Conservation Across Borders: Biodiversity in an Interdependent World

By Charles C. Chester

Conservationists have long been aware that political boundaries rarely coincide with natural boundaries. From the establishment of early "peace parks" to the designation of continental migratory pathways, a wide range of transborder mechanisms to protect biodiversity have been established by conservationists in both the public and private sectors.
Conservation Across Borders presents a broad overview of the history of transboundary conservation efforts and an accessible introduction to current issues surrounding the subject. Through detailed examinations of two initiatives, the International Sonoran Desert Alliance (ISDA) and the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative (Y2Y), the book helps readers understand the benefits and challenges of landscape-scale protection.

In addition to discussing general concepts and the specific experience of ISDA and Y2Y, the author considers the emerging concept of "conservation effectiveness" and offers a comparative analysis of the two projects. The book ends with a discussion of the complex relationships among civil society, governments, and international borders.

By considering the history, goals, successes, and failures of two divergent initiatives, the book offers important insights into the field of transborder conservation along with valuable lessons for those studying or working in the field.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Feb 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781597268493

Book preview

PREFACE

e9781597268493_i0003.jpg

In the mid-1990s, I was a Volunteer in the Park—a VIP, as they generously called us—in Yellowstone National Park. My assignment concerned management of the highly diverse extremophilic microorganisms that live in the 10,000 or so thermal features scattered throughout the park. At the time, I recognized the irony of working on microscopic critters in the largest national park of the lower forty-eight (I hadn’t yet heard of Death Valley’s 1994 upgrade from a monument to a park, superceding Yellowstone’s geographic preeminence). Little did I know that I would spend the subsequent decade studying landscapes that would dwarf Yellowstone National Park.

Also during that period, I had enrolled in the Ph.D. program at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. At a 1996 meeting of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Professor Tim Clark of Yale University suggested that I use my dissertation as an opportunity to look at the inchoate Yellowstone to Yukon Biodiversity Strategy (Y2Y). I immediately grabbed on to the idea. Over the following year, with the goal of conducting a large-scale comparative analysis, I spent a good deal of time drawing up a long list of other transborder conservation initiatives on the North American continent. Once I was disabused of the ludicrous notion of analyzing them all, I dramatically narrowed my scope to compare Y2Y with the International Sonoran Desert Alliance (ISDA).

Despite significant differences, both ISDA and Y2Y emanated from civil society. My essential question for both was this: How might the respective monikers of ISDA and Y2Y enhance the ability of their participants to do conservation in the real world? In the parlance of contemporary conservation circles, I was interested in their effectiveness in promoting on-the-ground conservation. I dissected that broad issue into a long list of specific questions, resulting in a standardized interview that I would eventually use with sixty participants in ISDA and Y2Y. (See List of Interviewees.) Wherever I have quoted an individual without providing a parenthetical citation in this book, the quote comes from one of these interviews.

Many wise people warned me to keep my interview short. Ignoring all of them, I ultimately paid the price by spending several months coding the resultant transcripts with the qualitative analysis software package NUD*IST—one of my favorite acronyms, which stands for Non-numerical, Unstructured Data: Indexing, Searching, and Theorizing. (Upgrades to this software package have unfortunately been renamed, and there are now several competitive packages on the market.) I strongly recommend the use of such an aid—without NUD*IST, I’d probably still be sequestered in some library carrel, buried in index cards.

From the perspective of a qualitative researcher, what surprised me the most was how differently the Y2Y participants and the ISDA participants interpreted the same questions. As will become apparent in reading the two case study chapters, ISDA participants responded to my questions in terms of a particular history, whereas Y2Y participants responded by describing a particular idea. Were I to start over on this project, I might tighten my questions to minimize room for such interpretation. But maybe not; as I describe in Chapter 5, the differing interpretations may offer the most useful lesson for conservationists in other transborder landscapes.

Ultimately, this book constitutes a condensation and update of my dissertation, completed in 2003. In addition to proving itself an effective doorstop, the dissertation contains a good deal more information on ISDA and Y2Y—as well as an analysis of how they fit into various theoretical frameworks expounded in the field of international relations. Most readers, I expect, will be happy to know that the editors at Island Press reined in my pack-rat mentality, thereby ensuring that the book focuses on key issues related to transborder conservation. However, for interested readers, some of that information is available in the form of an extensive set of Web notes to the book at www.islandpress.org/conservation_across_borders/webnotes.pdf.

