Hillary Rosner is a science journalist and editor who teaches journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also a friend and fellow member of Scilance, a network of 30+ science writers that has been meeting up online for 20 years. Over the years, I’ve loved following Hillary’s thoughtful, adventurous reporting on wildlife conservation, whether she’s writing about orangutans in Borneo or the Devils Hole pupfish in the Mojave Desert. Now, she’s written a wonderful book, which was published yesterday by Patagonia. It’s called Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World.

In Roam, Hillary writes about conversation projects around the world that are studying how wild creatures move across landscapes and working to support species by reconnecting fragmented habitat. I was lucky enough to talk with Hillary last week. Here’s our (lightly edited) conversation about Roam.

Hillary Rosner reporting in Kenya

Cameron: You’ve been writing amazing stories about conservation and wildlife for magazines and newspapers for years! What made you start thinking about writing a book?

**Hillary: **I’ve always wanted to write a book and had various ideas over the years that had gone nowhere. But I kept being drawn to stories that had the same backbone — stories that, at their heart, were about a creature that couldn’t move, or about something that was happening because animals weren’t able to move in the way they should. So when I did a Scripps fellowship in 2018 this was the project that I pitched for the fellowship. I spent some time that year taking classes like biogeography and ecology and dwelling in ideas around connectivity and these stories, and trying to see if it could, in fact, be a book.

Cameron: It could be a book! Now it IS a book! And it’s a book that’s coming at a critical time. In fact, at the beginning of the book, you write about how the outlook is gloomier for this work now than when you started researching the book — which was around the same time that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included funding for many conservation projects, including the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program. Now some of the projects you researched have been targeted for elimination.

**Hillary: **I was really conflicted about the author’s note, but I did feel like I needed to address this. Whenever you write a book, it’s going to take a long time to come out, and things are going to be different — but how strikingly different is just incredible. There are are projects in this book that are not happening anymore and that have lost their funding.

Cameron: Are there places or projects that you reported on that still make you feel hopeful?

**Hillary: **There is a project in Italy’s Central Appenines region that’s working to help create “coexistence corridors” for rare Marsican brown bears, which once ranged all over Italy but now have been isolated to a single national park and some adjacent protected areas. What struck me about this project was the people. They just had all these terrific young volunteers, college students, who could have been doing an internship at a hedge fund or tech company, and here they were carting around metal grates in the hot summer sun to cover open wells in the hillsides, trying to help these bears. I just felt like they were doing all these little, kind of seemingly mundane tasks that all added up to something meaningful. It just made me think, all you really need is a few people who care.

Cameron: Did you have any big surprises along the way as you were researching?

**Hillary: **There was definitely a time when I got to a place and realized that I had completely misunderstood what they were finding, which is sort of a funny position for a science journalist. I had really wanted to understand connectivity in urban ecology, because these creatures live among us — or we live among them. And then I went to an urban ecology conference where everyone was talking about a paper by Chris Schell that pointed out that the human patterns of racial inequality trickle down into non-human communities.

There had been some previous research in LA that showed that nicer neighborhoods basically hosted more forest birds, and less well-off neighborhoods hosted more urban birds. So I went to North Carolina to report on bird research, thinking they were finding the same things. And I got there and discovered that what was happening there was not the narrative that was in my head at all.

Cameron: What was happening instead?

**Hillary: **The researchers in North Carolina were finding that in parks, no matter which kind of neighborhood they were, there were all different kinds of birds. It actually ended up being great — I had to think about why and how this research connected to the story I was trying to tell, and what others lessons I could draw from it.

One theory about this is that parks are really important wherever they are, because they are a refuge for birds. Even in an industrial neighborhood, in a park, you might find forest birds because that’s where the resources are. Green spaces like this create connectivity and habitat for birds and other species that fly, and creating these corridors of green space can sometimes be easier for flying species, where you don’t have to build a terrestrial path across a city or a freeway. These green spaces are important for every neighborhood, everywhere, for humans too.

Cameron: Are there other places that had particularly appealing or challenging stories for you to report?

**Hillary: **My last research trip for this book was to Kenya, where I went to learn about elephants that graze in Samburu National Reserve in winter, and then migrate west along traditional routes to the plains of Laikipia, where they eat acacia seed pods. But development is impacting these routes.

That chapter was probably the most emotionally difficult for me, because the intersecting forces were so apparent there. In Kenya, there are so many intersecting forces. There’s development, and political issues, and tribal issues, pastoralists versus non-pastoralists, and all these different kinds of cultures and livelihoods. There was this crushing feeling of, *how can you make change here? *It became so apparent how much damage one person can potentially do. When there’s only one route left for the elephants, one person can just block it, you know?

Yet it was still hopeful, because there are still people who were trying really hard to make a difference. There’s a guy named Benjamin Loloju who was just doing this like Herculean work of meeting with community members in his hometown where all this land was being privatized and all these fences were going up. He was desperately trying to keep open these routes for elephants.

And to see these elephants in a remote part of the national park, and then to travel to the place they would migrate to in just a matter of weeks, and to see what they were up against, was really amazing.

Cameron: Along with your beautiful writing, there are also beautiful photos throughout the book. One of them that I can’t stop thinking about is a photo of researchers at the Savannah River Site Corridor project, where they have found that wildlife corridors increase seed dispersal. In the photo, they’ve set up these white structures to catch seeds, and somehow these structures — they look like upside down umbrellas — reminded me of the Truffula trees in the book The Lorax. Working on this book, did you ever feel like the Lorax?

**Hillary: **I mean, I definitely would like to speak for the trees. I just want people to care. I look around and see this like incredibly beautiful world, and I just want people to value that and understand what is going on when we mess with it, and how many people are trying to protect it and deserve to have their work funded. And that sounds so cheesy, but nobody is going be happy when all of this stuff is gone —not even the meanest person with a heart of stone is going to be happy.

Cameron: Is there something that you feel like you’ll carry with you from this book?

Hillary: I learned a lot writing this book, but one of the main things is that it made me look at the world differently. Now I’m constantly around thinking about trying to see it from the point of view of another species. What is this landscape like for me? What is it like for a bird? For a squirrel?

Also, with all of the amazing work being done in connectivity, I’ve realized that even the act of building things like wildlife corridors draws awareness to these issues. I was in Houston and was spending time with my cousin, and he said, *Let’s go to the park because there’s this really cool wildlife overpass that they just built. *And then he started telling me about what it was for.

On the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, one of the things that an organization called Osa Conservation has done is to put up these rope bridges across some of the roads. It’s literally a piece of rope strung across the highway between two trees and monkeys are using them. And then I was in a different part of Costa Rica with my son on a family trip. We were in a taxi and saw a sloth above us going across the highway on a rope. Seeing that in action was really cool.

Now, they’re even experimenting with different structures for the rope bridges. For example, is it better to have two ropes, and should they be next to each other? Should there be three? What makes different animals use them? I see a road and I think, how is a creature going to get across? I think about that all the time.

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Mother and baby sloth image via [Wikimedia Commons](http://nd baby sloth crossing a road in Costa Rica (Wikimedia Commons))

All other images courtesy of Hillary Rosner