Does wilderness have a role in 21st century conservation?
The role of wilderness in species and ecosystem conservation efforts worldwide has grown increasingly uncertain amid growing biophysical impacts from climate change and conceptual criticism of wilderness from some academic scholars and conservationists. These biophysical and conceptual challenges center on a perceived dilemma over ecological restoration, or any intervention that purposefully alters the ecosystem or it’s component species, inside a wilderness and other areas managed for their natural values. Broadly, this dilemma is whether wilderness should be devoted primarily to protection of naturalness, typically focused on particular species or biodiversity in general even if that requires manipulating habitat or species, or whether wilderness should be devoted primarily to being untrammeled, that is, left alone to change and evolve as an autonomous or self-willed landscape without imposition of human desires for what that landscape should look like or the species that occur there.
This dilemma is forcing wilderness managers, conservationists, advocates, and scholars into an “either-or” debate whether individual species should be preserved in wilderness if such action directly compromises the untrammeled quality of the landscape. Or whether the untrammeled quality of a wilderness landscape should be preserved if such deliberate inaction compromises the biodiversity of the area. Many examples of this dilemma, across a wide range of taxa and resources involving vegetation, fish and wildlife, water, and fire, are presented in this Spotlight’s featured publications. The Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute examined the legal, ecological, and ethical arguments offered in support of managing wilderness to be primarily untrammeled or primarily natural. Based on our analysis, we conclude that neither position is supported legally, ecologically, or ethically, and that this false dichotomy obscures a third option, that untrammeled and natural are interdependent values of landscapes protected under the 1964 Wilderness Act.
This third option embraces the primary legal mandate of the 1964 Wilderness Act to preserve the wilderness character of all areas designated as wilderness, based on the understanding that untrammeled and natural share a common root in the autonomy of wilderness ecosystems. That is, each is dependent on the other, and each is simply a different way of viewing and valuing the autonomy of the non-human natural world. Specifically, valuing untrammeled focuses on unfettered ecological and evolutionary processes, while valuing naturalness focuses on the biophysical products of these processes. A full appreciation of wilderness and fulfilling the legal mandate of preserving wilderness character, if it is to be robust and consistent, demands valuing process and product, untrammeled and natural, together.
With no place untouched by the effects of human actions in the Anthropocene, the value of wilderness is that it stands alone in striving to preserve landscapes that are untrammeled and natural and therefore has a significant and important role to play in 21st century conservation. The perceived dilemma between an untrammeled and a natural wilderness is a false dichotomy; legally, ecologically, and ethically, managers need to preserve wilderness that is both untrammeled and natural. Despite the challenge this may pose, managers are obligated to carefully, openly, and thoroughly understand all the potential benefits and impacts, i.e., the tradeoffs, to reach an informed decision about proposed actions that trammel a wilderness. Agency policy is needed to help guide managers in navigating these complex legal, ecological, and ethical tradeoffs. These decisions and the reasons behind them need to be formally monitored to allow future evaluation and assessment of their appropriateness and to ensure the continued contribution of wilderness to 21st Century conservation.