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National parks are the backbone of conservation. Yet mounting evidence shows that many parks are too small to sustain long-term viable populations and maintain essential, large-scale ecological processes, such as large mammal migrations and natural disturbance regimes.

A new study published on Jan. 11, 2023, in Scientific Reports found that enhancing ecological connectivity, known as “corridors” or “linkages,” among several of the oldest and largest national parks in the Western United States would greatly extend the time that many mammal species populations can persist. The authors analyzed the value of establishing ecological corridors for large mammals between Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks and between Mount Rainier and North Cascades National Parks. Their findings show that these corridors would not only enlarge populations, but also allow species to shift their geographic ranges more readily in response to climate change.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-26428-z

This should definitely be a thing

Yeah, glad that an idea like this is gaining traction

Can't even get wildlife bridges across highways. I'm all for it but this is a massive leap through a lot of bureaucratic holes.

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Rewilding unproductive subsidized land is a double win. We're throwing away over half the food we produce in this country. I think we can give some acreage back to nature.

If we didn't write come up perhaps we could get monkeys, I would love to have monkeys

The boomer cliff begins this year. The oldest baby boomers (77) are passing the average life expectancy age. So things are going to change very soon .

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good riddance

enough of people running things when lead ate holes in their brains decades ago

Hurts so much to hear that when my grocery bill is double what it used to be.

> things are going to change very soon

I really hope so. I've run into a lot of greedy assholes of all ages though so who knows?

They have to make up for all that product that gets wasted!

you realise every generation is full of conservative people, it'll hopefully change slowly over time but it's not going to be a "cliff" like you're celebrating

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future proves right again

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While that's true, we'll be getting rid of a big chunk of the lead-damaged people. They're the source of a lot of the anger and pure insanity we've been seeing, and they've been spreading it to their families.

Yeah idk this feels like you've been taken by a popular narrative. You really think the difference in ideas is so dependent on age? Not my experience, anecdotally, though I don't hang with a lot of old people.

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From an economic perspective, waste doesn't mean anything if the product has already been paid for. Prices won't go up if it's the consumer that is throwing away the product after they have already paid for it.

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Just don't put the xbox in your cart.

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Check out https://y2y.net

Yea, anyone who's in undergrad for biology will probably come across corridors in an ecology class. Its all about who owns the land...just look at the checkerboard land plots between BLM and the ranchers/land owners in wyoming

Would like to see larger chunks of BLM land in southern Michigan.

I miss learning abt road ecology

Good luck getting that passed in the House.

Indeed. When you run out of boomers to blame, will you then target GenX and then millennials? Eventually the real problem will come into focus.

“ecological bridges under the highways”

Tunnels for wild animal traffic?? This would be so cool.

sure it does, you still got to eat, thats more demand. Because i bought more tomatoes than I needed and threw some out and went to buy more, that was more tomato demand than if i bought just the right amount. That definitely does effect price.

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High-tension power lines and natural gas pipelines already cut swathes across the landscape; it'd be great if those same corridors could be naturalized with native species that support year-round wildlife instead of thistles and thorns to deter interlopers.

Imagine if landowners along these corridors were given some financial incentive (infrastructure bill) to regrow some hardwoods like hickory and oaks like US used to have all over the place.

Unearned generational wealth?

That corridor in Washington looks like a ton of land. Seems a little unrealistic to me.

Doubt. Congress dicks live 20% longer than their constituents. We have at least another 15 years of geriatric rule.

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iirc the majority of food waste happens before being bought by an end customer

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Also economically less work has to be put into making whatever you're throwing away. Less work means less overhead means lower prices

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We're talking wildlife corridors, right? Bird enthusiasts are trying hard to keep what flyways exist for migrating birds, as more and more development scrubs out viable wetland and natural terrain. I hope this corridor awareness spreads and takes hold before it's too late.

>will you then target GenX and then millennials?

... why wait?

I mean we built freeways and “parks” on their land. Shaped the world to suit our needs. Imagine growing up in a short time frame to not only have everything change but almost become hostile to your way of life. We must and should endeavor to provide proper pathways to our wildlife. Seems like all we care about these days is the meat animals we keep. It’s not a good process and shameful at the least.

Well yes. An overwhelming majority of people under 30 in the US vote democratic. Also, idea that people begin to vote for more conservative politicians as they age used to be true, but has recently began to stop being true. So if current patterns hold, the vast majority of the country will vote Democrat in the years to come. Both of these ideas are searchable online.

The IIJA (Infrastructure Act) passed last year includes $8+ billion for wildlife and wildlife crossings. Most new highways and road are being planned with some sort of wildlife crossings - usually underpasses - but the overpasses will become more common when possible.

