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This chapter shows how materially instrumental or utilitarian aspects of social life can acquire moral and religious meanings. It argues that the use of natural resources in Yellowstone underwent a process of “moralization” that had important institutional effects on the area (e.g., more government attention, scientific research, censuring, public sentiment, emotional disgust). The chapter documents the emergence and interaction of three “moral visions” (utilitarian, spiritual, biocentric) in Yellowstone in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in order to explain this process of moralization. To demonstrate the effects of this process, and how the meaning of Yellowstone changed from its early years, the chapter ends with an analysis of how new moral visions were institutionalized into new laws and policies, both nationally and locally, culminating in the creation of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—thus creating the social conditions for eventual intractable contemporary conflict that would soon follow.

This chapter investigates an “outlier” case of environmental conflict, where things did not follow the same social patterns observed elsewhere in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). The case study involves conflict over a plan to drill 136 natural gas wells just to the south of Yellowstone, in Sublette County, Wyoming. This plan is not unusual, given that this county includes two of the largest gas fields in the United States and that most residents of this county and state support this economically beneficial activity. But in a radical reversal, a large group of miners, outfitters, ranchers, and other old-westerners acted against their own economic and cultural traditions, starting an environmental movement to oppose drilling in this particular area. The chapter shows that the intense negative reaction to drilling in this area is caused by a violation of strong moral boundaries linked to old-west place attachment.

Early modern writers had long noted the apparent decimation of some indigenous peoples. However, such discussions took on a new and urgent form in the nineteenth century as a new scientific understanding of extinction as an endemic natural process was established. Many scholars have explored the notion of dying races in histories of colonial contact, modern land rights, or genocide; yet most have overlooked the new epistemological status of extinction as a mechanism for explaining natural change. This chapter explores how this scientific shift became combined with notions of wilderness in the American context to rationalize policies of Indian dispossession, forced removal from their traditional homelands, and the establishment of the world's first national parks. In doing so, it highlights fruitful directions for future histories of heritage, endangerment, and conservation.

This chapter examines how dramatic social change in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) after 1970 ramped up competing moral commitments. It draws on a wealth of longitudinal data about demographic, economic, and cultural rearrangement to show how the area transitioned, in striking fashion, from old west to new west. It makes two arguments: First, that this large-scale social change has important moral causes and consequences, as competing groups erect and protect new moral boundaries in the fight for nature. Second, this new social and moral arrangement fostered protracted environmental conflict. The chapter presents the cast of characters involved in GYE conflicts, and then documents the rise of conflict using a host of original time-series indicators, across a variety of institutional fields (e.g., lawsuits, voting segregation, congressional attention, scientific disputes, public responses, interest group conflict, carrying capacity conflict).

To manage a large elk herd that winters on a low-elevation, a 152,663 ha area along the northern border of Yellowstone National Park has gone through four phases since before park establishment in 1872: (1) no management except aboriginal hunting before 1872; (2) protection from hunting, predator control, and winter feeding between 1872 and the 1920s; (3) population reduction through trapping and shooting by park rangers from the 1920s through 1968; (4) no population control from 1969 to the present (the natural-regulation policy). Park officials' reports and 1914-1968 scientific observations agreed that the northern herd occurred at low numbers and migrated out of the park area in winter before 1872; increased to 20,000-35,000 wintering animals by the early 1900s; and was heavily impacting the northern-range biota. New research posed the 1971 natural-regulation ecological hypothesis and reinterpreted evidence to infer that elk in prehistory were abundant and wintered outside the park area; had not increased to 20,000-35,000 in the early 1900s; without control, the herd would stabilize at moderate numbers, and would do so without significant impact on the northern-range ecosystem as it had not in the 1914-1982 period. The purpose of this book is to review the entire documentary and scientific record to evaluate the effects of management phases on the size of the northern herd and, in turn, its effects on the northern range, thereby testing the natural-regulation hypothesis. The park may be entering a fifth management phase, depending on what effect the reestablishment of wolves in 1995 has on the herd, an effect that was not yet evident when this book was written.

This introductory chapter briefly presents the conflict in Yellowstone, elaborates on the book's theoretical argument, and specifies its substantive and theoretical contributions to the social scientific study of environment, culture, religion, and morality. The chapter argues that the environmental conflict in Yellowstone is not—as it would appear on the surface—ultimately all about scientific, economic, legal, or other technical evidence and arguments, but an underlying struggle over deeply held “faith” commitments, feelings, and desires that define what people find sacred, good, and meaningful in life at a most basic level. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This concluding chapter begins by summarizing key themes. It argues that the findings in this study raise supplementary questions that might be investigated in future studies about morality, technorationality, and policy conflict. It sets out questions that provide a good place to start for researchers and policymakers alike. These are, what is the role of science and technical expertise? Does it make a practical difference to stakeholders if they become more aware of their moral assumptions? How do we assess whether some moral arguments are more compelling than others? Does power rest in the logical cogency of an argument, as some moral philosophers might contend? The chapter also discusses the broader theoretical implications of this study for sociology.

This chapter examines the movement that lead to the creation of the first national parks. President Lincoln's 1864 signing of the Yosemite Park Act, which set aside fifteen square miles of the public domain and placed it under the protection and management of the state of California, created an important precedent for the preservation of larger areas in the coming decades. Congress also drew up legislation that provided for the “preservation” of Yellowstone in its “natural condition.” Passed into law on March 1, 1972, the Yellowstone Park Act removed two million acres of public domain from “settlement, occupancy, or sale.”

