In 1988, along the western boundary of Yellowstone National Park, the divergent institutional mindsets of the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service collided in front of a worldwide audience.

The point of impact was a proposed bulldozer line that, in a desperate act of futility, was set to be carved as a firebreak through a stretch of lodgepole pine. Pitted against one another were the Forest Service’s mantra of multiple use that interpreted fire as largely a destructive force threatening commercial timber production, and the Park Service’s mission of preservation, which embraced the flame as a vital element of ecological rejuvenation.

Fire commanders proposed that a swath of trees be cleared inside the national park to stop the advance of a conflagration driven by high winds. Yellowstone Superintendent Bob Barbee expressed hesitation, fearing that heavy machinery, if given a green light to blaze forth and carve an unplanned de facto road system in Yellowstone, would cause more visual and ecological damage than any impact made by wildfire.

Barbee caught political heat. Still, he held his ground and won the argument, though the real victor, experts said later, was “ecosystem management,” an amorphous term which, when applied to wild landscapes, can mean much or nothing.

The fact that agency managers communicated while surrounded by an inferno—and weighed the pros and cons of short-term action versus long-term consequences—was considered momentous. Sixteen years ago, it was rare for the cumulative effects of agency actions to be deliberated. Today, the greater Yellowstone region is touted as an international model for ecosystem-based management. The idea behind it is that oversight of common ecological values—such as maintaining the health of wildlife populations, watersheds and wilderness, while accommodating human use and resource development—will be coordinated in ways that transcend jurisdictional boundaries, acknowledging that nature does not adhere to artificial lines drawn on maps.

But now the integrity of ecosystem management in greater Yellowstone—serving as a microcosm of ecological management in general—is confronting its biggest test: the Bush administration’s mandate to develop natural energy resources. While the domestic debate over drilling for oil and gas has been focused largely on the symbolic battleground of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, full field development in and around the Jonah Natural Gas Field, near the geologic area known as the Pinedale Anticline, challenges the ability of the Park Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and state agencies to prove that natural values can be safeguarded amid monumental landscape alteration.

At roughly 18 million acres (not including contiguous private and state tracts surrounding it), greater Yellowstone is the largest and wildest mass of centralized federal wildlands in the lower forty-eight states. With Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks forming a central core, six adjacent national forests, three national wildlife refuges, a huge sweep of BLM holdings, and an American Indian reservation, greater Yellowstone encompasses an area 450 miles long and 250 miles wide. Inside this web of mountain, forest, plains and river headwaters are all of the major wildlife species that existed here at the end of the Pleistocene: grizzly bears, wolves, bison, the largest concentration of elk in the West, and other barometer fauna.

In December 1986, the ecosystem management concept—considered radical when it was first proposed by the Greater Yellowstone Coalition a few years earlier—was given its first serious consideration in, of all places, Congress.

The impetus was an alarming plunge in the famous Yellowstone grizzly bear population and the reality that unless action was taken to address the loss of bears and habitat, these bruin icons, classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, would die off.

Arizona Congressman Morris Udall, then chairman of the House Interior Committee, called upon the Congressional Research Service to deliver a report on behalf of the subcommittees on public lands and national parks. The report was commissioned because, at the time, land managers seldom shared information, they knew little about what other agencies were doing, and they had no idea what the effects of one agency’s actions were on another’s—while the numbers of grizzly bears spiraled downward.

The Yellowstone region represents an international flagship for conservation. Yet “the first thing likely to strike the reader of the report is the unevenness of the cumulative data on the region, both in quantity and quality,” the authors wrote, noting that even the so-called federal coordinating committees did little coordination. “One realizes that each agency has its own special set of needs as well as constraints when it comes to collecting information. But there is also a need to look at the Ôbig picture’ and it is precisely the inability to do so that has permitted some of the major ecosystem problems to build [to the point they] seem nearly intractable.”

To save the grizzly—indeed, to save the integrity of this ecosystem—the report said agencies needed to do a better job of gathering information on effects of actions, sharing it with their neighbors, bringing citizens into the discussion, and adopting a comprehensive strategy for management.

