Beyond Naturalness: Rethinking Park and Wilderness Stewardship in an Era of Rapid Change
304
Beyond Naturalness: Rethinking Park and Wilderness Stewardship in an Era of Rapid Change
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Overview
Beyond Naturalness brings together leading scientists and policymakers to explore the concept of naturalness, its varied meanings, and the extent to which it provides adequate guidance regarding where, when, and how managers should intervene in ecosystem processes to protect park and wilderness values. The main conclusion is the idea that naturalness will continue to provide an important touchstone for protected area conservation, but that more specific goals and objectives are needed to guide stewardship.
The issues considered in Beyond Naturalness are central not just to conservation of parks, but to many areas of ecological thinking—including the fields of conservation biology and ecological restoration—and represent the cutting edge of discussions of both values and practice in the twenty-first century. This bookoffers excellent writing and focus, along with remarkable clarity of thought on some of the difficult questions being raised in light of new and changing stressors such as global environmental climate change.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781597269117 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 06/22/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
David N. Cole is a research geographer at the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, US Forest Service in Missoula Montana.
Laurie Yung is director of the Wilderness Institute and a research assistant professor in the College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana in Missoula.
Read an Excerpt
Beyond Naturalness
Rethinking Park and Wilderness Stewardship in an Era of Rapid Change
By David N. Cole, Laurie Yung
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Island PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59726-911-7
CHAPTER 1
Park and Wilderness Stewardship: The Dilemma of Management Intervention
DAVID N. COLE AND LAURIE YUNG
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
—Albert Einstein
National parks and wilderness areas are an important part of America's natural and cultural heritage. On the surface at least, people appear to share a common vision of park purposes and wilderness values, believing that parks and wilderness are places set aside and protected from development to preserve their beauty, their natural features, and the opportunity for future generations to learn from them, love them, and experience them as we have. In addition to being powerful symbols that spark the imagination, parks and wilderness play a critical role in environmental conservation, especially as global threats to biodiversity mount.
From global climate change and invasive species to pollution and land fragmentation, anthropogenic stressors threaten park and wilderness values and raise serious questions about what it means to preserve our natural heritage. We cannot preserve parks and wilderness by drawing a line around them and leaving them alone. Protecting an area's beauty, heritage, and biodiversity entails thoughtful stewardship and, at times, active intervention. But active intervention presents a new set of challenges. Do park and wilderness managers have the policy guidance they need to be effective land managers in this changing context?
In this book we explore the goals that guided the conservation of large protected areas in the twentieth century, most of them related to the concept of naturalness. These goals were appropriate a century ago, when the struggle was one of protecting land from development and exploitation, and they retain iconic meaning and value today. But over the past century the world has changed and the pace of change has accelerated. The most certain characteristic of the future is uncertainty. The stewardship issues of the twenty-first century will be more nuanced, with solutions that are less clear cut, less black and white. Consequently, it is time to think beyond naturalness, to articulate park purposes in terms that are both more specific and more diverse than naturalness and to adopt a wider array of management approaches to achieve these purposes.
The concept of naturalness is more central to the stewardship of national parks and wilderness in the United States than to stewardship of other types of protected areas or parks and wilderness in other countries. Therefore, this book is focused on parks and wilderness in the United States. However, many of the issues raised in this book have broad international application. To set the stage for the chapters that follow, this introduction first explores some of the emerging dilemmas confronting park and wilderness managers. We then describe the central argument of the book and provide a guide to the chapters that follow.
Stewardship Dilemmas
Stretching from the banks of the Rio Grande up desert canyons to the forested slopes of the Jemez Mountains, not far from Santa Fe, New Mexico, is Bandelier National Monument. One of the oldest units of the National Park System, Bandelier was established in 1916. In 1976, most of the park (more than 23,000 acres) was designated as wilderness. Ancestral Pueblo people inhabited these lands long ago, in substantial numbers from at least the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. Remnants of their life here—from cliff dwellings to painted caves and potsherds—draw many visitors, as do the diverse desert, woodland, and forest landscapes. The monument is a place of peace and solace, and it provides connections to the past and to wild and natural landscapes.
