Wildland Conservation DRAFT
Protecting nature’s pathways
The United Nations reports that in the United States alone, nearly one in five animal and plant species are at risk of extinction due to habitat loss and fragmentation.
There’s something wild in your backyard… if you ignore it, it will go away.
Protecting wild spaces and the ecosystems they support must be part of our future if we want to preserve life as we know it. Healthy and accessible waterways, migration corridors, and open space are essential to the function of the natural world.
Over days, years, and generations, animals roam. They look for food, mates, and new territories to inhabit. They roam seasonally as food sources change. They move to survive local disasters, to survive winter, and to find locations with enough food to fatten up for breeding and raising young. Over several generations, they travel to repopulate decimated habitat and settle new areas. Plants migrate, too, a slow creep not always visible in our short human perspective. Living things move out of necessity. In many cases, they must migrate or they will perish.
Migration and motion are the nature of nature; native species cannot survive over time in the islands of habitat we have allotted them. In the world of nature, it is essential that things flow. But we have taken pieces of nature and isolated them, damming rivers, building fences, making decisions that impact wildlife based on lines on a map (towns, counties, states, nations), building roads until the entire continent is crisscrossed with ever more miles of interruptions. We try to fix our territories in perpetuity. But that is not how the earth functions.
Earthfire’s goal is to help us recognize our interdependence on the larger ecosystem within which we exist, moving us to more actively work to protect land and all forms of wildlife.
– Susan B. Eirich, PhD, Founder of Earthfire Institute
Put very simply, animals have to be able to get from here to there. Genes flow over space and time—genes of animals, plants, trees, fish, and birds. The flow is essential to the survival of species and to the interconnected systems all Life depends on. We cannot continue to segment the landscape without inviting the devastating consequences that we are now beginning to witness.
But by prioritizing the protection of remaining waterways and providing migration corridors between these isolated islands of habitat, we have a chance to preserve what is left of the world’s wild lands and the animals and ecosystems they house. By utilizing tools like conservation easements and practicing responsible development to safeguard open space and our watersheds, we can ensure the flow of Life continues across all landscapes.
Earthfire’s contribution to wildland conservation is two-fold. Our first goal is to educate people about the crucial importance of wildlife corridors and how they contribute to the preservation of landscapes and wildlife. The second half is to purchase large tracts of land within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem where Earthfire sits, which is the southernmost anchor for the last intact mountain ecosystem in the world, the Yellowstone to Yukon Wildlife Corridor (the “Y2Y”).
South Leigh Creek Trail Cameras
In September of 2020, with the help of dedicated supporters, Earthfire purchased 120 acres of critical habitat in the South Leigh Creek wildlife corridor, part of the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) migration corridor that connects directly to our property. This corridor is home to great gray owls, hawks, and cutthroat trout—as well as the valley’s larger inhabitants like foxes, otters, coyotes, moose, elk, and bears—this vital stretch of wildlife corridor provides safe passage from the Teton River to the mountains. You can view the vibrant activity of this corridor in our monthly trail cam videos.