Saturday, February 2, 2013

Part 1 of Five Part Op-Ed....Yellowstone in the Crosshairs:

   by Brian L. Horejsi

   Decaying Management in Americas National Park System

           Part I   For Who's Benefit? Beware the legacy builders

      Gardiner, Montana, is a very, very lucky town.  I say this because it counts as its neighbors - in fact it is buried in - public land.

    National forests block in the little town of well under a thousand permanent residents on two sides and what is often considered the crown jewel of North Americas public lands, Yellowstone National Park, blocks in the other two sides.

   That is as close to jurisdictional heaven on earth as one can get.  But not everyone sees it this way.

   After all, this is America, an ecological and political landscape feeding off fast food corporations, box stores, and trinkets made in China, all of these fixations driven by commercialization, consumption and blind growth.

   Few places escape the intensity of this agenda, and yet, barring a transient influx of motorized visitors, Gardiner is one place that has managed to hold off the worst of America's excess.

    In Gardiner, Park Street is named for a damn good reason.  It also functions however, as the towns "main" street, being home to the greatest concentration of businesses in town, and it "handles" virtually all the vehicles that enter and depart Yellowstone National Park via the historic Roosevelt Arch, which stands majestically at its west end.

   More importantly, however, Park Street separates a no longer quaint but still surprisingly low key Gardiner from Yellowstone National Park.

   The Park boundary, largely unmarked and unseen to visitors, runs the full length of this one-sided street, even the sidewalk is "squatting" on Park land.

    Standing on Park Street a person can enjoy a fabulous, largely unadulterated view of the north entrance to Yellowstone, the exception being an in-obtrusive iron fence that confines parked vehicles to a strip along Park Street.

    For decades, the commercial disrtict of Gardiner, as small as it is, has been borrowing this parking area, at no cost to local businesses or residents, to serve and increase visitor use of local businesses. A very sweet deal!

     Just beyond the metal fence is a unique, dry, desert like habitat, found in limited supply in the park.

   It has borne the brunt of extended historical human and wildlife use but still routinely supports, for days at a time, particularly in Spring, Fall and Winter, elk, bison, mule deer, and members of the regions highly endangered pronghorn population.

   Looking over this landscape, you get the impression of days past, the days of famed naturalist and Yellowstone protection activist George Bird Grinnel, the Parks first gamekeeper Harry Yount, and of course, Theodore Roosevelt.

    It's a strange mix, one of stark contrast with todays frantic world, represented by the thousands of vehicles that file into the park through this remnant historic landscape.

    This "old", presently undeveloped space still manages to send a message to todays perceptive visitors - beyond this largely invisible line, it says, starting right now, things are meant to be different, and in some ways they still are, just as they should be in a National Park.

    This initial look at Yellowstone can be a huge bonus to park visitors, as it is to local businesses, and people gather to enjoy, talk about, marvel at, and photograph what is for many their "first" Park landscape and wildlife experience.

   I have looked over it hundreds of times, and it still captivates me and whets my appetite for "more Yellowstone".

   I pass through this area daily during several periods each year. Last September, early one evening, I was leaving Yellowstone on the east end of Park Street, virtually on the Park boundary, when I suddenly became aware of a very large snake on the warm pavement just ahead of me.

   I swerved into the oncoming lane to avoid it, pulled a U-turn, literally jumped out, and there, to my amazement was a rattlesnake, about 36 inches long and thicker at mid body than my forearm.

   I would have welcomed the opportunity to sit nearby and watch it, but vehicles were oncoming.

  I waved them around, then began to coax the snake off the road, back into that unique little piece of habitat that stands eerily close to the little town of Gardiner, a habitat that has "sat" there for roughly a century of nearby human use, and yet, because it was neither paved nor industrialized, it was able to "serve up" this rare beast.

    Using my hat I waved the reluctant snake off the road, back into the Park.  I suspect it was headed into town, attracted by the warm pavement, one of those ecological traps ecologists refer to, places that entice wildlife for various reasons, none of which are beneficial to them - places that prove to shorten life spans and reduce reproduction.

   After the snake made its way back into the Park, not "safe" confines in the big picture sense, but still National Park habitat that was obviously able to ecologically contribute to the presence of this representative of an endangered species.

   Pretty significant , from a conservation point of view, and significant from my perspective as a conservation scientist.

   Several days later, while engaged in another critical event (hoever insignificant it really is) - getting my morning coffee from Lynne in a Park Street establishment - I happened to learn that "big plans" were in the works for "redeveloping" Park Street and the famous Roosevelt Arch.

  I was surprised, since I had been on the Yellowstone e-list for project announcements after providing comments on several other development schemes, and I'd not gotten notice of this particular one.

