Full Description
"Deeply reported and persuasively told, Roam is a gorgeous testament to the habitats that sustain life on earth—and the power and promise of protecting them. An inspiring and necessary read." — Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
What if saving our home planet starts with giving other species space to roam? How can we re-shape our human-built landscapes to serve both people and wildlife?
These are the questions that Hillary Rosner attempts to answer in Roam, an urgent quest to figure out how to stitch our fragmented planet back together. It's about the people trying to reconstruct landscapes where animals can once again move freely, as they did for millennia. It's about reconnecting Earth so that wild species and natural systems have room to adapt and thrive. It's about seeing wildlife as the guides we need to lead us to adapt to climate change.
Humans have always altered the landscapes around us; in some ways it's part of what defines us as a species. But since the middle of the last century, we've changed the Earth on an overwhelming scale. Our infrastructure, our hunger for resources, our methods of farming and traveling and living—all these have rendered our planet inhospitable for the other species that live here. As a result, all over the globe, animals are stranded—by roads, fences, drainage systems, industrial farms, cities. They simply cannot move around to access their daily needs. Yet as climate change reshapes the planet in its own ways, many creatures will, increasingly, have to move in order to survive.
This book illustrates a massive and underreported problem: how a completely human-centered view of the world has impacted the ability of other species to move around. But it's also about solutions, and hope: How we can forge new links between landscapes that have become isolated pieces. How we can stitch ecosystems back together, so that the processes still work, and the systems can evolve as they need to. How we can build a world in which humans recognize their interconnectedness with the rest of the planet, and view other species with empathy and compassion.
Contents
Introduction: The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (New York City)
Chapter One: Paving (and Flooding Paradise): The Science Behind Connectivity (Colorado's Front Range)
Chapter Two: The Linear Path: How Species Move (and Why Understanding it Matters) (Montreal and South Carolina)
Chapter Three: The Matrix: Creating Climate Corridors so Animals Can Move (Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula)
Chapter Four: Entering the Agave Corridor: Connecting Bats, Plants, and People (Central and Northern Mexico)
Chapter Five: A Wilder Europe: Bears, Rewilding, and the Beauty of Coexistence (Italy's Apennines and Trentino)
Chapter Six: A Fence Runs Through It: How Fences Make Us Bad Neighbors (Wyoming's Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem)
Chapter Seven: The Carnivore Among Us: Coyotes and the Urban Wilds (New York City and Long Island)
Chapter Eight: Corridors of Injustice: How We Treat Each Other is How We Treat the World (Los Angeles and North Carolina)
Chapter Nine: Hidden Connections: In the Everglades, Water is Everything (Florida's Everglades)
Chapter Ten: The Time Is Now: Elephants and the Gullies of Kenya (Northern Kenya)
Chapter Eleven: The Missing Link: Toads, Caribou, and Us (Colorado and British Columbia)
Epilogue: The Power of Bearing Witness (Iceland)
