Chicago Tribune: Progress may be unequal, but southern Africa is moving toward a revolution in conservation: huge transfrontier game parks that will eliminate border fences and for the first time allow animals--and park visitors--to cross national boundaries.

South Africa and neighboring Botswana opened the first such southern Africa reserve, the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, three years ago, linking already unfenced Kalahari Desert reserves on both sides of that border.

South Africa and its neighbors are planning five more such parks--and talking about an additional 16--knitting together conservation land in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Angola, Malawi and Zambia.

The jewel of the projects is the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park that will link South Africa's popular Kruger reserve with the newly established Limpopo National Park in Mozambique and Zimbabwe's Gonarezhou National Park. When the fences come down, a process already under way, the new reserve--formally created in December--will be larger than Maryland. Second-phase plans call for creation of a broader, adjoining conservation area that will push protected land to 40,000 square miles, the size of Kentucky.