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Defenders Magazine
Defenders View: Making Refuges Safe for Wildlife
Every day we read about some new threat to wild animals and plants. Vital habitat is paved over or plowed up; drought or disease kills birds and fish; invasive foreign species crowd out vulnerable native flora and fauna. A tide of extinctions is threatening to wipe out much of the natural heritage that is our children’s birthright.
A key to protecting the web of life, experts agree, is setting aside an array of lands where wildlife conservation takes priority. While much work needs to be done to protect vital habitat, the good news is that we already have the core of such a system here in the United States. These are our national wildlife refuges—more than 540 of them, covering nearly 100 million acres across the country.
The bad news is that many of these refuges are under siege—often from the same problems that bedevil wild animals and plants outside refuges. At Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana, for example, ducks, pelicans, herons and other birds must fight for space with nearly 180 oil and gas wells—wells that regularly spew waste into the rich marshes and bayous. At the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge in Minnesota, river bass and other species of fish are so contaminated by mercury from coal-burning power plants that they are unsafe not only for birds to eat, but humans, too.
Most of these challenges aren’t new. Defenders assembled a panel of eminent experts more than a decade ago to study the refuge system. In their 1992 report, titled “Putting Wildlife First," the experts concluded that “the system suffers from deep-seated problems." “Refuges are threatened from within by resource uses harmful to wildlife and habitats," the group wrote. “External threats such as pollution and watershed degradation make some refuges little more than oases in a desert of urbanized, cropped, overgrazed, overlogged landscapes."
A dozen years later, these threats remain. And new challenges have cropped up in recent years. Witness the repeated attempts by Congress and the Bush administration to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the “crown jewel" of the refuge system—to oil and gas drilling.
With threats to wild animals and plants around the world mounting every day, we cannot sit by and watch the only public lands devoted to wildlife protection whither away. There’s simply too much at stake—not only for us, but for future generations. So Defenders is launching a comprehensive effort to bring attention to the plight of our refuge system.
The most visible part of this effort is a new report highlighting the 10 most endangered refuges across the country. For this report (the first in a planned annual series), we have examined refuges across the country and chosen 10 based on the following criteria: the magnitude and timeliness of the threat(s); the significance of the refuge to our natural wildlife heritage; the opportunity for action to address the problem; and the refuges’ representation of overall threats to the system.
Our final list includes not only the Arctic, Delta and Upper Mississippi refuges, but places such as Don Edwards San Francisco Bay in California—where invasive plants are crowding out natural habitat for waterfowl—and Pocosin Lakes in North Carolina—where a proposed military jet landing field nearby threatens to destroy the integrity of land that shelters thousands of birds and a significant population of red wolves. The report—written and designed to be accessible to nonexperts—also includes recommended steps for protecting these refuges.
Our hope is that our annual “Top 10" list and other initiatives will spur long-overdue interest in and support for our wildlife refuge system. If we can’t protect wild plants and animals in our wildlife refuges, where are we going to do it? Clearly, we must start here.
