TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052989/05298900.024

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 10KB | 178 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 94

Springtime in the Rockies


Yellowstone recovers from the flames but becomes the center of a
debate

By Paul A. Witteman


    Across a parcel of scorched landscape, a pair of male
ground squirrels are enacting an annual ritual. Chirping madly,
the rivals dash at each other, tails raised, seeking to
establish hegemony over the turf that will become a summer home
for mate and offspring. The battle is fierce but short; the
loser scuttles off into the sagebrush. The victor preens on hind
legs, surveying a domain where shoots of bluebunch wheatgrass,
Idaho fescue and larkspur have begun to sprout. It is springtime
in the Rockies, and Yellowstone National Park is emerging from
hibernation -- and recovering from the most troubled time in its
117-year history.

    The last vision of Yellowstone most people carried into
winter was far less bucolic. It was an image of immense walls
of flame thundering across the canopy of lodgepole pine forests,
leaping entire ridgelines in a searing specter of natural
destruction that mocked man's effort to contain it. The fires
of 1988 appeared to be an environmental Armageddon. "If you
looked at the fire storms, you would have thought that nothing
would have survived," says Ed Lewis, executive director of the
Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an ecological watchdog group.

    Yet Yellowstone still lives and is as wondrous as ever.
Every 78 minutes or so, Old Faithful clears its throat and sends
its geyser spumes as much as 180 ft. into the sky, just as it
always has. Bison and elk graze side by side on Swan Lake Flats,
and the evening chorus of coyotes calling one another to the
hunt echoes hauntingly again across canyons. And soon the RVs,
the Conestoga wagons of the late 20th century, will be circling
up in campgrounds during summer evenings.

    Nevertheless, visitors will see a park that is dramatically
different from a year ago. The fires consumed 989,000 of
Yellowstone's 2.2 million acres, less than originally thought
but still an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. But the
flames were dervish-like, capriciously carving jigsaw patterns
out of untouched forest, sometimes encircled by heavily burned
areas. Blackened stands of lodgepole pine and Douglas fir should
gradually become meadows of aspens, wildflowers and grass; life
will go on. "From an ecological standpoint, there was no
downside," says John Varley, the park's chief of research. "It
is not a rebirth because there was not a death."

    Varley's view, which hews to a National Park Service
doctrine dating to 1963, postulates that nature, not man, should
be allowed to deal most of the cards in Yellowstone. Fires
naturally started by lightning strikes have been left to burn
in the park since 1972 unless they have seriously threatened
lives or property. In the 16 years before last summer, there had
been 233 such fires, which consumed a modest 34,157 acres. But
the policy became increasingly controversial last July and
August as the fires and smoke repeatedly drove tourists from the
park. This, in turn, made federal officials in Washington as
skittish as yellow-bellied marmots on the lookout for hungry
eagles.

    A review of fire-management policy was ordered by then
Interior Secretary Donald Hodel. The resulting report was a
muddled exercise in self-contradiction. Its authors confirmed
that the ecological results of natural burning are good. But the
report contended that "in some cases the social and economic
effects (of natural fires) may be unacceptable." Translation:
the main problem with the fires was not what they did to plant
and animal life but what they did to the tourist business.

    Yellowstone has 2.4 million visitors each year, who spend
some $43 million inside park boundaries alone. Says Bill
Schilling, executive director of the Wyoming Heritage
Foundation, a business-backed lobbying group: "Yellowstone is
Wyoming's crown jewel. Tourism was seriously impacted throughout
the state." Responding to pressure from business interests in
Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, the Interior Department has decreed
that this year every fire in Yellowstone started by natural
means, as well as by human carelessness, will be strenuously
suppressed.

    Though the fiery summer of 1988 scared away tourists, it
had relatively little impact on Yellowstone's animals, compared
with the normal rigors of winter. The fires killed only 335 of
the 31,000-member elk herd. But a harsh winter eliminated almost
5,000 more, and their carcasses lie in various states of
decomposition throughout the park.

