Guardians and gardeners: Managing wilderness for the twenty-first century

Abstract

The 1964 Wilderness Act is a landmark piece of legislation, providing robust protections from development, mechanization, and resource extraction to landscapes designated by the US Congress as federal wilderness. Today, the National Wilderness Preservation System, which includes 806 wilderness areas and 111 million acres, represents the world’s largest highly protected conservation network. However, a long-standing ethos of nonmanagement - exemplified by the philosophy that managers should be guardians but not gardeners - obscures long legacies of Indigenous stewardship and may not sustain essential wilderness values in a time of unprecedented ecological stressors. Many wildernesses are increasingly subject to complex and compounding unintentional (as well as intentional) human influences. In this article, we consider how a guardians and gardeners approach would acknowledge Indigenous influence, recognize contemporary and future environmental challenges, and provide managers the necessary rationale to respond to these complex realities. In the twenty-first century, it may be necessary to carefully, thoughtfully, and compassionately reimagine the dominant wilderness philosophy.

Citation

Boerigter, Clare E.; Parks, Sean A.; Long, Jonathan W.; Coop, Jonathan D.; Armstrong, Melanie; Hankins, Don L.; Hoagland, Serra. 2025. Guardians and gardeners: Managing wilderness for the twenty-first century. BioScience. 75: 1066-1082.