You Can't Conserve Wildlife Without Conserving Habitat
We keep deciding the future of nature one development project at a time. There is another way.
TL;DR
USFWS has narrowed its interpretation of “take” under the Endangered Species Act, potentially excluding wildlife deaths caused by habitat destruction when killing the animal was not the purpose of the action.
Wildlife cannot be separated from habitat. NatureServe reports that 41% of U.S. ecosystem types are already at risk of range-wide collapse.
Development decisions accumulate. Projects may be reviewed individually, but wildlife and ecosystems experience their combined effects across entire landscapes.
Science, advocacy, and international policy increasingly recognize that nature needs much more space, but numerical targets alone cannot determine where conservation and development should occur.
Landscape conservation design offers another approach: decide together what a landscape needs to become before thousands of individual projects decide its future for us.
Imagine a development project that destroys habitat occupied by an endangered species.
Some animals die as a foreseeable consequence.
Under a September 14 internal directive from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), my former agency, those deaths may no longer constitute an illegal “take” under the Endangered Species Act simply because they resulted from the project. The agency's new interpretation generally requires an affirmative act intentionally directed at a protected animal (AP News).
The directive implements a broader change that took effect the same day: a final federal rule rescinding the ESA's longstanding regulatory definition of “harm”, which had included significant habitat modification or degradation when it actually killed or injured protected wildlife (Federal Register).
The habitat can be destroyed. The animal can die.
But if killing the animal wasn't the purpose of the action, the ESA's take prohibition may not apply.
Ecology cannot make that distinction.
Habitat Is Nature Too
Wildlife does not exist independently of habitat.
And the habitat itself is already in trouble.
NatureServe's Biodiversity in Focus: The United States Edition found that 34 percent of U.S. plant species and 40 percent of animal species are at risk of extinction—and 41 percent of ecosystem types are at risk of range-wide collapse (NatureServe 2023). They also reported that 42 percent of land in the contiguous United States had already been converted to developed areas, ruderal vegetation, or agriculture (NatureServe 2023).
This isn't simply about whether killing an individual animal was intentional.
It's about what happens when development decisions accumulate across a landscape.
A subdivision. A road. A transmission corridor. A mine. A solar field.
Each project may be considered separately, but wildlife and ecosystems experience them together. Their effects accumulate as habitat is converted, fragmented, or otherwise changed.
Nature experiences the combined result of all those decisions—not one project at a time.
We Have Been Redesigning Landscapes for Centuries
New York's Manhattan Island offers an extreme but familiar example.
Human settlement shaped the island long before Europeans arrived, but European arrival in 1609 began a new period of colonization and increasingly intensive development that continues today.
Then, in the nineteenth century, New York made a remarkable decision: it set aside a large piece of an increasingly developed island for a different purpose.
The land that would become Central Park was not pristine wilderness. Farms, businesses, immigrant communities, and Seneca Village—a predominantly Black community—occupied parts of it. Creating the park ultimately displaced roughly 1,600 people (Central Park Conservancy).
Then came design.
In 1858, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux won a public competition with their Greensward Plan. They didn't preserve an existing Central Park. They designed one, extensively reshaping the landscape (Central Park Conservancy).
That's what makes Central Park relevant here.
Humans were already transforming Manhattan. Olmsted and Vaux demonstrated that transformation could also be intentional—guided by a vision for what part of the landscape should become.
In a city consuming almost everything around it, people decided that some land would not become more city.
We face versions of that choice everywhere today.
Different Purposes. Same Finite Landscape.
Development pressure isn't partisan.
During the Biden administration, the Department of the Interior accelerated renewable-energy development on public lands as part of the transition away from fossil fuels. By April 2024, Interior reported permitting nearly 29 gigawatts of clean-energy capacity on public lands (U.S. Department of the Interior).
Those projects served a very different purpose from expanding fossil-fuel extraction and were subject to environmental review and mitigation.
But renewable-energy infrastructure, despite it being constructed for good reason, still impacts landscapes and the species that live there.
So do houses, roads, farms, mines, and other things society needs or chooses to build.
The question isn't whether humans will continue changing landscapes. We will.
The question is how we decide what goes where.
Because nature doesn't experience our intentions.
It experiences the landscape our decisions create.
We Already Know Nature Needs Space
Fortunately, we aren't starting from scratch.
Conservation science points toward conservation at enormous scale. Designing Nature's Half synthesizes estimates of terrestrial conservation need ranging from roughly 44 percent to more than 60 percent. Fifty percent by 2050, or 50x50, provides a defensible, precautionary benchmark for ecological sufficiency.
Conservation advocates, like Dave Foreman, Harvey Locke, and E.O. Wilson, translated that science into an explicit ambition to conserve half the planet.
International policy has moved in the same direction, although it has not adopted 50x50. The Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework established 30x30 as Target 3, but it goes even further. Target 1 calls for participatory, integrated, biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning across all areas. And the Framework’s Goal A calls for ecosystem integrity, connectivity, and resilience to be maintained, enhanced, or restored. Together, they point toward its 2050 vision of “living in harmony with nature” (Convention on Biological Diversity).
Science helps establish the scale of the need. Advocacy gives that need ambition. Policy begins translating it into public commitment.
But none decides what goes where on a particular landscape. That’s what the conservation planning discipline does, and increasingly, design.
Designing Nature's Half begins from a simple reality:
Every social-ecological system occupies one finite landscape, within which ecological and human needs must be reconciled.
Conserving half doesn't mean giving half the landscape to people and half to nature. Some places may require strong protection. Working lands and waters can maintain ecological functions. Other places may need restoration. People must live and work across that same landscape.
The challenge is allocation.
What should go where?
Project by Project, or by Design?
Our current system too often answers that question incrementally.
A project is proposed. Environmental review begins. Permits are sought. Mitigation may be negotiated. Sometimes litigation follows.
Then another project arrives.
Those processes remain essential. But there is a fundamental limitation to relying on project-by-project review to shape entire landscapes:
The development proposal comes first. Conservation responds afterward.
Repeat that process thousands of times and we eventually produce a landscape.
But we never began by asking what that landscape needed to become to ensure ecological processes while meeting the needs of people.
Landscape conservation design reverses that sequence.
Bring together the people who share a landscape before every acre is spoken for. Determine what must remain intact and connected, where restoration is needed, where human uses can occur with lower ecological cost, and where unavoidable conflicts lie.
Then compare alternative landscape configurations and establish shared direction for the landscape people are trying to create.
Landowners retain their rights. Agencies retain their authorities. Communities still develop. Environmental laws still apply.
But individual decisions no longer have to produce the landscape accidentally.
That is the larger problem exposed by the new USFWS directive.
We can argue project by project about what constitutes “harm.” Some of those fights will be necessary.
But the larger question remains:
What kind of landscape are all those decisions producing?
We are going to keep building.
And science tells us we need to conserve much more nature.
Both must happen across the same finite landscapes.
We can continue deciding their futures one project, one permit, and one lawsuit at a time.
Or we can decide together, while choices still remain, what those landscapes should become.
Nature will experience the landscape either way.
The question is whether that landscape emerges by accident—
or by design.
#LandscapeConservation #HabitatConservation #Biodiversity #EndangeredSpecies #ConservationPlanning #LandscapeDesign #50×50 #DesigningNaturesHalf
