Social-Ecological Resilience and Law

Introduction

Social-Ecological Resilience and Law

AHJOND S. GARMESTANI, CRAIG R. ALLEN, CRAIG ANTHONY (TONY) ARNOLD, AND LANCE H. GUNDERSON

Environmental law is intimately connected to ecological concepts and understanding. The legal instruments, institutions, and administration of law in the United States are predicated on assumptions that nature is globally stable and that the inherent variability in ecological systems is bounded. This current legal framework is based upon an understanding of ecological systems operating near an equilibrium, or if disturbed, moving back toward an equilibrium. Such assumptions make much current environmental law ill-suited for many pressing environmental issues (Ruhl 1999; Garmestani et al. 2009; Craig 2010; Verchick 2010; Benson and Garmestani 2011). Emerging environmental challenges, such as cross-boundary water governance or climate change, are not easily addressed within the current legal framework, because although the problems may be easily identified, the solutions require frequent recalibration of the policy used to manage the environmental issue.

The legal system functions to create and sustain certainty and security in the distribution of resources among humans in society: power and authority, land and natural resources, financial capital and income, the fruits of transactions and innovation, physical safety, risk, etc. (Weber 1923; Unger 1983; Nedelsky 1990; Delgado 1991; Eagle 2006; Dick 2011). A dramatic paradigm shift in American law occurred in the 1970s, when Congress targeted hazardous waste, water pollution, and protection of endangered species with sweeping new legislation (Lazarus 2004). However, many of the federal and state laws directed toward the environment enacted in the late 1960s to early 1970s have been applied for more than a generation, and there is a growing question of relevancy and efficacy of these laws (Arnold 2011). One example is the legal approach to control and constrain ozone-depleting compounds, formulated in the 1970s. While successful at mitigating ozone degradation, this approach failed miserably when applied to current issues of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions (Nordhaus 2006). In addition to numerous challenges to laws that regularly test their meaning and effectiveness, laws are also predicated on social values and scientific understanding, both of which are subject to change. The uncertainty associated with the dynamics of social-ecological systems presents a set of problems outside the scope of classic environmental law and has led to a fundamental conclusion regarding the interaction of environmental law and social-ecological systems: rigid legal standards that protect property rights and advance economic considerations are largely incompatible with our current understanding of the dynamics of social-ecological systems.

The legal system, particularly in the fields of environmental, natural resource, and property law, assumes a globally stable nature (Ruhl 2008; Craig 2010). That is, the environment, ecosystems, and natural resources are presumed to exist in a particular condition or state. These conditions can be described generally for a range of ecosystems as clean water, productive fisheries, healthy forests, or viable populations. Many of the impacts of human activities, such as harvesting fish or timber or changing land cover types and patterns, are thought to move the environmental system away from a particular state. Therefore, nature and human relationships with nature are to be regulated and managed based on historic conditions and linear patterns of change that are designed to return these systems to a particular (generally predisturbance) state. For example, many environmental laws are set up to control pollution by regulating discharge of pollutants into the ground, air, or water (e.g., Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act; Clean Air Act; Clean Water Act). The implicit model in this regulatory approach is that by limiting these inputs, the ecosystem will return to a prior state—one of contaminant-free soil, clean air, or clear water.

However, during the past forty years, ecologists have developed a substantial amount of data and examples that indicate ecosystems can exist in a variety of stable configurations (Gunderson et al. 2009). Examples include clear lakes or estuaries that suddenly became turbid due to algal blooms (Scheffer 2009), grasslands that switched into shrublands (Folke et al. 2004), forests with periodic eruptions of pests (Holling 1986), coral reefs that have become algal reefs, and healthy populations that became endangered and vulnerable (Hughes 1994). In all of these cases, the ecosystem is characterized by alternate configurations, states, or regimes. Ecological resilience is the emergent property of ecosystems that mediates the transition among alternative states (Gunderson et al. 2009). Resilience theory has been developed to explain environmental systems that are complex, dynamic, and subject to abrupt and unpredictable change (Gunderson and Holling 2002; Gunderson and Pritchard 2002; Walker and Salt 2006; Gunderson et al. 2009).

