Can Underground Wilderness Remain A Reality?

 

By  Thomas Lera  NSS 14821 (RL)
submitted to NSS News for the March 2001 Conservation Issue.

 

 

In the near future, management action (or inaction) will increasingly exert a significant influence on the long-term value of wilderness. Managers may continue to allow wilderness conditions to diverge from a pristine state by electing not to pursue active manipulation. Or they may compromise our future ability to monitor the effects of human actions by intentionally manipulating the last of our wilderness. Neither option is attractive. Clearly there is need for active restoration in wilderness management, but its extent and magnitude needs to be more intensely debated. The first step is recognition that there is a conflict between the goals of pristine, unmanipulated and manipulated conditions. The primary purpose of this article is to increase awareness of this emerging dilemma that may include caves as underground wilderness.

 

The 1964 Wilderness Act contains at least three major conflicting goals: preservation of natural or pristine conditions, avoidance of intentional ecological manipulation, and provision of opportunities for use. As human disturbance of wilderness intensifies, managers must increasingly face the dilemma of choosing between the goals of restoring pristine conditions and avoiding conscious manipulation of ecosystems.[i] The Act contains no reference to underground areas.

 

Passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act presented federal land managers the challenge of maximizing different wilderness values reflected in three different management goals. One goal is to preserve lands "in their natural condition" (Sec. 2a). Definitions of naturalness vary but the concept is most often equated with pristine conditions and defined by what would have existed in the absence of man. [ii]  

In Sec. 2c, wilderness is defined as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man", with "untrammeled" meaning uncontrolled, unconfined, not restrained. Therefore the second goal--also related to the concept of naturalness--is to protect some lands from human control, from conscious, active, intentional manipulation. The third goal is to provide a variety of public benefits derived from use of the wilderness--"the public purposes of recreational, scenic, scientific, educational, conservation, and historical use" (Sec. 4b).

     

The major task of wilderness management is to optimize the trade-off between these three goals. Conflict between them creates dilemmas wilderness managers must resolve. So far, most attention has been devoted to the dilemma arising from conflict between wilderness use, particularly for recreation, and preservation of natural conditions. In reality, these wilderness areas are needed to protect examples of natural ecosystems and the diversity of life they harbor. [iii]

 

Natural processes will never cease no matter what, but challenges lie ahead too. John Twiss, the National Wilderness Program Leader for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington D.C. in 1995 identified the four greatest threats to wilderness as:

 

1)    distortion of natural processes (for example the lack of fire resulting in unnatural fuel buildup), pollution of air and water;

2)    the introduction and spread of exotic species;

3)    impacts and misuse of wilderness though recreation (occurs on only about 2% of the wilderness land base); and,

4)    lack of scientific monitoring [iv]

 

 

What will underground wilderness need to survive?

 

First, wilderness and cave managers will need more legal expertise to help in avoiding appeals and lawsuits, but also for a sound knowledge of pertinent wilderness legislation to ensure sound decision-making. Second, as the number of watchdog groups increase, wilderness and cave managers will need to cooperate with them and enlist their aid in developing management standards and wilderness regulations. Third, more money is needed for baseline research and monitoring. More wilderness and cave research information on ecosystem functions, as well as user impacts, will help managers make better decisions. Fourth, managers must place greater emphasis on restoring natural processes in wilderness. Finally, there must be more intra- and inter-agency cooperation and more consistency in management across the National Wilderness Preservation System.

 

We must resist the natural tendency to guide public policy by the "view through the rearview mirror." [v]  Such a backward approach to public policy will at best be ineffective and a waste of public effort and political energy; at worst and more likely, it will actually be damaging. We need to look clearly at where we are now, where we are being carried by ongoing changes in wilderness and cave management, and where these trends will take us in the future. This will not be easy. We need to look "through the windshield" and see where we are going.

 

Lands with wilderness qualities are a relatively scarce resource with significant alternative uses to satisfy important human needs and desires. The impact of protected, natural landscapes extends far beyond the physical boundaries of those areas. Natural landscapes tend to define the character and quality of the surrounding physical and social environment. This is clear when cave and karst wilderness areas protect water quality that supports off-site fisheries, or protect habitat that supports off-site wildlife populations. But the range of influence is greater than this. Protected cave and karst natural areas influence everything from scenic vistas, to recreational patterns, to patterns of urbanization.

