is the first article in a three-part series on connectivity.
It was the first of March, 1872, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law. With his signature, the nation’s first national park was officially born. It’s hard to say exactly where the idea for a national park came from, but the origins of Yellowstone seem to lie in the Golden State, several thousand miles to the west. Eight years earlier – well before it became a national park itself – Congress granted the Yosemite Valley and surrounding areas to the State of California, with a mandate to manage them as a public park.
Yellowstone and Yosemite were far from the first attempts by human communities, whether indigenous and colonizing, to grant special status to certain landscapes. Still, in the nearly one hundred fifty years since the first “crown jewel” of America was established, the idea has spread across the globe. The writer Wallace Stegner called national parks “the best idea we ever had,” and the concept has perhaps become one of America’s most influential cultural exports. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), today there are more than three thousand national parks scattered across more than 180 countries.
National Parks are only a small slice of the protected area pie. There are more than 12,000 public and private parks and preserves on the planet, encompassing some 15% of the planet’s surface (not including Antarctica), though the level of protection afforded to the wildlife and the habitats within them certainly varies widely – as does the primacy of biodiversity in the first place.
Indeed, a 2017 analysis found that while biodiversity protection was a top stated priority in land conservation agendas across the globe, it has only a minor influence on which areas are set aside for protection in practice. Instead, areas that were isolated, lightly populated, had little agricultural value, or had high tourism value were more likely to be set aside than were areas that were notably high in biodiversity or habitat richness.
But even where biodiversity is well represented within protected areas, the reality is that nature does not lend itself to confinement. This so-called fortress conservation approach to biodiversity protection – animals live here, and people live there – ignores the fact that ecosystems can only remain functional if organisms, along with the materials, energy, nutrients, and information they carry with them, can move across the landscape. And while there are fenced areas large enough to enclose authentic ecological processes – South Africa’s Kruger National Park is one notable example – they are few and far between. In most places, another solution is needed.
Connected Canopies
Like other dry forests of Central America, Nicaragua’s Paso del Istmo region, also known as the Rivas Isthmus, was first colonized at least four hundred years ago. Centuries of human pressure have resulted in patchwork quilt of habitat types: developed towns and villages scattered across a mosaic of farmland and natural forested areas. Some estimates suggest that less than 0.1% of the original old growth Mesoamerican dry forest remains intact.
It was once thought that spider monkeys by virtue of their arboreal lifestyle, required extensive closed-canopy forests to survive. Yet despite this dramatic loss of habitat, spider monkeys have persisted alongside human communities in the Paso del Istmo. While the monkeys – there are species all in the genus Ateles – are widespread through Central and South America, the black-handed spider monkey Ateles geoffroyi was re-listed as endangered in 2008 because they continue to suffer not just from habitat loss, but from hunting and from capture for the international pet trade.
These spider monkeys will not be saved by a National Park. The Paso del Istmo is home to more than 165,000 people; it can’t be simply walled off for wildlife. Instead, humans and monkeys alike must find a way to share the landscape.
A Global Challenge
Elephants illustrate the problem in a slightly different way. In Kenya and Tanzania, males can maintain territories of up to some seven thousand square kilometers, an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island. And since elephants migrate seasonally following the availability of fresh water, they total area they rely on over the course of a year can be quite a bit larger. Even if they spend lots of time within protected areas, they also must move between them, through farmland and even through villages. And that’s where elephants get into trouble. They raid crops, they siphon water from community wells, and they even kill people. Sometimes, they get shot or poisoned for doing so.
The need for coexistence with large, charismatic, and sometimes dangerous wildlife even occurs in some of the most densely populated, wealthiest cities on the planet. The second leading cause of mortality for male mountain lions in Los Angeles is being hit by cars zipping down the nation’s most crowded highways. (The first is being killed by other males, which is appropriate for the cats.) High-speed roadways cut each group of lions off from the others onto islands of habitat surrounded by oceans of asphalt and traffic. The habitat patches they do have are relatively high quality but that doesn’t matter if the most courageous lions are reduced to roadkill while their more risk-averse kin suffer from the biological defects that follow from inbreeding.
Researchers warn that unless something is done, pumas will spin down an “extinction vortex” and disappear from the only mega-city in North America in which large cats have so far made a home. It could happen in fifteen years.
Similar stories can be told about jaguars, parrots, peccaries, raptors, and more. Even snakes and turtles and butterflies attempting to cross narrow dirt roads can suffer if they can’t do it without being killed by passing motorists. In other words, protecting even quite large areas of high quality habitat is insufficient to address the looming biodiversity crisis. Animals must be able to safely move about, even after leaving the sanctuary of formal protection. In almost every ecosystem on the planet, humans must find a way to make space for wildlife: physical space, yes, but also psychological.
Click here to read part two: “Building Bridges – Literally” and click here to read part three: “Making Way for Monkeys.”