By Catherine Podojil
I have never seen a grizzly bear, wolf, lynx or mountain lion in the wild. But Mary Ellen Hannibal's description of a plan to allow these creatures to thrive outside captivity makes me want to drop everything and head West to help.
"The Spine of the Continent" focuses on a project to link protected areas of wildlife from the Canadian Yukon to Mexico along the Rocky Mountains, the spine of the title.
Hannibal, who writes about science and culture, talked, walked and "seminar-ed" with scientists, environmentalists, nonprofit leaders and government officials about the initiative.
Taking a cue from conservation biologist Michael Soule, these folks have a simple idea: Want to save a species facing extinction? Preserve the wilderness habitat and allow protected passage from place to place. Currently, only scattered spaces such as Yellowstone National Park keep human encroachment and predation at bay.
Establishing a linked stretch of particular habitats would extend the protection to river systems, forests, meadows and other bioregions.
Hannibal, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, is an engaging writer, sharing her own responses alongside scientific ideas. On a morning walk with environmentalists looking for bear tracks and scat, her colleagues sing out a jaunty " 'Hi, bear, here we are, not going to bother you.' I silently implore, 'Please bear, don't show yourself. I don't want to look at you.' "
Protection, yes -- sharing space, not so much.
Wendy Francis, executive director of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a major portion of the Spine of the Continent project, is instructive.
"As Francis describes the grizzly as an umbrella species, the preservation of which is likely to ensure the protection of many other species, so it goes the other way around: lose the grizzly and that's likely not all you'll lose," Hannibal writes. "Paul Ehrlich, famous since he and his wife, Anne, published 'The Population Bomb' in 1968, likens species loss to taking rivets off a plane. The plane can still function if you take out several, but at a certain point, the whole structure falls apart."
Hannibal subtitles her book, "The Most Ambitious Wildlife Conservation Project Ever Undertaken," and left me wondering about its chances now as the nation veers toward the fiscal cliff.
Still, staff at the National Park Service, NASA and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are among those enthused about the project's "connectivity." Advocates are tracking opportunities to influence policy, including through President Barack Obama's "America's Great Outdoors."
In 2010, Earth First founder Dave Foreman rallied an audience in 2010 in Berkeley, Calif., to the cause: "Always keep the vision of what conservation is all about. It's where the wild things are. They are beings, for their own sake, living their own lives. Untamed life is wildlife. . . . Life is a self-willed process. That is evolution. . . . We need to bring evolution out more in conservation.
"I'm going to close with a Zen koan: What is the sound of evolution?"
"Faces, bodies craned forward, including mine," Hannibal writes. "We were transfixed, about to hear evolution. Foreman asked again, louder, 'What is the sound of evolution?' And then he howled. A big, long, loud wolf howl. The crowd had been waiting for this. It howled back."Catherine Podojil is a critic in Cleveland Heights.