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Conference Explores East’s “Wild” Possibilities

By Janna Bialek

Audubon Naturalist News, May 2001

            It is early morning in the wild forest. An elk, moving through the scraggly understory, notices bright sunlight hundreds of feet away and moves toward the clearing. On his way to the stream the elk munches on some new leaves and flushes a grouse at the forest edge. He tramples a patch of trillium and lady’s slipper; such is the way with animals. A hellbender scoots around the rocky bank as the elk comes near.

The soil is busy and full of critters in the moist microclimate. Spring came late this year, and woods are full of vernal pools bearing salamander, toad, and frog eggs. A massive oak has been decomposing for 20 years now; holes in its upper reaches tell of past homes for bats, a pileated woodpecker or maybe flying squirrels. The season’s first arrivals from the tropics—Louisiana Waterthrush, Northern Parula, Blue-headed Vireos—are looking for an early edge on the competition by finding the best nesting places and a steady supply of insects.  A cougar silently sits on a sunny rock, waiting for the fawn to emerge from the bed of ferns downhill.

These are not the words of the first white settlers, but rather a vision of the future—of a “rewilded” East. A vision broad enough to accommodate large predators—the ones who compete with man for the top of the food chain, as well as beaver, migratory songbirds and other species whose future is now uncertain. 

As a nation, we have taken the lead in setting aside wild lands—imagine the U.S. without Yellowstone, the Appalachians minus large expanses of protected forests. Protecting land as national parks has been one of our country’s crowning achievements—our national parks set the standard for the rest of the world to follow.

But all is not well in the wilderness. For one thing, although a lot of wild land has been protected—80.7 million acres of national parks alone, not including national forests and wildlife refuges, and numerous other ways that land has been set aside—pressure from visitors is straining our national parks to the brink. Large grazers—deer in the east, elk in the west—have decimated the understory of our parks; these animals thrive because we have allowed them to survive in a food chain devoid of large carnivores. Beavers, who build wetlands that provide habitat for a huge number of species (as well as provide the ecosystem services of water management and filtration that downstream humans have to pay engineers to provide) have been largely removed from the ecosystem by hunting, loss of habitat, and beaver “management” in urban areas. And songbirds, who are hanging on to quickly-diminishing habitat as it is, are seeing that habitat increasingly dominated by medium-sized predators like raccoons and even other birds that thrive on fragmented, disturbed areas.

Those who argue for conservation are often consumed by battles to protect land from roads, to fight the loss of this or that endangered species, to stop development or the threat of pollution. These battles, while important, occur piecemeal—although they may protect individual pieces of land, they do not necessarily bring together all the people who are concerned about conservation, nor can they present an overall plan that will really link the land together and allow the kind of large-scale, restored wilderness that will truly protect all species, not just endangered ones.

Enter conservation biologist Michael Soulé, and his colleague, Dave Foreman, who ten years ago began The Wildlands Project (TWP). Convinced that a new vision for conservation was needed, one that weds science and advocacy and provided a collective approach to land protection by bringing in large groups of stakeholders, Foreman and Soulé vested The Wildlands Project with a mission—to restore corridors of the North American continent to their full wilderness potential.

“What should our landscape look like in the future?” Foreman asked a group of nearly 200 advocates, scientists, government workers and others at a recent conference sponsored by the Maryland Alliance for Greenway Improvement and Conservation (MAGIC). “Instead of attacking, and being defensive,” Foreman said, “why don’t we make a plan that would embrace a positive vision, something to work toward?”

Foreman credited Aldo Leopold with first coming up with the idea that conservationists could be “land doctors,” that their work could be directed toward healing the wounds that man has inflicted on the land. Putting their heads together to develop ways in which the healing could occur, Foreman and his colleagues at TWP impressed upon conference participants the importance of one central premise—that if you have a viable population of large carnivores, you have enough space for the earth to heal itself, and for a healthy ecosystem to occur. 