The U.S. legal system is resistant to change (Hathaway 2001). It is governed by principles of stare decisis (the common law’s following of prior decisions or precedents in deciding new cases), checks and balances on government authority, judicial self-restraint, protection of individual rights and freedoms, and similar concepts. A variety of legal rules and procedures make it very difficult for the U.S. Constitution to be amended and, to a lesser degree, for legislation to be enacted or amended (Ruhl 2012). The U.S. legal system favors the finality of decisions through principles of res judicata and collateral estoppel. It creates procedural and jurisdictional obstacles to appeals of or challenges to decisions. Rapid and often nonlinear transformations in ecosystems and social systems, though, require social institutions—including legal institutions—that are flexible and adaptive to change (Gunderson and Holling 2002; Gunderson et al. 2006; Olsson et al. 2006; Ruhl 2010). Although the change-slowing effect of law helps society to absorb shocks and disturbances up to a point, law can be brittle and maladaptive if it cannot keep up with the pace, scale, and direction of social-ecological change, such as drought and flooding patterns and their effects. Likewise, law is brittle and maladaptive if it assumes a static state that does not match ecological and/or social change.

The legal system is more flexible with respect to societal conditions than to ecological conditions. From time to time, the legal system balances its functions as a relatively conservative (i.e., change-resistant) institution with its principles and tools of equity, human rights, and social justice. When it does so, though, the legal system is focused either on nonenvironmental human interests or on human interests in their environment and natural resources, not on the well-being of nonhuman species or of nature’s ecological features and processes. In the U.S. legal system, nonhuman species or ecosystems do not have rights or legal standing (Stone 1972). Few, if any, truly ecocentric principles are imbedded in current laws (Tarlock 2012). To the extent that the law protects or advances ecological health or welfare, it is a by-product of political choice through the enactment of legislation and its implementation through regulations. In essence, the law deems ecological health and welfare a subsidiary of human health and welfare. Science, though, demonstrates that the functioning of social systems are intricately interconnected with the functioning of ecosystems at multiple scales (Gunderson and Holling 2002; Walker and Salt 2006). The feedbacks between the two systems render elevation of either human welfare or nature’s welfare, to the subordination of the other, an exercise in futility. Aldo Leopold made this point more than sixty years ago (Leopold 1949).

Throughout much of its history, the U.S. legal system has been an arena of contest between two competing ideas of instrumentalist choice: relatively autonomous, self-contained decision making based on a certain kind of deductive human reasoning from principles and theories of law, which we might loosely and perhaps a little imprecisely call legal analysis or legal doctrine (Wells 2010), versus contextual, fact-specific, pragmatic decision making based on mediation among different interests and ideas about human welfare, which we might call legal pragmatism (Grey 1996). However, natural systems and forces do not obey the laws of humans. Legal decision making disconnected from the underlying ecological and social context will likely produce unintended adverse consequences: solutions that are mismatched to problems; ineffective results due to uncooperative forces of nature and society; or even harm to people, ecosystems, or social institutions that could have been avoided by less abstraction and more concrete contextualism. Nonetheless, even contextual decision making based on pragmatic considerations puts too much faith in human capacity—including the capacity of legal institutions—to control nature and society. Human cognition and action, whether individually or collectively through organizations and institutions, are bounded (Lindblom 1959; Holling 1978). Legal institutions cannot unilaterally stop hurricanes, prevent droughts, dictate sea levels, or alter changes in climate.

Observers from nearly every discipline and ideological perspective have recognized the glaring, urgent need for U.S. law to improve its adaptive capacity and role in supporting the resilience of both social and ecological systems (Thompson 2000; Driesen 2003; Garmestani et al. 2009; Zellmer and Gunderson 2009; Craig 2010; Miller 2010; Benson and Garmestani 2011; Ruhl 2011; van Rijswick and Salet 2012). The maladaptive nature of law can allow, facilitate, or even mandate pathological choices and behaviors with respect to ecosystems. It can contribute to incidents of ecological collapse, which in turn lead to incidents of social collapse: humans and societies depend on resilient ecosystems if they are to survive and thrive (Gunderson et al. 2006). At regional scales, policies and actions that focus on ecosystem stabilization in order to optimize particular social goals (such as controlling floods through dams and levees on river systems), have led to ecosystems that are much less resilient and more vulnerable to various shocks—ecological or economic (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Take, for example, the levees that were constructed along the Mississippi River in New Orleans over the past 300 years; these structures have reduced the impact of minor flooding, yet increased the vulnerability to and cost of extreme events, such as Hurricane Katrina (Kates et al. 2006).

