EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to the Mountain Journal Book Club, an opportunity to expand your access to and knowledge of the wildness around us. Mountain Journal covers water, wildfire, wildlife health and connectivity, as well as public lands, and climate change. We report on the intersection of humans and nature, and document how scientific data, from ecology to wildlife biology, are faring.
The MoJo Book Club is a concept months in the making so we’re thrilled to launch it here with our first book, Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World. Author Hillary Rosner is an award-winning science writer who has been covering wildlife and wild places for The New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Wired and Audubon, among others, for more than 20 years.
I had the honor of interviewing Rosner as part of a panel called “Loving Montana to Death” during the first Montana Free Press’s Free Press Fest in fall 2024. It’s a great privilege to work with her here and to launch the Book Club with her deeply reported and researched new book, Roam. As an introduction to the segment of Roam’s chapter six below, here are three questions to introduce you to the book. – Joseph T. O’Connor, Managing Editor
Mountain Journal: You’ve been writing about environmental issues from climate change and energy to wildlife, public health and water availability for years. Why did you want to write this particular book?
Hillary Rosner: I’ve been covering environmental issues for more than two decades now, and I felt like coverage of climate change had been growing and expanding while meanwhile coverage of land-use change and its impacts was still incredibly small. I had seen the impacts of land-use change on biodiversity around the globe, and the stories that always grabbed me the most somehow involved species whose ability to move was curtailed. I saw a study that looked at close to 60 mammal species and found that around the globe, in places where humans dominated the landscape, all those animals were moving less. And I really wanted to dig into that.
MoJo: As a teacher, journalist and author, communication and information transfer is at the core of what you do. What do you hope readers and students will get out of this book and how are you looking to educate through your writing?
H.R.: Our way of looking at the world is so human-centric, and we need to find ways to change that. We need to find empathy for other species, and to learn to see the world as it looks through the eyes of non-human creatures. What does your city or neighborhood or rural property look like through the eyes of a bear? Or a hawk? Or a bee? Or a moose? What resources do they need to survive, and what is standing in their way of accessing them? My hope for this book is that people will just shift their thinking a tiny bit, and start to see that our actions have impacts that ripple out to the natural world. How can we, individually and collectively, make better decisions that can enable us all to survive and thrive? I also think that thinking from the perspective of another species makes us curious about the world around us, and that curiosity inspires hope.
MoJo: In chapter 6 of “Roam,” which we excerpt below, you give examples of how fencing has disrupted wildlife connectivity around the world. What makes Greater Yellowstone a prime example for how humans are fracturing landscapes and how is GYE a bellwether for other regions and their wildlife? What are the lessons here?
H.R.: The GYE is a great example of an ecosystem that is still ecologically whole in many places, so it’s crucial that we protect it before it is fragmented beyond recognition. Someone recently suggested to me that the Front Range of Colorado, where I live, represents a cautionary tale for the GYE. Not so long ago, that comparison would have seemed absurd, but the pace of change in recent years makes it feel a lot less so. Decades of accumulated research show the impacts of roads, fences, sprawl, etcetera, on natural ecosystems and the species that rely on them. So now is the time to make smart decisions about development — where, how, with what guidelines.
Protected areas, in the GYE and around the world, are not sufficient in size to contain the wildlife that rely on them. Climate change makes this even more true, as species increasingly will need to move to access resources elsewhere. Private land conservation is emerging as a critical pillar of biodiversity protection. The same issues facing the GYE are mirrored, with local flavor, in many places I visited to report this book, from Costa Rica to Italy to Kenya.
Excerpt from Roam, Chapter 6
by Hillary Rosner
West of Cody, Wyoming, along the road to Yellowstone National Park, the North Fork of the Shoshone River winds through the Absaroka Mountains, a landscape of extinct volcanoes that once towered thousands of feet higher than it does today. Strange formations of eroded volcanic rock, known as hoodoos, cap the hillsides. If you’re lucky, you might see a flock of bighorn sheep scampering beneath these ancient deposits. But that’s much less likely than it would have been before White colonists first began developing — and fencing — the landscape.
Ever since my first trip to the Rockies of the northern U.S. in 2003, I’d been gobsmacked by the extent of the fencing there. I fell in love back then, as so many do, with the region’s vast spaces, but as I drove around, I just couldn’t get over the barbed wire. You can drive for the better part of a day, or longer, and have fence lines alongside you the whole way, wire barricades cleaving the seemingly boundless vistas.
Across the American West, after the Homestead Act of 1862 granted 160-acre tracts of land — stolen from Indigenous people — to pioneers willing to settle down and grow crops, erecting fences became an obsession. Fences were a muscular way to delineate property, and also a means to protect crops from livestock. But there weren’t enough trees to build them from wood, and it quickly became clear that strands of wire did nothing to deter cattle. People began experimenting with ways to strengthen the wire with all sorts of sharp and pointy metal prickers, and in the early 1870s, a farmer named Joseph Glidden, who had moved west with his family from New York State to Illinois, invented a successful form of barbed wire that quickly became all the rage. Soon the stuff was being mass-produced, and nothing could stop pioneers from stringing it across their acreage.
