You want to hear a real Yellowstone disaster story? One that has nothing to do with fires? This one is about you and me and the U.S. Forest Service. Every year, you and I and the rest of the taxpayers in the U.S. of A. kick in about $25 million to subsidize logging operations in the Yellowstone ecosystem. These operations clear-cut about 20 square miles a year, and if they continue according to plan, they will require something between 5,000 and 10,000 miles of additional roads over the next 50 years.
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I learned about our subsidy of logging around Yellowstone from Michael Scott. Scott is the director of the Wilderness Society’s northern Rockies regional office, which covers the states of Montana and Wyoming. He was in town last weekend to speak at the ninth Northern Illinois Prairie Workshop at Northeastern Illinois University.
The invitation to Scott to deliver the keynote address at the workshop was one of the consequences of the fires that swept through Yellowstone National Park last year. Scott emerged last summer as a sensible spokesman for the idea that the fires were actually beneficial to the flora and fauna of Yellowstone and not catastrophic as proclaimed by the more thickheaded sectors of the press. A spokesman for fire is bound to catch the attention of prairie people, since we have struggled for years to advance the idea that burning can be a major tool of prairie management.
Scott believes–and his belief is based on conversations with the people who were directing the fire-fighting efforts–that nobody could have extinguished the blazes given the combination of circumstances that existed in 1988. He quotes a congressman from western Colorado named Pat Williams who said after a visit to the park, “You stand in front of a 200-foot wall of flame that’s running at 40 miles an hour and throwing sparks a half mile behind you, and you put it out.”
“Five years ago,” Scott said, “we couldn’t get the Park Service and the Forest Service to admit there was such a thing as the Yellowstone ecosystem. They were dead set against it. We got them finally to the point where they would talk about the ‘greater Yellowstone area.’”
Since neither the bureaucrats on the scene nor the Bush administration is showing any signs of wanting to do a job like that, the Wilderness Society is going to proceed on its own. The society will be carrying on a long-term study whose goals will be to find ways to integrate a sustainable economy into the Yellowstone ecosystem.