The term resilience has developed different meanings since Holling (1973) defined it as the capacity of an ecosystem to withstand a disturbance and maintain the same basic processes and structures. Since that time, ecologists have observed the degradation of resilience in many ecosystems (Folke et al. 2004). In most of these cases, resilience was eroded (mostly by human activities) to the point where these systems crossed a threshold that represents the limits of a particular system state, into an alternative state. That is, the processes and structures that characterize a system can rapidly change and self-organize around an alternate state characterized by a different set of processes and structures. It is the focus on alternative states that prompted Holling (1996) to distinguish between ecological resilience and engineering resilience. Ecological resilience is the amount of disturbance required to flip the system into an alternative state, whereas engineering resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb a disturbance and return to a stable equilibrium state. With respect to social-ecological systems, resilience is the amount of disturbance a linked social-ecological system can absorb before reorganizing into a new state characterized by a different set of processes and structures. A resilient system may or may not be highly variable or may or may not be in a state that is desirable to humans, but it is defined by the ability to withstand disturbance. A disturbance could primarily affect the social domain or the ecological domain, but because social-ecological systems are linked, a disturbance in one domain will affect the other domain. Contributors to this book all follow the definition of social-ecological resilience with caveats and specifics particular to their needs. For example, Benson and Hopton use a definition of resilience from Carpenter et al. (2001) that states that resilience is: (1) the amount of change the system can undergo and still retain the same controls on function and structure; (2) the degree to which the system is capable of self-organization; and (3) the ability to build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation. Cosens and Stow follow the definition offered by Walker and Salt (2006), which states that resilience is the ability of a system to provide or shift to a regime that can provide necessary ecosystem functions and services. Ebbesson and Folke define resilience as the capacity of a social-ecological system to absorb disturbances and reorganize, while retaining essential function, structure, identity, and feedbacks. Similarly, Eason and colleagues define resilience as the capacity of a system to remain within a dynamic regime and maintain system function (self-organization). According to this definition, human activities can erode the persistence of a favorable regime that provides essential ecosystem services. Regardless of these differences, the contributors address social-ecological resilience rather than the simpler, return time of a system following disturbance associated with engineering resilience.

This volume seeks to explore and perhaps offer solutions to what we see as the fundamental issue with respect to the law and social-ecological resilience: Can a legal framework be reformed or designed to accommodate regime shifts associated with social-ecological resilience while maintaining enforceability? Regime shifts are a type of change that has been proposed to describe system-level change. Other theorists (Schumpeter 1942; Holling 1986; Gunderson and Holling 2002) use the phrase creative destruction to indicate a period of rapid, system transition in which some forms of capital are destroyed and new types of capital are created. Creative destruction is endemic to many systems (e.g., economic, ecological, and social) of particular concern to humankind and thus must be considered in the calculus of managing for social-ecological resilience. By attempting to stem the inevitable process of creative destruction, humans have created the conditions for change that has the capacity to far exceed the scale (spatial and temporal) of the naturally occurring pulses of change (Odum 2007). This presents great challenges for environmental governance as we attempt to manage environmental problems within the context of an outdated legal framework, because ecosystems are not readily managed with cookie-cutter, front-end management proscriptions (Benson and Garmestani 2011). This obviously presents problems from the legal perspective, and one of the ways in which this conflict can be resolved is through application of adaptive management to ecosystem management. Likewise, principles of adaptive governance could be applied to the broader field of environmental governance and policy.

If environmental law is to be improved, there are at least three nonexclusive general approaches available. First, laws could be developed that foster resilience in systems of people and nature. Second, current law could be made more flexible and adaptive to changing ecological or social conditions. And third, law could be made to facilitate adaptive management, both as a framework for the generation and testing of laws themselves and as an approach to the management of our natural resources and heritage. Adaptive management is a key aspect of managing for social-ecological resilience. However, under the current administrative law paradigm, which is focused on the front end of policy, adaptive management is very limited. Part of the problem with the application of resilience theory is that it is difficult to translate fluid concepts into law, as there are aspects of social-ecological resilience that are not directly observable (Carpenter et al. 2005).

