In this interview, I discuss the book Borders of Biodiversity (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) with author Will Wright. The text explores how three charismatic species—gray wolves, monarch butterflies, and giant sequoias—reveal the limitations of rigid political and jurisdictional borders during an accelerating climate crisis.

Wright argues that traditional “fortress conservation,” which attempts to museumize nature within strict park boundaries, is insufficient for mobile species. Instead, successful preservation requires shifting focus toward ecological corridors that cross international lines and blend with human-use landscapes. The book demonstrates how studying these species spurred major advancements in science, including corridor ecology, chemical ecology, and dendrochronology. By blending historical research with personal field narratives, Wright underscores the continuous connections between human infrastructure, Indigenous practices, and shifting ecologies, making a case for binational solidarity and community-driven coexistence strategies to address the modern biodiversity crisis.

You can listen to the full interview on YouTube and Spotify or read an edited version of the transcript below.

Will Wright is assistant professor of history and environmental studies at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He worked as a postdoc at the University of British Columbia on a project integrating animal history and public attitudes toward gene editing cattle after finishing a Ph.D. at Montana State University in 2021. Will is author of the 2026 book Borders of Biodiversity: How Gray Wolves, Monarch Butterflies, and Giant Sequoias Transformed Large Landscape Conservation. Will specializes in the fields of human-animal relationships, conservation history, and history of science. 

Interview Transcript

This transcript is edited for clarity and length.

Jessica DeWitt: Hello, everyone! I am Jessica DeWitt. I am Editor-in-Chief here at the Network in Canadian History and Environment, and today I am talking to Will Wright about his new book, Borders of Biodiversity. Woo! Published with University of North Carolina Press this year. You want to introduce yourself, Will?

Will Wright:  I’m currently assistant professor of history and environmental studies at Augustana University, which is in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I finished a PhD at Montana State University back in 2021, and then was a postdoc at University of British Columbia, with Dr. Heidi Tworek…

DeWitt: Yes, and that’s how our paths initially crossed a couple years ago. We published a piece on that research that you did with Heidi. I was really excited when the University of North Carolina Press reached out and was like, do you want to read this book and check it out? And I was like, yes, yes, I do! So I thought we’d start off by just getting down to the basics of the book. It’s based on three case studies of charismatic species that have been the subject of substantial conservation campaigns. So I’m wondering if we could start by talking about these three species and explaining your rationale for choosing them.

Wright: Yeah, so the long subtitle of the book is How Gray Wolves, Monarch Butterflies, and Giant Sequoias Transformed Large Landscape Conservation. And I initially wanted to write about something that had to do with the biodiversity crisis. I think when I was a grad student, I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction where she talks about a variety of case studies like Panamanian golden toads and other sort of species that are on the brink of collapse, and so it really sort of hammered home that species are disappearing at a rate, I think, 100 to 1,000 times the background rate in the fossil record. But it’s hard to write about biological diversity as a whole. It’s very… other than if you framed it as kind of an intellectual concept or a scientific concept… it’s hard to kind of hard to grasp, and so to make it kind of more tangible, I wanted to root it in specific species and specific case studies. 

The IUCN has a list of extinction risks within different taxa of species. And so each one of them kind of represents a larger trend of biodiversity loss. So it’s like 34% of all conifers are threatened with extinction, 26% of all mammals, and 40% of all insects. And so the sequoia sort of stands in for the conifer trees, the wolves stand in for the mammals, and then the monarch butterflies stand in for the insects. So that was one rationale. And obviously, they stick out since they’re bright orange, uh, so they’re easy to spot. And then the sequoias are kind of a biological spectacle in themselves in California. They’re as tall as a 30-story skyscraper, uh, and they live, you know, 2,000 years old, so many of them living today were saplings when Jesus of Nazareth was walking the Earth, right? So … for those reasons, people are sort of attracted to these particular species, and so that was another sort of rationale for choosing them. And then, each one of them is primarily situated on a particular border, too, so the wolf case study is primarily rooted on the US-Canada border; the monarch butterflies, although the migration itself is trinational across Canada, U.S, and Mexico, it’s largely U.S.-Mexico, and then the sequoias deal with collaborations across borders when it comes to U.S. resource agencies and the Indigenous nations of California, largely the Miwok, Yokut, and Mono. And so the central question I sort of wanted to grapple with is how and why do people of different nationalities collaborate when these species span political borders, both international borders, but also jurisdictional borders.

DeWitt: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about how these charismatic species are so linked to … I’ve been doing more work with my colleague, Sarah York-Bertram, on emotional ecologies, and thinking about the way that emotions filter into our relationships with the environment. Thinking about the way that these particular species resonate on an emotional level for human beings is part of the story…

Wright: Totally.

