Other Environmental Themes

Protecting the Crown

Since its founding in 1951, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has protected about 120 million acres in all 50 American states and more than 30 countries. In that time, the organization has focused its conservation efforts on what it calls “The Last Great Places”--habitats deemed special in terms of the plant and animal species they harbor, as well as the natural processes they sustain.

The Last Great Places is really more of a philosophy than an exact list, with the general idea being that our best chance of helping nature lies in preserving large-scale landscapes and ecosystems rather than isolated pockets of biodiversity. One region that surely qualifies in this regard is the so-called “Crown of the Continent”—a 10-million acre expanse of mountains, forests, rivers, and grasslands extending from Montana into southern Canada. Nearly five times the size of Yellowstone National Park, the Crown contains some of the biggest stretches of roadless terrain in the continental United States.

Strategically located, the Crown connects the Canadian Rockies to several of the United States’ largest wilderness areas—the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, and the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

The Crown, consequently, provides important linkages between habitats. It also serves as a vital conduit for the migration, as well as general movement, of wildlife, which is extremely well represented in the region. Almost all of North America’s large mammals can be found here, including predators such as grizzly bears (the largest population in this country outside of Alaska), black bears, gray wolves, mountain lions, wolverines, bobcats, fishers, and martens. The land also abounds in moose, elk, deer, and antelopes. The Crown is distinctive in not having suffered an animal extinction in recorded history, going back at least to the time of Lewis and Clark more than 200 years ago.

But the area is not immune to threats. Human activities, particularly on the lower-elevation fringes of the Crown, have, for example, imperiled the Canadian lynx, which tends to build its dens along the edges of woods where trees are most likely to be toppled by wind. In 2008, TNC and its partner, The Trust for Public Land, secured 310,000 acres within the Crown, including land considered critical to the survival of the lynx. The purchase will prevent logging practices—especially forest thinning—that have degraded the lynx habitat, while also barring the construction of homes and roads on real estate that has recently skyrocketed in value. TNC conservationists saw the purchase as a last-minute opportunity to save the land from residential development. Forests recover over time, they say. But subdivisions are forever.