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Ecological Benefits of Wilderness

Wilderness plays a significant role in the overall health of ecosystems, and we enjoy a variety of ecosystem services from wilderness including air and water filtration, climate regulation, and maintenance of biodiversity. Ecology, generally, is the study of the interrelationships between organisms and their environment and how natural processes like floods, fire, and predation affect these relationships. As John Muir^{[1 p. 110]} once said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Poet Gary Snyder^{[2 p. 65]} writes, "In ecology, we speak of 'wild systems.' When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness."

More and more, we realize that we are part of an interconnected "web of life," and that our survival may ultimately depend on the survival of natural areas like wilderness. Natural disturbances like floods or fires maintain natural processes, systems and patterns and allow wilderness to live up to its definition of being self-willed land.

Clean Air

Wilderness improves the quality of our air because wilderness areas protect some of the cleanest airsheds in the nation. Under the Clean Air Act, air quality must be protected in Class I areas, which include wilderness areas in existence as of August 7, 1977 that are larger than 5,000 acres. This law set a national visibility goal of no human-caused impairment, which was further defined through the 1999 Regional Haze Rule, and established the Prevention of Significant Deterioration of Air Quality Related Values program for review of new pollution sources.

To ensure preservation of air quality, the wilderness management agencies monitor pollution that may impair visibility, harm human health by aggravating respitory illnesses and causing heartbeat irregularities and heart attacks, injure trees and other plants, acidify or cause unnatural chemical imbalances in streams and lakes, leach nutrients from soils, and degrade cultural resources, like archeological sites and historical buildings. Since most pollutants can be travel great distances overall air quality is monitored by monitoring visibility, rainwater and surface waters, and lichens^[3].

Clean Water

Many communities use water that starts flowing in wilderness because undisturbed ecosystems have a well-deserved reputation for producing clean water. According to the Forest Service, two-thirds of the nation's runoff, excluding Alaska, comes from forested areas, including wilderness, and 60 million Americans get their water from these watersheds^[4]. Recently, the Forest Service's Forests to Faucets project conducted a national-scale, spatial assessment identifying important forested areas for surface drinking water and reinforcing the importance of wilderness areas for clean water^[5].

In fact, some wilderness areas were designated in order to preserve healthy watersheds for current and future generations. For example, the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area and Wilderness Act of 1980, which designated the Rattlesnake Wilderness just outside Missoula, Montana states that the "area has long been used as a wilderness by Montanans and by people throughout the Nation who value it as a source of...clean, free-flowing waters stored and used for municipal purposes for over a century." Likewise, in the Endangered American Wilderness Act, which designated a variety of western wildernesses, "Congress finds and declares that it is in the national interest that certain of these endangered areas be promptly designated as wilderness...in order to preserve such areas...for watershed preservation."

Some wilderness areas, such as the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness in New Jersey, provide other water-related services including flood control, groundwater recharge, and storm water detention and filtration. Research shows that water coming into the swamp from local tributaries contains both natural and synthetic pollutants and that the swamp serves as a significant nutrient and sediment sink for these impurities^[6]. Although this exemplifies the filtering effects of hydrological systems preserved in wilderness areas, water quality leaving the swamp is poorer than that entering the swamp, a testament to the increases in water pollution from nearby urban areas.

Wildlife Protection

Not only does wilderness protect the air we breathe and the water we drink, it also protects the wildlife we cherish. Millions of birds use wilderness as nesting and wintering grounds, and resting places when migrating. For example, the permanent ponds, lagoons, intertidal sand flats, and vegetated dunes of Mississippi's Gulf Islands Wilderness are important stopover areas for migratatory Neotropical birds such as the Ruby-throated Hummingbird and Yellow-billed Cuckoo^[7]. This wilderness provides a critical last foraging opportunity for fall migrants crossing the Gulf of Mexico and is one of the first potential landfall sites for returning migrants. As with water, legislation has recognized the importance of wilderness to migrating species. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act designated many Fish and Wildlife Service Refuges that contain wilderness areas to "conserve fish and wildlife populations and habitats in their natural diversity including...shorebirds and other migratory birds, raptors, including bald eagles and peregrine falcons."

Many other animals, such as the wolf, bear, moose, wolverine, and elk, that need large undisturbed habitat, also make their homes in wilderness. According to an early study on wolverines in Montana, the average range of a wolverine is approximately 155 square miles or 100,000 acres and that "wilderness or remote country where human activity is limited appears essential to the maintenance of viable wolverine populations"^{[8 p. 1299]}. Without the space and isolation that wilderness offers, these and other wildlife species could not survive. Wilderness also protects cold-water fisheries. In Colorado, for example, 76% of Greenback cutthroat trout habitat, 58% of Rio Grande cutthroat trout habitat, and 71% of Colorado River cutthroat trout habitat is wilderness or roadless^[9]. By preserving habitat for such a variety of species, wilderness allows the natural cycling of birth, life, and death for thousands of animal species in their natural environments and helps maintain the genetic material needed to provide a continuing diversity of plant and animal life. Without wildlife to pollinate, fertilize and distribute seeds and nutrients, wilderness wouldn't exist. The presence of wildlife in wilderness helps us be more aware of the connection that all living things share, and that we are all a part of the circle of life.

References

1. Muir, J. (1988). My First Summer in the Sierras. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.
2. Snyder, G. (1994). The Etiquette of Freedom. The Psychoanalytic Review, 81, 57-75.
3. USDA Forest Service. (n.d.b). USDA Forest Service Air Quality Monitoring Website. Retrieved on August 3, 2009.
4. Sedell, J., et al. (2000). Water and the Forest Service. FS-660. USDA Forest Service, Washington, DC.
5. USDA Forest Service. (2012, February 15). Forests to Faucets Program. Retrieved on March 22, 2012.
6. Ten Towns Great Swamp Watershed Management Committee. (2007, March 2). Great Swamp Watershed Water Quality Monitoring Report.
7. Moore, F. R., Kerlinger P, & Simons, T. R. (1990). Stopover on a Gulf Coast Barrier Island by Spring Trans-Gulf Migrants. Wilson Bulletin, 102(3), 487-500.
8. Hornocker, M. G. & Hash, H. S. (1980). Ecology of the Wolverine in Northwestern Montana. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 59, 1286-1301.
9. Trout Unlimited. (n.d.). Where The Wild Lands Are: Colorado: The Importance of Roadless Lands to Colorado's Fish, Wildlife, Hunting and Angling. Retrieved on September 10, 2009.