Romance Lands and Conservation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Jerry Johnson Copyright Jerry Johnson. This work Licensed Under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0)” Chapter photo credits: Jerry Johnson Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1 Romance and Sludge in the American West ................................................................................. 12 Sludge and Romantic imagery dominate the lands west of the 100th meridian. .................................................. 16 Political Economy and the Environment ................................................................................................................ 19 Chapter 2 1862-1872 A Decade for the West and a National Park for the World ........................................... 28 1872 - “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People” .......................................................................................... 36 A University of the Yellowstone ............................................................................................................................. 46 Chapter 3 A Short lesson in conservation biology ......................................................................................... 59 Connectivity ........................................................................................................................................................... 63 Carnivores .............................................................................................................................................................. 65 Cores ...................................................................................................................................................................... 67 Yellowstone as conservation experiment ............................................................................................................... 69 Chapter 4 Four New Things ......................................................................................................................... 73 Tracking nature ...................................................................................................................................................... 74 Should trees have standing? .................................................................................................................................. 76 The political economy of the environment ............................................................................................................. 79 Man as part of nature ............................................................................................................................................ 81 The legacy of four new things ................................................................................................................................ 85 Chapter 5 Institutions – How things get done ............................................................................................... 88 The Grizzly Problem Is Defined by The Endangered Species Act: A case study of institution-building ................... 96 The Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC) coordinates recovery .................................................................. 99 Non-Profit institutions can be a “wild card” ........................................................................................................ 101 Chapter 6 Transitions in GYE ...................................................................................................................... 105 The Wilderness Act and the ESA ........................................................................................................................... 113 The Endangered Species Act ................................................................................................................................ 117 Chapter 7 A new view of public lands in GYE ............................................................................................. 122 A short lesson in amenity economies ................................................................................................................... 125 Not all good things go together ........................................................................................................................... 129 Wolves and Elk, Elk and People, and Bison .......................................................................................................... 130 Amenity Economies are Complex ......................................................................................................................... 139 Recreation for All? ................................................................................................................................................ 144 Chapter 8 A Word for Private Lands ........................................................................................................... 148 Chapter 9 It’s Not All Bad but Let’s Be Careful Out There ........................................................................... 156 Beware the Ecological Trap .................................................................................................................................. 158 The Political Economy of Wildfires ....................................................................................................................... 161 Chapter 10 What does the future hold? A Conclusion, of Sorts .................................................................... 165 Introduction Here is a chilling story: In the early hours of August 13, 1967, a grizzly bear dragged 19-year-old Julie Helgeson from a campground below the (Granite Park) chalet after gnawing the arm and legs of her male companion. By the time rescuers found her torn body hours later, Helgeson, a bright, charming Minnesotan, had suffered massive blood loss; though her bitten friend survived, she died on a makeshift operating table at the chalet at 4:12 am. At nearly the same moment, a different grizzly attacked another 19-year-old woman, Michele Koons, in her sleeping bag at nearby Trout Lake. Although Koons’ friends managed to flee, the young Californian wasn’t able to disengage her zipper, and the grizzly carried her into the night.1 Never in the nearly century-long history of the national parks had a grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) killed and eaten a human, let alone two in the same night. These incidents in Glacier National Park in northwest Montana put the future of the grizzly bear, and the public lands where they lived, at a crossroads. The tragedy was “splashed across newspapers nationwide” and forced the National Park Service into an uncomfortable conversation about parks and public lands and the large predators that live on them.2 The conversation about bear management is emblematic of discussions about public lands more generally that take place up and down the Rocky Mountains and in the halls of power in state and national capitals. How should we think of predators, our national parks, and public lands? Are parks glorified zoos or the “vignettes of wilderness” where nature, not Man, calls the shots? Are our national forests best viewed as recreational zones for urban citizens looking to get away for a weekend or sources of cheap building materials? Maybe they are best left as wilderness? What do we think of large dangerous predators when they move from our public lands into our private 1 Goldfarb, B. (2017). The 50-Year Legacy of Glacier's Night of the Grizzlies. Outside Online. 2 Everhart, W. (2019). The national park service. Routledge. lives? What sort of neighbors will we be? What do we, the citizenry, want from our national parks and public lands and the creatures that live there? Are they simply commodity factories whether timber or minerals or tourism or do they stand for something else? Even today those questions are unresolved and in many ways are more contentious than in 1967. The first inhabitants of what we call the West had to make a similar decision. The Grizzly bear was just as potentially dangerous to them as they are to us today, the natives – Blackfeet, Shoshone, Blackfoot, Crow, Tlingit, Haida, and others figured out how to reconcile living with bears by building them into their religious beliefs. By holding them up as mythical creatures they adopted a sense of respect as opposed to regarding them as competitors for resources as we would later. Early reports tell us they were afraid of them; they probably avoided them as best they could. They must have had their moments of terror along with a sense of awe, and respect. They did kill bears but for reasons besides malevolence. We have no evidence that Native Americans killed for anything other than food, fur, and spiritual power. A bear claw necklace would be a special gift but never traded. Their relationship with bears is different from the one we would adopt. When Lewis and Clark explored the West in the early 1800s an estimated 50,000 grizzly bears roamed between the Pacific Ocean and the Great Plains from Mexico to Alaska.3 Over the next hundred years or so, as European settlement expanded west of the 100th meridian, bear numbers and available habitat rapidly disappeared. Between the 1920’s and 1930’s, the grizzly bear lost 98% of its habitat to ranching and timber harvest in the contiguous United States. By 1975 of the 37 known populations to exist in 1922, only six isolated populations of bears remained.4 When Yellowstone was established in 1872 no one knows what the population of bears was but by 1975 the population of bears in Greater Yellowstone is estimated to have been between 136 and 312 individuals.5 One author described the steady loss of habitat as resembling 3 U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, 2018. Grizzly Bear. https://www.fws.gov/species/grizzly-bear-ursus-arctos- horribilis Knibb, D. G. (2008). Grizzly Wars: The Public Fight Over the Great Bear, Eastern Washington University Press. 4 Mattson, David J., and Troy Merrill. "Extirpations of grizzly bears in the contiguous United States, 1850– 2000." Conservation Biology 16.4 (2002): 1123-1136. 5 Mattson and Merrill. 1123-1136. a retreating ice cap. The range began to recede, then fragment, then each of those pieces began to shrink.6 Today, we are left with tiny remnant populations in the northern Rocky Mountains that are geographically disjointed and genetically isolated. Land-based apex predators like bears are charismatic, dangerous, and rare. In most parts of the world, they are the targets of government sanctioned extermination programs and illegal poaching – sometimes for profit, sometimes for spite. Where people raise livestock, predators are considered a threat to private property and the agricultural bottom line. In America, our history with grizzly bears (and wolves and large cats) is no different. The history of bear and man is like that of most large predators the world over. People removed or displaced them in favor of livestock, timber, mining, and to make room for human settlements. In the western United States sheep ranchers accounted for most bear deaths through the 1930s; later it would be the federal government.7 Grizzly bears will continue to be at the center of the debate over the future of public lands for generations. The reason seems obvious. Bears, like other predators and their prey, need land in order to thrive. The home range of a male grizzly may run into the hundreds of square miles. Often this is the same land settlers and commodity producers wanted (and still want) for their own use. Competing with a large and potentially dangerous predator was a cost that could easily be solved through eradication. It was only later, after much of that land was settled and developed and the bear was nearly exterminated, that the bear would come to symbolize wilderness and wildness. In 1967 there was no Endangered Species Act and there was an active grizzly bear hunting season in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming (there still is in Alaska and British Columbia).8 Hunters represented part of a small political constituency for the bear that was split between preservationists and game managers. Neither had much power compared to agricultural and timber interests in the region; they still don’t. 6 Knibb 7 Mattson, D. J., Herrero, S., Wright, R. G., & Pease, C. M. (1996). Science and management of Rocky Mountain grizzly bears. Conservation biology, 10(4), 1013-1025. 8 https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=brownbearhunting.main https://www.bookyourhunt.com/en/bear-hunting-in-canada Most supporters of bears did not make a living off the land. They were sport hunters, recreationists, and environmentalists who were part of the emergent conservation movement of the 1960s. Until passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and subsequent listing of the bear in 1975, there was no reason for public lands agency personnel to care about the bears one way or the other except as a game animal, and a problematic one at that. There were only a few scientists trained in studying bears and not much was known about them. As early as 1941 Montana’s first wildlife biologist Bob Cooney along with Ray Bigler conducted some of the first studies of Grizzly bears in what would become the Bob Marshall Wilderness.9 They laid the foundation of an ecological appreciation for the bears that would lead to their eventual listing but, ambivalence toward the bears, in favor of resource development, is probably an accurate description of official policy in most western states up through the 1970s. Another view would be benign neglect. Unlike wolves, there may not have been an all-out war on the bear but the prevailing attitude at the time across the west was a dead bear was better than a live one. Bears were shot on sight, poisoned, trapped, hunted, and generally decimated as a species.10 For the most part that has changed and the bear population is on the upswing. Today, political support for the bear is broader and deeper. Here is why the discussion about grizzly bears, wolves, and public lands matters today but continues to be contentious. John Muir called America’s natural landscapes our version of the grand cathedrals of Europe. He believed the “hope of the world” could be found in “the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.”11 The network of public lands,, including national parks and wilderness area, stand among our most significant cultural and civic accomplishments. To many, our public lands elicit the same awe as the Great Wall in China or the forgotten city of Angkor Wat and play the same role in our political culture. They help define America. They are also integral parts of our public infrastructure and viewed this way we can easily consider them engines of prosperity and societal well-being.12 The fundamental dilemma is this: Will prosperity 9 https://fwp.mt.gov/conservation/wildlife-management/bear/all-about-bears 10 Cahalane, V. H. (1939). "The evolution of predator control policy in the national parks." The Journal of Wildlife Management 3(3): 229-237. 11 Muir, J. (1979). John of the mountains: The unpublished journals of John Muir. Univ of Wisconsin Press. 12 Keiter, R. B., & Keiter, R. B. (2013). What Is a National Park?. To Conserve Unimpaired: The Evolution of the National Park Idea, 1-11. come as a result of pollution, development, and settlement our wild lands or, will it come in the form of preservation and with it, the conservation of creatures like the grizzly bear? Our decision will define who we are as Americans and will help decide the future of our western communities and economies. The decision is not related to public lands alone. Scattered in and among the huge tracts of public land are large, high quality private lands - much of it as spectacular as any national park. Ever escalating prices for quality ranchlands, even as far back as the early 1970s, suggests private buyers were well ahead of the curve when it came to the value of high amenity landscapes. They bought properties that offered scenic mountain vistas, access to clean trout streams, and solitude while they raise a few cattle and maybe play host to a resident elk herd. The buying spree continues today and those that can afford to live on their own private reserves pay a premium for access to the region’s spectacular landscapes. Their land deserves our attention because it is inescapably linked to our public spaces. They offer small but often important ecological connections between larger public landscapes. Others exploit these lands for their development potential in places like Jackson, Wyoming and Bozeman, Montana and that too is worth examination. The theme of this book is simple. It is that intact high-quality public and private lands are the economic and cultural armature around which modern western rural economies are assembled. Increasingly, people chose to live near national parks, in places with breathtaking views, and to spend their money (and retirement years) in places that bring them joy. Rural communities of a special type are the benefactors and sometimes suffer the casualties of these choices. The undomesticated inhabitants of public lands are integral to the role wild places play in those economies and our lives. The successful restoration of a viable population of grizzly bears is representative of the possibility of getting the management of public lands right for both bears and people. The central questions we explore here is the establishment of the institutional arrangements that occurred that led to the happy outcome that so much social value lies with places of high ecological integrity, including the preservation of habitat for the Yellowstone grizzly bear. To do that we focus on the Greater Yellowstone region of the intermountain west. Here, in the northern Rocky Mountains, in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the conservation and restoration of the Yellowstone grizzly bear is a windfall for the region, a positive internality, an unintended consequence, a public good. The recovery of the bear and its habitat is strongly associated with our personal and economic well-being. It is emblematic of our prosperity that allows us to make a positive decision to restore and live with a large and potentially dangerous predator. Three notions made this possible. First, the environment matters. In places like the Greater Yellowstone the environment is the basis for our community well-being. It helps define our social and civic arrangements that in turn heavily influence our personal choices and so, impact our communities. Building effective social institutions is a multifaceted task that needs people with high social capital and a willingness to invest it. In addition, liberty matters. By liberty I do not mean rampant unfettered actions that result in reckless exploitation. What I do mean is that responsible self-autonomy of individuals frees us to design a wide variety of meaningful and successful social and economic arrangements. Think of them as small-scale social experiments set on public landscapes. Some of those accords will produce private good. Others will produce public good. Both can help the environment when done “right”. Finally, science matters. Actions based on facts are actions that will result in better decisions insulated from political mischief, sometimes that involves bureaucratic risk. History shows those risks can have high payoffs. Greater Yellowstone is not a unique place and the lessons learned here can be applied elsewhere. The lessons that frame of the recovery of the Yellowstone grizzly bear and the role it played in the eventual prosperity of the Greater Yellowstone region are undeniable. Legal protection and subsequent conservation decisions were and still are a recipe for regional success on multiple dimensions. This is true for gateway communities near national parks and counties that contain a high percentage of public land. All places of natural beauty and ecological integrity share this recipe for prosperity. To fully grasp the significance of this story we explore the history of the West, the development of Yellowstone National Park, something about the discipline of conservation biology and related policy sciences, Grizzly bear recovery, and eventually the contemporary economy and social setting of the region. The Greater Yellowstone is a model of how to build a regional system of international importance and local well-being. The lessons are exportable. Let’s get started. Sidebar: The Greater Yellowstone Figure One: The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Ecosystem – An Island in the Rockies In the heart of the North American Rocky Mountains is an island - Yellowstone National Park. The park itself is the core of a greater Yellowstone ecosystem (GYE) and, like other great ecosystems of the world, is stellar place to come to terms with the complexity of earth’s natural processes, the web of life, and the role of humans in the natural world. The world’s largest geothermal system is the result of the region sitting on a 3,300 square kilometer volcanic caldera. There is life in the boiling waters of Yellowstone just as there is life in the lakes and forests of the region. The boundary of the GYE is defined by the historical range of the Yellowstone grizzly bear but it is a human construct, and the ecological and social footprint of the park reaches far beyond present day borders. Snowmelt from the park flows to the Mississippi, the Colorado, and the Columbia Rivers. Public land managers from around the world pay attention to Yellowstone because it is Yellowstone. During the summer of 1988, much of the park burned in a series of massive forest fires. The legacy of the burn is a complex vegetative mosaic of trees, grassland meadows, and sagebrush communities that are home to key predator species (grizzly and black bear, gray wolf, mountain lion), prey species (elk, deer, moose), and a host of birds and smaller mammals. The quick violent floods of 2022 refocused the world’s attention on the park once again. Over 4 million tourists visit the park each year. Sit for a few minutes at the boardwalk near Old Faithful geyser and you will hear a dozen languages and see people from all walks of life. Along with the GYE’s 500,000+ residents, they are an integral part of the social and economic fabric of the region.13 13 https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/greater-yellowstone-ecosystem.htm Chapter 1 Romance and Sludge in the American West There are two convenient ways to view the management of the environment and natural resources – including land. One is as sludge, the other as romance. Both are important to understanding the West and its public lands and both are more complex than they might appear. Sludge is air and water pollution, recycling, industrial waste disposal, nuclear depositories, toxic spills, the leftover spillage from oil and gas well, and mine waste sites. Concern over sludge immerses us in the world of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, both passed by Congress in 1972 and both extraordinary successes by any measure.14 Rivers and 14 Sullivan, T. J., Driscoll, C. T., Beier, C. M., Burtraw, D., Fernandez, I. J., Galloway, J. N., ... & Watmough, S. A. (2018). Air pollution success stories in the United States: The value of long-term observations. Environmental science & policy, 84, 69-73. Andreen, W. L. (2013). Success and Backlash: The remarkable (continuing) story of the Clean Water Act. Geo. Wash. J. Energy & Envtl. L., 4, 25. coastal waterways, as well as urban air sheds, are cleaner than before; people are healthier and live better and longer lives. The two laws changed how we act toward the environment. We no longer carelessly litter our highways, and most Americans support recycling, even if they do not always practice it. Polluted rivers no longer catch fire, people breathe easier, clean water is taken as a given in most urban areas. The world of sludge that gets most attention is the cleanup of past industrial activity in urban areas using funds from the Superfund Act officially known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980.15 The Superfund is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, the same agency that oversees the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Environmental Protection Agency (Department) estimates 12 million people or roughly 4% of the U.S. population, live within one mile of a Superfund site. While not all these sites pose a serious health risk, they all are degraded environments and communities with associated economic damage. Many of these industrial sites are found near impoverished communities of color where opportunity and prosperity are simply out of reach for their residents.16 A national map of the nearly 1500 Superfund sites across the US shows an inordinate number of locations in or near urban centers and concentrated on the Eastern seaboard and industrial Midwest. Those who labor in the world of sludge management work to clean the air of smog from automobiles and polluting industry, they seek regulations against the release of toxic air pollutants like mercury, arsenic, and lead from oil refineries, and they try to block regulatory loopholes that allows burning of industrial waste like tires, plastics, and chemicals with little to no controls. They work to oppose the siting polluting industrial facilities disproportionately located in nonwhite and poor communities. Sludge managers confront tons of plastic waste in our waterways and the associated food chain. Bad as it appears, that is not the whole story of sludge. 15 42 U.S.C. §9601 et seq. (1980) See also: Grad, F. P. (1982). A legislative history of the comprehensive environmental response, compensation and liability (Superfund) Act of 1980. Colum. J. Envtl. L., 8, 1. 16 Kramar, D. E., Anderson, A., Hilfer, H., Branden, K., & Gutrich, J. J. (2018). A spatially informed analysis of environmental justice: Analyzing the effects of gerrymandering and the proximity of minority populations to US Superfund sites. Environmental Justice, 11(1), 29-39. Figure two: A map of Superfund sites as of October 2013. Red indicates currently on final National Priority List, yellow is proposed, green is deleted (usually meaning having been cleaned up).17 Much of the work of sludge management takes place in the halls of Congress, or offices of federal agencies, and out of the view of the public. It is a world ripe with regulatory capture and political corruption. It is the world of political capitalism and beltway politics - for some of us it is a workplace too horrible to imagine. But we are glad others are willing to fight the good fight on our behalf, it is important work and there is much more to do. Romance lands are managed by a profusion (some would say confusion) of state and federal agencies, many with conflicting missions and goals. In many cases the centers of power are also located in the corridors of Washington. Just the actors have changed. Out west, mining and oil companies are still dominate players as are a small but growing contingent of anarchistic groups, rogue administrators and law enforcement officials, craven politicians, and a well- connected network of nonprofits and their lawyers. The romance lands are not insulated from sludge. Scattered across the western lands in and among some of our most cherished national parks and forests are many of the largest Superfund sites in the country. They are nearly all the legacy of hardrock mining on public lands. 17 "CERCLA". Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. EPA Regions 8 and 10 are comprised of the states of Colorado, Montana, North and South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho (Region 10) – the northern two thirds of the Rockies. The cleanup sites in these states represent the early economic history and culture of the region. Some of the names are familiar – Butte, Anaconda, and Libby, Montana; Kellogg and Challis, Idaho; Tooele and Magna, Utah; Leadville, Colorado. Many of the historic mining communities never recovered from the loss of their mining economy and still suffer from the wide scale legacy of sludge. In Libby, Montana people are still dying from asbestosis - the toxic residue from vermiculite mines whose impacts were hidden by the WR Grace & Company until 1990.18 Other historic mining communities are more familiar because they successfully put most of their toxic inheritance behind them by adopting a new economy, often based on tourism, and by doing so taking on a new community identity and culture – Aspen, Telluride, and Salida in Colorado; Park City and Alta, and Moab, Utah; and Coeur d’Alene, Ketchum, and Hailey, Idaho. We will discuss why some towns languish and others prosper later. The point is that a legacy of sludge is easily found in the West. It may differ in nature and origin from that found in the East, being more closely tied to the land than industrial factories and steel mills but make no mistake that sludge in the west is rampant with political influence and its own form of regulatory capture. Sidebar: Regulatory Capture The notion of regulatory capture is a form of political corruption that occurs when the regulated entity coopts a regulatory agency to serve its commercial or political interests. Imagine a regional federal agency whose job it is to regulate water pollution from a local mine. It is very easy for a mine operator, the source of good jobs in the state, to call an elected official and ask for political favors, maybe by suggesting a healthy campaign contribution, if only the Senator’s office would make a call to the regional bureaucrat in charge of the body of water and suggest some accommodation could be made to preserve those valuable mining jobs. This of course works best when the Senator sits on the oversight committee with jurisdiction over the agency. Another version is that the regulator (or legislator) can be swayed by the promise of a job in the regulated industry upon retirement – the so-called revolving door. Capture is a political failure of the separation of powers and public trust in their government institutions. It exists because vested interests have a greater financial stake in regulations affecting them, and so are 18 Dunn, J. (2022). Poisoned Wilderness. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century, 3. more likely to try to influence the regulator, than are relatively dispersed individual consumers.19 Sludge and Romantic imagery dominate the lands west of the 100th meridian. There is a certain attraction to the sludge economy or at least its idealized fantasy that is difficult to overcome but easy to appreciate. It is found in movies and fiction, and on cable TV. One can hardly think about the taming of the west without invoking the fabled image of the American Cowboy and the loss of those lands by Native Americans. We are constantly reminded in movies and songs how he (almost always he) tamed a wild land with a six-gun, his horse, his grit, and his wits. He was some amalgamation of Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and Gary Cooper, with maybe a little Sam Elliot thrown in, that herded cattle from Texas to Montana and along the way defeated the natives, fenced the wilderness, and built the towns that brought law and order to a lawless land. He made it safe for Charles Ingalls (Michael Landon) to bring his family west and make a life in a little house on the American prairie. Like most things historical, the reality of who and how the west was “tamed” is more complex than popular culture would have us believe. Not often mentioned are the women who played the role of community builders, entrepreneurs, and political actors that steadied the sometimes-chaotic extractive economies based on mining, timber, and livestock. Because the west was socially less restrictive for women, they were able to operate businesses and work more easily in male dominated professions where they often became influential in the community. Western states granted women the right to vote long before those in the east. Annick Smith’s 1979 film Heartland based on the book Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart, is a truthful portrayal of the role women played in the day-to-day life of farm and ranch life. The television hit Yellowstone romances the legacy of sludge by valorizing not only the rugged individual (Kevin Costner as John Dutton) but his methods of holding on to his ranch and way of life. He is often violent and unscrupulous. The romance of the cowboy, or the logger, or the miner infused and still infuses those who come west with the illusion of the self-made man that makes his own luck and success; the myth still accepted by many is that of “lives lived 19 Dal Bó, E. (2006). Regulatory capture: A review. Oxford review of economic policy, 22(2), 203-225. almost entirely in terms of rugged, essentially individualistic professionalism”20. Less often mentioned is the vast federal subsidy of military forts and land grants that made the west accessible to immigrants and people fleeing urban squalor.21 We see the impact of believing that myth today by people who think if they wear a big hat and Carhartts they are westerners. A big truck with a gun in the back window and 20-acre ranchette quickly follows. Unfortunately, so too might the Gladstone Flag and more than a casual interest in fringe political groups or anti- government militias. The legacy of sludge on today’s western culture is complicated. The geographic charisma of romance is as real as the mountains of the Rockies, the red rock public lands of the desert southwest, the iconic parks of Yellowstone and Yosemite, and the vast wilderness of central Idaho that holds wildlife habitat on par with the Serengeti, or the Amazon. For Westerners, romance lands are our home territory. They provide the context and substance of our lives. These are landscapes where we live a life grounded in immense beauty and environmental quality, though not always financial stability. They are defined by open spaces, clean air, pristine water, outdoor recreation, and abundant wildlife but most importantly – they are defined by the huge matrix of public lands that dominate landownership west of the 100th meridian. These lands are unambiguously linked to our prosperity and sense of individual liberty. There is a reason millionaires and billionaires spend freely to acquire working cattle ranches in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Montana. They vote with their pocketbook to acknowledge both the myth and the geography. 20 https://www.nytimes.com/1972/03/02/archives/sometimes-a-great-notionstory-of-logging-strike-opens-at- 22.html 21 Limerick, P. (1987). Legacy of Conquest: Th Eunbroken Past of The American West. WW Norton & Company. Sidebar: The 100th Meridian A sign near Blunt, South Dakota tells you have reached the 100th Meridian – a mythical line of longitude 100 degrees and half a world away west of Greenwich, England. The line runs north and south through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, the panhandle of Oklahoma, and through the middle of Texas. To geographers it is an expression of east or west. To the west, the climate is characterized by semi- arid or arid lands and require elaborate water management strategies that depend on snowpack and massive water storage (dams) and canal systems in order to produce viable agricultural economies. Generally speaking, to the east, the land receives warm moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and the lands there are productive without supplemental irrigation. To westerners it is an almost perfect demarcation of their lifestyle where the well-watered prairies give way to high plains almost within sight of and in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains. This is a land of large rivers and large dams, wide open spaces and barbed wire. Figure three: West of the 100th Meridian where conditions are generally drier in the American West.22 The explorer John Wesley Powell first noted the geographic transition and suggested in 1876 in his report to Congress that the region was not fit for agriculture due to the lack of water. Further, state boundaries, if there were to be any, should follow watersheds rather than political maneuvering. Congress and the railroads disagreed and continued to pass Homestead Acts up through 1909. The 100th meridian is where the west begins. Like sludge, romance is set in a complex, often invented, historical backdrop grounded in economic fiction and history. Westerners tend to overstate how noble it is to live here and understate how hard it can be. There is no great secret to getting by in fragile rural economies that are easy victims to international commodity prices. All it takes is hard work, creativity, and a degree of resiliency from outside forces. 22 http://www.ecowest.org/2013/04/26/what-is-the-west-five-ways-the-region-stands-out/ The most pressing romance land issue today is the role and future of public land designation in the western states. Disingenuous politicians will claim that national monument designation or federal wilderness “locks the public out of public land” and destroy western economies.23 Others, often those who live outside the Rocky Mountains, will extoll those same lands as the last refuge for endangered species in decline and without protection the last grizzly will quickly vanish from the landscape - the victim of thoughtless development and an irrational fear of predators. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle and is always more interesting than one might imagine. It is true that an economic transition from good paying timber jobs to an economy based in tourism is painful for many. It is just as true that most communities are in no position to stem the tide of change. Their futures are too closely tied to global economic vectors and investment banks to exert much influence. The same goes for conservation. All lands are not of equal quality and are not ideal habitat besides, it is increasingly difficult to raise grizzly bears in landscapes overrun by hordes of tourists demanding more parking for their RVs or subdivisions for their second homes. Management of romance lands requires enlightened political leadership grounded in the ecological and economic sciences, with a bit of political realism thrown in. That is a tall order but no more so than cleaning up a century of toxic mine runoff from a pristine mountain valley. Understanding how can happen it begins with something we call political economy. Political Economy and the Environment Environmental issues, whether they relate to sludge or romance, are inherently difficult for democracies to resolve. The reasons are easy to understand. On one hand environmental quality is natural to humans. Ecology, economics, and every other “eco” word shares the same original derivation from the Greek oikos (οἶκος) for "house", or "environment.” More accurately, oikos refers to the family or the family's property. The study of the environment – ecology, is a study of our home. Likewise, for economics. The first is the study of physical processes that sustain our home, the latter is the study of decisions that affect its management. All humans regard “home” as important. 23 https://e360.yale.edu/features/open-for-business-the-trump-revolution-on-public-lands On the other side, in the real world of technology; industry; and global economic activity, the environment often takes a back seat in favor of corporate (or government) profit and shareholder (voter) dividends. The environment has no inherent political power except in how we relate to it as citizens. Luckily, and inevitably, when the house gets too dirty humans respond. They design institutions and innovative ideas to clean house and start again. Political economy tells us there is a conspicuous relationship between economic well- being and environmental values – as incomes rise so too does the demand for a higher quality environment.24 Given a choice, people would prefer not to live in degraded environments and, given a modest level of prosperity, most would prefer a home with access to clean water and air, better health, and less filth. The tricky part is how to design democratic institutional arrangements that let people articulate and realize that choice and by doing so, help them achieve a higher quality of life made possible by responsible industrialization. The most effective model to date has been to design systems in which individuals flourish and have some say in the matter in how they will live.25 Democracies, where power lies with many and diverse individuals, work better than autocracies where power resides in the hands of a few elites. The nearer legitimate political power is to where we live, the better it seems to work, within reason. Western style democracies are founded on principles of liberalism – not the political tribalism of liberal vs conservative but the political order that favors non-negotiable human rights, individual autonomy, and the rule of law.26 The core value of western style democracy is the recognition of personal sovereignty. Jefferson’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are "unalienable rights" which our Declaration of Independence claims is given to all human beings by their Creator, and which governments are conceived to protect. This is largely aspirational because as James Madison said: If Men were angels, no government would be 24 Arrow, K., Bolin, B., Costanza, R., Dasgupta, P., Folke, C., Holling, C. S., ... & Pimentel, D. (1995). Economic growth, carrying capacity, and the environment. Ecological economics, 15(2), 91-95. Haines-Young, R., & Potschin, M. (2010). The links between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. Ecosystem Ecology: a new synthesis, 1, 110-139. 25 Harbaugh, W. T., Levinson, A., & Wilson, D. M. (2002). Reexamining the empirical evidence for an environmental Kuznets curve. Review of Economics and Statistics, 84(3), 541-551. Agrawal, A., & Ostrom, E. (2006). Political science and conservation biology: a dialog of the deaf. 26 Conway, D., & Conway, D. (1995). Classical liberalism (pp. 6-24). Palgrave Macmillan UK. necessary… you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”27 What he meant is this - people, living with other people, can learn to share power and authority and, remarkably, design ways to keep those mostly happy relationships intact. We can and do design social, cultural, and economic structures that enable us to rein in our worst impulses while figuring out how to live together and prosper. We call these structures institutions. A modern consequence of our Jeffersonian political system is that we are a country that continually seeks a balance between limited government and responsible liberty. As a political culture, we embrace neither a strongly centralized regulatory state nor unrestrained personal greed and self-centeredness. Walking this tightrope is a process dependent on meaningful political discourse and compromise. The western writer Wallace Stegner called the west the “geography of hope”.28 He thought progress toward building effective institutions that could lead to political resolution is probably easier when focused on romance lands rather than sludge or urban centers. Because we are negotiating in a setting where optimism is paired with quality rather than degradation, loss, and conflict, we act toward each other with optimism. It is easier to get along with your neighbor if you have something positive, like clean water, to work toward and preserve. For the most part Stegner’s insight has succeeded. For many that live on or near romance lands, optimism in our relationships include nature both by necessity and choice. Where we learn to live with nature we tend to do better as a community of humans. Liberal democracies respond best when their citizenry enjoy modest prosperity along with personal sovereignty. Prosperity is more than money. It includes thriving as an individual and enjoying the social conditions that enables success – however we chose to define that. Emotional happiness, personal safety, and good health are measures of prosperity. So is access to a clean environment.29 Communities without a path to happiness or access to health are said to 27 Hamilton, A. (2012). The Federalist Papers 51-60. New York: Signet Classics, an Imprint of New American Library, a Division of Penguin Group (USA). 28 Spencer, J. D. (2004). Interactions with Nature in Wallace Stegner's American West. University of Missouri- Kansas City. 29 The Constitution of Montana explicitly states residents’ right to a clean environment: Section 1. Protection and improvement. (1) The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations. (2) The legislature shall provide for the administration and enforcement of this duty. (3) The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support be impoverished. Political systems where prosperity is inaccessible inevitably lead to centralization of power and political demagoguery. Likewise, systems where political and social life are constrained due to poverty or impoverishment are prone to mischief by kleptocrats – those who prey on weak social and political institutions to the detriment of the population and the benefit of themselves – think of the autocratic rule of the Copper Kings in Butte, Montana near the turn of the 20th century. They were able to hold onto power because the vast majority of working miners had no other options – they were economically impoverished.30 In places where citizens own property and have access to institutions of power good things often happen. Most importantly, prosperity gives us choices. This can take many forms. When individuals are given the opportunity to acquire property, they will simultaneously acquire political power and so agency over their personal well-being. They see such systems as a way to maintain and even enhance their position. This is classic Lockean political philosophy that forms the basis of our contemporary political and economic system; Jefferson read Locke. Overemphasis on personal agency though carries potential problems. In Garret Hardin’s classic essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons, he points out what he sees as an insolvable dilemma – individuals acting in their own self-interest will destroy the common good and further, they will fail to find a way to avoid the destruction.31 This is the romance lands problem – in the race to live the prosperous life, we will tend to destroy that which enabled our prosperity. We overrun the land with our ATVs, overfish our public waters, or destroy the view through clear cuts or open pit mines or rural subdivisions. Some have pointed to the virtue of well-defined property rights and markets to overcome the tragedy.32 Destroy the commons in order to save them. They system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources. https://leg.mt.gov/bills/mca/Constitution/IX/1.htm. It is one of only three states (the others being Pennsylvania and Massachusetts) to have done so. 30 Interestingly, while most miners and their families lived on the financial edge, the social life in Butte was rich. Churches, civic groups, and taverns provided residents with the ability to build social capital in a town where financial capital remained in the hands of a few. This probably explains why Butte had a long and moderately successful union movement for several decades. For more see: Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917 by Michael Punke. 31 Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons: the population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality. science, 162(3859), 1243-1248. 32 De Alessi, L. (1998). Private property rights as the basis for free market environmentalism. Who owns the environment, 1, 29. would say that personal incentives will prevail, and quality can be preserved. This oversimplifies the problem. Public ownership is not, by definition, always inferior. As Hardin wrote several years after his essay in 1986 – the tragedy was inherent on all unmanaged or poorly managed lands – public and private.33 When a public regulatory agency has an incentive to manage lands toward a defined purpose and, a reason to do so, the tragedy may be avoided. Restorations of the Yellowstone grizzly bear following the principles of the Endangered Species Act is one example. A tour of private lands across the west would show landscapes that have been overwatered, overgrazed, and overharvested with the same predictable outcomes as poorly managed public lands. In fact, there are a range of possibilities from private ownership to cooperatives to public management that work to avoid the tragedy; the key is in designing the “right” social and economic institutions to govern behavior to avoid it. Understanding how to get the “right” solution is the essence of political economy.34 In 2009 political scientist Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for her work that focused on what those “right” institutional arrangements look like.35 Her work demonstrated how common property could be successfully managed without centralized government regulation or outright privatization through a variety of alternative, often innovative, arrangements. She encapsulated her life’s work in a book with the snazzy title: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, published in 1990.36 All the solutions she describes reflect a measure of prosperity that allow individuals to be players in the political system. The lesson is - it may not matter what form it takes but resolution of difficult Anderson, T. L., & Leal, D. (2001). Free market environmentalism: revised edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 33 Sinden, A. (2007). The tragedy of the commons and the myth of private property solution. U. Colo. L. Rev., 78, 533. 34 Yandle, B., & Morriss, A. P. (2001). The technologies of property rights: Choice among alternative solutions to tragedies of the commons. Ecology LQ, 28, 123. 35 What we refer to as the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Although not one of the five original Nobel Prizes established in 1895, it is generally accepted as an equal recognition of excellence, recipients are chosen in a similar way and the prize is awarded at the Nobel ceremony. 36 Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge university press. commons problems is possible if those affected are involved in the process. With that realization, two concepts tell us why environmental policy is difficult, even for effective political systems. The first is complexity, the second is emotion. At a National Game Conference in 1920, Aldo Leopold, at the time employed by the Forest Service to hunt and kill bears, wolves, and mountain lions in New Mexico, was adamant that predator control was good land management. He told the assembled wildlife managers: It is going to take patience and money to catch the last wolf or lion in New Mexico. But the last one must be caught before the job can be called fully successful. This may sound like a strong statement, but if any of you have lived in the West and see how quickly a piece of country will restock with wolves or lions, you will know what I mean.37 By the 1930’s Leopold was one of the nation's foremost experts on wildlife management and his book Game Management was the standard text for state and federal wildlife agencies. Leopold continued to study ecosystems where wolves had been removed and where they remained and, over time, rethought his position. By 1944, he recognized that he had been wrong. He came to understand how the eradication of key predators was destructive to the ecosystem, and he began to understand that predators played an important role in long term ecosystem health. In doing so he recognized “the fusion point of ecological science and the land community” including humans.38 In one of his most moving essays, “Thinking Like a Mountain”, he recounts the killing of a wolf (Canis lupus) and how the death became a transformational moment in his life as a land manager: I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned 37 Meine, C. (1988). Aldo Leopold: his life and work. Univ of Wisconsin Press. pg. 181. 