Pre-expedition Interview
  Conducted on September 2, 1998, by Michael Heasley

MH: You’re taking off on another trip for Radio Expeditions. Can you tell us about it?

Chadwick: We’re going to do a piece about this huge conservation proposal called Y2Y. A lot of people, especially people who go online, will be familiar with Y2K, the coming—perhaps—crash of computers in the year 2000. Y2Y is different.

Y2Y stands for Yellowstone to Yukon. It’s a proposal from some Canadian and American conservationists to create this huge zone reaching from Yellowstone National Park all the way...into Canada through Alberta and British Columbia and into the Yukon, [then] into Alaska. So it follows kind of the range of the Rocky Mountains up north and then bends a little bit off to the west. And the idea is to create this conservation zone that would link wildlife populations from the Yukon all the way down to Yellowstone.

MH: All this land would be national park land or protected area?

Chadwick: Actually a lot of this area already is national park land or protected area....This is rough terrain for people to settle, it’s very mountainous and very lightly populated. However, there...are towns and communities and highways and railroads, and those things aren’t going anywhere.

The Y2Y proposal really means recognizing that a lot of this area...is still a good home for North American wildlife. What we need to do to keep these species alive is provide some connections across some of the highways and railroads, provide ways for those animals to get back and forth. So this is not a proposal to nationalize all that land and move people off.

MH: Whom will you be meeting up with for this story?

Chadwick: One of the Y2Y supporters is hiking from Yellowstone all the way up to the Yukon. This is a young Canadian naturalist and park guide by the name of Karsten Heuer. He’s walking with his dog, Webster. The two of them are traveling—by foot, by canoe, on horseback, on skis and snowshoes—to talk to people along the way and call attention to this idea.

[Y2Y] is a grassroots idea that came from these Canadian and American conservationists who were sitting around talking and looking at maps and recognized that there’s a huge opportunity. If we do a little bit more in providing these animal overpasses, you can make it a really thriving region. For instance, the grizzly bear populations in Yellowstone, which are now isolated in an island, can be connected to the grizzly bear populations all the way to the Yukon. Wolves and bears and other large wildlife species can actually traverse this region as they did a couple of hundred years ago.

MH: What’s Karsten Heuer’s itinerary?

Chadwick: Karsten started out in late May down in Yellowstone. For the first two weeks he was hiking through snow....And he’s going to finish in early October in Alberta, a little bit north of Banff [National Park in Alberta, Canada]. Next spring he’s going to pick up where he left off...by canoe. I’m sure he’ll be skiing and snowshoeing at the point where he picks it up again. By the end of the summer he’ll get through to the Yukon.

MH: When and where will you be joining him?

Chadwick: We’re going to pick him up right north of Banff, where he’s joining with a couple of other naturalists and going by horseback for about a hundred miles.

MH: And for how many of those miles will you be with him?

Chadwick: Well, I think fifty or so, maybe a little more. We’ll be with him for three or four days—myself and our recording engineer and the producer, Carolyn Jensen, who’s the creator of Radio Expeditions.

MH: What do you expect to see?

Chadwick: We’re going to be in meadows and mountains. We can see elk, we can see bear, we can see wolves, and we can see a lot of land.

MH: Do you think there’s any danger that, once we call attention to these areas, we’ll see more human traffic through them?

Chadwick: People are going there already. The Rocky Mountain region in the U.S. is showing significant population growth. And the people who are moving there are by and large well educated....They’re going to these regions because they’re clean, they’re open, they allow access to the outdoors, to a lot of recreational opportunities. So I think people are already aware. What Y2Y is saying is this: Let’s recognize these people are coming here....and preserve the values that are bringing them here.

MH: How does biodiversity figure into the Y2Y story?

Chadwick: Habitat preservation is what matters, and that’s what Y2Y is about. Y2Y is about recognizing the role of large animals in the biosphere: What role do they play, and how do you keep them in the region?

These are animals that range over huge, huge areas—hundreds and hundreds of square miles. They often intrude on human activity—or we’ve intruded on their region—and come down and kill livestock....But the wildlife in these regions also shows a capacity to learn how to live around human communities. The question is, Can human communities learn to live around them...?

MH: Do you foresee any controversy—people thinking that if we make it easier for animals to migrate we increase the odds of more cougar attacks, more bear attacks?

Chadwick: I do think there is a likely controversy that the conservation movement has to address. Around Yellowstone, for instance, there’s a fund established by wildlife groups...[to] pay ranchers for livestock that’s been attacked by bears and wolves. They paid out, I think, [U.S.] $60,000 over the past couple of years for cattle and sheep losses....Maybe the conservation movement needs to do more of that, and to continue to do a public education job.

MH: A lot of people seem to be for preserving wildlife—as long as it’s convenient.