   I reacted as though I'd just seen surveryors stakes and flagging on one of my favorite trails!  Basically, it was a punch in the gut!

    I have thankfully enjoyed the view into Yellowstone from Park Street immensely, and done so for 15 years, each time marveling at this essentially "wild" piece of land holding its own against a virtual tsunami of pressures from Gardiner, a very unfriendly Park County government, and the state of Montana.

    This little lanscape has somehow survived, sandwiched between Park Street and Yellowstone's "old" entry kiosks a short way up the Gardiner River toward Mammoth.

    The original kiosk, historic in appearance, and in my view perfect for any National Park, acts to enhance the feeling that park management has been trying to keep the park as a Natural area, a throw back to the days of Roosevelt, a rejection of commercialization and modernization, an abandonment of the corporate notion that a park should be "developed".

    It is not clear what generated the Roosevelt Arch devilopment scheme. The "push" likely was multipronged and Park Service "builders" and planners were no doubt a major part of the thrust.

   They were reinforced by pressures from businesses on Park Street to provide more parking for consumerism, and at the same time, rid themselves of lines of slowly moving vehicles wating to pass through the Roosevelt Arch, presumably of course, after the occupants had dropped some cash in town - in other words, ramp up the through-put.

    While we expect that in the business world, we do not, and should not, expect or tolerate it in National Parks.

   A third likely force irritation with the public by concessioners employees who find themselves having to share what was historically "their" service road with the very people they make a living from.

    But there is more to this. Park Service planners and management, like so many public servants in todays prolonged attack on agency budgets, are always on the hunt for dollars, "planning" in Yellowstone sadly is embodied, all too often in building infrastructure and expanding internal use.

   The prospects that millions of dollars might be extracted from congress to empower public servants who want to push parking and development beyond the edge of park Street further into Yellowstone, onto the unique habitat from whene "my" snake came, lures planners and mangement like a candy store lures kids.

   Part of the scheme is to turn the Roosevelt Arch area into a stand-alone Roosevelt Park, a Coney Island of sorts, surrounding it with pavement and walk ways, and of course, feed more consumers onto Park Street, as though this were a National Park mandate.

    It is also intended to eliminate what has been a long standing occurrence of vehicles sorting themselves out, even though this local squeeze occurs only during part of the three peak months, as drivers work to enter the Park through the Arch.

   In doing so, the entry road is to be redirected and reconsturcted and a further lane added, eating up even more of the "near desert" habitat I've referred to.

   To cap off this scheme, the historical kiosks would be "eliminated" and that rare little piece of habitat behind the Roosevelt Arch would be invaded by a greatly expanded "modern" entry facility.

    There remains, however, "a whiff of the malodorous" associated with this scheme. Sitting in the middle of this new development is the brand new building housing the Yellowstone Association, which makes a considerable amount of its funding from tourists that stop on their way into the Park.

   Almost too conveniently, the Association headquarters and sales areas are just yards from the Arch; they would be front and center in any parking and walking redevelopment of the Arch area.

   As self-proclaimed "friends" of the Park, it is not difficult to imagine sub surface collaboration with the Park Servide about pushing this encroachment and expansion into the Park.

   As a major business in Gardiner, the Yellowstone Association stands to benefit more than any other establishment by concentrating people around its facility.

   Picture how this fits together; in June 2011, a new Superintendent, Dan Wenk takes the wheel in Yellowstone.

   With formal training in landscape architecture, he comes to Yellowstone with credentials highlighted on the NPS website announcing his appointment, of six years as director of Park Service "planning, design and construction services" with accolades for spending $60 million dollars on construction of facilities and structures in Mt. Rushmore National Park, including raising $30 million in private frunding to enhance that construction.

    Yellowstone thus finds itself under the day-to-day command of an architect, a specialist in design and construction.

   He has, as number two in charge, an engineer. I can only assume that these senior managers are both hardworking and decent people but the worry lingers that both see Yellowstone through the eyes of Washington politics and special interests, like concessioners and transportation interests, that lean very heavily on them.

   In todays world, more than ever in our history, the public is entitled to question where, and in whose interest, senior management effort is being channeled.

    Both have been beholden to a (former) secretary of the Interior - Ken Salazar - who has been point man for the administrations "all of the above" strategy for growth and taxpayer subsidized economic expansion, destructively forcused on public lands.

   Salazar's pro-development interference for example, appears to have instigated an ongoing revision of the Colorado National Monument management plan to consider growing demands for visitor/commercial use, including bike races, while admonishing that they "need to be better neighbors".

    There is little doubt Salazar's background and training are questionable in context of oversight of any organization / agency in which conservation of landscapes is a priority; certainly no consolation to Americans who care about Yellowstone's future!

