| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Habitats From Redwoods to the Sea Evolution loves an island. Isolation breeds weird and wonderful things. New species evolve quickly as they specialize to exploit narrow niches. Big creatures grow small. Small creatures grow large. An island's isolation is the key to its "creativity," but it is also its vulnerability. Islands cannot move when trouble comes. And neither, for the most part, can their inhabitants. Hence one of the twenty-first century's greatest conservation debacles: Virtually all of the intact wild land remaining in the lower 48 states, the repositories of the great bulk of North America's biological wealth, is now island habitat of one kind or another. It is divided into isolated chunks by cities and towns, pastures and plowed fields, highways and roads, suburban developments, and deforested areas. And trouble eventually is coming the way of these islands in the forms of invasive exotic species and the diseases they carry, and natural disasters such as fire, drought, and hurricanes. In prehistoric times, if a big patch of oak chaparral burned down, the animals on it could escape to neighboring areas. But today, if an isolated population of an endangered animal has no place to go when a fire sweeps across its home, and if no connections to other populations allow for recolonizing the area as the chaparral recovers, that species may go extinct. The problems of fragmentation are worsened by the prospect of rapid climate change (see Stephen Schneider interview, page 19). As the climates in habitat fragments grow wetter or drier, hotter or colder, they may become inhospitable to their plants and animals, making them doomed hostages. The key, say biologists from The Wildlands Project, is tying America's islands of wilderness into a web of interconnected preserves. Linking together two chunks of wilderness with a corridor of sufficient width to allow the movement of animals and the dispersal of plants multiplies exponentially the conservation value of each piece. Connect those two to a third and the value takes another leap upward. The Tucson-based Wildlands Project, an eight-year-old brainchild of conservation biologist Michael Soulé and EarthFirst! co-founder Dave Foreman, takes the long view of protecting wilderness and biological diversity. If Soulé and Foreman have their way, by the end of the twenty-first century this continent's core wilderness areas would be connected from sea to shining sea by a web of corridors reaching from Alaska to Mexico and from southern California to northern Maine. In perhaps the first demonstration that The Wildlands Project concept is more than pie in the sky here in California, in early October the San Francisco-based Save-the-Redwoods League purchased critical pieces of a wildlife corridor between Humboldt Redwoods State Park, the largest old-growth redwood forest, and the King Range National Conservation Area, the longest roadless coastal area in the lower 48. They are calling the acquisition "the corridor from the Redwoods to the Sea." The three key parcels in the purchase, totaling 3,800 acres, were bought from Eel River Sawmills for $5.25 million, only a small fraction of the $380 million taxpayers paid for the nearby Headwaters Forest, which is approximately the same size. Yet the conservation value of the stepping stones in this corridor purchase may be orders of magnitude greater. For 20 years, two local environmental organizations, Friends of Gilham Butte and the Environmental Protection and Information Center, worked to save the old-growth Douglas-fir forests of Gilham Butte from being deforested by Eel River's saws. They had a major breakthrough in 1994, when President Clinton's Forest Plan removed Gilham Butte from the public lands available for logging. With that little island floating between the two big islands of King Range National Conservation Area and Humboldt Redwoods State Park, the chance to create a full-fledged corridor became irresistible. Enter Save-the-Redwoods League and Ancient Forests International, primed first by a $100,000 grant from the Columbia Foundation, then fueled by a million dollars from the Paul G. Allen Forest Protection Fund, and a half million from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund. The state came up with $2.6 million and the Bureau of Land Management added $1.1 million of federal funds when it took over the title to the corridor lands in December, 1999. Nine-tenths of the Mattole River watershed's old-growth forests have been logged since 1945. Gilham Butte is one of the largest remaining roadless and uncut stands of forest in the entire watershed, and protecting it helps to ensure the health of five tributaries to the Mattole and three creeks that feed the South Fork of the Eel River. Salmon still return to both the Mattole and the Eel rivers and spawn in several of the streams whose headwaters are in Gilham Butte.
The Gilham Butte/Redwoods to the Sea corridor unites three distinct forest habitat types: redwood, mixed fir and hardwood, and upland coastal. Spotted owls, mountain lions, red tree voles, golden eagles, pileated woodpeckers, Pacific fishers, and possibly even the extremely rare Humboldt marten may occupy the property. The Humboldt marten is a small carnivore that hunts flying squirrels. It was trapped to near extinction in the first half of the century, and survivors were barraged in their old-growth homes during the logging boom of the second half of the century. Though many wrote it off as extinct since the 1950s, there have been incidental sightings of the martens in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Gilham Butte is considered prime habitat. "If they don't live there, they should," says David Walsh, director of Ancient Forests International. Protecting a viable connection between Gilham Butte, Humboldt Redwoods State Park, and King Range National Conservation Area may be just what the Humboldt marten needs to persist and recover in the coming century. Central to The Wildlands Project concept is the recruitment of private land-owners to preserve and enhance the conservation value of their land, even while they continue to make a living from it. Foreman and Soulé hope that by giving landowners incentives to act as good stewards and/or to sell easements or to trade unprofitable lands containing great wildlife habitat for land that may be more commercially valuable, the interconnected web of wild land throughout North America can be constructed piece by piece. Much of the land surrounding the recently acquired parcels is still owned by a family that has grazed cattle on it responsibly for generations. "It's largely thanks to their stewardship that this project is possible," says Katherine Anderton, acting director of Save-the-Redwoods League. The family, which wants to remain anonymous, is considering a land swap. They would trade a parcel that would give them easy access to the home on their ranch for a forested parcel that would broaden the corridor. It has also been important that Eel River Sawmills, the owner of the recently purchased land, was willing to negotiate. "Working with Eel River Sawmills was a completely different experience than negotiating with MAXXAM," says Walsh, who also worked against the multinational MAXXAM on the Headwaters deal. "Eel River is a local company and they recognize the conservation value of the area. They weren't holding the land hostage just to make a fortune on it," he says. The five-and-a-quarter-million dollars spent on the corridor will go far toward protecting the long-term wildlife values on 126,550 acres of neighboring public lands. They stretch from the huge redwoods of the Rockefeller Forest in the Eel River watershed, up through Bull Creek to the ridgetop, west around Gilham Butte, down to the Mattole River, and over the King Range to the Pacific. That's not just a benefit to wildlife, says Anderton. It's also a very real benefit to the nearby land owners who want to keep their community of wild neighbors intact and keep ancient runs of salmon in their streams.
Gordy Slack is Senior Editor of California Wild. |
Winter 2000
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