Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Minnesota Department of Forest Resources. Likewise, the University of Minnesota Department of Forest Resources does not guarantee the accuracy of information presented in these pieces. 

THE BOUNDARY WATERS CANOE Area Wilderness is known as a pristine wilderness area located in Northern Minnesota. The BWCA is about 1 million acres of forest and water, with 1175 lakes and 1200 miles of canoe routes (City of Ely, 2023). Visitors from all over the world travel to the Boundary Waters to experience a number of different ecosystem services. These ecosystem services include things like time in nature, solitude, lack of urban noise, beautiful sights of wildlife, forests, and stars, and much more. With the multitude of visitors, management is used to protect and preserve the wilderness of the Boundary Waters. 

The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service is a Federal Agency in charge of managing the 193 million acres of land and lakes that are the Boundary Waters (United States Forest Service, 2023). To manage this vast expanse of wilderness for environmental change or damage, the Forest Service uses a monitoring system called ‘Limits of Acceptable Change’ (LAC). LAC can be used to monitor, document, and understand change in order to make decisions on protection and management plans. An example of this is a campsite that is past the limit of acceptable change rating given and becomes temporarily closed for vegetation regrowth or rebuilding. 

However, management of wilderness in reality is not as straightforward as the LAC. Wilderness is currently managed as defined by the Wilderness Act of 1964, which is “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” (United States 88th Congress, 1964). This definition of wilderness that the Forest Service is currently using to manage the Boundary Waters removes man or human from the definition. 

I had the opportunity to take a variety of coursework related to wilderness and management in addition to my experiences with the Parks and Protected Area Management field course. I got to hear first hand from Indigenous perspectives and management agencies how important managing wilderness is and how big of an impact it can have on how visitors to those areas view their relationship to the natural environment. Traditional Ecological Knowledge in management practices view humans as part of the environmental equation. Practices like prescribed burning positively impact the forests and the people living in them. Humans are a part of nature and have been in nature for thousands of years; this is true in the Boundary Waters as well. Before colonization and the Forest Service, the Bands from the Ojibwe Tribe were living as part of nature in a sustainable and long lasting way. Humans gave to nature and nature gave back. 

However, today, our society is currently struggling with grand challenges like disconnection from our natural environment and industrialization, which has led to our current problem of accelerated climate change. When humans are removed from the concept of wilderness and environment, it creates a lack of solutions to fight the climate crisis and the ability to peacefully live in and alongside nature. In order to convince the general population and politicians we must shift the way we look at nature. We are not separate. We are animals and we belong in nature. I believe that by listening to Native perspectives and incorporating humans into the natural environment in our management tactics, we can repair the Western relationship to wilderness. As Hubachek Wilderness Research Center Forest Manager Kyle Gill said in reference to human relationship to nature, “we are part of these systems and we can be advocates for good and being part of a system.” The Limits of Acceptable Change, though low impact and effective, still treats wilderness as a separate entity from humans. I believe that in combination with management tactics like the LAC, natural resource managers should use educational tools to acknowledge and teach visitors the history of human connection with the land. We must acknowledge that humans are a part of wilderness in order to incorporate nature into our everyday lives and solve not only the climate crisis, but the way our society is disconnected with the earth. 

~Claire Volk

References

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness . Ely Area Tourism Bureau & Ely Chamber of Commerce. (n.d.). https://www.ely.org/ 

Hubachek visit lecture, K. Gill (2023)

Wilderness Act - United States 88th Congress (1964) https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Assets/USDA-FSA-Public/usdafiles/Environ-Cultural/wilderness_act.pdf