Farming With the Wild 383the regulation of hydrological processes, erosion control, weed suppression and
detoxification of chemicals. Instead, the organic agriculture movement has under-
standably focused its decades-long struggle on important issues less directly linked
to biodiversity loss – keeping the family farmer on the land, developing non-toxic
production practices and building markets for organic products. Under threat
from development, the consolidation of processors and farmland, decreasing farm-
gate prices, international competition and corporate domination, survival is at
stake. With the mainstreaming of the organic movement, even the futures of small-
scale farmers growing for local and niche markets now hang in the balance.
At the same time, spurred by critically plummeting wildlife populations in
industrial farming areas, the US Department of Agriculture resumed the allocation
of Farm Bill resources for conservation in farm areas in the mid- to late 1980s.
What started as a series of pilot programmes (the Conservation Reserve Programme,
Wetlands Reserve Programme, Wildlife Habitat Incentive Programme and others)
has over nearly two decades resulted in the protection and/or restoration of tens of
millions of acres of wetlands, bottomland forests and grasslands nationwide. While
spending on conservation programmes remains marginal compared to the subsi-
dies that prop up the mass production of only a handful of commodity crops,
thanks to significant pressure from conservationists and environmentalists, as
much as $2 billion could be spent on significant programmes in private lands in
the coming decade. These efforts will help to expand the amount of wetlands
under restoration and protection, fund a broad-scale grasslands conservation pro-
gramme, target key habitats for imperiled species in agricultural areas and reward
farmers for practices such as cover cropping and diversification. There is still much
to be learned, however, to make these conservation programmes more ecologically
and agriculturally effective.
Adding to this picture of the Lower 48 states, contemporary large-scale wilder-
ness recovery initiatives have set forth a bold and urgent vision for the restoration
of functional ecosystems over North America in the 21st century. According to the
country’s leading conservation biologists, our protected wilderness areas and
national parks have become increasingly isolated through surrounding resource
extraction and various forms of development. Many are unable to sustain viable
populations of the species they harbour, resulting in genetic isolation, inbreeding
and ultimately extirpation. As experts including Reed Noss, Michael Soulé and
Dave Foreman argue, connecting those fragmented wilderness areas through net-
works of corridors and mixed-use buffer zones is urgently needed to expand habi-
tat areas for wide-ranging species and to reverse the country’s (and the world’s)
stemming biodiversity crisis.
The dire situation of biodiversity loss and proposals to restore native diversity
across broad areas from Alaska to Central America have set the conservation and
agricultural communities on a collision course. With such a large percentage of the
US landbase in private hands and presently in agriculture – and much of that the most
productive lands and habitat, which were settled long before the ethic of conservation
took hold – a key to the North American wilderness recovery lies in working with