NEWS
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Figure 2: The 250-acre Gardens by the Bay park in Singapore. Nearly half of Singa-
pore’s land is comprised of green space and nature preserves. Credit: Martin/Flickr
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Corridor protection on the grand
scale has achieved remarkable re-
sults, notably with the 2,000-mile
long Yellowstone-to-Yukon Conser-
vation Initiative. It aims to connect
protected areas and to ensure safe
passage for elk, grizzly bears, and
other wildlife across 500,000 square
miles of largely shared habitat,
both public and privately owned.
At the same time, research by Nick
Haddad, a conservation biolo-
gist at the University of Michigan’s
W.K. Kellogg Biological Station, has
demonstrated substantial improve-
ments in biodiversity from corridors
as little as 25 yards in width, well
within the range, he says, of “what’s
reasonable in urban landscapes.”
Indeed, a new study from northern
Botswana has found that elephants
traveling from Chobe National Park
to the nearby Chobe River will use
corridors as small as 10 feet wide to
traverse newly urbanized areas.
Urban areas now increasingly rec-
ognize that it’s cheaper to protect
clean water by buying up natural
habitat both within their own bor-
ders and at the source, instead of
installing expensive technology to
purify it after the fact. It’s not just
about New York City purchasing
huge chunks of the Catskills. North
Carolina’s Clean Water Manage-
ment Trust Fund, for instance, has
also protected 500,000 acres of wa-
tershed and riverside habitat over
the past 20 years — with enormous
incidental benefits for wildlife.
Cities have begun to recognize the
value of protecting wildlife within
their own borders. Singapore, for
instance, has increased its natural
cover to almost half its land area
Grassroots
Vol 18
No 1
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March 2018
over the past 30 years, even as its
human population has doubled. Its
Central Catchment Nature Reserve
has become one of the last refuges
of the straw-headed bulbul, a bird
once common across Southeast
Asia. The government also recently
announced plans to create new na-
ture parks as habitat for the critically
endangered banded leaf monkey.
Even in the absence of new parks
and other habitat, city residents
have rallied to their wildlife, some-
times in extraordinary fashion. In
Mumbai,
development-oriented
politicians continue to encourage
the destruction of natural habitat,
particularly in the Aarey Milk Colo-
ny neighborhood abutting the city’s
Sanjay Gandhi National Park. But
local conservationists, together with
the park itself, have launched a pio-
neering campaign to help densely
populated neighborhoods around
the park cope with more than 30
free-ranging leopards in their midst.
Likewise, Los Angeles has turned its
mountain lions into urban folk he-
roes. (The Facebook bio of the lion
known as P22 begins: “Hi! I’m LA’s
loneliest bachelor. I like to hang out
under the Hollywood sign to try and
pick up cougars. Likes: Deer, catnip,
Los Feliz weekends. Dislikes: Traffic,
coyotes, P-45.”)
While gas and electric transmission
lines commonly divide and destroy
landscapes, some utility compa-
nies have found maintenance sav-
ings (and good press) by managing
these corridors as habitat, espe-
cially for pollinators and migratory
birds. California’s Pacific Power &
Gas, with 6,400 miles of gas trans-
mission lines, is the latest U.S. util-
ity to sign up with the Right of Way
Stewardship Council.
Highway departments have learned
that they can save money, reduce
their carbon footprint, please tour-
ists, and also help wildlife by con-
verting roadsides and medians from
grass to wildflowers. The Federal
Highway Administration recently
published best management prac-
tices for using roadside margins as
pollinator habitat — with Florida
incidentally saving $1,000 per road
mile in mowing costs and Oregon
reducing pesticide use by more
than 25 percent.
While restoration of abandoned rail
lines as habitat and hiking trails is
old news, British companie s have
recently begun restoring habitat
along active rail lines. Network Rail,
which controls most of the rail lines
in the United Kingdom, works with
conservation groups on species
from the great crested newt to the
natterjack toad.
The idea of making
human landscapes
more wildlife-
friendly dates back
at least to the anti-
lawn movement of
the 1970s.
The idea of making human-dominated
landscapes more wildlife-friendly dates
back at least to the 1970s, when the anti-
lawn movement proselytized for turning
backyards into habitat. But finding ways
— large and small — for wildlife to live
among us has come to seem dramati-
cally more urgent in recent years. That
may be partly because in this century
Homo sapiens has become a predomi-
nately urban species for the first time
in history, with huge projected growth
in cities and megacities. It may also be
due to a series of recent studies on the
implications of that growth. These stud-
ies read, at times, as if the researchers
are looking up from their data and de-
scribing the end of the natural world.
Even scientists were stunned in Octo-
ber by the report of a mass insect die-
off in Germany. That study, published
in the journal PLOS One, found that
over a 27-year period, from 1989 to
2016, the population of flying insects
at nature reserves across Germany had
collapsed, down by 76 percent overall,
and 82 percent in the peak mid-summer
flying season. Most of the likely causes
— including habitat fragmentation, de-
forestation, monoculture farming, and
overuse of pesticides — were factors
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