All is not well here, however. Despite a long history of human habitation and the fact that Bandelier has not been a pristine landscape for more than a thousand years, more recent Euro-American use of the park landscape has triggered unprecedented change in most of the park's ecosystems (Allen 2004). Conditions, particularly in the wilderness' piñon– juniper woodlands, have rapidly deteriorated. Studies of current and historical ecology tell a sad story (Sydoriak et al. 2000). Herbaceous ground cover and surface organic litter have largely disappeared, exposing soils to the erosive effects of rainfall, which can come in torrents during the summer monsoons. The park's woodland soils, which developed over tens of thousands of years, are being washed away rapidly. Most soil will be gone within about a century, with much associated loss of the artifacts and cultural heritage that were the primary reasons the monument was originally established.
As detailed by Sydoriak et al. (2000) and Allen (2004), these changes are the result of increases in the density and canopy closure of piñon and juniper trees—a response to the cumulative and synergistic effects of human activities, along with natural events. Intense livestock grazing, which occurred from the 1880s until 1932, resulted in loss of much of the herbaceous ground cover. Piñon–juniper density had long been limited by frequent, wide-ranging surface fires. The absence of an herbaceous ground cover to carry fire— along with federal programs to suppress fire—meant that fires no longer checked tree establishment. Consequently, twentieth-century rates of tree growth were unprecedented. More trees means even less herbaceous growth because trees effectively compete for water and nutrients, creating a positive feedback loop that favors further tree invasion and decreased herbaceous ground cover (Sydoriak et al. 2000). To add insult to injury, feral burros from about 1930 to 1980 and severe drought in the 1950s further contributed to declines in ground cover.
Because grazing and fire suppression caused the problem at Bandelier, one solution might be to eliminate grazing and restore fire. Indeed, this is part of the solution, but it is not enough. Unfortunately, as in many other protected areas, ecological thresholds have been crossed that are not so easy to renavigate (Allen 2007). The ecosystem has been altered so fundamentally that eliminating the original cause of the problem, or simply leaving the system alone to restore itself, no longer resolves the situation. According to ecologists working at Bandelier, the solution is not less but more human intervention. Experiments have demonstrated that if small trees are cut down over large swaths of land, a more continuous ground cover of native herbs and grasses can be restored, which in turn will reduce erosion and the loss of cultural artifacts. As Sydoriak et al. (2000: 212) observe, "This treatment directly reduces tree competition with herbaceous plants for scarce water and nutrients, and the application of slash residues across the barren interspaces greatly reduces surface water runoff and ameliorates the harsh microclimate at the surface, immediately improving water availability for herbaceous plants." After years of research, experimentation, and detailed assessment of trade-offs, Bandelier is implementing "ecological restoration" treatments across large portions of the park's designated wilderness (National Park Service 2007).
Forest thinning may be a solution to environmental degradation, but at what cost? Isn't wilderness supposed to be a place where interventions such as cutting trees are not allowed—where nature decides what's best? After all, current problems are the direct result of earlier generations doing what they thought was best. Is further intervention just a perpetuation of this arrogance? Such thinking led Howard Zahniser (1963), principal architect of the Wilderness Act, to famously declare that, when it comes to wilderness, we should be guardians, not gardeners. Or is it our responsibility to correct our past mistakes—to facilitate the healing process—and help Bandelier's ecosystems transition to a more functional state? Should we listen not to Zahniser but to acclaimed biologist Dan Janzen (1998) and embrace our role as gardeners, as the only responsible way to sustain wildlands into the future?
