Sonoran pronghorns are hanging on, barely, at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. They are listed as "endangered" on the Endangered Species List/NPS file
Editor's note: The latest article in an occasional series on how national parks might serve as an impediment to the sixth mass extinction.
It was a headline hard to ignore: Species Vanishing From Many National Parks.
We think, or at least like to think, that national parks, and their inhabitants, are forever. But James Gleick's piece in the New York Times back on February 3, 1987, brought reality into the picture. We shouldn't be surprised. Humans can be an alarmingly invasive species in their own right, impinging on natural habitat by erasing forests, turning over prairie into farms and ranchettes, damming rivers.
"Many species of mammals are disappearing from North America's national parks solely because the parks -even those covering hundreds of thousands of acres - are too small to support them," wrote Gleick. "Parks as vast as Yosemite and Mount Rainier have lost more than one-fourth of the species originally found there, and smaller parks have lost as many as 35 to 40 percent."
His story was spurred by William Newmark, an ecologist who reached out to the National Park Service for species data for research into predictions that "nature preserves are analogous to land-bridge islands."
Land-bridge islands are islands that once were connected to mainlands and were transformed into islands by rising oceans. Because of their isolation, these islands see more species go extinct from their landscapes than find themselves a new home.
Newmark took that theory onto land, into the Western U.S. and Canada, specifically, to see if the same principle applied to national parks.
"I report here that the natural post-establishment loss of mammalian species in 14 Western North American national parks is consistent with these predictions of the land-bridge island hypothesis and that all but the largest Western North American national parks are too small to retain an intact mammalian fauna," he wrote in a paper that appeared in the January 29, 1987, volume of Nature.
Among Newmark's findings:
- Lassen Volcanic National Park in California had lost 43 percent of its once-native species.
- Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park, both in Utah, had each lost 36 percent.
- Mount Rainier National Park in Washington had lost 32 percent.
- Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and Crater Lake National Park in Oregon had each lost 31 percent.
- Yosemite National Park had lost 25 percent.
Some of those extinctions had occurred prior to each park's establishment, some occurred afterwards.
Those double-digit percentage losses can be somewhat misleading; in the case of Lassen Volcanic, a dozen mammalian species were lost, according to Newmark's research, while Bryce Canyon lost nine. And it's important to remember that while Yosemite no longer can count grizzly bears among its existing species, Yellowstone and Glacier national parks both count hundreds of them. Plus, we just heard that wolverines are roaming Mount Rainier National Park.
Despite that great news from Rainier, it's nevertheless important to keep in mind that once a species is gone from a place, it's not easily brought back. Look how long it took Yellowstone to recover wolves once they were killed off in the 1920s (the recovery program got underway in 1995), and the on-again, off-again planning to bring grizzlies back to the North Cascades. And those are charismatic megafauna that gain attention and public support, or opposition, for their return.
All the while, human development and expansion goes on. Plans to push a 211-mile-long "industrial road" into the wild spaces of Gates of Arctic National Park and Preserve in Alaska and auction off oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are just two recent examples. How will those projects impact species?
My alarm upon learning that more than three decades ago so many species were vanishing from Western parks made me wonder how many more had been lost since then. So I tracked down Newmark.
"Unfortunately, because of a lack of population monitoring for nearly all species found within U.S. parks, we really do not know what the current status of species are," he told me earlier this summer.
National Park Service staff concurred with that assessment.
"What Newmark told you about the state of our data is true," a Park Service employee in the Inventory & Monitoring Division told me. "The NPSpecies inventories that grew out of his original papers only required one piece of evidence per species per park, which could be a museum or herbarium specimen, a publication, a good dataset, or a survey trying to fill in the holes of those existing sources."
The reason for that surprising lack of data shouldn't be too surprising: the size of the National Park System (84 million acres in all) and the practically countless flora and fauna species within it. Take a park the size of Shenandoah National Park (311 square miles) in Virginia; it might have 1,000 species of vascular plants, several hundred bird species flitting through, and then many more species of fish, reptiles, invertebrates, and, of course, mammals.
To get an idea of how many species might call a park home, look at the work Discover Life in America has done at Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
"Our goal is to learn all we can about the estimated 60,000-80,000 species of life in the national park, and share that information with scientists and the public," reads the group's mission statement.
A decade ago, during the summer of 2010, I noted in a story for Audubon Magazine that DLIA had tallied more than 6,500 species that hadn't previously been identified in Great Smoky, and 907 species that were previously unknown to science. Come forward a decade and those numbers have grown to 9,718 and 1,025.
The point, of course, is that there's a lot we don't know about plants and animals in the National Park System, both those that have gone missing and those that haven't been recorded yet.
If national parks are to serve as a barrier, or at least a slow zone, to the world's sixth mass extinction, we need more definitive answers to what's been lost and what we haven't seen, and understand the habitat needs to both support those species still in place and to bring back those that have gone missing.
With that information, a justifiable approach can be taken to seeing these species have room to roam.
Previous essays in this series:
Essay | National Parks As An Impediment To The Sixth Mass Extinction
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Comments
When this "occasional series on how national parks might serve as an impediment to the sixth mass extinction" starting coming out, I cheered it for its spirit and optimism and for the inspiration that it offers those of us who are truly committed to the very best goals of the national park idea. I offered a few comments on the previous article about the basis for E. O. Wilson's original call to save 50% of the planet for nature; but, other than that, I've remained silent, despite being 'triggered" by the "inconvenient truths" offered by this article.
However, at the risk of being another skunk at this garden party and despite remaining uncomfortable with many of the glib aspects of the current "woke" culture, I believe we all need to take another look at the current situation in the parks and the recent news about the parks and get completely "woke" up about it. James Gleick's thirty year old warning was right on target and for more reasons than even he might have realized. America's national parks truly are too small to support nature's needs, too small for too many reasons and in too many ways.
