Management Dilemmas That Will Shape Wilderness in the 21 st Century

Above: In many wilderness areas, recreational access must be limited so that visitors can experience solitude and pristine ecosystems. One challenge facing wilderness managers is finding the balance between access and preservation that maximizes those values. D av id N . C ol e monitoring conditions, implementing restricted permit systems or other visitor management techniques, educating visitors in the use of low-impact practices, controlling exotic species, and restoring damaged or altered sites. Scientific and experiential knowledge about how to manage wilderness has increased greatly; however, application of this knowledge is inadequate for at least two reasons. First, funding and resources for wilderness management have never been commensurate with the magnitude of the task (Vento 1990). Less obvious but equally limiting is lack of clear policy on how to resolve two fundamental dilemmas resulting from vague, conflicting language in the Wilderness Act. One dilemma—and it is not new—involves conflict between providing access to wilderness for its “use and enjoyment” and protecting the biophysical conditions and visitor experiences that constitute wilderness but are degraded by recreational use. The other involves conflict between two desirable attributes of wilderness ecosystems: wildness, the relative lack of intentional human manipulation; and naturalness, the relative lack of human influence. The future value of wilderness will largely be determined by how these dilemmas are resolved. Access, or Protection? Starting in the late 1960s, when recreational use was increasing 10 percent annually (Lucas 1989), numerous wilderness regulations were imposed, including limits on the amount of overnight use. Concerned that the wild would be regulated out of wilderness, influential researchers and managers urged nonregulatory management and avoidance of use limitations wherever possible (Hendee et al. 1990). Hopes that tight regulation could be avoided were buoyed by data suggesting that by the 1980s, wilderness use levels were no longer increasing (Lucas 1989). However, studies conducted in the 1990s indicate that wilderness recreational use continues to increase (Cole 1996). Moreover, studies of participation rates report that hiking and backpacking are the second and third fastest growing types of human-powered outdoor recreation (Cordell et al. 1999). Recreational impacts have also increased over the past several decades despite considerable progress in educating visitors in the use of low-impact practices. Studies report that although many long-established campsites have been relatively stable over time, the number of affected campsites has increased dramatically, and increases in impact have been most pronounced in lightly used portions of wilderness (Cole 1993). Studies of wilderness visitor trends indicate that perceived crowding has increased along with actual use (Cole et al. 1995). Particularly troubling is the increased traffic in many lightly used portions of wilderness, because this trend diminishes the availability of opportunities for the low encounter rates that most wilderness visitors prefer (Stankey 1973; Cole et al. 1995). Ironically, permit systems and other well-intentioned attempts to reduce problems in popular wilderness locations are among the primary causes of impact proliferation and increased crowding in lightly used areas (Cole 1993). Displaced visitors have been encouraged to select trailheads and destinations that are less frequented—vulnerable areas where even small increases in use cause dramatic increases in impact (Cole 1997) and visitor dissatisfaction (Stankey 1973; Cole et al. 1995). Pressures imposed by the increasing demand for wilderness recreation are aggravated by a dwindling supply of places outside wilderness areas that offer similar experiences. Since passage of the Wilderness Act, scientists and managers have stressed the importance of providing high-quality backcountry experiences on lands outside wilderness (Wagar 1974) as a means of relieving demand for recreation in wilderness. These suggestions have generally gone unheeded, and much of the public land that was unroaded a few decades ago has either been roaded or designated as wilderness. The size of the wilderness system has increased more than expected. It is already twice the “outside maximum” of 50 million acres projected in congressional testimony by Howard Zahniser, the principal architect of the Wilderness Act (US Senate 1961). This unforeseen growth of the system may result from today’s wider conception of areas that need to be set aside as wilderness, including small, previously disturbed tracts of land and lands that are adjacent to urban areas. A larger system, broader definitions of what wilderness is, and the loss of unroaded lands outside wilderness all suggest that wilderness will have to meet an everincreasing range of societal demands. Al Wagar, an early student of recreational carrying capacity, stated, “For wilderness, use limits are inevitable” (Wagar 1974, p. 278). Although continued population growth and increases in participation rates bear out Wagar’s prediction, little progress has been made in preparing for this eventuality. For wilderness use limits, it is not a question of “if ” but “when” and “how much.” Frameworks for deriving justifiable use limits have become available with development of the limits of acceptable change (LAC) and visitor experience and resource protection (VERP) processes. The foundation of these processes is quantitative standards (usually minimally acceptable conditions) that reflect explicit decisions about the most appropriate compromise between conflicting goals (McCool and Cole 1997). The fundamental dilemma is how best to balance responsibility for meeting society’s needs, particularly for backcountry recreation, with the mandate to protect wilderness conditions, both ecological and experiential. Managers need to prescribe quantitative