Yellowstone City Park: The Dominating Influence of Politicians in National Park Service Policymaking

In at least two advertisements in the last decade, tourism boosters in Cody, Wyoming, claimed that “Cody has a nice city park: . . . Yellowstone.”¹ The ads of course referred to Yellowstone National Park, about fifty miles west of the remote tourist town. While the phrasing was catchy, it also revealed a lot about the relationship between the town, the state in which it sits, and the iconic national park. As illustrated in three case studies in this article, parochial interests in Cody and Wyoming, acting in concert with powerful elected officials, have regularly overpowered National Park Service (NPS) managers in Yellowstone policymaking contests, with weakened resource or safety protections a common result. Other gateway communities and their political representatives have had similar effects in both Yellowstone and other parks, suggesting that such domination is not unique to Yellowstone. In most cases, politicians are responding to constituent concerns that NPS proposals will harm their economies or restrict their park access. While such domination does not always occur and some collaboration with gateway communities is laudatory, it is clear that political influence regularly overpowers the NPS and that park resources suffer as a result.

National parks have received a large amount of scholarship in the natural and cultural sciences, but fairly little from political scientists.² William R. Lowry has written three books examining the management of U.S. national parks from a political scientist’s perspective, but few other scholars have undertaken such inquiry. Lowry argues that political influence upon the national parks is strong and growing and that park managers advocating policy changes must therefore take care to build coalitions with supportive members of the public.³ A number of ex-NPS directors, speaking from the perspective of their firsthand experiences, also argue that the parks are politicized, although they provide fewer concrete examples.⁴

Other authors have argued that the NPS should embrace collaborative conservation with concerned stakeholders in an effort to produce solutions that achieve political support and are therefore more durable. These authors provide some success stories, but they collectively make the point that such solutions can be labor- and time-intensive, and that there are many limitations to collaborative processes.⁵ Further, in a specific critique relevant to this article, political scientist Judith Layzer finds that collaborative conservation efforts involving economic interests are less successful at environmental protection than efforts pursued through more traditional government policymaking channels. Most often, the economic interests—often supported by local politicians—water down the collaborative solution to the point where the desired environmental protection is not achieved. Perhaps unexpectedly, Layzer finds that land managers working within contemporary policymaking structures are more successful at achieving environmental protection.⁶

Layzer’s studies did not involve national parks, but the Yellowstone controversies discussed in this article suggest that park managers may not find conventional policymaking avenues any more successful. In all three case studies examined here, Yellowstone managers followed typical contemporary government policymaking procedures but saw their efforts thwarted by more powerful actors in Wyoming. In each case, Wyoming politicians rose in opposition to perceived threats to their state’s economy or to the public’s park access. They then successfully overpowered park managers and the associated proposals. Each controversy resulted in resource or safety problems that those managers had wished to avoid. Given the limits to collaboration discussed above, such difficulty with conventional policymaking procedures suggests that if park protections require restricting visitor access or reducing economic activity, the NPS will be unsuccessful in protecting its resources. Long-term park protection is not assured, as the case studies shall illustrate.

Boating on Yellowstone Lake

Canoeists on Yellowstone Lake today sometimes wonder why their serenity is interrupted by motorboat noise. The effects of motorboats on wilderness were hotly debated about fifty years ago, and the debate was perhaps the first time that Yellowstone managers butted heads with Wyoming’s unique political geography and strength. One of the larger states in physical size, Wyoming has the country’s smallest population, only about five hundred thousand. The state’s populace is well...