 

This can be stated very directly: People care where they live. They care about the quality of the natural and social environments, which make up their living environment. They are willing to make sacrifices to obtain access to these natural amenities. High quality natural environments draw people and businesses to areas even when economic opportunities are otherwise quite limited. [vi]

 

There are questions about the value of both above and underground wilderness as a reference (i.e. a baseline) and to what and how wilderness should provide a reference. The ideal reference area would be a pristine and unmanipulated wilderness area. (Can underground wilderness even be included in this concept?) Unfortunately, this is not an option, although the framers of the 1964 Wilderness Act, as well as most scientists of the time, probably failed to realize this. We can have wilderness that is close to pristine, although it would still be somewhat altered by human disturbance. However, to compensate for human disturbance and to re-create more pristine conditions, managers would have to actively manipulate wilderness ecosystems. Eventually, given the pervasiveness of human influence, aggressive pursuit of this approach would result in the manipulation of all wilderness ecosystems. At that point, ironically, all wilderness ecosystems would be artificial constructs to some extent -- a reconstruction of what humans think is natural. [vii]

 

However, manipulated wilderness would be useful as a comparison reference with highly altered landscapes (e.g., managed forests in karst wilderness and agricultural areas). Its value for this purpose would be determined largely by the skilled managers ability to define pristine conditions and the implementation of prescriptions to re-create them. However, it would be impossible to evaluate the success of these prescriptions and adjust management accordingly. All wilderness areas would be consciously constructed artifacts, so there would no longer be any examples of unmanipulated ecosystems to serve as reference areas. Ecosystem manipulations in karst wilderness would become experiments without controls.

 

Alternatively, we can have cave wilderness that is unmanipulated but substantially disturbed. Taking this approach, cave managers would actively attempt to keep direct human disturbances (e.g., carbide dumps) out of cave wilderness, but they would avoid active ecosystem manipulation within the wilderness area. The result would be wilderness ecosystems that diverge, perhaps substantially, from their projected pristine state. These wildernesses would be useful as reference areas for comparison to manipulated ecosystems, both within and outside of wilderness. They would provide controls for interventions within wilderness and provide scientists with a place to monitor the dynamics of unrestrained ecosystems. Many, however, would be poor examples of pristine ecosystems. Because of this, cave wilderness designations may not be realistic.

 

Pristine and Unmanipulated Ecosystems

 

In short, the goal of naturalness implies the desirability of wilderness ecosystems that are both pristine and unmanipulated, but these ecosystem states are to some extent mutually exclusive. So what are 21st century cave and karst wilderness managers to do? Is a compromise between pristine and an unmanipulated condition the best approach? The extreme of doing everything possible to approximate pristine conditions cannot be afforded, even if this approach is deemed desirable. As Vale points out, such intensive manipulation, because it would require conspicuous human presence, would also conflict with recreation use goals. [viii] The other extreme of no intervention anywhere -- while inexpensive in the short-term -- seems equally undesirable because the integrity of many wilderness ecosystems will inexorably degrade in the face of increased human disturbance.

 

One option is to distinguish, either generally or on a case-by-case basis, between acceptable restorations and interventions that are too manipulative. Criteria useful in evaluating the acceptability of a restoration might include, 1) characteristics of the disturbance (e.g., extent, persistence, etc.), 2) characteristics of what is being restored (e.g., its rarity, vulnerability, irreplacability, etc.), and 3) characteristics of the intervention itself (e.g., its complexity, likely side effects, etc.). It might be decided, for example, that cave restorations and chemical treatment of exotics within localized areas are generally acceptable because they only affect small, not particularly unique sites, and are unlikely to have far-reaching and unpredictable side effects.

 

Once this conflict is recognized, the pros and cons of alternative approaches can be researched. Then, decisions must be made about where and when manipulation is desirable. Until, and even after, these decisions are made, it is important to approach wilderness restoration with more humility than hubris. For restoration to be successful, cave managers must specify desirable (i.e., natural) conditions. This is no simple task, judging from the minimal progress made in defining desired conditions during the 30 years since passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. However, it is simpler than prescribing and implementing the interventions that will bring about desired changes in ecosystems, without causing undesirable and unanticipated changes elsewhere.

 

Conclusion

 

As Frank Egler observed, "Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, but more complex than we think." [ix] With this in mind, we should be cautious about consciously manipulating the last of our true wilderness — the underground wilderness. We need to renew the support that helped pass the Wilderness Act and subsequent passage of state-based wilderness allocation laws during the past decades. We need to work with other national groups in a national coalition for wilderness, including cave and karst areas. There are many threats to the Wilderness System and they cannot be overcome without broad public support. The NSS should adopt a position and issue a white paper on underground wilderness.  I suggest this be a discussion panel during the Monday Conservation Section’s Meeting at the Convention this year.