Crying in the Wilderness : YOSEMITE; The Embattled Wilderness <i> by Alfred Runte (University of Nebraska: $24.95; 271 pp., illustrated) </i>

In the last weeks of its first century, Yosemite National Park captured the nation’s attention with great fires. It will be tragic irony if these lightning-generated pyrotechnics, as natural to the Sierra Nevada as waterfalls and granite, deflect our thoughts from the real, man-made threats facing one of America’s most beloved places.

A visit to Yosemite Valley this year will overwhelm you with souvenir tributes to the park’s centennial. Alfred Runte’s dark history stands in stark contrast: His celebratory effort broods over the past century’s battles between the forces of vision and those of exploitation. Runte calls himself an “environmental historian.” Author of “National Parks: The American Experience” (1979), this academic-without-portfolio offers a free-wheeling, controversial and scholarly critique of Yosemite’s first 100 years.

The official touchstones of Yosemite’s history are its discovery by whites and the rapid extirpation of the native Ahwahneechees led by Tenaya in the mid-19th Century; the Yosemite Park Act of 1864 establishing a protected reserve of the Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias; its expansion and full-fledged establishment as a national park in 1890; John Muir’s heroic but failed campaign to save Hetch-Hetchy Valley from damming in 1913, and lastly the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916. But although he acknowledges these historical markers, Runte is after subtler, and ultimately more important, game.

“Among all of the debates affecting America’s national parks, the most enduring--and most intense--is where to draw the line between preservation and use.” Runte’s first sentence signals his anthem. His improbable heroes are a line of scientists tracing their heritage to Joseph Grinnell of the University of California’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley.

In Runte’s eyes, these men--beginning with Grinnell himself in the early days of the national park--saw Yosemite as a great reserve of wild nature, a source of scientific information and understanding. They used reason to campaign patiently for what we today would call the “wilderness ecosystem” model of a national park. “And so to Berkeley professors, students and alumni went the honor of founding Yosemite’s ‘university of the wilderness.’ From its graduates, Grinnell now looked forward to the evolution of a new public consciousness of the importance of national parks as refuges for biological diversity.”

Runte’s villains are an even longer line of despoilers and developers who saw money to be made in Yosemite and largely accomplished their mission. Their progenitors were the first to build hotels and plant orchards to service Yosemite’s pioneer visitors in the 1860s, and fought tirelessly to maintain and expand their claims on park land. Runte sees an unbroken line of concessioners leading to the mighty Yosemite Park and Curry Co., Yosemite’s sole proprietor of bed, drink and lodging, today a wholly owned subsidiary of the Music Corp. of America (MCA). Runte hyperventilates between his lines when he reports Edward C. Hardy, president of the Curry Co., calling Yosemite a “destination resort.”

And just where does the National Park Service and its predecessor stewards of Yosemite fit in Runte’s scenario? They are the largely unimaginative pawns of politics, conservation’s eunuchs, seeking always for compromise drawn from the seemingly contradictory aims of the National Park Service Act: “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Every compromise, finds Runte, has taken Yosemite further from its wild beginnings. Referring to Horace Albright, the Park Service’s co-founder: “Park Service tradition, Albright confirmed, leaned heavily toward public works . . . in Albright’s estimation, development was a given and therefore became a basis for comparison instead of an object properly targeted for exclusion. . . . The point he refused to acknowledge was that development itself, whether modern or crude, perhaps should never have been allowed inside Yosemite National Park.” Runte effectively uses a long, detailed section on the history of bear management in Yosemite to illustrate how natural resources have suffered, rather than inconvenience visitors or proprietors.

There is, oddly enough, a minor fourth element in “The Embattled Wilderness”--park visitors. In the grand play between preservationists and developers, both of whom claim to be serving some public, the Park Service ineffectually acting as umpire, Runte’s grandstands are largely silent. In truth, none of the principals in this heroic drama can claim to represent the real wishes of Yosemite’s millions of annual visitors, or the values of its 200 million owners.

The park concessioners, Curry Co. back through its predecessors, have had no trouble filling their rooms, bars, restaurants, and tour buses, nor selling their trinkets. There is more than a year’s wait for room reservations as I write this--surely, by some standards, an argument for more accommodations. On the other hand, when the Park Service queried its public in the 1970s for a revision of its General Management Plan, it found strong sentiment for de-urbanizing Yosemite Valley, for the reduction of structures and services.

As an ecologist, I am pleased by Runte’s focus on natural resources, and the long relationship between UC Berkeley’s field biologists and the evolving management of Yosemite. True enough, Joseph Grinnell, Joe Dixon, George Wright and A. Starker Leopold exhausted half a century trying to instill the notion of a wild biotic reserve upon the Park Service. Equally true, Yosemite’s waters still are befouled by introduced trout; its bears still trapped and sometimes killed to pay for visitors’ sins; its forests deflected from their ancient rhythms by the need to protect people and their possessions from fire. Yet the words of Yosemite’s ecological sages have--however belatedly--largely found their way into contemporary policy and practice.

Runte makes a relentless case that overcrowded, overprostituted Yosemite must be rationed; therefore why not reduce its amenities, and in so doing reduce the attraction to those who seek pleasures that can be purchased elsewhere?

In his tough treatment, Runte conveniently ignores the larger world in which Yosemite National Park must function and always has functioned. It is a social and a political construct; it and its stewards always have reflected the context of their times. Grinnell and his students weren’t merely ahead of the Park Service; as academics they were free to be visionaries and properly outraced social values.

Today, Yosemite faces new perils that Runte fails to address: air pollution attacking its ecosystems; development on its boundaries making it a biological island; political limits on the fires its forests demand, and the likelihood that climate change may yet destroy the nearly intact ecosystem painfully conserved thus far.

Without the best scientific effort and intense social commitment, Yosemite will not survive its second century.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness,” see the Opinion section, Page 4.