384 Ecological Restoration and Design
farming and ranching regions. As one example, the Richmond, Vermont-based
Wildlands Project, has been drafting strategies and creating maps to recover wilder-
ness on a massive scale throughout North America – with an emphasis on ecosystem
processes, the need for recovery of all species and the role of top carnivores to main-
tain ecosystem integrity. The Wildlands Project has been looking to other organiza-
tions, such as the Wild Farm Alliance, for ideas on establishing and maintaining high
standards for wildlife-friendly agricultural activities in compatible-use areas.
In their unpublished essay ‘Tame and Wild: Organic Agriculture and Wild-
ness’, North Dakota wheat farmer Fred Kirschenmann and his co-author David
Gould argue for an ever closer merger between conservation biology and agricul-
ture:
We cannot have healthy ‘organic’ farms within degraded landscapes. Quite apart from
the problem of ‘drift’ – whether chemical or genetic – there is the fact that the biodiver-
sity necessary to produce the ecosystem services on which our organic farms depend can
only be restored and maintained at the ecosystem level. It is the coevolution of a diverse
array of species interacting with each other that gives nature its dynamic resilience –
something Stuart Kauffman calls ‘interacting dancing fitness landscapes’ (Gould and
Kirschenmann, 2000).With this evolved thinking, a new vision for a more functionally integrated agri-
culture is emerging. Such a vision begins with farms that gracefully meld into
landscapes supporting a wide – if possible, full – range of native species. Arable
lands would be maintained in agriculture but would favour cropping systems that
mimic the surrounding landscape, while marginally productive lands would be
restored to native habitat. Every farm, while still functioning as its own healthy
ecosystem, would in some way act as a corridor connecting it to a larger, ultimately
wilder landscape – through clear and free-flowing watersheds, through woodlots
and forests, grasslands, hedgerows or wetlands, eventually into roadless areas
beyond human intervention. Society would do its part to actively encourage and
support community-oriented farmers who grow a mix of crops native to or adapted
to their different regions, and who are rewarded for not farming at the expense of
native pollinators, carnivores, fish or any other members of wild Nature. Ulti-
mately, entire regions could be recognized or certified by their ‘wild’ aspects. Such
a vision, however, will require new ways of looking at agriculture’s place on the
landscape. Fortunately, a number of pioneering groups and individuals have
already been ‘farming with the wild’ for a decade or more, and these models can
help establish the basis for a nationwide, regionally oriented movement.
Emerging models and wild farm pioneers
Building alliances between historical adversaries will no doubt require tearing
down decades-old walls and stereotypes: environmentalists, on the one hand, often
lumped with wealthy urbanites and bureaucrats who dispatch regulations from