Treesearch

“This is a divide.” Dad delivered this proclamation with the verve of a discoverer. This memory from childhood frequently surfaces as I struggle to interpret the topology, the complicated relationship between the topography and cultural history of my home, the Green River Basin, that great expanse of sagebrush/ bunchgrass steppe crowned with wilderness.

The California Desert Protection Act of 1994 was the largest park and wilderness legislation passed in the Lower 48 States since the Wilderness Act of 1964. It designated three national parks and 69 Bureau of Land Management wilderness areas. The California Desert and Wilderness Restoration Project is working to restore and revitalize these lands through a public/private partnership. The Project utilizes Student Conservation Association crews to inventory, to remove and rehabilitate unauthorized vehicle ways, to restore important wildlife habitats, and to help maintain popular hiking...

Websites from three U.S. agencies that manage wilderness were examined to determine what type of message is being communicated to the public about wilderness. Some websites contain almost no information about wilderness while others discuss it extensively. Most of the references to wilderness are in administrative documents. The second most common audience is prospective wilderness visitors. These messages were analyzed in detail. The dominant value of wilderness appears to be recreational rather than ecological, geological, educational, or scientific. Many websites talk about wilderness...

In the United States, national parks were established mainly for their scenic qualities with an emphasis on how they looked rather than how their natural systems worked. Natural conditions in Theodore Roosevelt National Park and Buffalo National River had been degraded by decades of livestock ranching and timber harvesting prior to their designation as units of the National Park System in the late 20th century. These ecosystems remained degraded and showed no progress toward recovering on their own. It became unrealistic to assume that the landscape’s natural diversity could recover...

Northern land claims agreements support establishing national parks and wilderness protection but are not prescriptive on wilderness management or what wilderness values should be protected. Parks Canada does not have strong wilderness policy or guidelines, which hampers development of management plans for northern national parks and progress on legislation of wilderness. The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, an important time in Canadian history, can provide the bases for Parks Canada to work with beneficiaries of land claims to protect wilderness.

The purpose of this research was to expand the wilderness value scale administered in the 1994 and 2000 versions of the National Survey on Recreation and the Environment using questions included in the 2003 NSRE. A data set of 1,900 cases was randomly split in half. Validity of the additional questions was tested using principal component analysis, a confirmatory factor analysis cross validation procedure, Cronbach’s alpha and weighted omega reliability coefficients, and identification of a simplex pattern among the scales. Results revealed that the three sub-scales, personal maintenance,...

The effects that outdoor programs have on participant feelings about the outdoor environment and wilderness areas are often assumed to be both powerful and positive. Moreover, it is believed that participation in outdoor or wilderness-based programs usually results in participants who have more pro-environmental and pro-wilderness beliefs, values, and attitudes. This study identified and measured changes in environmental attitudes and beliefs after participation in an outdoor leadership program. In addition, the strength or salience of these beliefs and changes in levels of salience was...

The ecological context of the Northern Appalachian region of North America is reviewed and general patterns of ownership and protection status of land discussed. Although there is wide variability among the states and provinces in the proportion of their land that is publicly owned, only a very small proportion, ranging from 0.1 percent to 8.0 percent, anywhere is managed as wilderness. However, a recent analysis of the Human Footprint in the region identifies a larger amount of land (35 percent) that is as yet relatively little modified by human disturbance, indicating that the amount of...

Alaska, northern British Columbia (BC), and the western portion of the Yukon Territory have extensive areas of wildlands that are matched by protected area systems covering some 20 percent of the land area of the region. One of the most outstanding of these is the Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek Park complex that is shared by all three jurisdictions. This entire 10 million-ha (24,710,538-acre) area is a transboundary World Heritage site, in fact the largest such internationally designated site on the planet. With its informal abbreviated name of the “St. Elias...

This paper explores the many natural, historical, and economic reasons the Commander Islands are an essential focal point for field expedition work and finally for conservation projects in the unique ecosystem of the North Pacific. Around the Commander Islands we can find a biologically productive and diverse marine environment. For example, it is one of the richest areas of seaweeds by species and biomass in the world. However, the number of sea otters has dramatically declined during the last seven years in some parts of the Northern Pacific. This fact clearly displays that something is...