Naturally Speaking

No matter what your opinion on political matters, I think it is vital to read from both sides of the debate. Chase does a great job of pointing out problems and asking questions. Here are a couple of reviews from Amazon:

I first learned of this book when I was working as a volunteer fire fighter in Northern California back in 1989. The subject came up one evening and the dinner table polarized between the Park Service/Forestry workers and the "environmentalist" crowd. (I was just helping out because my house was at risk from the fire and didn't fit into either camp.) The environmentalists hated the book while the professional forestry managers tried to explain to them that Chase had a lot of good points. I was curious enough to seek out the book to read and learned a lot. Chase's main point is that you can't have it both ways - if you don't want to manage these areas actively you are going to end up with the destruction of habitat and species you were trying to avoid - and proves his case in detail using the Yellowstone disaster as an example. His more recent book, In a Dark Wood, provides more evidence (including a depressing acount of how the unmanged elk herds in Yellowstone are destroying entire ecosystems

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This is a wonderful book if you are a wildlife biologist or avid wildlife observer. The author does bash the Park Service quite severely, but in all honesty - look into the overall history of the Park Service - he isn't off by far. I truly enjoyed his personal point of view. If you are looking for just a history type book, this really isn't it. This is more of a personal account, more than it is strictly history based about the park service/yellowstone. Highly recommended for those of you with an open mind and a deep concern for our wildlife and national parks.

I liked the style of the book, but I have to admit it got boring for me about half-way through. After all, once you read and understand the author's point, sooner or later he's just hitting the same nail over and over again. I think he makes the case so long because he anticipates a lot of cricism. Indeed, a couple of people on Amazon attacked him and called his book "ideological", as if a book about how we manage the environment could somehow NOT be about ideologies.

He asks a great question about three-quarters of the way through: What do we mean by nature? If the goal of the Park Service is to keep the parks in a state of nature, exactly what does that mean? Are people part of the enivironment? Or do we mean to keep the parks the way they would be without people present? But people have been part of the North American ecosystem for perhaps ten thousand years. Should we go back to Wolly Mammoths and Sabre-Toothed Tigers?

It's a great question because it is at the same time total philosophical nonsense and immensely practical. We spend a lot of money on our National Parks, and there are a lot of folks that want us to respect our ecosystem. In fact, the word "ecosystem" was spawned in an attempt to describe what the Park Services were supposed to manage and what we were supposed to care about. They (and we) were supposed to "maintain the ecosystem"

The problem with that is, as Chase points out, there is no such thing as a closed ecosystem. No matter where you "draw the line", there is always influence from outside the area. You can't hide a world of interdependencies with the simple word "ecosystem"

Personally I think people are part of nature. Therefore, for a park to be truly natural you should have people traipsing all over the place, leaving their trash, shooting the animals, and generally being the annoying dominant life form that we are. Obviously, however, that's not going to work. Pretty soon our national parks would look like New Jersey.

So are the National Parks then something like a huge version of a city park? In other words, should we actively micro-manage them? Should they be landscaped, beautified, and polished to maintain their photogenic status?

Ben Franklin wanted the Wild Turkey to be our national bird

We commonly hear that we need to keep some "wlid things" in the world, that being in the midst of nature in all of her natural, raw, wildness is good for the human soul. I find myself deeply emotionally agreeing with that statement. Being outside is like seeing the face of God. It can be a transcendental experience. What the heck does all of that really mean? I love hiking and being outdoors. I live in the woods on a fiarly large lot. We are so private that we cannot see our neighbors. Regularly fox, deer, rabbits, possums, skunks, and all other sorts of animals come through our yard. Bear live closeby. It's not uncommon to hear a wildcat in the mountains. Last week I saw a gorgeous flock of wild turkey. Are these wild enough? Natural enough? Why or why not?

I think sometimes when we go outside we get a little misty-eyed and awestruck. How can you NOT look at something like the Grand Canyon or the Rocky Mountains and feel a spiritual yearning? A sense of smallness and being part of a larger plan? Problems arise, however, when we take these good feelings and try to hammer them into public policy. You can't leglislate a feeling of sprituality, and sooner or later mankind must be a part of our view of nature. Parks are land, water, plants, and animals. We need to manage them, not worship them. That's our job and our moral responsibility. We should wipe away our tears, climb down from our soapbox, put away all airs of moral superiority and self-righteousness, and get to work at it.