Designing Wildlife Habitats ed. by John Beardsley (review)

Designing Wildlife Habitats is a collection of essays by social scientists, landscape architects, and ecologists that were delivered at a symposium held at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, D.C.) in 2010. The objective of this colloquium was to integrate expertise in ecology, landscape architecture, and history to explore the role of designers in the restoration and management of wildlife habitat.

This book represents a valiant attempt to integrate two disciplines with often conflicting objectives, and its title implies that within its pages is a practical guide to wildlife habitat design. The contents of the book are not quite ‘as advertised,” with the focus of many of the chapters on more theoretical abstractions and general themes. The true value of the book lies within the thoroughly articulated case studies of wildlife habitat design, illustrating a diverse set of challenges, as well as the approaches used in overcoming them. Thomas L. Woltz artfully describes the re-design of a 3,000-acre sheep farm on the East Coast of New Zealand (Chapter 9) to accommodate both agricultural production and wildlife conservation, stressing the importance of both solid conservation interventions (e.g., invasive predator removal, creation of scale-dependent habitat mosaics), as well as the inclusion of local cultural groups into the restoration process (e.g., access to historic burial grounds, employment of tribesmen at nurseries producing the plants used for reforestation efforts). Steven Handel’s narrative (Chapter 10) provides several examples of urban greening projects, most notably the design of the Orange County Great Park (California), which highlights the need to maintain landscape linkages in large-scale public land use planning to promote plant and wildlife movements. HNTB Engineering and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates directly address a human-wildlife conflict through the design of a wildlife design crossing system “kit of parts.” The volume also emphasizes consideration of several factors that will likely influence the long-term success of wildlife habitat design. Stuart Green’s essay provides a framework for local and non-local stakeholder interactions throughout all phases of the design process, and Jane Carruthers implores that we abandon the notion of “fortress conservation,” and instead design conservation areas that welcome human uses where appropriate. Kristina Hill examines large-scale conservation planning in relation to climate change, citing the need to account for the dynamics and stochasticity associated with a rapidly changing environment. Finally, Kongjian Yu and Joshua Ginsberg dedicate their contributions to understanding and integrating landscape designs across spatial and temporal scales.

However, the book falls short of its goal in some ways as well, mostly due to the lack of fluidity among the contributed chapters (although this is a shortcoming shared by many edited volumes). Beardsley’s introductory chapter incites excited anticipation of the cohesiveness of the essays to follow and solidly lays the foundation for how the contributions should complement each other. However, the reader comes to the disappointing realization that this is not the case only a few pages into Chapter 2. While human perceptions of what is wild, and humankind’s relationship with wild animals, sets an important backdrop for how we view the importance of wildlife conservation, these points are buried deeply within a verbose and arguably peripheral discussion of the definition of the term “wild,” and the history of wildlife domestication. There are no clear connections to current wildlife habitat design. Chapter 3 continues to digress from the stated central goal of the book by stepping further back in time with a description of 16th century Ottoman Gardens and menageries. This essay may be valuable to inform human-purposed, cultural, or artistic landscape design, but it has limited value in guiding contemporary wildlife habitat design or restoration. An additional outlier occurs in Chapter 6, with a highly personalized narrative of the loss of birds in the Neotropics, due in large part to hunting by local indigenous communities. The chapter concludes with a weak attempt to tie this larger conservation issue into habitat design, which reads more like an add-on than a logical...