Glacier serving as a model for world parks

Managing the effects of climate change on the National Park System was a recurring theme at a Wednesday presentation in Glacier National Park featuring two local leaders with global recognition on the issue.

Back from a trip abroad to the first World Parks Congress in a decade, Glacier Superintendent Jeff Mow told attendees at a “brown bag” presentation that the meeting in Sydney, Australia, brought more than 5,000 people representing 160 countries.

At the conference, Mow helped lead conversations and talks related to adapting parks to the pressures of climate change. While he has only worked in Glacier for a year and a half, he said he gained valuable experience dealing with those impacts at his previous job at Kenai Fjords in Alaska, where the effects of climate change are “much more in your face.”

“We were dealing with novel flooding situations during the summer from glacial melt,” he said, pointing to road construction as a particular challenge. “Some of the uncertainty is we’re not sure if it’s something that’s going to be here very long, … so maybe we invest in just an interim solution until we understand it better.”

While developing best practices for climate change adaptation, Mow said uncertainty plays a large role, much as it would in any business plan. He also received some feedback from people in Sydney who appreciated his practical approach to climate change response rather than simply focusing on the negative aspects.

“When we look at climate change … there are going to be winners and losers,” Mow explained after the presentation. “You might have longer growing seasons that benefit some wildlife, but there are going to be others that don’t see any positives as well.”

In 1932, Glacier and the adjoining Waterton Lakes Park in Canada were designated an international peace park highlighting the shared value placed on the area by both countries and opening the door for increased collaboration across the border. Mow said it’s a model that more countries around the world are embracing, and after hearing many people refer to Glacier’s primacy in the movement, he said he hopes to begin hosting peace park workshops at the historic Wheeler property on Lake McDonald.

Dan Fagre, a Glacier Park-based research ecologist from the U.S. Geological Survey, also joined the U.S. delegation, which included representatives from the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, NASA, the Department of the Interior and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Fagre said Wednesday that the U.S. park system was unique in having so many pristine, unaltered environments compared to many of its counterparts around the world.

“We had a relatively easy time, so to speak, in creating our big Western parks,” Fagre said. “We had a much more open canvas … it had not been completely transformed by agriculture, had castles built on it and wars fought back and forth and so on.”

He brought up several examples of more recently designated parks around the world, such as Swiss National Park, where human pressures on the landscape have been far more pronounced over a longer period of time.

“The famous Swiss brown cows have been grazing these subalpine areas, right up to the edge of glaciers, for 500 years. Consequently they don’t know what the natural assemblage of plants are … they had to come here, to the United States, to figure out how the hydrology of some of these flood plains work.”

Other challenges for world parks include the extreme violence faced by park managers in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “They have round-the-clock guards for the mountain gorillas because they’re poached so heavily. … And just last year the chief warden for this whole operation was murdered,” he said, adding that many parks were increasingly militarizing their park rangers in response to violence by poachers.

Fagre also noted how the National Park System benefits from research stretching back for decades that has helped scientists understand the changing conditions in the parks and develop plans to mitigate impacts.

Referring to developing countries, he said, “there aren’t much resources to address research issues, because that’s usually pushed to the back of the priority list when you’re simply trying to buy shoes for your rangers.”

Reporter Samuel Wilson may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.