This story is excerpted from the MT Lowdown, a weekly newsletter digest containing original reporting and analysis published every Friday.
Hillary Rosner is a science journalist whose reporting has taken her around the world to study the friction between human endeavors and intact wild landscapes. Rosner has written about wind turbines in Wyoming, declining caribou populations in Canada and an effort to help people connect extreme weather events to climate change. She is the assistant director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado and is working on a book about habitat connectivity that will be published next year.
Rosner will be in Missoula for the inaugural Free Press Fest, where she will be a panelist on a talk titled “Loving Montana to Death” scheduled for 3:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 6. MTFP asked her a handful of questions as a preview to that talk. Her responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
MTFP: The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is often said to possess the same cohort of large mammals that existed in pre-Columbian times, making it somewhat unique. What, in your view, has contributed to that?
ROSNER: At least one of those large mammals, the wolf, was reintroduced. We should probably recognize that — it was actually gone, but through the hard work of a lot of people, it was restored.
I think this is what is so unique about Montana and some of Wyoming also — that so much of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem still exists in its natural state, by which I mean it is not paved over and covered with parking lots and big box stores. It exists in these big chunks of land that are often lovingly maintained by people who have worked on that land and lived there for a long time. I think that is what’s really special and unique about that place — that animals still, for the most part, can roam relatively freely.
MTFP: When U.S. Congress established Yellowstone National Park in 1872, that was considered a pretty radical idea. Park management has definitely undergone some shifts in the ensuing years, but it was a leap to establish Yellowstone. Do you think other similarly big, somewhat wild ideas in land management might yet take root?
ROSNER: I would hope that there would be. I think a lot of the big ideas right now probably need to come in the private land space. We have set aside, in various ways, a lot of the public land we can. A lot of the biggest issues right now in conservation are really about private lands.
What was interesting to me when I was reporting this book is that although the particulars may look different, there’s an overarching theme of chopping up landscapes, subdividing private lands, putting up fences, selling them off into smaller parcels and thereby taking these remaining large open spaces that are so necessary for wildlife and fragmenting them even further.
I’m not totally sure what the big wild ideas will be, but I think whatever they are, they have to be about private land.
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MTFP: What are the best wildlife connectivity tools you’ve come across in your travels?
Wildlife overpasses and underpasses are a really obvious one. I don’t talk a ton about them in my book, but Ben Goldfarb has written a great book that deals with that called “Crossings” for anyone who’s interested. But that’s such a simple and obvious one and one that’s mostly positively viewed by the public. Nobody wants to hit a deer while going 75 miles per hour in their car, right?
And there’s a lot of work to engage people in their decision-making about rebuilding and restoring wildlife corridors. This is something that came up a lot in the different places I’ve visited — trying to engage local communities and put in wildlife corridors while we still can. Whether you’re talking about addressing fences in the American West or elephant movement in Kenya, you’ve got to develop solutions that are a win-win for everyone. Because if you’re just trying to do what’s best for wildlife, but not what’s best for people, you’re going to run into some problems.
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