Wildlife
The breakdown of binational relations and gutting of U.S. science agencies brings uncertainty to current cross-border conservation efforts
Canada is home to some of the planet’s most extraordinary animal migrations. Perhaps best known are the spawning runs of adult salmon that make their way out of the Pacific and up myriad waterways to the streams of their birth, distances that can exceed 1,500 kilometres. Arctic terns likewise make a staggering return journey from the Arctic to Antarctic, flying more than 40,000 kilometres each year. But perhaps most iconic of all are the millions of monarch butterflies that gather in the mountains of central Mexico each winter, painting fir trees in preternatural black and orange after an eight-month, out-and-back cross-continental epic of some 4,500 kilometres, in which five generations are born to die.
No surprise, then, that monarchs are the poster species for the 1995 Canada/ Mexico/U.S. Trilateral Committee for Wildlife and Ecosystem Conservation and Management, a model for cooperative continental conservation across a shared array of ecosystems, habitats and species. Along with other conservation endeavours spanning the continent, the agreement does so in the spirit of neighbour-supporting-neighbour. An often-fractious jigsaw of inter and intranational jurisdictions, agencies, Indigenous nations, NGOs and special interest groups work together for the good of all who occupy these landscapes. Though the monarch’s spectacular journey represents an ancient rhythm, it’s one increasingly buffeted by gusts of development, habitat loss and pollution, leading to its listing as an endangered species. And now there’s another headwind — politics. Malign actions of the current U.S. administration have opened up a country-sized conservation hole in the middle of the monarch’s migration route, affecting not only this butterfly but the conservation and collective management of ecosystems and myriad species from waterfowl to wolverines to whales.
While unjustified tariffs that threaten the well-being of all North Americans were dominating the news cycle, Trump 2.0 was simultaneously taking a wrecking ball to international institutions concerned with health, science and the environment. This included replacing directorships with manifestly unqualified individuals, overt ideological politicization of formerly non-partisan institutions (supported by disinformation emanating directly from the Oval Office — transgenic mice, anyone?), indiscriminate mass firings and layoffs, Orwellian restrictions on research and communication that make Stephen Harper’s muzzling of government scientists seem like a sandbox scrap, and funding cuts and grant freezes involving hundreds of millions of dollars that disproportionately affect graduate students and early career researchers — literally an entire generation of American science. These actions had immediate effect on everything from world-leading biomedical research to life-saving international development work and pollution vigilance, from key science-and-education funding to land and park management, and from critical atmospheric, ocean and weather data to natural disaster relief.
The virtual gutting of America’s main climate agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, saw former chief scientist Craig McLean lament that U.S. science now risked becoming a “backwater enterprise.” Venerable British journal Nature cast a broader net with the headline “An assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere.”
“There are many ways the pointless and bizarre antics of the president are undermining relationships with Canada in general that are also detrimental to species shared between our nations — or the land, air and water they occupy,” says Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity in Washington, D.C. “We’re still trying to figure out where the worst on-the-ground impacts will be, so our biggest question is: how bad are things going to get?”
Hartl’s worries aren’t just about individual species but the human relationships and organizations dedicated to their preservation. The Algonquin to Adirondacks Collaborative, known as A2A, is a U.S., Canada and First Nations partnership working with scientists, policymakers and conservation groups to maintain ecosystem and genetic connectivity across a biodiverse region of hardwood and mixed forest spanning eastern Ontario and upstate New York. Home to an array of both wide-ranging and endemic wildlife, the organization’s website calls it “one of the last large-scale, intact forest and wetland linkages left in Eastern North America … [and] the best remaining potential for wildlife movement across the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system.”
A2A Executive Director Jess Lax echoes Hartl’s sentiments. “Information sharing is impacted when relationships are impacted,” she says of issues with an upcoming biennial meeting to be held in the U.S., but for which funds — and motivation — are now lacking. “If Canadians [don’t want to or can’t attend], we’ll see that down the road — relationships won’t be as strong.”
“An assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere.”
It’s a critical consideration when information gathering itself is at stake. An important aspect of A2A’s work is habitat and connectivity mapping used to prioritize which land to protect in order to maximize benefits for stay-at-home species like fungi and turtles, as well as to support larger, more mobile species whose long-distance movements are critical to gene-flow. With money from Canada for north of the border and federal National Park Service money to cover the American work, the latter was only partially complete before funds were cut. If money can’t subsequently be found elsewhere, this could result in working from only a partial picture of the landscape going forward. “That adds a big wrench to the plan — and a lot of uncertainty,” says Lax. “We’d been working on it for 18 months and were hoping to finish by fall 2025. But that doesn’t seem like it can happen now.”
