11 - Creating a New Story, the Long View

Summary

The major problems in the world are the result of the differences

between how nature works and the way people think.

Society is partway to creating a new story of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Can we finish our journey to that story? The current record of our behavior in the GYE is decidedly mixed. The new story, our best hope for the future, embodies our growing understanding of what nature is and what an ethic for coexistence should be. The new knowledge and ethic together open a route toward sustainability, if we take that path and the long view. We now know that Yellowstone National Park is only part of a much larger regional open ecosystem connected through ecological processes to the rest of the world. This allows us to view the challenge of conserving the GYE's migrations and carnivores more realistically than a few short decades ago. It also allows us to better see our own actions today, their consequences, and also it details our hoped-for new ethic for the ecosystem and wildlife. We can now see what we need to do as we work ahead toward greater understanding and responsibility.

Briefly, to use the words offered by the physicist and philosopher David Bohm, “What is needed is thus a creative attitude to the whole, allowing for a constantly fresh perception of reality, which requires an unending creation of new meaning.” The new meaning and story are about integration, coexistence, and ethics. In closing this book, I offer a general assessment of the whole GYE story to date and provide specific recommendations to move us closer to the needed creative attitude, ethic, and actions toward wildlife and nature. To put it most simply, we need a new system of living with nature and wildlife and a new conservation story to guide us there. What we do in the GYE is of great interest to people worldwide.

The GYE conservation challenge is urgent because of our growing human population and intensifying harmful development, recreation, and other uses, especially on public lands. Data currently shows that humans are impacting the ecosystem in many unintended but detrimental ways. Recognition of these facts is growing in the public and professional sphere.