Four Important Reasons Why We Need Natural Open Space

On April 6, 2010 I presented to City Council a PowerPoint on how Natural Open Space benefits our community. Helping people understand why we need to protect our environment is an important part of my job at the El Paso Zoo. What follows is an updated summary of my presentation on natural open space.



Photo: Lowland areas like those being developed along the Trans Mountain Scenic Corridor are important to many desert wildlife species like the secretive long-tailed weasel that prey upon pocket gophers and ground squirrels. ©Will Wilson


1. Natural Open Space helps people enjoy the benefits of the natural world.
Here in El Paso we have lots of natural open space on the high on the high mountain ridges of the Franklin Mountains, but little natural open space in the lower elevations immediately surrounding the mountain range where most people prefer to hike and walk. Lower elevation natural open space is also critical to many species of plants and animals that live only in lower elevation habitats or need both lower and higher elevations areas.

Protecting natural open space is not only a problem in El Paso, but around the world. To varying degrees humans have already altered nearly half of the earth’s land surface. If current land development trends continue this number could easily reach 70% in the next thirty years.

2. The availability of natural open space helps to prevent nature deficit disorder by giving people more opportunities to explore the natural world, especially children.
Nature deficit disorder is a growing trend in this country where the average American child spends 44 hours a week with electronic media. Effects of Nature Deficit Disorder include: Childhood obesity, attention disorders and depression and long term ability to cope with stress and adversity.

3. Natural Open space is important to the water cycle, nature’s ability to produce oxygen and capture CO2 and other ecological services such as pollination and the services provided by millions of different species of microbes.
A single tablespoon of healthy soil might contain over a billion beneficial soil microbes!!! How many microbes live in one acre of natural open space in El Paso is anyone’s guess. The number is too big for most of us to fathom. Microbes provide amazingly complex ecological services. These services include reprocessing materials into available forms (i.e., mineralization) and into microbial cells and humus. Soil bacteria microbes fix atmospheric nitrogen and help plants to grow in areas where nitrogen is scarce. Other minerals like sulfur and phosphorus require microbial transformation in the soil that surrounds the roots to make them more available to plants. They also improve aeration by loosening dense and compacted soils.

Most importantly microbes decompose organic waste materials such as leaves and manure into organic humus. Our desert needs this humus to store both moisture and nutrients in the soil. Without healthy soils most plant species could not survive and the entire desert ecosystem as we know it would likely collapse.

Microbes are also important to balancing soil acidity and alkalinity, creating the carbon dioxide plants need, as well as producing vitamins, toxins, and hormones that both feed and protect the plant system.

Most people looking out across the desert landscape are not aware of the role microbes play in the desert and or in their everyday lives. Trying to imagine all that microbes do for us in maintaining the ecosystem is like trying to imagine all the stars and galaxies in the night sky.

4. Natural Open space provides habitat for thousands of species of animals and plants native to our Chihuahuan Desert and a part of our natural heritage.
Protecting Natural Open Space and a wide variety of habitats at all elevations requires strategic planning designed to protect these habitats and wildlife corridors important to species needing to move from one elevation to the next in search of food and water. Animals also need natural open space for protection from the powerful rays of the sun, wind and rain. To adequately raise their young natural open space is needed to protect many animal species from human disturbance and natural predators.

At this time strategic plans for the continued development in El Paso and the surrounding area focus almost solely on the needs of humans and not on the natural environment. “Smart growth” elements in planning may appear in part to be green, but do not address the habitat needs of most species of native wildlife including a careful analysis of wildlife corridors needed to maintain sustainable populations of larger animals like mule deer, javelina, coyotes, foxes and bobcats.

We need natural open space because we are connected to the natural world in countless ways. Every time we allow another acre of natural open space to be transformed by development activities including urban sprawl, wider roads and mining, we weaken the ecosystem and its services, all critical to our own survival.