The Environment?

Yellowstone Park was the first wilderness to be set aside as a natural preserve anywhere in the world.

The region around the Yellowstone River in Wyoming has long been recognized for its wondrous scenic beauty (even Lewis and Clark praised it). After the Civil War, the Northern Pacific Railroad wanted an attraction to draw tourists west ... so in 1872 (partly due to railroad pressure), President Ulysses Grant set aside two million acres and created Yellowstone National Park.

There was one (then unacknowledged) problem. No one had any experience trying to preserve wilderness. There was no historic precedent or experience. And it was initially assumed to be much easier than it actually proved to be.

When Theodore Roosevelt visited the park in 1903, he saw a landscape teeming with game. There were thousands of elk, buffalo, black bear, deer, mountain lions, grizzly bear, coyotes, wolves, and bighorn sheep. By that time there were rules in place to keep things as they were. Soon thereafter, the US Park Service was formed as a new bureaucracy whose original and sole job was to maintain the park in its original condition.

Yet within ten years, the teeming landscape that Roosevelt had seen was gone forever. The park managers - charged with keeping the park in pristine condition - had taken a series of steps that they thought were in the best interest of preserving the park and its animals. But they were wrong.

The early park managers mistakenly believed that elk were about to become extinct. So they tried to increase the elk herds within the park by eliminating predators. To that end, they shot and poisoned all the wolves in the park. And they prohibited Indians from hunting in the park, though Yellowstone was a traditional hunting ground.

Thus protected, the elk herd population exploded, and ate so much vegetation that the ecology of the area changed. The elk ate the trees that the beavers used for making dams, so the beavers vanished. The park managers soon discovered beavers were vital to the overall water management of the region. When the beavers disappeared, the meadows dried up … the trout and otter vanished; soil erosion increased; and the park ecology changed even further.

By the 1920s, the park rangers began to shoot the elk by the thousands. But the change in plant ecology had already become permanent; the old mix of trees and grasses did not return. Additionally, the park rangers realized that the Indian hunters had exerted a valuable ecological influence on the parklands by keeping down the numbers of elk, moose, and bison. This belated recognition came as part of a more general understanding that native Americans had strongly shaped the "untouched wilderness" that the first white men thought they were seeing when they first arrived in the New World.

The "untouched wilderness" was nothing of the sort. Human beings on the North American continent had exerted a huge influence on the environment for thousands of years … burning plains grasses, modifying forests, thinning specific animal populations, and hunting others to extinction. In retrospect, the rule forbidding Indians from hunting was seen as a mistake.

But it was just one of an unbroken stream of mistakes that continued to be made by park managers. Grizzlies were first protected, then were killed off. Wolves were first killed off, then were brought back. Initial animal research (involving field study and radio collars) was halted, but then resumed after certain species were declared endangered. A policy of fire prevention was instituted, with no understanding of the regenerative effects of fire. When the policy was finally reversed, growth was so thick that thousands of acres burned hot enough to sterilize the ground, and the forests did not grow back without reseeding. Rainbow trout were introduced in the 1970s, which killed off the native fish species.

And so on ... in a history of ignorant, incompetent, and disastrously-intrusive intervention, followed by attempts to repair the intervention, followed by attempts to repair the damage (as dramatic as any oil spill or toxic dump) that had been caused by the attempted repairs. Notice that, in this case, there was no evil corporation or fossil fuel economy to blame. This disaster was caused by environmentalists, who were charged with protecting that wilderness! They made one dreadful mistake after another, thus proving how little they understood the environment they intended to protect.

An argument has often been posited to preserve wilderness by leaving it alone, trusting to the (fictitious) “balance of nature” to take over. However, passive protection - leaving things alone - doesn't preserve the status quo in a wilderness ... merely setting aside wilderness doesn't freeze it in its present state, any more than locking children in a room will prevent them from growing up. The world is alive and in constantly changing flux. In order to preserve a piece of land in a particular state, that state must be strictly and accurately defined, and then actively (even aggressively) managed. But no one knows how to do that ... because any action changes the environment. And any change will inevitably hurt some plant or animal. For instance, preserving old-growth forest to help the Spotted Owl means Kirtland's Warbler (and other species) will be deprived of the new-growth forest they prefer. There is no free lunch.

And no actions have only positive consequences. For instance, banning CFCs in (misguided) efforts to protect the ozone layer actually harmed Third World people by eliminating cheap refrigerants so that their food spoiled more often and more of them died of food poisoning. The ozone layer is argued (at least, by industrialized countries) to be highly important, but those Third World populations disagree. Worse yet, banning CFCs had no effect on the ozone layer, anyway.

Another instance … banning DDT is arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. DDT was the best agent against mosquitoes, and (despite the ridiculous rhetoric) there was absolutely nothing anywhere near as good or as safe. People could (and in laboratory experiments DID) directly swallow DDT with no adverse effects. Yet, for political reasons, it was completely banned in the US. Since the ban, two million people each year (mostly children) have died unnecessarily from malaria. All together, the ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler. And the environmental movement pushed hard (and effectively) for it to be legislatively outlawed.

That inarguably qualifies environmentalism as the least exact of all sciences.