DeWitt: And then also, I’m thinking about the necessity of those of us who have undergone very large topics, understanding the obstacles to figuring out: “how am I going to write about this really big concept and also be able to finish it within my lifetime?”  I did my dissertation on the history of provincial parks in Canada and State parks in the United States, and that is over a thousand parks, and I had to figure out how to do that. And I still think it was too big of a project what I ended up with. But those of us who have done that really know how how critical it is to whittle it down. And that’s something that maybe people who haven’t undergone these kind of projects don’t realize these kind of topical decisions that have to be made for practicality sake.

Wright: Yeah. Well, and there’s kind of a narrative issue, too, of, like, how do you tie those three stories together so that they don’t feel like these kind of three separate case studies, you know? So, like, what’s the through line? And for me,  I guess my through line was that climate change is accelerating the movement of species across borders. There’s a scientific meta study that showed that of about 4,000 species recently tracked, about three quarters of them had shifted their ranges already … about twenty kilometers every decade. Species are moving either up in elevation or closer to the poles. And so, you know, for many species, survival is going to mean moving across international lines, and we need more of this kind of collaboration and solidarities across borders if many of these… and so that’s where large landscape conservation matters and comes into the picture.

DeWitt: So that kind of plays into my second question. How is Canada specifically interwoven into the conservation stories in this book?

Wright: With the wolf case study, it is a comparative history of wolf eradication in both Western Canada and the Western United States, mostly looking at Alberta and Montana. I tried to explain why wolves were eliminated totally south of the 49th parallel, while they remained in certain pockets sort of north of it in Canada. My sort of short answer is there were differences in how Washington DC and Ottawa applied state power to those areas. Whereas there’s kind of these very similar trajectories of both places. They both adopt bounty systems that are largely driven by livestock industries, but then they diverge in the sense that Alberta and other provinces continue with that system, whereas in the United States, they turn it over to the federal government and say, we’re going to have this Bureau of Biological Survey that’s going to be the sole entity. So that’s the biggest difference that I think explains why they were eliminated totally.

And then when this ecological vacuum occurs, in the mid-20th century, we kind of have this change in policy. So you have things like the Endangered Species Act in the United States, but also change in outlook, right? So the Canadian author Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf being probably the most famous example of that, leads to more tolerance of wolves, and so they start to recover because of both changes in policy and cultural attitudes. And so wolves start reclaiming ancestral territory. They start moving down the Canadian Rockies, largely, and start repopulating areas in northwestern Montana. 

And it’s at this very same time that wildlife biologists are starting to use radio collaring to track wolf movements. These biologists, both working in Canada and the United States, are just amazed at these trans-border dispersal movements, and so that becomes inspiration for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, which is a binational collaboration between conservation activists, both in Canada and the United States, to think less about core areas and more about connecting them through wildlife corridors.

So that’s the Canadian story. The second one, with the monarch butterflies, really is sort of rooted in Canada in the sense that people in all three countries had been seeing monarchs come and go for the last two centuries. But there was this Canadian couple, Fred and Nora Urquhart, who were based in the University of Toronto. They wanted to know: where are the monarchs that we see every summer and fall, where do they go during the winter? And so they started this citizen science tagging brigade called the Insect Migration Association, where they asked for volunteers to tag monarchs and report recoveries. And that started right after World War II. Over the next twenty years, they bring in thousands of participants, mostly from southern Canada and the US. in 1975, they confirmed that there’s this trinational migration, this migratory cycle that happens. So it’s, it’s kind of amazing … this scientific discovery of the 20th century, and it’s initiated by this Canadian couple.

And then the sequoias probably are the least Canadian in the sense that the sequoias grow primarily in California. But, the sequoias themselves tell a story of kind of supranational climate because they were so instrumental in the science of dendrochronology. And so they do have a story that at least can speak to. You know, anywhere tree ring science is used had its origins in sequoia trees. So…

DeWitt: Absolutely. Yeah. So I asked the question about Canada because this is NiCHE, firstly, but, also, I think that it leads us to what I think is the primary strength of your book, which is the effective demonstration that these national borders are artificial, and that they are detrimental to the ecological well-being of the planet. So I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about how large landscape conservation troubles our understanding of national boundaries.

Wright: To kind of preface it, borders themselves are these power constructs that nation states impose to maintain social difference, largely–who is considered a citizen, who is not? You know, questions of that nature.