Handy PDF summary here

Protected is the key. Ranchers and farmers won't like wildlife from far off being near and have the right to keep their property and assets safe so it's a problem.

Since something like half of the land in the US west of the Rockies is federal, go right on ahead fells, I’m not standing in your way.

Oh right. Your bff got the mining/petroleum/grazing/water rights. I see how it is.

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I think the biggest wake up call is going to be when the boomers die off and we realize that selfishness, greed, racism, and every other bad thing we attribute to them aren’t a generational thing but a human being thing

> the consumer that is throwing away the product after they have already paid for it.

Most food is wasted by corporations, not consumers. If they can’t sell it for a profit, they would rather it go in the garbage than be given to someone in need.

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2018/grocery-waste-04-16-2018.php

https://www.mic.com/impact/inside-the-tiktok-trend-shaming-corporations-for-destroying-perfectly-good-stuff-48292822

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Increased demand doesn’t always raise price, due to economies of scale, and the fact that the supply can be elastic and adjusted based on demand.

Think about it, if most people who ate tomatoes now stopped eating tomatoes, would the prices of tomatoes go up or down in the long run?

Sure, in the short term there would be a glut, and the price would go down. But then the supply itself would shrink. Tomatoes would become a ‘niche’ vegetable, like an exotic fruit, and the lack of scale would mean that they would be more expensive on the whole.

It’s the same reason why increased demand for novel consumer products like computers or smart phones pushes the price down in the long run. The increased demand results in the production of greater supply, and due to economies of scale, that item becomes cheaper on the whole.

All this is to say, if we all bought half as much food, production would shrink, and the price would effectively stay the same for us at the consumer level.

If you buy less of a company’s product, that company just produces less of it for sale. The price would stay the same.

(The price may even go up, because of a reduction of the economy of scale).

However, you would personally save money by simple virtue of the fact that you’re buying less of the product.

Which is to say, pro tip: You can save money by not wasting food you buy.

The food that was purchased by the consumer and then thrown away has to get replaced by new food right? So by replacing food that we threw away we artificially increasing demand. More demand+same production = increased prices

> Establishing expanded protected area network… would greatly enlarge available habitat

Am I missing something or does that sound really redundant?

They need to get ahead of the fences that are going to end up trapping a lot of wildlife during fires over the next few decades as well.

Lemme shorten this:

Animals don’t care what lines you draw on a map.

Nor do they understand why one toe past a random point is suddenly getting them and their collective murdered

The key is to subsidize the customer rather than the product.

I remember reading a panther study in Florida, the biggest killer by far was crossing roads. Just putting in animal overpasses would make a huge difference for most wildlife.

I keep hoping so. I keep desperately trying to find hope.

If you're interested in such habitats, there is a project in Germany called 'the green belt' which created a protected wild life corridor along the old border between the fromer GDR and western Germany. The project is planned to include more european countries and will then be called 'the european belt'. Link for more infos on the green belt: https://www.bund.net/service/publikationen/detail/publication/the-green-belt-long-term-work-for-a-vision/

So they want to make animal highways?

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roads too, fences

Its almost as if Native American tribes have been advocating for this for centuries… hm. Maybe we should have been listened to for environmental knowledge

I would be fine subsidizing this stuff going to people in need honestly. The waste is a failure of our greed and society.

National Parks are rooted in displacing Indigenous people, the communities who have been sheppards and protectors of nature for centuries. Theyre definitely NOT founded for the purpose of perserving the environment because if it was, they would have lef the land much more untouched with its Native people still living off the land. I’d suggest doing more research on early conservationist’s stances on Native Americans and the exploitable potential for the land they were living on and conserving.

Just one question though... how are the animals going to know where these corridors are? I mean, it's not like they read maps or signs...

I would hope the first step in creating this network of linked wild places would involve studying the actual patterns of movement, then put in the wild corridors by following the creatures 'desire paths'.

A lot of it is distribution.

Almost all of the land in the cascades is owned by either NPS or the US forest service. It's somewhat well connected with large bottomless culverts/tunnels on a ton of roads and there's a huge new wildlife crossing bridge over the freeway as well.

I actually work with these exact issues but in Sweden!

Here the corridors that infrastructure creates are utilized to increase connectivity between fields and open grasslands, which is a type of nature that's increasingly scarce here. The power line infrastructures clear any trees over a certain height to ensure safety and maintenance, but the grass and shrubbery is managed to promote habitats for insects, small birds, and endangered flora that likes open grasslands. This is possible because the power grid is state owned for the most part, and the state is responsible for the maintenance and not the land owner.

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"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.

And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed.

