Playing God in Yellowstone.
The Destruction of America’s First National Park.
By
Alston Chase
“Yellowstone is being destroyed by the people assigned to protect it… The National Park Service has brought about the elimination from Yellowstone of the white-tailed deer, mountain lion, lynx, bobcat, wolverine and fisher; and is now responsible for the decline of the black bear, big horn sheep, mule deer and beaver.” This was the charge when the book was published in 1986. Twenty years later little has changed.
Alston Chase provides an excellent history of Yellowstone and how management of the park changed from providing safety and a “near” wilderness experience to American’s to ecosystem management: which, despite its name, is not ecological at all. Ecosystem management became the foundation for policies that led to destruction rather than the preservation of Yellowstone. The World Conference on National Parks said that few parks in the world were large enough to encompass an ecosystem.
The new definition of wilderness replaced science with romance. “The myth it presupposed—that man was not part of nature—would be sustained by park management.”
Ecosystem
management boiled down to leaving the park to nature—a non-interference
policy. Park managers began to erect an impenetrable shield between
humanity and nature: All vestiges of scientific research were banned:
“Regulations were established forbidding tags, radio collars,
helicopters and other mechanical devices used to study wildlife”.
The book describes mismanagement and worse by the Park Service.
In Lynn White Jr.'s 1966 talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis, described how Judeo-Christianity was destroying the earth. In subsequent year’s people active in the environmental movement found that Judeo Christianity had less meaning: It was too anthropocentric. Alston Chase accumulates considerable evidence to show how environmentalism became a religion.
Those espousing management of wilderness would be dubbed descendants of Pinchot (the man appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to see that America’s wilderness was managed wisely) out to exploit nature.
Thereafter calls for the “creative disintegration of modern industrial society; the establishment of a new relationship between humanity and nature, founded on a new ideology of radical politics that would lead us back to primitive truths; and [man] must transform the urbanizing civilization into a new ecologically sensitive harmony-oriented wild-minded scientific/spiritual culture”, were heard throughout the environmental movement.
“Man, all were agreed, was the source of environmental evil, nature was sacred, [and] traditional science suspect.”
About the Author:
Alston Chase holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Princeton universities. Chase first visited Yellowstone in 1947. Subsequently he and his wife, Diana, founded a summer environmental program on Montana’s Smith River, where as a licensed Montana outfitter and Yellowstone Park concessioner, he routinely took classes into the back country of Yellowstone Park.
In 1975 he gave up his academic tenure at Macalester College, where he had been chairman of the Department of Philosophy, to become founding executive director of the Northern Rockies Foundation. He has also been chairman of the Yellowstone Library and Museum Association which sponsored the Yellowstone Institute.
He
has also written "In a Dark Wood: The Fight
over Forests & the Myths of Nature” and “Harvard
and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist” and “A
Mind for Murder: The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern
Terrorism”.
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