YELLOWSTONE

As one who has seen breathtaking natural beauty on five conti-nents, let me tell you that I could never make up my mind whether Rocky Mountain National Park or Yellowstone was the most beautiful spot that I have seen on this earth. The fire that burnt 1,000,000 acres at Yellowstone and is still raging out of control at press time has now sadly forced the decision.

Yet Yellowstone might have largely been saved had the Forest and Park Services brought in mechanized equipment earlier and had federal troops been deployed in time. The tardiness was caused by the "environmental ethic," which fiddled about rejuve-nated forests while Yellowstone was burning.

Applied to wilderness forest, the argument is quite correct, and I used it myself in 1973 (Ecohysterics and the Technophobes) to re-ject the absurdity of nature's checks and balances being frail and delicate: "An old forest, left to nature alone, is filled with overma-ture trees and it consumes as much oxygen as it produces. It slows, or even stunts, the growth of younger trees, which are the real operators of both photosynthesis and transpiration... [But na-ture] will weed out the offenders. It attacks them by disease, to which the old trees are less resistant than the young and vigorous ones. It hits the forest with lightning, and the old, dry trees will burn, whilst the few young trees that survive a forest fire will even-tually result in a rejuvenated forest. But natural selection and sur-vival of the fittest is no more than crude and random affair with the odds stacked against extinction . . . "

While this rejects the "frail and delicate" humbug, it is utterly irrelevant to Yellowstone Park, which was established in 1872 by Congress for the recreation and enjoyment of the American people. That is a purpose diametrically opposed to the armchair "envi-ronmentalists" in Manhattan who want it for the squirrels only. Why are the Sierra Clubbers so insistent that Recreational Ve-hicles be banned from National Parks, though they have to keep to the roads and can do no significant harm? Because when the en-vironmentalist Herrenvolk ride their horses through the parks, they do not wish to be disturbed by the sight of the blue-collar riff-raff.

Now to another point, namely the vast quantities of carbo-naceous soot entering the atmosphere, some of it reaching the stratosphere, from a one-million-acre fire. I do not have exact figures, but it seems obvious that this must far exceed the soot from a handful of nuked American cities. That means that by the time you get this newsletter, you will be fighting for survival in the sub-zero temperatures of Nuclear Winter. If the mails are still running, write for advice about your predicament to Prof Carl Sagan, Astronomy Dept., Cornell U., Ithaca, NY 14850, or Prof Paul Ehrlich, Dept. of Zoology, Stanford U., Stanford, CA 94305.