The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: Redefining America`s Wilderness Heritage

In 1872 Congress designated Yellowstone National Park as the world’s first national park; nineteen years later, the land adjacent to Yellowstone became America’s first national forest reserve. Since that time, the entire Yellowstone region has been the scene of major battles over resource management—debates between those who would use the land for extraction of national resources (mining, lumbering, and hunting, for example) and those who believe that wildlife and recreation should dominate...