Friday, March 26, 2004
By John Krist
By using less fuel and producing less exhaust, snowcoaches offer
a cleaner alternative to snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park,
while still allowing visitors to see the wonders of Yellowstone
in the wintertime.
VENTURA, California — Compared to the flood of visitors that washes
over Yellowstone National Park during the summer, the number of
people making their way during winter into that fabled realm of
geysers, hot springs, bison, elk, and wolves is but a trickle.
Visitation between December and March is seldom more than 1,000
people a day, whereas in June, July, and August — when most of the
park's 3 million annual visitors arrive — a crowd that size may
be found at eruption time on the boardwalk around Old Faithful.
Yet that relatively tiny number of winter visitors is at the heart
of a very large legal, political, and philosophical dispute, one
that in the past few weeks has taken a dizzying number of twists.
The conflict is emblematic of an old paradox built into the national
park system and reflects a deep and irreconcilable division in the
way Americans perceive their native landscape.
On the surface, the dispute is about snowmobiles. Four years ago,
the Clinton administration announced it would phase out the machines'
use in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, cutting the permitted
number in half for the winter of 2002-03 and banning them altogether
in 2003-04. Prohibiting the polluting machines was the only way,
the National Park Service (NPS) concluded, that it could comply
with federal standards regarding park air quality.
The decision to ban the machines was not reached abruptly. The
NPS began working on its winter management plan in response to a
1997 lawsuit filed by the Fund for Animals, alleging that the park
had failed to consider the effect of motorized traffic on wildlife
such as bison and elk.
The park service released a 700-page draft plan in August 1999,
analyzing several potential courses of action and concluding that
the best option was to require most winter visitors entering the
park from the west to ride shuttle buses, while allowing snowmobiles
to continue using other park roads.
Six months later, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded
that the park service's preferred option would do little to improve
air quality or address the other deleterious effects of snowmobile
use. On particularly busy days, such as the President's Day holiday
weekend, when thousands of smoky machines zoom along the park's
groomed roads, the air around the most heavily used park entrances
is blue with smoke, the snow grows grimy with soot, and some park
employees don breathing masks to protect their health. The EPA recommended
that the NPS ban snowmobile traffic altogether.
In March 2000, the NPS announced it intended to pursue the course
of action recommended by the EPA: a phaseout over the next two years,
culminating in a prohibition this winter. A final version of the
winter management plan including the ban was released for public
review in October 2000 and adopted in January 2001.
However, the incoming Bush administration promptly froze implementation
of the rule. A spokesman called it the product of a "rushed"
process conducted in "the final nanoseconds" of the Clinton
administration — an inaccurate claim, as the policy had been in
development for nearly four years. The administration then attempted
to scuttle the rule by settling a lawsuit on terms favorable to
the plaintiffs, mainly business interests that profit from snowmobile
use and had challenged the ban.
Environmentalists sued over that tactic, and a federal appeals
court judge ruled in their favor, calling the reversal "completely
politically driven" and ordering the original plan reinstated.
The pro-snowmobile forces appealed, and a Wyoming judge last month
issued a ruling that conflicted with the appeals court decision,
ordering the NPS to allow snowmobiles back into the park. The NPS
complied.
The first judge subsequently ordered the NPS back into court to
explain why it should not be held in contempt for violating his
earlier ruling. On March 9, he postponed a decision on that matter,
pending the outcome of an appeal filed by environmental groups over
the Wyoming judge's decision.
The dispute is about more than just snowmobiles, noise, and air
quality. At its heart are deeply conflicting attitudes regarding
the purpose of national parks. Do they exist to preserve unique
natural treasures in as undisturbed a state as possible, even if
that means curtailing some types of human activity? Or are they
intended primarily as playgrounds for visitors and to enrich private
businesses that cater to those visitors?
Those philosophies have been in conflict almost since Yellowstone
was established and reflect fundamentally incompatible belief systems.
As long as some Americans believe the natural world exists only
to be exploited for profit, while others believe in preservation
for its own sake, the courts will be called on to resolve the irresolvable.
A journalist for more than 20 years, John Krist is a senior reporter
and columnist at the Ventura County Star in Southern California
and a contributing editor for California Planning & Development
Report. His weekly commentaries on the environment are distributed
nationally by Scripps Howard New Service, and he is a regular contributor
to Writers on the Range, a syndicated service of High Country News,
which distributes commentaries to more than 70 newspapers in the
West.
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Source: John Krist
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