38 Knight, R. L., & Riedel, S. (Eds.). (2002). Aldo Leopold and the ecological conscience. Oxford University Press. to think like a mountain. Hence, we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.39 He based his epiphany on years of field observation through a scientist’s eye that could tease out the complexity of ecological relationships. He eventually changed his mind about how ecosystems work or fail to work. He understood they are more complex than he imagined. Doing ecological science today is no different. New research questions and data inform the science community on an ever-increasing range of issues. That is how science progresses. It sometimes takes time to sort through the intricacies of complexity like those that describe ecosystem processes, but the science eventually works itself out if we continue our inquiry with an open mind. Unfortunately, our political system is not oriented that way. Election cycles are seemingly perpetual, and events move quickly. Politics and policy on our public lands do not wear complexity well. Issues of the environment also carry heavy emotional baggage and so hold the potential for acrimonious debate. The political divide is geographical, economic, ideological, and sometimes, unfortunately, highly personal. The debate is embedded in culture or more accurately, sub-cultures. To oversimplify, urban people often see the natural world as an idealized Eden. They may have less awareness of where their food comes from or how their municipal water system works. They may see nature through the eyes of Rousseau where "uncorrupted morals" prevail in the "state of nature" rather than Hobbesian world where life is often violent, bloody, and short.40 A three-day visit to Yellowstone is hardly enough to convince them otherwise. They will see elk (Cervus canadensis) grazing peacefully in the Lamar Valley, they will likely not see an elk calf taken down by a 300-pound grizzly sow to feed her cubs. They will not see the bloody carcass, or see the healthy cubs grow into adults. They will focus on the romance and not see the violence of nature because that is what they came to see and expect. It would only be through careful observation over time that they would come to learn the intricacies of the ecological web of life. 39 Leopold, A. (1990). Thinking like a mountain. Eugene, OR: Lone Goose Press. 40 Hobbes’entire quote is: "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes, T. (1994). Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Hackett Publishing. We invariably over-idealize rural life but people who work and recreate close to nature, though sometimes misinformed, normally have some material basis for their opinion. Living close to forests, hunting and fishing, and even picking huckleberries (while keeping lookout for a black bear sharing the patch) adds a certain personal saliency to forest fires or drought and other issues related to living near wild lands; among these are living near large predators that may come for an occasional visit or surprise us on the trail. Rural people may enjoy this encounter more often than they like and will often carry a gun or bear spray and (hopefully) know how to use it. They will have a bit of that “sludge ethic” in their back pocket because they know it may serve them well or, in the case of a gun, believe it will. Members of these two groups are likely to differ when asked about wolves, wild horses, motorized recreation, grizzly bears, public lands, or wilderness. Our cultural and political differences will not be overcome easily, and science is often frustratingly inconclusive. But here is something most urbanites and their rural neighbors can agree on – romance lands are important and the issues that divide us are secondary to their conservation even though how we go about may differ. Here’s why. It turns out that managing for environmental good often results in economic and social well-being. Enlightened management of our western romance lands – both public and private, often precedes our general prosperity and quality of life. Our parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, waters, range, and forests produced immense amounts of private and public good over the last half century and we are the current beneficiaries. Even Utah Republicans acknowledge the millions of dollars generated by tourism in Zion, Escalante, and Moab as they continue to support oil and gas development on public land and insist on a continuance of their version of the mythic west. They, and others, may differ on how to use those lands, but most agree that living in flyover country with its high-quality rural areas offers a better life than city living. It is not unusual to hear westerners refer to their home as “God’s country”. The vectors that help define prosperity derived from our public lands are global and they run in both directions. They include the local business owner who moved from LA to Bozeman to build a local fishing company into a global corporation.41 It includes tour buses full of visitors from Europe, Asia, and South American traveling from one national park to another in a sort of 41 Simms Fishing Products was started in Jackson, Wyoming in 1980 by John Simms. K.C. Walsh, a Los Angeles-based management consultant, bought Simms and moved the business to Bozeman, Montana in 1992. touristic nature pilgrimage as they leave behind Euros, Yen, Yuan, and Pesos. That vector includes lessons learned managing endangered species in Greater Yellowstone that are applied in Africa or the Himalayas by a biologist trained at the University of Montana or Yale. Numerous ecologically rich location scattered around the world share similar vectors but the story of how they emerged in the GYE is the story we now turn to. Chapter 2 1862-1872 A Decade for the West and a National Park for the World History is a tricky thing. When does it begin and is there an end? Maybe there are several wests – an old one, a middle aged one, and now, a new one? In the movie Little Big Man, Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) laments the loss of the Cheyenne nation who were promised land where they could live in peace “as long as grass grows, wind blows, and the sky is blue”. Maybe the history of the old west ended when the American government reneged on that promise? Maybe it entered middle age when Clark and Lewis completed the first half of their journey and laid eyes on the Pacific Ocean; or maybe when they got back and told their story? Was it the establishment of Fort Astoria, the first permanent United States settlement on the Pacific Coast, a catalysis for western migration and what would become the Oregon Trail and financed by the richest man in the country at the time?42 Maybe the history of the new west began when Fredrick Jackson Turner declared western frontier to be closed in 1893 because it had all been conquered and settled by the White man and so a new era began? 42 See: Stark, P. (2014). Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's lost Pacific empire: a story of wealth, ambition, and survival. When we speak of the western frontier, we are speaking of land west of the Mississippi River – what political pundits today call “flyover country”. The Midwest, much of Texas, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Southwest, and the West Coast all constitute the historical frontier. These are the lands Americans settled after they became American, forgetting, or perhaps willfully ignoring, that those lands had been inhabited by first peoples for thousands of years. Sidebar: An Appraisal of the American West and American Identity A year after the Oklahoma Land Rush, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the frontier was closed. The 1890 census had shown that a frontier line, a point beyond which the population density was less than two persons per square mile, no longer existed. The announcement impressed Frederick Jackson Turner, a young historian at the University of Wisconsin. In 1893, he presented a paper to the American Historical Association entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In it he argued that the experience of the frontier was what distinguished the United States from Europe; the frontier had shaped American history as well as produced the practicality, energy, and individualism of the American character. The settling of the frontier he argued, was the nation’s formative experience. Turner's claims about the effects of the frontier on American life influenced generations of historians, particularly in their appreciation of the role of geography and the environment in helping to shape national development. Contemporary historians, especially Michael P. Malone and Richard W. Etulain expanded the thesis to explain the colonial relationship with the urban East while others, particularly Patricia Limerick, challenged and broadened our modern image of the American West. The debate over what constitutes the American West continues.43 The original thirteen colonies of America were, of course, settled to exploit the potential riches of “the new world” and the economic model was for the governments of France and England to partner with the merchant class to spread risk and offer security for exploitation. Profits were shared, and power projected onto both natives and other would-be 43 Malone, M. P., & Etulain, R. W. (1989). The American West: a twentieth-century history. U of Nebraska Press. Limerick, 1987 See also: https://www.eiu.edu/historia/Swinford.pdf exploiters/interlopers. Up to then, mercantilism had created empires and wealth for the great colonial powers, and it was assumed that it would be no different in the new world. In the northern colonies, the economy was the product of trapping and trading in furs as well as fishing – the primary source of wealth in Massachusetts. Southern colonies concentrated on agriculture and developed the plantations that exported tobacco, cotton, corn, vegetables, grain, fruit, and livestock. With a supply of captive labor, plentiful water, and generous growing seasons the South would prosper. Raw commodities were shipped from norther ports to Europe while household necessities and luxuries were imported. Investors in London, Bristol, Liverpool, Bordeaux, and Paris made profits in both directions by trading in goods and humans. A similar system of trade would run in the Pacific Northwest. Furs would ship from the future site of Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River to be sold in China at astounding rates of profit. Chinese goods would make their way to London. These were sold and cheap trade goods would make their way to New York, around the Horn back to Astoria to be traded for furs and the cycle of exploitation of the indigenous natives would continue. The only thing that made this trade loop different was that it was a wealthy German immigrant in cooperation with the American government to do the exploiting. Sidebar: John Jacob Astor and the Pacific Fur Company Just four years after Clark and Lewis completed the voyage of the Corps of Discovery one of the wealthiest men in America conceived of a fur trade terminus on the Columbia River. He funded two simultaneous expeditions one overland, one by ship. They would rendezvous and set up a fur trading network with local natives and export the furs of sea otters and beaver to China. The venture had setbacks from the beginning – the ship Tonquin was attacked by Chinook natives, the overland party nearly starved crossing Idaho and the War of 1812 resulted in the British owned Northwest Company buying the Pacific Fur Company and the Astorians abandoning Fort Astoria. The only meaningful legacy of the whole affair is that the route of the overland party became the Oregon Trail and the route used by tens of thousands of pioneers headed for Oregon, Utah, or California.44 Decades later the same model would be applied to the interior western frontier as moneyed interests from the two coasts would exploit interior territorial resources and ship commodities to production facilities elsewhere. This is understandable. Transportation corridors, 44 Stark, 2014 markets, and industry was located on the east and west coasts. The shortage of labor and infrastructure worked against meaningful economic development in the interior west. Unfortunately, as in other colonies worldwide, this model of economic empire-building was to be followed by violent independence movements (i.e. labor), structural poverty, and long-term economic dependency the consequences from which much of the west still suffers. It is also true that the investors and power brokers had perhaps never operated in a landscape that would shape the regional social and political culture as much as the vast frontier of the west. Those who sought to make a life in the west would value personal liberty and freedom and behave accordingly. This did not always work out well for the mining companies that dominated the early economies of western Montana, Nevada, and Idaho as they fought a long and often bloody battles over unionization of the mines. That sense of independence is still present today in the libertarian politics of many western members of Congress. During the early part of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln and the majority Republican Congress needed to populate the west with Union sympathizers and head off the expansion of slavery to western territories. They passed three bills that would accelerate a westward expansion in case the secessionist movement won. These were the Homestead Acts, the Pacific Railway Acts, and the Morrill Land Grant Acts, all passed in 1862. These three related pieces of legislation were the genesis of the modern West. The Homestead Act stated that any current or future citizen at least 21 years old with ten dollars in his pocket could claim a homestead of up to 160 acres of government land.45 All they had to do was “improve” the land by putting it to productive use by building a home and farming the land for five years. When those requirements had been satisfied that citizen could then make a claim on the land and own it free and clear through a process called “proving it up”. The Homestead Act was open to everyone regardless of race, gender, or nationality - except for native Americans who were not eligible for citizenship (and who had already proved it up for centuries). All it required was that one make a success of the land. Many did not. The American prairie west of the 100th meridian is a harsh place with little rainfall, cycles of drought, and wind that can blow for days taking the thin topsoil with it. There was often little 45 Porterfield, J. (2004). The Homestead Act of 1862: A Primary Source History of the Settlement of the American Heartland in the Late 19th Century. The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. in the way of building materials and fuel for the cold winters was in short supply. The small size of the sections increased the difficulties. In the relatively wetter eastern states 160 acres was sufficient for a farmer to be productive but, it is not enough to sustain agriculture on the dry plains. Scarce natural vegetation made raising livestock on the prairie nearly impossible. Failed homesteaders often packed up and moved on to the Pacific Northwest and California after failing to make it through their first harvest. In parts of Montana the failure rate of homesteaders was relatively lower compared to other states because of the rich farmland in what is now called “the golden triangle” – a region of high wheat productivity connecting Havre, Conrad, and Great Falls. In 1918, during the latter years of the homestead acts, over 14,000 claims were filed on 3.2 million acres in Montana. Of the estimated 300,000 people who filed for homesteads in Montana, roughly half successfully patented their claims. Montana is the exception. Just six months after the Homestead Act was passed, the Railroad Act was signed by Lincoln, and by May 1869, a transcontinental rail system extended across the frontier. Homesteaders who successfully proved their claim were rewarded with improved transportation and easier access to services and markets. The first railroad land grants went to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads.46 They were given a 400-foot right of way plus ten square miles of land for every mile of track they laid toward completion of a transcontinental railway. Timber on the land would be used for rail ties and the built infrastructure necessary to support the enterprise. By 1864 the land grants were revised and enlarged from ten to twenty square miles along with full mineral rights. Even given that bargain, a transcontinental railroad was considered a risky investment. Once rails were laid across good farming, ranching, and timbering country would settlers and investors follow? The homesteads alone were hardly enough to justify the expense. It would be up to the railroads themselves to spur interest in the largely unknown west. Through the promotion of western overland excursions, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West shows, the building and management of “dude ranches”, and promotion of what would become 46 Allen, D. W. (2019). Establishing economic property rights by giving away an empire. The Journal of Law and Economics, 62(2), 251-280. See also: https://ushistoryscene.com/article/1862-homestead-act/ the National Park rail line, the rail companies stimulated demand of wealthy Easterners (and Europeans) for a trip west. In the first year of operation, 1869–70, the six transcontinental railroads carried 150,000 passengers coast to coast. Railroad land was sold to would-be settlers and immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia were given easy terms for land purchases.47 Ethnic pods of Germans, Norwegians, Italians, Slavs, Scots, and many others can still be found across the western states today. At the end of the land grant era in 1900, four out of the five transcontinental railroads were built with help from the federal government. With help from bankruptcy courts the rail lines were kept in business. Only one line – the Northern Pacific owned by James J. Hill, was built with no Federal subsidy; it was also the only one to not eventually go broke or be taken over by a competitor.48 Viewed with the clarity of hindsight, the railroad land grants were likely the most important land management decision in the history of the United States, and we see the result every time we look at a map of the national forests and notice the sections of private land interspersed with public. Sidebar: The “Checkerboard” Pattern on National Forests Figure four: The existing “checkerboard” of property ownership in the eastern Crazy Mountains, Montana. Pick up a map of any national forest in the west and you will notice an odd pattern of green and white squares. The green areas are managed by the US Forest Service, the white are privately owned usually by timber companies that spun out of the original five railroads that were granted land under the Railroad Acts. One thing to notice is that the white squares are distributed in a pattern. That pattern is a problem when land management decisions vary between private and public owners. If you were a grizzly bear with 47 https://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/cbq-railroad/cbq-buffalo-bill-and-development- wyoming 48 Malone, M. P. (2013). James J. Hill: Empire builder of the northwest (Vol. 12). University of Oklahoma Press. a range of 500 square miles, you would prefer old growth public forests to clear cut private ones and so within that range you would only have half the habitat. Fuel loads also vary across ownership patters with past clear cuts being more fire prone so add complexity to forest management. Today, across the west, agencies and private owners engage in land swaps and purchase agreements to try to consolidate ownership into large contiguous blocks that provide both landowners with greater opportunity for better land use policy. The final land grant – the Morrill Act, helped lay the groundwork for a system of educational institutions that would become “land grant universities”. They would teach the working class the agriculture and mechanic arts to “promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life”.49 Many of the land grant institutions went on to become important research-oriented universities that would prove valuable as technological changes took place over the ensuing decades but their main function was to educate the masses so that they would be more productive in agriculture and the “applied arts” during the industrial revolution. The Morrill Act was essentially an economic development strategy for rural America. It needs to be said that the fifty-two land grant universities in the west occupy lands that were once the traditional territories of Native American natives and they had no say in who and why land grants were made. In all, nearly 80,000 parcels totaling over ten million acres were granted (grabbed?) to the states.50 The actual disposal of public land for a targeted purpose like education or state prisons, parallel in nature to the Homestead and Rail Acts, was disputed by some. Most politicians agreed that public lands would be for "the common benefit of the United States", but would turning them over to the states generate revenue for that common good? Congress was divided into two camps. Those, like Alexander Hamilton, who favored a direct revenue stream, wanted the public 49 7 U.S.C. § 301 et seq. 50 See: Ahtone, T., & Lee, R. (2021). Looking forward from Land-Grab universities. Native American and Indigenous Studies, 8(1), 176-182 McCoy, M., Risam, R., & Guiliano, J. (2021). The future of land-grab universities. Native American and Indigenous Studies, 8(1), 169-175. Lomawaima, K. T., McDonough, K., O'Brien, J. M., & Warrior, R. (2021). Editors' Introduction: Reflections on the Land-Grab Universities Project. Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAIS), 8(1), 89-97. lands sold to large buyers to minimize expense and maximize revenue to the US Treasury through corporate investment and development. Presumably mining companies would more than make up the loss in taxes on minerals through land purchases. Thomas Jefferson, a supporter of an indirect stream of revenue, wanted the public lands given away to settlers who would develop the land, add value, increase consumption, and so generate tax revenues. While both sides - revenue through direct sales versus revenue through settlement - saw the importance and need for financial returns from public lands, contrasts in methods would be debated for decades, and still is.51 By 1850 the Pacific Coast was settled, and the major cities were founded and populated. San Francisco was part of the United States by 1848, Portland incorporated in 1851, Seattle was founded later that same year. After the gold rush of 1848 was played out, would-be miners went inland where they would discover gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc in the Comstock Lode of Nevada, the Silver Valley of Idaho, in “the richest hill on Earth” in Butte, Montana, and eventually the great Kennecott copper strike near McCarthy, Alaska. In some ways the early settlers had to go east to find the west. They, along with the homesteaders, Mormon settlers, would be cattle barons, and business opportunists had found flyover country. In 1876 the geologist and Civil War hero John Wesley Powell noted a demarcation between east and west based on water, or more accurately the lack of it. His explorations of the Green and Colorado river systems convinced him that much of the land of the arid west would not support agriculture and that the highest and best use would be conservation, limited development, and political boundaries defined by watershed. He said as much in his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States to Congress in 1879.52 Low density grazing and agriculture would take place near water sources but development, if it happened, should take place where climate conditions allowed rather than random political boundaries. Under the direction of Powell, the newly created U.S. Geological Survey recognized the importance of the 100th meridian. To the east of the line, average annual precipitation is more than twenty inches – sufficient for non-irrigated agriculture. To the west irrigation is needed. The 51 https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/blm/history/chap1.htm 52 https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf line is also the point where the plains give way to the upslope of the Rockies. This is where the official west begins, at least according to Powell speaking as a government bureaucrat. 1872 - “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People” John Colter is a genuine legend in Yellowstone country where the legend podium is already crowded with names like Washburn, Hayden, Bridger, and Moran. Near Jackson, WY there is a Colter Peak and a Coulter Bay on Jackson Lake along with numerous Colter creeks, campgrounds, and even a Colter Winery in Juliaetta, Idaho. Near Bozeman there is a John Colter Run at the headwaters of the Missouri River to commemorate his escape from the Blackfeet nation after a two-week run for his life. Coulter may not be the best-known westerner, but his visage certainly gets around. In the fall of 1806 Coulter had just completed a journey of several thousand miles out and back to the Pacific Ocean with Lewis and Clark and now found himself in the Mandan villages in present-day North Dakota. A year later he headed back west guiding some trappers to the upper Missouri watershed. After a season with them near Three Forks, Montana he turned south, by himself, in winter. During the next several months he skirted the eastern boundary of the future Yellowstone National Park near Cody, Wyoming, went to Jackson Lake and then up to Yellowstone Lake. He undoubtedly saw many of the spectacular hot springs and geysers in the region along with their weird topography and foul-smelling discharges. When he returned to Fort Raymond, after his barefoot run mentioned above, people did not believe his descriptions of the lands he had explored. It was only later after miners and homesteaders saw the region’s geothermal features for themselves that “Coulter’s Hell” was accepted as reality.53 A few decades later in 1870, Scribner's Magazine ran a story, illustrated by landscape painter Thomas Moran, called "The Wonders of the Yellowstone".54 The article detailed the explorations of the Washburn-Doane expedition just recently returned from Wyoming. The next year geologist Ferdinand Hayden would conduct his own geological survey in the Yellowstone 53 Mattes, M. J., & Colter, J. (1962). Colter's Hell & Jackson's Hole: The Fur Trappers' Exploration of the Yellowstone and Grand Teton Park Region. Yellowstone Library and Museum Association and the Grand Teton Natural History Association. 54 https://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/NATURE/cap3.html region. The result was the Hayden Geological Survey Report of 1871. Both expeditions were well-connected to the Northern Pacific Railroad and financed, in part, by the company. The Northern Pacific that had laid tracks across the American west, with the considerable government subsidy of the Railway Acts and now it was looking for riders.55 Maybe the weirdness of the western landscape would be marketable to well-heeled tourists? By 1872 enough was known about the region that railroad executives could see the development potential and wanted to make sure the state of Wyoming would not manage the geysers and scenery exclusively for their own benefit; they wanted a piece of the action. They convinced Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes to sponsor legislation to protect the Yellowstone region as a national park – the world’s first.56 Dawes had been a proponent of preserving Yosemite as a national monument in 1864 and so philosophically he was already on board with conserving public land. On March 1, 1872, Congress passed a resolution signed by President Grant declaring Yellowstone's 2.2 million acres a National Park and appointed Nathaniel Langford, the author of the Scriber’s piece and close ally of management of the Northern Pacific, the first Park Superintendent. The superintendent title placed him in a position to grant permits for Northern Pacific's railroad hotels within the park boundaries and advancing the connecting rail track to the park's northern entrance at Gardiner, MT. Another rail terminus was located near present day Bozeman, MT at Gallatin Gateway. The Gallatin Gateway Inn opened in 1927 and was constructed and operated by the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad.57 It too was a profit hub that depended on visitors to the park who rode special made buses to park attractions. Northern Pacific Railroad adopted Yellowstone as its own and set out to establish their presence in the park, which can still be seen today in park iconography.58 55 https://wayback.archive- it.org/5005/20141107060318/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/RAILROAD/adverts2.html 56 Jackson, W. T. (1942). The Creation of Yellowstone National Park. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 29(2), 187-206. 57 Today, the former glory of the Inn is a memory. At one time or another it has been a restaurant, a bar featuring mud wresting women, and now it is employee housing for the resorts in Big Sky, MT. 58 Glacier National Park was established in 1910 was adopted by the Great Northern Railway. Grand Canyon National Park (1919) was partnered with the Santa Fe Pacific Railway. In his book The Discovery of Yellowstone Park: Diary of the Washburn Expedition to the Yellowstone and Firehole Rivers in the Year 1870, Nathaniel Langford suggests that the idea for a national park was “first broached to the members of our party on September 19, 1870, by Mr. (Cornelius) Hedges, while we were in camp at the confluence of the Firehole and Gibbon rivers." The creation story of the world’s first national park being proposed around a campfire on the banks of a wild river deep in the heart of wilderness is emotionally attractive but alas, is a myth.59 The reality of how the park came to be, through lobbying by the industrial railroads, is in sharp contradiction to the more romantic notion but the outcome is just as favorable. For the first time a large ecologically significant landscape was preserved with a formal mission to continue the state of preservation in perpetuity. It would try to be both a “public pleasuring ground” while preserving its ecological integrity. That is a significant thing. Ask any person in America about their impressions of the American west and many will point to our national parks among our other public open spaces – the product of forward thinking and seemingly unlimited wild lands. In polls over several decades, support for national parks is unwavering. Visitation continues to increase especially in the natural parks like Yosemite, Grand Teton, Zion, Arches, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone.60 The western writer Wallace Stegner saw “geographies of hope” in our wild places and public lands. He wrote that “visiting them was good for us as vacation from our insane lives”. He was clearly ahead of him time on that point. More broadly, he called national parks "the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst." Sidebar: The Best Idea Various people are credited with the statement that the national parks are the best idea America ever had but few would argue with it. In his stellar PBS series, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Ken Burns attributes the quote to Wallace Stegner. Others - Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Steward Udall, and virtually every director the National Park Service, have invoked the American ideal of national parks as reflecting the best of American values. The earliest source of the quote (and acknowledged by Stegner) is from Lord James 59 Schullery, P., & Whittlesey, L. H. (2003). Myth and history in the creation of Yellowstone National Park. U of Nebraska Press. 60 For visitation numbers to all national park units: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/socialscience/highlights.htm Bryce, the British ambassador to America in 1912. However, a rereading of his speech to the American Civic Association, "National Parks: The Need of the Future" reveals that he never used the term "best idea". The source of the quote, according to Canadian park historian Alan MacEachern, is still somewhat of a mystery.61 In any case it seems we need heroes, and it has now entered our national mythology and is most often attributed to Stegner. Given his stature as a western writer, I think in this case we can live with a bit of romantic myth- making. The very nature and reason for our national parks sets up an institutionally generated problem for park managers. When Yellowstone was created there was no administrative body to manage the new park, and few had a vision for doing so. Yellowstone was established as “pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people in order to protect for all time this outstanding natural area.”62 By 1916 Congress has passed legislation creating other national parks: Yosemite (California), Mt. Rainier (Washington), Crater Lake (Oregon), Mesa Verde (Colorado), Glacier (Montana), and Rocky Mountain (Colorado) but no central bureaucracy for their management. There was clearly a need for an agency to administer the park system and after considerable political wrangling between Gifford Pinchot, director of the US Forest Service, and members of Congress, the National Park Service Act passed in August 1916.63 The National Park System Organic Act, which created the Park Service, also set the purpose of the park system: The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations hereinafter specified by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments, and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.64 61 https://niche-canada.org/2011/10/23/who-had-americas-best-idea/ 62 https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/shutdown/fy2014/upload/NPS-Fact-Sheet.pdf 63 https://www.doi.gov/ocl/nps-organic-act 64 Winks, R. W. (1996). The National Park Service act of 1916: A contradictory mandate. Denv. UL Rev., 74, 575. The mission statement of the NPS – to conserve the resource but provide for human activities, does not do much in the way of instructing park service employees how to implement the mission or how they will be evaluated as an agency by either Congress or citizens. The mission statement is, even today, subject to interpretation by superintendents across the system. Balancing the two prongs of the core mission has and still involves dynamic political acrobatics. Private economic factions, like concessionaires, would like to expand business and profits. Public interest groups seek to prevent development or at least do it their way with their vision. Environmentalists place emphasis on preserving natural processes that preserves biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Other nonprofits actively seek development (and revenues) within the parks by building “visitor learning centers”. The park service promotes a political agenda aimed at satisfying everyone – especially the legislators who scrutinize and pass their budget. These sometimes-competing interests define the politics of running a modern-day national park. The same is true on public lands outside the parks, although it takes other forms. Management of all our public lands is a continual process of weighing tradeoffs between preservation and exploitation. Subject to political whims, we vacillate on what we want them to produce and how we should go about doing it. For example, in 1872, Congress passed both the visionary Yellowstone Park Protection Act and the General Mining Act. The first set aside public land from development in favor of conservation, the other codified the exploration and ownership for public resources (minerals) in favor of economic development.65 Originally, our public forest reserves were managed to produce wood products and protect watersheds. Today they are expected to produce commodities and nearly unlimited recreation of every type. One of the most contentious issues has been, and continues to be, fire. To understand that dilemma we need to first discuss water. Early preservationists pushed back when the director of the U.S. Forest Service Gifford Pinchot supported building a dam in the Hetch Hetchy valley near Yosemite. Water from the Tuolumne River was to be stored and diverted to San Francisco to help recover from the 1906 earthquake by ensuring a plentiful water supply behind the proposed Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. John Muir, the Scottish-born mountaineer and founder of the Sierra Club, saw things a little differently. He considered the pristine valley as another example of “America’s cathedrals” and opposed any development. The story is a classic in environmental studies that we do not need to 65 https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/mining-and-minerals/about go into here. One of the best sources of the story that recounts the history of the Pinchot/Muir/ Roosevelt conflict over conservation vs. preservation and Hetch Hetchy is in The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan.66 Egan’s take is that the fallout of Pinchot's vision of utilitarianism over preservation had implications beyond water and the Hetch Hetchy valley. One of those was our management of wildfires. In 1898, Gifford Pinchot was a friend and political ally of Theodor Roosevelt, and one of the most important founders of the early conservation movement in America. He was picked by Roosevelt to lead the Division of Forestry. It was later renamed the United States Forest Service in 1905. He was a product of wealth, privilege, and the best forestry education available - first at Yale and later as a postgraduate at the French National School of Forestry. In the late 19th and early 20th century, wildfires were seen as a waste of natural resources and were a significant threat to human life. Just a few years earlier, in 1871 the worst loss of life from wildfire in United States history occurred when the Peshtigo Fire burned 1.5 million acres in Wisconsin and Michigan, killing up to 2500 people.67 During his confirmation hearing Pinchot vowed to Congress that his agency could control fire in the newly designated national forests and preserve the valued timber supply. In August 1910, shortly after the Hetch Hetchy dam controversy began, the largest wildfire in American history charred an area of more than three million acres in Montana and Idaho, burned five towns to the ground, and killed nearly one hundred people. The fire burned virtually uncontrolled through the White Pine and Cedar forests of western Montana and north Idaho. Remnants of “the big burn” can still be seen in the black stumps of giant cedar trees in the Idaho panhandle. Pinchot lost his job. The Big Blowup left a permanent impression on the fifth chief of the Forest Service in 1933 - Gus Silcox – also a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry. He had fought the 1910 fire and was convinced that the only way to control forest fires was to extinguish them before they could grow big enough to do real damage. He instituted the “10 a.m.” policy, which mandated 66 Egan, T., & Dean, R. (2009). The big burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the fire that saved America (p. 352). Brilliance Audio. 67 Rosenwald, M.S. (2017). The night America burned’: The deadliest — and most overlooked — fire in U.S. history. Washington Post, December 6 that all fires be suppressed by 10:00 a.m. the morning after it was reported.68 This was forest service policy for the next four decades. One of the first things he would do is get more eyes on the forests by using the Depression era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to man 200 Forest Service camps on the national forests. The CCC workers constructed backcountry trails and cabins, and manned the network of lookouts for the decade the program was in existence.69 A network of fire lookouts was staffed by “spotters” who would triangulate a fire’s location using an alidade called the Osborne Firefinder, a sighting device used to determine the horizontal bearing of the event. Two bearings would allow spotters to pinpoint the fire using simple geometry. By 1939 smokejumpers and “hot shot” crews would deploy and rapidly descend on a fire and minimize the amount of land burned. This was all according to the Silcox plan. Throughout the 1950s and 60s Smokey the Bear told Americans “Only you can prevent forest fires” and fires were culturally defined as a “public bad”.70 In the decade following the Mann Gulch fire that killed twelve smoke jumpers in Montana in 1949, the Forest Service turned to newly created fire research centers in Montana, California, and Georgia to better understand fire behavior and tactical firefighting strategy, but they did not change their ways until 1978 when the Forest Service abandoned the 10:00 am policy.71 They learned that wishful thinking and fire lines were not up to the job of eliminating forest fires. Pinchot's emphasis on utilitarianism of natural resources is directly linked to the legacy of continued fire control up through the last part of the 20th century. Pinchot saw burned timber as a waste of resources that could be avoided if we just put enough men and technology on the fire. We are living with the consequences today in the form of catastrophic fires spurred on by fuel buildup on national forests worsened by climate change. 68 https://www.evergreenmagazine.com/why-a-10am-fire-policy/ 69 https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/ccc/ccc/chap1.htm 70 Stephens, S. L., & Ruth, L. W. (2005). Federal forest‐fire policy in the United States. Ecological applications, 15(2), 532-542. 71 Rothermel, R. C. (1993). Mann Gulch fire: A race that couldn't be won. Gen. Tech. Rep. INT-299. Ogden, UT: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Intermountain Research Station. 10 p., 299. Sidebar: Using the Osborn There are not very many fire lookouts left in our national forests. At one time there were hundreds built by the Civilian Conservation Corp during the Great Depression. Today only about 300 are in active use, most are staffed with volunteers. If you visit a historic lookout the turret of the Osborn Fire Finder dominates the glass walled observation box. The Osborn is located over a topographic map of the lookout area centered on a horizontal table. Figure five: The Osborn Fire Finder There is a circular rim graduated in degrees (and fractions) and two sighting apertures mounted above the map on opposite sides of a ring that slides around the arc. When smoke is spotted, the spotter sights the location using the apertures and calls in the location using degrees of the compass. Two locations are used by dispatchers to find the intersection and fix the precise location of the fire. Today drones and aircraft can cover much larger areas and use GPS for location during the fire season. Similar debates have pervaded public land management of other resources. Should we continue to subsidize cattle grazing on public land or use market forces to price grazing? Should we expand our system of wilderness areas and if so, what sorts of recreation is appropriate in such places, should the federal government divest itself of public lands to the states? In recent decades, public managers have shifted on a variety of positions in favor of the environment. As they learned more about their role in wildlife management, managers have moved from a default position on predator eradication to predator conservation. They have, in some states, changed the definition of the legitimate use of public water from irrigation or power generation to favor leaving it in the stream for fish habitat. Beginning in the 1960s some lands managers rethought letting wildfires burn themselves out without intervention. Nearly 150 years later we are still debating questions of how to manage our public lands and some of the issues remain the same. Through all these changes public lands managers face political and economic challenges, shifts in cultural norms, and changes to scientific knowledge as they oversee nearly 30% of the land mass of the United States. The national parks have been mostly, not always, insulated from these highly politicized conflicts. As the most romantic of the romance lands, the public and media are pleasantly biased in their favor. Visuals can be powerful. Network news programs enthusiastically run video of large forest fires, dead grizzly bears, or profile those who are political threats to our national parks and monuments. The romance frame is easy to manipulate, and the public often responds by giving money to environmental groups or engaging their elected political leaders. Sidebar: “The President Stole Your Land” Chances are if you are reading this Yvon Chouinard made at least one of your favorite pieces of outdoor clothing. After a brutal but life changing climb of Fitzroy in Patagonia he returned to build a company by that name. He had been importing rugged and warm clothing for climbing and mountaineering but eventually started making his own and a financial empire with a public conscious was born. One of the core values of his billion-dollar company is to put his money toward the environment and not shy away from political conflict. In 2018 shortly after then President Trump sharply reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah, Patagonia ran the following home page of their website and sued the president: Figure five: The Patagonia home page Dec 4, 2018 Romance lands were front and center of big business and big politics. Trump, his Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Congressional Republicans attacked the company and organized a boycott. It failed. Patagonia sold even more clothing and the attacks served as free publicity for a company whose DNA is in preservation of the natural world. Chouinard followed up the Bears Ears fight by spearheading moving the outdoor recreation industry’s national trade show from Utah, where support for Trump’s move was popular with conservative politicians, to Denver. Patagonia’s Action Works continues to engage their consumers and fight the good fight. In 2022 he restructured the company into a public trust where profits would go to fight for climate change legislation and support like-minded political candidates. He could have formed a nonpolitical nonprofit but instead chose to the take the fight to DC and invest in political realignment. His business continues to boom.72 Luckily, there has been little outright corruption involving the management of the national parks (as opposed to other public lands). The agency has benefited from competent professional leadership and a dedicated and well-informed workforce. The same is not true at the Cabinet level; several Secretary of Interiors have been explicitly hostile to the core mission of the Department of Interior, but few directly attack the National Park Service. In those cases, political tribalism drives behavior at the expense of science and the lessons of political economy. It is usually the land and the public that suffer. Most large bureaucracies, public or private, select against risk taking and innovation and most public land managers are no different. Perhaps there is some quality associated with taking responsibility for our most iconic lands that inspires a national park supervisor to “go to the mat” over a particular issue, as some have including Bob Barbee and Dan Wenk – both superintendents of Yellowstone and both skewered by their political opposition. Many of the success stories in Yellowstone are the result of entrepreneurial behavior within the tradition of scientific management where managers put themselves at some professional risk. Bringing the Yellowstone grizzly bear back from near extinction, letting backcountry fires burn, reintroducing wolves, and recent changes in bison management are dramatic examples. 72 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/business/patagonia-trump-bears-ears.html A University of the Yellowstone Parks and other protected lands are not just a pretty face we can be proud of. They have real utilitarian value during a time of rapid human caused ecological change – a period some refer to as The Anthropocene. Imagine an unfamiliar landscape. You know there are animals that live there but you are not sure which species are native, their distribution, or what role they play on the land or the ecosystem. The population of some species are in rapid decline, and you don’t know why. You know the array of vegetation but not sure which are exotic imports and which are native and if that matters and if so, to which species. How often did the landscape burn and why? What past human impacts on the land might have played a role in what we see today? Now think about managing that landscape in a “natural” state or renewing it in a way that resembles how it looked 100 or 500 years ago, or even 10,000 years ago. This would be analogous to managing Central Park back to its original state. You would make mistakes; you would most certainly not know when you had achieved your goal. How would you learn? One way would be to look to similar areas that remain relatively undisturbed. If you could understand how they work, how fragile or robust they might be, what the original array of wildlife was, what cyclic changes affected the landscape you might be able to restore heavily disturbed landscapes back to their former state. The ecological role of national parks and wilderness can serve as this ecological baseline. In his magnificent book The Song of the Dodo, author David Quammen describes the problem.73 He presents us with fine large Persian carpet and proceeds to imagine we cut it into thirty-six pieces two by three feet in size. The 216 square feet of carpet still exists but now, it more closely resembles a pile of throw rugs. Is it still a carpet? Most of us would say no, it is a mess of wool remnants that have little connection to the original whole and whose parts will blow away in the wind. To follow the analogy, you might be able to piece it back together, but you would never approach the integrity and artistry of the original carpet – if you could figure out what the original looked like in the first place. This is the role of places like Yellowstone - it is our version of an ecological Persian carpet – an intricate texture of plant, animals, and interrelated patterns that will take some time to fully understand. 