Travelling Along with Wildlands Project Conservation Program Director Conrad Reining

Imagine a place about the size of Norway, comprised of an extraordinary range of ecosystems- from cold boreal mountain tops, to lush agricultural valleys, to misty ocean shores. This place-all 85 million acres of it-is for the most part sparsely inhabited, with few big cities. But thousands of people, mostly in small cities and towns, have been learning to live on and from this land for hundreds of years. And in many places, folks have learned from past mistakes and are beginning to understand how to work with nature and help renew the land, for both wildlife and people.

This region is the greater northern Appalachians, which encompasses portions of northern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, as well as southern Québec and all of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Canada's Maritime Provinces. It is a remarkable place, much of it comprised of young forests in various stages of regeneration after centuries of heavy use.

Yet it's also a region under increasing threat. Tens of millions of urban residents live within a day's drive, and hundreds of thousands of them visit the region every year to escape the urban life in New York, Boston, and Montreal. Some of these people choose to stay, building homes in farm fields and forests far from established towns and villages. Many of the old-line timberland owners have sold their holdings, leading to fragmentation of large landholdings and pressure for short-term returns. Acid rain and mercury deposition, much of it originating in Midwestern power plants, has had serious impacts on the health of forests and lakes and rivers throughout the region.

Recognizing these threats and others, the Wildlands Project made protecting the northern Appalachians one of its top priorities five years ago. I was hired as its program director in the summer of 2001 to help launch the program. After spending nearly a decade in the humid tropics with Conservation International, I was looking forward to returning to the cool temperate forests of the Northeastern U.S., where I now live with my wife and two daughters in the upper Connecticut River valley of Vermont.

During the past four and a half years, I have been working with dozens of individuals and organizations from across the region to develop a proposed network of protected and connected lands that will capture the great sweep of diversity in this region. The job is too big for any single organization to complete on its own, so we rely on the input and feedback of countless individuals and groups in the field-folks that know the lay of the land in their region.

To get a handle on where protected and connected lands should be located, we selected-with much help from our scientific collaborators-critical conservation "features" that do a good job of representing the diversity in this region. These features include the predicted habitat for wolf, lynx, and American marten-native "focal" species either threatened or extirpated from the region; major habitat types as determined by unique combinations of elevation, geology and landform; and particularly rare or diverse ecosystems that we want to be sure we include in any conservation network. We then use decision-support software to help us determine what areas within the region are the most biologically important, based on a range of conservation goals, or scenarios, that we set for our conservation features. We then take these goal scenarios out to scientific colleagues for their input on the relative merits of each given their local knowledge.

We also want to make sure our work complements many of the other fine projects underway on both sides of the border, such as the ecoregional planning programs of The Nature Conservancies of the U.S. and Canada, a "current human footprint" analysis led by Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, and a "future human footprint" led by Two Countries, One Forest (2C1Forest).

Working on this challenging project has been a remarkable journey for me both personally and professionally. All of the data on the conservation features finally came together last fall, and we were able to generate the goal scenarios that are the precursors to our Wildlands Network Design or WND. Our former ecologist Patrick Doran spear-headed much of this work internally.

This detailed map, based on hundreds of layers of geographic information and scientific data, will show in detail what areas are currently protected as well as what lands need further protection if we are to see biodiversity in this region thrive over the long term.

Since the beginning of 2006, we have been taking our results on the road, engaging in an intensive set of consultations with groups and individuals in the states and provinces. Our analysis is regional in scope, but there is no substitute for the expert knowledge-and buy-in-that you can get only through visiting local people that know the land best. On these visits I have had the support of two extraordinary people, Karen Beazley and Charlie Bettigole.

The first stop on our tour was the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There we met with representatives from the conservation and scientific community to present our findings and seek advice on gaps in the research.

We then hit the road, heading overland to New Brunswick, passing through the austere Cobequid Hills and the narrow Chignecto Isthmus, which ties the mainland of Nova Scotia to the rest of North America. Earlier that day, we had talked about the Chignecto, and how important-and threatened-it is as a wildlife linkage. As the sun faded into the Bay of Fundy later that day, I was able to get one more unforgettable view of this very significant and beautiful place.

We then drove for hours in the dark in New Brunswick, passing only a few towns on our way to Fredericton. This provincial capital is also home to the University of New Brunswick, where we met with scientists and conservationists in a classroom that was as warm as our welcome. We gave our introductory/overview talk, then unrolled maps and fired up the laptop with all our data. Over the course of three hours, we put map after map up on the screen, tweaking something here and adding something there to make sure our results accurately reflected current realities in the region.

The following week, we drove from my hometown of East Thetford, Vermont to the border town of Sutton, Québec. There we met with yet another group of conservationists and scientists who were kind enough to speak with us in English and buy us lunch. Again, we put maps up on the screen and talked about how one could tie in the vast and unpopulated Gaspé Peninsula, with the settled flatlands of the Eastern Townships of Québec and the wild Sutton Mountains looming above us. This landscape linkage would then connect to other lands in Vermont, and ultimately, the Adirondacks. On the way home, we drove slowly through a snowstorm, inching our way south through the Green Mountains of Vermont, in awe of the great expanse of forest that still cloaks these mountains.

We have since completed similar meetings in Maine, Vermont, and New York. Much work remains to be done as we collect feedback from our partners across the northern Apps, and sometimes the feedback can be pretty tough. That is, the expansive conservation vision that we seek to put forth can be seen as threatening to some, and we must be sensitive not only to the many legitimate concerns of people who have spent generations on the land but also to the insights of our conservation partners and how best to convey these ideas. But it is precisely this kind of feedback that we need to make the whole project stronger in the long-run.

As we go about our travels in this region, the great possibility of restoration in this spectacular place becomes ever more apparent. Although he focuses on the U.S. portion of the region, Bill McKibben really says it best in the epilogue to Wilderness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast: "Both on the ground...and in the minds of more and more of their citizens, a new North Woods is taking shape. No longer the half-forgotten remnant of some past glory...the north country is now the foundation of a possible future glory, a place where human beings and the rest of creation could manage to make their separate, and sometimes intertwined, livings in reasonable proximity. It is, in conservation terms, all of a sudden the most rousing spot on the planet."