EDITOR’S NOTE: The Mountain Journal Book Club offers an opportunity to expand your knowledge of the wildness around us. MoJo covers water, wildfire, wildlife health and connectivity, as well as climate and public lands. We report on the intersection of humans and nature, and document how scientific data, from ecology to wildlife biology, are impacting the natural world. Our Book Club selections are curated from the writers who influence us and inform the stories we cover.
In our latest installment, we’re offering an excerpt from Borders of Biodiversity, environmental historian Will Wright’s new book outlining the complexities facing wild species as they contend with constraints of human development and a warming world. In examining gray wolves, monarch butterflies and the giant sequoia tree, Wright paints the picture of how three unique species are experiencing challenges and how cross-border conservation efforts can play a part in the solution.
One key component, Wright says, lies in wildlife passageways such as the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor, which can give animals the ability to move more easily within habitats as the climate changes.
“Wildlife corridors are proactive tools for helping mobile animals adapt to a warming world,” he says. “My book explores the historical origins of these tools and how they became a dominant conservation strategy today.”
Will Wright grew up on the Snake River Plain of Idaho, and some of his earliest outdoor memories in the GYE are fishing on the Henry’s Fork with his dad and two brothers. Will completed a Ph.D. at Montana State University, where he worked on a resource management project for Yellowstone National Park. His doctoral dissertation, which forms the foundation for his new book, won the Rachel Carson Prize from the American Society for Environmental History.
Wright is currently an assistant professor of history and environmental studies at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
For most of her life, Jodi Hilty’s scientific work has been about corridors. If isolated pieces of habitat led species down the dangerous path of extinction, the objective becomes, as Hilty put it, “How do you connect the places where wildlife live so that populations can be sustained over the long term?” Hilty spent quite a bit of time pondering that question prior to stepping into her leadership role at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, known as Y2Y, in 2016.
For a Ph.D. in conservation biology at the University of California-Berkeley in the late 1990s, Hilty turned her attention to the creeks of wine-growing regions in Sonoma County. Hilty measured the width of riparian vegetation near stream beds — then classified them as denuded, narrow and wide — to determine the corridor quality for a suite of carnivores moving through vineyards. Using motion-trigged cameras, Hilty documented that species such as mountain lions, gray foxes, coyotes and bobcats were 11 times more likely to travel in dense sprawling cover than in trimmed grape vines. The results shifted local conservationists’ focus from the “cores” of mixed-oak forest to riparian “corridors” in agricultural lands.
Later as executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Hilty and her team researched pronghorn antelope movements in Wyoming. Scientists recommended protection of a millennia-old migration between Grand Teton National Park and the Green River Basin, leading to the first U.S. federally designated wildlife corridor, aptly called the “Path of the Pronghorn,” in 2008. Her experiences reinforced a long-standing Y2Y goal: corridors can deliver a proactive antidote to extinction.
At the end of our meeting in Canmore, Alberta, I asked Hilty if she could point me in the direction of a project related to Y2Y’s efforts. She told me to look no farther than catching a ride on public transportation to Lake Louise. After boarding a shuttle bus and heading up the highway toward Banff National Park, I was pleased not to be in the driver’s seat. Cars and trucks zoomed past us on the Trans-Canada Highway, a wide four-lane road channeling millions of passengers each year through the mountainous valley.
Tucked in between two walls of jagged, snow-capped peaks, the highway shares a narrow path with the Bow River. A dozen or so miles after passing by the Banff townsite, I gazed out my window at what looked like an exit ramp. A gray cement bridge framed two semi-circle tunnels for automobiles to pass through. Everything looked like a typical highway feature, except for pine trees growing on it. I looked again, overhearing a fellow bus rider say it was the Red Earth Wildlife Overpass. I soon noticed large metal culverts buried beneath the roadway that offered more wildlife-crossing structures. Animals could have been passing over our roof and under our wheels at that very moment. This was a concrete step, literally, toward improving landscape connectivity.
The institutional origins of the Y2Y Initiative arrived in 1993 when a group of scientists and conservationists met to formally establish a binational partnership. Y2Y’s mission was to ensure the survival of biological richness, as well as life-supporting processes, along the Rocky Mountains by linking protected areas through habitat corridors. Founding members spoke to the power of developing connections among conservation groups in Canada and the United States — forming transnational political solidarity.