   People enter the architect and engineering professions to build and redesign "things", including nature.

   They do not go to university, or spend a career, learning to NOT build things, yet no-growth, and in some cases, de-growth is precisely the management strategy National Parks must implement to ecologically (and economically) survive todays wound up world and all its predatory interests.
    In my view, the evidence indicates that "design and construction" are the very things National Parks can no longer afford, either from an ecological or social perspective.

   There have always been opportunists lined up to exploit Yellowstone's phenomenal landscape - imagine, for example, the great tragedy Americans would have suffered if a fellow by the name of Jay Cooke, known as a railroad "financier", had succeeded in building his railroad through the Lamar Valley - and while they typically are, they have not always been, from "outside" the Park.

   My view is that we are seeing the descent of a new breed of management no longer tied to national standards, or bound by national tradition, history or commitment to optimize protection or recovery of landscape wide exological viability in parks on behalf of all Americans.

    With this evolution of Yellowstone's senior mangement team, and fueled by financial stimulus packages searching for places to "put shovels in the ground", Yellowstone and National Park management are in retreat, backing away from the path necessary for maintaining and strengthening the ecological integrity of National Park ecosystems.

   I am not privy to insider relations with Yellowstone senior management, so I am relegated to reading the tea leaves, so to speak, or more appropriately, examing the evidence!

    Americans have to stand back, look down the trail both ways, and calculate whether a necessary change to repower conservation is imminent, or even possible.

   And I submit that what they see are not the criteria essential to managing the conservation legacy of Americas National Parks.

   To the contrary, Parks need people at the helm who aggressively resist intensified invasion of National Park ecosystems, people that are active in reaching out of the Park to ward off never-ending commercial and destructive designs, all of which consume and degrade ecological capacity in Parks.

   The Park Services North Park Entrance FONSI (finding of no significant impact) statement, and the EA it rests on, is like so many others issued by government agencies intent on pushing their own agenda, far too specious.

    It points more to a self-serving process designed to brush aside public scrutiny than to problems or analysis that would be revealed by preparing a full Environmental Impact Statement.

    Further, it is a very classic, and far too common, example of a major structural breakdown in the EA process, wherein agencies like the National Park Service call their own shots on whether (and how) they should scrutinize their own activities with a legitimate enviromnental assessment.

   High-falutin declarations and self-serving conclusions dominate the contents of the Arches FONSI; "this proposal is necesary", and then, their own confirmation; the preferred alternative "best meets the purpose and need for the project".

   Perhaps not so strangely, there is no evidence anywhere that the public drove this process.

    A bone of contention for the public should be that Park management is degrading part of the Park because "improvements will have beneficial economic impacts on the community of Gardiner: while there is no question that regional communities essentially "live off" the park, hand feeding local businesses is not, and should not be, the purpose of a National Park or changes to it.

   This agenda and "purpose" cannot be justified given even incremental impacts within and on Park resources.

   When the "build up" of impacts (cumulative effects) resulting from greater local human activity, substantial increases in park traffic volume, and as yet unrevealed plans to expand Mammoth are considered - and they have not been - with all the behavioral and ecological consequences for humans and wildlife, it takes narrowly focused Park Management to deny that this development scheme will impair park resources.

   The North Entrance redeveopment agenda hangs its hat partly on a classic case of selective public engagement designed to ensure acceptance of a predetermined goal rather than a thorough analysis of impacts and full public participation.

    The "meet the public" schedule for the Roosevelt Arch plan amounted  to one scoping open house and one open house about the environmental assessment, both in one community - Gardiner.

   Building Park staff facilities over 5 times as large as those now in existence, as the proposed new entry gate facilities would be, may provide park employees with a new lunchroom, and that is part of the listed justification, but it is disingenuous to construe it as a benefit to the park.

   Part of the historical Gardiner entrance is todays drive from the relatively primitive site of the Roosevelt Arch to the little Kiosks where you pay your entry dollars or have your pass checked.

   This unique site and experience will be destroyed by another government building plan and more infrastructure, an unnecessary impact particularly when construction is not for the benefit of the park, but for commercial, personnel, and quite possibly, personal reasons.

    There are more reasonable and far less destructive (to Yellowstone National Park) alternatives to help sort out traffic issues at the North entrance, and they protect and maintain the primitive nature of the park and existing entrance.

   As should be the case, these outside-the-Park alternatives shift the ecological and economic costs to the local business community, Park County and the state of Montana, who appear to so far have successfully parlayed this scheme into a "shift the costs onto Yellowstone and the Park Service, but keep economic benefits outside the park in Gardiner" scenario.

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