Such dilemmas—and the questions they raise—are all too common in parks and wilderness these days. On the other side of the continent, on national forest land in the state of Virginia, is the Saint Mary's Wilderness. It was once one of the most pristine watersheds in the region (Figure 1.1), but long-term monitoring revealed a sobering trend of environmental degradation. As reported in an environmental assessment, by the late 1990s the pH of the Saint Mary's River had declined from historic levels of about 6.8 to levels of 4.0–5.6—a more than 100-fold increase in acidity. The diversity of aquatic macroinvertebrates—the foundation of the aquatic food chain—had declined 38 percent. The number of fish species had declined from twelve to just three, and two of those remaining species—brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) and black-nosed dace (Rhinichthys atratulus)—had not reproduced successfully for several years. The culprit was air pollution, in the form of sulfur and nitrogen compounds, being produced both locally and in the Ohio Valley.
In 1999, wilderness managers responded. A helicopter dumped 140 tons of limestone sand at six locations in the wilderness, adjacent to the river and its tributaries. This buffered 12 miles of stream in this small (7,000 acre) wilderness. Within 200 days, stream pH was back to 6.5 and macroinvertebrate diversity and fish density had increased dramatically. Was this intervention a success? By many measures, one would have to say yes. But as in Bandelier, one must ask whether the ends justify the means. Does more human intervention make things better or worse? Can two wrongs make a right? Moreover, in this case the proposed response did not attack the root cause of the problem: the production of atmospheric pollutants. It merely treated symptoms in the hope that a more permanent solution to the problem could be found. Success was temporary; 6 years later the treatments had to be repeated.
In the Big Gum Swamp Wilderness in northern Florida, fires historically burned through pine and wiregrass communities every 3 to 5 years (Christensen 1978). Fires seldom ignited within the boundaries of the small (13,660 acre) wilderness. However, fire frequency was high because, in the past, fires swept unimpeded across large portions of northern Florida's undeveloped, unfragmented landscape. Fires ignited by distant lightning strikes often burned into and across the wilderness. In recent decades, development around the wilderness has made it an isolated island, cut off from historic disturbance processes. Fire occurs infrequently. Consequently, vegetation composition and structure have changed, fuels have built up, and the potential for catastrophic fire has increased. Biodiversity is being lost. Wilderness managers have responded by mimicking, in part, the natural fire regime, intentionally setting fires inside the wilderness every few years.
Some of these interventions, undertaken to respond to undesirable human impact, may be needed at extremely large spatial scales. For example, whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) is the dominant timberline tree species of many of the parks and wilderness areas of the West, from the northern Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains. Throughout much of its range, whitebark pine is being decimated by white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola), a nonnative fungal pathogen inadvertently introduced in 1910. Mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae) are also killing whitebarks. In combination, blister rust and mountain pine beetles have killed more than 50 percent of whitebark pine across much of the northern part of its range in the United States, including parks such as Glacier National Park (Kendall and Keane 2001). Severe whitebark pine mortality could seriously affect grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) populations, which depend on pine seeds for a significant portion of their diet (Mattson et al. 1991). Whitebark mortality is exacerbated by decades of fire suppression, which has led to successional replacement of the pine by more shade-tolerant tree species. And yet the reintroduction of fire is also problematic for whitebark because decimated stands do not produce enough seed to naturally regenerate after disturbance (Tomback et al. 2001). Potential solutions include breeding rust-resistant trees, planting seedlings, cutting trees to create a more diverse and resistant age class structure, and burning—actions that may be taken across large swaths of park and wilderness lands.
There are an endless number and variety of challenging dilemmas like those described here. In the mountainous parks and wilderness of the eastern United States, hemlock (Tsuga) species are being decimated by the hemlock wooly adelgid (Adelges tsugae), an introduced aphid-like insect. Here the intervention involves insecticide injections and the introduction of nonnative beetles that prey on the adelgid. In the canyon country of the southwestern deserts—places such as Grand Canyon National Park—riverbanks are now dominated by the introduced shrub tamarisk (Tamarix sp.). The obvious solution is to eliminate the tamarisk and restore the natural ecosystem. But other values must be considered. Tamarisk thickets have become favored and important habitat for sensitive bird species such as Bell's vireo (Vireo bellii) and the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher (Empidonax traillii extimus)—species that have lost most of their original habitat to rampant development throughout the southwestern states. Which is more important: reducing the risk of species extinction or restoring riverbanks to a previous state?
