Managing the Wildland-Urban Interface and Recreational Land Use

How I would go about managing Wildland-Urban Spaces?

As the population of the U.S. increases and the ideal of a single-family dwelling with a white picket fence stays the ideal, urban sprawl and encroachment onto wild areas stays an ever-growing and serious issue. As a result, ecosystems get destroyed both by being razed and as a result of being immediately adjacent to human settlements (edge effects), resulting in habitat loss for both animal and plant species. In addition, animals come into closer contact with humans which may result in the propagation of disease (ticks as a vector for Lyme disease), vehicular accidents, and a reduction of ecosystem diversity, all of which are catastrophic to both humans and the natural ecosystems alike. 

The building of homes in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) is a problem all over Wisconsin, with this phenomenon particularly present in northern Wisconsin, but also in many of the counties neighboring Dane county (1).

The first issue I'd want to deal with would be that of stemming urban sprawl in addition to the enclosing of tracts of unused land. To deal with this problem, the first thing I would do as a land manager would be to put in place incentives that make it preferable to build new developments on plots of land either abandoned or never developed in the first place. In addition, new developments should occur as higher-density projects rather than as single-family dwellings with large unused lawns.

To help with preventing the edge effects from being so pervasive, I would also introduce incentives to let yards run fallow or to plant native shrub and tree species. This would be aimed at single-family dwellings like my mom's which sits on 2.5 acres of land, 2 acres of which is rarely used. This is land that, while would not act directly as a habitat for wildlife due to its scale, would allow the undeveloped land behind it to carry native species, free from the worst of the edge effects. Additionally, I would also stop manicuring and cleaning the sides of roads to the extent that it is done now. Not only have studies shown this to be effective to decrease speeding (due to decreased lines of sight and an increased perception of speed), these manicured areas provide ample ground for invasive species to establish themselves and for unnatural disturbance incidents to occur (such as elevated windfall), thus removing them would decrease the effects of such a road. 

How do we morally pair our desires to be among wilderness and natural resources with the requirements for protecting habitats?

As with nearly everything that is in a self-regulating equilibrium, there is a way to enjoy a self-sustaining feature without completely ruining its self-sustainability. Nature is no different. What we must be conscious of, however, is finding the maximum value we can extract from nature while still maintaining non-consumptive use. To find this line so as to maintain nature's long-term viability, especially amidst a time of increased growth of visitors to these natural places (2), we must rethink many of the ways in which we interact with it, specifically aiming at reducing our per-person impact. 

One of the main issues we need to address is how readily we make natural sites accessible to the masses, particularly by motor vehicle. Old Faithful is a beautiful site to see, but why must there be a parking lot, not 500 feet geyser observation deck, that is big enough for an amusement park? While this may be a particularly egregious example for a site that is rather extraordinary, this is a pattern that persists across many of our nature parks. My local park on the Fox River has three parking lots all attached by a road that winds through the medium-sized park, ensuring that you're never more than a few minutes walk from the road, from cars, and from the disturbances associated with modern life. This need to have immediate access by road to any landscape is killing the very nature that makes these landscapes so appealing. We would have a fraction of the impact on these nature sites if we instead were forced to hike, kayak, or otherwise use transportation less disruptive than roads and personal motor vehicles, thus I would argue we can continue or even increase our utilization of some wilderness areas if we chose these less disruptive methods if enjoying nature. 

Old Faithful and its amusement park parking lot-sized parking lot, with its closest spaces just 353 ft. away from the semicircle deck structure surrounding the falls (3)

In his most recent video, Wendover Productions cites a statistic that states since 2016, more than half of emergency phone calls that ended in an emergency evacuation were from people who either were "too exhausted" or were otherwise woefully under-prepared for the trek they were aiming to undertake (2). This statistic acts as more supporting evidence for my above statement that we desire to inhabit these ecosystems in a way that is wholly unsustainable for the number visiting, not based on respect, and divorced from the reality that these ecosystems exist in a state that is fragile to modernity's effects. The question of whether or not we can recreationally enjoy nature while still protecting it seems like the wrong question to be asking, as peoples for millennia have lived full-time in harmony with the land we now are so eager to destroy for our vacations. The more appropriate question I believe is whether will we change our recreational practices so that we treat nature as the fragile ecosystems it is, rather than a resource that must be accessible and exploited without so much as the need to break a sweat. 

Citations:

1. https://news.wisc.edu/more-homes-built-near-wild-lands-leading-to-greater-wildfire-risk/

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37Hmd-VkMIM&t=879s

3. https://earth.google.com/web/search/Old+Faithful,+Yellowstone+National+Park,+WY/@44.4587742,-110.82827481,2247.62452864a,1782.62662176d,35y,-117.24073225h,6.9452184t,0.00000001r/data=CigiJgokCcZFCmuuhUVAEZpvb5loa0VAGRw7zw_2_1XAIXuyExNrIFbA