Yellowstone to Yukon

Getting serious about conservation

Like most people in the Northwest, I'm proud of our many state and natural parks, particularly Mt. Rainier , Mt. St. Helens , and Olympic National Park . Okay, those are all mountains and mountain ranges near Seattle, so I'm biased. But the whole point is to think globally and act locally

Mt. Rainier

However, one thing always bugged me about those parks: they are too small for most large animals. Bears, elk, wolves, and the like all need much larger ranges than even those large parks.

I'm not a big fan of zoos. They're just animal prisons. Some of them are very nice prisons, but big animals need a big area to roam around in.

No zoos.

However, we can't just make the entire country a big national park. Cities and industry (even green cities and industries) need land and resources. But animals need access to practically the entire continent. So how do we give animals the freedom to move large distances?

Some scientists have called for creating large megaparks , but I think that's not the right way to go. It isn't a pathway to opening up the entire continent.

Instead, the solution is to connect all of the parks into a big network so animals can move.

It's all about Topology

Animals, particularly large ones, need a wider range of habitats than can be found in one park, even a large park. Many animals need to migrate over thousands of miles.

The solution is to create a large, integrated network, whereby large national and state parks are connected by corridors (however narrow) so that animals can move back and forth over long distances. So in my state, for instance, elk could move from Mt. St. Helens to Rainier and through the Cascades, all without having to come into contact with humans or civilization. Ideally, we would open up corridors so that the Olympics would also be connected, via a series of hops to smaller parks, all connected by narrow corridors for wildlife to travel.

This isn't a new idea, for instance the Buffalo Commons project is trying to do the same thing in the great plains for buffalo.

This would have a dramatic impact on parks everywhere. Our existing park system could support more animals, since they would have a wider range of habitats for foraging, and could migrate to avoid local droughts etc. Even smaller state parks would occasionally see larger animals such as bear and wolves, since they would be transiting to other large parks.

Imagining neighbors telling you that there were elk moving through the park down the street. How cool would that be?

[I'm assuming parks/corridors would have fencing, since after all the whole point is to keep animals from interacting with civilization. Fencing is not a hard problem to solve.]

However, there is a problem. This large network of parks would directly collide with another, deadly network: our network of roads and highways. So far, we haven't found a way for humans and animals to move over the same ground without one killing the other (and humans are by far the most deadly).

Roads: the Meatmakers

Ever since the car was invented, people have known that roads and highways impact wildlife (no pun intended). But lately people have been measuring the real effects of roads on ecosystems, with some frightening results.

Grizzly meets car.

One problem is the obvious killing. Animals haven't evolved to deal with something like a truck, which moves faster than birds but has a larger mass than any other land animal. So they get killed trying to cross roads. Canadians have called the Trans-Canada Highway the "meatmaker" because of the vast amounts of roadkill it generates.

But even if animals are smart enough to avoid cars, roads are a serious problem. The best way to avoid cars is to not cross roads. Some animals have figured that out, but that means that laying down a highway is tantamount to erecting a large mountaing range, as far as animal movement is concerned. Once a highway is created, animals on either side become genetically distinct. As a smaller population, they are more susceptible to inbreeding and genetic defects, and in general are less able to withstand population losses. They go extinct much faster than larger groups.

This effect (splitting animal populations into small, unstable sub-populations) is called "fracturing" (based on my web surfing).

Lately, different people (especially Canadian engineers) have been looking at real solutions to fracturing. The key is to make it easy for animals to safely cross highways and busy roads.

Underpasses (tunnels beneath the highway) are fairly cheap, but they can only be used by very small animals. [But I don't mean to dismiss underpasses! They have saved populations of tortoises and other animals.]

For larger animals, they have built animal-friendly overpasses.

Wolves and grizzlies have used this overpass.

And other people have proposed burying the highway altogether , which I think is an excellent idea.

Enter Y2Y

What's exciting now is that many people have starting putting all of these concepts into a single workable plan:

1) Keep large parks

2) Connect parks with corridors for animal movement

3) Use a variety of animal-friendly road-crossing strategies

This is a pathway to gradually building a continent-wide ecological preserve, pieces at a time.

The most ambitious of these projects is the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) initiative, which aims to create a multi-million-square-mile ecosystem for large animals in the West (US and Canada).

Y2Y stretches from Wyoming to Alaska.

The Y2Y project envisions an interconnected network of large parks, which they call Critical Cores and Corridors. These consist of many large parks, from Yellowstone up to the Yukon Territories, all linked by corridors of land. Highways that fracture the ecosystem will have animal-friendly crossings installed, using a combination of overpasses, underpasses, and burying roads where possible.

What I find most encouraging is that this approach lets the ecosystem be built up one park at a time. Y2Y is already targeting the highest-risk parks and corridors, so it can work on protecting key pieces right now, while planning to incorporate other parks in the future.

I think Y2Y represents one of the biggest steps forward in ecology and conservation in the past 100 years.

Help them out! Make a donation. I did.

Getting down with Megafauna

Once there is a large ecosystem, you can start looking at rebuilding the megafauna. Elk, deer, bear, and wolves can start becoming common again. Many of the animals that we've almost killed off could rebuild their populations.

And why stop with species that are almost extinct? Why not repopulate megafauna that mankind killed off years ago?

One great proposal involves transporting some similar species from Africa to North America. Published in the journal Nature , this article lays out a plan whereby they would start re-introducing species such as turtles, horses, camels (!), elephants, and ultimately predators such as cheetah and lions. Their argument is that people are abandoning the Great Plains anyway, and these animals (or very similar species) used to exist in North America until humans killed them off 13,000 years ago.

The plan to reintroduce species a bit at a time.

Why not go further? Instead of just recreating old populations using similar animals, why not replace extinct species with exact copies?

For instance, why not clone a wooly mammoth? Japanese researchers are proposing to do just that. They would sequence the wooly mammoth DNA, emplant it in an embryo, and have it raised by elephants.

Go for it!

Or why not clone the Golden Bear? It's kind of silly that the mascot of the State of California is extinct. They could clone that too, once we had provided it with an ecosystem to live in.

Okay, the cloning is a little far-out. But creating a connected ecosystem that could support large megafauna populations is a real possibility now.

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