Return of the Wild: Will Humans Make Way for the Greatest Conservation Experiment in Centuries?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/03-0



John Davis was roughly 5,500 miles into his 2011 trek from Southern Florida to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec when he passed through the Adirondack Mountains, where he has lived for the last 18 years. He spent a couple of days sailing and hiking around the southern shore of Lake Champlain, including the Split Rock Wild Forest. The 4,000-acre bloc of state forest land is the centerpiece of what Davis hopes will one day be a wildlife corridor – the “Split Rock Wildway” – linking Lake Champlain with the Adirondack High Peaks farther west. Once complete, the wildway would encompass about 12,000 acres. But it would be just one small piece of a much larger puzzle that Davis set out to highlight on his 7,000-mile journey. That larger puzzle is called “the Atlantic megalinkage.”

The megalinkage, if ever created, would be a vast network of wildlife habitats. It would connect eco-regions like the southern coastal plains of Georgia to the Appalachians and the Green Mountains of Vermont and from there to parts of southern Quebec, in the process protecting and allowing for the reintroduction of keystone species. Davis undertook what he called “TrekEast” because he wanted to get the view from the ground – by boat, bike, and foot – of what an eastern wildway might look like. In essence, he wanted to see if it is even possible.

The obstacles to implementing the idea are legion, from the dense network of roads that carve up the East Coast, to the absence of large nature reserves, to the public’s resistance to predators like wolves and cougars once again roaming the woods. But after months of traveling and meeting with conservationists, local officials, and scientists Davis came away “cautiously optimistic that it is still possible to create an eastern wildway.” Optimistic enough to set out again in early 2013 along the arc of the Pacific megalinkage, which would stretch from the Sonoran highlands of Mexico to southern British Colombia.

When he completes TrekWest, Davis will have traveled two of the four megalinkages outlined by Dave Foreman in his 2004 book, Rewilding North America. Along with the spine of the continent and an Arctic/boreal megalinkage, the four wilderness networks comprise what Foreman considers the “minimum requirement” for the re-establishment of North American wildlands. Imagine a series of large protected areas, many of which already exist, held together by a patchwork of corridors that allow for the reintroduction and movement of top predators. The return of predators will, in turn, help the rehabilitation of ecosystems – the grasslands of the Midwest and Western states, for example.