The Spine of the Continent – A book and an amazing project

Animals need to move, too. This is the message of Mary Ellen Hannibal and her book, The Spine of the Continent.

Hannibal explores the ambitious Spine of the Continent Initiative, a massive project to protect wildlife and land by connecting expanses of acreage across North America.

The concept, pioneered by conservation biologist Michael Soulé, has been picked up by many others over the years, as a long-term way to help preserve wildlife and plant life in the West, according to a write up in Kirkus Reviews.

Its ultimate goal was to unite discrete areas of publicly and privately owned wilderness to create one huge nature preserve stretching from Alaska to Mexico. In the first third of the book, Hannibal focuses on the history of conservation biology. The last two-thirds spotlight some of the many small organizations and researchers that are contributing to the larger vision, including projects focusing specifically on beavers, jaguars and wolves, among others. Throughout, Hannibal repeats the idea that everything in an ecosystem is connected.

It’s a seemingly simple concept, well-backed by research, and the author discusses how, in the long run, working for the preservation of even a single species links directly to larger issues such as climate change. Because Hannibal writes in a casual first-person voice, the narrative is occasionally haphazard, as she delves into the history of the beaver-pelt trade in America in one section and explores Soulé’s life-changing experience with Zen Buddhism in another. It has its share of odd moments, as when Hannibal compares beaver ponds to the concept of romanticism, or when she asks a scientist who experimented on temperature-intolerant pikas in the 1970s, “How could you fry those bunnies?” The author doesn’t fully explore the opinions of anyone who might oppose the Spine plan, but the book works well as an introduction to modern conservationist figures and concepts for casual readers.

Hannibal writes:

When veteran scientists weep in front of you, the world tilts a bit more on its delicate axis. Dispassionate brainiacs, crying? But that’s what happened while I was researching my previous book, Evidence of Evolution. Several of the taxonomists I interviewed actually wept while telling me about their research. The plants and animals they study are disappearing; the very special places these scientists love are changing too fast.

It’s easy to feel hopeless when confronted by the kind of loss biodiversity is experiencing now. But all is not lost.

While trying to figure out how to help these people, I heard about an ambitious initiative to link landscapes along thousands of miles in the Rockies – perhaps the most iconic of American places. Imagine a grassroots movement stretching from Mexico to Canada, powered by cutting-edge technology, fueled by idealism, and guided by blue-ribbon science. By connecting landscapes we can help save biodiversity, and that is what is happening along The Spine of the Continent. In this inspiring story, the West can still be called, as Wallace Stegner called it, “the geography of hope.”

For more information and to purchase the book, please check Mary Ellen Hannibal’s website.