Where the Deer and the Antelope Roam

In her new book, Roam, ($32; Patagonia Books), award-winning environmental journalist Hillary Rosner tackles the increasingly thorny issue of animal migration. Rosner traveled the globe—and to some of America's most iconic public lands—to explore the creative strategies conservationists, public land managers, and private landowners are implementing to provide wild animals critical opportunities to move in a world increasingly carved up by roads, fencing, and myriad other barriers. It's a timely topic. As Rosner pointed out in an email right after our interview concluded, road collisions with deer rise by 16% in the week following the fall time change—which just so happens to be this weekend.

CHRISTOPHER KEYES: I want to begin with something you wrote that I underlined in the book: “climate change has come to dominate media coverage of the environment.” This is also one of the reasons I wanted to create RE:PUBLIC. Where do you think we need more coverage—or what gets lost when every environmental story is written through the lens of climate change?

HILLARY ROSNER: This is something I've thought about for a long time. It's hard because, you know, I think it's great that climate change is getting covered. Obviously, that is a huge, massive issue that we need to be covering. But I think land-use change kind of falls under the radar. I think by framing things entirely in terms of climate change, we're just losing a lot of the conservation stories and the conservation angles and the biodiversity angles on things. For example, questions about renewable energy versus habitat for different species. That’s a topic that tends to divide even the environmental community—and we should probably be having more discussions about it. 


A theme in the book that you keep coming back to is this desire to see the landscape through the eyes of another species. Why is that important to you, and why does that get overlooked by most humans? 


I think that it defines the way we as a human species live on this planet, right? We have engineered the planet for humans and nobody else. We just don't generally think about anyone but ourselves in all of the ways that we shape the planet. I'm not so naive that I think that everyone's going to put other species first, but I think that there are ways that we can make better decisions about the spaces we share. Our public lands in this country cannot contain all the other species that need places to live. And so we need to think about how we can share the spaces that we all inhabit and need to inhabit.  

Right, a lot of this book is about strategies to deal with this shared space and wildlife’s need to move around in it. It all seems to come back to this idea of corridors. How would you define corridors, and why are they so essential to wildlife survival? 

So this is really just the basic idea of getting from point A to point B. Say I am a non-human species, for example—either I'm a species that migrates long distances and needs to get from point A to point B far away, or I am a backyard species that just needs to get from here to across the street so that I can access the food that I need. But in between, there is a road, a city, border wall, a fence, an industrial scale farm, a reservoir, a dam—whatever it is. And now you throw in climate change. A species might be in this wonderful ecosystem and habitat, like in Yellowstone. They might have everything that they need. But as the climate changes, wait—now it doesn't actually have everything they need. Now they need to move north and they need to move up in elevation. And what's in the way? It just makes it essential that we think about these corridors—safe routes for animals to travel from A to B.

Where do you think some of the most interesting work on corridors is being done? 

I have a chapter set in Italy. I went to the central Apennines to report on this conservation group called Rewilding Apennines. And one of the species that they're concerned with is this subspecies of brown bear. You think about Italy, it's so densely developed. It’s just got roads and people and cities everywhere. And so the idea that there are these bears moving through these areas, and wolves as well, was sort of fascinating to me. And some of the corridor work that's happening there is just recognizing that humans and bears are actually occupying the same spaces in a lot of instances. So how can we make it sort of safe for everybody? 

And what are they doing that's making that safe? 

One thing they're doing is trying to make the roads safer. They’ve put up devices on the highways that have sensors. When a car is coming, they make a really loud, scary noise, or they have flashing lights, and that alerts wild animals that there's a car coming and scares them away from the road. I also went out with some volunteers who were covering up old well holes that were in the ground. They were dug hundreds of years ago. No one uses them anymore, but bears fall into them and can't get out and then they die. And so the volunteers were carrying these heavy grates out into the landscape and drilling them over the holes, which just seems like an incredibly arduous, labor intensive thing to address wildlife movement, right? But there are only 60 members of this bear species left. So if you can cover one hole and one bear doesn't fall in, you've done something really useful. There was a whole series of these seemingly small activities that actually added up to something over there. Even taking down old fencing that's no longer being used, so the bears can roam.

