OPINION: Why is Alaska still using ‘maximum sustained yield’ to mismanage wildlife?

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

This may be done by manipulating habitat. However, the board has almost no authority to restore or enhance wildlife habitat, and there is no simple way to enhance the caribou habitat without removing the caribou. So intensive management 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 seems to have extinguished that struggle. The court relied on the Legislature’s definition of “sustained yield” — a pity, because that is not at all how the framers of Alaska’s Constitution defined it.

Intensive management is anchored in the mistaken belief that politicians know more about the nuts and bolts of managing wildlife than professional wildlife managers. Unfortunately, scientists can only study wildlife, manipulate populations and habitat, and enforce the law — the Legislature makes the law.

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

One of intensive management’s biggest problems — one Alaska’s courts keep failing to understand — is the difference between sustained yield and maximum sustained yield. “Sustained yield,” as used in the Alaska Constitution, means don’t harvest renewable resources at a rate that ultimately drives them to extinction.

This was a relatively new concept in the 1950s. Professional wildlife management was in its infancy. We were just beginning to figure out how America’s white-tailed deer, bison, turkeys, and beavers had been overharvested and nearly eradicated. Applying the sustained-yield principle was the solution that brought them back.

But sustained yield isn’t good enough for some politicians. While the intensive management law was being debated, Lt. Gov. Jack Coghill insisted the clear meaning of sustained yield “was for replenishable resources to provide a high or maximum sustained level of consumptive utilization for humans.” Ultimately, the Legislature adopted a definition of “sustained yield” to mean “the achievement and maintenance in perpetuity of the ability to support a high level of human harvest of game, subject to preferences among beneficial uses, on annual or periodic basis.”

This was not what the Constitution mandated. The framers repeatedly referred to sustained yield without adding the intensifier “maximum.” Now, thanks to intensive management, there is no longer any flexibility in the state’s management of wildlife. It’s like the old saying: “If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

Maximum sustained yield is a theory. It assumes the environment maintains a steady state — no heavy snows, no extended droughts, no warming climate. It 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 board will act promptly to curtail harvest when those levels are reached; and 4) that scientists can accurately identify the exact level at which recovery is sufficient to permit harvest to resume. None of these are achievable in the real world.

According to an analysis published in 2013 in the ICES Journal of Marine Sciences, when the demand for MSY was stoked in the 1950s for commercial fisheries, “it began as policy, it was declared to be a science, and then it was enshrined in law.” Consequently, nearly 80% of the world’s fisheries are fully exploited, over-exploited, depleted or in a state of collapse.

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

The court agreed with plaintiffs that predators must also be managed for sustained yield. But it 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. One cannot maximize a prey population without removing predators at an unsustainable level.

However, one can sustain a prey population, 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% of Alaska as “positive” for intensive management — as the board has done — and then initiate predator control across vast swaths of the state with little or no scientific justification.

It’s ironic that the Supreme Court opined in a 1999 decision (Native Village of Elim v. State) that “the primary emphasis of the framers’ discussions and the glossary’s definition of sustained yield is on the flexibility of the sustained yield requirement and its status as a guiding principle rather than a concrete, predefined process” (emphasis added). That’s exactly right. Wildlife managers need flexibility to negotiate fluctuations in wildlife populations, the environment, and human preferences.

The intensive management law — unscientific, unachievable, and unpopular — needs to be dispatched to a taxidermist and hung in the hall of history’s mistakes.

Rick Sinnott is a former Alaska Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist. Email him: rickjsinnott@gmail.com.

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