Shapiro and Glicksman (2004) suggest that in order to better accommodate adaptive management, back-end adjustments to regulation could serve as a more effective mechanism. They argue that administrative law would need to be amended via deadline extensions, exceptions, waivers, or variances for back-end adjustments to be incorporated into the regulatory framework. A notice and comment process is the recommended mechanism for back-end adjustments with the caveat, noted by Shapiro and Glicksman (2004), that in addition to a notice and comment process, Congress would also need to require agencies to establish electronic dockets and create annual reports on the back-end adjustment process. The back-end adjustment process is viewed as an improvement to the considerable guess work that is involved in rationalizing regulations at the front-end of the process (Shapiro and Glicksman 2004). Glicksman and Shapiro (2004) recognize that a regulatory system that has some flexibility, in appropriate cases, has the potential to generate the necessary conditions to manage for social-ecological resilience. This idea has great promise, as resilience-based management requires an iterative process that improves management as the process unfolds.

An adaptive system of law will need to focus on maintaining the resilience and adaptive capacity of both social and ecological systems, including such subsystems as institutions and communities. The failure of legal institutions to value and facilitate the resilience of ecosystems will likely reduce the sustainability of social systems that depend on ecosystems. At times, the legal system seems to operate as though its primary function is to promote the robustness and resilience of the legal system itself (e.g., Arnold 2010). Alternative conceptions of law focus too narrowly on the resilience of ecosystems, without adequate attention to the vitality and adaptability of the social systems and institutions that often seem to be at odds with the natural environment. For example, legal changes that give primacy to ecosystems or biodiversity, particularly if they require substantial transformations to social systems and institutions, may produce a variety of unintended consequences, including political backlash, nonimplementation or underimplementation of reforms, political and social conflict, and fiscal or economic hardships (e.g., Doremus and Tarlock 2008). Also, disturbances to social systems and institutions often adversely affect ecosystems and biological communities, while ecocentric legal reforms may fail to address the most significant pathologies of the interconnections among nature, society, and law. In contrast, an adaptive legal system aims for structures, methods, and processes that build the resilience and adaptive capacity of both nature and society—a range of ecosystems, social systems, and institutions. In order to manifest a transition to a sustainability paradigm, we must develop a better understanding of resilience, as sustainability is dependent upon social-ecological resilience. By this, we mean that sustainability is not a static state or an end point, but rather a dynamic process. Such processes have the capacity for nonlinear change and cross-scale interactions, and presents a tremendous challenge to laws based upon the conception of systems existing in a balance of nature. In essence, the law will need to be reformed or new law will need to be crafted in order to allow us to manage for social-ecological resilience.

