Dear HCN,
One of the few things
Greg Hanscom got right in his article on Yellowstone’s Northern
Range (HCN, 9/15/97) is that politics is running the show, and that
“range managers, wise-users and Republican lawmakers are all ears’
for any criticism of natural
regulation.
Unfortunately, he fell into the
critics’ trap and declared them the debate winners by default. He
sure gave short shrift to the scientific arguments presented in the
Park Service’s report, Yellowstone’s Northern Range: Complexity
& Change in a Wildland Ecosystem. There is, after all, evidence
supporting natural regulation. That evidence deserves more
attention and respect than High Country News gave
it.
In any case, the heart of the matter is not
that natural regulation is merely ideological while the active
management pushed by Alston Chase, Fred Wagner and Charles Kay is
objectively true and scientific – as the latter claim. All you have
to do is read what the latter have written about Yellowstone to
understand that they are no less ideological, no less likely to
manipulate science for their own purposes, than are supporters of
natural regulation.
The critics’ problem with
natural regulation is not so much that it doesn’t work, which is
something we can all argue over at an ecological level, but that it
acknowledges our ultimate inability to control the environment.
Furthermore, natural regulation acknowledges that producing
economic commodities for human profit isn’t the only purpose of the
land. Natural regulation has an ethical, noneconomic component the
active managers and their supporters in the commodities industries
can’t abide.
It would be nice if we could stick
with science, but science is not the issue in Yellowstone. If those
of us who love Yellowstone fail to understand that, we’ll certainly
lose what we love.
Robert
Hoskins
Casper,
Wyoming
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Humility is the heart of park’s approach.
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