Let's just look at the crown jewel, Yellowstone. As much land and as many species as that great park contains, it actually doesn't fully offer a real home for hardly any of them. It's generally only summer or, at best, shoulder season range, all of the pronghorn need to leave it, face a gauntlet of waiting gunfire, and reach distant lower elevation plains and valley floors by late November; most elk need to either be out of the park and, again, into waiting gunfire or at least down into Lamar and other valley floors to avoid getting trapped by deep immobilizing snows and that needs to happen by mid-December, again before winter officially begins; although bison can move through even the deep snows of January, they also have to inevitably start moving toward lower elevations or even out of the park and, again, into waiting gunfire to get to areas where less snow allows them to dig down to remnant forage; and the population of bighorn is tightly constrained by the limited amounts of winter forage available on the limited areas where high winds and steep slopes limit snow depth. Human development, selfishness, intolerance of wildlife, and seemingly insatiable need to kill for fun all impede access to winter range. Even birds have to migrate with the seasons to avoid Yellowstone's winters.
And, it gets worse. Just looking at recent NPT coverage, we've read about a small population of mountain lions, tightly confined for many years by surrounding human development, at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2020/09/inbreeding-evident-santa-m...), where NPS wildlife "experts" were suddenly "surprised" to find apparently unexpected evidence of advanced and potentially catastrophic inbreeding.
We've seen an article/commentary on transferring bison to indigenous nations ultimately come around to a discussion of the hybridizaton in bison at Grand Canyon (https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2020/09/bison-grand-canyons-north-...). And, I have written and commented ad nauseum on the gene pool losses already suffered by this species; on how, despite most "buffalo" looking sufficiently "bisony" to many less educated folks, most remaining bison are actually already significantly hybridized; on how many voices in the NPS, particularly within the current administration, continue to take an "if it looks like a buffalo it's close enough" attitude and lag in adopting a modern management approach, based on modern conservation biology; and on how human development, selfishness, intolerance of bison, and a seemingly insatiable need to kill for fun are all still alowed to combine and erode the gene pool of this species.
I have written and commented ad nauseum on the gene pool losses already suffered by Tule elk; how, despite those previous gene pool losses, Tule elk continue suffering from that same human development, selfishness, intolerance, and seemingly insatiable need to kill for fun; how, despite the recent repeated history of needless and inhumane elk deaths, on the NPS watch, at Point Reyes National Seashore (https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2020/08/concern-growing-over-healt...), a little clique of farm and ranch trash continues to call the shots there; and how the NPS has gone along with it, to the point where these rare elk continue to be fenced and trapped onto a small area on Tomales Point heat and drought put them, again, at risk from dehydration and starvation.
I have written and commented about the clear evidence of genetic drift in Yellowstone's wolves due, first, to the lopsided effects of repeated distemper outbreaks caused by wrongheaded NPS policies on allowing diseae carrying domestic dogs and cats into the park and, second, to, again, the same human development, selfishness, intolerance, and seemingly insatiable need to kill for fun that impedes the genetic interconnections needed keep the Yellowstone wolf gene pool vigorous for the future.
And, I have written and commented ad nauseum on the past history of repeated gene pool losses, current population depletion, and continuing lack of adequate genetic interconnection in Grizzlies in the lower 48 states. Yet, as Michael Wright's article in this morning's Bozeman Daily Chronicle (https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/yellowstone-grizzly-delisting...) and other articles report, republican politicians continue to push for a premature, unnecessary, and unwarranted delisting to allow their wealthy friends and contributors a chance to kill one ...for fun.
To support these gene pools, we need large enough populations to keep gene pool erosion at evolutionarily sustainable rates; to do that, we need sufficient habitat; and to protect that habitat, we need to restrain human intrusion and impacts. Few parks can offer that level of wildlife support, especially for larger species needing more extensive support. The evidence points to the fact that, although our national parks might serve some purposes in mitigating or slowing this next mass extinction, they're not, under the current circumstances and under current management, receiving anywhere near the level of protection and support needed to make them any kind of real impediment, they're just too small. So, what's to be done? Well, there needs to be more of them; they need to be bigger; and they need to be put to better use.
Let me repeat myself once again. Much of what needs to be done must address NPS management. Too much park leadership remains in that old scenery and entertainment mode. They're in the tourism business and, as I've already pointed out, as far as they're concerned, if it looks enough like a buffalo to be entertaining, it's close enough. And, they have powerful, although corrupt and wrongheaded, politicians behind them.
As I've said before, what are a few more extinct species to a corrupt political regime that ignores the Hatch Act, spits on Congress and its subpoenas, sneers at the emoluments clause, and scoffs at prohibitions against Conflicts of Interest? Even with regard to rare and threatened species with already damaged gene pools, the Trump Administration's acting park superintendents, the National Park Service's acting director, and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt couldn't care less. The intent of this administration has clearly been to undermine the rule of law across the board, normalize lawlessness when it's perpetrated by their cronies, and ...you know, make America function just like Putin and his oligarchic friends operate Russia and Xi and his party associates operate China.
But, again, as I've said before, it isn't just Trump. No, it's the republicans, republican enablers, and republican appointees that are the real problem. If we get rid of Trump, but leave the Senate in republican hands, we won't have accomplished anything close to what is needed. We need to hold the House and take both the executive branch and the Senate. We need to vote this November or as soon as we can in our individual jurisdictions and we need to remember that our problem isn't just Trump; it's an entire corrupt political party, from Greg Gianforte and Steve Daines in the north, to Cory Gardner and Ken Buck in the middle, to Lindsey Graham and Ron DeSantis in the south. So, don't just sit there, get up and vote!