Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: Moral Values in Management
The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), centred on the Yellowstone National Park, is an area of twenty-two million acres (89,031 km2)—over a third of the total land area of the UK. Spanning part of three western states in the USA, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, the area comprises five national forests, three national wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management holdings, state lands, two national parks, Indian lands and five million acres of private land. Within this landscape milieu, wild things are appearing in places they have not been seen for generations. From the Yellowstone National Park at the GYE’s centre, bison, grizzlies and wolves are being restored to the periphery. Beyond the boundaries of the Park, increasingly, they are hopping fences, sinking their teeth into cattle, running from hunters, running at hunters, grazing gardens, and occasionally injuring and killing people.
As a social phenomenon, this is viewed as the sum-total of advocacy, management, protection and resistance measures by advocates and critics of wild things, through which advocates seem to be achieving a narrow lead for now. The reasons for these human actions are complex and as much as they are ‘pragmatic’ or ‘evidence-based’, they are also moral. I look at the historical and cultural reasons why those whose work centres on wolves, grizzlies and bison believe what they do about wildness.