I'm glad you brought up fencing because there’s a stat in the book that just blew my mind. You write that there are 600,000 miles of fencing, crisscrossing the U.S., and that doesn't even include fences around neighborhoods and homes. Is that mapped? 

There are certainly efforts to map all of that, but part of the issue is that you can't see fences on satellite imagery of an area. Even in these places that we think of as being very wide open, like those lands in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, are just covered in fencing. For some species, those fences don't matter at all, but for a lot of species, they do. 

I was fascinated by the idea that habitat conservationists are often planning blind, because they don't have any understanding of where the fencing is. 

Right.
And because those fences tend to be exactly in the areas that have the lowest human footprint index, they are exactly in the places that we think are wide open. But this issue has prompted all kinds of interesting work. I went and did a fence removal, a volunteer morning with the Absaroka Fence Initiative. There were people there from federal agencies and state agencies and hunting groups and conservation groups—and everyone could kind of get behind it because this fencing was put up hundreds of years ago. No one's using it anymore. And all it's doing is blocking wildlife passage. And so it just seemed like a great, no-brainer: let's just take it down. There are volunteers who want to do this kind of work.
And there are other options. Some ranchers may still need a certain fence. But given the choice, they'd love to make it more wildlife friendly—make the bottom rung higher and the top run lower. There are ways to make fences more wildlife friendly, but it takes funding. It takes money. Everything's about money. 

What about human presence itself acting as a barrier to wildlife movement? We talk so much about the recreation economy, how we want to keep public lands open and in public hands so that people can get out and enjoy them. But going back to your desire to think like a species, what impact does, say, a trail system have on wildlife? 

This is something that was really interesting to me. When I was in a different part of the Italian Alps, researchers were using data from Strava to look at where humans were out recreating on the landscape, and then looking at the bear movement. And what they found actually was that even in places where there weren't physical barriers, the bears were actually avoiding the landscapes that humans were using. And so that's something that we need to think about. People in the conservation community have long thought, and I'm certainly one of them, that, Well, if we just get more people out on public land seeing what is out here and how beautiful it is, they will want to protect it. And I think that's true, but also, as we saw during COVID, you can have so many people out on a trail that it's being loved to death. And I don't know exactly what the solution is to those. 


Damnit, I was just going to ask you what the solution is.

I just think it's something that we need to think about. I think we need to recognize that our presence on a trail is some kind of barrier to animal movement. 


Speaking of solutions, one of your sources in the fencing chapter shared the idea that government regulation is really good at stopping people from doing things, but not necessarily good at creating a stewardship mentality. How do we promote more solutions that encourage good land stewardship instead of regulations which just seem to divide us?

I think, to start, we really need to recognize the value of private lands. It is in everybody's interest to have ranchers on the landscape. I think for a long time the conservation community was like, you know, ranchers are over here and conservationists are over there. I think that mindset hasn't really gone away as much at the government level.
The people who live on these lands are often the best stewards of them. Most ranchers don't want to sell off their lands and see them divided into ranchettes. We need to let those landowners pick and choose the conservation tools that make the most sense for them. Like: we are going to pay you for creating habitat that wildlife can graze on—habitat leasing. Or we're going to pay you a living wage so that you don't have to sell your farm and subdivide it. Or we’re going to pay you to remove fencing. 
If we want Grizzly bears and large carnivores living in our national parks, we need to recognize that they don't actually see lines on a map. Those species do not know where the national park boundary is. And so if we want to have them in the parks, then we need to find ways to keep those privately owned landscapes outside of the parks working for them, too. This theme kept coming up in my reporting no matter where I was in the world: the need to find solutions that cross both public lands and private lands

You alluded to some of these conservation programs having recently been eliminated. Could you highlight a few? 

Well, yeah, the bipartisan Infrastructure Bill [passed under the previous administration] set aside $350 million for wildlife crossing structures. Much of that money has been clawed back. And a lot of that was for projects that were already under construction. 
The habitat leases and a lot of those USDA conservation programs either have been cut or are most likely going to be cut when there's a new farm bill. In fact, I think the habitat leases were explicitly mentioned in Project 2025. 
And I really want to make the point that these things should not be political. These are projects that everybody benefits from. Like the wildlife crossing structures. Nobody wants to hit a deer going 80 miles an hour on the interstate. This should not be a political issue. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity. You can buy Roam at Patagonia or anywhere books are sold.