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.

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...