73 Quammen, D. (2012). The song of the dodo: island biogeography in an age of extinctions. Random House. Virtually every visitor to the park will comment on the obvious – the geothermal features, the prodigious wildlife, the spectacular views from the top of Mt. Washburn, the drama and beauty of Yellowstone Falls, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone from Artists Point. They will rightly think this is a one-of-a-kind place found nowhere else on Earth, and they would be right and at the same time wrong. Surely there is no one place on Earth like Yellowstone but, its ecological complexity is mirrored in many places. The wonders of Yellowstone, while dazzling in their scope and drama, are hardly unique. Surely the gigantic migratory herds of wildebeest (1.5 million!), 200,000 zebras, gazelle, buffalo, and the ubiquitous lions that migrate through the Serengeti each year surpasses the modest elk herds of Yellowstone, even with packs on wolves on their heels? You want charisma? Try a giant panda or polar bear – icons of World Wildlife Fund, in their natural habitat of dense bamboo forest in and polar ice. Scenery? Try the view of Mt. Everest from Tengboche, a Buddhist monastery above Sherpa capital Namche Bazaar – it may be the best view on Earth. Geothermal features? The second largest geyser field in the world is in the Russian Far East, Huanglong in central China is as colorful as Grand Prismatic in Yellowstone, Pamukkale in southwestern Turkey is a mirror image of Yellowstone’s Mammoth springs, with a Roman thermal spa from the 2nd century BC thrown in for good measure. The idea here is not to rank global attractions in some gross touristic contest but to make the point that Yellowstone shares attributes with much of the rest of the natural world and is not an ecologically unique place in almost any respect. In fact, it may have more in common with other natural areas than it has differences. That fact matters because we need places where we can learn how to restore and maintain large, protected areas. We need “control ecosystems” with minimal human influences that act as biological storehouses of ecosystem processes, where data is accessible, where people can come to learn and do research, and to act as places from where outreach to other regions is launched. Yellowstone is one of those rare places. In 2001 the World Wildlife Fund took on the task of identifying the world’s terrestrial ecoregions. They identified 867 locations classified into 14 biomes – large natural communities of flora and fauna that occupy distinct habitats. Examples are forests, tundra, grasslands, or deserts. Each biome has its own processes, climate, soils, species composition, and a host of other dimensions. Biomes are akin to habitats but at a much larger scale. Figure six: The 846 global ecoregions nested within 14 terrestrial biomes.74 The Yellowstone region is technically Temperate Conifer Forest on the WWF-US biome map.75 More specifically, it is a South-Central Rockies Forest centered principally on the Yellowstone Plateau with several mountain ranges radiating outward. Yellowstone is a region of coniferous forests of pines, firs, and spruce. Winter may last for months, and its high elevation mountains act as a storehouse for water during the warm dry summers. Globally, the Temperate Conifer Forest is one of the world’s largest in distribution – from Kazakhstan to Morocco, China, Scandinavia, and Japan. Above all, forests of the South-Central Rockies are particularly fire adapted being dominated by Lodgepole Pine (Pinus contorta). What looks like seamless expansive stands are really a patchwork of dense forest broken up by large meadows as fires burn in an irregular mosaic pattern on a 100 to 250-year cycle.76 There is more to the region than vegetation. It is home to an ecologically complete and complex array of predators and prey – from wolves to weasels, elk to voles. Approximately 150 species of birds live in the park at various times of year including the American Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus), the Mountain Bluebird (Sialia currucoides), and the Ruffed Grouse (Bonasa umbellus). Riparian zones hold a diverse 74 Dinerstein, E., Olson, D., Joshi, A., Vynne, C., Burgess, N. D., Wikramanayake, E., ... & Saleem, M. (2017). An ecoregion-based approach to protecting half the terrestrial realm. BioScience, 67(6), 534-545. 75 Dinerstein, 2017 76 Turner, M. G., Romme, W. H., & Tinker, D. B. (2003). Surprises and lessons from the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 1(7), 351-358. combination of animals and plants the most important being the beaver (Castor canadensis), cottonwood, and willow. The role of humans on the landscape goes back thousands of years but today is an obvious network of towns, roads, campgrounds, logged areas, mines, destination resorts, parking lots, homes, ranches, and rural subdivisions. And the system is constantly changing. If we are going to find good places to learn ecosystem level management, we need criteria for identifying the “control ecosystems”. Here are three. First, we need places that possess functionally intact ecosystem processes. Second, we need places of institutional integrity and functionality. Third, we need places with a long scientific record of discovery and objective research. Most of the scientific literature agrees that finding places with high functioning ecosystem processes comes down to one important concept – biodiversity. Simply speaking - the more species richness in a system the higher its functionality. This makes sense. Natural ecosystems perform many ecosystem functions simultaneously and all have the potential to be positively or negatively affected by biodiversity, or lack of it.77 These relationships may be more complex than they appear such as the connection between elk (Cervus canadensis) and beaver. An obvious and important one is a predator/prey relationship. Our typical conception of predators and prey are that one eats the other and when the population of prey decreases the population of predators should follow. This is the Lotka-Volterra predator–prey equations first described in 1910 and still found in most ecology textbooks.78 The most cited example is the cyclical linkage between the populations of snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) and the lynx (Lynx canadensis).79 The Lotka-Volterra equations tells us that in the Canadian boreal forests, the population of lynx should closely follow the population of hare; when hares are plentiful, lynx eat little else and their population spikes. When hare populations decline the number of lynx follow the 77 Lefcheck, J. S., Byrnes, J. E., Isbell, F., Gamfeldt, L., Griffin, J. N., Eisenhauer, N., ... & Duffy, J. E. (2015). Biodiversity enhances ecosystem multifunctionality across trophic levels and habitats. Nature communications, 6(1), 1-7. 78 Berryman, A. A. (1992). The orgins and evolution of predator‐prey theory. Ecology, 73(5), 1530-1535. 79 Nedorezov, L. V. (2016). The dynamics of the lynx–hare system: an application of the Lotka–Volterra model. Biophysics, 61, 149-154. downward trend. The problem is, this intuitive relationship seems not to hold in the real, observed world. Something else must be going on and a couple questions need answers. First, why does the population of hares decline and two, what is the true nature of the predator prey relationship when prey populations fall? Hare populations across most boreal forests undergo dramatic changes in a cycle that lasts 8-11 years. At the peak of the population cycle, snowshoe hares can reach a density of up to 1500 animals per square kilometer – about 250 acres. The habitat cannot support this many animals and they begin to starve. Add in the increased predation, because hares are relatively easier to catch at higher densities, and the population starts to decline even more quickly. Consider also that due to high populations of hares, other predators such as coyotes and birds of prey increase as well as the number of prey species like red squirrels and ground squirrels because the hares are easier to catch. The decline of the hare gives way to a process of accelerating decline.80 As the hare population bottoms out, it stabilizes for several years by self- regulating its reproduction. Slowly, the over browsed food plants recover, the hare population starts to increase again. Hares have several litters each year, so the population quickly rebounds. After a year or two at high densities, the hare cycle repeats itself. Meantime, during the hare shortage, the lynx will feed on mice, voles, squirrels, grouse, ptarmigan, and carrion. Some lynx will not find enough substitute foods and may move to another range (or die) but others will do just fine. What initially appeared to be a straightforward relationship turns out to be much more complex and nuanced. Without natural laboratories in which to make these observations it is possible that we would not understand these complexities. Other predator/prey relationships are similarly complex. Consider a different example with important policy implications. In 1995–1996, thirty- one wolves were introduced into Yellowstone National Park. The reasons for the introduction are varied including restoration of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to include wolves as an extirpated species, application of the Endangered Species Act, and to control the overpopulation 80 Rohner, C., & Krebs, C. J. (1998). Response of great horned owls to experimental" hot spots" of snowshoe hare density. The Auk, 115(3), 694-705. O'Donoghue, M., Boutin, S., Krebs, C. J., & Hofer, E. J. (1997). Numerical responses of coyotes and lynx to the snowshoe hare cycle. Oikos, 150-162. of elk in the park.81 At the time theoretical models suggested that the introduction of a predator gone from the system for seventy years would cause the number of elk to decrease between 5 percent and 30 percent and then stabilize or oscillate in that vicinity.82 In fact, after twenty-five years of wolves being back on the landscape the verdict is still out but there have been a cascade of effects – some of which we will return to later. Some studies suggest wolf predation has little biological significance with respect to overall elk population trajectory because the effects of wolf predation on elk differ substantially over relatively small spatial scales. Some elk herds are greatly affected, some not so much.83 Another study observes that while “elk are the primary prey of wolves in Yellowstone; so far, wolves have not significantly affected the elk population anywhere in the park”, they have simply moved them around.84 Others have found countervailing evidence: “by the winter of 2007 – 2008, elk numbers had declined farther than predicted by any of these studies. The northern range herd has steadily declined from approximately 17,000 in 1995 to less than 7,000 in 2006, a reduction of 60%, or triple the consensus prediction of a 20% decline”.85 The reasons for the differences in conclusions may have to do with when the study was conducted with respect to reintroduction, where they were done – in or out of the park and at 81 Bangs, E. (1996). Reintroducing the gray wolf to central Indaho and Yellowstone National Park. Wildl Soc Bull, 24, 402-413. [YNP] Yellowstone National Park, US Fish and Wildlife Service, University of Wyoming, University of Idaho, Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, University of Minnesota Cooperative Park Studies Unit. (1990). Wolves for Yellowstone? A Report to the United States Congress, Vol. 1: Executive Summary; Vol. 2: Research and Analysis. Dobson, A. P. (2014). Yellowstone wolves and the forces that structure natural systems. PLoS biology, 12(12), e1002025. 82 Boyce, M. S. (2000). Modeling predator–prey dynamics. Research techniques in animal ecology: controversies and consequences, 253-287. 83 Garrott, R. A., Gude, J. A., Bergman, E. J., Gower, C., White, P. J., & Hamlin, K. L. (2005). Generalizing wolf effects across the Greater Yellowstone Area: a cautionary note. Wildlife Society Bulletin, 33(4), 1245- 1255. 84 Smith, D. W., Peterson, R. O., & Houston, D. B. (2003). Yellowstone after wolves. BioScience, 53(4), 330- 340. 85 Creel, S. (2010). Interactions between wolves and elk in the Yellowstone Ecosystem. Knowing Yellowstone Science in America's First National Park, 67-79. how big of spatial scale, the time scale of the study, or how they were done – direct observation vs. aerial counts. In addition, it depends on what the researcher is studying. Some observe only direct effects of predation; that is counting the number of elk killed by wolves while others point to indirect effects of stress on elk reproduction or, the so-called “super compensatory’ effects of elk harvest by wolves and humans, in which each elk harvested causes the population to decline by more than one individual.86 A wolf killing a cow elk affects the number of young born to that particular cow in future years. It is also important to point out that a recent spell of dry winters has been advantageous to Yellowstone’s elk so weather and climate may be a factor. Finally, during the same time the number of grizzly bears was on the increase and no doubt contributed to elk mortality. But here is the important point: Where else but an outsized ecosystem like Yellowstone could ecologists run and learn from such an array of experiments where many uncontrolled variables are at work during an ecological restoration on this scale? If Yellowstone was not functionally intact, we could not understand the impact of changes to the system and science based policy making would be more difficult if not impossible. A second criteria for identifying exceptional “control ecosystems” is found by examining how policy is made by jurisdictional agencies. Policy making is a somewhat ambiguous concept that often conflates organizations, politics, institutions, and political processes. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the primary organizations are the National Park Service and the Forest Service while recognizing the fact that other federal agencies, states, counties, nonprofits, and private businesses are also important players in the system. In fact, over 28 formal jurisdictions have been identified in the 22 county Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem region.87 Organizations are groups of people and the governance arrangements that they create to co-ordinate action against other organizations.88 While it rarely results in open conflict, the Park Service and Forest Service are sometime at odds over how “their” public lands are managed and they often differ with the states, nonprofits that represent a host of positions, and private citizens. 86 White, P. J., & Garrott, R. A. (2005). Yellowstone’s ungulates after wolves–expectations, realizations, and predictions. Biological Conservation, 125(2), 141-152. 87 Clark, T. W., Amato, E. D., Whittemore, D. G., & Harvey, A. H. (1991). Policy and programs for ecosystem management in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: An analysis. Conservation Biology, 5(3), 412-422. 88 Williamson, O. E. (2000). The new institutional economics: taking stock, looking ahead. Journal of economic literature, 38(3), 595-613. These differences of opinion play out in public meetings, agency budget negotiations, and sometimes in the halls of Congress. Certainly, they are argued in local bars. Nobel Laureate economist Douglas North defined institutions as the "rules of the game," both the formal legal rules and the informal social norms that govern individual and agency behaviors.89 Understanding the institutional context helps us understand the rules of the policy setting and how they are applied. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the primary formal policy setting is the recognition and application of the agency mandates for the National Park Service and Forest Service. The mission statement of any agency is the framework around which formal rules operate. When Congress creates an agency, it states the purpose of the agency. Each agency has a history, a reason for existing, a jurisdiction, and a job to do. After the terrorist attacks of 9.11 Congress created the Department of Homeland Security whose mission is “to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards”. The job of administrators at DHS, or any other agency, is to develop strategies that detail how the mission will be realized and then determine goals that help the agency know if their strategic targets are met. How this happens is different for each agency, but both depend on success during the congressional budget process. Public lands agencies are no different. We will return to the respective missions of the various public lands agencies later. The other way of viewing the institutional context is through informal rules and relationships. This is sometimes referred to as organizational culture. The National Park Service is historically a science-based, conservation-oriented agency while the Forest Service was founded on utilitarian use of the nation’s forests (remember Pinchot). Those who work in the two respective agencies adopt cultural attributes that identify with the mission. Park rangers used to not carry guns and spent most of their time educating visitors to the parks. Forest rangers planned timber sales and controlled forest fires. Today, both park and forest rangers fulfill a wide variety of jobs ranging from resource planning to law enforcement, search and rescue, and public education. All the while they staff the offices where the paperwork documenting their work is duly recorded, filed, and archived. 89 North, D. C. (1991). Institutions. Journal of economic perspectives, 5(1), 97-112. North, D. C., & North, D. C. (1992). Transaction costs, institutions, and economic performance (pp. 13-15). San Francisco, CA: ICS Press. The late political scientist John Freemuth studied the cultural dynamic in the Park Service for many years. His objective was to understand how policy is made by park managers. His conclusion was that in the early days of the Service policy was designed and implemented by experts in resource management; they were products of science-based resource management programs at state universities.90 Now, political experts drive park policy and the institutional culture and so the informal rules have changed. Political calculations have replaced scientific ones. Freemuth points to the Carter administration as the turning point when all parks, monuments, and recreational assets were homogenized as coequal parts. No longer would certain parks like Yellowstone be managed as “crown jewels” of the system and deserving of special status and policy considerations (and budget). Rather than crown jewels, “all parts of the system were jewels in the crown” observed Freemuth. Many students of national park policy would agree that since Freemuth did his early work, the park service and Dept of Interior as well as the Forest Service, have become increasingly politicized.91 These cultural rules matter and the impact has been that national parks are managed today with a bias toward visitor use rather than preservation. As evidence, Freemuth compared the NPS to NASA – an agency with considerable scientific and professional autonomy.92 In the case of NASA, even after a few high-profile accidents, the public and government regulators generally defer to their scientific judgment about missions to space and how to accomplish them. Conversely, the Park Service is a politically responsive agency. It seeks to reflect democratic values as defined by the general public, elected officials, agency heads, agency clientele, and other special interest groups. It has far less autonomy in its policy decisions and how it fulfills its mission than NASA. Freemuth’s key insight was that success within the agency requires a significantly different culture than NASA and it “may have more to do with building consensus among the agency's constituencies than with dominant reliance on science and expertise”. 90 Freemuth, J. (1989, January). The national parks: Political versus professional determinants of policy. In The George Wright Forum (Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 26-38). George Wright Society. 91 https://www.hcn.org/issues/49.22/national-park-service-who-should-pay-for-public-lands 92 Freemuth, 1989 Romzek, B. S., & Dubnick, M. J. (1987). Accountability in the public sector: Lessons from the Challenger tragedy. Public administration review, 227-238. Science and expertise are tools for a manager in building consensus, not ends in themselves”.93 Park supervisors are keenly aware of the role their external constituencies play in budget negotiations and acceptance of policy decisions. Witness how fast Yellowstone Park opened after the flood that destroyed access from the north entrance. Sidebar: The Park Service in Action: the 2022 Yellowstone Flood In June 2022 a three-way confluence of events converged that resulted in a short but highly destructive flood that enveloped the northern drainages of the Yellowstone Plateau. At least five rivers in Park, Carbon and Stillwater counties (Montana) set all-time records for high flows. Rock Creek flooded into the main streets of Red Lodge and carved a new river channel through the center of town. The flooding Lamar River joined the Yellowstone to create flows of over 50,000 cubic feet per second – nearly twice the previous record. Hit hardest was the town of Gardiner – the gateway community at Yellowstone’s north entrance. In the park, the water ripped out roads, water and wastewater systems, power lines, and other critical infrastructure. Most assumed access to the park through the north entrance was closed for the season bringing economic devastation to the small town of 900 people that was looking forward to a strong tourist season after the Covid Pandemic. Cam Sholly, Yellowstone National Park astute superintendent, understands the economic and political importance of the park to the region. Even though the main northern entrance road to Yellowstone from Gardiner to Mammoth was completely washed out in places, the Old Gardiner Road, a little used dirt road to Mammoth could be used for limited access. The NPS quickly sent $50 million in funding to Yellowstone, the old road was upgraded and less than three weeks after a major flood event, the south and north loops of the park opened to the visiting public. Very quickly a system for moving tourists into the park via Mammoth was implemented and on August 1 visitors could use a reservation system to enter from Gardiner. Within a month of the flood nearly 95% of the roads in Yellowstone were open. Tourists, local residents, and business owners enjoyed near normal conditions because Sholly understood and responded to his many constituencies. Figure seven: Near complete destruction of the north entrance road (NPS) 93 Freemuth, 1989:284 A final condition for identifying “control ecosystems” is a sound scientific base on how the system works. This is a tall order. All ecosystems are complex and very likely there are none we understand fully. There are also few places on Earth pristine enough to use as controls for policy experiments. A realistic benchmark may be to simply look to systems where high-quality long-term science has been carried out for a long period of time. Yellowstone seems to fit the bill. The history of science in the park formally began with the Hayden expeditions in the 1870s and scientific inquiry as part of park management was instituted by Park superintendent Philetus Norris by 1882.94 The first science report on the geothermal features was published in 1935 and an early study of coyote ecology was produced by biologist Adolph Murie in 1937. Adolph Murie was hired in 1934 as a wildlife biologist for the National Park Service (NPS) and, with his brother Olaus, he studied a large variety of species in several park units including Yellowstone and what would become Grand Teton National Park.95 The well-known Craighead brothers began their elk and bear studies in 1959 and ran through 1971.96 The University of Utah deployed seismic stations in the region as early as the 1970s and continues to be the most important center for the study of geothermal and seismic activity for the region.97 In the 1970s and into the 1980s Yellowstone hired a staff of scientists to investigate numerous research areas of interest to management including the fisheries, bison (Bison bison), bears, elk, and eventually wolves. Using mini submersibles, scientists from the USGS mapped all of Yellowstone Lake discovering numerous geologic structures and thermal ecosystems. Outside the park system, university researchers from around the world have conducted studies as the park likes to say, “from archeology to zoology”. The importance of all this activity is the baseline data over many decades that allow evaluation of both natural and controlled experiments in the system. The fires of 1988 and wolf reintroduction in 1995 are easily the highest profile (and controversial) experiments to have been 94 https://www.nps.gov/people/philetus-norris.htm 95 Murie, O. J. (2017). The elk of North America. Stackpole Books. 96 Craighead, J. J., & Craighead Jr, F. C. (1971). Grizzly bear-man relationships in Yellowstone National Park. BioScience, 21(16), 845-857. 97 https://uusatrg.utah.edu/ conducted but others have been just as important. Here is one example that shows the value of having a foundation of science for policy making. Fishing is an important part of the park’s cultural history and today about 50,000 of the park’s four million visitors fish each year. For fly fishermen the world over Yellowstone is a “must do” destination. The fishery is noted for the native (Oncorhynchus clarik bouvieri), arctic grayling (Thymallus arcticus montanus), and mountain whitefish (Prosopium williamsoni). Up until 1970 take limits on fish varied widely as did fishing methods but managers found up to 10,000 fish per month discarded into garbage cans in the park.98 It seems most people just never got around to cooking them, but it was part of the culture of the time to keep what you caught. Such practices took its toll on the fishery and park fishery managers began to rethink the regulations. The alternative was to catch and then release the fish so others could enjoy them (the fish had no say in the matter). Catch and release fishing regulations were first implemented on Slough Creek in the northeastern part of the park and spread to other locations. Today, catch and release is the default regulation for most cold water fisheries across North America. Fish numbers in the park rebounded, waste was reduced, and the quality of the fishery improved with time. Catch and release is now policy in all but a few places in the park. To monitor the status of fisheries throughout the park a Volunteer Angler Report card is issued with each fishing license. Data is used to help set regulation. The revenue from fishing licenses helps fund research on aquatic systems and ongoing restoration projects. Without the baseline study of the park fishery, regulatory changes like catch and release would not have been validated and adopted. Public lands managers need places to learn ecosystem management. Issues of climate change, wildfire, predator/prey interactions, trophic cascades, and increased visitation pressures require ongoing management of parks and other wild lands. Our democratic institutions to manage public lands are highly functional and respected around the world and so, have legitimacy. Yellowstone itself is bounded yet large enough to conduct ecosystem level studies. The ecosystem is important enough globally to matter to other managers. In short, Yellowstone has the attributes that make it a natural campus for science-based policy making. Regional institutions, laws, markets, research, and social relevancy back up the science. Few other regions in the world can make the same claim. Luckily, the global scientific community recognizes the 98 Varley, J. D. (1998). Yellowstone fishes: ecology, history, and angling in the park. Stackpole Books. utility of conducting high quality research in places like Greater Yellowstone. On an average year there are over 200 active research permits investigating virtually every attribute of the region.99 99 https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/management/researchpermit.htm Chapter 3 A Short lesson in conservation biology Protected areas like Yellowstone National Park matter. Intact natural ecosystems produce a wide array of benefits we refer to as ecosystem services. These natural functions are necessary to sustain life at all trophic levels – including us. We are part of the web of life. Ecosystem services are autocatalytic processes. This means they form circular causal relationships within the ecosystem that feeds on itself – a sort of virtuous ecological cycle. These processes form the constituent building blocks that contribute to the overall functioning of the system. The healthier the ecosystem the more resilient and productive the system is. For human communities, ecosystem services can run the gamut from healthy and productive soils for agriculture, to flood and avalanche mitigation provided by intact natural forests to water filtration in wetlands and carbon sequestration in ocean ecosystems. Here are three compelling examples. In the introduction we saw how after a good deal of observation Aldo Leopold say that wolves helped sustain deer populations, vegetation, and soil through predation. The lesson is that land management is easier when predators are on the landscape. They cull the weak from the herds, disperse prey populations, and hold down the overall numbers thereby preventing overgrazing. Less soil runoff from healthy grasslands keeps spawning beds clean in local rivers and is better aquatic insect habitat. Fisheries, and ultimately fishermen, are the beneficiary. In river systems with salmon for example, the cycle goes full circle as bears and wolves feed on fish during the spawning migration and spread salmon protein through the forest.100 In Alaska, old growth forests hold nitrogen from salmon carcasses. Today, beavers are a ubiquitous species in much of the GYE. Their dams and lodges can be seen in most river systems where they use large amounts of woody material to block streams that eventually flood the land behind the dam and form beaver ponds. The ponds slow spring runoff thereby allowing water to seep deep into surrounding soils and moderate downstream flooding, they serve as water filtration systems, the ponds they create provide valuable fish and waterfowl habitat, and the ponds store nutrients in the mud and sediment. They also form large riparian areas for willow and aspen – a favorite food for browsers like elk, moose, and bison. When discussions and debates around the health of the Yellowstone northern range surfaced in the late 1960s one of the areas of concern was the diminished population and distribution of willow and aspen in riparian zones. One theory was that the loss of beaver and their ponds had resulted in less habitat for woody plants. At the same time, an overpopulation of elk and bison had reduced willow/aspen along those streams to almost nothing.101 The alternative theory was that fire suppression and climate change had devastated the plants. All this changed when wolves were reintroduced in the mid 1990s and more attention was paid to the ecological impacts or trophic cascade that occurred because of the reintroduction of wolves to the landscape. The interplay between beavers, willows/aspen, elk, and wolves took on a new level of importance and so too did the question of ecosystem services produced by the humble beaver. 100 Helfield, J. M., & Naiman, R. J. (2006). Keystone interactions: salmon and bear in riparian forests of Alaska. Ecosystems, 9, 167-180. 101 Creel, S., & Christianson, D. (2008). Relationships between direct predation and risk effects. Trends in ecology & evolution, 23(4), 194-201. Ripple, W. J., & Beschta, R. L. (2012). Trophic cascades in Yellowstone: the first 15 years after wolf reintroduction. Biological Conservation, 145(1), 205-213. Fortin, D., Beyer, H. L., Boyce, M. S., Smith, D. W., Duchesne, T., & Mao, J. S. (2005). Wolves influence elk movements: behavior shapes a trophic cascade in Yellowstone National Park. Ecology, 86(5), 1320-1330. Sidebar: Ecosystem services on the other side of the world Beginning in the 1990s, farmer in India began to administer the anti-inflammatory drug Diclofenac prophylactically to their livestock. It was cheap and effectively treated infections. It is also fatal to vultures if they ingest the drug when they fed on carrion, and there is a lot of carrion- an estimated ten million tons each year. Most of the 500 million cattle in India are considered sacred by most Hindus so only about four percent are consumed; the rest roam freely and eventually die. Vultures quickly cleaned up these carcasses. As the population of vultures crashed (by up to 90% in some regions), the carrion consumed by vultures each year declined, with serious consequences. Carrion rots quickly in the extremely hot Indian climate and serves as a vector for rabies, anthrax, plague and other pathogens that cannot survive in the gut of the vulture. Over 30,000 people die from rabies in India each year. As the number of birds declined, they were replaced by 18 million feral dogs, and rats, lots of rats. Both are perfect vectors for pathogens, and they cannot possibly consume all the dead cows. Cattle rotted in streams polluting local water supplies, public health suffered. The solution is to replace the lost ecosystem services provided by vultures. It turns out that breeding and release programs are more cost effective than carcass disposal plants and the value of a single vulture is calculated to be nearly $9,000 over its lifespan.102 The lesson here is easy: preserve the vulture, control pestilence, protect public health, and save money. Here is another example. Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, is a method used in labs around the world to “Xerox” small samples of genetic material so it can be studied. This technique was used to increase the amount of COVID-19 virus so scientists could develop robust tests and vaccines. The method would be impossible without the discovery of Thermus aquaticus, a heat-resistant bacteria originally found in Yellowstone’s Mushroom Spring.103 To make copies, the DNA has to go through several cycles of being heated and then cooled but high temperatures damaged the proteins needed to make those copies. Think about what happens when you fry and egg and the white congeals. It turns out that an enzyme from the Yellowstone bacteria could survive the cycles of heating and cooling and speed up the DNA replicating 102 Markandya, A., Taylor, T., Longo, A., Murty, M. N., Murty, S., & Dhavala, K. (2008). Counting the cost of vulture decline—an appraisal of the human health and other benefits of vultures in India. Ecological economics, 67(2), 194-204. 103 Brock, T. D. (1997). The value of basic research: discovery of Thermus aquaticus and other extreme thermophiles. Genetics, 146(4), 1207. process. Thermophilic bacteria in Yellowstone’s hot springs and PCR revolutionized microbiology, forensic science, and public health. Without protection of Yellowstone’s thermal features this important ecosystem service may have never been discovered. For conservation biologists, scientists who study and advocate for the preservation of natural processes, the way to ensure the production of ecosystem services is to preserve Earth’s biodiversity. Conservation biologists believe it is not enough to simply protect animals and their habitat, what is important is to preserve landscape scale processes, so the full suite of ecosystem functions is allowed to flourish. Their goal is to preserve the ecological interactions among the parts and so preserve the whole. It is an applied science and biodiversity is the strategy. Biodiversity plays an essential role in the production of all manner of ecosystem service provision, primarily as a regulator of ecosystem processes.104 A biodiversity of pollinators - bees, birds, and bats, adds to the stability of nonagricultural ecosystems as well as the security of many food crops. Too few bees and crops in California’s central valley agricultural economy will fail. Conservation biology is prescriptive in the sense that the goal is a management plan for the conservation of biological diversity at every level of the natural community. The late Michael Soulé, the acknowledged father of conservation biology, describes it as a “crisis discipline”.105 He refers to a disciplinary focus on the rapidity of ecosystem change from large scale disturbances such climate change, the increasing rate of human caused biological extinctions, and the global loss of whole ecosystems. To scientists like Soulé, conservation lacks the luxury of time if it is to preserve the natural world. If we can get the science right in the near term, the maintenance and restoration of biological diversity and ecosystem services will follow. This means they need strategies that can be applied when things go wrong and conservation biologists readily adopt the importance of the three C's of the discipline: Connectivity, Carnivores, and Cores, all of which are essential for protecting biodiversity.106 Isolated populations of animals need to connect with others to preserve genetic diversity. Carnivores are often the keystone 104 Mace, G. M., Norris, K., & Fitter, A. H. (2012). Biodiversity and ecosystem services: a multilayered relationship. Trends in ecology & evolution, 27(1), 19-26. 105 Soulé, M. E. (1985). What is conservation biology?. BioScience, 35(11), 727-734. 106 Noss, R. F., Quigley, H. B., Hornocker, M. G., Merrill, T., & Paquet, P. C. (1996). Conservation biology and carnivore conservation in the Rocky Mountains. Conservation Biology, 10(4), 949-963. species for ecosystem function. Cores are those special areas where nature is relatively undisturbed and serve as source habitats for the expansion of species. Biodiversity, measured by number of species functioning in a given system, is the metric by which management can be judged and the three C’s are the strategies. Connectivity The practice of conservation biology is not difficult for the uninitiated to grasp and can be summarized in one simple graphic called the species-area relationship: Figure eight: The species–area relationship describes the relationship between the area of a habitat and the biodiversity found within that area. Larger areas tend to contain larger numbers of species, and empirically, the relative numbers seem to follow systematic mathematical relationships.107 The upward curving line tells us about the relationship between an island, or island-like area such as a national park, and number of species (biodiversity) is this: larger islands contain more species and more individuals than smaller islands. This is possibly the most general pattern 107 Connor, E. F., & McCoy, E. D. (1979). The statistics and biology of the species-area relationship. The American Naturalist, 113(6), 791-833. Preston, F.W. 1962. The canonical distribution of commonness and rarity: Part I. Ecology 43:185–215 and 410–432. MacArthur and Wilson. 1967. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. found in ecology worldwide and offers several insights - the first being that core areas are not enough, especially if they are isolated. That is why connectivity is important. Isolated populations are doomed to failure either through genetic drift – mutations that erode fitness, maybe through inbreeding or because of random exogenous shocks to the population. Disease, habitat change, overharvesting, and bad luck are all causes of local extinctions. At a large scale, connecting ecoregions is a fundamental principle and potential solution. One of the most exciting examples is the nonprofit American Prairie in northeast Montana.108 It is perfectly illustrative of the possibilities and the difficulties of building connectivity. The creation myth goes something like this: Following the central tenet of conservation biology, scientists and conservationists from the World Wildlife Fund conducted a global study of ecoregions (mentioned earlier) of various types and looked for the best return on the conservation dollar to maintain and build biodiversity. One of the top contenders was the American shortgrass prairie ecoregion in Montana; one of only four intact prairie ecoregions in the world. Others are in Argentina, Australia, and Kazakhstan. The mission of American Prairie is to enlarge protected areas that were too small and too disconnected to produce meaningful ecosystem functions. It connects public, private, and reservation land that will eventually encompass three million acres and be home to the native biodiversity, including native plants, insects, and larger animals like the American bison, elk, wolves, and grizzly bears. The project entails working with public lands agencies, private landowners, and two American Indian reservations with all the attendant issues of property rights, cooperative agreements, local economies, and politics. It is only one of many efforts to build connective landscapes across North America. Since 2004, American Prairie has completed 26 transactions with private landowners to build their habitat base of 399,379 acres. Of that total 91,588 acres are private lands owned by the reserve, 307,791 acres are public lands (federal and state) leased to the landowner.109 On an even grander scale the Yellowstone to the Yukon vision is a series of connected ecosystems at a continental level that would allow large scale migrations as well as protected areas based on watershed boundaries.110 The initiative encompasses over a 108 https://americanprairie.org/national-discovery-center/ 109 For more information: https://www.americanprairie.org/ 110 For more information: https://y2y.net/ half a million square miles of landscape spanning five states, two Canadian territories, and two Canadian provinces. When completed it will support connectivity at a continental scale for wildlife and humans. These two projects, among others, highlight the potential for meaningful connectivity at multiple scales and in diverse landscapes. All it takes is vision and commitment. Carnivores For Soulé and other conservation biologists a good deal of attention is given to predators – usually the large and charismatic type. This is not solely because they are unfailingly alluring and carry a sense of danger, although that is true. They attract scientific attention because they are typically a keystone species for their ecosystem. A keystone is a species that, if removed, puts the ecosystem at risk of breakdown of its essential ecosystem services.111 Because interactions up and down the food chain are driven by keystone predators, their loss fractures the system. When a keystone species like lions or wolves are removed, ecosystems may unravel. Keystone predators are not necessarily large and vicious. Smaller predators like birds of prey, spiders, bats, and the smaller felines and canids, play important predatory roles but all ecosystems are dependent on a few key players. How those roles work is uncertain. Two interpretations of the ecological role of predators in large scale ecosystems prevail. In a top-down approach, predators limit the population of prey animals and so prevent overgrazing, soil degradation and ecosystem deterioration; they prevent an herbivore release. The other is resource driven. Large predators control the numbers of smaller predators that feed on others down the food chain that may be unavailable to the keystone species. When coyotes are eradicated populations of smaller carnivores like raccoons, foxes, ravens, jays, and robins explode. Songbirds, ground nesting birds, or pollinators may be wiped out. Viewed this way large predators prevent a mesopredator release.112 111 Mills, L. S., Soulé, M. E., & Doak, D. F. (1993). The keystone-species concept in ecology and conservation. BioScience, 43(4), 219-224. 112 Crooks, K. R., & Soulé, M. E. (1999). Mesopredator release and avifaunal extinctions in a fragmented system. Nature, 400(6744), 563-566. Limiting factors like water, soil productivity, and nutrients are responsible for building biomass, including the prey animals that feed predators. The issue is how the pyramid of organic biomass is maintained. The consensus is that in those places where large predators exist, the limiting factors tend to stay in balance.113 Remove a key part of the system and it may cause a ripple effect through other parts of the ecosystem. Remove a key predator and not only will prey species get out of hand, so too will the plants and animals that coexist with them. Bring the predator back and inevitably the system will repair itself. The process of change due to an imbalance between predator and prey are called trophic cascades. In the Greater Yellowstone Region, the conservation or reintroduction of Grizzly bears and Grey wolves offered the wider ecological community all sorts of benefits in the form of trophic cascades. Like so much in ecological studies, the subject of predators, prey, and trophic cascade is complex and scientifically unsettled but virtually no one disagrees that the rise in population of bears and wolves are associated with changes in prey behavior and the resource base.114 At this point it comes down to the nature of the cascade and primarily on the occurrence of density‐mediated and/or behaviorally mediated trophic cascade. We don’t need to go into that debate here except to say that some believe that reduced prey density allows plants to grow back, the soil to heal, streams are rejuvenated, and beavers return. Others believe that behavioral changes of prey species are one facet of the role of predators and that these changes are just one part of the complex ecological web and that ecological change is less linear. We will return to a discussion of trophic cascades in the park later. The fact remains that mankind has not been kind to predators and worldwide, when human populations expand, wildlife populations inevitably contract and typically ecosystems and ecosystem services suffer. Unfortunately, our ability to live with large potentially dangerous predators has not always gone well for an animal we perceive as a threat. 113 Leroux, S. J., & Loreau, M. (2015). Theoretical perspectives on bottom-up and top-down interactions across ecosystems. Trophic ecology, 3-28. 114 Ripple, W. J., & Beschta, R. L. (2004). Wolves, elk, willows, and trophic cascades in the upper Gallatin Range of Southwestern Montana, USA. Forest Ecology and management, 200(1-3), 161-181. Creel, S., & Christianson, D. (2009). Wolf presence and increased willow consumption by Yellowstone elk: implications for trophic cascades. Ecology, 90(9), 2454-2466. For two main reasons, one ecological and one sociological, large carnivores like the bear or the wolf are typically among the first to go in a system. Ecologically, large carnivores require landscapes with intact prey populations, which in turn require suitable habitat – likewise at a large scale. Humans are very effective at thriving in such productive habitat and, in turn, treat predators as competitors. As we expand our human footprint on the land, usually through agriculture or some other form of commodity production including rural subdivisions, we inevitably become less tolerant of their threats to our well-being. We have been running this scenario in Greater Yellowstone for a very long time. Cores The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has been a long historical experiment in ecology and natural resource management. The region’s biodiversity is the most important variable. It is the perfect example of a core area, but it has taken some time to fully develop and even longer to fully understand. It formally began when, in 1871, the Hayden Geological Survey explored the lands that would later be designated as Yellowstone National Park. The Hayden survey was the first federally funded effort to photograph, observe, and map the region, including a detailed study of Yellowstone Lake. The survey, along with photographs by William Henry Jackson and landscape painter Thomas Moran, was important to building support for the park’s creation a year later. The park itself is clearly an artificial social construct meant to delineate administrative boundaries. Wild, free roaming animals, grizzlies and wolves included, do not respect such borders, and freely move from parkland to national forest to private land, and back, often unmolested and unseen. The eventual recovery of the grizzly bear required a conceptual definition of the management problem; bureaucrats need boundaries, and the present-day borders of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem satisfies that requirement. The term Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem originated with Frank Craighead in a document he and his brother John wrote in 1972; he also referred to it in a report to the Congressional Research Service in 1986.115 It is 115 Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service, Corn, M. L., & Gorte, R. W. (1987). Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: an analysis of data submitted by federal and state agencies. US Government Printing Office. based on the early work on bears conducted by the Craighead brothers and delineates its presumed historical range. The idea became central to bear management in the region and is still used 40 years later by the scientific community across disciplines and by the nonprofits whose job it is to protect it. Today, according to the National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park is a superlative model of ecological integrity. Indeed, the suite of plants and animals present in the region today closely resembles that found by Lewis and Clark when they passed along the northern boundary on their way to the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1805.116 While it is true that the constituent parts of the system are in place there are ongoing issues with bison, bears, wolves, fires, and tourists. Management of all five is a constant balancing act between tradeoffs to satisfy the park service mission. Core areas of significant importance are political creations as much as fortunate accidents of nature. Had the early explorers not drawn the attention of the right people at the right time there may not have been a Yellowstone protected as a national park or even the idea of a national park. Without the right actors in place there would certainly be no American ethic of protected public lands. The same is true of most other core areas today and that would include national parks that had their own creation myth, wilderness areas, national monuments, and even that most generic of public lands - national forests. Sidebar: Is the Greater Yellowstone an Ecosystem? The Yellowstone complex is one of the first, if not the first, places where thinking about a large (between 18 and 13 million acres) ecologically intact region incorporated both the natural world and the administrative one. Such thinking is appropriate when considering the habitat needs of bears and wolves. Land managers though, often respond to different motivations when they represent the mission statement of their respective agencies. Where national parks and national forests share a boundary management practices will invariably clash on issues of fire, recreation, and forest health. Add in the various political constituencies for the several dozen land managers and owners and we have the makings of intense policy disagreement. One attempt at overcoming conflict is the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee that tries, without policy making authority, to “cooperate fully in matters relating to responsible land management throughout 116 https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.sup.johnsgard.01 the Greater Yellowstone Area”.117 Notice the use of GYA. It is as if the bureaucrats that manage the region cannot bring themselves to admit the implications of recognizing the region as an ecological system. To do so would be to admit that protecting the integrity of the region would require more than a loose cooperative arrangement – it would ask each agency to set aside it’s mission for the greater good of the landscape. No doubt systemwide management would be politically and economically burdensome but given the modern pressures on the region it may be the only way to save it and its constituent parts. The unfortunate political reality of America today is that the types of core areas needed to realize large scale biodiversity goals are very likely frozen in size. Most protected lands that function as core areas were not prioritized for biodiversity but for other qualities. Their creation and subsequent management are typically more complex than the singular quality of biodiversity. There are political tradeoffs in terms of size, use, regulatory imperative, agency jurisdiction, and a host of other variables. It is almost a certainty that romance land national parks like Zion, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone will not grow any larger in the years to come in any meaningful way. The same seems to be true for Federally designated wilderness, except for a few states like California, Montana, and Alaska and even there, craven politicians routinely attack the expansion of undeveloped wild lands in favor of commodity interests. The lack of expansion will force other solutions. The easy ones are in the past. The problem remains that biodiversity requires space – sometimes lots of it. Maintenance of core areas and building a connectivity network are the only real solutions. In Greater Yellowstone we have a long running experiment on the three C’s. Yellowstone as conservation experiment Those who have studied the Lewis and Clark journals have documented a good deal of spatial variability of populations of buffalo, elk, antelope (Antilocapra americana), and bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis),. The indigenous peoples of the plains significantly affected the populations of the animals they ate. Indigenous peoples have been making a living on the landscape at least as early as 8500 B.C. when they hunted the giant sloth and ancient camels at 117 Song, H., Liu, J., & Chen, G. (2013). Tourism value chain governance: Review and prospects. Journal of travel research, 52(1), 15-28. the end of the Ice Age.118 Hunting, especially mass harvests of buffalo and antelope, resulted in some areas being devoid of animals for extended periods of time. The horse-based tribes of the Great Plains were mobile so could move on when food was scarce to give decimated populations a chance to recover.119 The ecological system seems to have stayed intact through these events because the numbers of people on the landscape were few and herds could move on to less disturbed grasslands. When herd populations rebounded, they would inevitably be hunted again. Some archeologists argue that early natives hunted some species to extinction but clearly, they are not responsible for recent exterminations. We managed that all on our own. The story of the near extinction of the American bison is well known. Greed, entertainment, industrialization, and racism can all be cited as factors in the disappearance of the estimated 30,000,000 to 70,000,000 million bison that roamed the American west. In 1872 alone, 2,000,000 bison were killed just for their hides, which sold for about $3.50 apiece. It was not our finest hour. Later, through the intervention of the U.S. Army, the last herd of 50 wild bison were protected in Yellowstone in 1894.120 Sidebar: William Hornaday and the American Bison Hornaday was a taxidermist for the National Museum and traveled west to collect specimens of American bison for one of his trademark “life group” displays for the Smithsonian. He had a hard time finding them and was stunned to learn that the large herds he had seen just a few years earlier were all but wiped out. He dedicated the rest of his life to their recovery. His life is chronicled in a nice little book: Mr. Hornaday's War: How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World written by Stefan Bechtel.121 If not for Hornaday it is very likely the last few remaining bison in Yellowstone would not have survived hunters. Hornaday also campaigned for the conservation of many species of birds that were overhunted for their feathers that decorated women’s hats of the day. 118 Rachlis, E. (2015). Indians of the Plains. New Word City. 119 Laliberte, A. S., & Ripple, W. J. (2003). Wildlife encounters by Lewis and Clark: A spatial analysis of interactions between Native Americans and wildlife. BioScience, 53(10), 994-1003. 120 Watry, E. A., & Whittlesey, L. H. (2012). Fort Yellowstone. Arcadia Publishing. 121 Bechtel, S. (2012). Mr. Hornaday's war: how a peculiar Victorian zookeeper waged a lonely crusade for wildlife that changed the world. Beacon Press. It was the white settler though that tried hard to eradicate multiple species and they started with predators, especially bears and wolves but any animal that competed with livestock was targeted. Between the 1920’s and 1930’s, the grizzly bear lost 98% of its habitat in the contiguous United States most of it to development.122 By 1975 of the 37 known populations to exist in 1922, only six known populations of bears remained. Although no one knows what the population of bears was in 1872, by 1975 the population of bears in Greater Yellowstone is estimated to have been between 136 and 312 individuals. It was that year that the bear was listed as endangered. In fact, while the mix of flora and fauna in the region today closely resembles that of over two hundred years ago, there have been ups and downs. The park service has been complicit in managing for certain species at the expense of others and they are stilling dealing with the effects. As early as 1878 park management took a dim view of most predators including cougar, lynx, bobcat, fox, badger, mink, weasel, fisher, otter, and marten not to mention bears, coyotes, and wolves. They did so to encourage larger populations of elk, deer, bison for viewer pleasure and to underplay the reality of “nature, red in tooth and claw”. For a time during the 1920s, to reduce predation and enhance sport fishing for Yellowstone cutthroat trout, park rangers even destroyed pelican eggs on the several islands on Yellowstone Lake.123 Shooting was often considered too inefficient so eventually traps and poison were used. In the case of one grizzly that had killed a saddle horse, bait was planted in the carcass and it, and the returning bear, was blown up with dynamite. By 1933 much of the direct predator control, especially for coyotes, had decreased significantly. The last verified wolf killed in the region was in 1943 on the Wind River Reservation south of Jackson, Wyoming.124 By then the Park had an elk and bison problem and management of the northern range elk herd would develop into a full-fledged management issue of its own. 122 Mattson, D. J., & Merrill, T. (2002). Extirpations of grizzly bears in the contiguous United States, 1850– 2000. Conservation Biology, 16(4), 1123-1136. 123 Cahalane, 1939:232 124 The Last Wolf: Interview with Leo Cottenoir Yellowstone Science: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/upload/YS_1_4_sm.pdf Management of grazers in the northern reaches of the park has been a series of experiments in population control, natural management, and predator introduction. The politics and science have been, at times, incredibly divisive and continues today. Predator politics are often central to the dispute over management of elk and bison but more importantly, management in the northern range perfectly illustrates an inherent issue associated with conservation biology and management of keystone species – they do not respect jurisdictional boundaries. Wolves, bears, elk, and bison roam and did roam from the relatively sterile highlands of the Yellowstone plateau across the prairie far out into the Great Plains. Lewis and Clark saw their first grizzly bear in present day McCone County, Montana, southeast of the present town of Wolf Point – nearly 500 miles northeast from Yellowstone.125 There they also saw wolves and bison. There is still plenty of good habitat out there today and animals are expanding into their former respective ranges. To get there they will have to cross highways, private ranches, circumvent rural communities and inevitably, will have encounters with people or their livestock. The success of wildlife management in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has created downstream problems elsewhere. For the most part, the values and policies of conservation biologists have won out in Yellowstone, so far. The restoration of the Yellowstone grizzly bear and reintroduction of grey wolves are by far the clearest indication but so are efforts to restore native fisheries, beaver populations, and native plants. The Park Service no longer kills small predators like mink, wolverine, and fishers. Outside the system of the two national parks and regional wilderness things are not quite as progressive but for now things are not yet at crisis level. If conservative state politicians prevail in undoing past efforts that could change quickly. We will return to that discussion later. 125 https://lewis-clark.org/sciences/mammals/bears/grizzly-bear-encounters/ Chapter 4 Four New Things In 1972 John Denver sung the praises of living high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and helped officially push “the environment” into pop culture and the national conversation. How could politics be far behind? Following on the release of “Silent Spring” just a few years earlier, Edward Abbey published Desert Solitaire in 1968. It is still as superlative a narrative of nature as ever written but, until recently, was mostly a niche book among those “in the know” about Utah’s red rock country. The back-to-nature movement would help continue the cultural revolution started in the 60’s by young, well-educated social activists. Movies like Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973) and Chinatown (1974) reflected the growing environmental movement that would change the U.S. forever. Popular culture mirrors and often precedes the real world but in this case, following the lead of Aldo Leopold, scientists were already working on the sticky problem of studying wildlife. The legal framework and social sciences had some catching up to do and over the course of a decade they made up for lost time. Environmental science and policy were aided by technological and institutional progress spun out of the space program, shifts in the legal culture, and the academic world. Combined, the groundwork for a new environmentalism, or at least a different way to think about the environment, would be the result. In the Greater Yellowstone, that groundwork was laid by twin brothers based in Jackson, Wyoming. Tracking nature In 1949 Frank and John Craighead both earned their Ph.Ds. with grants from the University of Michigan Wildlife Management Institute. By 1959 they were working on Grizzly bear research in Yellowstone on a project that would run a dozen years and have lasting impact. Along the way they pioneered the use of using radio transmitters to track wildlife and later, they would adapt Navy satellite technology to track bears over the park’s wild landscape.126 To place tracking collars on the bears they had to develop protocols and drug cocktails to immobilize them. Then they had to figure out how to deliver them using specially designed rifles or “jab sticks”. Technologies they designed are still used by wildlife researchers the world over. The work of the Craighead brothers is one part of a wave of changes that would shape environmental policy for the next several decades. Space technology would play a central role. When the Craigheads placed a satellite tracking collar around the neck of a Grizzly bear they were pioneering the use of technology that changed how wildlife biology is done. In Craighead’s time, if biologists wanted to learn about an animal, they would literally follow it. For bears, that meant hiking many miles across wild country maybe meeting up with the bear in less-than-ideal circumstances. If you wanted to know what a bear was doing in hibernation, follow it into its winter den and crawl in, carefully. The brothers wanted to see where a bear goes, what it eats, how and where it spends time. It was laborious and sometimes dangerous work that was vividly retold in Frank Craighead’s book “The Track of the Grizzly”.127 The brothers followed bears for months often walking hundreds of miles a season. For animals that swim in the ocean or fly over great distances, their methods were impractical. In October 1957 the world woke up to a new technology that was both frightening and amazing – The Soviets had launched the first artificial satellite – Sputnik, and had started a race for conquering space. With the signal easily received by anyone with a short-wave receiver, people everywhere were alerted to the fact that Man now had a presence in space. Less understood, except by those with some specialized training, was how the signal could be pinpointed on earth and, even more groundbreaking, the signal could be reverse engineered to 126 http://www.craigheadresearch.org/frank-craighead-legacy.html 127 Craighead, F. (1979). The Track of the Grizzly. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco. receive a signal from a point on earth to a satellite at a known location. Once the Navy placed highly accurate clocks on satellites in space all the pieces were aligned to build a Global Positioning System – GPS. Now, everything on Earth was pegged to a set of coordinates – including animals with GPS enabled collars. By 1994 when the last of 24 GPS Block satellites were launched, everything on earth could be located as a set of points of latitude and longitude with astounding accuracy. The Craigheads, with support from the US Navy, figured this out early on and radio tracking of wildlife was born. Rivers, mountains, roads, humans, rural homes, forests, and bodies of water were all locatable. It is the geography of everything.128 Once you know the location of things and can assemble the data into layers, you can make a Geographic Information System or GIS. GIS is a computer software that can store, manipulate, analyze, and manage the data made possible with GPS and follow-on technologies. With better cameras located in space, mapping the actual landscape is possible. Land cover from foliage, grasslands, snow, soil, as well as growing seasons, and potential food sources are available with the click of a mouse and a bit of training. All this data, from anywhere and almost everywhere on earth can be compiled and “stacked” like layers of a cake and then queried through the layers. Researchers can ask questions like: “Where are bears likely to be in June, what habitats do they utilize, how close to roads do they travel, and what are they eating? Are they near others bears and if so, which ones? Do humans recreate there and when?” Scientists can now create an incredibly accurate record of the life of an animal, determine how it interacts with its surroundings, and then track it with the precision of a few meters. At a much larger scale suitable bear habitat can be identified and virtual connectivity corridors can be modeled. Property owners can be contacted, and negotiations begun. Sputnik and the Craigheads ushered in a true digital revolution for ecology and wildlife study. It made managing the three C’s of conservation biology manageable. Now of course every smartphone is a potential tool for conservation where you can “pin” your observations on to a map and share them with the world via social media. Tracking devices are so miniaturized they can be placed on honeybees. 128 Abler, R. F. (1993). Everything in its place: GPS, GIS, and geography in the 1990s. The Professional Geographer, 45(2), 131-139. Should trees have standing? At around the same time as the Craigheads were chasing bears around the Park, in the Sequoia National Forest of California a different sort of revolution was about to take place. Walt Disney Enterprises, the corporation that owned Mickey Mouse and operated the staggeringly popular Disneyland, started surveying an undeveloped part of the forest for a modest 80-acre ski resort (for comparison Aspen resort is 675 skiable acres). The Mineral King development had been on speculators’ radar since the 1940’s. At a minimum, the resort would require a new highway and large power lines to attract development to the relatively pristine valley of the East Fork Kaweah River. Nearly a hundred years before, in these same mountains, John Muir and others had founded the Sierra Club. The Club was part of the progressive movement of the early 20th century and was the first of the large national environmental preservation organizations in the world. Its main purpose back then was to keep a watchful eye on impacts to the Sierra Nevada range. The Club had kept track of the Mineral King project for years. When Disney moved ahead with its plans, the Sierra Club filed for permanent injunctions against federal officials, specifically Roger Morton, Secretary of the Interior, to prevent him from granting permits for the development. The district court granted the injunction, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned them for lack of standing. The case then went to the U.S. Supreme Court.129 Standing is a legal concept that ensures the correct party appears before the court in a dispute. For example, in the case of an automobile accident, the party harmed in the accident must be the one to sue the other driver, he cannot be an innocent bystander. In 1972 the definition for standing was the party who suffered or would suffer injury because of the defendants’ actions. In this case what injury would result if Interior issued the permit to Disney? The Sierra Club claimed they would be. The Court held that the Sierra Club did not have sufficient standing because it failed to show that any of its members had suffered or would suffer injury when Mineral King was operational. Justice Potter Stewart wrote: “Although building roads and high voltage power lines through the wilderness upsets the beauty of the area and the 129 Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972) enjoyment of some, such “general interest” in a potential problem is not sufficient to establish that a plaintiff has been injured in the manner that standing doctrine requires”. In one respect it would appear the Sierra Club lost the battle to represent nature. They did not lose the war. Justice William O. Douglas was an ardent conservationist from the Pacific Northwest and wrote a dissenting opinion that would forever shape the legal strategy for conservation groups. He wrote that if a rule was fashioned that allowed for environmental issues to be litigated in the name of an “inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers, and where injury is the subject of public outrage” then environmental disputes would be settled more efficiently and more cases that represent the public interest would be litigated.130 He went on to advocate for allowing nature’s voice to be heard in the courtroom through their proxies such as conservation groups like the Sierra Club. He urged the Sierra Club to amend its complaint to show how the club’s members, rather than the valley, would be injured. The club did and the ski resort was stopped after several more years of court battles. Today, “associational standing” allows an organization to sue on behalf of an injury to one or more of its members.131 Rather than finding an individual injured by a decision, a group can represent that individual or nature. Environmental groups can now sue on behalf of nature by demonstrating group members’ legitimate interest in conservation issues or in places like Mineral King. Because the Sierra Club had a long-term legitimate interest in the Sierras, members are deemed to have standing in such issues. The legacy of the case is that conservation groups now had a way to get into court and litigate environmental injustice. With that small opening they began to hire lawyers from top law schools and then they began to sue, and win. Nonprofits like the Center for Biological Diversity represent plants and animals go get them listed via the Endangered Species Act. In 1979, the National Audubon Society and the Mono Lake Committee filed a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles seeking an injunction for protection of the lake by invoking the public trust doctrine.132 130 Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972) pg. 405 131 The legal test for an organization to establish representative standing must satisfy the following: a) show that at least one of its members has standing, b) that the interests at stake are germane to the organization’s purpose, and c) that neither the claim nor the relief requires participation of the organization’s individual members. See: Hunt v. Wash. State Apple Advertising Comm’n, 432 U.S. 333, 343 (1977). 132 National Audubon Society v. Superior Court (Supreme Court of California, 1983, 33 Cal.3d 419) Sidebar: Native Americans Represent Grizzly Bears in Court In June 22, 2017 then Interior Ryan Zinke announced he was removing protections of Yellowstone grizzly bears under the Endangered Species Act. By the end of the month seven environmental groups had threatened to sue but had to wait 60 days to give Interior and US FWS time to respond. Native tribes had no such constraint and nine sued on June 30. Nineteen tribes eventually joined the case. They claimed Zinke had violated the Administrative Procedure Act that requires notice and comment and that he had also violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that prohibits the government from placing an undue burden on a person's exercise of religion. The claim cited the religious importance of the grizzly bear in tribal beliefs. Tribal spiritual leaders say grizzly bears need to be allowed to expand throughout their historical range for tribes such as the Hopi, Crow, Sioux, Piikani, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, and Zuni to freely express their faith. Native religious tradition over many generations was sufficient to show standing in the dispute.133 In 2004, the world’s whales, dolphins, and porpoises sued the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense through a self-appointed attorney. The complaint was the Navy’s use of certain types of sonar technologies could disrupt marine mammal life. The case was heard in the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii but was dismissed for multiple reasons, one of them standing. Perhaps this case stretched things a bit too far.134 The strategy of going to court would serve the conservation community well for many years. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts had just been passed and environmental lawyers were successful in seeing the intent of those acts were carried out. Animals began to get their day in court with the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Today, climate change, loss of biodiversity and habitat will eventually require the courts or legislators to come to terms with modern ecological problems; Sierra Club v Morton opened the courtroom door. In 2023 16 Montana students sued the State of Montana over the State’s climate change policy (or lack of it). plaintiffs argue that state legislators have put the interests of the state’s fossil fuel industry over their climate future.135 The case will decide whether the state’s 133 https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Grizzlies.pdf 134 Cetacean Community v. Bush, (249 F. Supp. 2d 1206) 135 http://climatecasechart.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/case-documents/2020/20200313_docket-CDV- 2020-307_complaint.pdf contribution to climate change violates its Constitution, which explicitly guarantees a right to a “clean and healthful environment.” It is another victory for standing of environmental issues. The political economy of the environment In 1971, two faculty members from Montana State University – one from the political science department, the other in economics, traveled three hours to their sister university in Missoula to listen to the future Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman. Friedman, ever the free market iconoclast, had very little experience with natural resource policy but had strong ideas about the reasons for failed government policy – invariably and myopically it was due to over regulation. He advocated selling off the national forests so they would no longer be mismanaged by public bureaucrats who did not understand or respond to the supposed virtuous incentives of the free market. He spoke about how the national forest system should be privatized along with the national parks and other public lands and how free market inducements would result in more efficient use of forest resources. The crowd in Missoula, a liberal pro-environment campus, was, to put it mildly, upset. In a debate that went on for nearly 20 minutes, John Baden, an economic anthropologist, argued with Friedman how public lands, no matter how badly managed, could not be turned over to the private market. As public goods, such privatization would result in exclusion and overexploitation – timber companies would overharvest and destroy the ecology of the forest. It would overturn the very concept of public lands. Baden did not convince him. On the way home to Bozeman, they reconsidered Friedman’s positions and his logic and asked an obvious question “If markets can produce bread and cars, why can’t they produce environmental quality?” The result of that and other conversations was a course the next Fall at Montana State called “The Political Economy of the Environment” – a first in the nation. That would lay the foundation for a new university hub of research – the Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources. The mission of the center would be to apply economic notions to environmental issues, a radical idea at the time. The core principles would be the same as for economics in general - the role of property rights and markets in making decisions about allocation of scarce resources. The challenge was to rethink how micro economic theory could be applied to improve environmental quality. The center eventually ran up against campus politics and moved into town where it was renamed PERC (Political Economy Research Center).136 Another think tank - FREE (Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment) would later split spin off and so the study of free market environmentalism at MSU and other universities was on its way. The New Resource Economics, as it came to be called, broadened to include more libertarian ideals such as personal liberty, responsible wealth, nonprofit management, and institutional incentives and as it did it became increasingly politicized and unfortunately perceived as a voice for pro development conservatives and climate deniers. Any natural resource policy textbook in 1970 was typically full of the ideas of central planning, energy flow, public finance, and the social value of public lands but there was rarely if ever any mention of private economics except as a despoiler of the environment. At around the same time, schools of forestry were teaching clear-cutting and forest planning that often resulted in publicly subsidized below cost timber sales. Grazing policy was stuck (and still is) in the 19th century practice of practically giving away grass to private cattle ranchers to graze on public land. As a result, the forests were a budgetary mess, and the range was being destroyed. Today, a resource policy textbook will invariably have a section on privatization, market forces, agency incentive structures and will present theory and practice of timber and grazing reform based on markets or market like structures. It will usually present a discussion of the importance of institutions for achieving rational policy. It may introduce the concept of public choice economics. Any environmental nonprofit that hopes to influence policy will include an economic way of thinking as part of its strategy. The New Resource Economics does not have all the answers, but their ideas have become mainstream and have resulted in some positive reforms. An interesting aspect of both PERC and FREE is that they thrived outside the traditional academic institutional setting. Once they were unrestricted by university politics, they were free to rely on private funding to conduct small highly focused workshops for legal scholars, economists, religious leaders, students, and journalists. Invariably, their funding streams began to reflect the libertarian bias of their founders and they became the target of greens and liberal opposition. There is no doubt that they have been an important element in how we think about 136 A running joke among detractors and admirers was PERC stood for Preserving the Environment through Ruthless Capitalism. the management of public lands and resources and have broadened the policy tool chest of public lands managers. Man as part of nature The late E.O. Wilson is considered one of the most widely respected public scientists in the world on par with Jane Goodall and Neil deGrasse Tyson today. During his 40 years on the faculty at Harvard Wilson wrote numerous books on biodiversity, science, human nature, and his specialty - myrmecology---the study of ants---on which he was the world's leading authority.137 His books on the fundamentals of human nature sparked violent dissent among some of his fellow biologists. His apostasy was that humans, like ants and other creatures, are the products of evolution and display behavioral characteristics based on adaptations to fitness. His first exploration into an evolutionary explanation of human behavior was Sociobiology: A New Synthesis (1975) followed by On Human Nature in 1978 and then The Biophilia Hypothesis (1993).138 In all three he argued that human culture is a product of our biology, our evolution, and our choices. Our biophilia explains why humans have deep connections with other life forms and nature. Each book was a progression in teaching how humans were not apart from nature but were an integral piece of the system and a product of its processes. Stated simply, we are animals with animal tendencies and animal affinities. The reactions came loud and swift. Some of his colleagues claimed his views were overly deterministic and denigrated the specialness of humans. Evangelical Christians said he ignored the spiritual essence of Man. But for most of us, his writing helped many to embrace the interconnectedness of Man and nature. The effect of Wilson’s writing is that he helped change our thinking about our place on Earth. Our appreciation of nature is not some luxury or indulgence. Rather, we are of nature and nature is of us. We cannot help but protect that which we are part of, to do otherwise would be illogical. Wilson’s writings, along with others, cemented a social value for nature and 137 Hölldobler, B., & Wilson, E. O. (1990). The ants. Harvard University Press. 138 Wilson, E. O. (2000). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Harvard University Press. Wilson, E. O. (2004). On human nature: With a new preface. Harvard University Press. Kellert, S. R., & Wilson, E. O. (Eds.). (1993). The biophilia hypothesis. Island press. conservation at the time when the environmental social movement needed the credibility of a Harvard scientist behind it. Looking back at the changes that took place over the course of a decade it is difficult to appreciate their revolutionary consequences. Today, virtually everyone with a smartphone packs along a GPS and if you use it to find a restaurant or special trailhead you are using a version of a GIS. Of course, we now think environmental issues are important enough to be litigated and who does not want to see animals treated humanely and the land preserved. When a river is polluted through an industrial accident, we are sympathetic to the loss of clean water and dead fish. There will be public pressure for someone to be at fault and pay. The way we will tabulate the amount they will pay will be through some formula that reflects comparatives in a private market. If fishermen will pay $X/day to catch trout and X trout have been killed, then the recreational market value of those fish, with the multiplier effect, is $XXXX. This is relatively simple to calculate and would readily be accepted in a court settlement. If the recreational value of the same river is greater than the value derived from damming it for irrigation what bureaucrat in his right mind would build a dam unless there is incentive to do otherwise? Likewise, if we go to Yellowstone in the Spring, we will enjoy watching newborn bison and elk calves graze in the lush Lamar Valley. As they run and kick up their heels in exercise we will reflect on own children’s behaviors and the “humanness” of all newborns. And we will readily accept it as part of the natural experience. Conservation biology as practiced today is the beneficiary of a host of changes in how we collect and analyze data, how we think about that data and its context, and how we resolve conflicts over what the data tells us. Conservation biology is increasingly dependent on using models to describe the world, but models only get us close. Sometimes we need new ways of thinking about the world. In 1994, another lesson from space exploration helped us rethink our perspective. At a public lecture at Cornell University, Carl Sagan presented an image to the audience. The image was taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. Six billion kilometers out, as it left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, NASA engineers turned the spacecraft around for one last look at its home planet and took a selfie. In the image the earth is a fraction of a pixel in size. Sagan reflected on the meaning of our place in the universe in his essay of the Pale Blue Dot: Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.139 If that does not change your thinking about the earth and the environment in which we live, nothing will. The revolutions that helped change how we do conservation affected Yellowstone, but not always smoothly or easily. In spite of their cutting-edge use of technology and the fact that the Craigheads were the undisputed authorities on the Yellowstone grizzly bear, they eventually clashed with Yellowstone National Park administration and their research came to an end. It would come down to feeding bears in a story that is, by now, well known. Here are the high points.140 Since the 1880s, tourist garbage from the campgrounds and hotels had always been collected and dumped in remote locations in the park, and sometimes near hotels. Grizzlies had been feeding on it for generations and in fact, the dumps were a popular tourist attraction where a dozen or so bears could be watched up close and personal. Sows taught their cubs that the dumps were valuable sources of protein and they returned year after year. As part of a new management policy of non-interference with nature, park administration proposed closing the dumps in as short of time as possible. In addition, they also wanted to remove all the colored ear tags and radio collars the Craigheads had placed on bears and elk. The controversy boiled down to how the bears would cope with a sudden loss of free and easy protein. 139 https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot 140 Mattson, D. J., & Craighead, J. J. (1994). The Yellowstone grizzly bear recovery program: uncertain information, uncertain policy (pp. 101-130). Island Press. The Craighead team thought that the way to wean the bears off garbage the closure should take place over ten years and that elk should be killed and left in the remote backcountry as supplemental food where it would draw bears away from the lodges and hotels. Park administration did not agree and in 1970 the last dump was closed, and bears began to disperse. Some went looking for their natural prey and carrion, others wandered into nearby towns and near the park hotels looking for easier food. Craighead’s fears had come true, and human caused bear mortality skyrocketed. Where in the early days of the 20th century sheep herders had been the main source of bear mortality, by the 1970s it was the federal government killing “problem bears” that wandered into towns and campgrounds looking for food. The crux of the matter was if the population of bears could be sustained from the roughly 200 the Craigheads thought existed or if the population was closer to the park service estimate of 300. Both numbers were likely closing in on the minimum viable population given the increasingly high rates of human caused mortality. After the brothers and their assistants had performed nearly nine thousand person-days of research, hiked a hundred and sixty-two thousand miles, and captured, marked, and studied two hundred and fifty-six Yellowstone grizzlies, their research permits were not renewed. The world authorities on grizzly bears were essentially locked out of the park and their research facility was later bulldozed by the park service. Radio tracking collars were removed from animals that had been tracked by the Craigheads for a dozen years. Again, a battle seems to have been lost but a war was won. The Craigheads took their data, maps, and technology to the University of Montana and continued their work on bears, elk, and other large animals that live in greater natural ecosystems. There, they helped build one of the outstanding ecosystem and conservation sciences programs in the country. They helped educate and train the next generation of biologists and managers that would eventually recover bear populations. The Craighead Institute, a nonprofit in Bozeman, MT, is run by family members and conducts ecological research in natural systems all over the world.141 The technology the brothers pioneered is still used daily in the park and around the world and their work is considered fundamental in ecological science. 141 http://www.craigheadresearch.org/ Can the same be said of Park Superintendent Jack Anderson and his scientific advisor Glen Cole who cancelled their permit? The legacy of four new things A visit to the park today will reveal a large number of animals with ear tags and radio collars. In a survey conducted in 2002 23% of park visitors saw an animal with a collar; most said it did not detract from their wildlife viewing experience.142 There are numerous research projects in the region that collar and track mountain goats, bighorn sheep, Yellowstone cutthroat trout, lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush), bison, various bird species, and of course bears and wolves. Maps of their habitat and movements can be found in dozens of scientific papers that are published each year and on numerous websites. These projects generate high quality data to inform policy decisions by multiple public lands agencies. On June 30, 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) removed Endangered Species Act protection of the Yellowstone grizzly bear (it would be relisted and delisted several more times over the next several years). The bear had been listed in the coterminous United States as a threatened species since 1973. The action by FWS was to declare the Yellowstone bear as a “distinct population segment”, something allowable under the ESA. It means the agency treats the Yellowstone population of bears separate from the others. Not everyone was happy with the decision and a coalition of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the National Parks Conservation Association joined together to sue the Department of Interior to stop declaring the Yellowstone bear a distinct population and ultimately, stop the delisting of the bear. Here is what is important for our purposes: each of the plaintiffs in the suit have standing in the case and demonstrate it with an array of justifications. The tribe has significant cultural and historical ties to the bear going back many generations and can demonstrate their interests with documents and tribal beliefs, the Sierra Club has at least two members whose economic well-being depends on running wildlife tours where grizzlies are star attractions. The Center for Biological Diversity, and the National Parks Conservation Association are long time advocates for bears as evidenced 142 Wondrak, A. K. Yellowstone Wildlife Watching. Yellowstone Science (summer 2002). by past lawsuits and policy positions. At this point their standing is not in question. That is progress. Just thirty miles north of the Gardiner entrance to Yellowstone is Chico Hot Springs. It opened in 1900 during a time when local gold miners needed a place to eat and relax. It later became a local hospital and eventually a high-end vacation resort. The nearby, now mostly abandoned, town site of Yellowstone City was near a moderate sized gold strike high on the slopes of Emigrant Peak. For various reasons most of the gold was never extracted. In 2015 a Canadian mining company proposed exploratory mining above Chico with risk of mine runoff to both Chico resort and the Yellowstone River. The argument against mining is based on a new view of the local economy. Lucky Minerals Inc., has proposed to “aggressively explore” for gold on 2,500 acres and to develop an open pit gold mine on Emigrant Peak 17 miles north of Yellowstone. The firm sought a “categorical exclusion” to environmental review under National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The move coalesced over 350 businesses and many area residents to rally around a campaign called “Yellowstone Is More Valuable Than Gold”.143 They point to 40% of local jobs being created by local entrepreneurs who live there because of the high quality of life, they point out that fishing on the Yellowstone River is worth about $70 million/ year to the local economy, and that Yellowstone National Park tourists spend about one billion dollars annually in the five counties that surround Paradise Valley.144 What makes this an interesting and sophisticated conversation is that many rational business owners in the region clearly understand that a traditional economic base centered around a mining operation is inferior to a highly diversified one centered on an amorphous package of environmental amenities – a romance lands-based economy. The economic game they are playing is redefining what constitutes a robust economy. Tom Powers, an environmental economist from Missoula, argues that traditional commodity development such as mining and logging have actually exacerbated the economic woes that afflict the region. He describes a “post cowboy economics” where telecommuters, retirees, lifestyle migrants, and recreationists are drawn to rural communities with high quality amenities 143 https://www.npca.org/advocacy/45-yellowstone-is-worth-more-than-gold 144 http://www.dontmineyellowstone.com/img/YGBC_EconomicReport_WEB.pdf and less hectic lifestyles.145 Business owners and environmentalists in the Paradise Valley are making an argument based on New Resource Economics. The Thorofare Ranger Station deep in the heart of Yellowstone is said to be the furthest building from any road in the contiguous United State. Those who visit there will experience wilderness in the most literal sense. It also happens to be the highest concentration of grizzly bears in the lower 48. Camping in the Thorofare allows us to live like our most ancient ancestors, if only for a brief moment. We will know fear of the unknown, fear of predators, we will know silence, and we will learn something about our primal selves. Stay long enough and you will revert to the biological animal we are. E.O. Wilson would express no surprise that we would not want to come home. These changes in how we see and experience nature are emblematic of the methodological progression of conservation biology. With each shift in how we observe the natural world our thinking changes and our vision is broadened. These shifts play a critical role in how the community economies of the romance lands will grow and change and how we frame our continued conversation about the future. No discipline holds all the answers to sticky resource questions but we continue to build on the “four new things” to help us understand how “everything is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords”.146 145 Power, T. M., & Barrett, R. (2001). Post-cowboy economics: Pay and prosperity in the new American west. Island Press. 146 https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/misquotes.aspx Chapter 5 Institutions – How things get done Economist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom defined institutions as organizations founded for a specific purpose that have established laws, practices, or customs that govern how those organizations go about their business.147 Institutions, both formal and informal, are how we get things done in a complex and politically diverse social system. Our understanding of how government and business works too often places an overemphasis on the personality of executives and leaders at the expense of understanding the institutional context in which they operate. The media loves to report on Trump tweets or fixate on Steve Jobs’ black turtlenecks as if they explain their accomplishments. The reality is that such frills are mostly unimportant to problem solving. The tweets of a president do not teach us much 147 Ostrom, E. (2005). Doing institutional analysis digging deeper than markets and hierarchies. In Handbook of new institutional economics (pp. 819-848). Boston, MA: Springer US. about policy outcomes or even its design. You will (maybe) remember Elizabeth Holmes’ efforts to emulate the success of Jobs by adopting his way of dress. It was not enough to ensure escape from her fraudulent scheme to cheat investors in the Silicon Valley startup Theranos. Affectation via social media or dress does not equal success. The focus on actor-centered policymaking is awkward for generalizing models of policy making and replicability – to understand how things really get done. Studying political appointees, for example, will not lend a big picture understanding of an agency; the hard work is mostly done by career bureaucrats who are the real experts in a specific policy arena. Most political appointees are invariably in office for the short term and are often driven by a personal or the short terms political agenda of the administration at the time. The agency may be propelled by a force of will by a charismatic leader, such as Bruce Babbitt when he ran the Department of Interior, but his principles may not last or change the culture of the agency. His opposite – James Watt, had no long term effect on Interior other than facing the bison on the agency seal to the right rather than left.148 Bruce Babbitt changed it back. The National Park Service, like the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and to a lesser degree the Bureau of Land Management, follow the general model of administration by federal and state governments. The separation of powers clause states that legislative bodies make and pass laws while the executive branch (Office of the President/Governors) implement and administer them. The problem is that legislators are not experts in most of the areas they are expected to oversee. For example, in response to the population decline of the American Bald Eagle during the 1960s due to DDT in their food supply, Congress passed the final version of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. There were no biologists in Congress (there still aren’t) that could provide direction on how to recover endangered plants and animals; it is a profession overrepresented by lawyers. The solution to making good policy is to delegate the function to a federal agency under the control of the executive branch, in this case the US Fish and Wildlife Service. This is how and why bureaucrats manage so much of what government does. For the most part this seems to work well at the federal level. Each of the public land agencies have a large workforce of experts who write the rules and, through a somewhat convoluted process, 148 This clearly partisan move brought this response from Jay D. Hair, executive director of the National Wildlife Federation: ''The fact that he didn't replace the buffalo with a bulldozer indicates that at long last James Watt may be moderating his views toward wildlife.'' codify them so the agency may fulfill its mandate. Here is how that works in the National Park Service. The mission of the National Park Service is to “preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations”.149 How the Service does that is open to interpretation with oversite by Congress. The director of the NPS issues policies, instructions, and directives aimed at system wide management of national parks. One example would be the reaction to a document referred to as “the Leopold Report” (officially known as Wildlife Management in the National Parks) that recommended how the park service would use ecosystem management to manage park visitors and ecosystems under the unified principles of what would become the discipline of conservation biology.150 Among other concepts, the report emphasized the ecological limits of carrying capacity, fire ecology, and the reversal of predator control in national parks. It further suggested that the NPS hire staff scientists to manage the parks using current scientific research and to drive the research agendas in parks. These policies were and are subject to not only Congressional review (and so politics) but also include public input (more politics) and notification in the Federal Register. Every federal agency has a similar set of rules and procedures it follows as it makes policy. The problem for Congress is that for the most part they have a very cursory knowledge of what Leopold was talking about, so they default to the political views of their various constituencies. For that reason, and others, a good deal of park policy has devolved to the superintendent level in the form of a document called the Superintendent Compendium.151 The compendium is the de facto management document for each unit of the Park Service and lists the features of park management subject to the discretionary authority of the superintendent. So, while park superintendents are expected to follow broad NPS policy, interpretation of the NPS mission is often a personification of a superintendent’s experiences, biases, and personal vision for the park. National Park superintendents operate within a set of park oriented institutions and every decision is a balancing act weighing political and public interests. When a superintendent is 149 54 U.S. Code § 100101 150 Rydell, K. L. (1998, January). A public face for science: A. Starker Leopold and the Leopold Report. In The George Wright Forum (Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 50-63). George Wright Society. 