Yellowstone to Yukon: Transborder conservation across a vast international landscape

• Y2Y is a landscape vision, a geographic region, a conservation mission, a network, and organization.
• Y2Y has been highlighted as one of the world's premier “large landscape” conservation initiatives.
• Current programmatic work by the Y2Y Conservation Initiative focuses on subregional networking and climate change.
• The evolution of Y2Y presents important considerations regarding discursive shifts, norm entrepreneurialism and governance.
• Key lessons from Y2Y concern iconographic messaging, “thinking big,” and practicing conservation at multiple scales.

During the mid-1990s, conservationists in the Rocky Mountains of the United States and Canada encountered the assonant composite of two nationally iconic words: “Yellowstone to Yukon.” Y2Y attracted a significant audience within the conservation world, not least—but not only—because each word connoted touchstone beliefs about wildness, wilderness, and wildlife. Today Y2Y is widely recognized as one of the earliest transboundary “large landscape” conservation initiatives, and the Y2Y label applies to a landscape vision, a geographic region, a conservation mission, a network, and an organization. More indefinite is the degree to which Y2Y has served as a form of mountain governance. Y2Y has helped to establish an interconnected community of conservation practitioners and conservation supporters, has channeled sizeable scientific attention toward the needs of far-ranging wildlife and, via norm entrepreneurialism and discursive shift, has brought about significant coherence within the conservation community on the need for landscape connectivity. Yet while some decision makers have formally recognized Y2Y, the influence on higher-level governance has been mostly indirect. And although Y2Y has been held up as a model for mountain biodiversity conservation, that model is more reflective of conservation biology than of governance theory. Nonetheless, in its multiple forms, Y2Y does influence and enhance conservation activities in the region. Most recently, the Y2Y Conservation Initiative, a non-profit organization registered in both Canada and the US, has focused on key “priority areas” within the larger region. Looking forward, even as Y2Y has achieved tangible success on a number of fronts, it faces myriad challenges that will require an increasingly responsive, open-minded, and adaptive approach to conservation.