Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness

by Paul Schullery

Overview

Yellowstone National Park is beloved passionately and, as with all objects of passion, it generates heated feelings and has for over 125 years. Created in 1872, Yellowstone has been at the center of efforts to conserve the nation's once vast western wilderness. In turn Yellowstone's history has demonstrated how complex those efforts to conserve it have been. As Schullery writes, "We inherited this great humming thing . . . Ever since then we have imagined ourselves wise enough to control it and have rushed to judge what is wrong with it. And every time we looked hard enough, we discovered that there was more wrong with our judgment than with Yellowstone."

This marvelously detailed book skillfully and objectively traces the park's social and ecological history from Pleistocene times to the present. Searching for Yellowstone is an absolute "must read" for anyone wanting to understand why the park is engraved in the American consciousness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780972152211
Publisher:	Montana Historical Society Press
Publication date:	04/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.62(w) x 8.16(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Paul Schullery, former director of the American Museum of Fly Fishing, is the author, co-author, or editor of more than thirty books, including American Fly-Fishing: A History (1987), Royal Coachman (1999), Lewis and Clark among the Grizzlies (2002) and, with Lee Whittlesey, Yellowstone's Creation Myth (2003). He lives in Yellowstone Park, Wyoming.

Table of Contents

Illustrations, (1) Introduction (2) Ancient Yellowstone (3) Things a Little Incredible (4) Wild Romantic Splendor (5) A Public Park (6) Ecological Holocaust (7) Privations and Inconveniences (8) A Single Rock (9) Big Men with Fine Personalities (10) Reasonable Illusions (11) The High Price of Success (12) Greater Yellowstone (13) Holocene Park (14) Imagining Yellowstone (15) Epilogue, Notes, Acknowledgements, Index

Interviews

Searching for Yellowstone remains the seminal book on Yellowstone's fascinating ecological history, and the Montana Historical Society Press is delighted to bring it back into print.

Editorial Reviews

"In Searching for Yellowstone [Schullery] has given us a refreshingly unhyperbolic look at the place he loves, and has thus notably honored its beauty, its mystery, its people, its past--and its future."
--New York Times Book Review

"The wondrous and subtle cultural landscape of Yellowstone is lovingly detailed in this comprehensive, level-headed study."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Searching for Yellowstone is . . . a guide to an inner park that few of us have been lucky enough to visit."
--Audubon

From the Publisher