But when people realize that there’s these species that span two nation states or move across the border and have these transboundary movements, it then becomes a place of kind of social connection rather than social difference.

With the example of the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, or Y2Y, many of the activists in Alberta, or BC, or Idaho, or Montana, were like: “we did conservation in Canada, and in Canada alone.” And similarly, people in the United States did it there, but there was no interaction, or no reason to collaborate or to connect. And so, a perfect example is Diane Boyd. She is a wildlife biologist who’s primarily working right on the U.S.-Canada border near Glacier and Waterton National Parks.

And as wolves are sort of moving into the area, and in the late ’80s, she collars a wolf named Kishenina, or excuse me, Kay. Kay disperses 650 miles or 800 kilometers northward, and actually assimilates into another wolf pack in Pouce Coupe, British Columbia, before it’s legally killed and harvested. It’s two-thirds of the way to the Yukon Territory, this wolf.

So, when people like Diane Boyd share that this, then people are like, well, you know, a place like Waterton, or a place like Banff isn’t really big enough to contain the ecology, and it’s not just wolves … it’s also grizzlies, migratory birds, etc.

And, so, large landscape conservation tries to move away from kind of the core zone thinking, right? Rather than thinking of these parks as kind of these self-contained units, conservationists are trying to think about what corridors connect that mobile species need to use.

And so, yeah, that necessarily connects Canadians with other people of different nationalities.

DeWitt: Absolutely. It brings into question, for me, why are we choosing this system of boundaries? How is it really serving us? 

Wright: These species kind of subvert the kind of binary space that states want to set up. And so then people on the ground start to question these boundaries.

DeWitt: Yeah, and I also think of how the borders were laid down in the center of Indigenous territories, spaces, and their role in helping us move past this. Thinking beyond these boundaries is really critical and comes out a bit in your book as well. This book could be really be employed well in a border studies class paired with something like Benjamin Hoy’s A Line of Blood and Dirt, which is about the US-Canada border.

So in my mind, it became clear as I read the book that there are borders at two different levels. So there’s these national borders, which we just discussed. And then, at a smaller scale, the book also interrogates the borders imposed on the landscape by fortress conservation projects, like national parks, wildlife refuges, etc. I was wondering if you could talk about how fortress conservation projects actually buttress extractive capitalist systems, and how wildlife conservation efforts and large-scale environmental forces like climate change illuminate the folly of trying to museumize nature in these ways.

Wright: Large landscape conservation sort of really shifts the attention from core areas, right? So, again, rather than seeing a park or a wilderness area or a wildlife refuge, as just kind of this self-contained unit, it shifts our focus to the corridors areas, which are often places of intensive human use.

That’s why conservationists invest so much time into things like fladry fencing or range riding programs, right? These rural spaces that livestock producers use are also biological passageways for wolves and grizzlies, and so we need to think about coexistence methods. Range riding is using horseback maneuvers to drive animals together so that they don’t get predated by wolves, or fladry being this electrified fence during calving season, right? Those are all things that allow livestock production to continue to exist, but allow it to be shared in a more systematic way.

When monarch numbers declined substantially in the 1990s, it largely had to do with or coincided with the use of Roundup Ready herbicide-tolerant corn and soybeans for glyphosate. And so, there’s attempts to think about whether we can use right-of-ways as places that we can create pollinator corridors so that the monarchs can move through these industrial agricultural spaces. Another example, the University of Kansas took over Fred and Nora Urquhart’s monarch tagging program, and eventually, in 2004, they  launched what’s known as the Monarch Waystation Program, which is kind of a… it’s basically asking the people who normally would be tagging to be gardeners, right? And so, it’s amazing that … I think they get, like, 3,000 new waystations every year, and they’re all over the, US and Canada. So, for example, I interviewed, Darlene Burgess, who had a waystation near Point Pelee National Park near Leamington, Ontario. She’s trying to do her part to sustain monarch migration and then that becomes the inspiration that leads her her to travel down to Mexico to see the overwintering site at the Biosphere Reserve. And so there’s stories like that. 

And then obviously there’s this tension between the way resource agencies want to burn, or prescribed burning, like Park Service or Forest Service and the ways that Indigenous nations want to do cultural burning, and so there’s kind of a tension there.I really try to say that many of these conservation efforts are successful because they shift the focus from conservation cores to corridors. 

And that, again, kind of problematizes some of the ways that a lot of the conservation histories are based on a park, one park. There’s kind of… there’s practical reasons for doing it, right? That it’s kind of… it’s neat and tidy. But for many of the ecologies that are so-called protected by that, they’re much more, you know, they flow in and out, really. I just tried to follow the flows rather than draw a boundary around the park and stick to that.

