2.%20Non-recreational%20use%20of%20wilderness%20and%20wildland

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2. Non-recreational use of wilderness and wildland

• Lecture outline
• Hunting and fishing
• Forests and forest products
• Water resources
• Minerals, oil and gas
• Agriculture
• Renewable energy
• Workshop group web poster QA

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1. Introduction

• Remember
• anthropocentric view
• value based on use
• most threats to wilderness are from human use
• Wilderness use
• traditionally as the pristine and original
  resource
• source of materials
• game (food and pelts)
• raw materials (timber, minerals, oil and gas)
• clean water supply
• source of land

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1. Introduction (contd)

• Wilderness as a playground
• hunting and fishing for sport
• wildlife watching
• eco-tourism
• walking and camping (wilderness trips)
• mountaineering, etc.
• other wilderness dependent sports
• Pharmaceuticals
• Renewable energy
• HEP
• wind

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2. Hunting and fishing

• Long history
• earliest humans to present day
• survival (hunter-gather) to modern sport
• http//www.extreme-wilderness.com/hunting_pictures
  .html

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We reached the old wolf in time to watch a
fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized
then, and have known ever since, that there was
something new to me in those eyes - something
known only to her and to the mountain. I was
young then, and full of trigger-itch I thought
that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that
no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after
seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither
the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a
view. Aldo Leopold (1949)
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2. Hunting and fishing (contd)

• Modern wildlife management
• E.g US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)
• http//www.fws.gov/
• working with others to conserve, protect and
  enhance fish, wildlife, and plants and their
  habitats for the continuing benefit of the
  American people

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Question

• To what extent do you support our right to hunt
  for food or for sport?
• and
• Is there scope for hunting/fishing as a
  wilderness dependent activity?

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3. Forestry and forest products

• Use of wilderness as a source of timber and
  related products
• Managed vs unmanaged
• Sustainability?
• E.g. rainforest loss

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3. Forestry and forest products (contd)

• US Forest Service
• http//www.fs.fed.us/
• Est. 1905 to manage public lands in national
  forests and grasslands
• "to provide the greatest amount of good for the
  greatest amount of people in the long run."
• 193 million acres under multiple use model

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4. Water resources

• Wilderness as a source of clean water
• supply to urban areas
• protected catchments/watersheds
• pollution free
• often forested (retention capacity)
• USGS http//water.usgs.gov/index.html

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Case studyMapping historic trends

• Methodology
• Date tagging of contemporary GIS data layers by
  visual comparison
• Visually compare sequence of maps
• Add date attribute field to GIS data layer
  describing when features appear
• Map wild land attributes at discrete time
  intervals
• Remoteness (distance and time)
• Visual intrusion by human artefacts (roads, hill
  tracks, reservoirs, power lines and plantation
  forestry

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(No Transcript)
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Data

• Northwest Scotland
• Affric-Kintail-Knoydart area
• Old and contemporary Ordnance Survey maps
• 1st series 1850s onwards available as scanned
  images (GeoTIFFs)
• Three dates
• 1860s, 1950s and 2004
• Now available online via Edina Digimap
  http//www.edina.ac.uk/digimap/

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Example historic data
2004
1866 2004 overlay
1866
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Time sequence human features in database

• Visual inspect shows obvious increase in human
  artefacts

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Time sequence simple road/track buffer

• Changes in distance from nearest road or hill
  track

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Time sequenceroad/track buffer including
barriers

• Changes in distance from nearest road or hill
  track

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Time sequenceremoteness as walking time

• Changes in remoteness by walking time

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5. Minerals, oil and gas

• Wilderness as a source of mineral wealth
• Again, a long history
• Mans fascination with mineral wealth
• E.g. Gold Rushes in North America
• E.g. Black gold

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Case studyArctic National Wildlife Refuge

• BigOil wants to tap the oil potential of the
  North Slope of Alaska, home to the Porcupine
  Caribou Herd
• http//arctic.fws.gov/
• http//arcticcircle.uconn.edu/ANWR/anwrpreface.htm
  l
• http//www.anwr.org/
• http//takeaction.worldwildlife.org/

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6. Agriculture

• Agriculture requires land
• driving force behind many wilderness losses
• E.g. early forest clearance for agriculture
• E.g. rainforest for agricultural land (from
  slash-and-burn to Macdonalds)
• E.g. ploughing up prairie

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7. Renewable energy

• The single biggest threat to wildland in Britain
  today
• HEP (historic)
• Wind farms

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6. Renewable energy (contd)

• Huge number of online resources
• http//www.bwea.com/
• http//www.yes2wind.com/
• http//www.rspb.org.uk/policy/windfarms/index.asp
  
• http//www.countryguardian.net/
• http//www.wilderness-trust.org/Wind20Farms20Act
  ion20Plan.pdf
• http//www.snh.org.uk/pdfs/polstat/ar-ps01.pdf
• http//www.mwtlewis.org.uk/index.htm
• http//www.viewsofscotland.org/
• http//www.saveourhills.org/
• http//www.mountaineering-scotland.org.uk/windfarm
  s/wf_links.html

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Question

• How do we solve the renewables vs wildland
  conflict?

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Workshop

• Group web poster QA

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Task

• Research and read up on the wind farm conflict
  facing the British uplands
• What are the issues?
• What are the arguments for and against?
• How do wind farms affect wildland?
• Use the web links in previous slides as a
  starting point

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Next week...

• 7. Wild futures
• Re-wilding
• Re-introductions
• Current threats to wilderness and wildland
• Workshop wind farm consultation exercise