Protecting Yellowstone: Science and the Politics of National Park Management

4: Wolves, Bison, and Snowmobiles

120 Chapter Four Wolves, Bison, and Snowmobiles S Facts mattered, but political power mattered more. —Hank Fischer, on the reintroduction of wolves The roller coaster that snowmobiling in Yellowstone has become epitomizes the dangers of political decision making. . . . —Hillary Prugh, on the recent history of the snowmobile controversy We are participating in something that is totally unpalatable to the American people, and it’s something we are not convinced that science justifies . . . . [These bison are] political hostages. —Mike Finley, referring to the bison test and slaughter program % During the contemporary policy-making era in Yellowstone, in addition to Fishing Bridge Village, the fire policy review, and the New World Mine, the park’s managers were dealing with three other major controversies : whether to return gray wolves to Yellowstone, whether visitors should be allowed to tour Yellowstone by snowmobile, and how to manage brucellosis-infected bison when they leave the park in winter. Each of these Wolves, Bison, and Snowmobiles 121 S issues dated back many years, but grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s into major policy-making issues. All reached their peak, in one way or another, in the 1990s and 2000s. Park managers succeeded in returning the gray wolf to Yellowstone in 1995; they began the first environmental impact statement (EIS) on winter snowmobile use in the late 1990s; and they completed another EIS on bison management at the same time, with a tentative solution reached in 2011. Given the contentious nature of each of these issues (evident in the quotes on the previous page), the late 1990s and early 2000s were intense policy-making times for Yellowstone managers; stretched thin between the different controversies, park managers deserve credit for achieving any success on these different fronts.1 As with the issues discussed in the previous chapters, these three involved substantial public discussion, scientific debate, and national political interest. Although they all reached a climax during the contemporary policymaking era, all three controversies continue today, ranking in the top ten of the National Park Service’s (NPS) nationally important issues. For these reasons (and because they involve Yellowstone policies), an examination of each is necessary to complete the controlled comparison in this study; they round out the suite of major policy-making controversies that have occurred in Yellowstone since 1981. Most important, each provides additional insight into the roles of the differing policy determinants in NPS policy making in the modern era. Each of the aforementioned issues has inspired at least one book-length publication, while wolf recovery and management has been featured in several books.2 With this available scholarship, there is no need to retell the full stories of how the NPS was able to bring wolves back, or how snowmobiles came to be in Yellowstone, or why the NPS has prevented bison from leaving the park in winter. Instead, brief overviews of the controversies will be presented and the six major policy determinants and their role in each controversy will be thoroughly discussed. Four of the determinants will be discussed in pairs: coalitions and issue framing (because interest groups are often pivotal in framing the issue for the public); and the implications of public access and economies (because these two generally go hand-inhand ). The other two, science and politics, will be discussed separately. For each policy determinant, vignettes from the past thirty years, illustrating the major role of that determinant in the controversy, will be presented. As in earlier cases, the three subjects (wolf reintroduction, snowmobiling in winter, and brucellosis-infected bison) will reveal that NPS policy-making Chapter Four 122 S controversies are mainly settled by the interplay of the six determinants outlined in this book, with science and politics being the most influential. Of those two, the contemporary political situation will once again carry the most influence. Wolf Reintroduction On January 12, 1995, a truck pulling a horse trailer loaded with fourteen gray wolves passed through the Roosevelt Arch in Gardiner, Montana (figure 24). Children from the nearby school, along with wolf-reintroduction proponents , stood on the roadside to witness the historic event: after nearly two decades of paperwork and politicking, the NPS and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) were finally reintroducing the wolf to Yellowstone National Park. From Gardiner, the wolves were taken to several large acclimation pens, where they were held for several months before being released into the wild. Since then, wolves have been successfully reestablished...