By Daisy Morales, Social Media Editor
Editor’s Note: This story was written in collaboration with North Carolina Health News for its Climate Change Workshop that occurred in February 2022. High school students from coastal NC were given the opportunity to learn about writing stories and photography while researching the effects climate change has on our coast. It was sponsored by the North Carolina Sea Grant and was organized by Working Narratives/Coastal Youth Media.
“I speak for the trees.”
I heard this phrase in elementary school. Almost everyone heard this phrase, actually, but many were too young to realize that in this line, Dr. Seuss was going beyond just making a children’s book. He was trying to expose a real-life issue in “The Lorax”: habitat loss.
Dr. Ron Sutherland, the chief scientist for a conservation nonprofit group called the Wildlife Network, recently sat down to talk about the environmental impacts of big construction projects on animals.
“I mean, there’s this idea out there that the animals kind of bring ‘The Lorax’ movies/books to mind, the brown barbaloots, packing up and going out somewhere else,” Sutherland said. “And the reality is there is nowhere else for these species to go.”
Sutherland explained that with so many houses and buildings being constructed, these creatures are in great peril.
“There’s just not that much natural habitat left, especially dry natural habitats,” Sutherland said. “In North Carolina, we have lots of wetlands that are still left thanks to some wetland protection laws.”
But not all places have enough protection.
“Wilmington, for example, has very little natural forest left, even though it used to be a really rich area with all kinds of biodiversity,” Sutherland said.
As a result of habitat loss, animals are starting to look in new places for food. Landscaper Curtis Grainger, who works for a landscaping company in Corolla, often sees animals such as deer eating flowers or shrubs that were planted as part of a garden.
When it comes to us as humans working together to solve these problems, Grainger has a few ideas in mind.
“We should leave the smallest footprint damages to the land and we should limit land sales for new homes,” Grainger said.
And while having animals in our backyard could potentially cause disturbances, Sutherland recommends appreciating these magnificent creatures while they last.
“Animals can be a nuisance, but animals are also a blessing, and if you have wildlife in your yard, you probably should just be enjoying it,” Sutherland said.
Especially since, according to Sutherland, habitat loss is expected to increase in the coming years.
“Basically, when we lose wildlife habitat in North Carolina right now, there’s the species that used to live there (and) they’re just basically going to die unless they get really lucky,” Sutherland said.
In addition, Sutherland noted that some animals are in more danger than others, such as box turtles, who were selected in 1979 as North Carolina’s official state reptile.
“They’re slow, slow-growing, and slow to reproduce, and so they can’t handle that much road mortality,” Sutherland said. “Once you get too many cars around the box turtles, they basically disappear.”
Even though conservationists have been trying their best to protect wildlife and prevent habitat loss, not all animals have been saved.
For example, the name of North Carolina’s football team, the Carolina Panthers, wasn’t randomly chosen. At one point, panthers were actually found in North Carolina. Unfortunately, due to habitat loss and hunting, Sutherland said that the panther population became extinct in the wild.
“At some point, we kind of closed the frontier, people had been chasing the mountain lions with dogs and everything,” Sutherland said. “At some point, they killed the last one.”
Another animal whose history is almost exactly like the panther is the red wolf. These rare animals are very close to extinction, being listed as one of North America’s most endangered animals.
Red wolves were once a part of the ecosystem of the entire Southeastern coast. But like the panthers, Sutherland said, their numbers started decreasing greatly due to habitat loss and hunting.
“I think North Carolina lost its last wolf by around 1900 and then, about 50 years later, people sort of assumed the wolves were gone,” Sutherland said. “But then they realized there were a few wolves left and so they decided to catch them and bring them in captivity and breed them and then put them somewhere safer in the wild.”
With 100,000 acres of habitat, Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge made it the perfect place to start releasing red wolves. According to Sutherland, biologists started releasing pairs of red wolves into the refuge in 1987.
The red wolf recovery program, of which Sutherland is a part, saw success over the next two decades.
“The wolf population grew pretty well up to about 130 to 250 animals around 2006,” Sutherland said.
According to Sutherland, their numbers started to decline again in 2012 for a variety of reasons.
“As of last year, the population got down to only eight confirmed animals,” Sutherland said. “In the wild, it’s one of the most endangered species in the world; it’s likely that it has a captive population.”
While Sutherland has always been a fan of nature and of helping animals, his real interest for conserving wildlife started after a big construction project took away what he used to call his playground.
“We had this nice forest that we played in and one day I went out there and it was covered in red tape,” Sutherland said. “All the trees had red-flagging tape all around them.”
That eventually led Sutherland to become a diehard conservationist.
“That kind of hit home deeply to me, I was really frustrated by that,” Sutherland said. “Since then, I’ve seen places all over the country, especially here in the Southeast, getting ripped up to make more and more developments.”
Developments and new constructions have been tearing up most places with lush vegetation. That’s why Sutherland suggests that taking care of the environment right now is more crucial than ever.
“Wildlife is important for its own sake, it’s important for the ecosystem that we live in,” Sutherland said. “A lot of humans forget that we live in an ecosystem and that we mess with the ecosystem to our own peril. I try to be cognizant of the fact that I’m just part of one species, and there’s all these other millions of species around the planet. Humans should not really have the right to destroy space for those other species.”
Sutherland noted that animal conservation is not just important for us, but for future generations as well. This is also a sentiment Grainger shares.
“We should protect our future,” Grainger said. “Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren need to have animals around and animals need space to thrive for our next generations.”
As stated by Sutherland, everyone should care about what is happening to the wildlife in North Carolina, even young people who don’t yet have access to legislative power. Principally because, according to Sutherland, in the upcoming years we will lose another couple million acres of wildlife habitat in North Carolina.
So if we don’t stand up and take action, then we might be looking at a world with no trees left. Much like the Lorax suggested, Sutherland noted that someone must stand up for the environment.
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,” Dr. Seuss’s the Lorax said. “Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
Junior Daisy Morales can be reached at 23moralesda04@daretolearn.org.
