“Deeply reported and persuasively told, Roam is a gorgeous testament to the habitats that sustain life on earth—and the power and promise of protecting them. An inspiring and necessary read.” —Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“Hillary Rosner has written both an elegy and a blueprint. With small and careful adjustments, we can—and must—make a world in which both humans and wild animals can thrive. We must do it now, for their sake and for ours.” —Florence Williams, author, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Read this to understand the science of connectivity—and to feel the determination and hope motivating the quest to honor nonhumans’ right to roam.” —Emma Maris, author of Wild Souls: What We Owe Animals in a Changing World

“This book shines a vital, and much-needed, light on the environmental complexities of life in the Anthropocene on a crowded planet. A must-read.” —James Balog, founder of the Extreme Ice Survey and Earth Vision Institute

What if saving our home planet starts with giving other species space to roam? How can we re-shape our human-built landscapes to serve both people and wildlife?

These are the questions that Hillary Rosner attempts to answer in Roam, an urgent quest to figure out how to stitch our fragmented planet back together. It’s about the people trying to reconstruct landscapes where animals can once again move freely, as they did for millennia. It’s about reconnecting Earth so that wild species and natural systems have room to adapt and thrive. It’s about seeing wildlife as the guides we need to lead us to adapt to climate change.

Humans have always altered the landscapes around us; in some ways it’s part of what defines us as a species. But since the middle of the last century, we’ve changed the Earth on an overwhelming scale. Our infrastructure, our hunger for resources, our methods of farming and traveling and living—all these have rendered our planet inhospitable for the other species that live here. As a result, all over the globe, animals are stranded—by roads, fences, drainage systems, industrial farms, cities. They simply cannot move around to access their daily needs. Yet as climate change reshapes the planet in its own ways, many creatures will, increasingly, have to move in order to survive.

This book illustrates a massive and underreported problem: how a completely human-centered view of the world has impacted the ability of other species to move around. But it’s also about solutions, and hope: How we can forge new links between landscapes that have become isolated pieces. How we can stitch ecosystems back together, so that the processes still work, and the systems can evolve as they need to. How we can build a world in which humans recognize their interconnectedness with the rest of the planet, and view other species with empathy and compassion.