This book is primarily concerned with trying to explore our capacity to manage for social-ecological resilience within the context of existing laws and organizations. Sandi Zellmer and Marty Anderies investigate the historical role of and provide an assessment of the current state of wilderness preserves in the United States, characterizing wilderness laws and policies within the context of resilience theory. Zellmer and Anderies argue that adaptation will sometimes require active intervention in untouched wilderness preserves. Melinda Harm Benson and Matt Hopton analyze the legal frameworks and institutions that can accommodate a resilience-based approach to biodiversity protection; they accomplish this by conducting an overview of the history and the current state of wildlife management and biodiversity protection in the United States. Benson and Hopton conclude that the current legal framework in the United States is in need of reform, and they provide recommendations for legal and institutional reform allowing for resilience-based management of biodiversity. Rob Glicksman and Graeme Cumming provide an analysis of the management of parks, refuges, and preserves for resilience, and a review of U.S. laws that have perpetuated a preservation paradigm for nature. They argue that there is now broad consensus that resource management laws need to shift to fostering and managing for resilience. Glicksman and Cumming conclude that while some of the flexibility in current law is being utilized, the existing legal framework, developed under the assumption of a balance of nature not in concert with ecological reality, is still too rigid in its approach. Robin Craig and Terry Hughes explore the governance of the oceans as it relates to marine protected areas, spatial planning, and resilience. Craig and Hughes review the threats to marine ecosystems and identify the fragmentation of regulatory authority as the critical governance challenge for these systems. They conclude that coastal nations could foster resilience in marine ecosystems by incorporating place-based marine management (e.g., marine protected areas) into their governance regimes. Barb Cosens and Craig Stow conduct an analysis of water governance and how it affects water allocation and water quality. They assert that there are two areas of the law that be must reformed if the goals of the Clean Water Act are to be met: fragmentation of policy and addressing uncertainty in data that policy is based upon. They conclude that integration of water governance and creating the capacity for adaptation requires new approaches to environmental management. Olivia Odom Green and Charles Perrings describe transboundary water agreements and the role they play in social-ecological resilience. Their analysis of social-ecological resilience concludes that treaties must create the institutional capacity to manage conflicts and integrate iterative governance mechanisms. J. B. Ruhl and Terry Chapin integrate resilience theory and ecosystem services theory. They highlight that the resilience of ecosystems and the resilience of policy are two different animals and that the resilience of one does not, nor should it necessarily, guarantee the resilience of the other aspect of sustainability. Ruhl and Chapin conclude by offering suggestions on where ecosystem services theory is useful for supporting the resilience of ecosystems and the resilience of ecosystem policy. Alex Camacho and Doug Beard offer a chapter that considers the interaction between resilience and climate change. They conclude that existing government institutions lack the adaptive capacity to effectively manage a problem as complex as climate change. Regulators and managers lack information on effects of and management strategies for climate change, as well as the institutional infrastructure to obtain this critical information. Jonas Ebbesson and Carl Folke make the observation that legal scales and jurisdictions do not align well with the complex nature of social-ecological systems, and this mismatch erodes resilience. Ebbesson and Folke argue that the distinction between national and international needs to be demoted in order to manifest transboundary cooperation in environmental matters. The chapter by Tarsha Eason, Alyson Flournoy, Heriberto Cabezas, and Michael Gonzalez incorporates resilience and innovation into American law and policy via two proposed new laws: the National Environmental Legacy Act (NELA) and the Environmental Competition Statute (ECS). The authors provide an analysis of both model laws based upon recent sustainability research in the United States. Eason and coauthors view the problem of resilience and law as one that will require new law in order to manifest a transition to sustainability. Tony Arnold and Lance Gunderson undertook the herculean task of creating a system of adaptive law, which is necessary, because legal decision making detached from the dynamics of social-ecological systems is likely to result in adverse consequences. They conclude that an adaptive system of law: has multiple goals, is multimodal and integrated, has the capacity to adapt to context, and has iterative legal processes with accountability. Garmestani and colleagues conclude with a chapter that integrates lessons learned from the book and synthesizes our current understanding of the interaction between social-ecological resilience and law.

The rigidity of our current legal framework is not well-suited to the complexity of social-ecological systems (Garmestani et al. 2009). In order to account for resilience in social-ecological systems, environmental law likely must evolve in response to changing environmental conditions (Garmestani et al. 2009). Law is incremental by design, and broad-scale change is therefore unlikely (Lazarus 2004). Thus, the law will likely have to evolve in an incremental manner, interspersed with dramatic change, in response to environmental problems. The chapters in this book emphasize different aspects of law and governance and highlight the features of law that allow for and hinder the capacity to manage for social-ecological resilience.

The authors in this book have analyzed the law specific to their chapter topic and suggested legal reform (see Zellmer and Anderies; Benson and Hopton; Glicksman and Cumming; Camacho and Beard), reform in governance (Craig and Hughes; Cosens and Stow; Ebbesson and Folke), reform to treaties (Green and Perrings), integration of theories (Ruhl and Chapin), and new law (Eason et al.; Arnold and Gunderson) as the means to deal with the tension between social-ecological resilience and law. It is our hope that by teaming top legal scholars with leaders in resilience science, we have contributed to a step forward in creating improved understanding of the barriers and bridges to resilience-based governance, illuminating the interaction between social-ecological resilience and law.