With planned habitat protection becoming a much more protracted process, organizations like A2A are forced into a more cautious stance; perspectives change on what’s possible in the moment, but also on vigilance for long-term repercussions that can’t yet be realized. One likely impact is in the area of road ecology and wildlife crossings, for which the U.S. typically had more money than Canada. When U.S. agencies were gearing up to do something big on that front, Lax notes, it created momentum for all parties to build on. “Now those funds are likely gone, along with some capacity, and their attention likely has to be focused elsewhere,” she says.
Which is unfortunate for wide-ranging critters like Alice the Moose, A2A’s emblematic mascot. Radio-collared in New York state’s Adirondack Park in 1998, Alice travelled some 570 kilometres to Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park, crossing a border, the St. Lawrence River and Highway 401 in the process. “It’s already a complex thing to figure out which species benefit most from road crossings, and this just further complicates things,” laments Lax.
Spanning five American states, four Canadian jurisdictions and some 75 Indigenous territories along the northern spine of the Rocky Mountains, the 1.3 million square kilometres encompassed by the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative form the most intact large-mountain wildlife region in the world. Since 1993, Y2Y has worked with hundreds of partners on the “big, bold idea” of protecting interconnected, biodiverse wildlands and freedom to roam for grizzly and black bears, wolves and mountain lions, caribou and moose, bighorn sheep and mountain goats — as well as a catalogue of smaller wildlife and biodiverse valley and alpine ecosystems that support them. Knowing that keeping such a vast and vital region intact is the best way to tackle both the loss of biodiversity and a changing climate, Y2Y addresses the critical needs not only of the region’s wildlife but also of its human inhabitants.
Within the corridor lies the spectacular Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, a 1932 union of Alberta’s Waterton Lakes National Park and Glacier National Park in Montana that represents both a symbolic and functional part of Y2Y. With its glaciated peaks, canyons, boreal forest, prairie grasslands, deep glacial lakes and rivers that flow to three separate oceans, the variety of front-range ecoregions is matched by a diversity of wildlife that includes the megafauna listed above, a litany of birds and a celebrated elk herd that migrates annually between summer alpine habitat in Glacier and winter prairie ranges in Waterton. These features make it a popular destination for both Americans and Canadians. But because conservation relies so heavily on people power, staff cuts on one side of the park will affect not just its ability to serve the public but the species it’s meant to jointly protect.
“Ten years ago, we held a big international meeting on transboundary conservation where someone brought up the difference between negative peace — the absence of conflict — and positive peace — the action of working together to resolve shared challenges and opportunities,” recalls Jodi Hilty, president and chief scientist at Yellowstone to Yukon. “That has really come back around for me today because it makes transboundary conservation, which is all about shared values and efforts, more meaningful than ever; something we always took for granted in the Y2Y region now holds a new significance.”
Transboundary conservation efforts can also be fiendishly complex. The International Porcupine Caribou Agreement between Canada and the U.S. is a legally binding 1987 treaty to coordinate conservation of the large transnational Porcupine caribou herd that migrates annually between Alaska, Yukon and Northwest Territories. The herd’s more than 250,000-square kilometre range comprises 12 areas within which five different agencies (Canadian Wildlife Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Alaska, Yukon and N.W.T. departments dedicated to fish and game) have jurisdiction. Thus, herd governance, by both a multinational board and technical committee, involves two federal and three state/territorial governments, eight Indigenous land claim agreements, six national and territorial parks or preserves, and two wildlife management areas. A model of co-operative management, it has also been successful.
Herd management is based foremost on aerial censuses. And while a 2017 effort estimated more than 200,000 animals — the highest since the 1970s — recent attempted updates have been hampered by issues both ecological (e.g., the herd not fully aggregating) and environmental (e.g., heat and wildfire smoke).
Unfortunately, because it uses Alaska’s ever-contentious Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Porcupine caribou herd has also become a political football between U.S. Republicans, Democrats and native Alaskans. Mark Hebblewhite, a Canadian researcher, former board member of Y2Y, and professor of wildlife biology at the University of Montana in Missoula has spent time with the herd. “During the first Trump administration,I was working with [the Bureau of Land Management] in Alaska when they were directed to open up all their lands for drilling,” he recalls. “Because it’s some of the most expensive oil and gas on the planet to develop, when they had a sale on leases, there were only four bids. There will probably be a re-emergence of threats to [drill], but the economics of accessing this resource under free markets might sink it.” That can only be good news for the herd, which, by nature of its binational peregrinations, is sensitive to habitat impacts on either side of the border.
