In the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, particularly in Alaska, being a Planning Team Leader involves a great deal more than what most LA's see as the planning function of their profession.

Just ask Leslie Kerr! Not only have her plans been implemented in almost nine million acres in our 49th state, but her planning and the resultant reports have won numerous ASLA Awards. In 1993, she was made a Fellow in ASLA and also won the Alfred B. LaGasses Medal from the Landscape Architecture Foundation for "distinguished and continuing contributions to the fields of resource conservation and public management."

Currently, Ms. Kerr is Chief of Planning for the Alaska Region of USFWS, and has been involved as Planning Team Leader in the process of setting up Alaska Maritime Refuge and Tetlin, Nowitna, and Kanuti Refuges - a total of 869,000,000 acres. "These are 'national interest lands', and it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prepare the first management plans for these areas," Ms. Kerr said. Refuge lands in Alaska account for 85% of the acreage in the entire refuge system, which is 11% of all Federal land. The passage of the Alaska Lands Act during the Carter administration doubled the size of the national wildlife refuge system overnight to total 104.3 million acres as conservation units, including 77 million acres in 16 new or expanded wildlife refuges.

Ms. Kerr added that she feels the success of these projects comes from the fact that the team worked with the local people. "Whatever their ethnic background, local rural residents have a long tradition of dependence on these lands as part of their subsistence culture. 'Ecosystem management' is now in vogue, but people who have been part of the ecosystem for millennia are usually ignored. We made sure the people most directly affected had a voice in our planning. In the process, we too were changed as we learned to see these magnificent wild lands through other eyes."

The largest of the refuges on which Ms. Kerr was the Planning Team Leader was the 4.9 million acre Alaska Maritime refuge. "This refuge has the broadest geographic extent of any conservation unit in the world," Ms. Kerr explained. "Alaska's coastal waters and islands contain one of the world's largest remaining seabird concentrations - 40 million breeding seabirds, 80% of Alaska's seabird population." Ms. Kerr made the point that, "the Exxon Valdez oil spill is thought to have killed 100,000 to 300,000 seabirds. Biologists suspect that introduced predators continue to kill at least 800,000 seabirds every year."

Other specifics are required in the other refuges on which Leslie Kerr served as Planning Team Leader, but in every case, this type of planning involves a great deal more than most landscape architects that are now planners can envision. It is not like planning huge multi-use projects, though it might have some similarities. The difference here is one of scope. These Alaskan refuges are more than 'national interest lands', with birds from four continents breeding here, and the outcome of these projects is something which benefits every living creature. (Note: See past and future issues of LASN for articles on Leslie Kerr, FASLA, and her work.) LASN

At this time, Leslie Kerr is serving as U.S. representative in the Ad Hoc Expert Group developing the Circumpolar Protected Areas Network. More on this ambitious program will be forthcoming in a future issue of LASN.