Issue 14: Global Wildlife Conservation
By Birch Dietz Malotky
When the University of Wyoming brought together a couple dozen managers and researchers from around the world to visit the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and discuss international wildlife policy, one reaction stands out to me above all others: “For better or worse, it’s nice to see that you’re dealing with the same issues we are.”
As national parks expert Bob Keiter observes in Upstream, Yellowstone National Park has served as a model for global conservation since its protection in 1872. Widely heralded as the world’s first national park—though Mongolia’s Bogd Khan Mountain, protected a century earlier, has a strong claim to the title—Yellowstone has continued to be a nursery for innovation in wildlife conservation and land management. From tracking and mapping animal migrations, to supporting private land stewardship, to collaborating across agencies for landscape-scale management, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is truly a leader.
And yet, in today’s constantly evolving world, huge challenges remain. Managers and researchers continue to battle invasive species and wildlife disease. They look to balance development pressure for food, fuel, tourism, and first, second, and third homes with preserving year-round wildlife habitat. And they work to reconcile what drought, wildfire, flooding, heat waves, and more will mean for the people and animals that depend on these cherished landscapes.
As Katie Doyle discovered in Spain’s Canary Islands, going away can teach you a lot about home. Around the world, people and organizations are working to reduce conflicts between livestock and carnivores, reconnect fragmented landscapes, and foster community-driven ecotourism that supports both people and wildlife. In these shared challenges, there is opportunity to learn from new and experimental thinking unbounded by decades of tradition, as well as the enduring wisdom of a people’s age-old relationship to the animals and the land.
While this issue of Western Confluence is divided into four, cross-cutting themes—evolving threats, patchwork governance, from the roots, and toward coexistence—what struck me in editing these stories was how entangled all the categories were. In the Alps, addressing conflict between wolves and people required coordination across a half dozen countries. Climate mitigation strategies had unaccounted-for impacts on the bond between people and reindeer that has shaped the arctic tundra of Sápmi. And repurposing a pastoralist community’s centuries-old adaptation in Kenya offered an unexpected way to protect lions and the rare antelope they hunt.
It’s a good reminder that thinking across borders includes looking outside the systems and silos we work in to see the web of cause and effect, problem and solution, that unite people, animals, and the landscapes they share. From tropical forests to African savannah, wet meadows to Mongolia’s mountain slopes, please join
me on a tour of large landscapes around the world as they work to address the most pressing issues in wildlife conservation and management today.
Header image: Protecting large landscapes is about more than preserving individual species, it’s also about sustaining ecological processes and relationships. In the arctic lichenlands of Sápmi, the cyclical migration of reindeer and people is woven into both land and culture. So too has the wildebeest migration shaped the Serengeti, working lands provided refuge for waterfowl and antelope in the Mountain West, and shepherds trod their mark on mountain slopes from the Alps to Mongolia. The story of wildlife conservation, then, is one of abundance, and movement, and coming together as people and animals to share the landscape, face new threats, and care for one another. Ina-Theres Sparrok, a herder in Voengelh Njaarke reindeer herding district in Norway, captures this confluence in the spring migration of reindeer across snow- and ice-covered routes that grow more treacherous with climate change.