    Yellowstone's herd of 2,700 bison was reduced more by a
highly controversial hunt last fall and winter just outside the
park (570 killed) and harsh weather (260) than by the fire (9).
Yellowstone's best-known residents, 200 or so grizzlies, may
have been reduced by a total of two as a result of the
conflagrations. A pair of bears that had been tagged with radio
transmitters could not be located during the winter. Says
Assistant Chief Ranger Gary Brown: "The bears don't seem to be
frightened by fire. Poaching is a bigger threat by a long shot."
The grizzlies will, however, find it more difficult to locate
a crucial source of prehibernation protein, the whitebark pine
nut. Though less than 20% of the whitebark pine trees in the
park were burned, some scientists feel that a larger percentage
of trees of nut-bearing age were killed. A shortage of the nuts
could drive bears from higher altitudes this fall -- and into
more confrontations with humans.

    Of the 1,000 or so species of floras in the park, lodgepole
pine and the duff from its fallen needles and branches provided
most of the fuel for the fires. But nature has provided the
tree with a way to make a comeback. Some lodgepole pinecones
are serotinous: they open and release seeds only when activated
by the heat generated by fires. In some areas surveyed by
Yellowstone biologists, seed densities from such cone releases
measure in the millions per acre. As a result, the ground will
soon be thick with pine sprouts.

    The best news for the plants is that much of the park's
soil seems to have been merely singed. The charred area in some
places is only a fraction of an inch deep, leaving root systems
intact. Compared with Mount St. Helens, where the 1980 eruption
left the side of the mountain without soil, Yellowstone was
fortunate.

    In fact, many experts believe more of Yellowstone should be
burned more regularly. Alston Chase, author of the book Playing
God in Yellowstone, points out that in the hundreds of years
that Indians lived and hunted in the area, they set fires that
helped create the park's landscape. The burned, mature forests
gave way to grassy meadows filled with willows and aspens, which
in turn supported more plants and wildlife. Yellowstone's
current guardians, Chase contends, should do the same as the
Indians. "We can't wait for lightning to strike," he says. "It's
better to have lots of small fires than one big one. I fear we
may have locked Yellowstone into a boom-or-bust cycle, with big
conflagrations at long intervals."

    Last year's fires have rekindled an old debate over
Yellowstone's future. There is growing awareness that the park
is integrally related to an area far beyond its boundaries. The
headwaters of three river systems that feed into the Colorado,
Columbia and Missouri all originate within Yellowstone. The
geysers and other geothermal features, all linked by
underground "plumbing," extend beyond the park's borders. And
Yellowstone's four-legged residents roam onto adjacent ranchland
and national-forest territory irrespective of lines on maps.
The Greater Yellowstone Coalition contends that the park is the
centerpiece of interdependent land that covers almost 14
million acres in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Says Executive
Director Lewis: "It is one of the last wild-land ecosystems
remaining in the temperate zone in the world." Environmentalists
like Lewis believe that the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, as
they prefer to call it, should be kept as natural as possible.

    That does not sit well with snowmobilers, ranchers, miners,
hunters and people who want to tap into geothermal power. Or
Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson. "We tire of people telling us all
those things we ought to do," he says. Those who want to use
the land for purposes other than watching buffalo roam see the
Greater Yellowstone arguments as efforts to encroach on their
ability to use land they consider their backyard. Says the
Wyoming Heritage Society's Schilling: "We find the argument to
be specious, undocumented and emotionally charged."

    The debate is heated and will get hotter still.
"Yellowstone has a symbolic aura," says Park Superintendent
Robert Barbee. "It is one of America's icons." However, the
park's future is caught between competing forces. Says Montana
rancher Len Sargent, whose 2,000-acre spread abuts both
Yellowstone and the adjacent national forest: "It's frustrating
to see decisions based on politics, not biology." But politics,
not biology, is what is practiced in Washington and state
capitals, where Yellowstone's fate will be shaped more
permanently than any series of wildfires ever succeed in doing.