Waterton-Glacier: The World's First International Peace Park

The idea came from Rotary Clubs. That detail tends to surprise people. The concept of joining two adjacent national parks across an international border into a single protected zone, now recognized as one of the more consequential conservation innovations of the twentieth century, was initially promoted by fraternal organizations on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel, the Rotary Clubs of Alberta and Montana, who saw the adjacent parks as a symbol of the peace between the two nations and proposed that they be formally joined.

On June eighteenth, nineteen thirty-two, Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta and Glacier National Park in Montana were officially designated the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, the first of its kind in the world. The two parks had existed separately since nineteen ten and nineteen eleven respectively; what changed in nineteen thirty-two was the political recognition that they were, ecologically, one place.

The idea spread. There are now more than two hundred transboundary conservation areas worldwide, from the Central American Biological Corridor to the parks spanning the borders of South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. The concept behind all of them, that wildlife does not recognize human political boundaries and that conservation must follow the ecosystem rather than the treaty line, began here, at the forty-ninth parallel, because two Rotary Clubs thought it was a good idea.

The grizzly bear that spends the summer in the Many Glacier valley moves into Canada in the fall. The wolf pack that ranges through the North Fork crosses the border without ceremony. The ecosystem does not care about the border. The park, at least officially, began acknowledging this in nineteen thirty-two, and has not stopped.

What you are looking at, from this overlook near the Chief Mountain border crossing, is a single mountain landscape that two countries have agreed to treat as one place. It is still, nearly a century later, a somewhat remarkable thing.