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ONE

Wilderness Preserves

Still Relevant and Resilient After All These Years

SANDRA B. ZELLMER AND JOHN M. ANDERIES

Since the late nineteenth century, policy makers and conservation groups in the United States have devoted a great deal of attention to preserving natural places (Hays 1959). Wilderness preserves, in particular, represent both the legacy of America’s past—remnant patches of the vast lands occupied for millennia by Native Americans and wild creatures—and our options and hopes for a biologically and culturally resilient future (Scott 2004). Wilderness areas provide many ecological and anthropocentric benefits, including habitat for a diverse array of species, watershed protection, carbon sequestration, recreational opportunities, beauty, and quiet sanctuary. In describing one lovely and terrible, harshly and beautifully colored wild area in Utah, author Wallace Stegner explained, We simply need that wild country . . . for it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope (Stegner 2004, 11).

Stegner wrote those lines a half-century ago. Although the strategy of setting aside certain wild or natural areas has served the nation well in the past, it is not clear that it will prove to be a viable conservation strategy in the future. Scientists have sounded the alarm: rapid and dramatic changes in climate are threatening the ability of ecological communities and processes to persist (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007). Adaptation strategies that promote resilient local and regional ecosystem responses to climate change will be imperative. In some areas, such strategies may include active intervention to foster transitions to more resilient ecological communities (Galatowitsch et al. 2009). For wilderness preserves, the desire for adaptation strategies raises a compelling question: Does it still make sense to protect wilderness areas from human intrusion?

This chapter explores the continuing relevance of preserving wilderness by preventing active human intervention. It concludes that the symbolic and ecological benefits of wilderness are as significant today as they were fifty years ago. Indeed, the importance of preserving wilderness areas will only increase as the climate changes. Land managers face complex challenges, however, when managing wilderness resources already degraded due to climate change or other human impacts that may require intervention to prevent further degradation. Deciding whether and how to intervene with active management tools, while maintaining the overarching wild values of wilderness, is difficult but not impossible. It is a fair bet, though, that historic characteristics and variability can no longer be the primary reference points for decision making, and that strategic approaches to monitoring and managing existing, expanded, and new preserves will be necessary (Craig 2010).

Based on a combination of lessons learned from several case studies of wilderness areas in which interventions were undertaken to address threats, and ideas from resilience theory and adaptive management, we propose three threshold inquiries that should be answered in the affirmative before a wilderness restoration project is undertaken. First, is there sufficient understanding about reference conditions and processes and the long-term effects of restoration actions? Second, is restoration even possible in a particular wilderness area, given the complexity of ecosystem dynamics and the pervasiveness of ecological change? Finally, can humans extricate themselves from the system within some discrete period of time and allow the ecological processes indicative of pre-degraded characteristics to resume functioning? If the answer to all of these questions is yes, then it may be acceptable to prioritize the need of the natural system for active restoration-oriented interventions over society’s need to keep wilderness areas wild and untrammeled.

Naturalness and Wilderness

The Wilderness Act of 1964 is widely known as one of the nation’s pre-eminent preservation statutes (Rodgers 1994). Today, federally designated wilderness areas are found within each major category of federal lands—national forests, national parks, wildlife refuges, and public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. There are nearly 700 federally designated wilderness areas in forty-four states, covering 109 million acres of land or around 5 percent of the U.S. land base (Gorte 2008). About 75 percent of the wilderness in the lower forty-eight states is located within only five ecoregions—one desert ecoregion, the Mojave Desert of California, and four high-elevation ecoregions, the southern and middle Rocky Mountains, California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest (Wilderness Society 2011).

Over the years, the Wilderness Act has been remarkably stable and robust, with few legislative revisions to its substantive requirements. The Act is so well loved that, as Bill Rodgers notes, it is virtually repeal-proof (Rodgers 1994). During almost every congressional session since 1964, new wilderness areas have been added to the system or existing areas have been expanded. Once a wilderness area is established, Congress rarely de-designates it, although land exchanges that release land from wilderness study are occasionally authorized (Scott 2004).

The Wilderness Act directs that a wilderness area must be "protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions (Wilderness Act § 1131(c)). Neither natural nor wild is specifically defined in the Act. Natural is commonly understood as produced or existing in nature" (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 2003), as opposed to artificial or human-made. In ordinary parlance, wild means free, untamed, autonomous, and in a state of nature (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 2003). The principal author of the Wilderness Act, Howard Zahniser, defined the term wild as untrammeled: not subject to human controls and manipulations that hamper the free play of natural forces (Zahniser 1959). The Act specifies that only those lands retaining a primeval character and influence, which are affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable, qualify as wilderness (Wilderness Act § 1131(c)).

