Excerpt:
... It was his third visit. Roosevelt saw a thousand antelope, plentiful cougar, mountain sheep, deer, coyote, and many thousands of elk. He wrote, "Our people should see to it that this rich heritage is preserved for their children and their children's children forever, with its majestic beauty all unmarred."
But Yellowstone was not preserved. On the contrary, it was altered beyond repair in a matter of years. By 1934, the park service acknowledged that "white-tailed deer, cougar, lynx, wolf, and possibly wolverine and fisher are gone from the Yellowstone."
What they didn't say was that the park service was solely responsible for the disappearances. Park rangers had been shooting animals for decades, even though that was illegal under the Lacey Act of 1894. But they thought they knew better. They thought their environmental concerns trumped any mere law.
What actually happened at Yellowstone is a cascade of ego and error. But to understand it, we have to go back to the 1890s. Back then it was believed that elk were becoming extinct, and so these animals were fed and encouraged. Over the next few years the numbers of elk in the park exploded. Roosevelt had seen a few thousand animals, and noted they were more numerous than on his last visit.
By 1912, there were 30,000. By 1914, 35,000. Things were going very well. Rainbow trout had also been introduced, and though they crowded out the native cutthroats, nobody really worried. Fishing was great. And bears were increasing in numbers, and moose, and bison.
By 1915, Roosevelt realized the elk had become a problem, and urged "scientific management." His advice was ignored. Instead, the park service did everything it could to increase their numbers.
The results were predictable.
Antelope and deer began to decline, overgrazing changed the flora, aspen and willows were being eaten heavily and did not regenerate. In an effort to stem the loss of animals, the park rangers began to kill predators, which they did without public knowledge.
They eliminated the wolf and cougar and were well on their way to getting rid of the coyote. Then a national scandal broke out; studies showed that it wasn't predators that were killing the other animals. It was overgrazing from too many elk. The management policy of killing predators had only made things worse.
Meanwhile the environment continued to change. Aspen trees, once plentiful in the park, where virtually destroyed by the enormous herds of hungry elk.
With the aspen gone, the beaver had no trees to make dams, so they disappeared. Beaver were essential to the water management of the park; without dams, the meadows dried hard in summer, and still more animals vanished. Situation worsened. It became increasingly inconvenient that all the predators had been killed off by 1930. So in the 1960s, there was a sigh of relief when new sightings by rangers suggested that wolves were returning....
And by now we are about ready to reap the rewards of our forty-year policy of fire suppression, Smokey the Bear, all that. The Indians used to burn forest regularly, and lightning causes natural fires every summer. But when these fires are suppressed, the branches that drop to cover the ground make conditions for a very hot, low fire that sterilizes the soil. And in 1988, Yellowstone burned. All in all, 1.2 million acres were scorched, and 800,000 acres, one third of the park, burned.
Then, having killed the wolves, and having tried to sneak them back in, the park service officially brought the wolves back, and the local ranchers screamed. And on, and on.
As the story unfolds, it becomes impossible to overlook the cold truth that when it comes to managing 2.2 million acres of wilderness, nobody since the Indians has had the faintest idea how to do it. And nobody asked the Indians, because the Indians managed the land very intrusively. The Indians started fires, burned trees and grasses, hunted the large animals, elk and moose, to the edge of extinction. White men refused to follow that practice, and made things worse.
Enviromentalists and their enviromental programs unfortunately have, not all but too many times, ended up in total failure for most any given ecosystems they have fooled with. Man or homo sapien sapiens as a species have yet to learn to leave well enough alone.
Then again theres mother nature and she always wins out in the end.
Enviromentalists and their enviromental programs unfortunately have, not all but too many times, ended up in total failure for most any given ecosystems they have fooled with. Man or homo sapien sapiens as a species have yet to learn to leave well enough alone.
Then again theres mother nature and she always wins out in the end.
do you really want to argue what benefits environmental regulation has? seriously?
Own property in Lake Tahoe and TARPA runs the show there. They are a corrupt orginization and force practice of bad forestry. They and the Sierra club who really runs the show there have been and still are in serious legal trouble now regarding the Angora fire several years ago.
Amongst other things I do to make $$$$ I'm 25% principal owner of a land development company and hate with a passion the government agencies involved with EIR's. They cost me mega $$$$ and are worth nothing. Not to mention they get in my way of making $$$$$ in a timely fashion.
I spend alot of time in China and I have to agree the SMOG is off the hook insane there and is due mainly from their coal burning power plants. No pollution control or scrubbers in the smoke stacks for these plants. They pushed off pellet type nuclear plants for quite a few years because no one would sell them this technology but offered to build and operate it for them. If you know most of the Asian mind set, particulary China, this is no good for them. So now just recently they finally fiqured out and designed their own pellet type nuclear power reactors that work well and have ramped up replacing the nasty coal fired plants with their new pellet type nuclear reactor power plants. They figure they should be totally off coal fired plants in about 30 years.
Also in their major cities the Chinese government offers tremendous tax break incentives and reduced registeration fees to convert gasoline fired vehicles to LNG.
As far as their water goes, it has mostly everywhere there been bad since B.C. times. If you ever go there you will notice alot of natives carrying their own boiled water during the day if their not in the new sections of the big cities and they religiously boil all their drinking water out of the tap at home.
Not sure what they intend to do about their water problem but I bet given enough time they will figure something out.
So as you can see my views on enviormental regulations are more than a bit bias. And yes, I'm truely a capitalist pig in the eyes of many laymen.
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