Made for each other?

When the US Air Force tested its largest conventional weapon, a 21,000-pound behemoth dubbed the "Mother of All Bombs," at Eglin Air Force Base in March, the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker had a ringside seat.

While human observers watched from 30 miles away as a towering column of dust and smoke rose from the blast site, some of the rare birds felt the blast from a forest bordering the bombing range.

Clearly, Eglin is no nature preserve - weapons are developed and tested there. The woodpeckers also must endure campers and hunters on parts of the 463,000-acre base in the Florida panhandle that the military doesn't use.

So viewing the big bomb test as just one more ecological disaster on the road to woodpecker extinction seems a logical conclusion.

But don't tell that to Michael Rosenzweig. The University of Arizona ecologist touts Eglin as a model for saving the planet's endangered species using a new-old approach he calls "reconciliation ecology." It is, he says, the science of planning or reengineering human habitats to accommodate man and nature simultaneously.

While other ecologists dream about pristine wilderness parks, Dr. Rosenzweig's utopia is a nuclear power plant's cooling canals adapted into a breeding ground for rare crocodiles. Or it might be suburban lawns ripped up and replanted with native species so a rare pocket mouse can survive. Or maybe even a bombing range turned into a place where rare woodpeckers thrive.

That's right. Despite all the intense human activity, Eglin's red-cockaded woodpecker population has risen 40 percent in the past decade to 600-plus birds, thanks to a sophisticated management partnership between environmentalists and the Air Force. After the big bomb test, researchers found all birds alive and well.

The idea isn't exactly new. Retooling land still in use by humans into something that animals and plants can better use is something akin to the ideas conservationist Aldo Leopold promoted in the 1950s. But it's getting new attention because some ecologists - Rosenzweig chief among them - believe the Earth is poised to lose far more species than originally thought.

Instead of, say, a 50 percent reduction in species, Rosenzweig's research suggests that the growing human population - in combination with global warning - could wipe out an incredible 95 percent of the planet's biodiversity by century's end. Thus, reconciling human habitat with other species' needs is not just a nice option. It may be the only one able to save a Noah's ark of threatened species, in his view.

"We're going to have to reconcile mankind's habitat needs with the habitat needs of other species," he says. "We already engineer our habitats, the difference is that we must do it with other species in mind."

Rosenzweig's research - and his new book "Win-Win Ecology: How the Earth's Species Can Survive in the Midst of Human Enterprise" - are beginning to attract attention.

"He's coming at it from a different direction, but I absolutely agree that reconciliation ecology is a fundamentally important strategy for preserving species," says Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and a scientific force in the ecology movement.

"If you're talking about survival of the species you can't just disregard all the rest of the planet [outside of wildlife preserves]. We've all said the same thing for a long time, but we just haven't focused on it. We haven't proposed statistical models or theories to deal with it - and that's what Rosenzweig has done."

That's not to say he agrees entirely with Rosenzweig's dire prediction. Conventional estimates are for the globe to lose half to two-thirds of all species in this century, he notes. So to him, 95 percent seems too high.

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