My greatest hope and fear for this book is identical: that it may be seen as telling the story of ISDA or the story of Y2Y. But whereas it is my hope for cause of ego, it is my fear for cause of omission. Through my research over the past years, ISDA and Y2Y have been my constant companions (and just like human companions, they have been a source of enduring happiness and intermittent annoyance). But a mere glance through my files—or procrastination at my bookshelves—never fails to reveal another character, another event, or another theme that I’ve missed in my narratives. So I have come to know ISDA and Y2Y well enough to understand that this book only scratches the surface of the stories they have to tell. Ultimately, the stories of ISDA and Y2Y cannot now be told; both are, praise be, living institutions whose stories have hopefully just begun.

Charles C. Chester

November 2005

1

RISING ABOVE THE TERRITORIES OF CHANCE

Over three hundred years before North America’s borders took their modern shape, a Spanish explorer named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became stranded on the western shores of la Florida. For nearly a decade, he and his three companions (one a black slave) did not so much travel as live across the present-day states of Texas, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Sinaloa—finally encountering Christians near the Pacific coast in 1536. Retold in countless narratives about Spanish colonization of the American Southwest, their story resonates because they were the first Europeans—and one African—to cross the continent starting from a point within the present-day United States. But more strikingly, it resonates because of their resilience across a vast landscape of which they were utterly ignorant (Cabeza de Vaca 1555).

Cabeza de Vaca’s terse account of his odyssey reveals a man who respected the indigenous cultures in which he immersed himself, and who recognized the land he crossed as a complex mosaic of biological and cultural patterns. The idea of a borderline cutting across that landscape, a line demarcating vastly different land-use practices and cultures to either side, would likely have been inconceivable to him. So although we do not know exactly when or where he and his companions stepped over the nonexistent international border, we can safely assume that the event was marked by all the pomp and circumstance of just another footstep.

Although borders often conform in some humanly logical way to the lay of the land (think of large rivers and mountain ranges), in the western portion of North America we have strewn straight-line borders across the landscape on the basis of diplomatic (and not so diplomatic) decisions born of geographical ignorance (see Carroll 2001; Rebert 2001). In so doing, we have unwittingly granted borders the power to carve out the fortified nation-states—or what I describe as the territories of chance—that so strongly define who we are. I am a Canadian, one says if born and bred in Vancouver, and similar phrases can be heard in San Diego and Tijuana. Yet in each case, it is possible to imagine the historical dice rolling a different way.

Unfolding in these territories of chance are the two principal case studies of this book, the International Sonoran Desert Alliance (ISDA) and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y). In the case of ISDA, if the United States had not acquired land from Mexico under the Gadsden Purchase of 1853–54, the area of concern would have been nearly entirely within Mexico—with the somewhat ironic result that the border would have more closely demarcated ecosystem boundaries. As to Y2Y, the 49th parallel divided the region due to little more than the compromises of geographic ignorance under the Treaties of 1818 and 1846 between the United States and Great Britain (for Canada).

So in one sense, these international borders are little more than unerringly straight one-dimensional lines that define two-dimensional areas on a map. Yet on the ground, borders often create severe cultural, political, and biological effects—even where a border reflects something of the land’s true character. To get a sense of a border’s physical impact, one need only stand on the Bridge of the Americas between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. That vantage point affords the dismal sight of an inanimate, canalized river entombed in concrete, and one can hardly imagine the former Río Bravo—Rio Grande for gringos—that once teemed with life (Weisman and Dusard 1986, 100). Or consider the largely regrown forests stretching across the northernmost parts of New York and New England, which in the United States have collectively come to be called the Northern Forest. That name makes little sense to the average Quebecer whose ancestors largely deforested the landscape immediately north of the international border. Their true northern forest is the boreal (the tendrils of which reach to within a two-hour drive of Ottawa), and not the tracts of Adirondack or New England forest that they drive through on southward treks to New York or Boston (Gawthrop 1999). Overall, the fact that immaterial one-dimensional lines can have such tangible multidimensional effects is nothing less than extraordinary. But we are so used to borders that it is difficult to see them—or their territories of chance—as anything but normal.

As their individual stories will show, ISDA and Y2Y are attempting to redefine the territories of chance by replacing them with a geography of hope, as Wallace Stegner (1960) so quotably put it. If nothing else, they are trying to rise above their territories of chance—to overcome the unnatural divisions in their regions by making some kind of sense out of the living landscapes they inhabit.

International Conservation: Complicating Matters to Solve a Problem

Against the trends of human population growth, increasing resource consumption, and the rapid pace of technological change, governments and conservation organizations have protected biodiversity by implementing various types of domestic conservation programs. Yet such initiatives in the domestic realm have repeatedly proven to become contentious and strife-ridden affairs that in countless cases seem to be unresolvable. Given the obstacles surrounding biodiversity protection on the domestic front, it is reasonable to wonder why one would choose to focus on the more difficult problem of international conservation. As Westing put it (1998, 91), working for conservation with two (or occasionally even three) sovereign states involved would seem to add a gratuitous layer of complexity that spells almost certain failure. So why try?