And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

West Wing reference? Poor Pluie.

All national parks should aim for natural corridors for animals to move between. This should be the goal

There's two reasons why corporations waste food.

When I was younger I used to work at 7-11 one night I was working with my general manager (owner's brother) and I had throw away the entire shelf of those little 7-11 breakfast sandwiches it was a good 40-50 of them. I asked my manager why we don't donate this stuff to people in need. He responded because corporate (not the franchise owner) wouldn't allow it because they don't want to run afoul of New York state law which actually has rules about how long establishments can keep certain kinds of food for the sandwiches the limit is 24 hrs from the time of delivery.

I worked at White Castle after that and I worked night shift so I had to go into the refridgerator and freezer and prep them for delivery, help the delivery guy unload the truck, etc. One of the things I did was throw away all of the food waste and then report what I threw away. I got stuck doing this unironically because I was honest and didn't steal. One day threw a good several large shovel full of hamburgers that couldn't have been more then 20 mins old but because of corporate policy we had to get rid of them I threw a good 1200 dollars of food away that night and then reported the items so they could become a tax write off.

People have idea how much food is thrown out by the food service industry and I'm scare to ask about the agriculture industry I'm gonna assume it's even more.

Except it doesn't work that way. If I sell something to a customer and give it to them I have to order more food regardless. It doesn't matter if the customer eats it or has a 50 hooker gangbang with cheeseburger pasties. From the business's point of view we sold product, we have to order more inventory, wait for it to come, restock said inventory. Whether the paying customer wastes the food or not after paying is irrelevant.

Your argument would make sense if the waste occurred before the customer paid for it. But after the transaction is complete it really is irrelevant.

"We doubled our profits year over year and bought back more shares!' Inflation is largely price-gouging directed at us. I don't hear any billionaires complaining about their record profits (except Musk).

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I live in a “small” town on the Front Range in CO. Residential development is booming at an insane rate here — there are at least 6 massive neighborhoods that have popped up in the last 2 years within only a 3 mile radius of my house. 4 of the 6 neighborhoods were built directly in the middle of native grassland that is an essential part of the elk migration path, despite cries of warning from environmentalists…. And now people wonder why they have mountain lion, bear, and elk in their backyards. It absolutely kills me to see what we are doing to our planet, and my heart breaks for the wildlife I see every day paying the price.

Where is this from

Time to bring back victory gardens to supplement big ag.

Indeed... Otherwise national parks are more like giant enclosed "zoos" separating other animals from human society. Wildlife crossings are similarly important outside of them.

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

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Thought I'd find this in the comments. Take my updoot.

Does that include federally subsidized milk?

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"unproductive" is a bad variable to use here. Productivity is based a lot on human imagination... and greed.

There's also the problem of ranchers.

Does anyone happen to know what species of cat this is??

A customer that eats 100% of what they order will order far less than a customer that eats 10% of what they order, assuming they have the same caloric needs.

Humanity itself.

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That’s called capitalist innovation, bb

All I can think of when I saw this was that looney tunes cartoon where the sheep dog and the wolf know each other and talk and say hello before they both clock in together to start their day at work.

I think the only thing we would need for a corridor in WA from NCNP to RNP is an animal crossing across Highway 2, 20, and 410. That is very doable.

Great! Maybe we can make a 500 mile buffer to keep wind turbines from being anywhere close while we are at it.

But again from the standpoint of the restaurant it is irrelevant. They have a recommended inventory level they have to maintain and a certain amount of food waste that occurs even if sales are zero. The issue is not the customer but the restaurant itself and to a certain degree the laws and policy they have to abide by. Plus if a customer pays for food in full the restaurant made their COGS plus their markup the economic impact as per the original context of the conversation is still zero. If you want to combat food waste and the socio-economic ramifications you need to focus on restaurants and their suppliers.

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Native Americans fucked the land up in their own ways too. They burned down forests for corn production, dammed rivers, etc. etc.

But what about private property that’s in the way? Eminent domain isn’t exactly a popular practice.

The small-scale controlled burns lit by indigenous people contributed to increases in the variation and ‘patchiness’ of the available environment, creating increased habitat diversity and increased abundance of berries and other plants that like to live in forest margins, which enriched the regions for bears, other large mammals, and humans too, while also decreasing severe high-intensity wildfire incidence. It’s really not at all comparable to what’s changed in the last 400 years.

And better still- if they connect Yellowstone to Glacier, well, Glacier is already connected to Waterton in Canada. And Jasper, Banff, Kutenai, and Yoho national parks in Canada are already very large and connected, and close to Waterton. Connect those to Waterton, and bam, you've got an amazing corridor going.

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