TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/052989/05298900.024

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 9.2 KB | 165 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.