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Federal land bureaus are developing a new approach to the management of large areas of public lands called ecosystem management. That approach remains fraught with many conceptual and implementation difficulties. One of the most important of the those difficulties concerns the relationship of scientific/professional modes of decision making with democratic decision processes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the first large scale attempt to implement ecosystem management in the Greater Yellowstone area and the difficulties that effort had in reconciling these modes of decision making. The paper concludes with suggestions as to how these two methods of resource decision making might be brought closer together.

The administration of the public lands in the Greater Yellowstone area always has been contentious. Today, the administrative and public policy issue of central concern is how, and whether, to administer the region under the principles of “ecosystem management.”; Although gaining in popularity as a new natural resource management and administrative paradigm, ecosystem management is fraught with unanswered questions pertinent to public administration, political theory, and public policy. These questions, discussed here, include the use of concepts of nature to defend various political orders; the role of science in this particular public policy debate when contrasted with more democratic methods of public decision making; and the administrative assumptions of national park and national forest managers.

Over the course of the last two decades there has been a recurring theme among proponents of the National Park Service mission that politics has undermined the day-to-day goals of the Service. With the increased politization of the Park Service, two recent proposals have called for removal of the NPS from the Department of the Interior and call for it to become an independent body along the lines of other government entities such as the Smithsonian Institution. This article reviews these proposals and suggests that in the long run removal from the Department of the Interior will not solve the problems of the NPS and may well accelerate them.

In the summer of 1988, the world watched as Yellowstone National Park appeared to go up in flames. The National Park Service (NPS) found itself under severe criticism for what popularly became known as its "let bum" policy, a policy that was perceived as allowing the unchecked destruction of the world's oldest national park. As the snows of winter put out the fires, the media turned its attention to other matters, but not before reporting various congressional calls for the resignation of high-level NPS officials and promises of hearings on fire policy. To many, the 1988 fires might be viewed as an isolated example of policy failure. Yet, the fires can more accurately be viewed as another cue that the policy, management, and future of America's national parks all remain unresolved.