Preserving Yellowstone's Natural Conditions: Science and the Perception of Nature

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U of Nebraska Press, Jan 1, 1999 - History - 370 pages
American ecologists seeking to influence the founders of the National Park Service had hoped that protection of the parks would create preserves where ?natural conditions? could exist in an idealized presettlement state. These hopes, however, produced a bitter irony. In order to secure a naturally functioning park, officials had to provide intensive management to preserve ?nature at work.? For the better part of the twentieth century, the forms this management has taken have polarized public opinion. ø James A. Pritchard?s Preserving Yellowstone?s Natural Conditions demonstrates that even the most up-to-date scientific policy could not reckon with public expectations and animal behavior. When Yellowstone stopped its bear feeding program in an attempt to restore naturally regulated bear populations, the public bemoaned the loss of the spectacle. The bears, meanwhile, had learned to associate humans with food, and the loss of reliable meals brought them into campsites. Park officials had to shoot bears that made a menace of themselves, leaving many people frustrated with the park?s attempts to preserve Yellowstone as a natural ecosystem. ø Pritchard believes that restoring natural conditions for bears and other animals is a sound idea. Yellowstone, he argues, represents an ecological anchor, a relatively untrammeled slice of nature. Despite decades of tampering, the park provides scientists and managers with an outdoor laboratory for examining natural processes that existed before extensive settlement.
 

Contents

A Preservationist Yellowstone 18721915
1
Conservation Thought and Yellowstone 19161930
23
The Wildlife Division and the Ecology of Intervention
75
Managing the Natural During the Postwar Era
147
A Natural Yellowstone 19631974
201
A Greater Yellowstone 19751995
251
Epilogue
307
Notes
315
Sources
357
Copyright

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About the author (1999)

James A. Pritchard is an environmental historian and an adjunct professor of landscape architecture at Iowa State University.

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