THE DEAL
It's hard to say whose idea it first was to make British Columbia's 15.5-million-acre Muskwa-Kechika region -- about as large as seven Yellowstones -- into one big legislated area devoted to wildlife and wilderness preservation. But much of the early dreaming was done by Dave Porter, chairperson of the Kaska Dena First Nations Council, and two other Canadians, George Smith and Wayne Sawchuk. Smith is the conservation director for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. Sawchuk is an odder sort: a logger and a trapper who's known as an incredibly skilled tracker and reader of animal signs -- a throwback, like the wild Muskwa-Kechika itself, to an earlier era -- but also a dedicated conservationist and accomplished photographer.

"Like all things, the concept of protecting the Muskwa-Kechika had its evolution," says Peck, who was raised in Trutch, British Columbia, on the Alaska Highway, and made his first trip on horseback into the region 48 years ago. He remembers an old guide and outfitter, Leo Rutledge, talking in the 1970s about how the area should be protected, though it was Smith and Sawchuk, in the 1990s, who got the ball rolling after a chance encounter at an environmental meeting that concerned an entirely different wilderness area. The two men then stayed up all night talking -- about Muskwa-Kechika. The two subsequently formed a campaign to protect what they called at the time the northern Rockies of British Columbia, and soon afterward hooked up with Peck through a mutual acquaintance. The idea finally got real legs around 1993, when the provincial government gathered the various stakeholders -- the oil and gas industry, First Nations representatives, hunters and guides, environmental groups, policy makers -- and got them to sit down together. Four years of negotiations resulted in the establishment by the British Columbia legislature of the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area in October 1997. In 2001, an additional four million acres was set aside.

The heart of this wild land has been scratched by hardscrabble miners and other searchers in the past, as has the land just to the east of the northern Rocky Mountains, where the tilted slab of stone and sky finally meets the plains. This terrain, the muskeg, which parallels the north-south run of the mountains, bounding them like the moat to a grand castle, is a fantastically rich and swampy flatland, largely uninhabited -- and uninhabitable -- by humans, a place as subtle as the mountains are dramatic, yet connected and vital to that other terrain, providing the mountains' inhabitants with critical habitat needs such as spring calving and nesting and grazing grounds. The muskeg also holds immense deposits of oil and gas. And so in those lengthy negotiations among the various stakeholders, Peck, Sawchuk, Smith, and others, realizing they could not stop the juggernaut of oil and gas development across all of Canada, proposed a compromise. Conservationists were given a four-million-acre patchwork of several large protected parks throughout the region, the largest 1.64 million acres in size, while industry was granted the right to explore the potential for resource extraction (natural gas, primarily, as well as oil, mining, and timber) on land totaling 11.3 million acres, although there would be numerous restrictions on development.

The size of the trophy helped ease much of the possible consternation among all parties. Given a 15.5-million-acre pie in such an unpeopled landscape as northern Canada, there was for once almost enough for everybody. A map of the area resembles a dragon standing upright on its hind legs, with lobes of spiny armor radiating from its body. The head, with gaping jaws, is facing north and west, the sacred, protected parks, including a vast, oblong core, ensconced safely, or so we are told, in the beast's belly and chest. The other 11.3 million acres -- the dragon's spines, skin, some of its armor, legs, arms, and tail -- comprise a patchwork of nine million acres of "special management zones," and 2.3 million acres of "wildland zones" where protection of the ecosystem's wild character -- the dragon's essence, so to speak -- would be the main goal of land managers. The legislation called for a kind of broad study of each watershed before any oil and gas drilling could proceed. Development would be allowed only under specific conditions, using state-of-the-art exploration methods. For example, slant-hole technology could be used to minimize the number of drilling pads required, and vehicles could use temporary roads, lanes of compressed snow and ice that vanish come summer, when they're obviously no longer usable. In some places, drillers might be required to use only a frozen riverbed for access; they'd have to be finished and out before spring, when the sleeping dragon began to stir again. A secret wellhead might remain, like a tiny needle stuck in the beast's thick hide, but that would be it. The dragon's heart would be protected forever. Not a perfect deal, by any means, but far better than what would have existed -- which is to say no protection whatsoever -- had Sawchuk, Smith, Peck, and the others not entered the fray.

"This is going to work," Peck tells me. "It's a new way of doing business, so it scares some people, but it's going to work."

The legislation also authorized (and funded) a multiparty advisory board made up of First Nations representatives; local, regional, and provincial government appointees; the oil and gas industry; and loggers, miners, hunters, guides, and environmentalists. The board was also given the responsibility of disbursing $3 million a year on special projects in the area -- mainly education, research, oversight, and restoration. It funded, for instance, the development of a Conservation Area Design -- a scientific analysis of the wild health of the entire region, including a plan on how to preserve that wildness -- by two outside organizations, Round River Conservation Studies and the Nature Conservancy of Canada. (Round River Conservation Studies is an American conservation group on whose board I sit as a trustee, which is how I first became aware of these issues.) Needless to say, the conservation community at large is watching with great interest, for if traditionally opposing parties can find a way to hammer out some grand conservation scheme here, utilizing principles of conservation biology -- a science which acknowledges that all natural processes are or should be interconnected -- then there might be similar hope for other areas around the world. The Muskwa-Kechika model, says Peck, who chairs the advisory board, demonstrates that legislation can serve as "a catalyst to make the hard decisions."