What has gone wrong in greater Yellowstone? “The death of a unique idea, such as Ôecosystem management’ in greater Yellowstone, happens when government creates a bureaucratic program around the concept, but instead of looking to the future with vision, it takes its cues from the past,” says biologist Chris Wood, a senior vice president for Trout Unlimited and former senior manager with both the BLM and Forest Service. “There is evidence that some people in the Forest Service and BLM are still trying to shoehorn the same old timber sales and mines and oil and gas wells into something they call a new paradigm but it doesn’t work.”

The value of billions of dollars in profits for oil and gas companies, coupled with millions in tax receipts and royalty payments rolling into economically struggling local counties and the state of Wyoming, is being weighed against the hedged survival of the second-longest known wildlife migration corridor (involving pronghorn antelope) in North America, and one of the most imperiled game bird species in the West, the greater sage grouse. The short-term prosperity of an energy boom is being stacked against the net worth of a sustainable tourism economy heavily dependent on a healthy environment and scenic beauty.

Since 2001, every measure implemented since 1986 has come under attack by the Bush administration and its allies in Congress who have sought to reduce environmental regulation, streamline the process for natural resource extraction, dole out tax breaks and subsidies, and limit citizens’ ability to challenge agency decisions.

In terms of crafting a cohesive vision for the land that strives to achieve long-term protection of irreplaceable natural values, which in turn fuel a sustainable economy, Wood acknowledges that Greater Yellowstone is walking a fine line between success and failure.

Over the past decade, Timothy Clark, an adjunct professor at Yale University and founder of the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, which serves to provide a scientific baseline for land management decisions, has hosted a number of closed-door discussions with agency managers at all levels in the greater Yellowstone region. “A lot of these people are quite open in closed workshops. It is amazing what they talk about,” Clark says. “No one expects to go back home and see dramatic transformation in management. What you see are individuals who want to read more, talk more, listen more, think more. This is the basis of ecosystem management where civil servants form new alliances and relationships and do not allow the mentalities of fiefdoms to leave them divided.”

Clark says the largest obstacle is a climate of fear. “Some of these agencies are stuck in the transition from the old way of doing business to functioning within the demands of a new, more enlightened world,” he says. “A lot of the leadership needs to speak up to help facilitate the transition because the bureaucracies themselves will not do it.”

Those who have attended Clark’s sessions say they’ve been enormously useful in advancing meaningful dialogue about political and institutional conflicts preventing stewardship. One participant is Chuck Schwartz of the U.S. Geological Survey, who oversees the federal Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. If ever there was a need for meaningful ecosystem management, Schwartz says, it is now, as the federal government and western states prepare to take the Yellowstone grizzly population off the threatened species list.

Conservationists warn the decision is premature and politically motivated, given that one of the prime advocates for delisting is the oil and gas industry. The Forest Service has been reluctant to encumber itself with restrictions that cut against the grain of local politics favoring traditional resource extraction, particularly on lands outside of federal wilderness. Here’s the paradox: In order for the region to be ensured of a healthy, self-sustaining population of grizzlies, secure habitat must be set aside to accommodate a growing number of bears. Today, the focus has shifted beyond the boundaries of Yellowstone Park and adjacent Forest Service wilderness into areas of national forest and BLM parcels targeted for oil and gas drilling, logging, sport hunting and expanded motorized recreation.

Schwartz says that when grizzlies leave Yellowstone—or as the population grows beyond the park boundaries—the rate of survival goes down as they come into contact with traditional rural land users and the expanding human population.

“Garbage is cocaine to bears. Once they get on it they’re hooked. There is no rehab program that works and most grizzlies will keep pursuing human trash until their behavior becomes too aggressive and then we’re forced to remove them,” Schwartz says. On the issue of sanitation, an ecosystem strategy has been successful as the Yellowstone Grizzly Bear Subcommittee has made great gains in bear-proofing thousands of trash dumpsters and in getting hunting guides to hang the carcasses of elk and deer out of the bears’ reach.

Recently, Schwartz and a group of colleagues completed a 170-page monograph on Yellowstone grizzlies that calls attention to source-sink dynamics, which in layman’s terms means trouble spots where the rate of natural bear reproduction is exceeded by the rate at which bears die, most notably from human causes. The compelling issue confronting bear managers is whether those source-sink areas on Forest Service and private land expand or shrink.