DeWitt: That’s so critical and something that I have criticized in a lot of park histories. They stick to the boundaries of the park. And I also find that a lot of park histories are very origin focused. Like, they’re like, this is how the park came to be … and then… the end of the story! Um, but there’s so much more going on within the park border, along the boundaries, and then if you think about it, in these corridor ways, that’s another level of thinking about this conservation. 

The sequoias had me thinking of… I grew up on the outskirts of Cook Forest State Park in Pennsylvania, which is the largest stand of old-growth timber east of the Mississippi. And it’s called the Forest Cathedral, right? So everything’s planned around this forest cathedral. But now with climate change and the hemlock woolly adelgid, there are these clear forces that are threatening the trees. Also, trees die eventually, right? Whether there’s these outside forces or not. So, like, the problem of just focusing on these… these specific, you know, stands, whether they’re sequoia or hemlock is that we lose sight of the ecosystem as a whole

Wright: One of the things that they discover mostly through doing tree-ring science with the sequoias is they can reconstruct these fire histories that are, like, 2,000, 3,000 years long, which is amazing to be able to understand this kind of long-term ecological relationships between the sequoias and fire. And what scientists notice, and this is mostly the work of Thomas Swetnam and his team at the University of Arizona, is that during the Medieval Warm Period … so before kind of the Little Ice Age … around 1200 CE, the sequoias burned a ton, right? And so they kind of use that as an analog to say, well, if we know, if the future for us is a warmer one than we have at present, then one way that we can build climate resiliency is by getting a lot more fire onto the landscape, because it, you know, it showed that during this last warm period we had a lot of fire. And then that got them saying, well, iIf it had a lot of fire, who’s doing the burning? and then who’s doing, then obviously led them to…, the fire is not going to be caused by lightning alone. Lightning can only explain so much. And so they start to realize that  Indigenous people have been doing a whole lot of burning, and that becomes the basis of collaboration that is still unfolding. 

DeWitt:  Another thing that your book, particularly monarchs and the sequoias in this instance, got me thinking about, how fortress conservation changes the local economy around tourism, and how then that kind of is a new trap. It’s in some ways a new extractive industry, where we’re bringing people in for an experience that they can take away, and the people who are living around it are then forced to, in order to stay in that location, are then forced to transition their livelihoods to making these tourism experiences possible, right?

Wright: Yeah, and I mean, particularly I talk about this with the monarch case study. It’s not until 1986 that a biosphere reserve was created. It basically happens in the aftermath of the discovery of these overwintering grounds. And it just so happens that thirty different ejido communities have land rights,particularly to timber, and the monarchs need intact forest to overwinter. And so there becomes then a big push, right, to kind of reorient their economic activities away from timber extraction to ecotourism, but the monarchs are only there four to five months out of the year, so what do ejidatarios do in the remaining eight months? And so, it becomes one of the tensions surrounding the biosphere reserve. On the maybe positive side, it’s not a colonial, let’s remove the people approach, right? So ejidatarios stay on the land, but at the same time, many of the rights that they had exercised had been circumscribed now. And so, how do we both kind of maintain the ecology that the monarchs need as overwintering habitat, while still sort of meeting the needs of the community that relied on the forest.

DeWitt: And yeah, I really appreciated learning about that. Certainly, for me, that was the case study that I knew the least about.

It really struck me that this is also a story of the development of the field of ecology and our understanding of ecology. And I was wondering if you wanted to touch a bit upon how the history of science, and as well as technology, which I think often go hand in hand, appear in the book.

Wright: I’m trained in history of science, history of biology, um, so that’s one of my focal points – the social construction of scientific knowledge and how our knowledge is rooted through material things. For each one of these case studies, there’s actually a new scientific subfield that gets developed out of thinking through particular species.

It’s not just the wolf tracking, but through this kind of radio and satellite transmitting devices … Etienne Benson’s Wired Wilderness is a great book for this …  the field of corridor ecology doesn’t get developed unless they can track these animals to show that they have these kinds of movements. 

With the monarchs, a brand new field of chemical ecology develops, which again looks at chemical-mediated interactions between organisms. I focus on a lepidopterist named Lincoln Brower. He tried to prove that monarchs are poisonous. The reason they’re poisonous is that they lay their eggs on milkweed, it’s the sole host plant. They consume the milkweed, and the milkweed has what is called these cardenolides, which are toxic. And so they internalize those toxins and then put them out at the wings, and then that becomes a defense against birds. So the monarch example shows that there’s this chemical connection between milkweeds and monarchs through cardenolides, and this field of chemical ecology develops because of the study of monarchs.

