Radical conservation methods needed, says expert
Endangered Mexican Wolf (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
In the 21st century, some species might need human help to survive, according to biologist Camille Parmesan.
Camille Parmesan: The mountaintop and polar species don’t have anywhere to go. They’re very likely to die off. Even ones that live at lower elevation, if you’re living in a tiny nature reserve – and you’re surrounded by cornfields – it’s very difficult for you to move – to track the climate as it’s changing.
Parmesan said conservationists might need to help.
Camille Parmesan: So as a conservation biologist, we know we can’t save all biodiversity. But there is a certain set of species – that are again, very restricted, have barriers to movement – that we consider at high risk from climate change. And I think it’s these that we need to start considering some fairly radical approaches to how to preserve them over the next hundred years.
She proposes introducing species to new environments, before it’s too late.
Camille Parmesan: Instead of being reactive and just dealing with populations going extinct right and left, we should start placing them in advance, or as the climate is shifting. We should help them move and help them shift along with the climate when they can no longer do it for themselves.
What do you propose for animals such as the mountain caribou, whose American population now numbers less than 50 (about 1800 total, counting the caribou in Canada? Their food(arboreal lichens), habitat(old growth spruce-cedar-hemolock forest) and migration patterns(altitudinally) are specialized. Yet the Colville and Idaho Panhandle National forests are planning to log the habitat that the caribou need so desperately. The simplest solution would be to protect them with every necessary means, but this hasn’t been politically feasible. I suspect that most endangered animals are endangered for precisely the same reason- politics and human greed.