November 4th, 2008
The concept “seems so strikingly obvious,” and yet it hasn’t always been at the forefront of conservation efforts, which have tended to focus on particular protected areas, such as national parks, or on specific species, said Andrew Taber, executive vice president of the New York-based Wildlife Trust.
There’s nothing wrong with those efforts, but the times call for activists to start “thinking at the landscape scale” as well, Dr. Taber said. “We need to figure out ways to protect … whole systems in a world that’s heavily used. We’ve got to think much more holistically in the area of conservation.”
At its meeting in Barcelona this fall, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) accepted the Wildlife Trust’s proposal to build a Red List of threatened ecosystems, similar to the IUCN’s Red List of endangered species.
The hope is that identifying whole ecosystems as endangered, threatened or vulnerable, just as species have been categorized, will help policymakers prioritize and make good decisions about how to conserve natural areas, Dr. Taber said.
Once the science is in place, the rest will fall to lawmakers, conservationists and even the smallest local governments and grassroots groups.
Like the one that has just formed in Clauser’s neighborhood, called the Chalk Mountain Preservation Association.
Thinking Locally
Here in the scrappy, rolling hillsides southwest of Fort Worth, local folks are flocking together to save the Golden-cheeked warbler and the Black-capped vireo – and the land that the birds and residents share at a central site known as Chalk Mountain (Texas translation: a nice-sized hilly area) near the town of Glen Rose.
Area residents of Somervell County already have made room for a nuclear power plant near Glen Rose and numerous gas wells targeting the rich Barnett Shale reserves that dot this part of Texas.
So when word made the rounds about a new gravel pit slated for one slope of Chalk Mountain, near where Clauser takes his birding expeditions, several folks, and ultimately several hundred, voiced opposition.
Some, like Clauser and his wife Beverly, who’s saved hundreds of birds during a lifetime as a licensed bird rehabilitator, are worried about how the birds will fare when the blasting begins, the dust flies and the rock mining and crushing claim more nesting habitat.
Others want to protect the peace and aesthetics of their rural neighborhood. They fear the loss of property values, potential pollution to well water in the area and an unsightly scar on the land because the site is visible from a highway that tourists use to access the area, said Darrell Best, an organizer of the Chalk Mountain Preservation Association.
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