Dear HCN,
We are pleased that High
Country News had the good taste to introduce Fred Wagner’s
editorial “Scientist says Yellowstone Park is being destroyed”
(HCN, 5/30/94) as “opinion,” because there certainly isn’t a lot
besides opinion in it. His comments about the Yellowstone grazing
issue are specious, riddled with errors, and overloaded with
conspiratorial accusations. Wagner puts such a shrill spin on this
whole story that it would take a small book just to suggest the
real complexity behind his simplistic
arguments.
Rather than writing such a book, we
will offer a couple of general observations for HCN readers, who
are welcome to contact us for more
specifics.
First, Wagner proposes that the recent
scientific research directed by Congress in 1986 “did not address
the key problems. It focused on herbaceous vegetation when it is
the woody vegetation that is fast disappearing from the northern
range under elk browsing.” Yellowstone history is too well known
for Wagner to rewrite it like this. Since the grazing issue first
arose early in this century, concern for the grasslands has been
overwhelmingly the central issue. If there has been a secondary
issue it has been erosion supposedly caused by elk. Woody
vegetation has always ranked well below those
concerns.
We therefore assume – now that a wealth
of new ecosystem-based research has challenged traditional
interpretations of grassland deterioration and has simply disproved
the old views of elk-caused erosion – that Wagner is grasping for a
fresh villainy and the only thing he could find is elk effects on
the woody vegetation. It is, indeed, true that there are important
unresolved questions about woody plants, and we have every
intention of continuing to foster research on those questions. But
however hard Wagner tries to rewrite our history, he isn’t going to
change what has really mattered here.
Second,
Wagner repeatedly questions the credibility of recent research
conducted by respected scientists from numerous agencies and
universities. But while these researchers have regularly published
their findings in the leading refereed scientific journals, every
source of criticism that Wagner mentions (including his own
“opinions’) is entirely unrefereed. Apparently critics aren’t held
to the same standards as the people they
criticize.
Something odd is going on here,
something that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with science. At
first glance, Wagner seems to have adopted Yellowstone-bashing as
some kind of bizarre hobby in which self-righteous indignation can
replace a balanced perspective on extremely complex issues. Could
it be that he, like others, is somehow threatened by the new
thinking on range ecology coming out of Yellowstone
research?
Since the 1960s, the many scientists
who have actually done research here and have thereby influenced
the direction of Yellowstone management deserve great credit for
going up against the hard-liners of traditional range management.
They have real data, and so we will continue to listen to them
rather than to the casual observers and the hobbyists. We owe it to
this resource to use the best information available in its
management.
Robert D.
Barbee
Yellowstone National Park,
Wyoming
Robert Barbee has been
superintendent of Yellowstone National Park for the last 11
years.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Scientist’s critique was just plain wrong.
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