SAFE PASSSAGE is an appropriate title for the "grandfather" of large connective wildlife corridors, THE YELLOWSTONE TO YUKON INITIATIVE----Whose goal is to connect the 2000 miles between these end points with enough interconnected large swaths of wild open space to allow the persistence of the West's array of wildlife, both predator and prey animals across and up and down the food chain..... "Y2Y is effectively a relay race, in which each region is trying to hand off an intact landscape to the next: Yellowstone to the High Divide, the Waterton Front to the Canadian Rockies, Jasper to the Muskwa-Kechika"................."The group’s totem, is the grizzly, whose expansive habitat requirements make it a useful umbrella for protecting other species"............. "If an ecosystem can support bears, it’s probably healthy enough for everything else...................."As Y2Y and its satellites have pioneered new approaches, they’ve become models for large-scale connectivity efforts on six continents"............. "The European Green Belt, a network of habitat that was incidentally protected by the Cold War’s Iron Curtain, will someday run north to south through twenty-four countries, from the Barents Sea to the Aegean"............... “Peace parks”—border-spanning protected areas that allow wildlife to migrate unfettered by geopolitics—have sprung up in Africa"............... "A proposed Atlantic Megalinkage would run from Florida to Quebec, joining ecosystems like Georgia’s coastal plains and Vermont’s Green Mountains"

read the full article by clicking on this link
https://orionmagazine.org/article/safe-passage/

Illustration by Mike Reagan.

Safe Passage

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BEN GOLDFARB

on a soggy September afternoon in southeast British Columbia, Nancy Newhouse swung her truck through a bank of pearl-colored fog and bounced to a halt on the shoulder of Highway 3A. Newhouse, Tom Swann, and I emerged into the cold mist, stepping carefully around the puddled ruts carved in the pullout. A convoy of logging trucks, their beds heavy with timber, sprayed mud at our shins. Adjusting our raingear, we began trudging north along the highway; to our left, a screen of cedar, spruce, and Doug fir shielded the valley below. After a hundred yards, the curtain thinned, and Newhouse stopped.

“There it is,” she said, the hood of her Nature Conservancy of Canada raincoat pulled low over her eyes. She pointed through the trees, toward the floor of the Creston Valley. “There’s the corridor.” I followed her finger, baffled. Sorry, I wanted to ask, but where’s the corridor? I searched in vain for signage. A non- descript swath of grainfields glimmered through the shifting fog. The land lay flat, furrowed with oats. The brown arm of a dike, built to stave off the floodwaters of nearby Duck Lake, wormed across the property.

Though the land appeared mundane to my human eye—Yellowstone it wasn’t—from a grizzly bear’s standpoint you’d be hard-pressed to find a more important parcel in North America. This humble polygon of farmland, dubbed the Frog Bear Conservation Corridor, was a crucial piece in a two- thousand-mile puzzle, a bridge that would allow isolated clusters of Ursus arctos horribilis to mingle and mate. “This movement corridor is well known,” Swann, Newhouse’s colleague at Nature Conservancy of Canada, told me as raindrops pooled in his trim white beard. “The science is clear.” That science was why NCC had recently purchased and protected 679 acres of the Creston Valley. Though the land’s $2.5 million price tag was steep, Newhouse and Swann had help: over half the funds had come from the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, one of the world’s most ambitious wildlife groups.

The vision of Yellowstone to Yukon, or Y2Y, is jaw-dropping: Its leaders espouse a continentwide network of protected areas and corridors that would allow animals to wander unhindered through a landscape the size of France, Spain, and the United Kingdom combined. The organization’s advocates dream that the effort will preserve migration routes for caribou and wolves, link pockets of far-ranging creatures like wolverines, and help animals of all sizes flee northward in the face of climate change. The group’s totem, however, is the grizzly, whose expansive habitat requirements make it a useful umbrella for protecting other species. If an ecosystem can support bears, it’s probably healthy enough for everything else.

Ben Goldfarb’s journalism has appeared in High Country News, Earth Island Journal, The Guardian, and other publications. He received a master’s degree in Environmental Management from Yale University. This story was supported by the Solutions Journalism Network.