Thirty years ago, the Alaska Legislature enacted an intensive management law, requiring the Board of Game to increase the number of moose, caribou and deer before restricting hunter harvests.

This can be done by manipulating the habitat. However, the council has virtually no power to restore or improve wildlife habitat, and there is no easy way to improve caribou habitat without eliminating caribou. Intensive management therefore almost always boils down to shooting and trapping wolves and bears.

Wildlife biologists and others have opposed the universal, knee-jerk application of predator control. A recent decision by the Alaska Supreme Court appears to have put an end to this struggle. The court relied on the legislature’s definition of “sustained performance” – too bad, because that’s not at all how the framers of the Alaska Constitution defined it.

Intensive management relies on the mistaken belief that politicians know more about the nuts and bolts of wildlife management than professional wildlife managers. Unfortunately, scientists can only study wildlife, manipulate populations and their habitat, and enforce the law: it is the legislature that makes the law.

Initially, wildlife managers were slow to implement intensive management because public opinion and scientific expertise opposed it. But this resistance faded in the early 2000s with the election of Frank Murkowski. For reasons known only to themselves, conservative governors prefer the advice of hunters and pro-hunting organizations to that of professional wildlife scientists.

One of the biggest problems with intensive management – ​​one that Alaska courts still fail to understand – is the difference between sustained yield and maximum sustained yield. “Sustained yield,” as used in the Alaska Constitution, means not exploiting renewable resources at a rate that would ultimately drive them to extinction.

It was a relatively new concept in the 1950s. Professional wildlife management was in its infancy. We were just beginning to understand how American white-tailed deer, bison, turkeys, and beavers had been overexploited and nearly eradicated. Applying the principle of sustained yield was the solution that brought them back.

But sustained returns are not enough for some policymakers. As the Intensive Management Act was being debated, Lt. Gov. Jack Coghill insisted that the clear meaning of sustained yield “was that replenishable resources provide a high or maximum sustained level of consumptive use for humans “. Ultimately, the legislature adopted a definition of “sustained yield” to mean “obtaining and maintaining in perpetuity the ability to support a high level of human harvest of game, subject to preferences among beneficial uses, on an annual or periodic basis.

This was not what the Constitution required. The designers repeatedly referred to sustained output without adding the intensifier “maximum.” Today, thanks to intensive management, there is no flexibility in state wildlife management. It’s like the old adage: “If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” »

Maximum sustained yield is a theory. This assumes the environment remains stable – no heavy snowfall, no prolonged droughts, no global warming. This assumes: 1) that scientists can accurately estimate population levels with limited funds; 2) Can accurately recognize when the population reaches maximum sustained yield; 3) that the commission will act quickly to reduce the harvest when these levels are reached; and 4) that scientists can accurately identify the exact level at which recovery is sufficient to allow harvesting to resume. None of these goals are achievable in the real world.

According to a analysis published in 2013 in the ICES Journal of Marine Sciences, when the demand for RMD was fueled in the 1950s for commercial fishing, “it started as policy, it was declared as science, then it was listed in the law.” As a result, almost 80% of the world’s fisheries are fully exploited, overexploited, depleted or collapsing.

The Supreme Court has never questioned the legislature’s addition of “high” to the Alaska Constitution’s sustained performance requirement. State attorneys argued that if the sustained yield principle applied to predators, then it would require “the State to simultaneously maximize populations of predators and their prey.” There is still this word: “maximize”. The Alaska Constitution requires no such thing.

The court agreed with the plaintiffs that predators must also be managed to achieve sustained yield. But he took a wrong turn by concluding that the constitutional provision “subject to preferences among beneficial uses” meant that the legislature could maximize prey by minimizing predator populations. You cannot maximize a prey population without eliminating predators to an unsustainable level.

However, one can maintain a prey population, thus allowing for human harvest, without reflexively shooting and trapping predators at an unsustainable rate. By all means, allow predator control in specific areas when necessary and scientifically justified. But don’t classify 96 percent of Alaska as “positive” for intensive management — as the council did — and then launch predator control over large swathes of the state with little or no scientific justification.

It is ironic that the Supreme Court stated in a 1999 decision (Native Village of Elim v. State) that “the primary emphasis of the authors’ discussions and definition of sustained performance in the Glossary is on the flexibility of the ‘sustained performance requirement and its status as a sustained performance requirement’. a guiding principle rather than a concrete, predefined process” (emphasis added). That’s absolutely true. Wildlife managers need flexibility to manage fluctuations in wildlife populations, the environment and human preferences.

The intensive management law – unscientific, unworkable and unpopular – should be handed over to a taxidermist and hung in the Hall of History’s Errors.

Rick Sinnott is a former wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Send him an email: [email protected].

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