ABSTRACT
Globally, people are filling in wild spaces with homes, livestock and crops with even greater alacrity, and they are doing so despite the best intentions of statutes such as the Endangered Species Act. Public spaces fall short of species needs on purely ecological grounds too. This chapter looks at private and communal spaces anew—seeing them not as peripheral areas possibly helpful in, or ancillary to, species conservation, but as nontraditional core areas where the imprint of humankind is explicit and where the fate of species and their habitats rest in the balance. Southern Africa took the first steps to put private and communal lands at the forefront of species and habitat conservation—and for good reason. Decades of unregulated hunting followed by unrestrained poaching, skyrocketing human population, and massive government subsidization of cattle ranching had reduced wildlife habitat in the region to a fraction of what it had once been.
