The Yellowstone Scam
Morrison, Micah
Micah Morrison THE YELLOWSTONE SCAM The National Park Service cons the President, the press, and the public. Mammoth Hot Springs T he historic fires of '88 were snuffed 1 by the autumn snows...
...According to numerous NPS publications and official reports, "meteorological events' drought, heat, wind— were responsible for the fires...
...One writer called the gateway towns "economic parasites...
...the Forest Service's mandate is "multiple-use," which allows some mining, ranching, logging, and fuel operations in parts of the national forests...
...Over across the other side of the park, a guide tells me, Cache Creek has been torn to pieces...
...B eyond the immediate issues, a complex political battle over the future of Yellowstone is shaping up...
...This reinforces gearhead antipathy to what it feels is a slow takeover by uppity, yuppity liberals...
...They were ignored...
...In local terms, it's the "gearheads" (conservatives) versus the "granolas" or "treehuggers" (liberals...
...Satchell of US...
...Birds twitter nearby...
...Yellowstone officials and their allies speak of an "ecosystem" 1 that includes the park and millions of acres 'The Yellowstone region is a chaotic mix of federal, state, and private lands...
...Something is gone...
...The animals are fine, the tourists are coming back, and the true challenge lies in preserving the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem from the encroachment of "developers...
...Nature's ways they can live with, man's errors they can live with—man's lies and denials and evasions they cannot live with...
...The US...
...If it were up to me," he said, "I would ban all timber sales...
...Forest Service concepts of "multiple use" of wilderness areas...
...Natural regulation—let it burn—is sound policy in the GYC view, and after all, one does not criticize one's political allies...
...This is only about 48 percent of the park...
...The GYC's long-term goals are an expansion of park preserves and a centralization of the area's fragmented administrative authority into what one of their writers calls a "National Biosphere Reserve...
...W hen the park launched a May public relations blitz, the media, chastened and apparently unwilling to do any digging on their own, trumpeted the NPS line...
...TWo separate sources in the NPS told me that Park Superintendent Robert Barbee and Chief Scientist John Varley have convened meetings of department heads and instructed them to confront all questioners with "vague, feel good" answers...
...The NPS's policy of natural regulation—the phrase "let-it-burn" is frowned upon—has proved sound...
...He turns up a few roots beneath a half inch of charred soil...
...Yellowstone is the major employer in the area and most residents spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution...
...The fire released nutrients that will enrich the soils, further promoting growth...
...Treehuggers imply that gearheads are noisy lowlifes who will wreck the environment...
...Reporters have been steered away from heavily damaged areas...
...On the other side is a loose array of traditional economic interests—ranching, mining, timber—plus assorted snowmobilers, hunters, and other conservative elements...
...And then there are the current glowing reports of increased tourism...
...Multiple-use, for example, must be reined in...
...preliminary surveys at several sites in the park revealed that within a few days after the fire, densities of new seeds on the ground ranged from 50,000 to one million per acre (which equals one to twenty seeds per square foot...
...The news from the NPS gets better...
...Others have been even less kind...
...Only a lengthy investigation of NPS actions during and after the fires and a careful survey of Yellowstone will establish if park officials engaged in a cover-up of actions taken during and after the fires, or simply are putting the best face on a bad situation...
...The NPS policy of letting naturally caused fires burn is defended...
...We hear about the seeds from serotinous cones of the lodgepole pines...
...We keep the road to them plowed, we supply police and fire and ambulance...
...Welcome to a Changing Yellowstone," announces a special supplement handed to every visitor entering Micah Morrison, roving correspondent for The American Spectatoi is working on a book about Yellowstone and the fires of 1988 for Harper & Row the park...
...The flames sketched a "mosaic" of burned and green patches across the park...
...See the wildflowers...
...It's a complicated story, and the NPS is not the only culprit...
...On one side is the NPS and a number of liberal environmental groups led by an outfit called the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC...
...of adjacent land...
...Ignore the elk carcass floating in the lake...
...News voiced the GYC view of things: a general antipathy toward development...
...Things can get downright nasty...
...They repeatedly charge that some of the fires could have been put out early and that the NPS lied about their true size...
...Eventually, the environmentalists will seek an even larger federal role in land ownership...
...The guiding idea is that the special, wild nature of the Yellowstone region must be preserved—and to do that the boundaries of the preserved area must be expanded...
...The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem itself is an as-yet undefined six- to twelve-million-acre swath around the park: a sort of ecological buffer zone...
...Tel: 406-586-1593...
