From reformations to progressive reforms: paradigmatic influences on wildlife policy in Yellowstone National Park

Abstract

Recent environmental scholarship has suggested that nature is chaotic and the concept of a balanced nature is a false one. Yet the attempt to "balance" nature is a human-driven effort arguably rooted in a paradigm that started in early modern Europe. This paradigm emerged at the end of the fifteenth century as Western man began to separate from and elevate himself above nature. With the renewed religious vigor of the sixteenth-century European Reformations man embraced the scriptural concept of his God-given dominion, and thus control, over nature. Men of faith initiated the Scientific Revolution, which culminated with the Newtonian idea of mechanization and led to the idea of nature as balanced. These ideas formed, in part, the basis for natural resource management into the twenty-first century.^In the United States nineteenth-century Romantics and twentieth-century Progressives influenced the paradigm through direct response to the free market economy, the driving ideals of American exceptionalism, and the enlistment of the elitist values of Social Darwinism and the cult of masculinity, which further shaped American environmental policies.Man's effort to seek a balanced nature has caused him to invent and reinvent nature within the framework thus making nature a cultural, rather than a scientific, construct. Perhaps one of the best case studies concerning the paradigmatic influences on wildlife policy is the effort of various managing entities in Yellowstone National Park to revive the American Bison.^In examining the decisions of Yellowstone National Park and Department of Interior management the emerging, overarching theme in Yellowstone's first seventy-five years of bison management includes both cultural determinism and cultural hegemony, though not always in the strictest Marxist/Gramscian model. Even as policies changed, and sometimes drastically, the underlying theme proves that scientists and policy-makers alike made decisions more often influenced by cultural paradigms that proved mired in social and cultural constructs. Embracing the theory of the balance of nature, wildlife managers allowed nascent cultural concepts to permeate policymaking. Hence, the American Bison has been left hanging in a man-made attempt to balance nature both for nature's sake and for the pleasure of mankind.