HARVEY WANTS HALF
Harvey Locke, founder of the monumental Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, talks about how Y2Y continues to evolve as it turns 20 and why the Nature Needs Half conservation edict is gaining momentum
Harvey Locke, founder of the monumental Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, talks about how Y2Y continues to evolve as it turns 20 and why the Nature Needs Half conservation edict is gaining momentum
Harvey Locke thinks big — continentally, actually — but most importantly, he follows through. In 1997, he and an ensemble of conservationists and scientists founded the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative with the unprecedented idea of not just protecting but connecting as much of the intact temperate and boreal mountain ecosystem between southern Wyoming and the northern Yukon as possible. Twenty years on, they’ve more than doubled the park and conservation-land area in this critical 3,500-kilometre-long corridor, facilitating the movements of countless species across its channels and improving how humans and wildlife coexist on the landscape. The idea of “large landscape conservation” has caught on around the world, and Locke is now also promoting his Nature Needs Half movement, which as the name might suggest is the same transformative idea writ on an even grander scale.
On getting the scope right
The huge scale of Yellowstone to Yukon was a hypothesis at our first meeting in 1993 and the topic of a discussion piece I wrote for Borealis magazine the next spring. The response from scientists and conservationists in Canada and the United States was, “This is the right scale!” and they even went so far as to say we should add a bit more on each end and to the west. Then it was like that high school science experiment where you drop a string into a solution and everything crystallizes on it right away. The corridor is important not only because of the species that are in it and its stunning natural beauty, but also because it’s part of the public’s imagination about what wild nature is: “Yellowstone” stands for natural park; “Yukon” stands for wilderness. I chose those words deliberately. And Y2Y is adapted to our places and cultures — it’s not a template you can take and shove somewhere else. No one is saying, “We have the magic recipe: pay me.” We’re saying that this is the scale we need to work at, but it needs to occur on your terms and work for your culture.
On Nature Needs Half
People all over the world are interested in applying large landscape conservation to their own countries and on their conditions. They’re looking to Y2Y for inspiration, which is why I’ve given talks everywhere from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Anchorage, Alaska, southern Chile, and Darwin and Sydney, Australia. This gave rise to the Nature Needs Half movement, which is simply Y2Y gone global — a truly transformative vision for humanity. It’s the idea that we must protect in an interconnected manner at least half of the surface of the Earth, land and sea. If all we can manage is isolated fragments, we know it isn’t going to make it through time. If it’s a big, connected system of at least half of the world, there’s a chance that the functions of life can stay with us, that we can still have fresh water, pollination, a stable climate.
So whether it’s wilderness areas, national reserves, tribal lands, corporate lands, private lands or municipal watersheds, these must aggregate to the scale of half the planet. We must build a coherent view of what the 21st century ought to look like, and at the heart of that must be wild nature.
On national parks as centrepieces of large landscape conservation
Y2Y is about keeping all wildlife on the landscape along with people, including the “inconvenient” species like wolves and bears. Look all over the world and you’ll see an astonishing correspondence between the places where those species persist and national parks, from grizzlies and wolves in Yellowstone and Banff to elephants, lions and mountain gorillas in Africa to tigers in India. You take away the parks, and those animals will cease to exist. The national park was one of the great ideas of the 19th century, the gold standard of conservation. But we know they are not enough on their own — that they must be both big and connected. In the Y2Y corridor alone, we have Yellowstone (the world’s first national park), Banff (the world’s third national park), Waterton-glacier (the world’s first international peace park) and the world’s first natural world heritage sites (Yellowstone and Nahanni). From these building blocks, we were able to engage the public in imagining conservation biology connected over a vast area and were thus able to create the global icon of large landscape conservation.
On the importance of connectivity
As soon as we decided on the Y2Y scale, a flood of information started coming in that both informed and validated the idea. There was a wolf, for example, radio collared by American biologist Diane Boyd in Montana’s Flathead Valley, that travelled to Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway at Dawson Creek, northeastern British Columbia. Another from that pack went down to Yellowstone. Boyd and Canadian biologist Paul Paquet, who had a project right on the edge of Banff and Kananaskis, found that wolves were moving between Banff and the Flathead Valley in Montana as part of their normal lives. The avalanche of evidence kept coming in. After I gave a talk in Yellowstone in 1997, two trumpeter swan researchers came out of the audience and told us to add these birds to our list. They had just banded baby swans in Nahanni National Park Reserve, N.W.T., that ended up in Yellowstone. At the same time, an Alberta naturalist named Peter Sherrington