Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone: Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem

The story of how Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the world’s first national park, has become synonymous with nature conservation--and an examination of today’s challenges to preserve the region’s wilderness heritage.

For more than 150 years, the Yellowstone region--now widely known as the twenty-three million acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem--has played a prominent role in the United States’ nature conservation agenda. In this book, Robert B. Keiter, an award-winning public land law and policy expert, traces the evolution and application of fundamental ecological conservation concepts tied to Yellowstone.

Keiter’s book highlights both the conservation successes and controversies connected with this storied region, which has been enmeshed in change. During the 1980s, leaders in Yellowstone embraced ecosystem management concepts to recover a dwindling grizzly bear population and to support wolf reintroduction. Since then, management policies in the region’s two national parks and adjacent national forests have largely followed suit, prioritizing ecosystem-level conservation over industrial activity. Groundbreaking efforts are currently afoot to protect elk, deer, and pronghorn migration corridors and to maintain the park’s bison population, effectively expanding the scope of regional conservation initiatives. But in the face of explosive human population growth and related development pressures, new efforts must also account for the region’s privately owned lands along with accelerating recreational activities that present quite different problems.

Indeed, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem--extending across three states and twenty counties and embracing more than sixteen million acres of federal land as well as private and tribal lands --can only be characterized as a complex, jurisdictionally fragmented landscape. As Keiter makes clear, the quest for common ground among federal and state officials, conservationists, ranchers, Indigenous tribes, and others is an enduring task.

Exploring both notable conservation accomplishments and the ongoing challenges confronting this special place, Keiter’s book explains the many forces--scientific, political, economic, legal, cultural, climatic, and more--at work driving controversy and change across the region. But more than this, Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone shows us that the lessons gleaned from Yellowstone’s expansive nature conservation efforts are profoundly important for both the country and the world.

Robert B. Keiter is the Wallace Stegner Professor of Law, University Distinguished Professor, and founding director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah S. J. Quinney College of Law. His books include To Conserve Unimpaired, Keeping Faith with Nature, and The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. He currently serves on the National Park System Advisory Board and as a trustee for the National Parks Conservation Association.