Kodiak brown bear, Kodiak NWR, Alaska. (Image credit: James L. Cummins)
At the, “Conserving the Future,” US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Vision Conference, I was inspired to hear Dewitt Jones’ presentation as he urged us all to embrace the words, “Carpe diem,” or “seize the day” every day of our lives. Dewitt also talked about “Vision” and the importance of perspective as he retold a story his father passed on to him in childhood in which one individual considered himself a “stone chipper” and the other a “cathedral builder,” yet both were doing the same job. Dewitt is right: Carpe diem combined with the right vision can truly result in mountains moving, and our task ahead as we work in conservation today is just that: we need to move mountains. . . . And we need to, “move refuges”.
The USFWS is trying to do just that with their new Visioning process. They are incorporating concepts that “transcend” normal USFWS boundaries and are talking about landscape-level conservation efforts that are large, involve many agency and NGO partners and push physical conservation boundaries much beyond those solely around refuges, such as the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives and America’s Great Outdoors. I and TWS support this type of vision and encourage the agency to continue trying to move mountains and refuges during these challenging political and environmentally shifting times.
I also urge the US Fish and Wildlife Service to “seize the day” with the concept of wilderness. I am very inspired by many aspects of the draft vision for Wildlife Refuges unveiled at the conference. I am also left feeling that more could be done to prominently address wilderness and its benefits for wildlife, habitat, visitors, communities, refuges and the agency overall.
Wilderness is one of the USFWS’s greatest management tools in refuge management and plays a key role as our
nation faces a warming climate. It is important to account for the value of wild lands and designated Wilderness in promoting ecosystem resiliency and species adaptation in the face of climate change. Wilderness areas provide important baselines for scientific research particularly in areas significantly affected by climate change – and the USFWS Vision does identify the importance of this aspect of wilderness. Further, wilderness provides an essential sanctuary for imperiled plants and animals, including those affected by climate-induced habitat changes. Wilderness also provides significant ecosystem services, such as clean air and water worth billions of dollars across the nation, and provides significant positive economic gains for communities that
include wilderness-based tourism and recreation business opportunities and increased property values, among others. The USFWS Refuge Vision should more vigorously highlight these important values of wilderness and recognize the important role of wilderness for the future of species, refuges and the agency.
For example, wilderness provides species with relatively large areas of unfragmented habitat to allow species the time and space to adapt to climate change. Large, unfragmented and wild landscapes can provide the habitat that species need to adapt to climate change. Some components of our natural systems are changing at
rates that are out of sync with the species that depend on them. For example, plants may be flowering earlier but their pollinators may be delayed in arriving to do their job, with detrimental consequences for both organisms. In a large protected wildland, there is greater chance that these two species will find the right conditions to re-synchronize their life cycles. Restoration of ecosystems that have been diminished in size and health will increase the area of wildlands that can provide habitat for species in peril.
Wilderness can provide essential refugia from dramatic changes. As Darwin describes in his 1859 publication
The Origin of Species, organisms are constantly adapting to a changing environment. Wild ecosystems are constantly changing in response to such forces as fire and water; stasis is the exception. However, climate change is altering the environment to reflect conditions previously considered extreme or which are
entirely out of the range that species have contended with. Increases in fire intensity and changes in the timing and intensity of storms will alter the intervals at which ecosystems can recover and provide habitat for wildlife.
Wilderness provides species with large, unfragmented habitat for migration and refuge from areas that have burned, are experiencing drought or floods, or from the effects of other climate-related disturbances.
Wilderness protects diversity at all scales. Natural food webs grow from the bacteria in the soil that recycle the nutrients that support the plants that caribou and geese eat, and they, in turn, support the wolves, bear and humans that depend upon them. Only when a complete food web is protected can we achieve the resiliency needed for most, if not all, species to adapt to climate change.
Wild ecosystems are inherently complex and variable. While scientific research is improving our understanding
of them and improving predictions of how they will be impacted by climate change, we already know that by providing the above services, wildland protection is the number one thing we can do right now toward helping the inhabitants of our planet adapt to climate change.
Nicole Whittington-Evans
Alaska Regional Director
The Wilderness Society
