From the beginning of the article published by BioScience: After taking office, President Biden signed an executive order announcing his America the Beautiful plan to conserve 30% of US land and water by 2030. He challenged Americans to collaboratively “conserve, connect, and restore the lands, waters, and wildlife upon which we all depend” at a national scale (US Departments 2021, p. 9). Here, we take a major step in advancing President Biden's plan by envisioning a bold and science-based rewilding of publicly owned federal lands (hereafter, federal lands) in the American West. Beyond concerns for human survival and flourishing, a principled commitment to the natural world and a sense of moral urgency underpins the motivation for our proposal. In general, rewilding aims to reestablish vital ecological processes that can involve removing troublesome nonnative species and restoring key native species. Our rewilding call is grounded in ecological science and is necessary regardless of changing political winds. Our objective is to follow up on President Biden's vision to conserve, connect, and restore by identifying a large reserve network in the American West suitable for rewilding two keystone species, the gray wolf (Canis lupus) and the North American beaver (Castor canadensis).

Link to full bio on website: https://www.publiclandsmedia.org/projects George Wuerthner is an ecologist, writer, photographer who has worked on public lands issues for four decades. He specializes in researching and writing about public lands and natural resource issues. His areas of expertise include wildfire/forest ecology, predator ecology, national parks and wilderness history, conservation history, livestock grazing impacts, energy development impacts, conservation strategy and conservation planning. He is well versed in western public lands, and has visited all the western national forests, and BLM districts. He has also been to over 400 designated wilderness areas, over 180 national park units including every unit in Alaska, as well as the major national wildlife refuges, state parks, and other public lands throughout the West.