The coyote population at Yellowstone National Park (YNP), Wyoming, has not been subject to human persecution for several decades allowing for direct observation of their behaviour, interactions among pack members, and how they deal with changes in their environment. From January 1991 to June 1993, data from over 2500 hours of direct observation were collected on members of five resident packs, five transient individuals, and eight dispersing animals, in the Lamar River Valley of YNP. This chapter synthesizes the findings of this study.

This chapter examines the bitter, long-lasting, and sometimes violent dispute over the Yellowstone bison herd—America's only remaining genetically pure and free-roaming herd, which once numbered more than 30 million but was exterminated down to a mere 23 single animals. This intractable issue hinges on current scientific disagreements about the biology and ecology of the disease brucellosis (Brucella abortus). But in recent years, a more radical, grassroots, and direct action activist group called the Buffalo Field Campaign (BFC) has found success by shifting the focus of the debate away from science, toward the deeper religious dimensions of the issue. The chapter shows how the infusion of the conflict with moral and spiritual feeling has brought to the fore deeper questions that ultimately needed to be answered, thus making this a public religious conflict as much as a scientific one, sidestepping rabbit holes of intractability. It observes the ways in which BFC activists engaged in a phenomenon called moral and religious “muting.” This has theoretical implications for understanding how certain elements of culture (e.g., individualism and moral relativism) can organize and pattern others—especially in post hoc explanations of religiously motivated activism.

This chapter examines perhaps the most well-known, and most controversial, conflict in the history of Yellowstone: the reintroduction of wolves in 1995, after they had been exterminated from the Rocky Mountains just six decades earlier. Hundreds of popular and scholarly books and articles have been written about the reintroduction, nearly all of which focus on the biology, ecology, and economic impact of the wolf's return. However, the eventual restoration of wolves brought little resolution, even despite such scientific and economic certainty. This is because the ongoing war over the wolf is not ultimately about wolf science, ecosystem dynamics, or economic costs and benefits. Instead, deeper cultural commitments are knowingly, and unknowingly, pushed beneath the surface of rational policy debate, and the failure to acknowledge them hinders opportunities for conflict resolution. The goal in this chapter is to demonstrate this point and examine the competing moral orders that motivate this ongoing war over the wolf in Yellowstone.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of changing thoughts regarding fires at national parks. In 1926, the idea of igniting fire in a national park was anathema. By 1965, fire was on its way to becoming a tool, a way to manage landscapes for ecological, environmental, social, and visitor purposes. Continuing public debates about fire in national parks are considered.

This chapter discusses the implications of the fire at Yellowstone National Park in the summer 1988. The fire shattered the existing fire management program, illustrating not only the boundaries inherent in the implementation of policy, but the inability of current strategies to meet extraordinary challenge. In essence, conflagrations such as the ones that occurred at Yellowstone transformed fire policy from a science-based response to a political issue.

This chapter discusses the National Park Service's fire management policy after the 1988 Yellowstone fire. The NPS' efforts to mitigate fire and to plan for its management throughout the national park system met with great success during the following decade. The development of a national fire planning and management structure — the new standards that the NPS successfully implemented and the remarkable biological renewal of Yellowstone — combined to give the service's fire management greater credibility with the public than it had ever before enjoyed.

The legacies of Hetch Hetchy are numerous. Without the fight, American national parks might be administered by the US Forest Service. The fight was instrumental in the passage of the National Parks Act of 1916, establishing the National Park Service and defining the mission of American national parks. Also without the Hetch Hetchy fight, dams may have been built in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, Dinosaur National Monument, and on either end of Grand Canyon National Park. Over the years, the Hetch Hetchy fight has raised the consciousness of a nation. For the first time the nation questioned the meaning of progress, and in a sense, Hetch Hetchy was a national awakening. Since 1913, the fight has often been used by conservationists as an example of what should not happen to a spectacular mountain valley located in a national park.

Park and wildlife managers are facing an ironic dilemma as they work to restore and protect aquatic ecosystems — must amphibians be sacrificed if native fish are to return? Over the past century throughout the United States, resource managers sought to enhance the recreational value of lakes and streams by stocking non-native (exotic) game fish. The “success” of this effort is now recognized as a serious impediment to conserving natural aquatic biodiversity. Introduced fish endanger and replace native fish species through predation, competition, hybridization, and disease transmission. In many cases, bringing back the natives is doomed unless the introduced fish are eradicated. In Yellowstone National Park, four species of non-native trout were introduced, have become established, and threaten the survival of indigenous fish. A program to remove non-native trout has begun, but techniques used to remove these fish also threaten amphibians. Recommendations are made to eliminate or reduce the threat to amphibians, including making managers aware of the presence of amphibians, and offering strategies for reducing amphibian vulnerability to fish removal techniques.

In the process of the making of building nation-state, numerous mountain ridges have been mobilized as "natural" borders between states. On the opposite, recent initiatives try to shift from this notion of mountains as barrier to mountains as bridges among communities. The transboundary character of the mountains is considered as an asset. These regional initiatives are part of the general rise in influence of transnational regions, which the imaginaries of globalization seem to encourage, even as the exclusive prerogatives of nation-states evolve and transborder practices intensify.