The Ministry for the Future

sheep from extinction by an effort now being studied and copied all over the world, and around that same time they had forbidden outright the killing of mountain lions. Connecting that great bio-island to Yellowstone meant getting Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Oregon, and Nevada on board, and though there were political complications in all these states, the truth was they were mostly emptying of humans across huge swathes of their rural land, and if public and private entities were offered a good enough deal, which mainly just meant offering them enough money for conservation easementlike arrangements, they usually went for it. The corridors could be patched together, the interstates finessed by under- and over-passes, the hunting laws changed, and the nights in particular given over to animals, as they mostly always had been. People diurnal, animals nocturnal, this wasn’t entirely just them trying to avoid us. A lot of them lived that way even in the wilderness. So, lots of people were paid for motion-sensitive night photos of animals they sent to us, like bounties in the old days but reversed, people paid for keeping them alive rather than killing them. Local governments were often enthusiastic, sensing tourism, and various federal agencies liked the plan, especially BLM and the Forest Service, which for the purposes of this project were the two agencies that counted most. If we could keep under the radar in Washington, where assholes congregate and bray loudly about the God-given right to kill everything in creation without restraint, we could usually make corridor creation work quite well.

So, fine. Corridors were extended from the south end of Y2Y in multiple directions, southwest to California, then right down the Sierra spine of California to its big deserts, then also west and north to the Cascades and Olympic Range, and then also down the continental divide, down Colorado and New Mexico right to the border. People were talking about a Y2T, meaning Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, just following the great line that forms the spine of both Americas. Most of the Latin American countries involved were already doing things like it, and Ecuador and Costa Rica had been leaders all along. It could happen.

So, but what about going east? Meaning east into the eastern half of the United States, and the eastern half of Canada?

Well, most of Canada is empty, really. Of course they have their wheat belt, and the Highway One Corridor, and their big cities, sure. But most of that is near the US border. And Canada is big. Really, they could lead the Half Earth movement without even changing much; shift two percent of their human population, and over half of their country would be left to the animals. Of course a lot of the world turns out to be like that. But Canada, wow.

The United States, not so much. The farm states have a well-distributed population, and farms occupy every square inch of land that can be cultivated, and they’ve killed off all the wild animals they can, in particular the top predators. So naturally they have a deer infestation, thus a tick infestation, thus a human plague of Lyme disease and so on. Oops! Ecology in action! And it’s true they still have the usual super-competent omnivore scavengers, the coyotes and raccoons and possums and such. But other than that, no. The Midwest has been treated like a continent-sized factory floor for assembling grocery store commodities, and anything that got in the way of that was designated a pest or vermin and killed off. Just the way it was. Part of a long-standing culture. It had been the same in California’s central valley, and it was still in the ag regions of the South.

So when you advocated for wild animals in these old-fashioned parts of the country, it was like advocating for locusts or your favorite plant disease. Even though they were getting it backwards in terms of source of disease. And living in pools of pesticides that were chewing on their hormones and their DNA in ways sure to kill them. But that was a case that had to be made, and for sure there were headwinds. There were people screaming at you at meetings. There were men with guns foaming at the mouth, sick with the anticipation of shooting and killing some animal, any animal, such that their target might easily shift from wolf to man, if they thought they could get away with it. The situation had to be handled with a touch of delicacy.

First, money. Significant applications of money. Then persuasion. Hedgerows often saved soil, they built soil, they were considered worth the land they took. Native plant strips, the same. No-till ag, the same. Habitat corridors had to be seen first as extensions of that kind of agriculture, done to increase soil building and soil resilience. Wide hedgerows were the wedge for this topic, the least objectionable innovation. Then the idea of wild animals had to be brought in as kind of pest control devices. Of course those who grazed domestic animals were not pleased, but since the mad cow disease scare in the previous decade, with its subsequent collapse of beef demand, there were simply far fewer domestic beasts out there to worry about. Hogs were enclosed, chickens were enclosed; those supposedly terrible wolves would now mostly be eating tick-infested crop-eating deer; it was the deer who were the pests, deer who devastated crops! It was a matter of crop protection to have wild predators on the land! And you could even hunt them later on, if some culling was found necessary. Although making this argument was a bit disingenuous, as some of the more hotheaded among my colleagues were all for doing their culling by hunting the hunters. But we who were friendly Midwestern spokesperson types emphasized the pest control aspect of re-introducing wild animals, without going into detail concerning which pests we were talking about.

And to tell the truth, the upper Midwest, and the states west of