Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 25, 1994 TAG: 9411050007
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM K. STEVENS THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYO. LENGTH: Long
From 10,243 feet, where marmots scurry about above the timberline, distant slopes garbed in evergreen forests alternate with the gold-beige velvet of grassy inclines and alpine meadows.
Deep gorges, cascading cataracts and broad rivers cut through a sweeping vista punctuated by blue lakes and bright green mountain marshes. Close up, Yellowstone's incomparable geysers spout and its hot pools bubble, and the land abounds with the elk, bear, moose, deer, antelope, bison and bighorn sheep that have earned it the nickname ``America's Serengeti.''
The magnificent, world-famous landscape still ranks as the most nearly intact of big American ecosystems outside Alaska. But scientists and conservationists say that even Yellowstone's ecosystem is under increasingly serious threat from human pressure - much of it, they say, exerted by the region's more committed admirers.
The park itself is merely the protected core of a vast, seamless ecosystem seven times as large. As big as West Virginia, it includes not only the jagged ranges of the Gallatin, Beartooth, Absaroka and Teton Mountains, along with the national forests that carpet their slopes, but also public and private lands that lie beyond them.
``Everything in view is part of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem,'' Jim McKown, the park ranger who lives in his observation post at the top of Mount Washburn, says as he gazes into the distance.
It is on private lands far from here, out on the ecosystem's ramparts, that the latest threat to its integrity has appeared. There, scientists and environmentalists say, a private real estate boom fueled by the desire of people to live close to Yellowstone's natural charms is eroding those charms and punching deep salients into the wild.
People ``are literally loving the place to death,'' says Dr. Patrick Jobes, a sociologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, on the northern fringe of the ecosystem, who has joined with ecologists to study interrelationships among the region's people, economy and environment.
Some ecologists fear that unless it is controlled, a proliferation of subdivisions on private land will disrupt rhythms on which the ecosystem's biological health depends. Among the features believed to be at particular risk are :
nRiver-valley habitats, which contain some of the ecosystem's richest assortments of plant and animal species.
nThe purity of some of the region's cold, clear rivers and streams.
nMigration routes traveled by elk and other big ungulates as they move from the high country to lower elevations when winter approaches - not to mention the winter habitat itself, much of which is on private land.
nHabitat of the threatened grizzly bear, the creeping loss of which is already forcing the scarce bears into no-win conflict with people.
This new hazard joins that of mining, logging, grazing and petroleum drilling in national forests and other federally owned lands outside Yellowstone and the adjacent Grand Teton National Park, which are themselves off limits. The latest alarm along these lines involves a plan to open a gold mine near Cooke City, Mont., in the Gallatin National Forest just outside the Yellowstone park borders. Environmentalists and some politicians vehemently object, for fear that poisonous waste, which must be contained forever, will ultimately escape from the mine and ruin some of the ecosystem's most beautiful streams.
But such exploitation of federal lands may no longer be the most serious threat. Extractive industry has been far eclipsed, economists say, by a new economy founded on outdoor recreation and on the earnings of footloose businesses and residents, especially retirees, attracted by the natural wonders here. The resulting growth in population, development and general human traffic may now be responsible for the most intense ecological pressure.
These new realities are also changing the political equation that has governed the long-running struggle over Yellowstone's future. The dispute has commonly been cast as one between adherents to the status quo, who hold that the land is there for people to exploit, and conservationists, who say the ecological health of this international treasure should come first.
Now the conservationists have an economic argument of their own: destroying the natural attractions on which the region's economy is now based would kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
The struggle's center of gravity is shifting perceptibly away from the federal level, where it has become highly polarized, toward the state and local levels where private land-use decisions are made. There are signs that some early progress is being made toward reconciling the competing claims of ecology and economy.
Conservationists believe the ecosystem is still robust enough that it can be sufficiently protected, and the new regional economy with it. ``Not only can we get it right in Yellowstone, not to get it right would be an enormous black eye,'' said Louisa Willcox, the program director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a decade-old alliance of 110 environmental organizations based in Bozeman.
by CNB