For years, the Forest Service and BLM have professed a willingness to see ecosystems as more than the sum of their own lands, but as history has shown, these agencies’ records of thinking and acting holistically have come under suspicion. Yes, it’s true that at present in the greater Yellowstone region, federal and state agencies have working groups that focus on the conservation of grizzlies, bison, bald eagles, trumpeter swans, sage grouse and whitebark pine, among others. But what’s lacking is regard for conservation in the big picture.

Prior to joining Trout Unlimited, Wood assisted Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck in crafting the agency’s roadless rule intended to protect nearly 60 million acres of roadless national forest lands that provide important refugia for wildlife, serve as the source of fresh water for more than 50 million Americans and are rare havens of solace. Just weeks after leaving his post, Dombeck watched his successor Dale Bosworth and Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey (a former timber industry lobbyist) join the timber, mining and energy industries in moving to have the roadless rule overturned.

Critics say Bosworth and Rey have used the Healthy Forests Initiative as a ruse to commercially log national forests in the name of fire prevention and that several roadless areas are on the block. The Bush administration exempted the Tongass rainforest in Alaska from receiving additional protection in spite of a growing national backlash against taxpayer-subsidized road construction. A rebellion against Bush administration policies has been quietly growing inside the Forest Service and it has been joined by the private sector. For example, with regard to the Tongass, 500 gun clubs across the country have joined 100 prominent executives from the outdoor recreation industry—including Black Diamond, Patagonia and Outward Bound—in saying that old-growth trees are more valuable left standing than felled.

“I have sometimes been very critical of this administration. Frankly, it has made some boneheaded decisions not in the best interest of the land,” Wood says. “The real land ethic and environmental consciousness of an agency does not reside in Washington, D.C. It either exists or does not exist on the ground.”

Individual people who are managing national forests, parks and BLM tracts are committed to doing a good job, he says, but the real problems are institutional ones. Every once in a while, missions of agencies collide, and they are hard to reconcile.

Wood points to the infamous standoff which occurred during the 1990s between the Park Service and Forest Service over the New World Gold Mine, slated to be developed by a Canadian company just outside Yellowstone’s northeast corner.

The plan advanced by Toronto-based Noranda called for a gargantuan toxic tailings impoundment to be erected on the Gallatin National Forest, with Yellowstone officials saying that if a breach ever occurred in this highly active seismic area, park waterways would be polluted. The conflict was exacerbated by the fact that Gallatin Forest Supervisor David Garber said that because of the General Mining Law of 1872, his agency could not deny a permit for the New World project to proceed. Why? Because the prosaic federal code established hardrock mining as the highest and best use of the land.

Only after the Clinton administration intervened did Noranda back down and abandon the project. Wood says there are parallels—holding far more serious ecological implications—with the pace of oil and gas development targeted for Forest Service and BLM land at the southern end of the ecosystem.

Cumulative effects analyses are intended to take into account a range of activities occurring on a spread of landscape at once. For example, if a major timber sale is proposed on a national forest, and the logging is deemed to potentially have an impact on lynx habitat, an agency biologist may want to assess the condition of habitat over a wider area, including other private and public lands adjacent to the Forest Service tract. The same method could be applied to oil and gas drilling’s effects on pronghorn and sage grouse.

Every autumn, pronghorn antelope that spend their springs and summers in Grand Teton National Park embark on an epic migration hundreds of miles long that passes through the Upper Green River Basin, which includes the Jonah Natural Gas Field and Pinedale Anticline. Similarly, sage grouse inhabit the basin, and this population is one of the last healthy concentrations of those game birds in the West. Sage grouse are candidates for receiving endangered status because of sharp declines and loss of habitat that have left only fragmented populations at one-tenth of historic numbers in eleven states.

But during the Bush administration, as part of its national energy strategy, plans for hundreds of natural gas wells have given way to a rush to develop thousands of wells. Joel Berger, a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, says development and related impacts could soon sever the ancient pronghorn migration path, dooming the park population.