The principal response is obvious: Biodiversity knows no political boundaries. Transborder conservation cannot await problem resolution at the domestic level for the simple reason that biodiversity has evolved not in conformance to the dictates of political geography, but rather in accordance with the biogeographic forces of natural selection. If it is true that approximately one-third of all terrestrial high-biodiversity sites straddle national borders (Westing 1993, 5; 1998, 91), then effective conservation must take into account this inherent transpolitical nature of biodiversity. In short, although purely domestic approaches to biodiversity conservation have been and will be critical, protecting life on Earth will ultimately require an international approach.

All of this is old hat to practicing conservationists, most of whom know full well that saving the world means working across international borders. Indeed, the multiple environmental impacts of borders have elicited a broad range of responses. A 1996 survey of the U.S.-Mexico border environmental activities, for instance, listed 485 distinct transborder initiatives and projects (most of them related to environmental education and pollution control; see U.S.-Mexico Border XXI Program 1996).

Along with the sheer number of initiatives that survey identified, it also revealed a significant development in how transborder conservation takes place. Since the dawn of conservation diplomacy at the end of the nineteenth century, individual citizens and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have played an integral role in international environmental affairs (Dorsey 1998). Collectively described as civil society, these nongovernmental, nonmarket actors have traditionally focused on influencing (or reacting to) governmental actions—governments being the traditional arbiter of cross-border cooperation (see DeSombre 2000). More recently, however, civil society actors have taken on the task of reaching across borders to work together directly without input from or influence on governmental entities. ISDA and Y2Y are two noteworthy examples of this trend. Under both, individual citizens and NGOs have banded together with the first-order priority of coming to know and understand each other. Through such networking, participants in ISDA and Y2Y have been empowered to focus on their ultimate mission: to protect each region’s ecological and cultural cohesiveness from the threat of political boundaries.

It is important to note that although ISDA and Y2Y share this broad mission, the two initiatives commenced in the early 1990s with substantially differing conceptual foundations. ISDA participants concentrated on building an environmentally sound regional economy, with biodiversity conservation as one component. Y2Y’s first and foremost issue was biodiversity conservation, although most participants soon came to recognize the need to focus on the dramatic economic changes facing local communities. In essence, participants in both initiatives struggled over what constitutes sustainable development and how that loose concept relates to biodiversity conservation. And although the word biodiversity was heard far more often in the halls of Y2Y than in those of ISDA, the concept of biodiversity was central to both. It is thus necessary to take a look at the history of what biodiversity has come to mean.

Save the Whales (and Fifteen Thousand Other Species)

Over millennia, evolution and migration have endowed the North American continent with an immense variety of ecosystems, species, and individual populations. This diversity has never been static; since North America separated from Asia and Europe about 120 million years ago, ecosystems have shifted and transformed, species have come and gone, and individual populations have appeared and disappeared. In the continent now host to the artifact boundaries between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, the only biological constant has been change (Flannery 2001).

Yet even as biologists and ecologists have moved past romantic notions of the balance of nature, they have discovered that rates of change in biological and ecological processes have accelerated due to the apparently ineluctable absorption of the earth’s biological productivity for the use of Homo sapiens (Haberl et al. 2004). Within all biomes of the continent, from grasslands and deserts to montane forests and arctic tundra, the biological landscape is experiencing an unprecedented degree of alteration that has led to catastrophic results for many of the continent’s species. On a global scale, scientists have focused on the loss of species, pointing out that human activities have increased rates of species extinction by anywhere between 100 to 1,000 percent compared to normal background rates (i.e., the rate of extinctions on a geologic timescale not including the five major mass extinctions that paleontologists have detected in the fossil record) (Levin and Levin 2002; Regan et al. 2001).

Up until less than two decades ago, scientists and conservationists referred to this general problem with myriad terms and slogans that ranged from endangered species and silent spring to Bring back the wolf and Save the whales. The latter, perhaps constituting the planet’s most widely recognized call to conservation, seems to offer a straight-forward message. But it is worth pondering what is actually entailed in that simple catchphrase. For example, there are approximately 78 species of whales, each with its own conservation requirements—some needing a lot of help, some arguably little (Waller 1996, 397). Saving 78 species sounds relatively doable, and, happily, the prospects for at least a few whale species have improved over the past two decades due to international cooperation (Corkeron 2004; Payne 1995, 296). But what about 15,503 species? That is the total number of threatened species listed by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), many of which will also require individualized prescriptions (or proscriptions) in order to be saved (World Conservation Union 2004). Even worse, 15,503 is widely recognized as a severe underestimate.

