Scores of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees have been working for months with the National Wildlife Refuge Association, Friends and partners on a vision to guide the National Wildlife Refuge System for the next decade or so. This renewed vision, titled Conserving the Future: Wildlife Refuges and the Next Generation, will be the successor to the Fulfilling the Promise vision crafted in the late 1990s.

The process of developing the vision has been transparent, with healthy discussions online at http://americaswildlife.org/. The Conserving the Future: Wildlife Refuges and the Next Generation vision document will be presented for ratification at a conference in mid-July in Madison, WI.

This is the second in a series of Refuge Update Focus sections leading up to that conference. The section’s title—“Conserving the Future, People to People”—derives from Wisconsin conservationist Aldo Leopold’s famous quotation, “There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.”

The section’s content focuses on the people–to–people realms of two of the five Conserving the Future Core Teams: “relevance to a changing America” and “leadership and organizational excellence.”