By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 9, 1997; Page A27

The government of British Columbia announced today the creation of a 10 million-acre wilderness preserve in the northern Rockies, protecting an area dubbed "North America's Serengeti" because of its abundant wildlife.

After five years of bargaining among provincial government officials, conservationists, oil and gas industry executives, and others with a stake in the area, British Columbia Premier Glen Clark unveiled what is one of the largest conservation steps in Canadian history.

Of the area, 2.5 million acres will be in fully protected parks. The other 8 million will be the site of only limited development, and even that will be designed in ways to protect wildlife habitat and the overall ecology of the area, said Mary Granskou, executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.

Creation of the wilderness area has the support of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Indian communities in the area and others, Granskou said.

"This is huge. It is on the scale of Yellowstone; it is Banff without the roads," Granskou said, referring to the centerpiece Canadian park that has been under development pressure in recent years.

By contrast, the new area in British Columbia's northeastern corner is largely untouched, still home to as many as 27,000 moose, 15,000 elk, 500 grizzly bears and other species.

It also is a potentially attractive site for oil and gas exploration, a fact that made negotiations with industry officials critical to the project's success.

"This demonstrates a new style of cooperation. . . . This will preserve critically important core wilderness areas and temper industry practices around their periphery," Granskou said. Though classified as park land, there will be little or no road development and limited public access, Granskou said.

Clark's announcement is a major victory for a group of conservationists trying to establish a connected corridor of protected areas from Yellowstone National Park in the United States, north through the Yukon. The new British Columbia preserve is a major step toward that goal, which seeks to ensure the survival of grizzly bears and other species that roam across wide areas of wilderness.

Tanzania's Serengeti National Park is world-renowned for its plentiful, untouched wildlife.