Flag celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

On Tuesday night, many of us enjoyed a screening of the agency’s new film, “America’s Wildest Refuge: Discovering the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” in the ornate old Orpheum Theater on State Street here in Madison. It is a marvelous film, highlighting the history and values of the Arctic Refuge in Alaska, and showing why this iconic place is indeed America’s wildest refuge.

The film also brought to my mind the rich legacy of Wilderness within the Refuge System.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stewards over 70 areas totaling nearly 21 million acres of designated Wilderness, about one-fifth of the entire National Wilderness Preservation System.  The other three federal land management agencies (Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management) care for the remainder of the
Wilderness System.

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Dr. Earle began her talk charging us to compare earth to Mars.  They are sister planets, but have
taken very different paths with earth becoming the blue and green gem that it is today and Mars a giant cold desert.  Dr.Earle told us that “We have thought about “terriforming Mars, but in some places we are doing a good job at “marsifying earth”.

A generation ago we could never have imagined that we have the power to actually alter the life support systems of our planet at a global scale, but now the concepts of human-induced climate change and ocean acidification and global impacts of fish populations due to over-harvesting are not abstract hypotheses, but rather factors that those of us who work on the ground must think about in managing fish and wildlife habitat.

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