...News, pine shoots "will be poking up through the ash...
...Yes, in other places the fire did jump and burn, and you can see fascinating and grotesque shapes on the mountainsides, as if some ancient Indian god had come flaming down from the sky and commenced a deadly ghost dance...
...With fire heat estimated as high as 1000 ° Fahrenheit on the surface, some biologists have expressed concern about soil sterilization...
...Local people know the countryside well and warned of out-of-control blazes early in the summer of '88...
...Enormous public confusion resulted from hasty reports in the media," notes one park document...
...Brokaw and other mediagenic TV and movie types for years have been trickling into the region for vacation stays of various lengths, buying summer homes and traipsing around in chic outdoor clothing...
...Nature, of course, is a savage mistress and sometimes all we can do is stay out of her way...
...Yellowstone: A New Beginning" trumpets another glossy publication...
...Don't worry...
...NBC's Tom Brokaw is a major treehugger and an important asset of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 Nothing will grow here, not for a long time...
...Our Land is at 530 Park Ave., Idaho Falls, ID 83402...
...Of that, 562,350 acres was 'canopy burn,' meaning that the forest was blackened...
...I hiked through blasted zones where there was not a cone or pine shoot in sight...
...A mere half million acres were "blackened" by severe burn, and the other 300,000 burned acres will quickly spring back to life...
...Yellowstone, a federal entity, long has had a running battle with the surrounding small towns...
...As Snow Melts, Yellowstone's Rebirth Begins," said the Washington Post...
...Be happy...
...Does Yellowstone exist for the people in the gateway communities...
...There is, for example, the case of the lodgepole pines and their heat-sensitive, seed-releasing serotinous cones— cited in virtually every media report...
...Moments when we look upon the fury that has overtaken parts of Yellowstone and, like Lear on the heath, rage against those "sulphurous and thought-executing fires...
...See the green meadow...
...Lodgepole pines form approximately 80 percent of the park's trees...
...I dig down, looking for soil, a root, anything...
...They bristle at suggestions that they are servants of industry and pillagers of the land...
...Local residents also claim that the NPS has lied about the number of animals killed during the fires...
...Fire can't destroy the "Greater Yellowstone ecosystem . . . [but the] realistic fear is that the tapestry of America's most ecologically pristine national park will be unraveled, thread by thread, as its creeks are poisoned by mining wastes, endangered grizzlies are shot as they stray over the ecosystem's shrinking boundaries, forest clear-cuts destroy scenic viewscapes and the development squeeze turns Yellowstone into a big-sky version of Central Park...
...Soil surveys have shown that no more than one-tenth of one percent of the park received severe enough burn intensity to kill the roots, rhizomes, bulbs, and seeds that lie a few inches under the surface...
...In fact, the fire was good for the soil...
...This group aligns itself with U.S...
...Motel owners I spoke with in early June said bookings were way down, and backcountry guide services say they have been driven close to bankruptcy...
...Were sold the idea of the West as independent," McNamee said, scorning this traditional view...
...At a recent GYC meeting at a lodge inside Yellowstone, Barbee was given a standing ovation...
...Thomas McNamee is president of the GYC, author of a respected book on the grizzly bear, and a resident of New York City...
...News exercising his critical acumen from economically moribund Wyoming: last year's "smoke and flames ironically obscured what most experts think is the true threat to the park's future: development...
...In the matter of those serotinous lodgepole pinecones, for instance, it turns out that the study was conducted decades ago...
...The Yellowstone region encompasses parts of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho...
...The coalition was organized, on the scene, and able to provide sound bites and background information for the media...
...The fight could contribute to the shape of national environmental policies, particularly the management of our natural resources...
...After some of the greatest forest fires in history, should we uncritically accept the explanations of the very people to whom Yellowstone's care was entrusted before the fires...
...Satchell in US...
...My foot sinks into black ash on the forest floor, crazy white lines criss-cross the deep powder: markers of death where trees fell and vanished in 1000° heat, leaving only lines of pale ash...
...News approach, written by Michael Satchell, in the May 15 edition, is a perfect model of the story repeated in newspaper, radio, and television reports across the country...
...This group's mode of outdoor use tends toward hiking and skiing...
...Residents of the "gateway communities" around Yellowstone and some employees of the NPS are furious...
...Black poles fall away from me on all sides, running down a hill and back up a mountainside, spreading out around the whole valley...
...It's more a story of dishonor than of outright villainy, a story of the cowardly and arrogant behavior endemic to the bureaucratic mind...