“Here we have this amazing resource, a pronghorn herd whose migration is second only to ANWR’s Porcupine caribou herd in terms of distance in the western hemisphere, and yet we have this blind spot,” says Michael Scott, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.

Meanwhile, retired grouse expert Clait Braun, who worked for thirty years with the Colorado Division of Wildlife, says the greater Yellowstone population of sage grouse is perhaps the last, best hope for saving the species. States estimate their numbers between 140,000 and 250,000 total. “They’ve created grouse on paper that do not exist in the wild, particularly in Wyoming and Montana [which have the highest remnant concentrations of birds],” he says. “No one wants to face up to what the real numbers are because it’s political dynamite.” Braun ticks off a list of fragmented grouse populations—in California, Utah, Washington state, New Mexico, the Dakotas—that he says are steadily headed toward “winking out.” He predicts the Gunnison sage grouse in Colorado, a subspecies, will be extinct by 2030, and he believes that if current trends persist, the greater sage grouse will be so reduced in number and lost habitat by 2050 that it will never recover.

In 2002, the Bush administration set a new record for the number of oil and gas permits it processed in the West and Alaska, and the mark was surpassed last year. More than three percent of America’s gas is being extracted from the Green River Basin, and the number of wells there is expected to multiply. BLM staffers across the West acknowledge they are overwhelmed with processing drilling applications. Officially, agency spokespeople insist that the buffer zones they have prescribed to protect grouse breeding areas, known as leks, are adequate.

Despite fierce rebuttals from the agency, Braun says the BLM has suppressed dissent from biologists who are concerned about environmental impacts, yet are more worried about losing their jobs for speaking out.

Imagine this scenario: You are an avian biologist for the BLM specializing in the natural history and monitoring of sage grouse in the Jonah Natural Gas Field and Pinedale Anticline. As energy development creates a noose around once-productive leks and sage grouse numbers begin to decline, what are your options if you believe there is a correlation between the decline and the expanding infrastructure of drilling pads, pipeline, roads, power corridors and traffic? More to the point, how will your supervisor respond when the individual has just spent many months heeding the Bush administration’s calls to expedite drilling permits as quickly as possible, and the governor of Wyoming and local townspeople have heaped praise upon the supervisor for making full field development a reality?

As energy and other kinds of commodity interests rear their heads, Scottt says the administration should be asking how everything fits together to protect an international treasure. Instead they are asking: How fast can we exploit the gas?

“It is a stark example of the lesson we haven’t learned,” Scott says. “In order to protect these values we need to think more broadly than boom and bust. The agencies are working hard to meet the needs of the energy industry in the Green River Valley, but what about the ranchers whose pastures are being destroyed, or the hunters who covet the game, or the communities who value their sense of place? And what about the ecosystem? I’m not opposed to energy development, but it needs to take place alongside the other values.”

He cites the Bush administration’s overturning of the ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone, a ban that was widely supported by hundreds of thousands of citizens from across the country; the overturning of the roadless rule, which millions of citizens had backed; and attempts to open Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front to energy development despite citizen opposition. And he cites Vice President Dick Cheney’s refusal to turn over the records of meetings held between his energy task force and energy companies, including Enron, that presented the Bush Administration with a wish list that was adopted as policy.

Real ecosystem management, Scott says, is as much about protecting the hallmarks of democracy—the free speech of civil servants, listening to dissent, championing open government, and giving citizens a stake in the process—as it is about crafting policy.

“Remember the big picture,” Congress implored citizens and managers in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem sixteen years ago. “In the end, using the right words aren’t important. It’s what happens on the land that matters,” Wood says. “You may get an Aldo Leopold whose words inspire, but the outcome is only assured by good people who are given the latitude to make good decisions.”

Hiking recently across the Jonah Natural Gas Field, I was reminded of an observation made to me by the late conservationist David Brower. “If citizens want to know how much real vision and character their federal civil servants possess, then watch how land management agencies respond when they confront political pressure to abandon their duty of environmental stewardship.”

As Bob Barbee knows—with flame swirling all around—it’s in this realm where the real battle to save greater Yellowstone will be won or lost.