151 https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/management/compendium.htm replaced or retires, park policy may change, sometimes very quickly as was the case with the Craigheads and Superintendent Jack Anderson. The ouster of Dan Wenk as superintendent of Yellowstone is a case study in rapid policy change. Sidebar: Wenk “(Y)ou can still be in Yellowstone as a tourist but you will no longer be superintendent.” That was the statement by political appointee and acting park service director Dan Smith to Dan Wenk, the now former superintendent of Yellowstone National Park. After 42 years at the National Park Service and seven years in Yellowstone, Wenk was unceremoniously pushed out of the park service by the Trump appointed Interior secretary Ryan Zinke and his staff of political operatives. Wenk had known that he was the target of a forced transfer, though no one at Interior offered him a rationale for it. Rumors persisted. The question is why, and the answer came down to Wenk’s years of experience in the service and a certain degree of independence that came with it versus Zinke’s efforts to empty the public lands agencies under his control of professional expertise. With the core policy experts in the NPS and BLM gone, Zinke, presumably with the approval of Trump, would be free to shift preservation policy toward greater levels of commercialization and resource development. Those fears were on full display out when Zinke ignored the pleas of five Native American tribal nations, local county commissioners, and the millions of supporters of Utah’s public lands and reduced the size of Bear’s Ears National Monument to allow for over 60,000 acres to be open for oil and gas development.152 Dan Wenk got caught up in a policy shift of immense proportions and found himself out of a job in short order. So did Zinke. After less than two years at Interior he left under findings of ethical malfeasance.153 Superintendent discretion results in different policies in similar parks. High-risk sports like climbing and mountaineering are actively managed in parks like Grand Teton and Yosemite but not in Yellowstone. In Acadia National Park (Maine) and Glacier Bay (Alaska) kayaking and canoeing is encouraged as a way to experience the wilderness nature of the parks. In Yellowstone, except on one short segment of the Lewis River, river running is strictly forbidden (but has been tolerated by past superintendents as a don’t ask/don’t tell policy). Defensive pepper spray for bears is illegal in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, home to over 1700 black 152 https://www.courthousenews.com/interior-head-calls-reduction-bears-ears-monument/ 153 https://apnews.com/article/business-montana-billings-ryan-zinke-bf26ed5e11cc2b9d21c028f7fbf6cd0f bears, but encouraged in Glacier and Yellowstone where grizzlies present an uncommon but real threat. While each park has a particular culture associated with it, the superintendent influences how that culture will be expressed. Within the institutional structure of any agency are organizations or groups of people and the associated governance arrangements they employ in order to coordinate action. Organizations have the advantage that their actions can be dissected and understood through their institutional structures. Organizations may be formal or informal, they may be organized top down by leaders within the agency or bottom up by citizens and nonprofits who seek influence. They may be centrally planned and hierarchical or grass roots with no apparent center of power and authority. What is important is that their actions, if they are successful, are not random decisions based on a reactionary response. They are deliberative and deliberate. The Bureau of Land Management is notorious for harboring internal organizations within the agency that seek to preserve the “cowboy culture” within the ranks.154 The original job of the BLM, or General Land Office as it was known, was to encourage homesteading and western expansion. It was combined with the US Grazing Service into the BLM in 1946. It followed that mission until the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. Now, the agency managed the bulk of the nation’s grazing land, subsurface mineral rights, energy development, and outdoor recreation. Many BLM agents identify more closely with the grazing and ranching community than mountain biking and hiking. Agents tend to stay in one place for a long time – sometimes their whole career. This fosters strong ties to locals and local policy. Both go along with strong local control and strong internal bureaucratic inertia that can make reform problematic. Institutional norms are the rules by which organizations behave.155 Students of public policy like institutional norms. They describe how organizations work and if you know that, you can more easily understand the decision-making system. Fortunately, after several decades of ignoring institutional studies, there is a resurgence of a new institutionalism in policy studies and economics. Regular patterns of behavior; and the rules, norms, practices, and relationships that 154 Skillen, J. R. (2009). The nation's largest landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West. University Press of Kansas. 155 North, 1991 guide behavior, are the focus.156 This is a reversal of years of emphasis on actor-centered policy, the psychology (pathology?) of leaders and the role of individuals in organizations. If you want to understand how the world of policy and decision making works you need to understand institutions. This is not to say individuals do not matter, they do but, if we gain a deep and long- term view of an agency if we can understand what makes it tick. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is around 15 million acres of forest, rangeland, river valleys, and high mountains. Most everyone agrees there should be a mix of preservation and development in the area and that the mixed economy comprised of entrepreneurs and the federal government serves the public well. There is also general agreement that improved management processes are needed if the ecological and economic quality are to be preserved. The institutional and policy making setting in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is an exceptional illustration of “marble cake federalism” where functions of the American government are so mixed as to be indistinguishable in terms of action and purpose.157 Sometimes it is difficult to know who does what. From a legal point of view "there is no single entity empowered to assess the larger ecological ramifications of serial or concurrent development activities within the ecosystem" nor is "there is a common approach to land management” in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.158 Likewise, in terms of conservation policy, there is no administrative coordination among agency programs.159 The system operates in a state of persistent complexity of institutions, organizations, and institutional norms. 156 Cairney, P. (2013). Understanding public policy: theories and issues. (No Title). 157 Grodzins, M. (1960). The federal system. Goals for Americans: The report of the president’s commission on national goals, 265-282. 158 Keiter, R. B. (1989). Taking account of the ecosystem on the public domain: law and ecology in the Greater Yellowstone region. U. Colo. L. Rev., 60, 923. Pg. 985. Keiter, R. B. (2022). Grizzlies, Wolves, and Law in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: Wildlife Management Amidst Jurisdictional Complexity and Tension. Wyo. L. Rev., 22, 303. 159 Clark, T. W., Amato, E. D., Whittemore, D. G., & Harvey, A. H. (1991). Policy and programs for ecosystem management in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: An analysis. Conservation Biology, 5(3), 412- 422. Sidebar: A Stark Boundary The complexity of multiple jurisdictions on the landscape is seen on the western boundary of Yellowstone and the Targhee National Forest. In the early 1970s, in the "Island Park" area of the Targhee, an infestation of the mountain pine beetle required a massive salvage of lodge pole pine near the boundary with Yellowstone. Forest planners predicted nearly 100% of the forest would die and that wildfire would sweep the area fueled by millions of board feet of dead timber. Over the next decade Idaho U.S. Senators put enormous pressure on the forest supervisors to keep cutting trees and provide local timber jobs until the forest was clear cut right up to the park boundary. The boundary is seen as a straight line easily visible in satellite photographs.160 Ironically, the North Fork fire, part of the 1988 complex of Yellowstone fires, started in one of the clearcuts that were believed to prevent the forest burning. A woodcutter dropped his cigarette in a pile of logging debris and the clearcuts burned as readily as the forest. Figure eight: The boundary between Yellowstone National Park and Targhee National Forest is clearly seen in this Landsat 7 image 1999. To the west (left) of the delineation is the Targhee National Forest. The heart of the complexity problem is that the mix of Federal, state, and local jurisdictions that often have competing agendas. Public interest groups struggle for attention on the fast-changing agenda cycle, and private landowners are sometimes at odds with public management. It is a regional landscape of multiple jurisdictions, uses, ownership, and goals. In short, there are so many institutional structures in place, coordination is difficult at best. Bison management is a good case in point. Roughly 4000 bison live within the borders of Yellowstone National Park.161 Most live in the northern range. During the mating rut in late July and early August they will congregate in 160 https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/546/yellowstone-park-boundary-from-landsat-7 161 Kauffman, J. B., Cummings, D. L., Kauffman, C., Beschta, R. L., Brooks, J., MacNeill, K., & Ripple, W. J. (2023). Bison influences on composition and diversity of riparian plant communities in Yellowstone National Park. Ecosphere, 14(2), e4406. the Hayden and Lamar Valleys where they will establish dominance by bellowing, wallowing, and fighting with other bulls in spectacular displays of power. The winners earn the right to mate with receptive females. During the winter season, they migrate north toward Mammoth Hot Springs while others move west toward West Yellowstone. During the deepest snow months, they often move out of the park in the lowlands of the Yellowstone River and onto National Forest and private land near Hebgen Lake. In the park, bison are considered one of the most charismatic animals commonly seen by visitors. Herds roam freely until they are outside the park where they fall under the jurisdiction of the State of Montana. Because of the small potential for Brucellosis infection and because they compete with cattle for grass, jurisdiction shifts from the park service to the Montana Department of Livestock where they are managed like problem cattle.162 To avoid the remotely potential contact with livestock, the employees of the park and the state of Montana work to keep the herds near the park border, sometimes by hazing them with a helicopter, sometime by shooting or capturing them. Domestic livestock are sometimes directed to other grazing grounds further down valley. This is different than other wildlife are managed by Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks where they are treated as game animals that have both an intrinsic and economic value. To the Montana Department of Livestock, bison are a problem they wish would go away and one way to do that is to round them up and either destroy or relocate them. Montana law makes moving live bison from the park to other conservation areas (i.e. tribal lands) very difficult, leaving few options to control the population. Park managers and members of the public would like to see bison roam across boundaries unmolested; livestock interests would like to see them stay in the park (or not exist at all), Montana hunting interests would like a more developed hunting season, Native American tribes would like to see bison respected as cultural icons and bring them to reservation lands so they can restore native herds. Hunting is not allowed in the park and Montana would rather capture and slaughter bison than 162 Many park bison carry the nonnative, bacterial disease Brucellosis that induces abortions in pregnant cattle, elk, and bison. The bacteria that causes the disease, Brucella abortus, can be transmitted between animals if they come into contact with infected birth tissues. Brucellosis has not had a substantial effect on wildlife populations but it poses a financial risk to ranchers because it can reduce the reproductive rate and marketability of their animals. Agricultural interests manage for no contact between wild bison and domestic livestock. See: Cotterill, G. G. (2020). Disease ecology and adaptive management of brucellosis in greater yellowstone elk (Doctoral dissertation, Utah State University). allow a hunting constituency to develop thereby forcing a change in management strategy. In all, eight agencies have some level of jurisdiction over bison. There is not even agreement on exactly what the bison problem is, but the battle lines are clear. The result is that multiple viewpoints preclude more than token coordination of the brucellosis problem, trans boundary migration, and population control. Multiple public interest groups complicate the problem. The complexity of the matter is defined by the operating principles of the various agencies. Before a problem can be solved, it must first be defined accurately.163 In fact, the way a problem is defined prefigures the solution. Unlike the intractable bison management issue, Grizzly bear management is an excellent case where clear problem definition coupled with administrative coordination effectively solved a highly complex problem. In this case the Federal government not only defined the problem, it also presented a solution. It is a study in how important institutions and institutional norms can be. The Grizzly Problem Is Defined by The Endangered Species Act: A case study of institution-building The inflection point for bear conservation was passage of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and subsequent listing of the bear in 1975. Up to that time bears were hunted, the federal government killed many “problem” bears, and there was an insignificant political constituency for protection of the small Yellowstone population. The ESA recognized that our natural heritage, defined narrowly as its plants and animals, is of "esthetic, ecological, educational, recreational, and scientific value to our Nation and its people".164 The purpose of the ESA is to protect and recover imperiled species and the ecosystems upon which they depend. It is the second part of that statement this is most important although it is the first that garners all the attention. 163 Dery, D., & Mock, T. J. (1985). Information support systems for problem solving. Decision Support Systems, 1(2), 103-109. 164 16 U.S.C. 1531-1544 https://www.fws.gov/media/endangered-species-act-basics-50-years-conserving-endangered-species Species at risk may be listed under the ESA as either endangered or threatened. "Endangered" means a species is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range. "Threatened" means a species is likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future. The Yellowstone grizzly was listed as threatened because there is a healthy population in Alaska and the species itself is in no danger of extinction; only the five subpopulations in the lower 48 are at risk. Protection for species at risk officially began in 1966 with the passage of the Endangered Species Preservation Act. It provided a way to list and give limited protection to endangered native animals. The large land management agencies – the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, and Defense were to protect such species but not at the expense of their agency mission. In 1969 the act was extended to protection of species in danger of "worldwide extinction" by prohibiting their importation and subsequent sale in the United States. This provision was implemented to protect charismatic species like whales, elephants, and tigers that are put at risk because of the global market in meat, ivory, and body parts. In 1973 the first meeting on the first Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was held and the current Endangered Species Act was enacted as it sought to restrict commerce in plant and animal species believed to be harmed by trade; the US now had a comprehensive body of regulation that placed real and meaningful protection to the natural world. Endangered status protections have been given to a variety of plants and animals found in the US or elsewhere. Grizzly bear listing under the Endangered Species Act brought “the bear problem” into distinct focus. The bear was threatened with extinction; the solution is to bring it back from that brink. There may be ancillary issues of predation on livestock or human caused mortality, but all concerned knew now how the problem would be defined. The lead agency would be the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and it would adopt the requirement in the ESA of using the best available science to solve the problem. Under the guidelines of the Endangered Species Act, the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service develops a habitat conservation plan for the listed species. The first Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan for Greater Yellowstone was released in 1976, another in 1982, the last in 1993.165 Again, 165 Timeline and documents at: https://www.fws.gov/species/grizzly-bear-ursus-arctos- horribilis?aggregated_content_type=%5B%22Conservation%20Plan%22%5D according to the language of the Act, the problem is defined by placing emphasis on habitat management as the strategy for recovery. From there a research agenda emerges – what sort of habitat, how much, when do they use different habitat types, what are the food sources within those habitats, what threats are there to those food sources, and when do they use them? Basic questions about bears are asked: where are the bears, when are they in certain places, how many are there, what are the demographics, how does their diet vary over time, how far do they travel, what are the sources of mortality, how many young do they have? Fortunately, the work done by the Craigheads and others gave scientists a head start on these and many other questions. The process of problem definition and a data collection program to inform the resolution of the problem is an important element in the success of interagency coordination and land management policy. Without it, competing agendas confuse institutional behaviors. With listing comes norms of policy making constrained by law. The Endangered Species Act is often criticized for its rigidity and prescriptive nature. Some would argue that less formal arrangements might be more effective and politically palatable. In fact, there are provisions for flexibility and two are important for our purposes. The first is the concept of “take”. The second the term “distinct population segment”. One of the misconceptions, and complaints, of implementation of the Endangered Species Act is that a member of the listed species cannot be killed or harmed. This is simply not true. “Take” in the parlance of the Act is defined as “harassment, harm, pursuit, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect any threatened or endangered species”. “Harm” is further defined to include significant habitat modification or degradation which “actually kills or injures fish or wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including, breeding, spawning, rearing, migrating, feeding or sheltering.”.166 A listed animal may be “taken” in two ways. Section 10a(1)B of the Endangered Species Act allows a landowner or agency to apply for an "incidental take permit". This could mean a timber harvest that has a chance of harming the species or altering habitat. In this case the “take” is incidental to the activity of logging private land. This might mean the harvest would take place when the animal is not in residence or there would be some compromise in the size and configuration of the sale but likely the sale would take place in some form. Another example 166 50 C.F.R. § 222.102 (NOAA Fisheries’ Harm Rule); see also id. § 17.3 (USFWS’ Harm Rule) would be a permit to destroy an individual animal killing livestock. The “take” is incidental to the agricultural operation and the problem animal would be removed. The other method of “take” is to list the animal as a “nonessential experimental population”. This is how grey wolves were listed in 1974 in Yellowstone. The designation allows the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service to relax the restrictions of the ESA to encourage cooperation from those who might oppose the reintroduction program. The effect is that for nonessential species, critical habitat cannot be designated, and the full protections of the ESA are not applied outside of a National Wildlife Refuge or National Park. In the case of wolves, after they were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, livestock predation could allow ranchers to shoot the offending wolf(s). The distinct population segment designation is another little known provision of the Act and directly applies to the delisting of the Grizzly bear in Yellowstone. A distinct population segment is a portion of a species' or subspecies' population or range. It is described geographically instead of biologically, such as "all members of XYZ that occur north of 40 north latitude." What this means in real terms is that the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service considers the Yellowstone bears to be genetically uncoupled from other populations and so can be managed in isolation. Some might argue that managing large far-ranging predators in this manner undermines the intent of the Endangered Species Act but in the case of bears, it allowed the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service to move forward with delisting attempts and so free up future management options and anticipate future issues. The Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC) coordinates recovery By far the most important institutional authority on the recovery and management of the bear for the last 40+ years is the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee organized under the U.S. Geological Survey housed in the Department of Interior.167 In 1973, in reaction to the closure of the garbage dumps and the subsequent management issues with bears, an interdisciplinary group of scientists and biologists was assembled for long- term monitoring and research efforts on grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone region. The 167 https://igbconline.org/ Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team would later become the model for the other ecosystem level study groups concerned with recovery of bison, spotted owls, sturgeon, and bald eagles. The core science focus of the IGBST is to study bear population trends as well as bear mortality and other survival issues. They conduct their work quietly and without political fanfare. Grizzly bear recovery for the lower 48 states is divided into five regions: the Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, the Selkirk Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem, the North Cascades Ecosystem, and the Bitterroot Ecosystem. The mission of this mini- bureaucracy is to use the best available science to recover the bear in the each of the five regions where conditions may call for different strategies. Recovery and management for all five regions is carried out under the supervision of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC). Members include representatives from the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, Parks Canada, the states of Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming, and the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. A Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator works with the National Carnivore Program Leader and the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team Leader. In Yellowstone the recovery process has been slow but steady and the bear population has grown by 4-7% for the last two decades.168 They have expanded their range by 11-34%.169 The IGCB is noted for avoiding politics and maximizing science. The Yellowstone Ecosystem Grizzly Bear Recovery Area includes all of Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks, as well as portions of northwest Wyoming, eastern Idaho, and southwest Montana. Other federal lands include the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forests (NF), The Bridger-Teton NF, Caribou-Targhee NF, and the Custer-Gallatin, and Shoshone National Forests. Federally managed lands make up 97.9% of the recovery area’s 9,209 square miles. Grizzly bears occupy 48 percent more of this habitat now than when they were listed. Human occupancy of private lands adjacent to the Recovery Area has also increased since the 168 There is some disagreement over the numbers of bears in the region. The Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team claims there are 670-750 grizzly bears in the GYE and growing. Independent researchers claim the population is not growing and may be in decline. See: https://www.grizzlytimes.org/the-numbers-game 169 Sells, S. N., Costello, C. M., Lukacs, P. M., van Manen, F. T., Haroldson, M., Kasworm, W., ... & Bjornlie, D. (2023). Grizzly bear movement models predict habitat use for nearby populations. Biological Conservation, 279, 109940. grizzly was listed. In the figure below the outlines of the recovery zone (yellow) and the current know distribution of bears (hash marks) show that the bear has expanded its range beyond the planned recovery area.170 Figure ni ne: Yellowstone Grizzly recovery geography The Yellowstone Ecosystem Subcommittee (now the Yellowstone grizzly Coordinating Committee) is the multiagency organization that managed the recovery of the grizzly in the Yellowstone Ecosystem. Membership includes federal, state, county, and tribal agencies. After delisting of the bear in 2017, the group name was changed to reflect management rather than recovery. A subset group of the Coordinating Committee is the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team (IGBST). This a science-based team of on the ground researchers whose goal is inform policy makers on bear biology and demographics. Multiagency coordination ensures consistency in data collection and methods over the long term. The coordinating committee is a useful model for ensuring focus on the recovery and management problem. Agencies are obligated to act within an institutional setting that continually places focus on recovery using best available science rather than politics to define and eventually resolve the problems of bear conservation. Non-Profit institutions can be a “wild card” Public citizen involvement in Yellowstone grizzly bear recovery and management is long-standing and passionate. The fragmented overlapping management regime in the region means it can be difficult for citizens to understand how the decision process works and how priorities are constructed. This is especially true of recent newcomers who may care deeply 170 https://igbconline.org/committees/yellowstone/ about a particular issue but have little knowledge of public lands agencies or how to access the policy making process. One solution is to align with a nonprofit that reflects your values. The environmental nonprofit industry in the region is a significant economic entity in its own right. The Greater Yellowstone environmental nonprofit community consists of nearly 200 conservation nonprofits that direct a combined annual budget of $150 million, have 500 employees, and are overseen by 700 board members.171 They run the spectrum of highly focused species-specific organizations such as The Wolverine Foundation to the Friends of Hyalite – advocacy for a small part of the Gallatin National Forest, to The Greater Yellowstone Coalition – an all-encompassing organization with a yearly budget of $3.5 million. Nearly every community has a conservation land trust to protect open space. The “big ten” national environmental groups are all represented in the region (Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, Land and Water Conservation Fund, etc). Tactics for all these groups runs the normal gambit of conservation nonprofits that includes lobbying local and regional policy makers, representing conservation issues in the courts, and engaging in traditional issue advocacy with the public. In a trend repeated in all large national parks, there are nonprofit foundations for both Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks that function as the official education and fundraising partner. Nonprofits exacerbate the institutional complexity of the region because again, they too compete for resources, members, and often for their place in the regional environmental agenda. They are not homogeneous in their outlook. In the case of bear management, most environmental groups oppose hunting while hunting and agricultural groups support it – both for different reasons. The standard operating procedure for all nonprofits is to use information and the legal system to sway public and agency opinion. The size of the Greater Yellowstone environmental nonprofit community would suggest it is an influential player for conservation in the region but that is not always the case. Again, referring to the administrative complexity of the region, even the most effective nonprofit would have difficulty influencing the number of actors on any one issue. For example, where would one start among the dozen or so agencies with jurisdiction on bear management? How might they pressure an insulated agency such as the U.S. Animal and Plants Inspection Service (APHIS), the institution with significant power in the bison/brucellosis 171 Cherney, D. N. (2011). Environmental saviors? The effectiveness of nonprofit organizations in Greater Yellowstone. University of Colorado at Boulder. debate (being a regulatory agency with little public oversight, it is mostly invisible to the public). In a comprehensive survey of Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem nonprofits Cherney, found a wide array (22) of goals that ranged from habitat conservation to education to promoting recreation.172 He claimed few groups achieved their goals as stated in their mission statements. The most important role for nonprofits in the highly complex and politically charged Greater Yellowstone is, he suggests, as an outlet for democratizing the technical scientific backdrop in which policy decisions are made. Most anyone can understand the appeal of a wolf on the landscape and donate toward keeping it there. Few will take the time to understand the ecological role of predators and the difficulty some have living in close proximity with them. Nonprofits give an outlet to feelings of empathy for the environment and how it should be managed but most do little to educate the public with respect to the science underlying their agenda. Institutions are not the only vehicle for rational policy making but they are the most important in terms of understanding the process. Institutions force individuals to work in together toward a common purpose. By taking the time to understand the institutional structure, we can readily understand how organizations tackle issues far too large for individuals to address and we can more easily understand why bureaucratic structures such as land management agencies behave the way they do. This is particularly true in the case of bear recovery and subsequent management. The institutional and cultural context of the Endangered Species Act, and the one in which bear management is grounded, is dependent on science. Language in the Endangered Species Act requires the use of the “best available science” to manage listed species. This fact alone tells us how policy will be assessed and how the game will play out. Agencies and nonprofits may or may not agree with the science, but they are likely to evaluate it within the norms of the scientific method. Nonprofits, especially those who do not traffic in science, can appeal and criticize but to be effective they will need to conform to the preexisting culture. They will need experts in conservation biology in addition to lawyers. The best employ both. In the case of the Yellowstone grizzly bear the science is well established and generally accepted. Most everyone involved agrees on the behavioral and ecological science of the bears. 172 Cherney, 2011 There is even general agreement on the numbers (currently estimated in 2021 by the IGBC at around 700-1000 bears). The disagreement comes with impact of future mortality from all sources, impact from diminished food supply, and the role of climate change on bears. Those are questions science can answer. Defining the bear problem within the context and culture of the using the Endangered Species Act set public land managers up for success. The solution to the problem and measure of success is to delist the bear and it will be delisted at some point in the near future. After that point the three states (Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming) will take over management of the bears in their respective states. This has a downside. Some fear the political cycle will start again and give way to politics rather than science. That is almost guaranteed given the current political cultures of the three states and conservationists have reason for concern. The highly conservative legislatures and governors of the three states already have plans in place for grizzly bear hunting seasons and have weakened state predator conservation policy to the extent that bears, along with wolves, will be heavily targeted. The job of the bear constituency will be to learn the new institutional context of the three states and how they can approach bear management going forward. Chapter 6 Transitions in GYE During and after World War II, the US Forest Service began to sell timber in earnest and would continue to for the next 40 years. All that harvest employed thousands of men, some recently home from war, and helped build hundreds of timber towns up and down the Rockies. It also required hundreds of thousands of miles of roads to be constructed, sometimes costing many thousands of dollars for each mile. There were many reasons for the uptick in logging. During the war, wood was needed for hangars, barracks, ships, and crates for shipping supplies and ammunition to support the war effort. To increase production, technological progress resulted in faster, lighter chain saws. What took two men to cut in a day with axes and a crosscut saw could be accomplished in an hour by one man with a gas-powered saw. As the wood supply increased, bigger and better trucks could haul more timber to larger mills so logs could be processed more quickly and cheaply. It was, and still is, backbreaking and dangerous work. After the war, an important provision in the G.I. Bill was low interest, zero down payment home loans for servicemen, with more favorable terms for new construction. The building boom was on, and the American dream of home ownership was born. Abraham Levitt broke ground on a planned community located in Nassau County, Long Island in 1947 and suburban living was added to that dream. Millions of American families moved from apartments in the inner urban core to stand alone homes on the outskirts of cities and towns. Must of the wood to build suburbia came from national forest lands. The US Forest Service responded to all this demand in a rational bureaucratic manner. It is a basic law of public bureaucracy that performance is measured by expenditure because output is often ill defined. Forest supervisors quickly understood what timber harvest meant to the agency. Very simply, if the agency spent money on timber harvest, it could go to Congress for a larger budget. A larger budget meant more influence on how public lands were managed, more influence meant greater bureaucratic power and prestige for the agency. It became the basis on which personal careers were made. To be known as a forest supervisor who “got the cut out” was high praise and ensured progress up the agency corporate ladder. More power and authority over the future of public lands made the Forest Service the most important player in the economies of the western states. In the case of timber, the agency enjoyed a tangible measure of output – millions of board feet. Imagine a one-foot length of a board one-foot-wide and one-inch-thick and then calculate how many are contained in each log in a timber sale. The total would be number of board feet in a given unit of harvest. A log measuring 10 inches in diameter and 20 feet in length would have a volume of approximately 70 board feet. Multiply that log by thousands of trees and you can calculate the forest yield. In the language of institutional economics, the Forest Service responded to agency incentives. If it was rewarded for cutting more timber, which they were, then of course that is what it would do and did. Since profit was not the motive, they could cut timber even if they lost money. Which they did. Here’s how. The Forest Service has always had a good grasp of the resources available on the national forests. They had high quality maps, they knew their forests because they counted their trees, they knew how many board feet each forest produced. Agency timber cruisers would hike the groves of marketable timber measuring and identifying the various species of trees while recording and mapping the data. They know when a stand is ready for market and when it is mature and when it is, the forest manager plans a timber sale. This consists of a stated location and amount and type of wood that would be available for harvest, how and when it is harvested, and how many miles of road would be needed. The sale would then be put out to bid to private logging contractors. The successful bid and subsequent harvest would yield revenues for the forest system based on the species mix, the respective market prices, and the respective amounts of each species of tree. The contractor would hope to turn a profit after the costs of harvest and transport. There are some interesting details however that can result in a sale ending in the black or red. The most important is roads or more accurately road credits.173 Access to the timber is typically via a network of roads into the forest. The less extensive the existing road network at the place of the sale the more miles of new road that will be charged to a particular sale, or series of sales, thereby increasing its cost. These costs are usually in the form of road credits given to the contractor in the sale contract. In other words, part of the cost of the sale is to pay the contractor to enlarge the forest road network. In the past it was not unusual for the earnings on road building to be equal to or more than the value of the timber. Road credits, and some other funds such as brush removal credits, reforestation, and habitat restoration would result in the forest service actually losing money selling public timber. In most cases it was not the timber industry that was subsidized, although many local timber companies enjoyed a virtual monopoly on winning timber sales and they sometimes acquired the timber at rock bottom prices, rather, it was the Forest Service that used arcane accounting methods to boost the size of their timber budget request to Congress. Congressional delegations from the western states, many of whom sat on the relevant policy and budget committees, were supportive of the arrangement because it was good for the economies in their districts. Getting the cut out meant jobs and that meant political support come reelection time. By the late 1980s the annual timber output of public land of 11 billion board feet represented just 12 percent of the United States’ total harvest.174 Private land timber production had replaced timber from public land that was heavily concentrated in a few western states. Much of it came from large private holdings in the Pacific Northwest and in the southern states 173 O'Toole, R. (1987). Reforming the forest service. Colum. J. Envtl. L., 13, 299. 174 https://ecowest.org/2013/05/28/timber-harvest-falls-in-national-forests/ where wood for pulp could be grown quickly and cheaply. Those states where public timber was cut had paid an ecological price for the heavy harvest of the post-war era. Around 380,000 miles of roads, mostly built to access timber were built with significant impacts to water quality and wildlife habitat. Rural communities became “addicted” to sustained, but not sustainable, timber supply.175 Generations of families and communities would come to rely on timber jobs in dozens of small towns throughout the Pacific Northwest and the Rockies. Very few of those small timber mills exist today. The large timber harvest had an upside. The public had a steady supply of inexpensive lumber for home building and acquiring a piece of the American dream. They also had ready access to their national forest lands through the network of roads. The post war increase in outdoor recreation encouraged the Forest Service to build campgrounds and trails – another great way to spend public money. National forest recreation visitation increased from about 5 million in the early 1920s to 18 million in 1946, 93 million in 1960, and 233 million in 1975.176 By 2009 over 173 million people made recreational visits to national forests.177 Today, about 150 million people visit their national forest each year.178 The boom in the outdoor recreation industry and its effects on the modern western economies will discussed in a later chapter. Some Forest Service managers understood the effects of how fast they were cutting forests and how it would impact non timber constituencies. The Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960 gave the Forest Service discretionary authority to manage national forests “for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes” and the agency attempted to reduce harvest levels following its passage.179 The timber industry pushed back 175 Freudenburg, W. R. (1992). Addictive economies: extractive industries and vulnerable localities in a changing world economy 1. Rural Sociology, 57(3), 305-332. 176 MacCleery, D. (2008). Re-inventing the United States Forest Service: evolution from custodial management, to production forestry, to ecosystem management. Reinventing forestry agencies: experiences of institutional restructuring in Asia and the Pacific. RAP Publication (FAO), Bangkok, Thailand, 45-77. 177 Donovan, G. H., Cerveny, L. K., & Gatziolis, D. (2016). If you build it, will they come?. Forest Policy and Economics, 62, 135-140. 178 Bowker, J. M., Askew, A. E., Landry, C. E., Hedges, A., & English, D. B. Wilderness Use, Users, Preferences, and Values from 2005 to 2014: A Case Study Using Forest Service National Visitor Use Monitoring Data. A Perpetual Flow of Benefits: Wilderness Economic Values in an Evolving, Multicultural Society, 77. 179 Public Law 86-517 claiming a loss of jobs and that threatened the economic stability of rural communities and of course their own bottom line. Environmentalists pushed the agency to change how they did business, especially to curtail timber harvest methods that damaged forest ecosystems. The most ecologically serious of timber harvest is the practice of clear cutting where all trees were cut down even if they have little to no value in the market. The result is that the soil is exposed to the elements and erosion. Brush and slash, the leavings of the harvest, were often burned so the land could be more easily replanted with mono crops of marketable timber species thereby reducing biodiversity and forest resilience. This controversy would eventually result in the passage of the National Forest Management Act of 1976 (NFMA). The NFMA outlined management of national forest lands for increased participation of the public in national forest planning and decision making as well as the development of highly detailed planning processes for national forests.180 The agency shifted from locally oriented planning based on the needs of local communities and timber for local mills to a highly centralized, data rich decision-making environment. The Forest Service bureaucracy now resembled that of the military where data collected at the forest level made its way upward to be included in forest plans, regional plans, and eventually the budget request that went to Congress. The agency became particularly adept at using GIS mapping and remote sensing technology to understand their resource base. They would use that data and ever-increasing computing power to build models that allowed the agency to supposedly achieve multiple objectives on the forest – so-called linear programming models. Because the agency had a culture of counting trees, they began to count everything. Using data from the forest stands, habitat needs of game and nongame animals as well as their numbers, river flow data, recreation use and campground visit data, and multiple other data sets in these models enabled forest planners to quantify multiple resource tradeoffs. Of course, as they did so each constituency had a greater stake in the outcome and timber harvests became even more politically contentious. By the 1990s, the workforce of the Forest Service had diversified. More women had signed on with the agency and so too had the diversity of scientists. Wilderness and recreation managers were larger part of the management pool. Wildlife science within the agency was on 180 Fedkiw, J. (1998). Managing multiple uses on National Forests, 1905-1995: A 90-year learning experience and it isn't finished yet (Vol. 628). USDA Forest Service. the rise and many Forest Service studies shed new light on the ecological values of roadless areas and the damaging effects of roads on water quality, fish habitat, and biological diversity. In the face of public opposition to perceived subsidized logging of public lands Congress became increasingly reluctant to fund additional road construction. In January 1998, barely a year after starting his job, the 14th Chief of the United States Forest Service, Mike Dombeck, proposed a moratorium on new roads in many national forest roadless areas. For the most part though, the Forest Service was still busy cutting timber, building roads, and appeasing the timber industry. Environmentalists were also busy one two fronts – the first legislative, the second economic. As early as 1949, Howard Zahniser, a reporter who worked 12 years for the Fish & Wildlife Service in the information division, presented an idea for federal wilderness legislation. The support for wilderness had been around several decades but now, here was someone in the resource bureaucracy who could bend the ear of members of Congress. His idea was to establish a national wilderness system and identify additional appropriate areas as they emerged. In 1955, drafts of a bill were circulated in Congress. At around the same time the Forest Service was supporting the emergent multiple use conversion probably to fend off wilderness legislation. After passage of the Multiple Use, Sustained Yield Act in 1960, some in the agency argued that since wilderness was one of the many multiple uses allowed in the act, there was no sense in passing redundant legislation. That changed in 1964. The Wilderness Act was first in a series of “legislative overlays” - laws passed by Congress that constrained management of the national forests.181 The Wilderness Act created a new designation of land management and the following year a Land and Water Conservation Fund was established in 1965.182 Financed by oil revenues, the LWCF was used to purchase land, water, and easements for recreation and the protection of natural areas. The National Trails System Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act followed in 1968. The Endangered Species Act followed in 1973. These designations enjoyed wide public support from recreationists and preservationists alike. 181 Keiter, 1989 182 Vincent, C. H., & Resources, Science, and Industry Division. (2006, July). Land and water conservation fund: Overview, funding history, and current issues. Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. The “overlay acts” created separate systems within which wilderness, rivers, and trails with outstanding natural, scenic, recreational, geological, cultural, historical, or other values could be designated by Congress into the national system of public lands management. Once these protective actions were specified, often after being proposed for such designations by the Forest Service itself, the agency had to integrate the new designation into their forest plans.183 Sometimes this would affect the amount of timber available for harvest, so such designations were often opposed by the timber industry and residents of small towns that depended on industry jobs. “Wilderness, Land of No Use” bumper stickers were commonplace in places like Darby, MT and Yellowpine, ID.184 On the economic front some environmental groups began looking into Forest Service budgets to understand agency incentives, if not their arcane accounting practices. One such activist was Oregon policy analyst Randal O’Toole. Working for the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, he took on an examination of timber sales across several national forests and found that in many cases costs exceeded revenues to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars to the taxpayer.185 Agency incentives seemed to O’Toole to have more to do with power and influence in the Washington budget process than good forest policy. O’Toole’s understanding of budgeting clearly articulated some “hidden” incentives in the agency budget. Here is one example of how a timber sale could be designed to spend more money than it brought in. In 1916 and 1930 Congress set up a couple of trust funds for the Forest Service. Normally, a trust is set up to hold onto assets until the recipient is qualified to receive them. Until that time a neutral third party manages the fund. Congress bypassed the third party and simply created a way for the Forest Service to generate discretionary revenue from timber sales and bank it for a rainy day. The trust is not a trust at all, it is a money laundering scheme that 183 Council, D. P. (1988). Outdoor Recreation in a Nation of Communities: Action Plan for Americans Outdoors: a Report of the Task Force on Outdoor Recreation Resources and Opportunities to the Domestic Policy Council. Task Force. 