To Conserve Unimpaired

For much of its existence, Yellowstone National Park spent the winter months quietly under a blanket of snow. Winter was a time of restoration, for the bears that hibernated on isolated mountain slopes, for the elk and bison relieved from the attention of visitors, and for the park rangers who used the time to recover from the hectic summer season. That is no longer the case, however. The park is now a beehive of activity during the winter months. Snowmobiles dash around the park roads, rangers are on frequent patrol to control wayward visitors, and the winter-stressed wildlife must endure regular encounters with snow machines and cross-country skiers. Along with this new winter season has come controversy that strikes at the heart of what our national parks are and supposed to be.

National parks and wilderness are practically synonymous, at least in the minds of most visitors. Never mind the roads that penetrate into the parks or the lodges scattered about them, one popular vision of the national parks is of untamed wilderness with miles of unbroken backcountry and legions of wild—and sometimes fearsome—animals. That would accurately describe Yellowstone, Glacier, and several other national parks, and it is an image the National Park Service has endorsed from its earliest days. Since 1964, however, following passage of the Wilderness Act, portions of only a few parks have been designated official wilderness areas, and the prospect of such a legal designation has ignited intense controversy in others. Given the ever-mounting visitor and recreation pressures coming from within the parks as well as development pressures coming from outside park boundaries, the challenges involved in maintaining an undisturbed natural setting have grown increasingly more difficult. As a result, whether the parks are true wilderness strongholds or whether the Park Service can consistently manage them as such is open to question.

National parks offer a prime recreation setting, and millions of visitors would seem to agree. From the outset, the Park Service has encouraged visitors to avail themselves of the hiking, camping, fishing, and other outdoor opportunities available in the parks. Along the way, beset by diverse new recreational requests backed by powerful businesses and constituencies, the Park Service has opened some areas to snowmobiles, off-highway vehicles, personal watercraft, and similar activities. It has also denied or limited access for other users, including hunters, mountain bikers, white-water kayakers, and aerial enthusiasts, asserting that these recreational pursuits are incompatible with national park purposes. At the same time, Congress has significantly expanded the park system to meet escalating recreational demands, creating new national recreation areas, gateway parks, and related designations. In addition, the private sector—concessioners, outfitters, gateway businesses, and others—has come to play an important role in promoting and providing recreational opportunities for park visitors. Underlying this evolution in recreation policy is the fundamental question of whether the national parks are appropriately regarded as playgrounds or whether they should aspire to more lofty goals.

As tourist destinations and recreational meccas, the national parks are imbued with a distinct commercial overtone that can be traced to park concessioners and nearby communities. From the beginning, the national park designation has served as a beacon for entrepreneurs who have viewed park visitors as a resource to be exploited. Initially, local residents stepped forward to provide intrepid, nineteenth-century wilderness adventurers with accommodations and food, only to see their efforts soon displaced by outside corporate entities eager to exploit a burgeoning captive market. Whether their commercial activities were centered inside the parks as concessioners or outside them in gateway communities, each recognized the park as the proverbial “goose with the golden eggs,” and each has long been deeply entwined with the making of park policy, yet another instance in which the parks cannot be divorced from their larger surroundings. The Park Service, unschooled in the commercial marketplace, has long looked to private business to help meet its visitors’ needs, creating sometimes unholy relationships with adverse ramifications for park resources and values. The public interest in nature preservation and the private interest in profit are rarely in harmony.

Although the national parks are widely associated with the gateway communities adjoining them, the relationship between national parks and their American Indian neighbors is not as evident. With few exceptions, the early national parks were created without regard for competing Native American claims or concerns; entire tribes and families were routinely expelled from their ancestral lands, ironically, so as to protect these new nature enclaves from the taint of any permanent human presence. These original inhabitants did not stray far, however. By one account, nearly one-fourth of the national park units have a connection with Indian tribes, usually through a common border or established inholding rights. According to former Park Service director Russ Dickenson, there is not “a single major national park or monument today in the western part of the United States that doesn’t have some sort of Indian sacred site.”¹ Over time, once Indian tribes began to assert themselves in political and legal arenas, the Park Service has found itself confronting an increasing array of challenges linked to historic land claims, treaty rights, and sacred sites. Not only do these controversies raise important ownership, access, and social justice questions, but they also pose important questions about national park conservation policies that sharply separate people and nature.