Yellowstone—a great national treasure and in many cases as wild a land as can be found on the lower 48 states—is a perfect example of an ecosystem out of whack, Foreman says. “We’ve restored the elk to Yellowstone, and everywhere you go now, you can find elk. But the Yellowstone elk are not really elk,” he says. “They’re a kind of ‘meadow potato.’ With the loss of wolves, the elk are just big, lazy creatures who graze all day. But when the park service brought back the wolves a few years ago, the elk woke up. They started becoming elk again.” And with the elk in check, the ecosystem can be spared overgrazing and hopefully recover. Foreman likened the elk situation in the West with our own deer problems in the East.

The vision of The Wildlands Project is to provide corridors to connect wild areas that will be sufficiently large to allow large carnivores to roam from one end of the Rockies to the other—and eventually to do the same in parts of the East.  Foreman envisions a broad swath of corridors linked together—starting with the land that is already preserved to serve as “core areas” and adding to them by working with different stakeholders to fill in the areas in-between as linkage corridors. The first such plan—the Sky Islands Wilderness Network—was released last fall. Sky Islands encompasses 10.5 million acres of “megadiversity” in New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico almost to the Chihuahuan desert—land Aldo Leopold called “near to being the cream of creation.” More than forty mountain ranges and one-half of all North American breeding birds are found in the Sky Islands wildlands. 

But devising large, biological corridors for top predators to roam is one thing in the West, where the land is in relatively few hands and there are already large patches of wilderness, and another thing altogether in the fragmented, overpopulated East. We bump up against each other here even on the most remote parts of the Appalachian Trail. We build second houses—and the roads to get to them—to get away from things, but inevitably find ourselves with unwanted neighbors. Even small towns in rural areas are becoming suburbanized, and welcoming the influx of money that this means.

“The purpose of the Appalachian Highlands Wildlands conference,” David Foreman told conference participants, “is to create a network of people working together to create a network of land. From New Brunswick to Alabama, there could be cougars and Cerulean Warblers.” Although Sky Islands is the only published wilderness plan yet developed by TWP, the organization has already been at work with conservation activists in our area on a Chesapeake Bay Wildlands Network design, and will soon be releasing a plan for Maine. 

The Wildlands Project takes an ecosystem approach to developing a wildlands network. According to David Bynum, Southeastern Wildlands Coordinator for TWP, the Chesapeake Bay wildlands group began to come together about six months ago, with about sixteen players from government, conservation groups and scientists all working to identify the possibilities for protecting the regions that feed the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. The group looked at ecological wounds, native animal and habitat loss, forest loss and degradation, pollution, marine degradation (with the possible future idea of a marine wildlands system), and alterations in hydrology. The group is working toward determining logical and reasonable goals for land preservation, and focal species to protect or introduce. But a crucial first step will be providing maps to incorporate a bold vision for protection.

“The idea with mapping is to look at land use like a picture puzzle,” says Bynum.  “We look at land ownership, then overlay forest interior and find where logical core areas are. From these cores, we spread out, enlarging the wilderness and developing linkages between wilderness areas so that animals can expand their range and increase access to each other.” 

Although it started out roughly termed as a Chesapeake Bay Wildlands project, TWP and those working on the concept design rapidly realized what a tricky thing names can be. “We initially had the hunch that not enough coastal plain was set aside to be able to be developed as wildlands, and that we would have to concentrate above the fall line,” Bynum said. But when the group looked at development, population, and land use patterns in the Maryland piedmont, they soon realized that the project range would need to be moved even farther west if it was to accomplish rewilding goals. Even though the project is now named “Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network Design” the headlands of the bay are its focus, not the bay itself. “Which doesn’t mean that the rivers and streams that lead into the bay can’t serve as excellent riparian corridors for wildlife,” Bynum reminds.