184 Of course, exactly the same bumper sticker could imply support for wilderness as land of no use which was exactly the point of the Wilderness Act. 185 O'Toole, R. (1987). Reforming the forest service. Colum. J. Envtl. L., 13, 299. removes Congressional oversight for spending public dollars and shifts the spending to local forest supervisors. The Brush Disposal Fund was set up in 1916 to provide money to clean up or burn excess tree parts after logging referred to as “brush” or “slash”. The fund is paid by the logging contractor on top of the cost of the timber sale. The funds are managed by local forest managers so over time, they divert the money away from the disposal of brush to bureaucratic overhead – such as computers, salaries, and rent. One audit showed that nearly 35% of brush disposal funds were spent on non-brush related activities.186 Having such a convenient slush fund shifts a good deal of autonomy to the supervisor and away from the regional office. Likewise, the Knutson-Vandenberg Trust Fund (K-V Fund), passed in 1930, set up discretionary revenues from timber sales to finance forest reforestation and non-commercial thinning operations. It was later amended to allow for renewable resource management such as improvements to wildlife habitat, range improvement, and watershed projects. K-V funds are like overhead – they cover the costs of operation above and beyond direct revenues. Here is the problem. First, these funds are public revenues not subject to Congressional or public oversight; they are part of the fiefdom of the forest manager. Second, they provide what economists call a “perverse incentive”. Instead of selling the “right” amount of timber for a given forest, a manager has an incentive to oversell because it benefits his local forest budget by pumping money into the fiefdom’s books. If in a bureaucracy the budget is the measure of performance, spending these discretionary funds on “forest improvements” enhances the career of the supervisor while it may or may not enhance the qualities of the forest. The National Forest Management Act of 1976 and the move toward intensive forest planning was an attempt to change these practices but because the institutional incentives remained little changed except that below cost timber sales were mostly phased out. 186 Alston, R. M. (1988). Reforming the Forest Service. The Wilderness Act and the ESA Two of the overlay acts are particularly important to Grizzly bear recovery – the Wilderness Act (1964) and the Endangered Species Act (1973). Both laws would forever change the physical and management landscape of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The formal definition of wilderness is “… recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”.187 For the Forest Service this presented a problem. Whereas timber is quantifiable and tangible, and managers can be evaluated on how much they cut, wilderness is a place where no permanent trace is permissible. If wilderness systems can change over time in their own way, free, as much as possible, from human manipulation, what is a manager to do and how are they to be evaluated? How does the agency spend money on “non-management”? Even more of a problem – if the wilderness system was to expand, how would they do that and how would that affect timber production, the primary way the Forest Service justified its budget? It took at least a decade for the Forest Service to learn to manage wilderness and to train wilderness managers. In the late 1960s political scientist Herbert Kaufman published The Forest Ranger.188 He describes a homogenous agency culture based on timber management with pretense to other concerns such as fisheries, wildlife, watershed, and recreation. He explains it by pointing out most forest managers were products of one of the 27 forestry schools dominated by conservative, white, middle class, males who all rose through the ranks by doing the same job, that is: cutting timber. The administrative hierarchy did not encourage new thinking while encouraging conformity. Further, the agency represented the classic “iron triangle” often cited by political economists who describe a close relationship between bureaucratic agencies, special interest lobbying organizations, and the legislative committees or subcommittees with jurisdictional (i.e. budgetary) authority. In the case of the Forest Service the timber industry lobby and local Chambers of Commerce exerts influence with elected officials and forest managers from the regional level up through cabinet level positions in Washington DC. In the case of wilderness there were few in the agency who would advocate wilderness management 187 McCloskey, M. (1965). Wilderness Act of 1964: Its Background and Meaning, The. Or. L. Rev., 45, 288. 188 Kaufman, H. (2006). The forest ranger: A study in administrative behavior. Resources for the Future over timber. Certainly, the timber lobby had no interest in withdrawing potentially profitable forestland from production. Elected officials from Congress to county commissioners were more interested in local jobs than the few recreationists who would find their way into remote undeveloped wilderness areas. The relationship works because the interests of the three parties converge – Congress would give the Forest Service money for timber sales, the Forest Service would sell timber, and the industry would buy both timber and elected members of Congress. Yet, there were people in the agency who did advocate for wilderness. Implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act discussed above created demand for new types of employees who could assess impacts and long-term consequences of road building and clear cuts on wildlife, watersheds, recreation, and fisheries.189 In response, they hired wildlife biologists, hydrologists, recreation experts, economists, archaeologists, and sociologists—colloquially known as: “the ologists”. Their willingness to confront the old-guard forester culture earned them the label “combatologists”.190 The National Forest Management Act and NEPA gave a legitimating voice to the rapidly evolving ecological sciences. They could argue, for example, that some species did well at the forest edge as created by clear cuts, but others did well in preserved old growth forests as found in many wilderness areas.191 Fire played a natural and necessary function in many forests and increased forest edge and diversified the ecological makeup of forest lands. Economists could point to new use studies on wilderness and the impact on rural communities.192 Notably, there were many studies that associated industrial forest practices with impacts on grizzly bears. 189 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) [42 U.S.C. §4321 et seq. (1969)] was written to establish processes for protecting our environment prior to undertaking any major federal government action that significantly affects the environment. NEPA requirements are invoked when airports, buildings, military complexes, highways, parkland purchases, forest management and other federal activities are proposed. Environmental Assessments (EAs) and Environmental Impact Statements (EISs), which are assessments are required from all Federal agencies and are the most visible NEPA requirements. 190 Lewis, J. G. (2005). The Forest Service and the greatest good: A centennial history. 191 Keenan, R. J., & Kimmins, J. P. (1993). The ecological effects of clear-cutting. Environmental Reviews, 1(2), 121-144. 192 Rudzitis, G. (1999). Amenities increasingly draw people to the rural west. Rural America/rural development Perspectives, 14(2221-2019-2682), 9-13. Among these were reports on timber harvest and oil exploration impacts on bears and their habitat needs.193 The presence of the “ologists” and their science-based policy helped create a new era of forestry within the agency. There was a growing response among some supervisors that large areas of forest should remain undisturbed if the biological legacy of the Service was to remain intact. Wilderness could be a way to accomplish that. Wilderness and wilderness recreation captured the public mind in the 1970s and visits to particularly high profile areas increased rapidly. Wilderness visitors to places like the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana and the Frank Church-River of No Return wilderness in Idaho are representative of the level of visitation high quality public land management can attract. Each of the three areas generate tens of millions of dollars for local state economies and act as protective reservoirs for a wide array of plants and animals. Ten distinct National Wilderness Areas have been established within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem since 1966. All are home to the Grizzly bear. The wilderness system was not static. The Wilderness Act provided for an evaluation of potential wilderness lands within ten years of passage. The draft Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE) report was completed in 1972 and evaluated 55.9 million acres of land and 1,449 roadless areas for possible inclusion into the National Wilderness Preservation System. 193 McLellan, B. N., & Mace, R. D. (1985). Behaviour of Grizzly Bears in Response to Roads, Seismic Activity and People. Canadian Border Grizzly Project. Aune, K. E. (1994). Comparative ecology of black and grizzly bears on the Rocky Mountain Front, Montana. Bears: Their Biology and Management, 365-374. Elgmork, K. (1978). Human impact on a brown bear population (Ursus arctos L.). Biological Conservation, 13(2), 81-103. Harding, L., & Nagy, J. A. (1980). Responses of grizzly bears to hydrocarbon exploration on Richards Island, Northwest Territories, Canada. Bears: Their Biology and Management, 277-280. Zager, P. E., & Jonkel, C. J. (1983). Managing grizzly bear habitat in the northern Rocky Mountains. Journal of Forestry, 81(8), 524-536. Craighead, 1980 Mattson, D. J., Blanchard, B. M., & Knight, R. R. (1992). Yellowstone grizzly bear mortality, human habituation, and whitebark pine seed crops. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 432-442. Doak, D. F. (1995). Source‐sink models and the problem of habitat degradation: general models and applications to the Yellowstone grizzly. Conservation Biology, 9(6), 1370-1379. The final report was published in 1973, with 274 of the roadless areas (12.3 million acres) selected for possible wilderness designation by Congress. The decision was a firestorm of conflict between industry and environmentalists with the Forest Service in the middle. In the wake of numerous lawsuits another review was undertaken (RARE II) and completed in 1979 and identified 2,919 areas (62 million acres) for review. The agency recommended that 15 million acres be added to the wilderness system. Congress added some of the land on a state-by- state basis rather than an omnibus act. In particularly contentious instances (i.e. Alaska, Montana and Idaho) “wilderness study areas” were designated and managed as wilderness until political compromise can be achieved. In the case of some Montana wilderness study areas the wait for formal designation has gone on for over four decades.194195 The problem is that elected politicians change along with the public land agenda. Currently, given the swing toward solid red state status, there is little support for more wilderness in Montana or Idaho. Finally, schools of forestry that had previously focused on training students in timber production, had time to develop methods and curriculum for wilderness management. A key research question was if wilderness was a place of no permanent human impact, then how does one study and evaluate its management? One theme that emerged was the determination of the recreational carrying capacity of a resource as a goal for wilderness managers. The idea made sense but now the question was how to measure it. Researchers looked at minimizing both the human footprint as well as the experiential one for visitors to help preserve the natural state of a landscape. Approaches to operationalize (and minimize) the human footprint ranged from local scale impacts (i.e. campsites) to larger contexts such as trails and to large scale thinking about overall carrying capacity of a resource or “limits of acceptable change”.196 The other area of 194 The wilderness drama is complex. The best reference for understanding the process, management, and politics can be found in: Nie, M., & Barns, C. (2014). The fiftieth anniversary of the Wilderness Act: The next Chapterer in wilderness designation, politics, and management. Ariz. J. Envtl. L. & Pol'y, 5, 237. 196 Cole, D. N. (1981). Managing ecological impacts at wilderness campsites: an evaluation of techniques. Journal of Forestry, 79(2), 86-89. Hall, C. N., & Kuss, F. R. (1989). Vegetation alteration along trails in Shenandoah National park, Virginia. Biological conservation, 48(3), 211-227. Cole, D. N. (1990). Ecological impacts of wilderness recreation and their management (pp. 425-466). North American Press. impact research focused on the psychological. Here, limits of acceptable change included the aesthetics of overcrowding including visual and sound cues of sharing the wilderness experience with others.197 The Forest Service finally had all the pieces in place to effectively manage wilderness. They had a cadre of scientists rich with data from multiple disciplines, they had forest managers who could see it was in the agency’s interest to learn to manage wilderness, they had sound data on the wilderness resource and how much they could “produce”, and they had a growing constituency for wilderness and wilderness recreation. The agency responded by slowly increasing wilderness staffing on all 397 national forest wilderness units and increasing funding for wilderness management. As the Forest Service became more attentive to the statutory categories that emphasized protection of natural values, recreation, and other uses, and which limit or prohibit commodity production, the scene was set for a cultural shift in within the agency. It would be the Endangered Species Act that would accelerate it. The Endangered Species Act More than any other law, the Endangered Species Act is the genesis of the move to ecosystem level management and away from the dominance of timber production on the national forests. Protection of species with large home ranges like the Yellowstone grizzly bear and the Grey wolf virtually mandates an ecosystem approach involving assessments at the scale of multi- ownerships and jurisdictions. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 provided a statutory mandate and framework for protecting species in jeopardy.198 It prohibited federal agencies from carrying out actions that might negatively affect a species listed as threatened or endangered. The ESA is Roggenbuck, J. W., Williams, D. R., & Watson, A. E. (1993). Defining acceptable conditions in wilderness. Environmental Management, 17, 187-197. Stankey, G. H., D. N. Cole, R. C. Lucas, M. E. Petersen and S. S. Frissell (1985). "The limits of acceptable change (LAC) system for wilderness planning." The limits of acceptable change (LAC) system for wilderness planning.(INT-176). 197 Brown D. L. Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan January 29 1982 U. S. F. a. W. Service Shelby, B., & Harris, R. (1985). Comparing methods for determining visitor evaluations of ecological impacts: Site visits, photographs, and written descriptions. Journal of leisure research, 17(1), 57-67. 198 ESA; 16 U.S.C. § 1531 et seq. administered primarily by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) – part of the Department of the Interior. In the case of Grizzly bears the National Park Service was enlisted as a partner in recovery along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the U.S. Forest Service, the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribal Fish and Game Department, and the States of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Such partnerships are normal procedure for the recovery of species that have wide ranges and reside on multiple jurisdictions. The Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Nixon in 1973. The purpose of the Act was to “protect and recover imperiled species and the ecosystems upon which they depend”. The ESA makes provision for two protective classifications: threatened and endangered. A threatened species is one that is “likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range." The Act defines "endangered” as "any species which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range." Within the provisions of the Act, threatened status provides for slightly more flexibility and agency discretion than endangered status. This frame for the ESA is known as the “jeopardy standard” where only those species most at risk are afforded protection.199 If a plant or animal lands on the list of endangered species it is already in deep trouble. Likely, the species in question is in direct conflict with ongoing human actions like ranching, agriculture, oil and gas development, mining, or development in other words – the vested interests that caused the plant or animal to lose viable habitat. The game is heavily weighted in favor of commodity development. Each species listed for protection under the ESA is subject to an analysis of why the species is at risk. This may include habitat destruction or modification, overutilization (overharvest), disease or predation, or inadequate regulatory mechanisms (lack of enforcement of existing harvest laws). Identification of the reasons why the species is in decline helps direct the recovery process but most of the time it comes down to devising a plan to identify, preserve, recover or mitigate the loss of habitat. Habitat recovery plans are collaborative efforts between U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists with the assistance of species experts, other land management agencies, NGOs, and researchers. Once critical habitat is identified, a plan is designed to recover the population. Recovery plans may include collaboration with private landowners, trans locating populations to formerly 199 Rohlf, D. J. (2001). Jeopardy Under the Endangered Species Act: Playing a Game Protected Species Can't Win. Washburn lJ, 41, 114. occupied habitat, captive breeding programs, and land acquisition for use as habitat. All have been used with success to both delist species and to prevent extinction.200 The Act allows for some discretion for management of listed species and one feature of the ESA is particularly relevant for our purposes. Under section 4(d), threatened (not endangered) species may be managed under regulation deemed “necessary and advisable to provide for the conservation of threatened species”. One of these regulations is the provision for Distinct Population Segments (DPS). When the original Endangered Species Act was passed a species was ‘‘any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants and any other group of fish or wildlife of the same species or smaller taxa in common spatial arrangement that interbreed when mature’’ (ESA, Section 3(15)). This was changed in 1978 to redefine a species as ‘‘any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants, and any distinct population segment of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature’’ (ESA, Section 4). This seemingly small redefinition had consequences on how the Endangered Species Act would be implemented. The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the two agencies with enforcement authority of the Endangered Species Act, focused on geographical distribution and genetic diversity within the species and defined DPS as a population that is ‘‘reproductively isolated’’ from other populations and one that is an ‘‘important component of the evolutionary legacy of the species”.201 In 2005, on the run up to delisting the Yellowstone grizzly bear, the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service proposed establishing a DPS for grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. This would enable them to take Yellowstone population of bears off the Endangered Species Act list and claim a significant political and conservation victory. They argued that the 200 An effective understanding of the Endangered Species Act is found in: Czech, B., & Krausman, P. R. (2001). The endangered species act: history, conservation biology, and public policy. JHU Press, Baier, L. E. (2023). The Codex of the Endangered Species Act: The First Fifty Years. Rowman & Littlefield, and Irvin, W. R. (2010). Endangered Species Act: Law, Policy, and Perspectives. American Bar Association. 201 Rosen, T. (2007). The Endangered Species Act and the distinct population segment policy. Ursus, 18(1), 109-116. Keiter, 2022 Yellowstone population was both discrete from other populations and their genetic legacy was not important to the overall stock of bears in the lower 48 states. On March 22, 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Yellowstone Distinct Population Segment (DPS) of grizzly bears to be a fully recovered population no longer meeting the ESA’s definition of threatened or endangered. They cited population growth between 4 and 7 percent annually from as low as 136 individuals when listed in 1975 to more than 500 animals as of 2006 and expansion of their range by 48 percent since 1970.202 The arguments against the DPS were challenged by environmental groups on the grounds that the Yellowstone population is not unconnected from other populations in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem, the Cabinet-Yaak and Selkirk ecosystems and the Selway- Bitterroot in Idaho. In fact, the Yellowstone population is a key source for repopulating those areas and Yellowstone bears have been documented migrating to those areas. On September 21, 2009, the Federal District Court in Missoula issued an opinion that vacated the delisting decision so the bear was once again on the Endangered Species Act list. The Bush administration appealed but lost again on the DPS designation. The DPS strategy would return a few years later. Listing under the provisions of the ESA can accomplish more that habitat restoration. The cultural bias in favor of the Yellowstone grizzly bear shifted dramatically in several ways in the years since listing and likely in part because of it. During the time of the 1967 deaths of Julie Helgeson and Michele Koons in Glacier and later, the death of Harry Walker in 1972 in Yellowstone, it was easy to find people who would take their revenge on bears. The purge of predators in the national parks is well documented in Yosemite and other California national parks as well as Yellowstone.203 Much of this was in reaction to the fear we all hold of things 202 https://www.fws.gov/species/grizzly-bear-ursus-arctos-horribilis 203 Rowell, G. A. (1974). Killing and Mistreating of National‐Park Bears. The New York Times March 23 https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/23/archives/killing-and-mistreating-of-nationalpark-bears.html Smith, J. F. (2016). Engineering eden: The true story of a violent death, a trial, and the fight over controlling nature. Crown. Clark, T., Rutherford, M., & Casey, D. (Eds.). (2013). Coexisting with large carnivores: Lessons from Greater Yellowstone. Island Press. Knibb, D. G. (2008). Grizzly Wars: The Public Fight Over the Great Bear (p. 67). Eastern Washington University Press. that can kill us. A good deal of the antipathy towards bears was also to protect grazing interests on public lands. If a bear maimed or killed someone it was invariably destroyed. Somewhere along the way, as the public learned more about bears – what they ate, how they lived, and their natural intelligence, people began to change their view of the bears. Even after attacks, and sometimes even deaths, it was increasingly rare to find someone who wanted the bear killed.204 That is not to say lawsuits are not filed against public lands agencies (i.e. Martin v. United States, and Francis v. State of Utah 2010) but that is largely in response to perceived agency failure and not the fault of the animal.205 The increased attention ESA listing brings to an animal seems to have a way of softening our attitude toward it. 204 The same is not true at the state level where several western states (i.e. New Mexico) have mandatory kill laws in effect for animals that attack humans. 205 392 F. Supp. 243 (C.D. Cal. 1975) 248 P.3d 44 or 2010 UT 62 Chapter 7 A new view of public lands in GYE When bears were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act the “bear problem” was defined and, within the confines of the Endangered Species Act, has been mostly solved. After 40 years of hard work by dedicated scientists and many hours invested by activists the bear will be delisted at some point in the near future. A cynical person could be excused for asking “is this all we get, more bears?”. Depending on your point of view the answer to that question is a very positive or very negative YES! (and no). There is no doubt living with large predators comes with real costs. Even the most ardent supporter of wilderness and wild animals must admit there is a level of stress associated with recreating or living in bear country. Thanks to legislation like the Wilderness Act and the Endangered Species Act we can enjoy the luxury of having more bears on the landscape and so are forced to come to terms with that reality. Most bear attacks result from individuals, often archery hunters, moving quietly through the woods and accidently surprising a bear. Campers in Yellowstone National Park have been attacked in their tent (Soda Butte campground in Lamar Valley, 2010) and on the trail (Mary Mountain Trail in Hayden Valley, 2011) but these incidents are rare. Since 1980, there have been 34 human injuries caused by grizzly bears in the Yellowstone backcountry: an average of one per year.206 Considering the numbers of hikers, mountain bikers, trail runners, park visitors, hunters, and people working in the countryside, the chances of a bear encounter remains exceedingly small. In fact, measured as a percentage of the increased numbers of forest visitors, the incidence of accidents is decreasing. Fortunately, most human/bear encounters end well for both the bear and human, and usually, someone goes home with a terrific story to tell about their visit to Yellowstone country. A bear encounter is a special experience. Attacks on humans, of course, get the most attention but there are other costs as well. Raising livestock in the presence of bears (and wolves) requires more time and vigilance where “riding herd” takes on real meaning in terms of labor and logistics. The presence of a herder minimizes potential conflict. The reality is that predator fatalities account for a tiny percentage (@1%) of total cattle and sheep losses in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.207 By far the biggest killer of livestock is weather. But symbols are important, and a bloody lamb carcass will always get more media attention than a flock of frozen sheep. More bears have meant we need to step up our game to avoid encounters. When the park dumps closed in 1970, Superintendent Bob Barbee instituted a new approach to deny bears access to human food – design and use bear proof garbage containers. The logic was, if bears were not rewarded with food, they would quit looking. The park service worked on multiple designs for public and private garbage containers as well as dumpsters. Park administration replaced all the containers in park facilities and convinced the gateway communities around the park to do the same. They also started an education campaign to keep camps clean and to place 206 https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/injuries.htm 207 U.S. Department of Agriculture-Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. "Sheep and Lamb Predator and Nonpredator Death Loss in the United States." http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/sgdl/sgdl-05-27-2010.pdf (2015) Servheen, C., (2014) Livestock Losses and Grizzly Bears: Perspectives on Livestock Loss and Risks, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. any available food in bear proof lockers that now ubiquitous in nearly all campgrounds in the region. Many residents in rural subdivisions take similar precautions. We take in our bird feeders in the Fall and we keep our BBQ grills clean and in safe storage. Private orchards are favorite targets of bears and most of the time it is easier to just share. Some rural municipalities in the region provide bear proof trash containers and either fence the trash dumps or ship it out of the reach of bears. All of these are costs that accrue to residents and local governments. Living with a large, incredibly smart omnivore takes effort. To focus purely on the costs of bear recovery however misses an extremely important point – in multiple ways we are directly better off with bears than without. Many thousands of eloquent words have been and will be written about the virtues of living with bears. Doug Peacock, Frank Craighead, Thomas McNamee, Scott McMillan, Bill Schneider, and others have written of the excitement of living and being in bear country.208 These are people who have spent quality time in the presence of bears. Anyone who has seen a bear in the wild forever remembers the combination of excitement, fear, anticipation, the primal closeness to nature. For some, the experience is addictive, and they return to the park year after year for another glimpse of true wildness. Bear season in Yellowstone means bear viewing season. Critics of the ESA and bear recovery predicted that local economies would suffer as land use (logging) shifted in favor of the bear. It was, and still is, easy to find a county commissioner, state legislator, or governor of a western state complain that conservation costs jobs. Nothing is further from the truth where virtually every local and the regional economy has seen steady growth in spite of listing bears and wolves and setting aside habitat for them.209 It is statistically impossible to say bear conservation has caused this spike in prosperity (and it probably hasn’t), but it is easy to see that the ESA and the Wilderness Act did not foreclose an increase in human population, wealth, financial and social capital and all the other variables that leave us better off. There is no inherent tradeoff between jobs and the environment. In fact the opposite is true. 208 Here is a short list: Peacock: Grizzly Years/The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears, McNamee: The Grizzly Bear, McMillan: Mark of the Grizzly, Schneider: Where the Grizzly Walks: The Future of the Great Bear, Craighead: The Track of the Grizzly. 209 Johnson, J. (2020). Grizzly bear restoration and economic restructuring in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. In Parks Stewardship Forum (Vol. 36, No. 3). In most instances, social values and conservation science share the same goals for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The public lands agencies are generally honest brokers in the policy of natural resource management for the region as they struggle to fulfill their agency mission. The source of policy conflict is not when we do not know enough about the ecology of the region; the problem is that we often do not know enough about human values with respect to ecological science of complex ecosystems. The transition from commodity driven economies toward a system that incorporates conservation happened due to top-down legislation from Washington DC, but it was going to happen anyway. The cultural and demographic shifts that followed technological and legal transformations in conservation were unstoppable. More people flocked to rural places like the GYE because they wanted a different life than they could find in the city. But, even as these improvements to our lives left most of us better off, not all good things go together. A short lesson in amenity economies With its open spaces, mountains, and wild rivers, the American West has always attracted people as a place to have an adventure or sight see the spectacular western landscape. Early visionaries saw the potential for an interesting life guiding in the Tetons or on the Main Salmon River in Idaho. A few passionate fishermen discovered Montana rivers early on and, like Dan Bailey and Bud Lilly, helped publicize the remarkable GYE fishery. For most business owners it was tough going for a few decades but eventually the region was “discovered” by all manner of would-be residents. In the language of economics, they and those that followed are attracted by natural amenities – nature as a people magnet. Amenities are important to economists, but they have had a difficult time assimilating those grounded in nature into their economic theory. The problem was that they fully understood the draw of good jobs, low taxes, and high wages – the kind of economic amenity that is relatively easy to quantify. The standard economic models said that people naturally flock to places with strong economies where they can use their skills to get ahead, buy a house, and make a life.210 210 Stankey, 1985. Economists were less able to account for the notion that economic well-being of people derives not only from quantitatively expanding commercial business activity but from economic and noneconomic qualities that flow from the natural and social environment. It was not that they did not believe noneconomic attributes were not important to location decisions, it was that they could not easily count them. To a traditional economist if a variable cannot be counted it is assumed away. Tom Powers thought otherwise. Thomas Michal Powers fit right in at the University of Montana in Missoula, a relatively small liberal college town squarely seated on the banks of the Clark Fork River at the base of the Rattlesnake mountains. When he arrived in 1968 his hair was pulled back into a ponytail that reached to the middle of his back. He brought, with his economics PhD from Princeton, some ideas about the role of nature and the environment, and the rational world of economics.211 His idea was that some people will make a voluntary rational decision to migrate toward quality of life even if it costs them in real terms (i.e. money). In other words, he thought consumer demand for oikos is real and could be accounted for. He saw that some people considered the tradeoffs between a high wage against a life lived on or near romance lands and many choose romance. At that time that decision carried a real and sometimes costly trade off. The rural west was not steeped in economic prosperity. It was still very much a rural economy in every sense of the word. Ruralness meant proximity to raw materials but not finished goods, cheap but often unskilled labor, high shipping costs, distance to developed markets, and poor communication infrastructure. If you were interested in moving to a place like the GYE you had better bring your own nest egg, a bundle of economic survival skills, and be prepared to be less well off financially than if you had stayed in Seattle or Cleveland. That began to change and around the same time that John Denver celebrated the environment, and legal protection for nature was institutionalized, people began moving to the Rocky Mountains. Apparently, Denver’s message was having its effect. Powers, and others, began to document those shifts and they were finding that rural economies were less and less economic backwaters and more and more dynamic 211 Power, T. M. (2020). The economic value of the quality of life. Routledge. economic engines powered by noneconomic forms of capital.212 The old west was giving way to a new western economy. The economic base was about to shift. Traditionally, rural economies depend on a tangible economic base on which to build a community. In Butte, for example, the Berkeley Pit formed the backbone of an economy since 1864 when copper was discovered in the Asteroid Mine. Mining, processing, logging for mine timbers all created a high demand for labor. General stores, boarding houses, whore houses, bars, churches, and public infrastructure followed until, during its peak, Butte supported a population of nearly 100,000 in 1917.213 The workings of the extractive base theory requires that mines, farms, or timber companies export their goods to production facilities where value is added; that money is usually banked with large financial institutions in New York or Chicago. Minerals are processed into copper wire or lead for batteries, grain is ground into flour and baked into bread and cereal, logs are turned into 2x4s to build houses but very little of this value added production takes place in rural communities. In return, money flows in from the external markets for raw goods and then churns around in the local economy. The logger is paid, buys a truck, food, clothes, etc. You get the idea. This internal flow is called the multiplier effect; the longer the money circulates in the local economy the larger the multiplier. The community thrives but the bulk of the profits for finished goods resides elsewhere. When the Butte mine and operations shut down in 1985 the economy tanked. Once the base was lost the city could not sustain itself. The story is the same for most commodity economies. When prices fall or the same product can be produced elsewhere for less, the foundation of the economy and community is at risk. The ghost towns up and down the Rockies are testament to the fragility of building an economy on a single base – it is not to say it cannot be done but such places are notoriously non resilient to external shocks. Power described a different version of the rural economy in the GYE. The one he saw emerging in places like Livingston and Bozeman, Montana, Rexburg and Driggs, Idaho, and Pinedale, WY had no obvious base.214 There may be some small-scale extractive activity, but it 212 Bourdieu, P. (2011). The forms of capital.(1986). Cultural theory: An anthology, 1(81-93), 949. 213 Punke, M. (2013). Fire and brimstone: the North Butte mining disaster of 1917. Hachette Books. 214 Power, T. M., & Barrett, R. (2001). Post-cowboy economics: Pay and prosperity in the new American west. Island Press. existed side by side with a log home builder, a fly-fishing shop, and the ubiquitous downtown coffee shop or microbrewery. He noticed other businesses springing up. Artists sold their work on Main Street but also in boutiques located elsewhere like San Francisco and Denver. Architects designed ever larger homes for retirees attracted to the skiing or fishing; and new creative builders constructed them. Seated in the coffee shop were people working away on laptops connected to the world via the ever-expanding internet. Some worked for environmental nonprofits whose mission was to save the very place where they lived and the qualities that attracted them. Still others traded stocks or managed investment portfolios for wealthy individuals who lived in urban centers, or locally, it did not matter. It seemed that wherever he looked, he saw an economy made up of many people doing many different things and making a living doing them. Retirement savings and local entrepreneurs were increasingly important as sources of local income in addition to the traditional way the community made a living. Local economies up and down the Rockies were increasingly diversified both in terms of the range of economic activity and the sources of income. Retirees, tourists, and locals could find good quality food at locally owned restaurants, employ local craftsmen, and buy what they needed at locally owned shops The same multiplier effect circulated money through town but now, raw materials were not exported to distant markets and dependent on global prices rather, local money circulated locally for a longer period as local furniture makers provided the new homeowners with unique products produced nearby. Growth generated its own demand for local goods and services. The reason for this transformation is easy to understand. Environmental quality attracts people who value a clean environment, rural living, and high-quality outdoor recreation as opposed to living in the urban jungle. Communities that possess the “amenity package” have less unemployment, rising home prices, and, their Main Street flourishes with new businesses. Interesting people move into town and bring with them new ideas and energy, social and financial connections, and high levels of education. Communities that continued to try to exploit commodity driven wealth find that their economic destiny is not theirs to control. Simply stabilizing the local economy to insulate it from global shocks requires subsidies by land management agencies in the form of below cost timber sales, an expanded Farm Bill, and continued use of public lands for private wealth creation. Some of these activities run up against the maintenance of environmental quality that the newcomers desired. This could get messy, and it did, but that story is for later. The essential elements of the new western economy are that amenities are an initial draw for growth, but other attributes reinforce the attractiveness of rural communities. In order to thrive there must be good schools, recreation infrastructure, access to health care, transportation infrastructure, and cultural and artistic services. Employment growth in the new west amenity communities is more likely related to these man-made amenities than the suite of natural amenities but they are complementary. Perhaps most important is a high functioning airport with connections to the two coasts. Large urban centers are still where the real action is if you want to work remotely or depend on a steady stream of tourists arriving easily. It is difficult to play host to people who demand quality if the human and built infrastructure is not up to scratch. Quality attracts quality. The theme of quality carries over to natural amenities. Those places that preserved their version of nature enjoy an advantage over those degraded by past commodity development. Some of this is luck. Places with a history of sludge are in a more difficult competitive position that those who escaped that era’s legacy of pollution. With help from programs like the Superfund program though, many places have recovered their natural beauty. Water pollution can be mitigated, streams restored, clear cuts grow back. Nature can be restored, and local economies are better off for it. For the most part the citizens of the new west embrace the values represented by having wild bears on the landscape – open space, undisturbed lands, wildness. Bears are part of the amenity package and exemplify how we feel about the environment. Still, there are cowardly politicians that will look to exploit social divides over bears, wolves, wilderness, and regulation of commodity production. They do no favors for amenity economies and the people who live there. Not all good things go together The ESA and the other environmental legislation of the 1970s had a profound influence on the use and management of both federal and non-federal lands in the Greater Yellowstone. Public and private land in the region is in better condition had laws not been passed that protected ecological processes, viewsheds, and ecosystem services. Wildlife populations across the region are healthy with only a few species of concern. Two predators - wolverines and lynx top the list; see the pattern here? Human communities in the region are doing well. Residents have more choices and widespread opportunity to prosper. Not everything is a success but, in the overall balance sheet for nature and humans, things are working out. In the complex human and ecological Yellowstone system policy and political conflicts are unavoidable and seem to lurk around every corner; there always seems to be a crisis of some sort. Oddly enough, given the ecological and socioeconomic importance we have placed here on the restoration of the Yellowstone grizzly bear, it is not the central or most immediate of controversies in the region. The bears will be delisted, they will be hunted, they will continue to kill very few humans and livestock, and they will survive as a species. They may even eventually expand their range to the extent that isolated populations in northern Montana and Idaho interbreed. The bear will abide, and we will abide the bear. We will return to the bears’ future later. No, the real issues we need to consider are much more difficult to resolve, if there is resolution, than bears on the landscape and how we will live with them. The list of things we find to disagree about here in the GYE is not endless, but it is too long to fully consider here. For now, let us focus on three highly contentious issues related to our discussion up to this point: wolves and elk and bison, people and their economies, and recreation and landscapes. They are related in the most obvious ways. Wolves and Elk, Elk and People, and Bison Nearly three decades after grey wolves were reintroduced to the region there are still highly charged political hostilities over their impact; much more so than bears. Set aside the fact that most hunting districts in the region are overpopulated with elk, it is easy to find people who will claim wolves have and continue to decimate the once great herds that roamed the public lands of the Yellowstone Northern Range.215 They will claim that predation by wolves has wiped out the elk and the hunting economy that went with them. Facts do not support that conclusion. 215 Ripple, W. J., & Larsen, E. J. (2000). Historic aspen recruitment, elk, and wolves in northern Yellowstone National Park, USA. Biological Conservation, 95(3), 361-370. Huff, D. E., & Varley, J. D. (1999). Natural regulation in Yellowstone National Park’s northern range. Ecological Applications, 9(1), 17-29. What has happened is a much more interesting story but also makes the policy solution, if there is a need for a policy solution, more challenging. Usually, when wolf opponents and supporters discuss the intricate ecological connections of Yellowstone’s wolves, elk, and people, they are referencing a specific part of the Yellowstone ecosystem. They are often referring to the infamous population of elk of the Yellowstone Northern Range, the most famous elk herd in the world. The northern herd is Yellowstone’s largest and most contentious. The herd is defined by those animals that winter in the Lamar and Yellowstone River valleys from Soda Butte to Gardiner, Montana. As winter snows pile up, they migrate out of the park to lower elevations along and north of the park’s boundary into the Custer Gallatin National Forest and private ranchland. The range faces peculiar and complex management challenges and by 2000 captured the attention of the National Research Council as a topic of a research report that examined the efficacy of “natural management” of the resource.216 The contentious issues of “natural regulation” adopted in the late 1960s calls for the NPS to let ecological processes within the park function free of direct human interventions, or, as described by the Park Service, “natural environments evolving through natural processes minimally influenced by human actions.” The debate comes down to the state of the land because of the large elk herds prior to reintroduction of wolves. Many claimed, and the Park denied, that the forests of the northern range were in terrible condition from too many elk overgrazing the range. Elk ate the willows and aspen shoots along rivers and stream and destroyed riparian habitats for songbirds and beavers. Ironically, after decades of debate over whether the range was overgrazed by too many elk, when the wolves returned public concern rapidly shifted to the herd’s small size. Scott Creel, an ecology professor at MSU, specializes in behavioral and ecological studies of large predators. He typically deals with lions, leopards, and African wild dogs but also studied the Yellowstone wolf/elk relationship for several years. When the 31 wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995 and 1996 the population of the northern range elk herd was at an all-time high of between 17,000 and 20,000 individuals. The National Park Service's 216 National Research Council. 2002. Ecological Dynamics on Yellowstone's Northern Range. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10328. environmental impact statement for reintroduction predicted a decline in elk of 5% - 30%.217 Creel and others found that by 2006 wolves had, in some areas, reduced elk numbers by 60%.218 The northern herd shrank down to around 7,000 animals. The docile elk herds had never seen a wolf. They were an easy bounty of protein on the hoof and the wolves increased in number by a factor of twelve. As discussed in chapter three, there are multiple views of how the predator/prey relationship works. One is that they are largely compensatory that is; predators do not add to the mortality of the prey population, they replace other forms of population decline such as starvation, death from injury, or winter die off. The Park Service claimed wolves would not reduce the elk population appreciably because they kill elk that would have died anyway during the harsh Yellowstone winters. The survivors enjoy less competition for food and habitat and rebound quickly and the cycle repeats; remember the Lotka-Volterra equations. The other view is that predators change behaviors of prey and that influences the population dynamics. Creel thinks that this is what happened in Yellowstone. Scott looked to elk birth rate as an explanation. Predators do not affect their prey only by killing them and the decline in GYE elk numbers is larger than can be accounted for by direct predation rates. Doug Smith is a park biologist and was project leader for the Wolf Restoration Project in Yellowstone for many years. He calculated that wolves in the ecosystem take 8,448 to 11,616 elk per year from a total population of about 40,000.219 As a comparison, hunters take over 25,000 elk each Wyoming elk season. When predation risk is low or absent, prey move through the landscape and harvest food accordingly. In Yellowstone, this took the form of very large herds of elk feeding out in the open at all hours of the day in places like the Lamar Valley. They were highly concentrated and predictable; tourists loved it. But, when predation risk is high, most prey species modify their behavior. For elk, these behavioral responses to predation risk include changes in habitat use, 217 Smith, D. W., & Bangs, E. E. (2009). Reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park: history, values and ecosystem restoration. Reintroduction of top‐order predators, 92-125. 218 Creel, S., & Christianson, D. (2008). Relationships between direct predation and risk effects. Trends in ecology & evolution, 23(4), 194-201. 