By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 27, 1997; Page A20

Across North America, the grizzly bears and wolves don't care where the borders lie. They won't stop roaming at the boundaries of protected areas like Yellowstone National Park. The 49th parallel, which divides much of Canada and the United States, holds no significance to the animals.

But, despite conservation efforts that date back 100 years in both countries, large mammals have been given a smattering of islands, green spots that seem large in their own right yet fall short of what nature needs to sustain itself. In between are roads, towns, coal mines, ski resorts and ranches.

At this small Alberta resort, a group of conservationists gathered this month to start filling in what they regard as the missing pieces.

Their goal: an unbroken seam of protected land running from Yellowstone in the south through the Yukon Territories in the north. The area outlined by their plan covers nearly 800,000 square miles. It includes some of the world's most prominent parks, like Yellowstone in Wyoming and Banff in Alberta, Canada; it also cuts through major urban areas and some prime mineral, timber and ranch land.

There is no illusion about evicting humans or shutting down development. The group gathered here argues instead that two of the world's richest economies should be able to conserve a portion of its remaining wilderness.

"This is the wild part of North America, one of the few places left where everything is still intact and we have a chance to keep it intact," said Dave Foreman, a coordinator of the Wildlands Project, an effort to conserve wilderness areas.

The Yellowstone-to-Yukon, or Y2Y, initiative is rooted in the science of conservation biology, which looks at the success of species in relation to the condition of the land and environment around them.

Scientists contend that even large protected areas cannot guarantee the survival of such species as grizzly bears if they are bifurcated by roads or restricted at their borders by farms, ranches, towns or other developments. For the full food chain to survive and remain in balance, protected areas need to be connected so animals can hunt, propagate and roam without constraints.

The principle is gaining credibility, driving long-range land use plans in highly developed places such as Florida and spurring efforts to connect rain forest reserves in South America.

The Yellowstone-to-Yukon idea is ambitious, but those involved believe it can be achieved. Within days of the conference, the government of British Columbia announced completion of an agreement to protect 2 million acres of northern Rockies wilderness and tightly control development of 8 million acres more. Supported by Canada's oil and gas industry, it is seen as a model of how wilderness and industry can coexist.

"Maybe at the dawn of the 21st century we could think a little differently," said Harvey Locke, a past president of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and an originator of the Yellowstone-to-Yukon project. "We need to think how the landscape lives, not how we draw lines."