Mapping—both in its literal sense of looking at maps to identify wildlife corridors and the more abstract sense of mapping a strategy to bring people together—is a crucial element used in developing a wildlife plan. Using a grant from Town Creek Foundation, the design group broke the watershed and highlands down into manageable parts from a planning perspective. A list of focal species—those animals that occupy such a significant ecological niche that their success in an area would serve as an indicator of ecosystem health—was developed: the eastern elk, cougar, wolf, black bear, fisher, pine marten, coyote, bobcat, beaver, river otter, snowshoe hare, Golden and Bald Eagles, Cerulean Warblers, brook trout, American eel, Virginia spinymussel, eastern bog turtle, and Indiana bat. Other species, including flying squirrels, warblers, salamanders, woodpeckers, would of course also benefit from ecosystem restoration.

Bynum cautions that the plans for a restored Appalachian wildlands are still in the very early stages. “We have brought a few people together and gone a few rounds. The next step is to cast the net wide—to bring as many people into the process as possible,” he says. 

A few months ago, a similar process occurred in Pennsylvania (since ecosystems ignore artificial boundaries such as states, multi-state success is a prerequisite to an effective plan), where the group Wild PA worked on putting together the maps and species list in their state. Tanya Sagar, who organized the conference, was surprised by the results: “We basically didn’t know how many people would sign on. We planned for about 50—but had almost three times that many!” Sagar, who is a ninth generation resident of the Pennsylvania mountains, remembers waking up as a child around 4 o’clock one morning and hearing a noise “that can’t be mistaken for any other sound.” The dogs on her porch were nervous; her mother called around to the neighbors, who of course, were asleep. “My grandmother, who was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, told me about these cougars that would follow her home after she got off of teaching. I realized that was what I heard—a pair of cougars calling each other from up on the ridge down to the valley.” 

Sagar fully appreciates how lucky she was to have been raised in such an environment, and hopes that such stories will be part of the mountains in generations to come. “When we started looking at the species we wanted to focus on, we looked back at the historical records and found three different types of wolf in Pennsylvania. Researchers swear they’re all still down there, although there is no DNA evidence to prove it. Certainly there are the deer out there to support these populations,” she says. 

Deer are only one reason to restore large predators to the wilds of Appalachia. Foreman found that in the absence of cougars; songbirds, particularly neotropical migrants, are vulnerable. “Without large predatory cats to keep medium-sized predator populations like raccoons, skunks, even housecats, in check, there is an excess of predation on songbirds,” he says. Research supports this—David Wilcove of Environmental Defense looked at songbirds in northeastern forests and found that the absence of top predators resulted in what he calls an “explosion” of mid-level predators, with dire consequences for eggs and nestlings. 

Restoring the natural balance to the ecosystem by giving adequate range to top predators is only one part of the equation, however. For a natural area to be wild, it must truly be without barriers—namely, roads. Research increasingly shows that roads have both obvious and unforeseen consequences on wild populations.

The most obvious effect that roads have on the forest is that they act as a conduit for the biggest predator in the forest—man. A road through a forest—whether an official road into a park, a logging road, or, increasingly, an illegal jeep trail—opens up the woods to poachers (large, trophy animals are especially vulnerable), poses the risk of roadside mortality for all animals, and provides a conduit for harassment by off-road vehicles. Ed Perry of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pointed out at the conference that the Allegany National Forest, which on a map looks like a contiguous large swath of green space, in reality has 2,600 miles of existing roads, a thousand of which were used just for logging. A full 20 percent of the continental U.S., Perry estimates, is affected ecologically by roads, even though roads cover only one percent of actual territory (or roughly the size of South Carolina) .

The reasons that roads have such a negative impact are many: roads are corridors for predation (both by man and animals), they concentrate the search area for predators by fragmenting spaces into islands, they increase instances of nest predation and disturbances, and they alter the forest ecosystem by removing leaf litter. 

“But why should we care about leaf litter?” Perry asks.  “When a road comes in, even the smallest gravel road, it alters all the area around it. The layer of leaves on the forest floor is the power plant of the forest. This is invertebrate habitat—the bottom of the food chain, the food for insects, salamanders, birds. Not to mention its importance in soil production and the retention of water. When a road is cut, it provides conductivity for wind and the physical displacement of leaves. It opens the canopy, speeds decomposition, and changes the whole surroundings. That is why roads create little fragmented islands.”