As for how herd management might be affected by cuts, Hebblewhite defaults to one of ecology’s favoured rubrics: context-dependency. “It’s contingent on so many things,” he says. “Like, who specifically got fired? Are they involved in harvest management? If you don’t have harvest data from First Nations and native Alaskans, you’re missing a key management component. And getting that data is based on hard-won relationships of mutual trust between individuals; trust that comes slowly but is easily lost [if the people disappear].”
He also points to the colossal task of keeping track of the herd. A pause on U.S. spending could mean no survey aircraft all summer. “It’s hard enough to count caribou but harder still when half the team is missing and no one can write a cheque,” he says.
The pointless and bizarre antics of the president are undermining relationships with Canada.
The flow of money across borders in these enterprises is all the more fraught because it’s asymmetrical. Canadian conservation groups have a history of tapping into U.S. funds to improve our own country’s relatively weak record of environmental stewardship, a reality spurred by toothless species protection laws, little funding and minimal enforcement of protected lands that’s likely to create more gaps. As an example, Hebblewhite led a study analyzing how protected areas within the Y2Y complex were expanding, finding that while 70 per cent of the budget came from U.S. sources, barriers to acquiring land in the U.S. meant that 70 per cent of the spending — and thus expansion of protected areas — was in Canada.
Though this new regime is bad news for Y2Y, Jodi Hilty believes motivation on both sides of the border can help weather the storm. “When the U.S. listed wolverines as endangered last year, it was clear the species couldn’t remain viable in the Lower 48 unless it stayed connected to the Canadian population and that the biggest barrier was the need to get wildlife safely across roads,” she says of a range of wildlife crossing projects approved or underway in both countries. “Funding may be a question mark now, but these regions are really committed to this stuff, and so continuing conversations to support these efforts in the context of a larger landscape is important. Having something that’s bigger than any one region keeps people engaged.”
Meanwhile, executive orders that stripped away protections for terrestrial wildlife and the environment are also affecting transboundary aquatic conservation.
Cherished on both sides of the border as both home and a source of drinking water, food, recreation, trade and transport for some 30 million North Americans, the Great Lakes are the largest and most diverse freshwater ecosystem on Earth. The binational Great Lakes Fishery Commission has, for more than seven decades, coordinated Canadian and American government agencies and conservation groups in protecting the lakes’ $5-billion commercial and recreational fisheries from overexploitation, pollution and the scourge of invasive species. But now, staffing cuts to its long-running control program for invasive sea lamprey — a fish parasite common to top predators like lake trout and whitefish that single-handedly almost destroyed the Great Lakes fishery in the 1950s — threaten the entirety of this vast, mid-continental treasure.
And out east, with fewer than 380 of their kind remaining, North Atlantic right whales endangered by ship strikes and fishing-gear entanglements now face the added danger of indifference from U.S. policy. “This is a species, like any wild animal, that doesn’t recognize borders, so what happens in the U.S. can impact in Canada,” Kim Elmslie, campaign director for Oceana Canada, told CBC. “Rolling back or changing measures in the U.S. could hasten this species’ decline and potential extinction.”
Although pushback is coalescing in the U.S., it’s hampered by many in the scientific establishment being intimidated into silence by the threat of further job loss. And while the 100-plus lawsuits filed against the Trump administration by everyone from worker’s rights groups to Hartl’s Center for Biological Diversity can claim a few early wins, it’s mostly a glacial process in a time of urgency. Fortunately, there’s the energy of youth to counter. Launched by five early-and mid-career scientists, “Stand Up for Science” became an instant national movement to defend the discipline as a public good and central pillar of social progress. March 7 saw official protests in 32 U.S. cities and statements of support from international organizations, like Canada’s Evidence for Democracy, who understand such assaults as very much about their own country’s internal politics.
Environmental issues also apply to humans, with many people working to ensure water and air pollution generated in one country doesn’t hurt the other. “Essentially, I see a general disruption of the ability to cooperate on any environmental challenge,” says Brett Hartl, deriding the meteoric impact of Trump’s actions on institutional knowledge, expertise and capacity to address complexities that took enormous effort over decades to accrue. “People burning [this] down in the most random, untargeted way is going to make it hard to rebuild. The cumulative effects of attacks on every agency are, in the end, going to be far more costly than the money saved from any individual action.”
And yet, it’s that same human component and history of cooperation that might pull us through in the end. A single truculent foe may threaten monarchs and other migratory species, binational wildlife corridors and waterways, but more progressive governments and people passionate about the protection of these species and environments are unlikely to give up on a way forward. “To the degree that non-governmental organizations can continue to work in a trans-boundary way,” says Jodi Hilty, “these efforts will likely prove to be [most] important to the long-term health of both countries.”
This story is part of a series about ecological corridors produced with support from Parks Canada. Learn more by visiting the Right of Passage website.
This story is from the May/June 2025 Issue
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