A moose wades in a stream that begins in the Grand Tetons, an important part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

In Yellowstone National Park you can find endangered grizzly bears, our nation’s last wild bison herd, 50,000 elk and clear streams teaming with blue ribbon trout. But just beyond the park’s boundaries, it’s a different story: clearcuts, oil rigs, mining claims and cattle grazing in the seven national forests surrounding the famous park.

The Greater Yellowstone ecosystem is the largest remaining area of relatively undisturbed plant and animal habitat in the continental United States. Of the world’s 10 major geyser fields, Yellowstone is one of the last that has not been damaged or destroyed by drilling. Eighty-one percent of Greater Yellowstone’s 18 million acres is publicly owned, and 62 percent of that is national forest. Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks make up only 14 percent of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

Yellowstone, America’s first national park, was established in 1872 for preservation and “for the enjoyment of the people.” Covering a volcanic basin, Yellowstone has more geysers and hot springs than anywhere else in the world. It is one of the last remaining strongholds of the endangered grizzly and the only place in the world where a wild bison herd has survived continuously since prehistoric times. The ecosystem has the largest concentration of elk found anywhere in the world, more than 300 species of birds, gray wolves, woodland caribou and anadromous salmon and trout. And the list goes on.

As a popular national park, Yellowstone enjoys the relative safety that status provides. But the seven surrounding national forests are less popular, and less protected, even though they are crucial to the ecosystem that makes Yellowstone such a special place. The surrounding forests include critical grizzly bear habitat, big game wintering range and blue ribbon trout spawning grounds. Extraction, grazing, development and urban sprawl threaten elk, deer and antelope migration patterns (largely unchanged since the last Ice Age) that are crucial to their survival. Extraction and grazing threaten the purity of three of the West’s great rivers—the Colorado, Snake and Missouri—that originate in Greater Yellowstone. Undamaged watersheds also provide Yellowstone and the surrounding communities with protection from flooding along with clean water. Today, Greater Yellowstone faces a formidable threat: The Bush-Cheney energy plan. Created behind closed doors last year with Enron and other energy giants, it would pave the way for oil and gas companies to despoil an alarming number of our last wild places, including the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, despite the fact that more than 90 percent of public land managed by the BLM in the Rocky Mountain states is already open to leasing and drilling. The Bush administration issued a record number of energy permits last year, opening millions of acres of public land to oil and gas drilling.

Yellowstone National Park and its inhabitants can survive only in conjunction with the seven national forests that surround them. Yet mining, logging, grazing and drilling, encouraged by the Bush administration, continue to despoil the surrounding forests on which the park depends for its wildlife’s survival, water and greater ecosystem health. Unless we want to lose this national treasure, the time is long past to stop all extraction from the public lands surrounding Yellowstone National Park.

Click here to read about the seven national forests surrounding Yellowstone National Park.