219 Smith, D. W., Peterson, R. O., & Houston, D. B. (2003). Yellowstone after wolves. BioScience, 53(4), 330- 340. diet, movement and grouping patterns, increased vigilance levels, and commensurately reduced foraging time. They move into the dense timber and so feed less, they move in smaller bands so are less detectable, and experience more stress when wolves are present. Creel and his graduate students collected elk scat to look for higher rates of cortisol, a stress related hormone, among elk under greater predation risk. What they found is that when wolves are present cortisol levels were not appreciably higher. The elk appear to be vigilant but not necessarily scared of wolves. They looked at other indicators of stress. The researchers found lower levels of progesterone - a steroid hormone that increases dramatically during pregnancy, particularly during the third trimester. They measured the relationship between the mean progesterone level for a population of elk and the level of predation pressure (measured as the elk-wolf ratio) and found that progesterone levels were dramatically lower in populations with high wolf to elk ratios.220 Elk under predation risk do not get pregnant at the same rates as those without predation risk and the reason seems to be lower nutrition. To avoid wolves, elk retreat to the timber and eat less. Nutritional restriction delays breeding enough that the elk herds were shrinking. Remember the discussion of trophic cascades – the idea that returning predators to a landscape can help restore ecological function. Promoters of ecological drama like to refer to this as “an ecology of fear”. Creel is saying that the risk effects of increased predation impose significant costs on prey, but it may be an “ecology of vigilance” that results in lower birth rates of elk. The nature of the trophic cascade is one of behavioral mediation when wolves are present. For predator and prey that evolved together, this is hardly surprising, though less theatrical than animals living in cold fear of one another as some would have us believe. What really matters after 25 years of having wolves on the range is that there are now fewer elk grouped up in large bovine-like herds without a care in the world. The bands of elk we encounter today are wary and on the alert – exactly the way elk evolved to behave in the presence of predators. Paradoxically, because there are now elk spread over a larger area due to dispersion by predators and hunting pressure, Wyoming and Montana fish and game agencies find elk management taking up a lot of their time. By far the greatest threat from too many elk in a given area is that they, like bison, may harbor the pathogen brucellosis, the bacterium that causes the disease Brucella abortus. As discussed earlier, Brucella can be transmitted between elk or bison 220 Creel, 2010 and cattle if they come into contact with infected birth tissues. Brucellosis has not had a substantial effect on wildlife populations, but it poses a high financial risk to ranchers because it can reduce the reproductive rate of their herds and marketability of their animals. Known as undulant fever, it can be transmitted to humans who drink contaminated milk or cheese and can cause fever, drenching sweats, joint pains, backache, and loss of weight and appetite. Long-term effects can include arthritis, swelling of internal organs, depression, chronic fatigue, and recurrent fevers. The risk to the industry is so great that if an infected cattle herd is found on a ranch in the GYE, the entire herd is quarantined from the market and sometimes destroyed. Billions of dollars have been spent to eradicate brucellosis from cattle in the United States. Most infections are spread cow to cow and between domestic herds. Brucella abortus persists in both the bison and elk populations of the Greater Yellowstone. The solution seems obvious – allow more elk to be hunted and decrease the size of the herds. The problem is, in part, that one of the most charismatic of game animals in North American does not have enough hunting pressure to keep the numbers down. What is going on? You might not notice it from all the camo-wearing guys wandering the aisles in your local Cabela’s or the hunting “snuff” videos on You Tube but the overall numbers of big game hunters in America is declining and has been for years. Nationally, shooting sports and gun sales are up but Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks (MDFWP) sees fewer elk tags sold and fewer elk taken with each survey they conduct. The same is true in Wyoming (except for antelope). Americans love their guns, but they are not using them to hunt big game. Hunting for elk and deer takes place on both public and private lands and virtually all the 10 million acres of national forest land in the GYE is good elk habitat open to in-state and out of state hunters; there are just not enough hunters. Or more accurately – not enough of the right kind of hunter. Big game hunting is still big business in parts of Montana and Wyoming and the two states together bring in well over a half billion dollars each year in the chase for elk, deer, bear, and antelope (Idaho’s big game economy is far removed from that state’s portion of GYE and is inconsequential to the state totals). For the most part, in-state residents hunt public land for meat. They are not trophy hunters except when the opportunity presents itself for the bull of a lifetime. They do not spend much money to hunt but for many longtime residents hunting is an enjoyable way to fill the freezer with some superior quality meat and spend time with friends. Public land hunting is only part of the story. If you are an out of state hunter looking for a true trophy elk chances are you will hire a guide and go on an outfitted hunt. You may horse pack into the wilderness of the Thorofare on the south-eastern edge of Yellowstone in Wyoming but increasingly it is more likely you will hunt private land in a less remote setting. A couple of decades ago ranchers started to be approached by private outfitters with a proposition: keep the public out and lease them exclusive rights to guide elk hunts on their property, in return they would control who has access to the ranch and generally take over the management of hunting. Leasing to an outfitter solved a lot of problems for landowners. Gates were no longer left open, they did not have people knocking on their doors early in the morning asking for access, their cows were not being shot, and most notably – they had a new source of revenue coming into their agricultural operation. For many landowners that extra money is enough to keep the ranch going when cattle prices fall or there is a tough winter, or they send a kid off to college. Ranchers that lease their land have an incentive to produce elk even as those same elk threaten the cattle industry with disease. The downside is that guided hunters want trophy bulls not cows. Taking a few bulls out of the herd does little to control elk numbers or the spread of Brucella. With less hunting pressure compared to public lands, the elk catch on fast. Elk hold on private ground for more of the year, eat well, and raise their calves successfully. Fewer predators on ranches and fewer elk being hunted means the problem is getting worse, not better. But even that is not the whole story. Changes in land ownership in areas outside of YNP have affected elk distributions and the ability of state wildlife authorities to manage elk populations. In the elk hunting districts north of YNP, there has been a shift in property ownership to more amenity owners who like elk on their ranch. They enjoy watching them. Many don’t hunt, they don’t lease to outfitters, and do not offer public access for hunting. Their ranch is an elk refuge. Bill Travis at the University of Colorado and a graduate student calculated that most of the winter range in the northern range is privately owned, much of it by the new amenity buyer.221 For locals, hunting elk as they made 221 Gosnell, H., Haggerty, J. H., & Travis, W. R. (2006). Ranchland ownership change in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, 1990–2001: implications for conservation. Society and natural resources, 19(8), 743- 758. Gosnell, H., & Travis, W. R. (2005). Ranchland ownership dynamics in the Rocky Mountain West. Rangeland ecology & management, 58(2), 191-198. their way to winter range was a recipe for success, now it is off limits to Montanans who would like to put a couple hundred pounds of elk meat in the freezer. The problem is compounded by landowners who prevent access to public land through their property by closing roads and putting up fences. Management targets in hunting districts are more difficult to meet because the land is out of the administrative control of state agencies. These land use and land ownership conversions have contributed to a much larger fraction of the northern elk herd now being found outside of YNP and not just in the winter but nearly year around. Large herds congregate on ranches in larger and denser groups for longer periods of time and in the process, exacerbate the brucellosis problem. Here are some numbers to consider: 1995 elk 1995 elk 2018 elk 2018 elk population harvest population harvest Wyoming 103,448 17,695 110,300 25,091 Montana 109,500 No data 138,470 27,793 Idaho 112,333 22,437 120,000 22,326 Table one: Elk population and harvest222 Restoring wolves to the Yellowstone landscape did change the population of elk in the region but not in the way opponents of wolves think. The reason hunting is more difficult today is because the large and predictable herds that migrated out of the park are no longer as large nor are they as predictable. Wolves have made them less so. Elk now form smaller and more widely dispersed bands and hunting those smaller groups of elk is more difficult because access to good hunting land has been curtailed. The wolf/elk problem is really a people problem. Closely tied to the elk issue is the bison conundrum. Middleton, A., Stoellinger, T., Bennett, D. E., Brammer, T., Gigliotti, L., Flint, H. B., & Maher, S. (2022). The Role of Private Lands in Conserving Yellowstone's Wildlife in the Twenty-Frist Century. Wyo. L. Rev., 22, 237. Epstein, K., Haggerty, J. H., & Gosnell, H. (2022). With, not for, money: Ranch management trajectories of the super-rich in Greater Yellowstone. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112(2), 432-448. 222 Sources: Fish and Wildlife agencies in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming If the elk problem is a people problem, bison a culture problem. Bison are arguably the most important native animal in North America. Their numbers, which some have estimated to have been 60 million during the 19th century, transformed landscapes with their grazing and hooves. They help create habitat for prairie dog towns and have driven the evolution and species diversity of plants and grasses of the western rangelands.223 Their role in the spiritual and domestic life of Plains Indians is understood to be a seamless relationship. Without the bison the native civilization that thrived for thousands of years would have been impoverished. Prior to the adoption of the horse by Native Americans, most human bison predation relied on the use of bison jumps or hunting opportunity created by deep winter snow. That changed with the introduction of the horse and again when a strategic military decision was made to wipe out the bison herds and by association, Native American populations. White settlers have been trying to control bison numbers ever since. They are seen as direct competitors to cattle for grass and range. In states like Wyoming and Montana agriculture still holds sway over state politics. Two free-ranging bison herds reside in the GYE – a small herd near Jackson, Wyoming, and a much larger herd north in Yellowstone National Park. The northern range bison, and those on the west side of the park, regularly migrate onto public and private land outside the park. When they do, there is a small risk that they spread brucellosis to domestic cattle. The response by the State of Montana has been to transfer jurisdiction of bison from Fish, Wildlife, and Parks where they were managed as a native species subject to hunting to the Department of Livestock and manage them as such when they cross into state land. This essentially allows the state to regulate wild bison as stray cattle. There are two major problems associated with this tactic. The first is that as livestock bison can be trapped, hazed, and rounded up and put into quarantine or destroyed with no participation by the public. The other is that it makes shipping bison to native lands problematic. Throughout these bureaucratic manipulations it should be reiterated that there are no cases where wild bison have infected cattle with brucellosis. 223 Shamon H, Cosby OG, Andersen CL, Augare H, BearCub Stiffarm J, Bresnan CE, Brock BL, Carlson E, Deichmann JL, Epps A, Guernsey N, Hartway C, Jørgensen D, Kipp W, Kinsey D, Komatsu KJ, Kunkel K, Magnan R, Martin JM, Maxwell BD, McShea WJ, Mormorunni C, Olimb S, Rattling Hawk M, Ready R, Smith R, Songer M, Speakthunder B, Stafne G, Weatherwax M and Akre TS (2022) The Potential of Bison Restoration as an Ecological Approach to Future Tribal Food Sovereignty on the Northern Great Plains. Front. Ecol. Evol. 10:826282. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2022.826282 The cultural bias against wild bison is changing but slowly. Just outside the northern border of the park a small seasonal hunt takes place on state land. Natives, who claim a tribal right to hunt, and state sanctioned hunters take several hundred animals in any given year however in 2023 the total take was 1,067 animals. These hunts often take place in full view of tourists and near residential homes. The major complaints of homeowners living near the hunt is the chance of a stray bullet entering the home and the piles of bison offal left by hunters that attract grizzly bears. The unfavorable view of the hunts is unfortunate because hunting could create an influential political constituency for bison conservation. Since 2019 the NPS initiated the Bison Conservation Transfer Program that tests and identifies bison that do not have brucellosis and transfer them tribal ownership as an alternative to sending them to slaughter.224 Several hundred bison have been transferred to multiple reservations through the InterTribal Buffalo Council but not without continued opposition from the Montana Department of Livestock and area ranchers. Thanks to these transfers the number of wild bison on tribal lands is now on the increase. Figure nine: Major events leading to decline of American bison (Bison bison). Since 2000 there is a slight uptick in the number of bison transferred to native lands.225 Hopefully the anti-bison culture will soften over time and bison and tribes will receive more animals to place on reservations and so rekindle their relationship with a noble animal. 224 https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/management/bison-management.htm 225 Shamon, 2022 Amenity Economies are Complex More people are settling in the Greater Yellowstone, especially since the Covid pandemic. The GYE consists of 145,635 km2 of land, 32% managed by the USFS, 19% by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and 7% managed by the NPS. About a third of the region is privately owned. The population of the 20 counties that make up the GYE more than doubled between 1970 and 2015 (111.6% increase) and the region is now home to over a half a million residents.226 In the last decade about 4500 people moved in each year. By 2050 the population will reach nearly a million.227 All those new arrivals need a place to live and during those same years the number of homes in the GYE counties more than tripled from 79,128 in 1970 to 227,687 in 2015.228 There will be over a half million new homes built by 2050. Most will be in or adjacent to the existing population centers of Bozeman, Idaho Falls, Livingston, Big Sky, and Jackson but development of rural land is expected to continue at a very high rate. One study showed that from 1970-1999, the population grew by 58% but the exurban or rural housing density grew by 350%. Many of the new homes in the region are second or third homes in the Jackson and Big Sky resorts. As discussed earlier, we know why they come and if the amenity package for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is better than where they live now, people will continue to be attracted to this place. Amenity driven economies are associated with three large scale changes: new residents demand that the quality of the environmental amenities that attracted them in the first place be preserved, those same residents help create and maintain a vibrant economy that is more diversified than before and so more resilient, they also increase the demand for housing. There are inevitable tradeoffs and it seems you cannot maximize all three at the same time. As a case study, let’s take a deep dive into the evolution of the economy of Bozeman and Gallatin County – one of the fastest growing amenity counties in the nation. 226 Hansen, A. J., & Phillips, L. (2018). Trends in vital signs for Greater Yellowstone: application of a Wildland Health Index. Ecosphere, 9(8), e02380. 227 Wilkinson, T. (2019). Unnatural Disaster: Will America’s Most Iconic Wild Ecosystem Be Lost to A Tidal Wave Of People? Mountain Journal, Feb. 14. https://mountainjournal.org/the-wildest-ecosystem-in-america- faces-death-by-too-many-people 228 Hansen, 2019 People moving to the region come for the spectacular scenery, recreation, a taste of small-town life (compared to Seattle or LA at least), a clean and healthy place to raise their family, and nearly unlimited outdoor recreation. They are not going to tolerate erosion of those qualities by supporting clear cuts on local forests or accept mine runoff in their favorite trout stream. Call it NIMBYism if you will but many of these people made a conscious choice to move here and they have an interest in protecting their amenity income. This places a financial burden on local governments. It means late night planning meetings and possibly limits to growth, although that is a tough sell. Here is an example of where they got it right. In June 1997 the Gallatin County Commission formed the Gallatin County Open Space Task Force. The goal was to develop methods that the County could adopt to preserve existing private open space before it was taken over by developers. The feeling was that rapid development was eroding an amenity that was important to preserving the county’s rural quality of life. Haphazard development, due to weak planning laws in Montana, was quickly fragmenting large agricultural landscapes. In many cases the only way to pass on wealth from an agricultural operation is to sell it outright or develop it. In 2000 over 60% of Gallatin County voters favored a $10 million open space bond. In 2004, they approved a total of $20 million in new taxes to fund conservation. The open space bond continues to be passed by voters – in 2018 support surpassed 65%. The program aids farmers and ranchers to put their land in a conservation easement although sometimes it buys land outright. The easement is a way to transfer development rights to keep the land in production and out of the hands of developers. To date, about 50,000 acres are conserved under land trusts in the region. A network of highly successful nonprofits leverage some of this land to build public parks and a heavily used network of public trails.229 The most developed counties in the region all have a similar nonprofit conservation land trust of some sort in place. After some negotiation, the landowner will, in effect, donate their development rights to the trust. In return, the landowner will receive a tax deduction equal to the difference between the value of the land as encumbered by the easement and what it could be worth if it were developed for its "highest and best use" – usually development. In some cases, this deduction can be worth millions of dollars. Typically, landowners are either farmers and 229 https://gvlt.org/gallatin-county-open-lands-program-17-years-50000-acres-later/ ranchers who have owned the property for generations or, very wealthy individuals, families, or businesses that can afford a ranch and have no interest in development but will realize a substantial tax savings by placing the land in a conservation easement. This strategy for amenity preservation requires a small bureaucracy, voter involvement in tax policy, a trust relationship between the landowner and the land trust, and citizen involvement to sustain the effort. Such activity is not free and not trivial. So far it has been wildly successful. It also imposed a lost opportunity to collect more in property tax for the county. Unfortunately, in 2023 the Montana Senate sought to place a 40-year limit (SB 357) on such easements thereby negating the positive benefits of long term protection.230 The bill did not pass but the handwriting from conservative legislators is on the wall. Preserving amenities means supporting things like the quality of local schools and short response times for rural fire districts. In fact, unless the “human built” amenities keep pace with population growth natural amenities alone cannot sustain a community. This costs taxpayers in real terms. The upside (and downside) is that those communities that maintain both sets of amenities continue to attract people and business. In Bozeman, the city has undertaken several downtown rejuvenation efforts over the years that try to balance a functional downtown shopping space with modern infrastructure efficiencies. It built a parking garage off Main Street to encourage workers to make space for free parking for shoppers, lighting design is low key and tries to preserve a feeling of rural; there are lots of brick sidewalks and flowers. For a time, downtown merchants resisted real estate offices on Main Street to avoid the feeling of being a tourist town but that is no longer the case. To keep the core downtown vibrant and intact, a special taxing district helps pay for continued improvements. Gallatin County has taken very seriously the imperative that a good airport is vital to a good development climate. It may be the finest small airport for a town of 50,000 in the US. Inevitably though, downtown is changing as it caters to high end condominium development and new hotels rise above the historic four-story limit. Tom Power showed that when people move to a place they like, they figure out how to live there. They bring or build businesses and they become invested in the community’s future. Throughout the ecosystem, small businesses were the first wave of entrepreneurial activity, and 230 https://montanafreepress.org/2023/02/22/legislature-conservation-easement-change/ most could do well. They are restaurants, coffee shops, small niche manufacturing firms, specialty stores, float trip companies, art galleries, real estate firms, architects, the list goes on and resembles other successful towns anywhere in the US. These are main street business that cater to both locals and tourists. They are dependent on affordable rents and minimal competition from national retailers. It did not take long for the national firms to arrive. The big box stores were and still are a threat to small merchants, but the best local businesses survive by providing good service and encouraging people to buy local. It seems to work out for many of them, if they can find a workforce. Once the boom began, Bozeman and the Yellowstone region began to attract larger players in the economy. In Jackson the skiing company Life Link was started in 1977 by a Jackson Hole ski patrolman. A spinoff of that business became Simms Fishing Products. In In 1992, both companies were bought by a wealthy investor who moved them to Bozeman. Today, Simms employs 115 people in Bozeman and is one of the top fishing equipment brands in the world. It was recently acquired by a national sports conglomerate. There are several global hunting supply firms, a large shoe manufacturing company, and an emergent high-tech sector. These may not be small locally owned businesses but again, their management explicitly chose where they wanted to do business. They employ locally and they leverage the outdoor quality of the area. They are for the most part good neighbors. Parallel to the growth in business was the expansion of the retiree market. The baby boomers, whose investments did very well during the Reagan years, were looking for a place to land and many of them found or returned to the Greater Yellowstone. They brought high levels of nonlabor income with them – retirement nest eggs and a high propensity to spend them on skiing, fishing, hiking, and travel. Beyond the amenity package, Bozeman is an especially attractive choice because the town is large enough to offer comprehensive health care and 911 service. Small towns do not typically have the economy of scale for an all-inclusive health care facility that includes a coronary and cancer center, orthopedic services, assisted living, and end of life care. In addition, retired consumers look for personal financial, real estate, and legal services as well as stimulating experiences such as art festivals, university lectures, and concerts. Their spending further stimulates and diversifies the economy. Public support for retirees is mixed. They tend to not support tax increases such as school bonds but do support nonprofit activities that match their leisure-oriented consumption habits. They are not inclined to be involved in local politics except as it suits their lifestyle. The local land grant university, Montana State, has helped spin nearly 30 large and small optics and photonics companies into the local economy. The parallel growth of optics education and research at Montana State and the arrival of a couple laser and optics firms in the 1980s spurred continued growth in high tech. Today, Bozeman is a sort of distant bedroom community to Silicon Valley. Tech firms pay teleworking programmers, managers, and support people high wages to live near and consume Bozeman’s amenity package. The employees are happy; unlike tech workers in other places, 75% will stay with their firm for their career – an unheard-of rate of retention. One of the oldest regional tech firms was RightNow technology, a customer relationship management software service (whatever that is). It grew to 500 Bozeman employees before it was bought by the software giant Oracle. It still operates here and is joined by several laser firms and associated software startups. Of course, all this demand has an enormous impact on real estate and the fundamentals of American economic theory prevail. The rate of growth, and that in the nearby resort of Big Sky, has made the cost of housing a constant topic of conversation among residents. For those who own a small business, work for the local university or one of the big box stores, or work as a general laborer, the cost of housing is increasingly prohibitive for employees. In 2003, when the first boom time in the Rockies was well under way, the median home price for a single-family home in Bozeman was $189,000. By the time the national housing bubble burst in 2006, the price had jumped to $310,000. In 2008, the financial crisis hit Bozeman along with the rest of the country, but the town was relatively unaffected. The median home price in Bozeman dropped only 9.7% to $258,225 while nationally it dropped nearly 30%. In 2020 the $189,000 home sells for over $500,000 and has continued to climb to over $700,000.231 While the national median home price is still about 7.5% lower than 2008 pre-crash highs, Bozeman homes recovered their small drop and rebounded to new highs. The high-tech salaries and retirement nest eggs threaten to drive those with average incomes out of the market. Not so slowly Bozeman has taken on the urban trappings of other places that have experienced rapid growth and is no longer a special place in any sense except for being 231 https://bozemanrealestate.group/real-estate/market-report/bozeman surrounded by high quality public lands. Public trails abound and the mountains are still beautiful any season of the year but Bozeman’s and the county’s inability or unwillingness to manage growth is an object lesson for other communities in the region. Recreation for All? Westerners, not just those who live and work in Greater Yellowstone, are defined by their play. We do not always refer to it as that but let’s face it – herding cattle, guiding white water rivers, being a professional ski patrol, or selling ranch properties is, in some real sense, a fun way to making a living. Not everyone gets to do the fun jobs of course – oil field workers, retail sales, construction, teachers, all work hard for lower wages than they could make elsewhere. But when that whistle blows and it is time to go home, westerners know how to enjoy life year around. Hunting and fishing, skiing, river rafting, hiking, biking, are all popular pastimes and can be done locally even by those with lower incomes because most available recreation takes place on public land. This, again, produces mixed results. Public land recreation began in earnest after WWII when post war prosperity and a history of logging on national forests created unprecedented access through a massive road network constructed for removing harvested logs. In turn, the Forest Service constructed campgrounds and hiking trails. National forest recreation visitation increased from about 5 million in the early 1920s to 18 million in 1946, 93 million in 1960, and 233 million in 1975.232 By 2009 over 173 million people made recreational visits to national forests.233 Today, forest visits average 150 million people each year.234 The boom in public lands recreation exposed people to nature and almost certainly helped expand the political constituency for conservation 232 MacCleery, D. (2008). "Re-inventing the United States Forest Service: evolution from custodial management, to production forestry, to ecosystem management." Reinventing forestry agencies: experiences of institutional restructuring in Asia and the Pacific. RAP Publication (FAO), Bangkok: 45-77. 233 Donovan, G. H., L. K. Cerveny and D. Gatziolis (2016). "If you build it, will they come?" Forest Policy and Economics 62: 135-140. 234 Service, U. S. F. (2016). U.S. Forest Service National Visitor Use Monitoring Survey Results National Summary Report Data collected FY 2012 through FY 2016. National Visitor Use Monitoring Program. among other amenities.235 The dilemma is that modern recreation can come with significant environmental and social impact. Again, let’s focus on recreation in and around Bozeman. Bozeman/Gallatin County is home to four ski resorts (Bridger Bowl, a community nonprofit, Big Sky/Moonlight Basin and Spanish Peaks both for profit resorts, and the very private highly profitable Yellowstone Club).236 The two for profit resorts are essentially venues for marketing the dream of a home in the mountains. In this respect they are no different than other destination resort properties. Bridger Bowl enjoys an almost cult-like following among hard core skiers and serves as an attractant for many Bozeman residents, MSU students, and visitors. The direct impacts from downhill skiing are relatively benign. The indirect impacts include the demand for homes, inflationary pressures on the cost of living, water and sewage management, traffic congestion and overcrowding of roads and schools. With more visitors comes more permanent or part time residents leading to overcrowding of hiking trails, fishing streams, and sometimes recreation conflicts.237 Unfortunately, data on these and other impacts is not readily available; those who study tourism tend to focus only on the positive economic impacts that accrues from tourist spending and how to increase the visitation rate through marketing. They have a clear incentive to do so because most of this research is paid by tourism revenues such as room taxes. This lack of data means that public awareness of impacts is not readily perceived except by long term residents who notice the crowding and conflict. Without public awareness, effective public management of tourism is challenging. Lack of problem definition leads to a lack of action. 235 Thomas, S. L., & Reed, S. E. (2019). Entrenched ties between outdoor recreation and conservation pose challenges for sustainable land management. Environmental Research Letters, 14(11), 115009. Kellert, S. R. (1994). "Public attitudes toward bears and their conservation." Bears: Their Biology and Management 9: 43-50. 236 Johnson, J. (2011). Chapter nine: Mountain Resort Sustainability In The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, USA. Sustainability of Tourism: Cultural and Environmental Perspectives, 182. Another high end resort is being built in the region – the One&Only Moonlight Basin will be a large (8,100 acre) homesite and resort accommodation complex designed to attract global wealth to the region. 237 Clifford, H. (2002). Downhill slide: Why the corporate ski industry is bad for skiing, ski towns, and the environment. Sierra Club Books. One example where recreation user group pressure has resulted in management action is the popularity of mountain biking. Mountain bikes are extraordinary machines where a rider of moderate ability can travel many miles deep into the backcountry on forest service roads as well as horse and hiking trails. Some of these trails transect wilderness or wilderness study areas – areas where mechanized transportation, including mountain bikes, is not allowed. Just two hours south of Bozeman the Lionhead trail is such a place. It bisects a recommended wilderness area within the Custer Gallatin National Forest, a unit currently undergoing a forest-plan revision. To help frame the planning process a coalition of environmental groups invested considerable time and resources into a process they call the Gallatin Forest Partnership. In 2019 they produced a proposal and presented it to Custer Gallatin National Forest officials. They hoped it would form the basis for future legislation that would create new legal wilderness, outline recreation corridors, and result in permanent conservation protections for the forest. Mountain bikers seem to have won large concessions in the agreement, here’s why. Keeping mind that not all mountain bikers want access to ride in wilderness or wilderness study areas, in negotiations across multiple jurisdictions in the Rocky Mountains a small subset of vocal and politically connected bikers continue to advocate for access to wilderness. They have played an interesting political game by aligning themselves with strange partisan bedfellows – conservative politicians like Greg Gianforte and Steve Daines, both Montana Republicans, and Mike Simpson, (R, Idaho) to gain and preserve access. This puts them in the same policy camp as off-road motorized recreation and anti-wilderness advocates. Kayakers and rafters crafted similar political partnerships with conservatives when they tried to gain access to river floating in Yellowstone National Park. They engaged with Cynthia Lummis (R, WY) to sponsor the Yellowstone and Grand Teton Paddling Act.238 The measure would have opened more than 400 miles of rivers, streams and creeks to paddling, regardless of environmental impacts or consequences. It died in process when Lummis left the House in 2016. One biking group claimed to support resolution of wilderness study areas “by any method which protects cyclist access to these public lands”. This hardened position with respect to wilderness lands signals a shift toward recreational values away from ecological principles in land management toward consumption-oriented recreation policy. The perceived “right” to ride a 238 https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/974/all-info bike in the Hyalite Porcupine Buffalo Horn Wilderness Study Area somehow becomes more important than protecting the ecological values of the best wildlife habitat in the entire Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the reason for the wilderness designation. The result has been a split among groups that should be political allies and a weakened pro-conservation position. The balkanization of support will ultimately weaken the concept of wilderness and conservation. The take home lesson is that outdoor recreation does not always equate to conservation. The recreation dilemma takes us full circle. There are inherent incompatibilities between promoting population and economic growth and preservation of the natural amenities that stimulates it. There is a misconnect between wildlife management that gives in to the politics of sportsman’s groups to hunt wolves and bears and ecological restoration principles that seek to restore ecosystem functions through predator conservation.239 There is inherent conflict between legally mandated designation of use for public lands like wilderness and the responsible use of those lands by recreationists. Society can discuss these trade-offs in meaningful and constructive ways, but good science needs to be the sturdy foundation upon which institutions and social policy are constructed. Too often it is not. In today’s political climate, resolving the nature of trade-offs of resource management is particularly distressing. The “right to ride” a mountain bike, the right to not have to compete with wolves during elk season, to prevent public access to public land, to compromise the quality of a community in the name of unbridled development are real and important questions of public policy. Unfortunately, we, the public, rarely engage in the time-consuming task of becoming informed and engaged. Rather, the position we take resembles a political heuristic – a mental shortcut that defines our position. One’s position on wolf reintroduction is strongly associated with a suite of similarly held political positions and in order to be internally consistent, we rarely examine the details that define our opinion. 239 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/3/eaao0167 Chapter 8 A Word for Private Lands The GYE is a mosaic of land ownership and each landowner – Federal, state, and private play an important role in the three C's of conservation biology: Connectivity, Carnivores, and Cores. Public land holdings by the Federal government add up to around 27% of the US or about 640,000,000 acres; no one really knows the actual total.240 In the 240 Figure ten: Federal public lands https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10585 western states the percentage of ownership is much higher. Private ownership of lands in the western states is an even more elusive number and maybe it does not really matter. Not all private land is pristine or protected from development but much of it is contiguous and so may be suited to the preservation of migratory routes of herds of elk, mule deer, antelope and the predators that follow them. Two things do matter though – the geography of large landholdings and the diversity of owners of large properties. Let’s remember that the core of the GYE – the park, is situated on a relatively high plateau formed by the Yellowstone Plateau Volcanic Field. The plateau is part of a 700 km long line of volcanic fields that have migrated across the west from Nevada to its present-day location at the rate of about 3 cm each year.241 The volcanic origin of the plateau is formed by a series of basalt and rhyolite lava flows. Over the course of the last million years or so, multiple rivers running off the plateau have created fertile river valleys around the perimeter of the caldera. These lands are ideal habitat for animals and humans. They are also the lands that are most desirable for agriculture and communities. Some private lands are critical linkages to larger tracts of public land and so amplify the effect of protected areas. The Flying D Ranch, owned by entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner, is a distinctive case, though not unique. Turner bought the 113,613-acre ranch in 1989 and took down most of the internal fences and replaced cattle with bison. Then he placed nearly all the ranch in a conservation easement that protects it from development. He hired wildlife ecologist Mike Phillips, who had worked on early wolf reintroduction in YS, to manage the wildlife on the Flying D and other properties through the Turner Endangered Species Fund. The immediate goal was to bring wolves back to the Flying D and other Turner ranches but the broader one was to make the ranch profitable and friendly to native species of the region – including grizzly bears. Turner believed that innovative ranch management could protect nature and provide economic stability to his operations. He would do this by building a national market for bison. He built a chain of 40 high quality restaurants that feature his bison on the menu, and markets high value ecotourism experiences on some of his ranches including hunting and fishing. Turner manages over 45,000 bison on various ranches across the west as part of his two-million- 241 https://www.yellowstone.org/yellowstone-supervolcano-revealed/ acre empire.242 Eco management is only half the story. By placing the ranch in a conservation easement, he ensured that the ranch property would remain a critical linkage between Yellowstone, wilderness, and winter elk range in the Madison Valley. Flying D property abuts the Less Metcalf Wilderness to the north and west, the Custer Gallatin National Forest and some land owned by the State of Montana. Virtually all the ranch is prime habitat for elk, mule deer, wolves, bison, and bears along with other native species. The augmentation of protected federal lands by Turner is a marvelous act of philanthropy but does not completely solve the migration problem; in some ways it literally kicks it down the road. Located just across from Turner’s ranch is what local resident and conservationist Rob Sisson calls “the last hundred acres”.243 This land is virtually the only undeveloped land that allows for unrestricted movement by elk to cross US highway 191 and gain access to protected open space that reaches to the northern border of Yellowstone. It is a pinch-point, and the corridor is in danger of closing shut due to rural development. Turner has done his part, now it is up to area residents, landowners, and local government to do theirs. Turner’s story is not unique and wealthy landowners across the GYE emulate him with help from a supportive infrastructure of nonprofits. Sidebar: How do animals cross the road? The short section of US 191 between Ted Turner’s Flying D Ranch and thousands of acres of elk habitat is too much of a barrier for some to survive the crossing. A recent survey by the Montana Department of Transportation reported 253 deer and over 80 elk were killed during the study period by automobiles as they tried to beat the odds. This isn’t just a hazard for animals, hitting a 800-pound elk at 60 mph can be fatal to all involved. A solution is possible if residents and local governments can work together. Figure eleven: Which crossing is safer? 242 https://www.nationalbuffalofoundation.org/hall-of-fame-honorees/robert-edward-ted-turner/ 243 https://mountainjournal.org/development-near-bozeman-could-destroy-elk-migration-route Wildlife under- and overpasses can decrease collisions between cars and animals by 85-95 percent and are proven to work from Bhutan where wild elephants cross under a motorway to bridges for slow moving sloths in Costa Rica. They are already in use near Glacier Park in Montana and Banff National Park in Canada where there have been six overpasses and 38 underpasses stretching over 17 years. Wildlife crossings don’t just protect animals and humans, they connect ecosystems. A wildlife crossing for US 191 just south of Gallatin Gateway would cost between one to seven million dollars but with nearly 20,000 cars driving between Big Sky and Bozeman each day we can expect the number of accidents to steadily increase. One idea to finance it could be to sell a voluntary wildlife friendly travel permit to commuting locals and tourists. The most common conservation strategy for owners of large, high-quality parcels is to place the land in a conservation easement. The easement is a permanent voluntary legal agreement between the landowner and the easement holder – often a nonprofit with the specific mission of negotiating and holding these contracts; virtually every county in the GYE is part of the land trust network. Landowners typically negotiate the terms of the agreement that will include the acreage, development rights (if any), access for the public (or not), and almost any contingency imaginable. In return, the conserved land, in theory, is permanently protected according to the terms of the agreement. The easement may be eligible for state and federal tax benefits due to fixing the value of the land at a lower value than developed land and some states subsidize the conservation action. For wealthy landowners the tax benefits for estate planning can run well into six or even seven figures. At the end of the day there is also the legacy that the land is preserved in perpetuity from future development. Landowners chose to enroll their land for a variety of reasons including open space preservation, wildlife habitat, protection of river and riparian areas, and to provide access to recreation in the form of trails easements or river access. Paradoxically, conservation easements also have the unintended effect of increasing land values of adjacent properties because the potential development values of the unprotected land are increased. In locations near urban centers this free rider problem may exacerbate the difficulty of preserving open space. Sales of private ranches and “amenity properties” hit a record in 2021 both in terms of the number of sales and the value. Some ranch brokers reported 100% increases in revenue in 2021 compared to the previous year and there is no reason to think the end is in sight although there are fewer ranch properties for sale in 2023.244 The trend is a double-edged sword. Some buyers of properties are no doubt speculating that prices will go higher and hope to turn a profit. Another trend though is to buy long-time ranch properties – so-called legacy ranches. Buyers are looking for a place to live away from urban centers but close to the local town (and airport) to be with their family and enjoy life. These properties will likely not be subdivided and will remain in the family, hopefully for generations. They typically do not run the operation for maximum profit but do tend to keep it agriculturally operational, within limits. This is often done for tax purposes where agricultural land is taxed at a much lower rate than other uses. While there are large landholding neighbors in the region that, like Turner and others, place great value on conservation and the preservation of open spaces, there is a numerical reality to the impact of private lands for large scale conservation. At 3,472 square miles, over 2.2 million acres, with Grand Teton adding another 310,000 acres, the two parks are large contiguous areas of highly protected lands. When combined with the national forests public land in the GYE exceeds 20 million acres or two thirds of the land mass of the GYE. The amount of private land that could play a role in conservation is a small percentage of the total but that may miss the point and there are instances where private land conservation plays an outsized role. One example of a three-way win is the nearly 1000 acre parcel known as the Upper Gros Ventre River Ranch. The ranch was initially donated to the Trust for Public Land and the Jackson Hole Land Trust and acts as an important migration corridor for elk, antelope, and grizzly bears between the wilderness of the Gros Ventre range and Grand Teton National Park. In addition, four tributaries to the headwaters of the Gros Ventre River are now managed as a system connected to the main stem restoring over 5 miles of spawning habitat for the resident, native - the Snake River fine spotted cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii). The land was ultimately signed over to the Bridger-Teton National Forest and added to the national forest system so the public will enjoy full access to the land. This transaction was a tremendous example of public-regarding behavior by a wealthy landowner; one could hope to see it emulated many times over. Unfortunately, private land ownership does not always result in public good, and some buyers have a different game plan. The Wilkes brothers – Farris and Dan, are the second largest 244 https://westernranchbrokers.com/market-update-2023-montana-land-values/ landowners in Montana and own 700,000 acres in several western states. They are well-known conservatives in their native Texas where they made billions in the fracking industry. Unfortunately, they are also well known for locking the public out of public land by putting up illegal gates and employing armed guards to prevent using historical public right of ways – they call it trespassing. In Montana where the brothers own over 300,000 acres, they have pursued similar tactics while claiming to be simply protecting the land from overuse. Now, they seem to be selling substantial amounts of land in both Idaho and Montana to like-minded buyers. Who knows what their end game is, but they seem not to be concerned with being good neighbors to people who have hunted and recreated on the land for generations. Private lands are often barriers to access to public lands. Remember the discussion of railroad land grants and the checkerboard land ownership patterns that were the result. Today, much of that private land is part of a large ranch holding and public sections are interspersed with private. In many cases there is no public right of way access to the public sections but some who want to access the land for recreation or hunting argue they have a right to “corner cross”. Corner crossing is the act of gaining access to public sections by climbing over the corner post and not setting foot on private land. Most western states have defined corner-crossing as trespassing. Landowners and property-rights advocates argue that fences often do not follow ownership lines so the corner may or may not be on private land. Sportsmen advocates counter that GPS mapping programs let users know exactly where they are, and that public land should be considered accessible unless there’s a compelling reason to keep the public off. This conflict will eventually be settled by the courts but in the meantime is a highly contentious form of class warfare. Sidebar: More access for the public by privatizing wildlife? The numbers of big game hunters are in decline and more elk spending more time on private land. The combination poses an imminent problem for game managers and private landowners. One part of the solution is to increase access for hunters who want meat in the freezer rather than a trophy bull. The mantra of the free market environmental faction is “incentives matter”. What they mean by this is that if conservation efforts that include private landowners are to succeed, efforts to make wildlife an economic asset must be part of the mix. One such proposal gives landowners elk hunting permits in trade for public access in effect, giving them property rights to publicly owned elk that reside on their ranch. Montana will begin a program that will design elk hunting access agreements that will provide landowners with an elk license, permit, or combination thereof in exchange for allowing free public elk hunting access. For every permit granted to the landowner three members of the hunting public will be allowed to hunt the property. Permits are to be used by an immediate family member or an authorized full-time employee of the landowner. The landowner may select one of the three public hunters thereby opening the back door to the sale of a public elk permit. Time will tell if this proposal can be implemented with transparency to ensure public resources do not trend toward privatization. The corner-crossing debate is high stakes for landowners who would lose exclusive access to prime public land and that could affect the value of their hunting leases. In effect, they get an additional section (640 acres) tax free for each public section they lock the public out of. The stakes for the public are just as high as hundreds of thousands of acres of public land are off limits to access. The temptation for some landowners to fully exercise their perceived property rights will not be settled easily and several court cases have progressed to state supreme courts with no clear legal doctrine yet determined. A future decision will hinge on a federal court interpreting the Unlawful Inclosure of Public Lands Act of 1885 which prohibits fencing on private property from obstructing “any person” from peaceably entering public land. On one hand the private fence and prevention of corner crossing violates the law, on the other landowners claim to be fencing their private land. Given the conservative makeup of many federal courts, the future of corner crossing rights does not look promising for the public.245 Private lands are an important part of the matrix for conservation because they can include specific locations of very high ecological quality and can serve as connection points between core areas. Missing from the equation is useful data that can show how the ecosystem and the public benefit from tax incentives, buyouts, and land exchanges that provide clear benefit to owners of high quality parcels. These are often not referenced in conservation agreements. The future of private land conservation is uncertain. Wealthy, conservation-oriented landowners like Turner are increasingly rare. The Yellowstone region is attracting large numbers of people of great wealth, but few seem to be mobilizing it toward large scale conservation let alone wildlife management. The Bezos and Zuckerbergs of the world do not seem much 245 In June 2023 the Wyoming corner crossing case – the so-called Iron Bar case, has been decided in favor of the defendents who were found not guilty of trespass. https://wyofile.com/ranch-owner-in-corner-crossing- case-drops-waypoint-6-trespass-claim/ interested in conserving nature.246 Destination resorts near pristine wilderness are increasing in size and number throughout the region and so enlarge their ecological footprint, but few do much to enhance protection of surrounding land. It will take continued effort by nonprofits like the Trust for Public Lands and other conservation organizations to stave off the effects of the land use decisions by the wealthy. 