[...]... want at the very least to freeze the status quo, and preferably to move law and policy back to the early twentieth century, when private property and the interests of industry ruled the day The groups at the forefront of the campaign, with warm and fuzzy names like the National Wetlands Coalition and the Marine Preservation Association, claim to be grassroots organizations, but for the most part they... end of the second paper, Preston looked up from his mathematical formulations long enough to speculate on their implications: “If what we have said is correct, it is not possible to preserve in a State or National Park, a complete replica on a small scale of the flora and fauna of a much larger area.” You cannot make a Xerox reduction of nature and stash it away in some remote corner of the world that... together into an ecologically and socially functioning whole The emerging understanding about how the natural world functions at scales from a few square feet to a thousand square miles oƒers the promise, at long last, of an alternative to the despairing minimalism of the past thirty-five years of conservation We should no longer debate the changes we can make at the margins of human behavior so we can... of acres of forest The plans focused initially on individual pairs of owls, and gradually widened their scope to include the landscapes of which owls are merely the most famous representatives Other species, particularly a small seabird called a marbled murrelet and five species of salmon, entered the fray At this time, few policymakers or land managers saw the ideas of conservation biology as important... management agencies of the federal government the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service—created a committee of scientists under the direction of Jack Ward Thomas, then chief research biologist at the Forest Service, to develop a scientifically credible strategy for the conservation of the spotted owl This panel, called the Interagency... otherwise transforming huge areas of land, human-scale landscapes consisted of patches of forests, meadows, flood plains, grasslands, and so on The patches would slide about in response to floods and fires like a kaleidoscope, or what ecologists call a shifting mosaic, but over a large area and a long period of time the amount of each type of habitat would remain more or less the same Parks and reserves... the arid lands west of the 100th meridian, then best to leave control of pasture in a community’s common range and water in the hands of acequias a system of communal management of water by associations of farmers in New Mexico that to this day cooperatively maintain irrigation ditches and distribute water Powell’s proposal, wrote Wallace Stegner, “embodied o~cial encouragement of a social organization... proposed a plan for spotted owl management that would protect 5.3 million acres in large habitat conservation areas across seventeen national forests The plan represented the most extensive application to date of the concepts of conservation biology to a real endangered species problem across a wide area.3 The committee report, widely known as the Thomas Report, put an important stamp of approval on a scientific... broad scale grow long indeed Communities strong enough to play such a role often derive their strength from a shared love of the land The attachment to the land exists in traditional agrarian communities, like the Amish, and among some ranchers, most of whom focus on the relatively small areas in which they actually work As an example of how things have already changed, consider the idea called the. .. thumbnail; others are as long as your arm The landscape for a bear introduction covers many square miles; for a beetle it may extend just a few square feet Scale also refers to the scale of observation: Over what area and what time period do we observe, say, wild res or changes in a population of animals?1 Scientists understand just the outlines of how nature functions across just a handful of scales, . 257 introduction But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and. class="bi x0 y0 w0 h0" alt="" THE FUTURE OF THE WILD