Borders of Biodiversity

Borders of Biodiversity is about histories of transnational conservation, examining how and why people of different nationalities across North America collaborate when species cross national borders. This story matters because we are confronting a tension today between a warming world in which lifeforms are fundamentally on the move and a walled world trying to restrict those movements. This book centers on three focal species—gray wolves, monarch butterflies, and giant sequoias—reflecting how these species were pivotal to the making, unmaking, and remaking of borders. Conserving large landscapes for these representatives of biodiversity takes us beyond the international lines of modern maps from the U.S.-Canada border, to the U.S.-Mexico border, to the treaty borders of Indigenous nations. The book contextualizes the origins and significance of wildlife corridors as conservation and climate adaptation strategies.