Long regarded as an ideal outdoor laboratory, the national parks have not been consistently administered with science or education in mind. Even from the earliest days, scientists and others recognized that these protected settings provided a rare opportunity to study the natural world and to learn from it, but for most of its first fifty years, the National Park Service showed little interest in scientific inquiry except as it might enhance the agency’s modest visitor education programs. Early resource management policies rested more on conventional wisdom than rigorous data-based research and experimentation. As long as the parks offered spectacular scenic vistas and diverse recreational opportunities, park managers were satisfied that they had fulfilled their conservation responsibilities. After all, these splendid settings were not set aside as research or educational facilities, nor with much regard for on-the-ground ecological realities. These views, however, were gradually supplanted by a persistent cacophony of voices calling for more scientifically rigorous management and an explicit scientific mission for the national parks, a position finally enshrined in law at the end of the twentieth century. But the national parks’ educational role and potential have yet to receive the same attention. Indeed, the Park Service’s interest in incorporating either science or education into its mission has wavered over the years, as will become evident.

From the beginning, the national parks have served as a sanctuary for wildlife, a primary feature that has long drawn visitors to the parks. Whether it is a roadside bison jam in Yellowstone or a chance encounter with a solitary bear in the Great Smoky Mountains backcountry, the experience of viewing native wildlife in its own habitat has thrilled generations of park visitors. Wildlife conservation has a checkered history in the national parks, however. Not only have Park Service wildlife management policies flip-flopped over the years, but the agency has regularly faced intense political pressures in its quest to safeguard park wildlife. Animals may generally be protected in the national parks, but that did not stop the Park Service from eliminating wolves and other predators during its early years, nor has it stopped the agency from culling excess elk and deer to restore park ecosystems. Nor has the Park Service’s preservation mandate protected park wildlife when they wander beyond park boundaries, something that occurs regularly in the seasonal quest for food. Whether viewed from a historical, scientific, or political perspective, the national parks are imperfect wildlife reserves that nonetheless play a crucial conservation role.

Neither grizzly bears nor wildfires recognize boundary lines. The sacrosanct borders that we have constructed as straight lines on maps to define our national parks are of no significance to the creatures and natural processes that give life and shape to park landscapes. Since the designation of Yellowstone and the inception of the national park concept, wildlife have wandered to and from park lands, responding to seasonal habitat needs and other urges. Fires have regularly burned across administrative boundaries, and the watersheds that often originate in our parks are connected like vital arteries to downstream human and natural communities. As obvious as these linkages are today, they have not always factored into how we understand national parks or how we manage them. Instead, the image of the park as an island—a separate enclave or sanctuary—has long prevailed, both in popular imagination and management circles, confirmed by powerful notions of property rights and bureaucratic autonomy. But the ecological sciences, now abetted by the overarching threat of global climate change, are breaking down this traditional enclave notion and giving the national park new meaning as the core component in a much larger ecosystem setting. Just as the national parks have long been connected with the communities and visitors that depend on them, the parks are also vital to the expansive natural systems that define their very essence.

The American national park system, as currently constituted and managed, does not reflect the dramatic evolution we have witnessed in the national park idea. Indeed, the national park system fails to fully capture either the critical ecosystem science principles or the contemporary social values highlighted in previous chapters, a fact reflected in the myriad controversies examined throughout these pages. Most notably, the system fails to encapsulate our modern understanding that national parks must be conceived and managed in a broader ecological context. Important ecosystem types remain unrepresented, key wildlife habitat still lies outside park boundaries, and adjacent development proposals regularly imperil park lands and resources. Sites interpreting the nation’s racial and ethnic heritage are also poorly represented in the system. Moreover, as profound social and demographic changes further alter the relationship between people and nature, the need for new opportunities to expose citizens to our natural heritage and to safeguard ecologically sensitive areas is more apparent than ever.

Still widely heralded as “America’s best idea,” the national parks actually represent an assortment of ideas that have evolved over time. As the Park Service’s founding director, Stephen Mather poured his enormous energy, passion, and personal wealth into making the national parks one of the country’s most cherished institutions, and, judging by the extraordinary growth of the national park system and in visitor numbers, he largely succeeded. The national parks inevitably evoke powerful positive images of unsullied landscapes; majestic mountain peaks; free-roaming wildlife; clear, flowing rivers; ranger-led campfire talks; and carefree family vacations. The public rarely contemplates other prevalent but less savory images: car-clogged roads, a cacophony of two-cycle engines, degraded ecosystems, the pervasive taint of commercialism, and unrelenting local development and political pressures. In the midst of such awesome beauty, it is hard to acknowledge that the national park idea is still far from settled, much less that it is often shrouded in controversy. But that has been the reality from the beginning, and it is no less true today.