Yellowstone's Northern Range - Greater Yellowstone Science ...

THE NORTHERN RANGE
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practically all of the decisions that determine the
condition, trend, and fate of the plant and animal
communities. To attempt to replace that native
decision-making process with the value-judgmentdriven
opinions of any alternative position in the
northern range debates-that is, to once again try
as Ollf predecessors did to overrule a system that
has 10,000 years' experience at managing itselfwould
be to announce that we haven't learned a
great deal from our own history.
On the other hand, commitment to the ideal
of a naturally regulated northern range does not
mean that future management of the northern range
cannot be practical. Indeed, the growing understanding
of the complexity of the northern range,
and of the compromises already made with its
"purity" as a native grazing system, have led some
observers to: 1) accept the imperfections of the
present arrangement (acknowledging that there is
no perfect restoration of prehistoric systems); and
2) suspect that the existing ecological processes are
quite able to sustain the system in a productive and
educational way (Macnab 1983, Rolston 1990,
Boyce 1991). These latter observers are in effect
saying that this ecosystem may not be perfect, but
it shows every sign of functional integrity, so rather
than wring our hands over possible flaws or tinker
without sufficient cause, let's get on with it, learn
from it, and see how it goes.
This is not a recommendation to avoid
intervention on the northern range at all costs.
Such intervention, whether to restore wolves or
fight fire or not fight fIre or suppress exotic plant
invasions, or poison exotic fish and restore native
fish, or cull bison, in fact, occurs on a routine basis.
National Park Service policy and a shelf of
legislation require managers to intervene in
national park settings for many reasons, including
the protection of endangered species, the restoration
of exterminated species, and so on.
The challenge for the manager, then, is to pay
aggressive attention to the changes and consequences
of the ecological processes while resisting
the temptation to overmanage by stepping in too
soon to "fix" a situation that is always more
complex than it at fIrst appears. The national parks
provide their ecological settings with the opportu-
nity to exercise a variability and freedom somewhat
alan (though probably never identical) to their
prehistoric states. Given this freedom, all the
operative factors in landscape evolution, including
climate, earthquakes, volcanism, erosion, predation,
herbivory, fire, and many others, interact and
provide many opportunities for enrichment of
human knowledge and for human appreciation of a
wildland setting.
This, as was stated earlier, is a difficult and
complex undertaking on the northern range,
because so many North American grassland
communities have been altered extensively by
contemporary human uses, especially those
associated with agriculture and livestock grazing,
that we are without local comparisons (and have
only a few such comparisons available globally) by
which to judge how the range is doing. The
disciplines associated with wildland ecology have
taught us a rather shocking fact: there are relatively
few places left where we can even see a setting that
is relatively undisturbed, operating as it did in
prehistoric times, with its native complement of
predators, scavengers, grazers and plant species
(Frank 1990). It is also difficult because the human
activities of the ancient past have been replaced by
remarkably dissimilar human activities of the
industrial present.
Despite a well-catalogued list of imperfections
or changes from its pre-establishment
condition, Yellowstone National Park has been
identified by scholars as one of the best remaining
oPPOltunities to examine wildland ecological
processes on a large scale (Houston 1971, Frank
1990, McNaughton 1996a, Soule 1996). The
research summarized in this book amounts to the
broadest, most comprehensive examination of an
ecological issue in any North American national
park, and it provides ample evidence that there is
no urgent need to intervene on any large scale on
the northern range at this time. In fact, there
appear to be excellent reasons for not intervening,
the best of which includes the opportunities that the
northern range provides us for learning about
wildland ecosystems.
In summary, current understanding of the
northern range is based on the following general