Poof ... Park Threat’s Gone

When science runs afoul of politics, it’s usually the science that gets hurt. The Bush administration is raising such collisions to a new level. One recent example was deletion of a section on global warming in a broad study of the state of the U.S. environment. Another was the brushoff given scientific findings in repealing a ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park.

Now comes the cheerful scrubbing of a report to the United Nations on environmental dangers to Yellowstone National Park, established in 1872 as the world’s first national park.

In 1978, Yellowstone and Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado were the first two U.S. sites listed by the U.N.’s World Heritage Committee as world heritage sites, which number more than 700 worldwide (the U.S. total is now 18).

Since 1995, Yellowstone has been on a special list of sites in danger of losing some of their environmental magnificence. One reason was a proposed gold mine along a park boundary, but also seen as dangers were poor sewage facilities, the invasion of a voracious nonnative trout species, threats to bison and grizzly bears, the effect of millions of visitors and general development pressures from outside the park.

The mine threat was eliminated when the government under the Clinton administration purchased the site. This led the Bush administration to ask the committee to remove the park from the endangered list. “Yellowstone is no longer in danger,” Paul Hoffman, an Interior Department official, said in a letter submitted to a meeting of the Heritage Committee in Paris on Monday and Tuesday. The original Park Service draft listed all the remaining problems, many of which are worse now than they were in 1995. They were scrubbed from the final version.

Environmental groups went to Paris in an attempt to keep Yellowstone on the endangered list. The committee debated an unprecedented two hours Tuesday before deciding, after heavy lobbying from the Bush administration, to drop the park from the list. But one committee member emphasized, “It’s off the list, but not off the hook.”

The committee asked the administration, and groups outside government, to report annually on efforts to resolve the other threats to the park. At least the issue is now more in the public eye than before.