Habitat Conservation

Pic of coyote from personal collection 

Habitat – Preserve, Restore, and Create. This is an occasional article in a series about habitat conservation and ecology. Habitat is where the flora and fauna live. They have adapted to that particular environment and need it to survive and thrive. The biggest threat to the loss of biodiversity is the loss of habitat. We must conserve. Our own survival is at stake. Most of us don’t want to relate to the fact that the loss of just one little component of the natural world is a threat to us; but we are all in fact inter-connected. At the rate we are going, we will be the only ones left besides for cockroaches and coyotes!

Conserving and protecting habitat and our natural world is a major challenge. All kinds of factors are working against that, the most immediate and severe is man’s continual destruction and crowding out of habitat. There are three important functions that we undertake to help reverse the decline.

Preserve. The first and easiest effort to protect habitat is to not disturb it in the first place. Trust me…it is so much less work to set aside a functioning habitat and protect it from further encroachment than to deal with trying to fix a degraded one. The problem is of course that everyone wants that habitat for something else. “Urban sprawl”, that all-encompassing term is habitat’s biggest enemy. Now fortunately there are many entities… public, private, and non-profit that have worked to preserve habitat around our county, the state, the country, and the world. Every time we have the opportunity to preserve, we must grab it since so much has already been lost.

Restore. Restoration is the next step if you haven’t been able to preserve habitat in its’ natural state. Many habitats have been severely degraded by both human and some natural activities. (We won’t get into natural disasters, which are really a whole another issue). Nature has a marvelous ability to heal itself. This has been proven and seen many times in many places. Simply doing something like taking the cows off a riparian area can enable that riparian area to heal itself and return to its’ natural state. Often we have to help things along. We can eliminate the sources of degradation. “Exotic” or un-natural plants and animals are one of the biggest threats. Often eliminating these pests results in immediate improvements. The list can be endless and the remedies need to obviously be targeted to the specific habitat. But no matter what you do, restoration is going to cost, both time and money.

Create. Creating habitat where there wasn’t one before is the most drastic and most difficult of all conservation efforts. Essentially, you are trying to replicate nature by constructing a habitat that mimics the real thing. For starters, you are probably trying to do this in a place that didn’t historically have that particular kind of habitat in the first place. You face all kinds of challenges. First you have to decide what exactly the components are…the natural forces that create habitat; then try to figure out how to get the plants and animals you want to inhabit the habitat. I am politically and religiously neutral, but when it comes to creation, we are really attempting to do God’s work. This really is rocket science!

I have been involved over the years in all three elements of habitat conservation. To me, they are all worth doing and very rewarding, depending of course on the specific circumstances. There are many organizations that are devoted to these processes. Local, state, and federal governments and entities are a prime mover and financier. Ditto innumerable non-profits and local groups. Funding can come from many sources. Grants, donations, fees, and etc. all are used. I discussed “mitigation” in some prior postings. Mitigation is the process whereby the entity that causes destruction of a habitat must make up for that by preserving, restoring, and/or creating like habitat. This has proven to be an excellent force since the ones that do the damage are responsible for “fixing” it. Of course, things really don’t get fixed. Even if we mitigate, we are only replacing what is lost. No net loss is a good concept, but I would rather have the glass half-full than half-empty.

Our world and especially our own local world here in San Diego is becoming one big man-made slab of humanity and all humanities trappings. We must strive to keep some open space. Otherwise there will only be us, the cockroaches, and the coyotes!

Openspaceman@cox.net