Wendy Francis of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, observed that “we weren’t even talking to each other across the 49th parallel before Y2Y, and now we sit down and meet two or three times a year.” Gary Tabor, a U.S.-based wildlife veterinarian, remarked that “Y2Y helps North Americans to view their common landscape not as several countries but as one continent.” The attendees of early meetings — conservation activists drawn mostly from Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho and Montana — labeled themselves as a loose “network” rather than a distinct “organization” because they wanted to bring their disparate work together instead of supplant it.
For that reason, Y2Y members reframed local actions with continental significance. At the second gathering, they agreed to develop a Yellowstone to Yukon “atlas” that would serve as the shared “vision” of the large landscape they were trying to protect. In October 1997, they also hosted a conference called “Connections” at Waterton Lakes National Park, workshopping the proposed maps and texts with 350 attendees. The whole process, Harvey Locke commented, was dedicated to “how the landscape lives, not how we draw lines.”
From 1987 to 1996, automobile and train collisions accounted for 80 percent of all wolf fatalities in and around Banff, not to mention a large proportion of grizzly, deer and elk deaths.
Louisa Willcox, field director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in Montana, led the charge finishing up the atlas project. Willcox was motivated to participate after listening to a presentation a decade ago on the “island effects” of site-specific conservation given by prominent biologists Thomas Lovejoy and Jared Diamond, who told conservationists like herself that “they weren’t thinking big enough” with the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Their words resulted in a paradigm shift.
“This was as big as it gets,” Willcox remembered. “Nobody wanted to hear what Diamond and Lovejoy had to say, including me.” She concluded that “if we’re going to take care of animals such as grizzly bears and wolves, then we’ve got to think broader than the scraps of habitat we’ve got left.” In other words, Willcox’s take on island biogeography translated to working toward large landscape conservation.
In April 1998, Willcox and other Y2Y advocates published A Sense of Place, the atlas assembled to define an “ecoregion,” a geographic unit not commensurate with human-made polities. Delineated by biological communities on similar terrain, the landscape extended along the Rocky Mountains 2,000 miles long north-to-south and 200 miles wide east-to-west. Willcox noted a stark contrast in habitat fragmentation spatially.
“Whereas the northern, Canadian area consisted of wild areas punctuated with islands of development,” Willcox told an interviewer. “The southern portion — mostly in the United States — was an ‘inverse template’ of islands of wildlands in the midst of a ‘sea of development.’” The text reiterated that parks and protected areas alone were not big enough habitats to maintain viable populations of wolves and other carnivores. National Park Service and Parks Canada officials signed a memorandum of understanding a month later recognizing the “Yellowstone to Yukon Corridor” as a high-priority area and thus affirming a mutual interest in “national parks close or contiguous with the border for the purpose of conserving shared ecosystems.”
One justification for Y2Y’s work was a shift in international economics. As president of the Alberta Liberal Party during the 1990s, Harvey Locke lived the contradictions of capitalism. At one of the early Y2Y meetings, Locke told members, “We have moved on a socio-economic plane toward free trade. And we need to be talking about free trade in large carnivores. And we need to be defending those sorts of things with the same kind of vigor that the business interests defend free trade with.”
Just as the North American Free Trade Agreement — signed by Canada, Mexico and U.S. governments in 1993 — further opened the three countries to flows of corporate commerce, Locke argued that mobile animals like wolves and grizzlies should be afforded the same top-level privileges. “Paradoxically,” Locke observed in the 2000s, “the United States and Canada, each other’s largest trading partners, have organized themselves to ensure the free flow of investment capital, goods and energy across the border, but have not thought of the free movement of wildlife in the same way.” Organizing for a more connected landscape paralleled the capitalist push to structure a more connected economy.
This paradox came out as the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative struggled with a bottom-up versus top-down organizational structure. To avoid a “command-and-control” hierarchy, they set up a democratic architecture radiating outward from the Coordinating Committee to Council. Although Bart Robinson, founding editor of the naturalist magazine Equinox, was hired to manage day-to-day operations, the real power came from the 120 council members who adopted consensus decision-making. They agreed that Y2Y would not accept any funding from the “primary extractive” industries, such as Suncor Energy or Weyerhaeuser Timber, and instead seek out a few charitable organizations.