...He opens his Swiss Army knife and digs into a blackened meadow now fresh with a thin coat of new grass...
...Thankfully, according to the NPS, the "vast forest of lodgepole pines are fire tolerant...
...Based on a recent two-week visit to the region, it is clear to me that the NPS is providing nothing resembling the whole story...
...Membership and budget have doubled in the last year...
...Park Superintendent Robert Barbee has appeared in Washington and a number of European capitals with the message that the media distorted the Yellowstone fires...
...He stops, unable to continue...
...As the fires began to run out of control, the NPS played down local complaints and turned away pleas for action...
...Recovery has started and biologists say much of the burned area will be green and lush come spring...
...Gearheads suggest that treehuggers are radical interlopers seeking to destroy traditional labor and lifestyles by choking land use...
...It aligns itself with the NPS goal of "preserving" the environment, or "ecosystem," a term the GYC has done much to popularize...
...other areas showed some pine shoot growth, but an experienced outdoorsman told me that the vast majority of the shoots will not survive...
...Yet if man is partly or wholly responsible for the destruction in Yellowstone, shouldn't man be called to account...
...So, to summarize the NPS account of the fires and the latest media relay: the fires were not nearly as bad as reported...
...Renewal" is the theme...
...Yellowstone: A New Beginning" explains that mapping inside the park's boundaries "indicates that a maximum of 988,925 acres experienced some kind of burning...
...Humanoids, too, are not abandoning Yellowstone...
...Not so, says the NPS...
...Park employees involved in firefighting have been warned not to make waves...
...We know some of the fires were inevitable, but some weren't," a Cooke City motel owner told me...
...NPS reports of the fires are "all a bunch of goddamn lies," said John Griscomb, a Montana businessman...
...NBC's Tom Brokaw, for example, is a major treehugger and an important asset of the GYC...
...These days, a smoke screen is billowing out from here at the Yellowstone headquarters of the National Park Service (NPS), where federal officials, in a successful damage-control effort, have hoodwinked the President and the press, misled the public, and turned some of the biggest forest fires in recorded memory into nothing more than Mom Nature's little weenie roast...
...Varley unceasingly sounds variations on this theme—one local resident compared him to a "tent revivalist...
...The message: forget about the fires, come to Yellowstone...
...Tel: 208-523-5000...
...I walked through the park, drove through it, took an all-terrain vehicle up into some of the adjacent wilderness sectors and talked with backcountry guides and long-time residents who have seen treasured groves and 300-year-old Douglas firs wiped from the face of the earth...
...It's also a story of lazy journalism missing the story once again, crumbling beneath its own sloth and a kill-the-messenger campaign by the NPS...
...T he NPS might as well adopt the 1 tune "Don't Worry, Be Happy" as its anthem for 1989...
...There was "frequent and unfortunate oversimplification and exaggeration," says another...
...They claim that the NPS allowed the fires to get out of control and now is trying to cover up the damage and direct public attention away from the issue...
...The GYC is shrewdly playing the environmental game at the local level, focusing on Yellowstone while trying to influence key congressional Greens such as Al Gore and Tim Wirth...
...Lies— or spin control...
...It isn't just "blackened canopy burn," it's some of the most beautiful spots in the nation gone forever from our lives and our children's lives...
...If a Pan Am jet crashes into a mountain, would we let Pan Am issue the official report on the crash...
...2 The GYC is located at 40 East Main St., Bozeman, MT 59715...
...News & World Report, "From Yellowstone Ashes, New Life THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 17 and Approach," ran the New York Times headline...
...They appear to be slowly coalescing into something called the "Wise Use Movement," centered on Our Land magazine in Idaho...
...Other sources confirm that these instructions have been passed on to all employees at orientation meetings...
...Apparently, the only group he hasn't met with is local residents...
...The truth and an apology—neither will be easy to come by...
...Another 372,350 acres was 'surface burn,' meaning that only the forest underbrush burned, and most trees will not die...
...Yet there is one evil gremlin lurking in the woods, and he isn't carrying a torch...
...And it's a story of certain environmental groups enjoying a rather too cozy relationship with the Park Service...
...I look at the black and silent valley, near the origin of the North Fork fire on the west side of Yellowstone...
...It begins with tiny wildflowers sprouting in blackened meadows, moves on to observe peacefully grazing animals (preferably with a few newborns romping nearby), and then eyes are lifted to the horizon, where "stands of evergreen lodgepole pine, interlaced with lifeless swaths of rust-red and black trees that have perished from heat or flames," keep watch over the placid valley...
