TESS Book Launch - Wildlife Crossings of Hope

In an ever-more crowded world, wild creatures of all shapes, sizes and means of locomotion desperately need room to roam. Too often our own structures, especially the 40 million miles of roads girdling the planet, block the paths of wild creatures, who become isolated in habitat fragments. Throughout the globe, however, scientists, engineers and landscape architects are stitching the planet's pieces back together, building bridges for animals, protecting large swaths of land called "corridors," and demolishing dams that prevent fish from moving freely in their home waters and beyond. Mini-tunnels for salamanders, ingenious canopy bridges for primates and possums, and the world's largest wildlife bridge—inspired by a celebrity mountain lion in southern California—are showing us what's possible as we restore landscape connectivity for terrestrial species. And dams are coming down everywhere from South Africa to Japan, opening crucial new swimways for native salmon, eels and other aquatic creatures. Crossing structures and liberated rivers in turn can create vast unbroken corridors that often flow through national borders, providing very real lifelines for wide-ranging wildlife.

About Dr Teddi Chichester

Dr Teddi Chichester is the author of Wildlife Crossings of Hope: Connecting Creatures Around the Globe (Holiday House, 2024), a non-fiction book on nature conservation. She is a Writing Programs Distinguished Lecturer at UCLA, one of the world's top public universities. She spent many childhood summers hanging out with banana slugs and the world's tallest trees in Northern California's coastal redwood forests, where her father worked as a State Parks Interpreter. Currently, she volunteers at a nursery propagating native plants for the world's largest wildlife bridge, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which promises to protect and unite two threatened populations of mountain lions severed by ten lanes of non-stop traffic.

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