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. 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 wide–ranging 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 July 11–15 in Madison, WI.

This is the third, and final, in a series of Refuge Update Focus sections leading up to that conference.

The section’s title—“Conserving the Future, People to Land”—derives from Wisconsin conservationist Aldo Leopold’s quotation, “There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.”