“Every fence has social and ecological winners and losers.”
Christine Wilkinson, wildlife researcher, University of California, Santa Cruz
Immediately, the barbed wire began causing problems for wildlife. Buffalo got trapped in the wire and either starved or died of injuries, not to mention that the fences kept them from reaching vital forage and watering holes. It’s unclear just how big a role fences played in the near-eradication of buffalo across the West, compared to their mass slaughter for hides, but Native Americans, who had relied on the buffalo for centuries, nicknamed the wire “devil’s rope.” Within a matter of decades, of the massive herds of buffalo that had once dominated the West — there were 60 million of them, by some estimates — only a few hundred remained.
Today, scientists conservatively estimate that more than 600,000 miles of fences crisscross the West, and that’s without counting property fencing in cities and suburbs. In just one Wyoming county, researchers mapped roughly 4,500 miles of fences — that’s nearly two and a half times the length of the U.S.-Mexico border. The Absarokas and other Western landscapes may look wide open and sprawling, particularly to roadtrippers from more paved-over parts of the country, but in fact they are sliced up by thousands of miles of barbed wire, put there to keep livestock in (or out), to mark boundaries between public and private lands, or to keep animals away from roads.
I’d come to the Absarokas to participate in a quiet but meaningful event, one that’s slowly taking root in places around the world. On a dazzling summer day, I pulled off the highway and up a dirt road at the edge of a ranch, where a dozen or so people were already assembled in a field, gathering tools. From pickup trucks and SUVs, they retrieved wire cutters, thick gloves, buckets, and water bottles. They were ready for a morning of manual labor: The volunteers planned to dismantle several miles of barbed wire fencing. It was strung across private land, whose owners had actively sanctioned its removal — yet the enterprise still felt oddly subversive, almost like breaking and entering. Clipping a fence connotes trespassing; it was hard to get past that sensation. Perhaps it’s a sign of just how entrenched the notion of fences as barriers has become in our collective psyche.
Heading up to Cody, Wyoming, driving north across the state with my family, I marveled at how relatively empty the state’s land still felt, compared to Colorado — where it’s increasingly hard to go camping without a reservation, and nearly impossible to get one if you don’t book it six months in advance. But while there may have been fewer people, the fences were everywhere.
For hours and hours, they lined the highway, broken only where two roads intersected. We passed a deer standing frozen at a roadside fence. Was she trying to cross? Or did she not even bother anymore, having come to see the fence line instead as a territorial boundary?
Buffalo were nowhere near the only wildlife harmed by barbed wire. Fences can spell disaster for animals that migrate seasonally, or for those simply moving around for their basic needs. Mule deer can get their legs caught as they try to jump over. Pronghorn antelope, which tend to scramble under fences, can get stuck or scraped on the bottom wire, dying there or later from infected wounds. One study looked at pronghorn in the northern sagebrush steppe in Montana, Alberta, and Saskatchewan — where the research area contained enough fence to wrap around the planet eight times — and found that pronghorn selected paths with fewer fences to cross. The landscape might be vast, but the actual habitat available to animals can be far less than what it seems. This kind of information is crucial to restoring connectivity and permeability.
Because it’s usually not possible to see fences in satellite imagery, they are often overlooked in conservation planning. They also do not factor into the Global Human Footprint Index, a widely used mapping tool that shows the relative influence of humans on landscapes around the world. In fact, said Wenjing Xu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Frankfurt, Germany, fences tend to proliferate precisely in areas that appear to have an otherwise low human footprint. She had noticed this same phenomenon the first time she traveled to the Tibetan Plateau, a landscape she had dreamed of visiting as a child in her native China. “From a human perspective, fences are for managing land and livestock, and they are barely visible from afar,” she said. “For animals that need to roam, however, every ‘invisible’ fenceline could be an actual barrier that they have to figure out how to overcome.”
No matter where you are across the western U.S., Xu said, on average you are likely less than two miles from a fence. As a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, Xu was part of an emerging field of research known as fence ecology, which has sprung up to uncover the impacts of all these fences — and find ways to mitigate them.
Despite being “one of the most widespread manmade features on Earth,” according to one study, fences have never previously been the focus of comprehensive scientific research. This may be partly because, as that same study put it, fences are hard both to detect and to define. Is a border wall a fence? What about a line of beehives used to deter elephants? If you can’t define something, it’s tricky to study it. Fences can be barriers to wildlife movement and cause ecological consequences that ripple out, but they can also be helpful tools for both ecological restoration and, somewhat counterintuitively, wildlife connectivity. Around the U.S. and globally, the scores of wildlife overpasses and underpasses being constructed require miles of high fencing to keep animals off roads and funnel them to the bridges and tunnels designed for their use. Untangling the impacts of fences on all kinds of creatures that encounter them is a challenge. “Every fence has social and ecological winners and losers,” said Christine Wilkinson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studied wildlife and fences at Berkeley along with Xu. It can be hard to figure out which is which.