standards for wilderness conditions, recognizing that the more stringent standards are, the lower use limits will have to be and the more demand will go unmet. Even then, questions remain about whether this balance between access and protection should be consistent across wilderness or whether some wilderness lands should emphasize recreational access and some should be more strongly protected, as wilderness advocate Bob Marshall (1933) proJournal of Forestry 5 posed. The choice is between narrow and wide ranges in standards for different portions of wilderness. Early wilderness use limitation programs tended to reduce diversity, decreasing use and impact in high-use places and allowing some increase in low-use places (van Wagtendonk 1981). Although this traditional approach is a legitimate option, there are reasons to consider a wider range of conditions. If wilderness was a narrowly circumscribed land designation, and there were substantial public lands in nonwilderness designations providing opportunities for highquality backcountry recreation experiences, as Bob Marshall and others proposed, there would be little need for a broad spectrum of wilderness conditions. It is worth considering whether substantial acreage should be allocated to nonwilderness backcountry designations. Although President Clinton’s recent direction to study roadless lands provided a new opportunity to do so, in the past there has never been sufficient interest from the public or management agencies. Perhaps wilderness has evolved into a large and diverse system that must meet more preservation needs and more recreational demand than Congress, agencies, or early wilderness advocates envisioned. A broad range of wilderness conditions could be provided by allowing high visitation in carefully selected and delineated wilderness locations, while protecting most wilderness in a lightly used condition. Such a wilderness management zoning approach (Haas et al. 1987) would keep most wilderness close to the low-use ideal described in the Wilderness Act and still meet the increasing demand for wilderness experiences. Costs include acceptance of far-from-pristine conditions in heavily used wilderness locations and the need to restrict access across much of the wilderness system, including places that are still lightly used. A recent study of several heavily used wilderness destinations in the Pacific Northwest (Cole et al. 1997) provides some indication of the costs of allowing heavy use within wilderness. Results showed that aside from possible displacement of sensitive animals, the ecological integrity of intensively managed destinations need not be seriously compromised by recreation. Moreover, the experiences these places offered were still reported by visitors to be high-quality experiences, characterized by solitude, primitiveness, and lack of confinement—the words the Wilderness Act used to describe the experiences wilderness should provide. Most visitors to these destinations, even the very experienced, did not support efforts to keep all wilderness locations from being heavily used. Most supported the concept of limiting use if “overuse” occurred but did not feel that even a place like Snow Lake, in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, where another group is encountered every three minutes on popular weekends, was sufficiently overused to require limits (Cole et al. 1997). Wild, or Natural? The Wilderness Act describes several desirable attributes of wilderness ecosystems. According to the act, wilderness is “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” An uncommon word, untrammeled is often misread as “untrampled” and misinterpreted as meaning undisturbed or uninfluenced. The word is actually synonymous with unconfined and unrestrained. Thus, untrammeled wilderness would be wild, self-organizing, autonomous (Turner 1996), and not controlled or manipulated by humans for any purpose. Wilderness is also a place where “natural” conditions and processes are preserved. In the context of wilderness, the word natural is usually defined by a relative lack of human influence. Ideally, future wilderness ecosystems should be little different from what they would have been in the absence of postaboriginal humans (Landres et al. 1998). In this article, I contrast wilderness that is “wild” (untrammeled) with wilderness that is “natural” (not influenced by humans). I recognize that these words have multiple meanings and that their use oversimplifies complex phenomena. They are endpoints of a continuum, and it is impossible to precisely define or achieve truly natural or wild ecosystems. My purpose is to illustrate the inherent conflict between wilderness ecosystems that are free from intentional human manipulation and control (wild) and wilderness ecosystems that are free from postaboriginal human influence (natural). When the Wilderness Act was passed, its proponents assumed that keeping wilderness wild would also keep wilderness natural. Since then, however, ecological understanding has advanced. The result is an unanticipated management dilemma. Metaphors of the “balance of nature” have been replaced with notions of natural ecosystems that change profoundly and idiosyncratically with the climate, are strongly affected by natural disturbance processes, and exhibit multiple equilibria and end points (Pickett and Parker 1994). We have learned that human activities have global effects; even remote wilderness has been altered by modern humans (Cole and Landres 1996). The ubiquity of ecosystem change and human disturbance forces us to confront the fact that we cannot have wilderness that is truly wild or natural—let alone wilderness that is simultaneously wild and natural. We must choose between desirable wilderness attributes, at least to some 6 January 2001 D av id S pi ld ie Increasingly, wilderness ecosystems are being intentionally manipulated to restore natural conditions. On this disturbed campsite, a mulch mat has been applied to protect transplanted vegetation.