Buffalo

Last night I saw a brief part of a show about Yellowstone National Park and the railroad industry. It was on NH Public Television, and was called YELLOWSTONE: AMERICA'S EDEN. It was very depressing. It started out showing footage of huge herds of buffalo roaming the plains. There used to be 60 million buffalo in the western US. The white men, railroad people from what I took from the show, wanted to own the land that was presently occupied by native americans. They noticed that the native americans relied heavily on the buffalo for survial, and they thought that a nice indirect way of getting rid of the native americans would be to kill off the buffalo. The show had pictures of enormous piles of buffalo skulls and said that St. Louis sold 200,000 buffalo hides a day! The pictures and facts were deeply distrubing about how incredibly quickly and thoroughly the buffalo were distroyed. In fact, the buffalo were thought to be extinct until about two dozen buffalo were found in what is now Yellowstone National Park.

Ironicly, the same railroad people saw the beauty of yellowstone and realized it was worth perserving. They were one of the main groups lobbying for yellowstone to become the first national park. Of course, the beauty to them was the number of people who would ride their railroad to see the natural wonders. Suddenly the buffalo, elk, sheep, and deer were valueable to these people. So valueable that they decided to kill gray wolf and bear to reduce the predators of these animals. As a result the population of these grazing animals increased. Unfortunately, the population increased beyond what could be supported by the small yellowstone ecosystem. The over population lead to over-browsing, which lead to the decline of beaver, which lead to the loss of wetlands, which hurt duck and fish populations, etc.

The program went on to show the vast influx of people via automobiles and the detrimental impact they had. They showed the park rangers cleaning Morning Glory pool of all the trash people put in there. They pulled 86 dollars of pennies out of the pool!

I went to Yellowstone a few years ago, and luckily a lot of the damage of previous visitors, such as trash in Morning Glory Pool, is temporary. Much of the damage has not been temporary. The buffalo still are a fraction of their original numbers, grizzly bears are not present in Wyoming like they used to be, nor or the wolves.

I was depressign to me to see such destruction to beautiful and innocent creatures and habitat. There is a delicate balance between enjoyment of our natural wonders and over use.