The heart of the matter

Those of us concerned with managing nature in America’s national parks had it pretty well figured out 30 years ago. We would remove the past artifacts of human settlement and protect parks from future anthropogenic influences; nature would do the right thing and we would all celebrate the consequences. During the course of the 1980s, the ecological paradigm of homeostasis, and thus natural stability, finally crumbled in the halls of academe. The Leopold Report’s 1963 clarion call to maintain, or where necessary recreate, “as nearly as possible the condition that prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man” began to look increasingly antiquated. Paleoecologists were reporting that “primeval” ecosystems frequently dated back only centuries to a few millennia—when climate had made a hard turn. We park managers subtly moved on, leaving native ecosystem species and processes to express themselves as they would on the land without our presuming the outcome. We would remove what didn’t belong, such as tractable non-native species and water diversions, and restore what had gone missing through human actions, such as extirpated species and fire. Establishing Redwood National Park had fired up a passion for restoring anthropogenically altered ecosystems, and we advanced from mitigating erosion in logged Northwest coastal creeks to tackling the jungles of strawberry guava and pig in Hawaii. We were managing for Nature: It felt rather grand, and for the most part the results looked pretty good as well ... although they sometimes came at great cost, and required chronic maintenance. Our era of optimistic confidence was short lived. Climate change eased into our consciousness slowly, from the initial findings of the climatologists and, eventually, the first uneasy forecasts by the ecologists: The world will look quite different. Temperature, precipitation, and substrate packets that have nurtured ecosystems will move elsewhere, or disappear entirely to be replaced by unprecedented new habitats. Plants and animals that can, will have to move. Biotic communities that have seemed organic in their integration will disassemble and novel combinations will arise. In these circumstances, what is a native species, or a native process? Nonetheless, conservation biologists surmise that in the face of changing climate, relatively intact ecosystems, especially large ones and ones connected to other ones, stand the best chance of persisting and minimizing extinction. Restoring damaged or