Most conservation efforts are local. These efforts must generally be place-based, drawing energy from personal attachments to lakes, streams, rivers, mountains, valleys, meadows, urban gardens, beaches, and ocean reaches. There seems no better way to encourage people to focus on place—and to understand what is at risk—than to draw them to it with maps.
The ability of maps to connect people to place exists in cultures where maps are never actually drawn. Hugh Brody's Maps and Dreams describes Pacific Northwest Indians who carried maps in their heads. With uncanny precision they knew where animals and fish were likely to be at certain times of the year and the routes to get there. Survival depended on precision in mental map-making and map-reading.
Modern conservationists are starting to draw these maps. Commercial fisherman Ted Ames, who experienced the collapse of New England groundfish stocks, systematically interviewed older fishermen along the Maine coast to determine where the now vanished "cod nurseries" were once located. He carefully mapped these areas, creating a new design for their protection with the hope that the cod fishery can be rejuvenated. Canadian conservationist Wendy Francis plotted the locations of wild animal road kills (bears, wolves, coyotes, elk, deer, etc.) along the Trans-Canada Highway near Banff National Park. The story her map tells may one day lead to the construction of underpasses and overpasses at these animal crossings.
Advances in technology enable modern map-makers to include a wealth of biological and topographical information drawn from satellite imagery and GIS data sets. Boise-based Conservation Geography recently produced maps demonstrating that U.S. Forest Service claims of the amount of old growth habitat in the Clearwater National Forest are substantially overstated. These maps led to a moratorium on logging in that northern Idaho forest. Boston's Charles River Watershed Association has produced maps to show the relationship between land development and sub-surface aquifers in headwater towns where water shortages have become critical and contentious. These maps stimulated town officials to consider zoning land to sustain groundwater, thus restricting development above these underground reservoirs.
Maps
can amplify and/or simplify information. Stunning new maps of
coastal British
Columbia created by Ecotrust and the Sierra Club of British
Columbia show the remaining unroaded watersheds in that magnificent
stretch of temperate rainforest. These maps, which speak truths
previously hidden from public view, have strengthened the case
for protecting pristine watersheds for their long-term conservation
value.
In
other cases, maps enable us to see landscapes in new ways. The
rapid emergence in the last three years of the Yellowstone to
Yukon Conservation Initiative—a U.S.-Canadian collaboration
of more than 100 organizations stretching 2,000 miles along the
Rocky Mountains—has drawn enormous energy from a map
which was an entirely new creation. It links Wyoming to the Yukon
Territory and all points in between.
Two novel approaches to conservation maps deserve reflection. In Montana, Louisa Willcox used a metaphorical house floor-plan to describe the current fate of grizzly bears. Arguing that grizzlies now occupy only one percent of their former range in the lower forty-eight states, her imagery of imprisoned and isolated "bears in the bathroom" puts their situation onto a "map" which enables humans to better understand how tough it is going to be to protect this endangered species.
In their recent book, Continental Conservation (Island Press, 1999), Michael Soulé and John Terborgh reinforce this theme by provoking speculation on how habitat maps might be drawn by other species. A map drawn from the perspective of wild animals—elk, wolf, bear, or moose—showing their ranges would go far to explain human threats to their natural "homes".
While map-makers have the power to enlighten and to persuade, they also have the capacity to mislead. A map is the product of a set of choices—about what to include or exclude, what to emphasize, where to begin and where to end. These choices shape how we see the world. Some examples help to sharpen this point:
- Familiar highway maps show roads, human settlements and political boundaries. They do not define watersheds, the basic unit of nature on which to focus conservation strategies. Therefore, readers are not invited to think about the location and presence of watersheds when consulting this common type of map.
- In the Pacific Northwest, government agency maps on both sides of the Canadian-U.S. border reach to the international boundary and then stop. A reader of these maps is not invited to consider the integrity of forest and river systems which stretch across an artificially-designated international boundary.
- Some eco-regional maps of coastal areas published by the Nature Conservancy show no biological relationship between the land and the sea. Beyond the water's edge, the maps are blank. This may be explainable because the Conservancy emphasizes land protection, but such maps promote a fiction that there is no biological connection between terrestrial and marine systems. In reality, the linkages are profound.
- Maps designed and promoted by land developers rarely contain rich biological information nor do they explain the cumulative impact on nature of housing developments, malls, and super highways. These maps implicitly extol the virtues of economic development, not the values of ecological services offered by the land. Far from being entirely objective, such maps can be ideological.
As these examples show, maps can lead and mislead. They themselves are not reality—only a representation of reality. However, their potential to focus attention on place and to teach can be impressive. In the last decade environmentalists have shown how remarkably influential newly created maps can be. These new maps have stimulated insights, influenced agency resource management policies, shaped judicial decisions, and generally advanced the cause of nature conservation.
Theodore M. Smith
Executive Director
August, 2000
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