Land Use & Open Space Conservation

Michael S. Stevens is the Co-Founder and Principal of Pioneer Mountain Group, an environmental consulting firm based in Hailey, Idaho. PMG provides a range of management, conservation, scientific and natural resource production and marketing services to clients including non-profit organizations, investment firms, and private landowners. The firm’s current projects are in the western United States, Latin America and Canada.

For millennia, Colorado's Yampa River Valley has followed the rhythms of wildlife mating and migration, the habits of elk and grouse and bear. The arrival of ranching in the 1880s altered the pattern a little, but radical change didn't occur until the last half of the 20th century. That's when the big ranches began to be broken up into small ranchettes and vacation-home lots, the kind of low-density exurban sprawl responsible for habitat fragmentation across the West.

Not long ago, a visitor came from Israel to Milwaukee to share his perspective on that country’s environmental movement. Daniel Orenstein is a Senior lecturer, in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion Israel Institute of Technology. Orenstein met WUWM Environmental reporter Susan Bence next to one of Milwaukee’s “greening spaces” – the Milwaukee River, and explained his philosophy. He believes environmental solutions can be attained by understanding that human social systems are linked to ecological systems.

"It's an incentive program for the private sector, to get them to invest in an area when it's probably cheaper to go somewhere else," said Ruth Steiner, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Florida and director of the school's Center for Health and the Built Environment. Read the story

The study, "Connecting Natural Landscapes Using a Landscape Permeability Model to Prioritize Conservation Activities in the United States," appears in the journal Conservation Letters. Authors include David Theobald of CSU, Kenyon Fields and Michael Soulé from Wildlands Network and Sarah Reed from the Wildlife Conservation Society. Read the full story

Sen. Barbara Boxer seems to have achieved the impossible by crafting a transportation bill that is overcoming partisan gridlock in the U.S. Senate. Recently, the Senate voted 85-11 to advance Boxer's transportation bill, MAP-21, to a floor vote that is expected to be scheduled when Congress returns to Washington on Feb. 27. Read the full op-ed