And then I sort of hinted at it, the late 19th century giant sequoia forest is being logged over intensively. About a third of all giant sequoia tree forest is felled in a 50-year span, which prompts interest in their conservation. But this logging is also a kind of a boon for scientists, because they go and they can talk to the logger and be like, well, when was this tree felled? And they’ll be like, well, 1891. And then the scientists realize that there’s these kinds of patterns of rings that they can effectively date. And then, if they can date one tree, because they know the outer ring, then they can cross-date it with maybe rings that they don’t know. And then that allows them to kind of establish a master chronology. And so the tree ring science, it’s developed by A.E. Douglas at the University of Arizona, — he’s an astronomer. He’s interested in sunspot cycles, and so that’s why he gets interested in sequoias, because there are these long living trees … but then out of that comes various different applications, right? So … wide and narrow ring growth can then be a proxy for reconstructing past climates because if we know hot much moisture is not readily available here, then ring growth is more dependent on a kind of climate variability. Or later we figure out that fire scars leave their marks on particular rings that we can date, and so we can reconstruct fire histories. Tree-ring science, or dendrochronology, really is born out of this kind of irony of sequoia extraction.

In each one of these examples, we have these new scientific fields developed. It shows that our human creativity is bound in material things; it’s not some abstract idea. So I try to show that, too, so we see that sort of developmental progression.

DeWitt: So, your firsthand experience of these landscapes with the people on the ground and the conservation spaces is scattered throughout the chapters, and I found this aspect of the text really engaging. And when I am reading, I find that nature writers are often the ones who use first-person perspectives, but It’s much less common in environmental or history of science spaces.

Firstly, I wanted you to wrap up our conversation today to talk about how this on-the-ground research and exploration impacted your overall project, and then why you decided to include yourself in the narrative. Also, I feel like this decision was also based on your desired reach of the book and the audience that you were seeking, if you could also talk about that.

Wright: I was really inspired by, kind of, field journalists, nature writers. I mentioned one already, Elizabeth Kolbert. She had her first book is called Field Notes from a Catastrophe. It’s about climate change. Or someone like David Quammen. He has a book called The Song of the Dodo. It’s really famous about biogeography, or his most famous one is probably Spillover. It’s on the origins of pandemics that spill over from animal hosts to human hosts, and so I really tried to model that, or try to mimic that kind of approach. When I included myself in the narrative, it’s not to draw attention to me necessarily; it’s more to draw attention to the people that I’m following. These various episodes are trying to show that the work is presently ongoing. I follow mostly scientists or other land managers in the field.

I also wanted to show that there’s kind of this unbroken history; we’re still living with these historical trajectories in the present. And so, by narrating in the first person, and showing these kind of moments in time, is showing, well, okay, I’ve talked about these historical trajectories, but they matter, you know, now. It’s kind of an environmental studies type of approach, trying to show the origins of contemporary problems or contemporary challenges. So that was another reason for using this writing method. It also produces a faster and more engaging narrative.

I wanted to reach people in environmental history, or history of science, or borderland studies, obviously, you know, scholars and practitioners in the field, but I also I wanted to reach various conservation practitioners and people that are just interested in these charismatic species. Um, so, you know, there are people who are just monarch lovers, and they may be interested in this book.

These histories that we write are reflections of ourselves, too. I wanted to kind of experiment and push to say, you know, it’s okay to include field work and personal narrative and not be so removed and detached or disembodied from the work.

DeWit: Absolutely. I love that aspect of it. So I think you made the right decision.

Wright: Well, good. I feel good about it.

DeWitt: Well, this was a fantastic conversation. It was a joy to read the book, it was a joy to chat with you about it, and thank you for joining me today.

Wright: It was a pleasure. Thank you, Jessica.

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Jessica DeWitt

NiCHE Editor-in-Chief, Social Media Editor at Jessica M. DeWitt: Editing and Consulting

is an environmental historian of Canada and the United States, editor, project manager, consultant, and digital communications strategist. She earned her PhD in History from the University of Saskatchewan in 2019. She is an executive member, editor-in-chief, and social media editor for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). She is the Managing Editor for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines and Associate Editor for Environmental Humanities. Closer to home, she is the President of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society, a Coordinating Team member of Showing Up for Racial Justice Saskatoon-Treaty Six, and a Conservation Advisory Committee member for the Meewasin Valley Authority. She focuses on developing digital techniques and communications that bridge the divide between academia and the general public in order to democratize knowledge access. You can find out more about her and her freelance services at jessicamdewitt.com.

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