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Through a process of participatory mapping, this research assessed the impacts of the 1984 change in Alaska fire policy from one of exclusion to one of management on Native land use in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Findings suggest that while the change in policy has had little measurable effect on community land use the continued suppression of fire on Native owned lands is having a direct impact on the current availability of wildlife resources to the point of necessitating territorial expansion among Native resource users. However, given the complexity of human nature, the impacts associated with the 1984 policy change should not be reduced to a simplistic cause-and-effect relationship. Rather this...
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Abstract: In this article we extend the theory of community prediction by presenting seven hypotheses for predicting community structure in a directionally changing world. The first three address well-studied community responses to environmental and ecological change: ecological communities are most likely to exhibit threshold changes in structure when perturbations cause large changes in limiting soil or sediment resources, dominant or keystone species, or attributes of disturbance regime that influence community recruitment. Four additional hypotheses address social-ecological interactions and apply to both ecological communities and social-ecological systems. Human responsiveness to short-term and local costs...
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Challenges for aboriginal resource management in the Yukon Territory are discussed. After decades of state administration, indigenous peoples throughout the world are now succeeding, to varying degrees in the reimplementation of self-governing institutions and administrative processes. This reorientation is most observable in the context of the natural resource management, where a major policy trend is to devolve stage authority and administrative responsibility directly to local levels. It is found that while the language of devolution and local control now permeates local-state interaction, in many cases the new institutions that are created following devolution have little resemblance to indigenous forms of management.
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