Park management
When nature goes too far
Jan 1st 1998 | BIG HORN, WYOMING
From The Economist print edition
IN 1986 Alston Chase, a writer, stood before a piece of ground in Yellowstone
National Park which had been grazed, as Mr Chase put it, “as smooth as a golf
fairway.” He turned to a scientist. “Is this range damaged?” he asked. “What is
truth?” the scientist replied rhetorically. “You and I look at this scene and see range
damage. The Park Service sees nature at work.”
As Yellowstone enters its 30th year of “natural regulation”, it finds itself in the middle
of a deepening dilemma: should it go on letting nature take its course, or not? Critics
have questioned natural regulation ever since its inception, and the policy now has
fewer friends than enemies. When 800,000 acres—more than a third of the park—
went up in smoke in 1988, patrons, furious at seeing wild fires left to burn,
bombarded politicians, who then called for the head of the park superintendent,
Robert Barbee. But similar storms erupted when nature was not left to regulate itself:
1,084 bison were shot during the winter of 1996-97 as they left the park looking for
forage. A judge in Montana has just ruled, despite a petition from environmentalists,
that they can be shot this winter, too.
Now Yellowstone’s estimated 18,000 elk sit in the political spotlight. Park scientists
once thought there could never be too many elk; there could be temporary
overgrazing, but the range, they insisted, would spring back as soon as the elk died
from starvation, revealing a natural equilibrium. This has not happened. The
numbers at which the elk population would theoretically stabilise have kept rising,
well beyond what the scientists predicted.
Population ecologists such as Mark Boyce, of the University of Wisconsin at Stevens
Point, say that winter and wolves will eventually take care of the problem. The cold
and lack of feed that drove bison out of Yellowstone last winter also killed an
estimated 6,000 elk. But wolves are a different story. They have killed about 360 elk
since they were reintroduced to the park in 1995; on December 12th a federal judge
ordered that, being a “non-essential experiment”, they should be removed again.
Other scientists think the elks will not “internally regulate” their population before
they have devastated vegetation in the park. Charles Kay, an assistant professor of
political science at Utah State University, says the elk and bison in Yellowstone have
become so numerous that they are destroying the habitat necessary to support a
wide variety of animals, especially in an area called the Northern Range. Last
February, Mr Kay produced (and showed to Congress) a striking series of
photographs of different parts of the park at the turn of the century and now. These
showed that, over the years, elk have stripped the park of its aspen and willow
stands. Mr Kay claims that aspen in particular have suffered a 95% decline since the
park opened in 1872: a serious development because beaver rely on aspen to build
their dams, which in turn are vital to keep wetlands going.
Park officials say that the elk are only partly to blame. In their view, a hotter and
drier Yellowstone caused the moisture-loving willow and aspen to disappear. Mr
Boyce says that Mr Kay’s pictures do not tell the whole story: although elk have been
hard on these trees in some places, in others their impact is undetectable. And Mr
Kay himself admits that aspen groves have been deteriorating throughout the west.
The feeding of elk outside the park complicates the issue. Only two of the nine
Yellowstone elk herds winter in the park. The rest migrate to feed. Herds in the
southern end of Yellowstone head for the Jackson Hole Elk Refuge, where the state
of Wyoming feeds each of them 3.5kg of hay a day. How can the numbers stabilise
at a low level if they are fed? One biologist, Aldo Leopold, once flung up his hands at
the folly of it all. “It seems to me academic,” he said, “to talk about maintaining the
balance of nature. The balance of nature in any strict sense has been upset a long
time ago, and there is no such thing to maintain.”
Yellowstone, pulled and tugged by changing policy manuals and overbearing
politicians, has a history of reactive management. When attacked by critics, the
faithful tend to circle the wagons, only to capitulate as soon as some scientific school
of thought convinces them that disaster is imminent. Yet that may change.
Yellowstone is part of a new experiment in park fees. Last year the entry fee was
raised to $20; the park will keep $8. Will visitors really pay to see dying elk and
meadows nibbled down to the roots? Keeping part of the gate receipts may give the
park more autonomy, and push politics further out of the picture. It would be even
better if the park’s managers used their new freedom to come up with a consistent
set of principles on which the park could be run.