Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone

The story of how Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the worlds first national park, has become synonymous with nature conservationand an examination of todays challenges to preserve the regions wilderness heritage. For more than 150 years, the Yellowstone regionnow widely known as the twenty-three million acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystemhas played a prominent role in the United States nature conservation agenda. In this book, Robert B. Keiter, an award-winning public land law and policy expert, traces the evolution and application of fundamental ecological conservation concepts tied to Yellowstone. Keiters book highlights both the conservation successes and controversies connected with this storied region, which has been enmeshed in change. During the 1980s, leaders in Yellowstone embraced ecosystem management concepts to recover a dwindling grizzly bear population and to support wolf reintroduction. Since then, management policies in the regions two national parks and adjacent national forests have largely followed suit, prioritizing ecosystem-level conservation over industrial activity. Groundbreaking efforts are currently afoot to protect elk, deer, and pronghorn migration corridors and to maintain the parks bison population, effectively expanding the scope of regional conservation initiatives. But in the face of explosive human population growth and related development pressures, new efforts must also account for the regions privately owned lands along with accelerating recreational activities that present quite different problems. Indeed, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystemextending across three states and twenty counties and embracing more than sixteen million acres of federal land as well as private and tribal lands can only be characterized as a complex, jurisdictionally fragmented landscape. As Keiter makes clear, the quest for common ground among federal and state officials, conservationists, ranchers, Indigenous tribes, and others is an enduring task. Exploring both notable conservation accomplishments and the ongoing challenges confronting this special place, Keiters book explains the many forcesscientific, political, economic, legal, cultural, climatic, and moreat work driving controversy and change across the region. But more than this, Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone shows us that the lessons gleaned from Yellowstones expansive nature conservation efforts are profoundly important for both the country and the world.