A New Perspective on Parks

A conservationist redefines the role of our national parks

By Jonathan Adams

In his new book, The Future of the Wild: Radical Conservation for a Crowded World, Nature Conservancy biologist Jonathan Adams offers an inspiring vision for conservation in the 21st century.

The following essay, adapted from his book, explains why parks and protected areas are the cornerstones of conservation—and why we must now look beyond their borders.

Imagine the North American Wilderness as the explorers Lewis and Clark saw it: forests thick with chestnut trees in the East, prairies teeming with bison and rivers overflowing with salmon in the West. Now picture the continent today: Superhighways link colossal cities, suburbs stretch farther and farther into the countryside, industrial farmland goes on for miles, and a few patches of greenery and a national park or two break up the monotony.

Those two images don’t fit together: the frontier closed, the wilderness disappeared, and there is no going back. Yet, across North America and indeed around the world, conservation scientists, activists and communities have begun crafting visions for conserving and restoring wild creatures and wildlands over larger areas than ever before, raising the hope for a far bolder and more lasting kind of conservation than we have ever seen.

Such visions smack of particularly naive optimism. Several centuries of farming, logging, mining, dam building and rapid population growth smashed the wilderness into thousands of shards, a few of them large but most of them tiny and increasingly isolated. Even with national and global commitments to putting the pieces back together (although no such consensus exists today and none seems near), the task would seem impossible. Not only would we need to halt the current march of humanity across the landscape, we would need to reverse it.

That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. The young science of conservation biology has matured to the point that it now helps us understand how nature works across miles and miles of land and water. That understanding can guide efforts to save wild species across their native habitats rather than as doomed and decaying museum pieces, and enable human communities to become again part of the landscape rather than simply abusers of it. Beginning in the early 1980s, biologists, ecologists and pioneers in conservation biology started redrawing the boundaries of their ideas about how the world works. They moved up the scale from individual animals to populations to natural communities to broad landscapes to regions to continents. Government agencies, scientists, activists and human communities around the world increasingly recognize that the environment does not end at the last traffic signal in town, or at the county line or even at the border post. Effective conservation demands a far broader perspective.

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