Identifying Cores & Corridors
BIG RIVER CONNECTIVITY involves identifying large core habitat areas suitable for apex predators and keystone species. These cores are connected by relatively narrow corridors which allow wild things to move freely from one core to another. The cores and corridors are left permanently wild with minimal human interference. Our landscape plan involves the least possible amount of restoration followed by letting nature take its course. Recolonization involves minimal if any, capture and transportation of wild creatures. We are advocates for passive rewilding and passive recolonization. We believe in TRUSTING WILDNESS.
Flood Plains & Steep Slopes
Much of the land in rural areas has been converted from natural systems (woodland, wetland, prairie) to crop and pasture. This development has resulted in the loss of wild beauty, biological diversity, as well as top soil and nutrients. Today there are many obvious impacts of humans over-domesticating the land. The culminating event for our Mississippi River Watershed is found in the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone”. Land least desirable for agriculture is often the land causing grief in the watershed, but it is land well suited for rewilding. This land is found on floodplains and steep slopes. Our cores and corridors are largely located in these critically fragile environments. They are surrounded by buffer zones also planted to perennials but with harvesting, burning, or grazing common. The remaining agricultural land is operated in ways which provide for both present and future generations. We believe a lower input, sustainable culture will emerge and that producers will simultaneously adopt a lower input, sustainable agriculture.
Communities of Life
When speaking of cores and corridors we include communities. By community is meant an assembly of living things (human and non-human) together in a place. We believe that all life has intrinsic value separate from its immediate, often short-sighted, usefulness to our species. We believe that human survival depends on wildness. We trust the sovereignty of otherness in an interdependent world.
“There’s a land where the mountains are nameless, and the rivers all run god knows where.”
Robert Service