Perry reminded the audience that the biomass of salamanders and amphibians exceeds that of all other life in the forest except insects. And highly mobile species like amphibians are less likely than other species to “get to the other side”—in one study, a road with an average of only 24 to 40 car passages per hour killed nearly half of the migrating toads in the study area. “The wood turtle population in Pennsylvania, where I study,” Perry says, “is now almost entirely post-breeding, mature adults. That’s all that are left.”

The time has come, Perry and others argue, to realize that there are forests, and then there are forests. A large green swath of land on a map does not necessarily guarantee a healthy ecosystem.  Durland Shumway, who is a forest biologist at Frostburg State University, calls the remaining 39 acres of old growth eastern hemlock forest at Swallow Falls State Park “as close as I can imagine to being the forest the settlers saw.” 

Nowhere is the battle for ecosystem survival more immediate, and perhaps more important, than at the Savage River State Forest in western Maryland.  Shumway was at the conference to garner support for his plan to get the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to donate land in the Savage River State Forest as an ecological research site. With four species of large oak, it may in fact be the largest remaining stand of old oak forest north of the Great Smoky Mountains. “Some of these trees are 350 years old, overlooked by loggers, probably because the land is just too steep and rocky,” Shumway says. Ancient sites like these may be our last remaining opportunity to study the influence of fire, natural succession, and logging on eastern forests, as well as key to protecting endangered species. 

But protection has a price. Like our national parks, we are loving the old growth forest at Swallow Falls to death. “When we started noticing that the old hemlocks were dying, of course we looked for the wooly adelgid, which is typically killing hemlocks. But we didn’t find it. Then it occurred to us—the 39 acres at Swallow Falls receive about 200,000 visitors a year. Few of them take the trail—they just cut straight through the woods to the falls. The hemlocks are being killed by soil compression from all that foot traffic. The point is,” Shumway reminds us, “size counts.” 

Do we have the political will to leave the wilderness to those creatures that belong there? Can we—loggers, hikers, nature enthusiasts, recreational off-road vehicle users, hunters—muster the humility to allow “self-willed creatures,” as Foreman calls them, the reign of the forest, to decide that there are some places where roads and even trails just don't belong? Easterners have lived without wild predators among us for generations. Plenty of us respond to rumors of bears, cougars, or coyotes by staying out of their path, locking the kids inside, even reaching for a gun. Only reluctantly will we share our space at the top of the food chain. 

There are positive signs, though,  that the vision of a rewilded eastern forest may indeed come true. Before the conference ended, DeGroot reported the good news that the Maryland legislature had authorized $35 million—not full funding, but a good start—for the Governor’s GreenPrint program. But it will take the effort of many states, of thousands of people, of property owners and developers and politicians and a seemingly endless list of people with vision before this monumental task will be realized.

“Key to the vision of The Wildlands Project—and its success,” Foreman told the conference, “has been its good relationship with landowners.” In fact, with the East so highly fragmented and privately owned, a project to restore wilderness is unlikely ever to get off the ground unless property owners can be convinced of the benefits of environmentally-sound management. Foreman tells the story of “Wolf Friendly Beef,” which is produced by a Western rancher who worked with TWP to govern his ranch according to ecosystem principles. “Why do  ranchers hate coyotes?” Foreman asks. “Because they eat calves. Well, what the ranchers didn’t think of is that when you calve in January, the coyotes are out of food. Of course they’ll go after calves.” Foreman and the rancher experimented with calving in March, and restoring natural balance to the grazing area. “Not only were no calves lost, but the rancher now sells his beef at a premium, because he uses no chemicals, and calls it ‘Wolf Friendly Beef’. He’s making more money than all his neighbors because of it.” Clearly, Foreman says, ecosystem management makes good business sense.

“We need to educate people about what opportunities are out there—that’s what this conference is about.” Foreman point out, for example, that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has money set aside to pay farmers to restore wetlands, and then, according to him, “they pay them to LEAVE IT ALONE ! There’s all this money that people could benefit from if they just think a little more broadly.”