246 To be fair to Jeff Bezos he created a $10 billion “earth fund” to save the planet so that when we live in space we can visit earth like a planetary Yellowstone. Color me skeptical. Chapter 9 It’s Not All Bad but Let’s Be Careful Out There It is far too easy to take the dim view of change in the region. More people, more construction, more unfortunate encounters with bears and wolves for both animals and humans, more policy conflicts over recreation and public land management, not to mention impending climate change impacts, may encourage us to think the place is quickly eroding in the very qualities we find attractive. If we step back for the big picture view, things may not be as bad as they seem. Most of the people moving to or visiting the region make a conscious and presumably rational choice to do so. Given the high cost of living and relatively lower earnings in most of the GYE, moving here may not make perfect economic sense but let us assume most people have given the decision some serious thought. The choice is important because we can assume those who make the move are, in some way, more committed to the decision and to the community in which they choose to reside. They have a psychological reason to make it a success. Rural sociologists use the terms community and place attachment to denote a sense of belonging or rootedness in a community.247 They suggest that people who choose to live in the small cities and towns of the region are devoted to them and their surrounding lands more intensely than in urban locations because they are closer to community dynamics and share common values with their neighbors. Their community is more than a place to sleep, it is a place to be involved in the social and civic life of their home base. These feelings hone their survival skills in an economy that is often highly competitive and sometime intensely narcissistic. When we look at the high rates of civic engagement in small towns, they take the form of buying local at the farmers market, volunteer fund raising to build a new library or fire station, or giving to local nonprofits and, if we are paying attention, we see tangible evidence of the sense of attachment of many residents (whether it is actually higher than tight knit urban neighborhoods is open for discussion). In real terms growth and change in the region has brought the potential for a prosperous life to more people. Compared to the 1970s, when the economy was in the tank, there are now more jobs in more sectors than ever before. In the last forty years total employment of the region has increased nearly 70%.248 Blue collar labor is still present, especially in the building trades, but there are now more jobs in high end producer services, financial services, government, and the tourism sector. There are more places to eat, be entertained, meet friends, and more social spaces. The air is cleaner, and the water supply is dependable. Fire trucks and ambulances respond faster on a network of paved roads, airline connections are more plentiful and less costly, and the access and quality of health care is equal to or surpasses that in large metropolitan centers. When we compare the changes to the regional economy with the rest of the nation we are doing well indeed. Much lower unemployment and a higher net inflow of earnings suggest the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem economy outperforms much of the rest of the country. Not everyone wins however. 247 McCool, Stephen & Martin, Steven. (1994). Community Attachment and Attitudes Toward Tourism Development. Journal of Travel Research. 248 Hansen, 2019 Beware the Ecological Trap Imagine a bird, perhaps a yellow warbler (Setophaga petechia), flying over the floodplain of the Gallatin River. From the air, she sees healthy understory vegetation for nest cover and plants that will attract the insects she depends on for food. She lands and builds a nest in which to raise her young. Unnoticed, and unseen, by her is the resident population of brown cowbirds (Molothrus ater), drawn there by the disturbed agricultural land nearby. These brood predators lay their eggs in host nests, the cowbird chick outcompetes those of the warbler, and she raises them instead of her own chicks. In nature’s terms she has failed catastrophically. Ecologists would say the warbler has fallen for an ecological trap. She misread the cues of the landscape and in the process lost her precious investment in time and energy. The booming economy in the Yellowstone region presents something like an ecological trap for some. The new class of wealthy knowledge-based workers in healthcare, business and finance, and high value personal services come with advantages many locals, and would be locals, cannot see. Many arrive with nest eggs of savings or retirement, degrees from prestigious universities, and the social connections that allow them to hold a job elsewhere while living in the Yellowstone region. Aspirational, but less fortunate, in-migrants see the high employment figures, the prosperity of locals, the amenities, and the other cues emanating from regional media, environmental nonprofits, and chamber of commerce boosters. They do not notice or see the rise in poverty, the demand on local food banks, or the slim margins by which many people live; they may not know the high rate of second (and third) jobs held by the Greater Yellowstone working population are some of the highest in the nation. Prosperity for some does not automatically translate into prosperity for all. The game of survival of the fittest results in the less fit failing to carve out a quality life. They find they have fallen into the trap from which escape is difficult and perhaps ruinous. The unfortunate externalities of our amenity-based prosperity suggest that not only do not all good things go together, not everyone can be a winner. Sometimes failure is just around the corner with a car that won’t start or increased rent. Social commentators and pop psychologists are full of “learn from failure” platitudes. They have a point, to an extent. Learning from failure is sometimes a path to future success and no one said life was going to be easy. But when people fail, the direction of the outcome is uncertain. Some will acquire the skills necessary to thrive. They may go to school, learn a trade, save their money and, if they are very lucky, be future homeowners. They reinvest in their community and recoup their losses. The city councils and business communities of many small towns in the region are occupied by former ski bums, seasonal Alaskan fishermen, spec home builders, and small business owners who succeed through hard work, the help of friends, and a little luck. Many residents are just one medical crisis or broken marriage away from a financial catastrophe but they keep on keeping on and at the end of the day they manage to carve out a life. The other direction failure might go is a bit darker. Up and down the Rocky Mountains, in most of the new west boom towns, there is an undertone of offensive political change. In her book American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West, Betsy Gaines-Quammen shares with us a peek inside of one group of anti-government, anti-public lands, anti-nearly everything most new westerners would believe in; at least those seated in the coffee shops and boutiques that line any main street new west boom town.249 The people she writes about are not your latte-sipping liberals enlisting their land into conservation easements or giving to local environmental nonprofits. These are deeply conservative, sometime deeply disturbed, individuals that profess a set of beliefs antithetical to what most of us learned in our high school government class. These are people that claim to speak for a marginalized group of people who do not share, or at least think they do not share, in the American dream of thriving in the New West. There has always been a dark side to the West. Deep seated racism and skepticism of outsiders can be traced back to the early mining days when Chinese miners in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and other mining centers experienced active and often violent discrimination. This included laws excluding Asians from working new mining claims and assessing specific taxes on their activities. Chinese miners were beaten and their property destroyed. Many left the lucrative mines to start service businesses. Immigrants from Europe — Irish, Italians, Scandinavians, and Serbs, were all considered second class citizens by those who came before. Ethnic neighborhoods in most mining towns were defined and divided by native language and religion. Native Americans never had rights approaching citizenship in any of the western states and native sovereignty is under continual attack. 249 Quammen, B. G. (2020). American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West. Torrey House Press. Today, a strain of odious faux libertarian political culture lies near the surface in many rural communities of the region. Grounded in part in the Mormon settlements of the West and, in part, by the most recent wave of in-migrants, this new allegedly libertarian narrative is grounded in a sacrosanct belief in private property rights, some strange interpretations of the Constitution, and a mythic freedom that comes with living in the wide-open spaces of the West. Much of it is thinly veiled racism and antisemitism with roots in the bizarre neo-Nazi spectacle that was Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho. Butler’s organization was bankrupted by a $6.3 million award for gross negligence in an assault on a local family. But they and like-minded others did not go away.250 A dispersion of sorts, ordered by Butler, sent his members to small rural towns across Idaho, Washington, and Montana. Some landed in the Greater Yellowstone. They have attracted others and today we find a strong anti-government sentiment among what appears to be a growing contingent of governors, state lawmakers, local sheriffs, and county commissioners. The social impacts are well documented and, as I say, odious. They have had their sights on public lands for a long time. The elimination of Federal ownership of public lands did not begin with the Trump administration, although the agenda was moved forward with the appointment (and subsequent resignation for ethics violation) of Ryan Zinke as his first Secretary of Interior. The movement began in earnest during the Reagan administration and the appointment of a former attorney for the ultra-conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation – James Watt. The nonprofit public interest law firm is funded by overwhelmingly conservative sources usually with a financial stake in less protection for public lands notably oil and mineral development and timber interests. A past president of MSLF, Watt, was supportive of the “wise use” movement of the 1980s and 90s. The term was borrowed and bastardized from the language of Gifford Pinchot. MSLF was founded on the same three principles as the current western libertarian anti public lands rhetoric we see today: defending the constitution, protecting property rights, and advancing 250 Gill, J. (2017). Idaho's Southern Accent: Confederates, White Flight and the Aryan Nations. Hawley, G. (2017). Making sense of the alt-right. Columbia University Press. economic liberty.251 Many in Trump’s Interior Department and western conservative politics had close ties to MSLF and there are spinoff groups in every western state. Today, the public lands privatization crusade is a muddle of cattle ranchers, oil companies, logging interests, large and small landowners, Mormon fringe cults, and various militia groups. All share in anti-government rhetoric and actions. The militia movement in the west has not garnered the public’s attention, it should. Ruby Ridge (Idaho), Waco (Texas), the Murrah Federal Building bombing (Oklahoma), Hayden Lake (Idaho), Jordan (Montana); these are places familiar as the highpoints of the movement and they are, to some extent, interrelated. Another outstanding writer – Leah Sottile, has documented the strange emergent political movements in the west for a number of years and her Bundyville podcast is well worth a listen.252 It is difficult to clearly understand what these groups want except that they all seem to wish the Federal (and in many cases state) governments off the land, out of their lives, and to quit managing the public’s lands in the public’s interest. They seem to think federal land would be better managed by private interests or at least by state governments that share their version of liberty. Let’s briefly examine this contention in the context of wildfires. The Political Economy of Wildfires Wildfire policy is a complex mix of historical legacy, ecology, and human values. The watershed fire event for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem were the Yellowstone fires of 1988. They find their ultimate cause with the great fires of 1910 discussed earlier. Almost every ecosystem in North America is sustained through periodic fires. Today, foresters understand fire is a management tool to promote healthy forests and, paradoxically, periodic fires help prevent larger more destructive blazes like that in 1910. The science of fire management that allows for some natural fires to burn (or “let burn”) and encourages “prescribed burns” intentionally set by land managers, has radically changed the culture of the Forest Service. These are not changes made by normal bureaucrats. Fortunately, wrongheaded scientific inertia that we pursued in the past can be overcome by enlightened managers who leverage 251 https://spn.org/organization/mountain-states-legal-foundation/ 252 https://www.opb.org/news/article/bundyville-occupation-podcast/ science with entrepreneurial risk taking to overcome stagnation and political manipulation, a rare combination in any organization. The ethic and practice of unquestioned fire suppression stayed with the park service until 1967 and the Forest Service until around 1970. Current practice by both agencies is to allow certain "natural fires" in areas with approved fire plans to burn in the Yellowstone backcountry and in wilderness areas. By 1968, the Park Service had in place administrative policies for natural areas of the entire National Park System. These recognized that "The presence or absence of natural fire within a given habitat is recognized as one of the ecological factors contributing to the perpetuation of plants and animals native to that habitat."253 This was a major shift in the Service's approach to fire, from one of suppressing all fires in national parks to that of managing fire and recognizing its use as an actual management tool to help accomplish a more ecologically based management objective. These changes were in place during the fire season in the summer of 1988. Unfortunately, over the course of a century of fire suppression, the interruption of the natural fire regime in the western forests allowed for buildup of considerable fuel loads and the political firestorm of 1988.254 The great fires of 1988 changed the ecological landscape of Yellowstone National Park for many decades to come; lodge pole pine forests are slow to recover in the dry high elevations of the Yellowstone Plateau. The fires also changed the institutional ecology as political pressures shifted wildfire policy once again. During the ’88 fires, the decisions of high-ranking members of the park service were scrutinized by members of Congress and the public, a reaction as predictable as the first snows of Fall that eventually extinguished the ‘88 fires. As the fires continued to burn, then President Ronald Reagan’s White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said the President met with the Secretaries of Agriculture Richard Lyng who managed the seven national forests in the affected region and Interior Donald Hodel who 253 http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anps/anps_6j.htm 254 See: Stevens, W. K. (1990). Biologists add fuel to Yellowstone fire. Journal of Forestry;(USA), 88(6). Masters, R. E., Galley, K. E., & Despain, D. G. (Eds.). (2009). The'88 Fires: Yellowstone and Beyond, Conference Proceedings. Tall Timbers Research Station. Shuman, J. K., Balch, J. K., Barnes, R. T., Higuera, P. E., Roos, C. I., Schwilk, D. W., ... & Zhang, X. (2022). Reimagine fire science for the anthropocene. PNAS nexus, 1(3), pg. 115. oversaw the NPS and, with Deputy Defense Secretary William H. Taft IV. Taft would eventually deploy over 4,000 National Guard troops to help with the firefighting effort. Locally elected politicians – notably the conservative delegations of Wyoming and Montana came out with their political guns blazing calling for the park service to offer up a high- profile sacrifice. They wanted the immediate resignation of William Penn Mott, director of the National Park Service and particularly specified that Bob Barbee, superintendent of Yellowstone be fired claiming he had literally destroyed the park with his “let it burn” policy.255 Both kept their jobs. Today, the first page of the park fire policy clearly states: “Fire suppression is the cornerstone of the Yellowstone Fire Management Program.”256 That is a wide divergence from the “let burn” policy of 1968. The “let burn” policy was political capital for anti-government groups. The massive expenditures and troop deployments smacked of waste and inefficiency. They argue things would be different if federal lands were under state control. In 1995 the USFS spent 84% of its budget on non-firefighting expenditures. By 2014 that fell to 58%. By 2017 56% of the USFS budget was spent on fire suppression and is expected to be two thirds of the budget by 2025.257 Would things indeed be different if states managed national forests? The short answer is that yes but not for the better. Most western states keep a fund for wildland fire management. Over the course of several years Montana built up a fund that totaled nearly $60 million in 2017; lawmakers raided the fund to the tune of $30 million due to lagging state tax revenues. That year the state’s share of fighting massive wildfires cost the state $74.4 million leaving the state about $40 million short. The state legislature had to be called into special session to try to sort out the resulting deficit budget. With fires getting bigger, causing more damage and more expensive to fight, the economic reality is that most of the western states would quickly go bankrupt during a dry year with big fires. Advocates of placing federal lands under state management think they could “manage the land better”, code for more commodity development and privatization for developers. A report 255 Barbee, B. (2009). I Was There: Bob Barbee, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park during the 1988 fires. Yellowstone Science, 17(2). Pg. 7-10. 256 http://www.nps.gov/yell/parkmgmt/firesuppression.htm 257 https://www.trcp.org/2017/11/30/dysfunctional-wildfire-funding-model-ensures-public-lands-will-burn/ https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2015-Fire-Budget-Report.pdf published by the Congressional Research Service found that the costs of maintaining federal lands in Idaho -- including congressional appropriations, litigation costs, federal highway money and PILT (property taxes paid by the Federal Government) -- are far higher than what they returned in timber, oil and gas, grazing and recreation fees.258 The states could sell off public lands; raise fees on ranchers and other public land users; increase the pace of large-scale logging; or rapidly develop lands with oil wells, mines and roads at the expense of other important uses of public lands like hunting, hiking and camping and they still could not afford to manage the land. The reality is that current Federal public lands management, including wildfire management, is a enormous subsidy to the amenity economy of the western states and they would be wise to take the money and move with the times. Many conservative administrations in the west seem not to understand these simple economic lessons so the debate will inevitably continue and so will anti- government sentiments. The truism of the sorts of changes that have taken place on romance lands in the Greater Yellowstone is that the costs and benefits of conservation - hosting more bears on the landscape, or living in the new economic and social reality, are not evenly distributed nor are they always easily measured. Surveys show over and over that the public, be they park visitors, residents of large urban centers, or most Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem residents, overwhelmingly support policies like bear and wolf restoration, and conservation. People like bears but there is always an undercurrent of fear and the same is true of the social and economic shift. Those who are new to the experience of living with bears are fearful of the unknown. Those who are new to the experience of living in a region where rapid growth is ubiquitous are just as uneasy with the reality of increasing land prices and an unpredictable social and political system. People who have lived in close proximity to bears for a time learn to tolerate them. They may not be overjoyed but, as with the obnoxious next-door neighbor, they learn to live with them with minimal conflict. This includes most of the ranching community in the region and over time, with more experience, tolerance will grow. Can the same be said of adapting to a new social reality? 258 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44267 Chapter 10 What does the future hold? A Conclusion, of Sorts The premise of this book has been that restoration of the Yellowstone grizzly bear is emblematic of how conservation is strongly associated with an overall net gain for the region. Restoring bears set the Greater Yellowstone region up for success in public and private lands management and fostered prosperity for residents. It was also good for the bears and other wild creatures, waterways, and ecosystem integrity. Grizzly bear conservation is a convenient way to frame the discussion of conservation vs commodity development, the old west compared to the new, and to examine the social balance sheet of who wins and who loses in this new and still evolving economic and social realignment. Earlier I posed the question with respect to Grizzly bear restoration: “is this all we get, more bears?”. For some that would be enough but for most of us we need something more than a simple “Yes”. Here is where political ecology comes in. The “political” in political ecology is concerned with power. In our context we ask – what is the power calculation with respect to conservation and equity among its recipients and how might we reconcile the inherent unevenness. Where political economy is the study of institutionalized solutions. Political ecology considers the role of institutions in the ecological and conservation context. It teaches us that if we can design functional social institutions, we can solve problems. Elinor Ostrom, remember her from our discussion of the Tragedy of the Commons, tell us what “functional” means. Her eight design principles for solving these sorts of problems can be applied to managing the social tolerance for bears and the inequities of living in a romance economy. By applying Ostrom’s principles to bear management perhaps we can envision a framework for how to think about future social policy. The first three of her principles are central. First, there must be clearly defined boundaries to the problem. Without boundaries, problems tend to run over into other issues. There is only so much bear habitat. Bears can and are expanding their range outside the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in all directions and bears are now seen in places where they have not lived for decades. In anticipation of delisting, the three states of the GYE are already making decisions where those bears will be tolerated, if they will be relocated or killed, and on hunting regulations – the default position seems to be liberal hunting seasons that will result in high rates of bear mortality. There is another way. The advantage of decades of Grizzly bear science is that we currently know where they are, and we have robust habitat models that predict their future whereabouts. Science will help define the boundaries, but humans will eventually define the social boundaries for bears and that work has begun. Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks has already invested in full time positions aimed at managing the expanding range of bears and the attendant social impacts. Over time, locals learn to live with their new neighbors and tolerance grows. With experience, living with bears is no longer as scary as it once was. In those infrequent instances where management interventions are necessary, they are rarely fatal to the offending bear and more commonly the bears are moved to where they will have fewer conflicts with humans. One example of the limits of tolerance is when bears become garbage habituated – in that case the bear is often destroyed. A fed bear is a dead bear. The advantage of clear borders to problem definition is that everyone knows where one policy stops and another begins, and we can adapt accordingly. We can easily imagine zoning for bears. Outside the “bear tolerance zone” human values will prevail, inside, the management bias is toward the bear. This is better than another all-out war against the animals or unending social conflict. Next, Orstrom says, there must be shared costs and benefits of problem solving. Unfair inequality poisons collective efforts. Unfortunately, there is almost no way to ensure this happens with respect to bear policy. Regional landowners will almost always incur the direct costs of livestock loss and perceived threats to their livelihood while most of us who enjoy bears and other wildlife will pay nothing for the privilege. In the parlance of public policy, we are free riders on the system of bear conservation. Because we shoulder none of the cost but receive many of the benefits, we need to rethink how to shift those costs to the bear-enjoying public. One idea gaining traction is a tax on outdoor recreation products that could be earmarked to, among other goals, offset the costs of bear management and in return, give the pro bear public some skin in the game. One could easily imagine that a modest tax on kayaks, backpacks, mountain bikes, and all other manner of outdoor equipment could be used to help pay for the costs of bear management and habitat acquisition, among other conservation projects. Several nonprofits and state policies reimburse livestock losses due to predation. This is a good start and the so-called “backpack tax” could add to those funds. Still another idea is for states to sell nonconsumptive wildlife permits. One could imagine that a robust cost-shifting program could expand the tolerance zone discussed above. Sidebar: Giving Non Hunters a Voice in Wildlife Management The North American Model of Wildlife Management, the basis for virtually every state’s management of game animals, recognizes that wildlife is a public-trust resource, and that science is the proper basis of wildlife policy. The model says that the hunting public funds state fish and game commissions through the purchase of hunting licenses and modest state funding. In Wyoming for example 55% of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department budget comes from the sale of hunting and fishing licenses and fees. In Montana it is nearly 100%. The result is that hunters have the most influence over how the state commissions and their wildlife policy. Hunters rightly claim credit for saving or restoring iconic American species like elk, antelope, ducks, and wild turkey. Yet, they have also pushed for aggressive hunting seasons on wolves and grizzly bears. Because they do not contribute in a meaningful way to fish and game budgets, the non hunting public carries less political clout. At the same time, the 10 largest non-profit conservation organizations contribute $2.5 billion annually to habitat and wildlife conservation; of this, 12.3 percent comes from hunters and 87.7 percent from the non-hunting public.259 Such numbers suggest an inequity when the non-wildlife consumptive public has less say in controversial wildlife management issues such as fur trapping, predator control, trophy hunting, coyote killing contests and wolf reintroduction compared to hunters and trappers. One solution is to sell the public non consumptive “hunting” licenses and tags, so they have an even voice in management. Fearing political backlash from a conservative state legislature, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks stalled such proposal to sell a wolf-management stamp that would have funded non-lethal parts of the agency’s program. Another idea is to sell “watchable wildlife” licenses as is done in Idaho and North Dakota. Finally, Orstrom teaches that policy reached by consensus will always be more sustainable than a top-down approach. This is, in fact, Ostrom’s guiding principle. The State of Montana was at one time ahead of the curve on this. In April 2019 former Governor Bullock created the Governor's Grizzly Bear Conservation and Management Advisory Council whose purpose was to solicit public input for “fundamental guidance and direction on key issues and challenges related to the conservation and management of grizzly bears in Montana, particularly those issues on which there is significant social disagreement”. Membership to the council was open to all applicants but represented a cross-section of Montanans from ranchers to hunting guides to conservationists and tribal members. They could draw on expertise from state agencies but also held a series of public meetings across the state in an effort to design policy recommendations from the grassroots. The council met 15 times and received over 16,000 public comments. They released their final report in the Fall of 2020.260 While they did not agree completely, they made progress by showing where they did agree and again, defined boundaries around the issues of disagreement. Other states could and should consider similar efforts to reach grass roots citizens and actively involve them in policy making. Such a commission goes beyond the minimally effective public meeting and public comment period. It goes without saying that 259 Bruskotter, J.T. Nelson, M.P., Peterson, M.N., Peterson, T.R., Serfass, T.L., Sullivan, L. and J.A. Vucetich. (2022). Beyond Game Management: Toward a More Inclusive Ethic for Wildlife Conservation. School of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.13989.58085 260 Final report at: https://fwp.mt.gov/gbac such efforts require honest brokers and representation of a wide array of political interests. That is why it rarely happens. Her other principles focus largely on maintaining a workable stakeholder driven problem- solving process. They involve close monitoring of participation in the process by those involved, a consideration of graduated sanctions for bad actors to avoid rent seeking behaviors, a fast and fair conflict resolution process for participants so equity is preserved, and sufficient local autonomy for people trying to work together. The final principle is centered on shared values of many groups working together. Very simply, if they are to make progress, they must be on the same page in terms of the boundary issue, sharing the costs and benefits of problem solving, and being committed to a consensus process. It is essentially an issue of scaling smaller efforts. This is particularly important where the “problem” roams over long distances and across multiple jurisdictions. It is easy to be optimistic toward building more social tolerance for bears. After all, they are the iconic symbol of romance lands and there is a tremendous amount of social and bureaucratic good will already invested in their success. If the regulatory integrity of the Endangered Species Act can be preserved and regional stakeholders can be active and equal partners with federal agencies there is good reason to hope the bears will continue to thrive along with the ecosystem services associated with them. Whether agencies can preserve the integrity of the ESA into the future is an open question. I am not worried about short term shocks to our political system, however disturbing. Administrations come and go and while the Trump administration has caused irreparable harm to America’s public lands, the larger issue is that of administrative competency. National parks, monuments, wilderness, and other protected lands are born in a political matrix. Soon after, and often before, the creation of a new park or wilderness area "Interest groups" (“friends” groups) pop up like mushrooms after a spring rain. These groups have a stake in how the new areas are managed and usually represent their own narrow agenda. Everything from public access issues, wildlife management, hunting, fish management, motorized recreation is fair game, and the list goes on -- and on. All these groups represent individuals who believe their position is the best and correct one. They play the "policy politics" game, trying to ensure that their stake is represented when legislators or land managers make a decision. A recent example in Yellowstone National Park is legislation allowing park visitors to carry guns for "personal protection", whatever that means. In this case, a powerful national interest group (the National Rifle Association) had enough sway to get their agenda into the legislative process and then, into a law. There was no compelling reason for the law but the group representing gun owners saw an easy political win – virtually every legislator from a western state supported the bill. Other issues include, but are not limited to, winter recreation use, bison management, new commercial development in the park, or limiting visitation. The list is long. The point is – it is not sufficient for public land managers to be well trained in the ecological sciences, they must be effective administrators with a keen ear for politics as driven by the public and elected politicians. Science based land managers are trained to collect and interpret data. The belief is that where the data are compelling certain decisions are self-evident. From there, obvious strategies follow. It does not always work out that way as the next couple of examples show. Current Yellowstone Park management policies call for the restoration of native populations of fish. Restoring native populations mean that non-native fish must be eliminated. In Slough Creek, an iconic and popular fly-fishing stream in the northeast park of the park, a determination to restore the native fishery to this stream resulted in a "requirement" for fishermen to kill all non-native trout that they catch. This includes nonnative rainbow and brown trout as well as hybrids with native Yellowstone Cutthroat trout – the “cutbow”. This policy is not popular and is a source of serious controversy, not to mention a barrier to progress restoring the fishery. Returning all trout unharmed after catching has been the ethos among serious fly fishermen for years; killing trout violates cultural norms of people that are passionate about conservation and fish. Observance of the mandatory kill regulation is spotty at best and fisheries managers have had to resort to artificial barriers to prevent upstream migration, electroshock removal, and as a last resort - poison. These methods are also unpopular but at least do not rely on the ability of fishermen to identify nonnative trout or on rapidly changing the culture of catch and release practices. The lesson is that while the mandatory kill policy is a good science-based management decision, it may not be politically expedient. At least politicians are not yet involved in the controversy, unlike the next case. Another "technically correct" but highly charged solution involved closing a popular campground at Fishing Bridge to favor habitat for bears. Bob Barbee referred to his immersion into the dispute a “political bloodbath”. The entire story can be found in the wonderful book “Protecting Yellowstone: Science and the Politics of National Park Management” by retired park ranger and writer Michael Yochim.261 Read the book. Here is the short version. At the outlet of Yellowstone Lake is a Grizzly bear paradise. Cutthroat trout spawn in nearby Pelican Creek, meadows offer grazing, bison and elk calves are easy pickings in the Spring, and nearby forests are safe places for a summer nap. In the 1980s there was a commercial village consisting of stores and a service station, an RV camp, tourist cabins, picnic areas, and a tent campground. Having such a development in prime bear habitat challenged the regulatory ethic of the park and invited potentially disastrous human/bear conflicts. Fishing Bridge accounted for more grizzly fatalities than any other place in the park. Keep in mind this is only a few years after Endangered Species Act listing of the bears. In 1981 the Park Service made plans to close Fishing Bridge within five years and shift use toward the planned Grant Village development a few miles away. Barbee took over as Yellowstone superintendent in 1982 and stepped into a developing political firefight. He once told me his entire Park Service career was a series of moves from one crisis to the next, this would not be his last. The cast of characters in this policy drama included environmentalists, park planners and wildlife managers, the Chamber of Commerce of Cody, Wyoming, the president of Hamilton Stores that operated stores in the park, as well as RV advocates like the Good Sam Club and Trailer Life. But, most importantly, the controversy attracted the attention of members of the powerful and vocal Congressional delegation from Wyoming – Congressman and future Vice President Dick Cheney and Senators Malcom Wallop and Alan Simpson. By June 1984 Yellowstone staff had written an environmental assessment report on why the area should be returned to a more natural state. Senator Simpson, who grew up in Cody, demanded a full Environmental Impact Statement on the closure – a move calculated to take more staff time and park budget. He also insisted it include not only the ecological impacts but the social and economic as well. Barbee turned to a new computer modeling technique known as Cumulative Effects Models that he believed would show accurate impacts on the Fishing Bridge bear population. Simpson, well-known as an irascible character, simply refused to accept the research and pressured the Park to keep the facilities open as they worked on the EIS. 261 Yochim, M. J. (2013). Protecting Yellowstone: Science and the politics of national park management. UNM Press. In the end, the Fishing Bridge closure was challenged by environmentalists who thought it did not go far enough and by politicians who, of course, thought it went too far. Three years later, in 1987, the EIS was released and a political compromise over science was crafted. Even as 95% of public comments were in favor of complete closure, the NPS would close only the tent campground and move it, and the source of human food for bears, a few miles down the road. They would keep the commercial facilities and the RV camp intact. Senator Simpson thought it was a “pretty good compromise” – one based on his political calculations, not science. The conclusion to this sordid political drama is too good to not offer here. After several more years of public comment, more study, and the inevitable revisions, Barbee issued the final EIS in 1994 just as he was leaving Yellowstone for a new post as the Alaska regional director of national parks. He refused to sign it. The new superintendent Mike Finley made no final decision and left it to sit on his desk, so the EIS was never officially issued. Bill Clinton appointed Bruce Babbitt as Secretary of Interior and the Senator from Cody retired. The campground that was removed was never relocated and the camp spots have never been replaced. In the end, political pressure is, at best, temporary when the actors and administrative priorities in Washington DC invariably shift. In this case, the best science did not prevail, but it managed to wait out the bully from Cody and we ended up with a “satisfactory” conclusion. A lesson of both cases is that a solid, data-supported explanation, may not result in better understanding by the public but attention paid to the social and political dynamic might. Opponents of policy often do not look at the data and will not accept the explanation because it does not fit their preconceptions. Those who live and work on the land are especially prone to their own version of “barstool biology” and while local knowledge may not be technically sophisticated, it very well may have value--and besides, "home folks" do not take to being unappreciated. Their idiom may not be clothed in the language of science, but it is theirs and it will be to the advantage of the scientist/manager to understand and appreciate it, maybe even try to accommodate it if feasible. Had Park fishery managers undertaken a slower and more culturally sympathetic approach with fishermen on Slough Creek perhaps they could have implemented a more successful native fish policy. If they had approached the RV crowd and Senator Simpson with alternatives to camping at Fishing Bridge maybe they could have designed less impactful camping locations and avoided a long political fight. The future of public lands is ultimately in the hands of its managers. If those public servants are mindful of the politics and protective of the science, then things will most likely turn out okay. But those same lands are also in the hands of the public – literally and figuratively, and that should give us hope for their future. The history of public policy tells us that major changes generally come from outside the organization, at least initially. "Policy is never forever" the saying goes, but it is often guarded vociferously by the bureaucracy in charge. This is especially true of long-established time-honored procedures. Predator control died hard in the national parks and the shift in policy came about from academia and nonprofits. Embracing fire as an essential ecological factor came from outside the Forest Service was also pushed by those in academia and working for nonprofits. For those internal to the agency that would like to see changes, it is helpful to cultivate bedfellows from outside the organization to help carry the political water, no bureaucracy rewards adventurism or zealotry for change from within. This is why it is important to understand the nature of management problems and recognize that they are the product of natural and social science. Sidebar: Wicked Problems Sometimes it seems the issues of the day – conservation of natural resources, wildlife conflicts, forest health and wildfire, or recreation impacts, are the same ones we worried about in past years and what we will likely be worrying about in the years to come. There is a reason for this – it could be there are no good solutions or at least we do not recognize them as such. Policy analysts have a name for these sorts of conflicts – wicked problems.262 Wicked problems seem infinitely difficult to solve because they not only often lack optimal solutions or definitive answers but, because the very conditions that define the problem change over time and the problem continues to be redefined; they are forever issues. A hundred years ago no one thought twice about cutting old growth timber or shooting a wolf. Today, our social bias is toward preservation of both. The culture of management has changed, and cultural bias always plays a key role in our inability to find resolution of wicked problems. Divergent groups will never agree on what exactly the problem is when managing public lands for example and it seems we continually talk past each other on mining jobs, recreation user days, or solitude. Likewise, if there are no criteria for defining the problem, there is no criteria for resolution and therefore conclusion. 262 Balint, P. J., R. E. Stewart, A. Desai and L. C. Walters (2011). Managing wicked environmental problems. Wicked Environmental Problems, Springer: 207-217. Solutions, like problem definition, lack clear metrics and are subject to interpretation. When are bears truly recovered – when there are a minimum number of breeding females, when they are out of danger from humans? No one can say for sure. Wicked problems are often symptoms of other systemic problems. In the case of grizzly recovery, the loss of habitat was largely a function of forest management and agency incentives. It was necessary to change management but that alone was not sufficient to save the bears. Further, bear recovery scientists had one chance to save the last 150 Yellowstone grizzly bears. If they got any part of it wrong, they ran the risk of failure. They did not have a large body of other work to draw on, they could not conduct experiments and hypothesis testing, they have to move ahead and approach the problem in a series of iterations. They did not have the luxury of making a mistake. They took a rational scientific approach and ran with it. Fortunately, it worked out. Not all problems facing the GYE are “wicked” in nature. Many are completely understandable and solvable. Politics plays a key role and while politics has a negative connotation for some, for others it is a process that often results in incremental progress. Those political victories are the result of having intact democratic institutions that function in the public interest. Right now, institutions that foster the continued transition of what it means to live near romance lands should be a priority for communities in the Greater Yellowstone. Bounding the problem(s) of development, affordable housing, and preservation of ecological integrity is paramount. This could begin with a redefinition of “community” along the lines of an “econshed” where the vectors of spending and growth are considered. A good example is the close connection between resort development in Big Sky, MT and the towns of Ennis, Gallatin Gateway, Belgrade, and Bozeman. Right now, each seem to act as if spillover effects from Big Sky affect them without regard to other communities. In fact, they are interconnected with respect to housing for resort employees, affordable housing for residents, labor competition, land use, water, and everything else needed to preserve vibrant economies. The five communities need to recognize the connections and function as a regional economy rather than competing with each other in a race to the bottom to see who can develop faster. This could lead to cooperative solutions to both the costs of development as well as shared benefits. Such shared efforts will give a regional voice to residents, elected officials, and nonprofits. It will not be easy. Romance lands are the future of ecological and human well-being in the Greater Yellowstone and beyond. The history of the region shows that thoughtful management by an enlightened public bureaucracy working in partnership with private landowners can preserve that well-being far into the distant future. The lessons of experiments like wolf reintroduction, bear restoration, catch and release fishing, conservation easements, and other innovations can be exported to other global locations. Jaguar reintroduction to the American Southwest and Wolverine restoration are two examples. Both will result in enhanced land management in favor of nature. Policies like catch and release can be mirrored in places like the Austrian Alps where a catch and kill culture has resulted in degraded recreational fishing.263 The superintendents of Yellowstone National Park have a unique perspective on the region. Their job is not only management of the park. To do their job effectively, they must think about how park policy affects local economies and adjacent public lands and work in partnership with both. Bob Barbee, a 42-year veteran of the Park Service and Yellowstone’s superintendent from 1981 to 1993, had such a perspective. As he told me shortly before his death in 2016, he was “there at the beginning” with the fires of 1988, the early efforts at wolf reintroduction, and his signature accomplishment – the restoration of the Yellowstone grizzly bear. I asked him about the future of parks and public lands. He told me of his successful efforts to stop spraying DDT in Yosemite and shifting the fire policy in Yellowstone – he was not always a popular guy with the public and politicians. But, he said, if public lands managers are there to win a popularity contest, they should go work elsewhere (he suggested the Post Office). Management of our public lands, especially those in and around Yellowstone is, he said “a big deal”. I couldn’t agree more. 263 Unfer, G., Pinter, K. (2018). Recreational Fisheries: The Need for Sustainability in Fisheries Management of Alpine Rivers. In: Schmutz, S., Sendzimir, J. (eds) Riverine Ecosystem Management. Aquatic Ecology Series, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73250-3_14