The two major contributors were the Henry P. Kendall Foundation, a Massachusetts-based trust which derived its wealth from textile manufacturing, and the Wilburforce Foundation, which was founded by former Microsoft computer engineers. In 1998, Y2Y members dedicated money toward a “mini-grants” program, initiating scientific research to identify bottlenecks and barriers within the large landscape.
An immediate challenge to wildlife connectivity was the Trans-Canada Highway. Back in 1958, Canadian authorities finished constructing the new road through Banff National Park; and in the early 1980s, they proposed widening it from two to four lanes to expand tourism. Harvey Locke of Y2Y dubbed the Trans-Canada Highway and Canadian Pacific Railway, both of which go through the narrow Bow River Valley, as the “Berlin Wall of Biodiversity” because of the high rate of wildlife deaths.
From 1987 to 1996, automobile and train collisions accounted for 80 percent of all wolf fatalities in and around Banff, not to mention a large proportion of grizzly, deer and elk deaths. In effect, animals either never crossed the infrastructure or ran the risk of being struck if they did. Much like breaking down the Berlin Wall to reunite Germans at the end of the Cold War, Y2Y advocates thought this transportation barrier must come down to protect a single population of wildlife.
As part of environmental mitigation process for the Trans-Canada Highway, wolf expert Paul Paquet, who also served on Y2Y’s science advisory board, recommended that an elevated thoroughfare or crossing structures be constructed. With pressure from the Y2Y Initiative, the Ottawa government allocated $3.3 million in the mid-1990s to build two wildlife overpasses and 22 underpasses. The structures were an easy sell after a cost-benefit analysis showed that drivers were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in vehicle damage from hitting wildlife.
The Banff Wildlife Crossings Project, a long-term research effort sponsored by Y2Y, has monitored the willingness of animals to cross those structures basically since they were built. Using hair snares, sand patches and trail cameras, scientists documented 100,000 crossings from 10 species of large mammals, with nearly 7,000 coming from wolves alone.
On top of that, wildlife collisions were reduced by 80 percent. More underpasses and overpasses were soon constructed because of this evidence. By the mid-2000s, the 44 total structures between the national park’s eastern entrance and the continental divide at the BC-Alberta border were, as of this writing, the most for any single span of highway in the world. These transportation re-designs worked in making roads more permeable to animal movements.
Most hostility to large landscape conservation originated from corporate influencers. In 1999, a spokesperson of the Competitive Enterprise Institute — a Washington, D.C.-based think tank funded by billionaires Charles and David Koch — stoked fears that Y2Y’s goals represented environmentalists’ desire to create one giant park devoid of resource extraction.
“Once people zero in on what this is about,” a libertarian pundit asserted, “that it’s another massive layer of land-use control, they’ll pay a lot more attention.” The Forest Alliance of British Columbia, an advocacy group for timber corporations, forecasted that implementing Y2Y would result in the loss of billions of dollars in revenues and thousands of jobs.
“It’s amazing to me,” the Forest Alliance chair remarked, “that U.S.-based environmentalists have the nerve to come up here and propose that half our province be locked up in the so-called Y2Y corridor.” Parallel to claims that Y2Y was really a cover-up for American interests on Canadian soil, others argued it was a ploy of the United Nations. In 2001, William Grigg of the far-right John Birch Society insisted that Y2Y’s “binational land grab” meant that “roughly two-thirds of Idaho and nearly half of Montana would be subsumed into the bioregion, which would eventually be administered by a UN-approved ‘bioregional council.’” Corporate messaging with nationalist undercurrents offered guidance to conservative political allies.
Y2Y members counteracted negative publicity in a variety of ways. Some neutralized extreme critiques with humor. Lance Craighead of American Wildlands wrote a local newspaper editorial, requesting that “if anyone out there is part of this ecoterrorist paramilitary arm of the United Nations, or is otherwise concerned about environmental issues, please send us a (tax deductible) check to improve our web site.” Others provided educational outreach.
