The Alaskafication of America
It began in 1980 as a wild green idea, a gleam in the eye of a founder of the environmental activist group Earth First! It grew, clarified, and came up for serious consideration during a meeting of scientists in November 1991. Finally, it was presented as a real and desirable possibility before the 1993 annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology. Now it is known as the Wildlands Project, and it's up for public debate.
The core of the idea is perhaps best seen as a moral vision. In this view, preserving biodiversity---as full a range as possible of native plant and animal species---is a good thing. The rate at which human activity has driven species to extinction is shameful and should be brought under control. Pragmatists defend this view with arguments about economic and other anthropocentric concerns---who knows what naturally occurring cancer cure remains yet undiscovered, literally lurking in the weeds?---but at heart it is the expression of a belief that other forms of life have a right to go on living. St. Francis may be the original patron saint of this belief, and the Endangered Species Act is probably its present worldly expression.
Conservation biologists believe Americans are not doing well. We save few species and lose many, and more become threatened or endangered every year. The scientists are especially concerned with the fate of big carnivores like cougars, wolves, and grizzly bears. These animals need a lot of space, and the national parks and wildlife refuges simply can't provide the needed habitat and elbow room.
The Wildlands Project would change that. According to the journal Science, which devoted several pages of its June 25th issue to discussing the project, one major problem for species survival is habitat fragmentation. For example, southwestern Florida has enough wild swampland left to sustain a fair population of its subspecies of cougar, but the land is crisscrossed with roads and dotted with towns and resorts. Thus, too many of the big cats die beneath truck wheels or before suburbanites' shotguns.
The Wildlands Project would save the cougars in three steps. First, the project would buy up the most important cougar habitats. These would be big enough to contain whole ecosystems, so that crucial sources of water and habitat for important prey species would be included in the protected zone. Any roads or settlements existing in these good-sized core areas would be ripped out. The areas would become recreated but real wilderness, with human activity highly limited and regulated. Next, the cougar habitats would be connected by protected corridors so that animals could move safely among different home ranges. Finally, buffer zones would surround the core areas and corridors. The buffer zones, like the corridors, also would limit human activities; only low-density housing would be permitted, for example. Cities and metropolitan areas would not lie directly next to core areas. The buffer zones would help insulate the protected ecosystems from the worst effects of human development.
High on the list of worst effects are those that come with roads, which---to quote Science---"act as funnels for exotic plants, expose animals to the hazards of traffic, and permit the ingress of poachers." As one unnamed ecologist commented, anything within one six-pack of a parking spot is in danger.
After these changes take place over the next 200 years, the map of Florida has a familiar blotchy quality. So does the map of Oregon, and one of the southern Appalachian Mountains.
They remind me of any map of Alaska. Just look at what those biologists want. Few roads? Cities surrounded by sparsely inhabited buffer zones? Huge areas for big predators to live undisturbed with safe access between areas? Hey, in the north, we're doing it right. For the rest of the United States, the Wildlands Project may remain merely a wild green idea...but it sounds like home to me.
