This is my third report to you on the progress of the Roaring Fork Watershed Biodiversity and Connectivity Study. Starting in December 2021, and continuing into January 2022, the many-layered GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps which constitute the core deliverables of the Study, are being “test driven” by the agencies and organizations of the Science Team.
This process ensures further refinements to the final product and provides training to assure that the full capability of the Study deliverables is understood and accessible.
In the meantime, the following story may interest you and helps underscore the importance of our Study.
Remembering Two of America's Leading Naturalists
An impromptu picnic with E. O. Wilson (top left) and Tom Lovejoy (top right) at ACES in 2006.
Twenty one years ago at New Year’s, rain soaked, we scrambled up an abandoned military tower to see columns of mist rising out of the Amazon rain forest. The downpour was moving away with the easterly trade winds and in the interval between storms, raucous flocks of macaws coursed below us, above the emerald canopy. Our venerable guide Tom Lovejoy was letting us experience the atmospheric engine of successive rains transformed to rising mists that repeated across the forest, pulling the jungle’s heat into the upper atmosphere. There, high westerly winds carried the warmth out over the Atlantic, warming and driving the Gulf Stream north to temper the climate of the British Isles and western Europe, including the South of France, which at the latitude of Maine would be much colder without the Amazon rainforest. Everything is connected, and when you see the heat engine working you feel its power. The power of intact biodiversity.
Tom Lovejoy and his colleague and mentor E. O. Wilson both died in late December 2021. (Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s tribute in the New Yorker here.) They will forever be the godfather and father of biodiversity conservation. Jody and I knew them and treasure them and their legacies. Wilson studied and defined the intricate workings of nature from ants to the whole Earth - and he advocated for saving half the Earth’s wildness, because “Biodiversity as a whole forms a shield protecting each of the species that together compose it, ourselves included.” Lovejoy conducted the world’s largest/longest running (and ongoing) ecological experiment, the Forest Fragments Project in the Amazon, which demonstrates the critical importance of intact wild landscapes and the perils of ecosystem fragmentation.
Here in the Roaring From Watershed, inspired by these two great men in their lifetimes, and where conservation is a solid community value, their legacy is honored in many ways. One is marked by the collaboration of several individuals, organizations, and agencies: The Roaring Fork Watershed Biodiversity and Connectivity Study. (Read the 12/3/2021 Aspen Times cover story about our work here.)
We could hope for another Lovejoy or a Wilson, or we can be encouraged to collective action by the words of Terry Tempest Williams, “Far better than to hope is to ask, what can I do today to make a small difference, and what can we do in community tomorrow to make a big difference?” Protecting and restoring biodiversity, for its intrinsic value, its value to humanity, and its tempering of climate change is just the right thing to make a big difference.
Sincerely,
Tom Cardamone
Executive Director