...Yellowstone Lives...
...The fires that swept across nearly one million of the park's 2.2 million acres and through surrounding forests are being portrayed as simply another turn in the ecological cycle...
...The National Park Service is trying to bury the controversy," said a year-round resident of the tiny, isolated town of Cooke City, where feelings are especially bitter after the community came within hours of being totally destroyed by the fires...
...The GYC's influence, he said, is far out of proportion to its size, partly because the national environmental groups have "ossified...
...As a result, the public has been presented with a sanitized version of the fires of '88 and their political and economic repercussions—a curtain is being drawn around events that could reshape not only the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park but also the traditional culture of the American West...
...Other places too...
...There are places, moments, that Barbee and Varley would like to paste a Smiley Face over...
...Now, adding insult to injury, the NPS acts as if nothing happened...
...As for the animals, the NPS reports that "mammal populations sustained only small losses...
...The ecosystem argument is not without validity, and we'll come to it in a moment, but here is Mr...
...Another compared them to "spoiled children...
...To me it sometimes seemed like a weird mix of an environmental Big Lie and Potemkin Village: Fire is nice...
...A nice story, but full of holes...
...The Despain tour was repeated for me and, no doubt, hundreds of other reporters...
...Fires caused many cones to open and release their seeds...
...We are out with park biologist Don Despain, a kind and patient man who seems to spend all his time shepherding journalists...
...The park is wonderful...
...Yellowstone's chief scientist, John Varley, steps in: "The fires simply have no ecological downside...
...Sometimes they forget that this park has the word 'National' in its name...
...pointedly asked Mary Davis, an NPS information officer...
...All we want is the truth—and an apology...
...Thousands of copies were mailed to travel writers and agents, along with copious printed material...
...She added what seemed to be a veiled warning: "Cooke City is most dependent on us...
...Within five years these saplings will be waist high...
...Forest Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture...
...The publication features sixteen color photos, only two of which show burned forest areas...
...I spent a little time with representatives of both factions...
...We marvel over the new grass and cluck about a few burned trees at the outskirts of the meadow...
...The entire session," said one person who attended an orientation meeting, "was about how to deal with the media...
...Seeds from lodgepole pines will speedily repopulate the forests, and the soil is not sterilized...
...By June," says US...
...Federal authority looms large in the area, and the townspeople are frustrated by their political powerlessness...
...To McNamee, securing the ecosystem means "preserving the biological diversity and integrity of the landscape...
...The NPS, with a mandate to preserve Yellowstone's natural state, is a division of the Department of Interior...
...Many of the tourists are from nearby towns and counties, driving through for a look...
...But hike off the road for a while and you may encounter vast stretches of decimated landscape...
...To be sure, Yellowstone lives, and much of it is still spectacularly beautiful...
...2 Once again, though, the conservatives are playing catch-up with the liberals...
...In June, park officials announced that spring visits were up 23 percent over the previous year...
...The surrounding wilderness areas are administered by the U.S...
...The fires, he concedes, were good for the GYC...
...Yellowstone's forests have regenerated countless times and are well on their way to doing so again...
...They ridicule the notion that much of the burned areas will soon spring back to life...
...Some of these charges are detailed in my November 1988 TAS report, "While Yellowstone Burned...
...announced U.S...
...In its drift toward embracing a greater federal role, the GYC often echoes the NPS line on many issues, including the fires...
...Not an idea that would go over big in some local communities, and McNamee acknowledges that "we'll probably have to compromise on the issue of multiple-use...
...According to a biologist I consulted, only 30 percent of the pines bear effective serotinous cones...
...No "mosaic" here...
...The company holding the contract for Yellowstone's lucrative tourist trade, TW Recreational Services, produced a dreamy 17-minute videotape featuring idyllic landscapes, happy tourists, graceful elk and lumbering buffalo, sparkling streams, and, oh yes, about four minutes of heavily edited fire footage...
...We spoke in Cooke City...
...The only sobering note in all this good cheer, and it is a note sounded over and over, is the role of those damn reporters...
...Mammoth Hot Springs T he historic fires of '88 were snuffed 1 by the autumn snows nearly a year ago, but the smoke is thicker than ever...
...Treehuggers get more press because they appeal to the liberal conceits of the major media and because they are better organized and project a hipper image...
...The fact is they suck at the federal tit twelve months a year...
...McNamee THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 19...
...Grasses and shrubs will also flourish, leaving the forest healthier and more biologically diverse...
Vol. 22 • August 1989 • No. 8