With so many documented and undocumented threatened species, the practical implications of fifteen thousand iterations of Save the... is overwhelming. So how do we think about this problem comprehensively? One answer came through the widespread adoption of the catchall concept of biological diversity. Although the phrase dates at least to the 1960s (see, for example, Krutilla 1967, 786), its contemporary use is dated to the 1980 publication of two U.S. government reports (Lovejoy 1980; Norse and McManus 1980). Its shorthand version, biodiversity, did not become adopted within the conservation community until after the 1986 National Forum on BioDiversity and the publication of its proceedings as the book Biodiversity, edited by the well-known Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson (1988). Use of the term has since dramatically increased; it is now widely employed by physical scientists, conservationists, and social scientists and has been adopted into the common vocabulary of the media (Jeffries 1997, Chapter 1). And regardless of whether the reading public has itself become an endangered species, it is worth noting that approximately four hundred commercially available books have the word biodiversity in their titles—and that at least at one time, the word generated more finds on Google than did climate change, Beatles, George W. Bush, or Tiger Woods (Norse and Carlton 2003).

So what exactly does biodiversity mean? A generic and ubiquitous definition is the totality and variety of life on Earth (see, for example, UNDP n.d.), but it has been pointed out that that definition is nearly equivalent to the long-extant term biota (Vogel 1994, 18). By 1986, however, biologists and ecologists had worked out a more rigorous definition that proposed a three-tiered hierarchy of diversity: the diversity of ecosystems, the diversity of species, and the diversity of individuals and populations within a single species (commonly called genetic diversity but more precisely referred to as allelic diversity) (Norse et al. 1986). Whether writing journal articles or grant applications, scientists today regularly rely on the term biodiversity as shorthand for a distinction between these three levels. And when those in the life sciences talk or write about having to save biodiversity (which some of them do quite often, others not nearly enough), they typically take care to distinguish between the natural phenomenon of biodiversity on the one hand, and the advocacy position of biodiversity conservation (or some such pairing) on the other. The shorthand language of biodiversity thus makes it easier for scientists to draw attention to the broad anthropogenic forces that threaten the planet’s ecosystems, species, and genetic resources.

Yet regardless of its scientific definition, biodiversity is often simply equated with conservation and has been described as the rallying cry of the global extinction crisis (Takacs 1996). As is plainly evident from the sixty-two individual contributions to Wilson’s pathbreaking book Biodiversity—all of which concern the loss of biodiversity—the word has been intimately tied to its imperiled status from the start. Furthermore, it is now widely understood in terms of a social movement—a result due in no small part to political contention over the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), more commonly known as the Biodiversity Convention. Concerned over intellectual property rights for biotechnology, the first Bush administration declined to sign the convention at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (President Clinton signed the CBD in 1993, but the U.S. Senate has not ratified it). The refusal to sign provoked clamorous opposition from the conservation community, strong dissent from numerous developed and developing countries, and a good deal of attention from the media, thus giving the word biodiversity a cachet it would likely have taken years to garner otherwise.

Ultimately, there is good cause to associate the word with conservation. Scientists and conservationists have grouped the human-caused threats to biodiversity into six general categories: overexploitation, loss of habitat, degradation of habitat, invasive species, climate change, and secondary effects (and multiple permutations thereof—this classification system will be revisited in Chapter 5). These six categories are often described as the direct or proximate causes of biodiversity loss, as opposed to the underlying or root causes such as human population growth, overconsumption, and technological change. And it is important to keep in mind that these multifarious threats constitute tremendous challenges not only for individual species, but for ecosystems and genetic diversity as well. In the United States, for example, scientists have identified eighty-two ecosystem types that are threatened, endangered, or critically endangered (Noss et al. 1995). At the genetic level, scientists have estimated that individual populations of species are being extirpated at a rate of 16 million per year out of an estimated total of 1.1 to 6.6 billion populations worldwide (see Ehrlich and Daily 1997–98; Hughes et al. 1997). Overall, Wilson has argued that biodiversity loss is the most irreparable environmental challenge facing humanity, with consequences more lasting than ozone depletion, toxic releases, transborder air pollution, and even nuclear war (Christen 2000; Myers 1993, 159). In contrast to those, as a popular saying goes, Extinction is forever.

