Why Wildlife Matters
A Modern Manifesto
In his famous Wilderness Letter from 1960, writer and conservationist Wallace Stegner wrote of the need to protect wilderness “because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.” Today, having met this challenge many times over, our
collective moral character is now being tested and measured by what we choose to ignore, to save, and allow to exist, free—to the extent possible—from humanity’s indelible influence. Of course, wildlife is a vital component of wilderness; the latter can’t endure without the former. Think of the importance of pollinators to a meadow, bison to a Great Plains prairie, or wild salmon to the coastal temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. But far from being the sole value of their existence, wild animals benefit our lives in numerous ways. They are a barometer by which we can measure the health of the environment. They are a salubrious and welcome diversion from our own hectic lives. They’re valuable reminders, both of our inherent limitations as humans, and of Nature’s remarkable vitality. For some of us, wild animals serve as manifestations of a spiritual life, of where we’ve been and where we may be going. And by observing and studying wildlife, we can better understand our own lives, place, and commonalities as part of Nature’s web of life. Chief Seattle, the ancient leader of the Duwamish and Suquomish tribes, once observed, if all the beasts disappeared from the earth, man would die of a great loneliness of the spirit. For, as wild animals remind us, and as Chief Seattle realized, all life is connected.
To ensure the continued viability of life on earth—human and wildlife—The Wildways Project promotes the following actions:
Including wildlife as a vital stakeholder group
There is no scenario in which humanity lives a high quality of life while our wild neighbors suffer and decline. What happens to wildlife happens to us, eventually. And because wild animals elevate our own quality of life, and considering our capacity as humans for compassion and imagination, it is imperative that our city and state leaders begin to consider the needs of wildlife and to recognize our wild neighbors as a legitimate and vital stakeholder group in our policy and planning. It is up to us to give them a voice. Anything less is uncivilized and unacceptable.
Nature-based solutions
Modern society has for far too long worked to separate nature from our communities and especially our food-production systems. Only recently have we begun to realize what a mistake this has been. Chemical concoctions designed to control one type of pest are invariably made ineffective by the following growing season, and obsolete by the next, requiring scientists to develop even stronger compounds that have increasingly serious implications for our soil and water, and ultimately wildlife and human health. It’s time we realize that nature has a better—and simpler and healthier—way. Whenever and wherever possible, we must embrace nature-based solutions in addressing agricultural, climatic, ecological, and societal challenges. Instead of lacing our crops and lawns with chemicals, for example, companion plantings of native flora can attract beneficial insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals that control pests for us while contributing valuable ecosystem services such as water filtration, erosion control, and carbon sequestration, for example.
Restoring, protecting, and connecting wildlife habitat
In the countryside, this could include nearly any environment, whether field, forest, canyon, or stream. In an urban community like Oklahoma City, it includes parks, medians, empty lots, river and stream corridors and their riparian buffers, urban and community forests, and extant grasslands, among other environments. High-priority urban wildlife habitat must be identified and protected in perpetuity. After all, a city can’t grow and flourish while its natural infrastructure stagnates and declines. Additionally, we must dedicate ourselves to linking these habitats via natural corridors and dedicated crossings--underpasses or overpasses that protect wild animals from roadway traffic and other dangers--thus ensuring wildlife can travel safely from one location to another.
Incentivizing individual wildlife-habitat projects
Some of the easiest and least-expensive ways to benefit wildlife begin around our homes. Whether it’s constructing a swale or rain garden on your property, stabilizing a stream bank, planting a pollinator garden, avoiding herbicides and pesticides, cutting down that invasive callery pear and replacing it with a redbud tree or an elm or an oak, outfitting our windows with visual aids to help birds avoid collisions, building a hedgerow, allowing the autumn leaves to remain on our yards through the winter, or eliminating our lawns altogether and replacing with low-maintenance xeriscapes featuring native, drought-friendly vegetation, or with native trees designed to shade our homes during the hottest part of the day, there are myriad ways in which we can benefit our wild neighbors while helping make our communities more resistant to floods, droughts, and today’s changing climate. It’s time to expand city- and state-sponsored economic incentives for such environmental- and wildlife-friendly improvements and upgrades.