While some fences, like the U.S.-Mexico border wall and those in the Mara, are new, others are relics, erected decades ago and no longer serving any purpose. In that way, taking down fences is similar to the movement to remove outdated, environmentally devastating dams along some rivers. As fence ecology raises awareness of the potential for harm, land managers and conservation groups are beginning to push for removal or replacement of fences — and it’s sometimes a solution that otherwise-at-odds constituents can get behind. “Everyone can agree on this,” Tony Mong, a wildlife biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, told me that morning on the ranch. Mong was the chair of the Absaroka Fence Initiative, a group that organizes volunteer work days to take down old fencing that’s needlessly blocking wildlife movement.
The Absarokas are part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem , a place where the migration of ungulates — pronghorn, deer, elk, bighorn sheep — is “what makes this whole system run,” according to Arthur Middleton, a wildlife ecologist who divides his time between Cody and Berkeley. The migration here, much like the one in East Africa, is crucial for the health of these animal herds. But it’s also crucial for the health of the ecosystem itself. Saving the planet’s biodiversity and stemming climate change are not separate issues. Another emerging field of science, called zoogeochemistry, aims to merge the too-often separate studies of wildlife ecology and of the interactions between plants and soil — what scientists call “biogeochemical cycling.” Climate science relies on measurements of these plant-soil interactions because they deal with how much carbon the planet’s trees and other plants are soaking up and how much is being stowed away, below ground, rather than contributing to warming in the atmosphere. These measurements, though, rarely include the role of animals, even though their presence or absence can change the calculations to a huge degree. Across the planet, animals contribute to storing billions of tons of carbon.
In the GYE, the ungulate migration is increasingly blocked by roads, pipelines, and residential subdivisions, as well as all the fences. “It’s death by 5,000 cuts,” Middleton said. The Absaroka Fence Initiative, though, was taking action. The group is made up of state agencies like Wyoming Game and Fish, as well as federal ones like the Bureau of Land Management, conservation groups like The Nature Conservancy, and local landowners, and had been organizing fence-removal and modification events for about a year — all during Covid times — when I visited. One event, in May 2021, drew about eighty volunteers, who removed three miles of fencing, nearly 4,000 pounds of wire and posts. The July effort was smaller, with 25 volunteers recruited from AFI’s ranks rather than the general public.
We organized into teams and fanned out to different spots across the ranch. I tagged along with Xu and Middleton, as well as some people from TNC and the Mule Deer Foundation, and one of the ranch’s owners. For three hours, we inched our way south and then east, between a road and an irrigated field, removing metal fasteners that attached the barbed-wire strands to posts. We clipped and rolled huge lengths of wire, untangling the strands from thick sagebrush that had grown up and entwined itself around the fencing.
Standing in the scorching sun of the late morning, the ranch owner, who did not want me to reveal her name or the property’s, pointed out a well-worn elk path. “The mamas come through twice a day, morning and evening,” she said. “They leave their calves in the sage and come down here. So they have to navigate the fence.” She pointed toward another valley where there was a herd of twelve bighorn sheep. Moose were common here, too, and the previous week she and her husband had watched a herd of 40 elk graze near their house. “We’ve wanted to take this fence down for years,” she said. “But now with this new initiative starting up, it’s much easier.”
“From a human perspective, fences are for managing land and livestock, and they are barely visible from afar. For animals that need to roam, however, every ‘invisible’ fenceline could be an actual barrier that they have to figure out how to overcome.”
Wenjing Xu, researcher Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, Frankfurt, Germany,
“Easy” was maybe relative, I thought. It was grueling work. As the sun rose higher, the temperature went with it. At some point, like a mirage, an ATV appeared — some other volunteers bringing us blissfully icy drinks. By the time the work was done for the day, we had removed two miles of fencing. It felt deeply satisfying, and also like a proverbial drop in the bucket. For volunteers, though, this kind of work yields instant gratification, a sense that you are having a true, direct impact on the land and wildlife. That connection is vital. I thought of the mama elk who now could access their browsing areas without having to clamber over barbed wire, and my own sweaty scramble in the sagebrush seemed more than worthwhile.
“There’s a growing recognition of how important these working lands are,” Abby Scott, Northwest Wyoming program director for TNC, told me over sandwiches at a spectacular hilltop cabin on the ranch. “I think we are right on the edge of becoming something bigger.”
Middleton hoped so. About 30 miles to the west, Yellowstone is thronged with tourists year after year, many if not most looking to see some of the region’s charismatic mega- fauna. But what lots of people don’t realize is those animals don’t stay inside the park. They move in and out across the boundary, and without the “out” part, they can’t survive. “People don’t make connections between the wildlife they want to see in Yellowstone and the conservation work that needs to happen here,” Middleton said. It was similar to the issues playing out in Corcovado, in Costa Rica, albeit on a much larger scale: Some wildlife needs more than what a protected area alone can provide.
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