Wilderness and national parks around the world are experiencing similar stewardship dilemmas. In Kruger National Park, South Africa, burgeoning populations of elephants confined within park boundaries are converting woodland into grassland, forcing park managers to propose culling. We have been slow to recognize such conundrums and even slower to act on them. Action is difficult because it raises ethical concerns and requires value-based, often highly political decisions. Should park and wilderness managers intervene in natural biological and physical processes? If so, under what circumstances and how? What specific actions should managers take? Unless predictions about the likely consequences of climate change are grossly overstated, climate change is about to hone the horns of this dilemma to the point where it can no longer be ignored. Some scientists (Cole et al. 2005) predict that, given a changing climate, Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) may no longer be capable of surviving unaided in Joshua Tree National Park. What does this suggest about park purposes and appropriate responses? Should the park follow the Joshua trees? Will the trees be able to migrate successfully? Does the park have an obligation to help secure the future persistence of Joshua trees on lands outside park boundaries? What are the conservation goals of a park that has lost its icon and signature botanical element?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beyond Naturalness by David N. Cole, Laurie Yung. Copyright © 2010 Island Press. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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Table of Contents
PrefacePART I. The Changing Context of Park and Wilderness Stewardship
Chapter 1. Park and Wilderness Stewardship: The Dilemma of Management Intervention\David N. Cole and Laurie Yung
Chapter 2. The Trouble with Naturalness: Rethinking Park and Wilderness Goals\Gregory H. Aplet and David N. Cole
Chapter 3. Evolving Ecological Understandings: The Implications of Ecosystem Dynamics\Richard J. Hobbs, Erika S. Zavaleta, David N. Cole, and Peter S. White
Chapter 4. Shifting Environmental Foundations: The Unprecedented and Unpredictable Future\Nathan L. Stephenson, Constance I. Millar, and David N. Cole
Chapter 5. Changing Policies and Practices: The Challenge of Managing for Naturalness\Laurie Yung, David N. Cole, David M. Graber, David J. Parsons, and Kathy A. Tonnessen
PART II. Approaches to Guide Protected Area Conservation
Chapter 6. Let It Be: A Hands-Off Approach to Preserving Wildness in Protected Areas\Peter Landres
Chapter 7. Ecological Integrity: A Framework for Ecosystem-Based Management\Stephen Woodley
Chapter 8. Historical Fidelity: Maintaining Legacy and Connection to Heritage\David N. Cole, Eric S. Higgs, and Peter S. White
Chapter 9. Resilience Frameworks: Enhancing the Capacity to Adapt to Change\Erika S. Zavaleta and F. Stuart Chapin III
PART III. Management Strategies for Implementing New Approaches
Chapter 10. Objectives, Priorities, and Triage: Lessons Learned from Invasive Species Management\John M. Randall
Chapter 11. Responding to Climate Change: A Toolbox of Management Strategies\David N. Cole, Constance I. Millar, and Nathan L. Stephenson
Chapter 12. Conservation at Large Scales: Systems of Protected Areas and Protected Areas in the Matrix\Peter S. White, Laurie Yung, David N. Cole, and Richard J. Hobbs
Chapter 13. Planning in the Context of Uncertainty: Flexibility for Adapting to Change\F. Stuart Chapin III, Erika S. Zavaleta, Leigh A. Welling, Paul Deprey, and Laurie Yung
Chapter 14. Wild Design: Principles to Guide Interventions in Protected Areas\Eric S. Higgs and Richard J. Hobbs
Chapter 15. A Path Forward: Conserving Protected Areas in the Context of Global Environmental Change\Laurie Yung, David N. Cole, and Richard J. Hobbs
Contributors
Index