The problem of biodiversity loss has been addressed by investigators in a wide range of academic disciplines, including philosophy (Rolston 1994), economics (McNeely 1988), political science (Tobin 1990), international law (Heijnsbergen 1997), history (Reiger 2001), geography (Platt 1996), linguistics (Magurran 1988), policy analysis (Takacs 1996), education (Jacobson 1995), anthropology (Davis 1998), chemistry (Eisner 1994), health (Grifo and Rosenthal 1997), medicine (Aguirre et al. 2002), physics (Gell-Mann 1994), geology (Ward 1994), and, of course, a myriad of subdisciplines in biology (e.g., forestry, ethnobotany, limnology, and genetics). This book looks to many of those disciplinary perspectives to address transborder conservation of biodiversity.

Overview of the Book

Chapter 2 provides a broad overview of the global history and current status of transborder conservation. From the establishment of early peace parks to the designation of continental migratory pathways, the chapter sets out the full panoply of transborder mechanisms to protect biodiversity. It then examines the rise of bioregionalism and the history of international cooperation under the aegis of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Program. The chapter ends by arguing that even while many of the conceptual roots of ISDA and Y2Y can be traced to MAB and its global network of biosphere reserves, both initiatives are significant departures from earlier transborder work.

Chapters 3 and 4 address each of the two case studies respectively with a fundamental question in mind. In a world of endangered species, degraded ecosystems, and burgeoning human populations, have ISDA and Y2Y tangibly enhanced biodiversity conservation and the possibility of sustainable economies? Or to rephrase the question in terms of international cooperation: Has working together across international borders tangibly enhanced the effectiveness of nongovernmental actors in their pursuit of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development? To answer that question, both chapters focus on how the respective initiatives were established, what their overall intentions and functions were, and how they have or have not translated intentions into action.

Chapter 3 takes place within the Sonoran Desert, one of the world’s most biologically diverse deserts and considered to be one of North America’s least anthropogenically modified ecosystems. Whereas the U.S. government began protecting large portions of the region in the 1930s, official Mexican efforts to protect the region—particularly the extremely arid volcanic region known as the Pinacate—began only in the late 1970s. During the 1980s, many conservationists and scientists became more vocal in expressing their concern that these separate national efforts inadequately addressed both the human and conservation needs of the region as a whole. They believed that it would be more effective to designate a vast portion of the region as an international biosphere reserve. Although one particular protected area on the U.S. side of the border had been designated a biosphere reserve in 1976, the designation was little more than a label since there had been no implementation of the fundamental biosphere reserve concepts of core areas and buffer zones.

The International Sonoran Desert Alliance was born within this intellectual milieu. This is not to say, however, that ISDA was solely the child of biosphere reserve thinking; the numerous individuals who participated in ISDA did so for a variety of reasons, one of the foremost being the lack of indigenous control over traditional lands. Chapter 3 describes both ISDA’s complex formation and the various institutional personalities that it took on in subsequent years. One of ISDA’s more prominent roles, in addition to advocating for the official designation of an international biosphere reserve, was as a forum for local participation in planning and management of the extant biosphere reserves—the importance of which the international MAB Program had repeatedly emphasized. ISDA’s role provides insight into just how complex local participation can be, for over the course of the 1990s ISDA faced tremendous obstacles that include internal discord between staff and board members as well as a reactionary political movement aimed at disassociating the United States from international conservation programs. Yet ISDA—as well as the very process of putting ISDA together—made several significant contributions to conservation of the region, including the establishment of a renowned biosphere reserve within Mexico and cooperative agreements both between the states of Arizona and Sonora and between the United States and Mexico.

Chapter 4 examines the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y). Several factors led to the synthesis of the essential Y2Y concept of wildlife connectivity throughout the Rocky Mountains that stretch between the United States and Canada—mountains that once blocked development but now beckon a human presence that all too often places insubstantial value on wildlife habitat. While one of these factors was the relatively uniform ecological and biological conditions of the region, equally if not more important factors included general advances in the science of conservation biology, specific findings of conservation biologists regarding the needs of large carnivores and wide-ranging species, and other lessons gleaned from large landscape and transboundary initiatives both within and outside of the Y2Y region.

Initially established as a loose network of conservationists and scientists throughout the region, Y2Y has since become a formal organization. Participants attest that Y2Y has infused the region’s conservation community with cooperation, camaraderie, mutual understanding, and inspiration. Once isolated from each other by long distances and narrowly focused agendas, conservationists within the Y2Y region now find themselves working in conjunction with a geographically extensive array of individuals and organizations that have also tied their efforts to the Y2Y vision. Y2Y’s success has largely been attributed to its engaging landscape vision, a vision that has incorporated both missionary and scientific elements within its iconic composition of Yellowstone (the first national park in the world) and the Yukon (the proving ground of Canadian grit, poetry, and national