Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness

Schullery, P

Yellowstone is one of the best-known places on earth-or is it? The popular image of the world's first national park is composed of equal parts myth, hype, and rare glimpses of the incredible wonder of the place. Searching for Yellowstone is the first environmental history of one of America's greatest and most far-reaching experiments. Combining exhaustive research with twenty-five years of experience at Yellowstone, Paul Schullery paints a dramatically new picture of the park and its meaning to the world, showing how Yellowstone's "discovery" by whites followed 10,000 years of occupation and use by native Americans, and how the park's founding became a creation myth for the conservation movement. Yellowstone's image as a peaceful, unchanging American wilderness is belied by a century of bitter debate over what its real purpose should be, as our continually changing relationship with nature has altered our preconceptions about wild country. The park's founders had no idea that the hot springs they preserved would someday provide us with the material for such miraculous technologies as DNA fingerprinting. Nor could they have imagined that Yellowstone would become a global conscience, a barometer of the health of a rapidly changing planet. The search for Yellowstone is as vital and unpredictable today as it was in 1872, and Paul Schullery makes an urgent, eloquent, and startlingly practical case for ensuring that Yellowstone lasts for another 125 years. of Yellowstone with many years of experience working and living in the park, Paul Schullery paints a dramatically new picture of the park and its meaning to the world. Originally published in 1997 and in an updated edition in 2004, Searching for Yellowstone has become a standard reference on the continuing rediscovery of one of the world's foremost natural treasures.

Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness

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