June 25, 1998 Missoulian (AP)Yellowstone to the Yukon; Canadians trying to inspire effort to preserve wildlife corridors. By SCOTT McMILLION Bozeman Daily Chronicle
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It supports vast elk herds, immense forests and bustling human communities. It is beautiful, productive and accessible.
Most people seem to like it fine just the way it is. Why not keep it that way?
It is a question local governments, zoning commissions and major politicians have argued about for years. The discussion is generally couched in "quality of life" terms, especially in the high-growth scenic areas stretching from the Yaak to the Yukon, from Waterton to Wyoming. How do we protect our landscapes and our wildlife from ourselves? And make a living while we're at it?
That discussion is what the Yellowstone to Yukon project, known as Y2Y, is all about, according to a Canadian couple traveling 1,900 miles on foot, horseback and canoe to publicize the notion.
Maxine Achurch, 33, and Karsten Heuer, 29, are heading north through October, when they wrap up this year's trek in Canada's Jasper National Park.
They'll start again next summer, traveling all the way to the Yukon, punctuating their days in the backcountry with stops in towns, grabbing a hot shower and talking about the Y2Y concept wherever they stop.
Will anybody listen? Time will tell. They hope to meet with ranching groups, outfitters associations and anybody else who might have reservations about their goals.
The overall aim is to establish secure, protected corridors where big, far-ranging animals like grizzly bears, wolves and wolverines can travel unmolested.
The corridors they envision are like a stout cord connecting already protected gems like Yellowstone, Glacier and the Canadian parks.
Look at the land today and you see a place where it's theoretically possible for big animals to travel between Glacier and Yellowstone. But the thread is fraying, being gnawed by development, logging, highways and mines. The corridors are important because without them isolated animal populations are vulnerable to outbreaks of disease, inbreeding and other calamities.
Heuer, a Canadian park ranger, said he's seen it happen before, in South Africa, where he once worked transplanting carnivores from one island of wild land to another, trying to keep populations alive in places separated by intense development.
The Y2Y goal is comparable in some ways to the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, a five-state wilderness proposal that would designate much of the Northwest as protected wilderness. The bill has gone nowhere in Congress, facing stout opposition from congressmen from all of the affected states.
Y2Y, which includes 100 affiliated environmental groups, has some similar goals but different methods, Heuer and Achurch said.
"This is bottom up," Achurch said. "It's nothing to do with government."
"We're trying to get the local people to say, Here's where we can make a difference,' "Heuer said.
The migration zones "don't mean no human use," Heuer said. There could be limited logging, grazing and oil and gas development within them, he said.
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Those details remain to be worked out, however. So does the size of the proposed corridors. Deciding where to draw a line is "a hard thing to do," he agreed.
The idea of drawing a line and establishing different sets of rules governing human behavior on either side of it is always a contentious issue; as anybody who has followed a zoning dispute can attest.
But try to add the plight of the Banff National Park grizzlies to a Big Sky zoning hearing and you can imagine the complications. And many remain dubious about the motives of the loosely knit Y2Y group.
"It's another crazy idea that somehow gains momentum among people who don't have to make a living on the land," is the way Cary Hegreberg, executive secretary of the Montana Wood Products Association, described Y2Y.
He pointed out that vast amounts of private property lie between the parks and wilderness areas of the Northern Rockies. Imposing restrictions there "would be pretty tough for most folks to swallow," he said.
"I don't buy that the notion is to keep things the way they are," Hegreberg continued. "I don't believe that. And keeping the landscape the same is a whole lot different from keeping social and economic systems intact."
Still, Y2Y proponents say they're committed for the long haul. They've received significant national press coverage in Canada and the United States. They've got scientists and economists on board.
They've got enough money at the two person Canmore, Alberta, headquarters to distribute small grants to affiliated groups. And they're looking 20, 40, 100 years down the road.
They want to have a network of environmental groups established that can, for instance, muster forces to fight a bad timber sale in Wyoming instead of leaving that battle to a local group, Heuer said.
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The long hike is intended to let people know the network exists, to build support for it wherever they can.
"It's been mislabeled as a huge national park concept," Heuer said. "That's not what it's about. It's about maintaining what we have today."
Which sounds like it ought to be simple, even noncontroversial.
It's not likely to be that way. Hegreberg said his industry will keep an eye on the group.
"These things in their initial stages sometimes seem pretty ridiculous," he said. "But sometimes they gather momentum and you've got a significant political fight on your hands."
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