Conservation Note
The 5000 Mile Project: running the length of South America
Katharine and David Lowrie ran unsupported from Chile to Venezuela to raise money for conservation and to record the grasslands they crossed.
The 5000 Mile Project was an attempt by Katharine Lowrie, a former RSPB staff member, and her husband David to run the length of South America (unsupported, from the south of the continent northwards) to raise funds for wildlife conservation and to draw attention to the habitats along the route.
The distance is the headline, and it is not the interesting part. Running five thousand miles is a feat of endurance; what distinguished the project was that the route ran through South America’s grasslands and open habitats, which attract a fraction of the conservation attention given to its forests despite being at least as heavily converted.
Grassland is the habitat that loses these arguments almost everywhere. It photographs poorly, it looks like farmland to a non-specialist, and its species are less charismatic than those of forest or wetland. A project moving slowly and continuously through it, recording what was there, was an unusually direct way of making the case. The account of the Kinangop grasslands is the same argument made about a single Kenyan plateau, where the habitat has an endemic bird to speak for it and is being converted anyway.
The project’s own site and the conservation organisations it supported hold the record of what was raised and recorded.