From June 1998 to September 1999, Parks Canada employee Karsten Heuer completed what was called a “Y2Y Hike,” walking the Rockies from south to north to “symbolically trace the dispersal of a wolf” and stopping at towns along the way to deliver presentations about the large landscape vision. After giving 100 public talks and twice as many media interviews, Heuer noted that “regardless of their background or occupation, people who understand that Y2Y is not a huge park proposal are supportive of the idea and are often inspired enough to want to help.” Still others tapped into popular culture.
In the first season of the television show The West Wing, Pluie the Wolf and Y2Y were dramatized when White House staff participated in “Big Block of Cheese Day,” a fictional workday in which they meet with special interest groups who pitch ideas for funding. (Actor Nick Offerman proposed a “wolves-only roadway,” or wildlife corridor based on Pluie’s nine-month journey of 40,000 square miles, 10 times the size of Yellowstone National Park.) Whatever the platform, Y2Y representatives tried to offer an inspiring counternarrative of their internationalist mission.
“Paradoxically, the United States and Canada, each other’s largest trading partners, have organized themselves to ensure the free flow of investment capital, goods and energy across the border, but have not thought of the free movement of wildlife in the same way.”
Harvey locke, canadian conservationist, writer, photographer
Y2Y advocates realized the landscape vision would mean nothing on the ground without a base of grassroots support, from naturalist guides to hunting organizations, labor unions to civic leaders, religious institutions to Indigenous nations. In 2002, Y2Y hosted a meeting with Native Americans and First Nations groups to, in the words of Wendy Francis, “find ways to support your traditional work and lifestyles.”
A year later, the Deh Cho First Nations — a confederation of Dene and Metis peoples from the so-called Yukon and Northwest Territories — began negotiations with Parks Canada officials to expand Nahanni National Park. Herb Norwegian, Grand Chief of the Deh Cho Dene, argued that large landscape conservation made sense for Indigenous nations because big contiguous habitats ensured that Native foodways could be preserved. “Landscape species” like woodland caribou, Dall sheep and grizzly bears migrated across park boundaries that many scientists considered to be too small. The shared goal of park enlargement brought Indigenous leaders and conservation activists together.
The proposal was contested on two fronts. Canadian Parliament, under majority control of the Conservative Party, wanted to keep mineral prospects open as a tungsten mine and a lead-silver-zinc mine operated in the region. Deh Cho representatives, in contrast, wanted guarantees that any expansion of park lands under historic treaty rights would be subject to co-management between sovereign governments.
In 2009, Deh Cho First Nations and Parks Canada agreed to the six-fold increase of Nahanni National Park and Reserve, now 12,000 square miles in size. The designation turned a new page in park administration by incorporating traditional ecological knowledge into management decisions, allowing for subsistence uses like hunting and trapping, and supporting Dene culture in education and interpretation. The bigger park also created a new core area to serve as a northern anchor in the Y2Y landscape.
Overall, the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative has made progress in conserving a large landscape. Back in 1993, when the group started, only 11 percent of the region’s land was protected — 34.7 million acres, or equivalent in size to New York state. This territory was represented by “cores” of national parks and wilderness areas. By 2013, protections nearly doubled to 21 percent, including an additional 31 percent with some sort of conservation status — 166.9 million acres, roughly equal in size to the state of Texas. The latter area was mostly “corridors,” a mishmash of political jurisdictions with special management practices for maintaining connectivity. In only 20 years, the Y2Y landscape reached a 50-percent threshold, as advocated by biologist and author E.O. Wilson, to safeguard biological diversity.
Although the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative has expanded its focus to connecting avian and aquatic ecosystems (birds and fish move across political borders too), the freedom of movement for charismatic mammals, especially carnivores, remains central to its work. At the first meeting in Kananaskis, Alberta, Harvey Locke told Y2Y members that wolf movements “blew the doors off of conventional thinking about what boundaries are for your ecological integrity.” He concluded that the Y2Y landscape “is the continental seed stock for large carnivores. If we lose this, we lose them. Period.” Wolves had recovered inside core zones like national parks, but the story remained to be told if these animals would be accepted moving through corridors.
Excerpt from Borders of Biodiversity by Will Wright. Copyright 2026 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
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