Healing the Wounds: An Example from the Sky Islands - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 191

10
Healing the Wounds: An Example
from the S ky Islands
Dave Foreman, Rurik List, Barbara Dugelby, Jack Humphrey,
Robert Howard, and Andy Holdsworth
CONTENTS
10.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 194
10.2 Wounds to the Land .......................................................................................................... 195
10.2.1 Wound 1: Loss of Important Species ................................................................... 196
10.2.2 Wound 2: Watershed, Stream, and Riparian Damage ...................................... 198
10.2.3 Wound 3: Elimination of Natural Fire ................................................................ 199
10.2.4 Wound 4: Fragmentation of Wildlife Habitat .................................................... 200
10.2.5 Wound 5: Invasion of Exotic Species ................................................................... 202
10.2.6 Wound 6: Degradation of Forests and Woodlands ........................................... 204
10.3 Healing the Wounds .......................................................................................................... 206
10.3.1 Objectives for Goal 1: Recover Native Species ................................................... 206
10.3.2 Objectives for Goal 2: Protect and Restore Riparian Areas ............................. 207
10.3.3 Objectives for Goal 3: Restore Natural Fire ........................................................ 207
10.3.4 Objectives for Goal 4: Restore and Protect Connectivity ................................. 207
10.3.5 Objectives for Goal 5: Control Exotic Species .................................................... 207
10.3.6 Objectives for Goal 6: Restore and Protect Native Forests ............................... 207
References ..................................................................................................................................... 208
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of
wounds. … An ecologist must either harden his shell or make believe that the conse-
quences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks
of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.
Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold , 1972*
Aldo Leopold came to understand land health and ecological wounds from his experience
in New Mexico and Arizona from 1909 to 1924 and trips to the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua
in the mid-1930s. In 1937, he wrote
For it is ironical that Chihuahua, with a history and a terrain so strikingly similar to
southern New Mexico and Arizona, should present so lovely a picture of ecological
health, whereas our own states, plastered as they are with National Forests, National
* See Leopold 1 and also Ehrlich. 2
193