Because federal wilderness areas are to remain both natural and free of human manipulation, wilderness designations impose the most restrictive management directives in federal law, far more so than the directives that apply to national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, and other federal land categories (Wilderness Society v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2003). In fact, when surveyed about their ability to implement climate adaptation policies, federal land managers indicated that the constraints imposed by the Wilderness Act could act as a potential barrier (Jantarasami et al. 2010).

While the congressional mission for the National Park System provides the closest analogy to the Wilderness Act’s mission, even the national parks (i.e., nonwilderness areas of parks) are managed quite differently than wilderness areas. The National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 provides that the fundamental purpose of parks is twofold: "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations" (National Park Service Organic Act of 1916, emphasis added). Congress began setting aside federal public lands as national parks for conservation and recreational purposes in 1872 with the establishment of Yellowstone National Park (Act of March 1, 1872). There is an elemental distinction between parks like Yellowstone and wilderness areas, however; there can be no permanent roads in wilderness areas, and motorized or mechanized means of transportation are generally prohibited in wilderness areas but are quite common—even prevalent—in national parks. The absence of roads and motors is the hallmark of wilderness, distinguishing wilderness areas from all other categories of federal as well as state and private land.

To ensure that natural conditions and wild characteristics are preserved, the Wilderness Act imposes a variety of management restrictions. Specifically, as noted above, the Act prohibits most roads, and it also forbids motor vehicles, motorized equipment, mechanical transport, aircraft landings, and structures or installations except as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area (Wilderness Act § 1133(c)). Does this mean that land managers must stand back while wilderness areas evolve in whatever direction nature chooses [be free-willed] . . . regardless of pre-existing condition or future consequences? (Sydoriak et al. 2000). Not necessarily. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit observed, Congress did not mandate that the Service preserve the wilderness in a museum diorama, one that we might observe only from a safe distance, behind a brass railing and a thick glass window (Wilderness Watch et al. v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service et al. 2010). Rather, wilderness is to be made accessible to people, ‘devoted to the public purposes of recreational, scenic, scientific, educational, conservation, and historical use’ (Wilderness Act § 1133(b)). In addition to limited use of motorized or mechanical measures as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area, the Act also authorizes such measures . . . as may be necessary in the control of fire, insects, and diseases, subject to such conditions as the Secretary deems desirable (Wilderness Act § 1133(d)(1)).

Climate Threats to Naturalness and Wildness

In the mid-twentieth century, when the Wilderness Act was passed, preventing active manipulation of land and natural resources within this one special category of federal lands made good sense. The human population was growing, and Americans were becoming more affluent and had more free time and the means to travel to remote areas and to recreate with all sorts of mechanical or motorized devices. Meanwhile, industrialization—large-scale mining and pollution from a wide range of activities—was becoming more widespread and in many cases more destructive. In 1964 and the following few decades, creating and maintaining a system of untrammeled, natural preserves seemed attractive and even critical. In the twenty-first century, however, the changes wrought by climate change are making some question whether maintaining wilderness areas will be possible in the future, and whether devoting resources to such an effort makes any sense (Galatowitsch et al. 2009; Camacho 2011). Moreover, even if the effort is made, its not at all clear that it will be possible to keep something both wild—untrammeled and unmanipulated—and natural—exhibiting only those processes and functions that would be found in nature absent human influence (Cole 2001).

For some if not most areas, a dramatically warming climate creates a no analog future (Williams and Jackson 2007; Ruhl 2008). Although land managers might look to existing ecological conditions, processes, and functions in southern or low-elevation areas to predict future conditions, processes, and functions in northern or high-elevation areas and to plan future scenarios and management responses (Galatowitsch et al. 2009), bringing climate models down to the fine-scale level needed to make timely on-the-ground management decisions may seem little better than reading tea leaves. Precipitation patterns, vegetative shifts, species migration and invasion, wind, and soil composition are likely to change in unpredictable ways.

Temperature increases in the American West—where most wilderness areas exist—are likely to be even greater than the projected 3°F to 10°F worldwide increase by the end of the century (Saunders and Maxwell 2005). Storms, floods, drought, fire, disease, insect infestation, and species invasion are likely to become more severe and widespread. Some scientists believe that the effects will be most