Protecting the Crown: A Century of Resource Management in Glacier National Park

Catton, Theodore; Krahe, Diane; Shaw, Deirdre

This report draws a timeline from 1910 to 2010 and describes the process of evolution of resource management over the park’s first century. It examines continuity and change within an organization whose trajectory, like that of most organizations, has been toward greater and greater specialization and complexity. This resource management history forms a part of the park’s administrative history. This report also aims to be an environmental history of Glacier. It aims to identify and analyze significant connections between environmental change and social change. In the Glacier context, social change encompasses everything from the growth of human population, agriculture, and industry in the surrounding region, to the evolution of the park visitor experience, the development of new environmental laws, and our changing conceptions of nature. This report is in five chronological chapters. The first chapter describes Glacier’s natural and cultural setting prior to establishment. The subsequent four chapters cover the century-long history of the park in roughly 25-year increments. These four chapters each center on a dominant metaphor of how park managers conceived of nature and resource management in Glacier. Each metaphor or conceptualization may be viewed as the next in a sequence. But in each case the older thinking was not discarded; it was simply pushed into the background. Thus, earlier metaphors of nature may be more properly viewed as layers, one layered on top of another, each giving rise to a more complex and textured understanding of what was involved in preserving the park in a state of nature. The four metaphors might be given the shorthand labels of reservoir, sanctuary, relic, and ecosystem.

Protecting the Crown: A Century of Resource Management in Glacier National Park

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