Restoration and conservation challenges in wilderness frontiers

The concept of wilderness best applies to remote, unpopulated areas, devoid of large human impacts. One example of a wilderness frontier is the archipelagoes and fjords region of southern South America. However, such areas are rapidly becoming transformed by development projects driven by powerful global market forces. The conservation of wilderness, as a state of nature, is therefore a difficult and unlikely task, and conflicts will increase between groups with different ethical views or legal rights over the last wilderness areas. I advance here two arguments that can guide our actions in the last wilderness frontiers: 1) although the existence wilderness is not necessary for the conservation biodiversity, wilderness has other values that must be explicitly recognized in a policy context, and 2) the potential for restoration of wilderness is an important value in itself that must be protected by understanding the resilience of ecosystems in advance to large-scale transformation. Values of wilderness ranging from ethical and cultural to economical and geo-political should be integrated into policy decisions about the future of such areas. Although it can be argued in principle that wilderness cannot be restored through human action, the resilience properties of ecosystems allow them to recover from disturbances without, or with minimum, human intervention. Our development plans for wilderness frontiers should aim at preserving ecosystem resilience to avoid irreversible loss of wilderness values. Ecological and cultural understanding is needed to develop policy guidelines for maintaining ecosystem resilience and restoration potential.