As we have advanced through the industrial and technological ages with their attendant innovations and accomplishments, a human conceit has arisen that our modern impulse to “go big or go home” has somehow made us masters of our environment. While we have proven quite adept at shaping the environment to accommodate our preferences for convenience and commerce, our mastery, however, insofar as it applies to natural ecosystems, seems to lean mostly toward their degradation and destruction. The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection is preparing its 2015 Wildlife Action Plan, which is fat with data supporting this discouraging fact but leavened with a little hopeful determination. The DEEP Wildlife Division chief puts it this way: “This is a vision for the future of fish and wildlife conservation in our state; to keep common species common.”

The draft action plan — available for public review and comment at the DEEP website — is itself a revision of a 2005 plan aimed at conserving our fish and wildlife. Over the intervening decade, the advance of climate change and the retreat of the natural habitats of an expanding list of threatened species suggests that the mere writing and releasing of action plans is not the same thing as actual conservation. It is true that we are now seeing more bears and bobcats, but that is not because they are flourishing. They are here in suburbia because their wilderness habitats are under pressure elsewhere. And some catastrophes currently unfolding, like the collapse of bat colonies decimated by white nose syndrome, are easy to keep hidden away and forgotten in caves simply because both the critter and the condition are so creepy. But consider what happens to the insect population when bats disappear from Connecticut for good.

The disturbing truth is that some very familiar species are under great stress because of degradation, fragmentation or outright loss of habitats, changes in land use, and competition from nonnative invasive species. These species of greatest conservation need, according to the action plan, include wood thrushes, barn owls, Eastern meadowlarks, bog turtles, wild brook and brown trout, Eastern oysters, Horseshoe crabs, and scores of other species indigenous to our state. Some species, like the New England cottontail rabbit, exist only here. We cannot rely on some remote and protected cottontail outpost in some other region or country to back us up on this one. If we lose it here, it is lost to the world.

The thing that will keep the 2015 Wildlife Action Plan from going on the shelf as just another volume in ever-expanding encyclopedia of environmental red flags is a concerted response to this call to action by public agencies, towns, conservation organizations, and private landowners. Our accelerating drift toward the loss of species and the loss of our ecological balance can only be averted as it has evolved: by continuous action, parcel by parcel, watershed by watershed, greenbelt by greenbelt.

Public comment on the final draft of Connecticut’s Wildlife Action Plan will be accepted through August 21 at ct.gov/deep/wildlifeactionplan.