If I asked you if Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is a natural place, I suspect that nearly all of you would answer yes. And you’d be right, and wrong, too. Let me explain.

Last month I wrote in this space about how the headquarters complex Is a man-made oasis—a place where nature prospers because of human intervention. The trees and gardens at headquarters reflect continued work by many generations of humans—a saga that stretches from Indigenous Peoples to refuge managers.

The same is true of the refuge as a whole.  It is now, and has been for a very long time, a managed landscape. For example, within the refuge’s almost 300 square miles, one can find over 2000 miles of ditches and dikes. Within this network of contained waterways, refuge managers also work with roughly 1,000 water control structures.

All this human infrastructure, much of it so subtle that most visitors do not see it, reflects a long history of human interaction with the landscape, a process that started many centuries ago. Northern Paiute peoples manipulated their homeland in many ways to make it more productive. In addition to hunting, they planted species they preferred and used fire to achieve changes in vegetation In short, they made the environment more productive.

When Euro-American ranchers invaded the region in the middle nineteenth century, they accelerated the pace of change. The cattle economy they developed placed a premium on grazing lands, and the ranchers initiated a process of spreading water across the landscape as broadly as possible.

When the federal government bought out the ranchers in the Blitzen Valley in the 1930s, management shifted from maximizing cattle to maximizing habitat for birds, but that, too, required spreading water seasonally across as much of the landscape as possible, a process that continues today.

So, inescapably, Malheur is a managed landscape – not a national park where the goal is to leave nature alone as much as possible.  By managing the landscape, we make it more productive for the birds and wildlife that depend upon it. This helps make up for the large areas of once-similar habitat that have been lost to other uses in Eastern Oregon over the past century and a half. 

This brings us to the contradiction at the heart of a place like Malheur—in order to support the region’s natural resources, we manage the landscape in many unnatural ways—as evidenced, for example, by Malheur’s 1000 water control structures.  To grasp this contradiction is to understand the full complexity of a place like Malheur—an unnatural landscape built of natural pieces for the purpose of sustaining nature.

– W. Tweed, Board President