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...