America’s First National Park

Look at these stunning photos and tell me you don’t want to catch a flight straight to the West Coast and spend a week admiring the beauty of Yellowstone National Park! High mountain peaks, beautiful foliage, and geysers erupting are just a couple highlights of Yellowstone. It has so much to offer, yet it is surely not getting the respect, attention, and funding that it needs!

Just to give a bit background on the home of Old Faithful (which I’ll talk about geysers later, don’t worry!), let’s have a quick history lesson. Yellowstone was established as a national park near the start of the twentieth century. National parks and their importance grew during this time period thanks to Theodore Roosevelt, who came to be known as the “conservationist president,” as he was a big advocate for national parks. Similarly to the way that many people view the parks now, Roosevelt saw them as a cultural hub that many people can visit at the same time, allowing for the enrichment of our nation’s culture and education of our youth and even adults surrounding nature and land structures that have been erect for thousands of years on our Earth. For this reason, Roosevelt created the United States Forest Service, with the intention of protecting these monumental public lands.

However, this can definitely be seen as problematic. With four million people entering the park every year, there is bound to be environmental deterioration and abuse at the hands of humans. If we look back into the past, human interference with the land was already present. In as early as 1873, it was determined that people were carving their names into the rocks and were destroying stone wall formations. People, even workers (which wow, that just goes to show how misinformed people were on the consequences of their actions on the environment) were even going to the extreme of dumping harmful chemicals like soap and lye into geysers. The parks continued to experience harm, as people littered. Today, with more education on the environment and respecting the Earth, blatant actions of disrespect such as littering and leaving harmful chemicals on the lands have definitely dwindled. However, with 4 million sets of feet traversing around the park, there is surely damage to trails and land which really cannot be reversed.

So now that you have a bit of Yellowstone’s history under your belt, prepare yourself for the news and current state of the park. Let’s talk about one of the problems that this park is facing–an overwhelming bison population. This has actually been a problem that the park has been facing for a while–even the earliest years of its establishment, which prompted people to start poaching the bison. But today, the bison themselves are experiencing a plague–a bacterial disease known as brucellosis.

Brucellosis is a bacteria that affects cattle, bison, and elk and induces abortions. Rather than treating the bison and interfering with nature, many conservationists are calling to just let the bacteria take over and run its course. Since these bison are plagued with a bacteria that is easily transferred via birth tissue, the goal is to remove the infected bison from the land so the disease eventually is no longer present in the population.

This is very time consuming and expensive to remove bison from a location. Conservationists suggest that there should be better alternatives, such as fences and vaccines which could eliminate the spread of the bacteria. Although this isn’t a problem that is affecting the state of the actual land, it is affecting the wildlife which are in fact a part of the park.

Now that we’ve highlighted issues that have been presented to wildlife in Yellowstone, let’s talk about the land itself. A new problem that has popped up is the fact that the boundaries that were established at the onset of the parks are no longer enough to keep the parks secluded. For example, parts of Yellowstone are being affected, as the boundaries are rather close to potential mining sites. This is definitely problematic, as the lands that have been protected by national laws are going to see threats of being invaded by corporate companies only interested in making money and drawing profits.

Speaking of corporate companies and drawing profits which is rather political, parks have become a focal point for political discussions. Politicians are insisting that the federal government should return the park lands to the states, rather than being owned by the government.

Based on the photos scattered throughout this blog, it is clear how important it is to be aware of the fact that there are surely environmental consequences that come with our actions in national parks, like Yellowstone. Make sure to visit my blog for next week’s episode, where we will be highlighting troubles plaguing yet another nationally protected land!