Barbarians rev up at the gates of Yellowstone
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK––As the
first and most popular National Park, Yellowstone could be
seen as the capitol of a wilderness empire as far-reaching as
Imperial Rome.
The 150 snowmobiling wise-use wiseguys who
rallied October 11 in West Yellowstone against limited park
road closures might be seen as the vanguard of the Huns,
hellbent on sacking what they don’t understand.
Looking at a map of North America, one can easily
imagine parks, forests, and national monuments linked
into a continuous set of wildlife corridors from the Yukon to
the Gulf of California. Much of the Mexican terminus is
already protected within a United Nations-recognized
Biosphere Reserve––but another part, the San Ignacio
Lagoon, is both an important gray whale calving area and
potentially jeopardized by salt extraction facilities in joint
development by Mitsubishi and the Mexican government.