It’s summer! And there is no better time to hit the road and explore the beautiful and important natural spaces in the United States’ collective backyard. From Yellowstone to Acadia, Yosemite to Zion, the landscapes contained within the US National Parks are diverse, awe-inspiring, ecologically vital, and full of history. As you prepare for your journey, don’t forget to pack your tents, your sleeping bags, your cameras—and, of course, your books. We here at the University of Chicago Press are delighted to help with the last! Below, please find some suggested reading for your National Parks adventure. Suitable for both armchair travelers and road-trippers alike, these works celebrate the extraordinary shared resources that are our parks while also making clear: we must never take these resources for granted.

Science, Conservation, and National Parks

Edited by Steven R. Beissinger, David D. Ackerly, Holly Doremus, and Gary E. Machlis

“Particularly valuable for providing both historical context and a vision for the future as we move into the next 100 years after celebrating the first National Park Service centennial, Science, Conservation, and National Parks will continue to be timely and relevant for many years to come. . . . Overall, this book is both an excellent read and a valuable resource for your personal or institutional library. . . . You, too, will find ample reasons to read and refer to this compilation.”—BioScience

The Future of Conservation in America: A Chart for Rough Water

Gary E. Machlis and Jonathan B. Jarvis, With a Foreword by Terry Tempest Williams

“I learned from my early days exploring the forests and waters of Georgia and my years in Washington, DC, that conservation is an American value that needs replenishment by each new generation. There are growing dangers to our most precious civic possessions: the air we breathe; the water we drink; and the land that sustains us. Divisive politics distract us from these common interests. The Future of Conservation in America calls for an enlightened vision for the future. The authors draw from a combined eighty years of public service in conservation and science to chart a course for a new generation of conservation action and leadership.”—President Jimmy Carter

Yellowstone Wolves: Science and Discovery in the World’s First National Park

Edited by Douglas W. Smith, Daniel R. Stahler, and Daniel R. MacNulty, With a Foreword by Jane Goodall

“How did wolves go from feared, hunted and decimated to a protected part of Yellowstone National Park’s ecosystem? Yellowstone Wolves tells the fascinating story. . . . It’s a comprehensive look at what happened when wolves were driven out of Yellowstone, and how nature is recovering now that they’re back. . . . Part scientific tome, part rallying cry against humans’ impulse to interfere with the natural world, Yellowstone Wolves is a powerful testament to what happens when ‘people unite to give Mother Nature a chance,’ as Jane Goodall puts it in her foreword to the book.”—The Washington Post

National Parks Forever: Fifty Years of Fighting and a Case for Independence

Jonathan B. Jarvis and T. Destry Jarvis, With a Foreword by Christopher Johns

“There’s an argument that can be made, one backed by evidence, that the past fifty years have seen the most egregious attempts to subvert the mission of the National Park Service to preserve and protect natural resources unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. That argument is clearly laid out in National Parks Forever. . . . A rich collection of institutional knowledge from within the machinations of government and from within the National Park Service.”—National Parks Traveler

George Meléndez Wright: The Fight for Wildlife and Wilderness in the National Parks

Jerry Emory

“Emory’s enumeration of Wright’s accomplishments—including a survey of wildlife in Western parks, the first of its kind—is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Emory, who is married to one of Wright’s granddaughters, has succeeded admirably in demonstrating the continuing relevance of Wright’s ideas and the value of his legacy. Highly recommended for nature lovers and park enthusiasts.”—Library Journal

Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone: Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem

Robert B. Keiter

“While Yellowstone National Park is the core of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), the GYE is actually much bigger than the park, encompassing Grand Teton National Park and a variety of other public lands, for a total of 23 million acres. Keiter, a public land law and policy expert, explores the GYE in this book, which comes out in July. He looks at how the Yellowstone ecosystem came to be tied to conservation, and the controversies, challenges, and changes the region has dealt with in the past, as well as what it’s currently facing. But it’s not just a book about Yellowstone; Keiter examines the lessons in nature conservation learned from Yellowstone and how they can be applied elsewhere, helping to pave the way for the future.”—American Scientist

And to get you started on your National Parks reading list, please enjoy an excerpt from the preface of Robert B. Keiter’s just published Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone: Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem. Recently featured at Yellowstonian, Keiter’s “eminently timely” book is the story of how Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the world’s first national park, has become synonymous with nature conservation—and an examination of today’s challenges to preserve the region’s wilderness heritage.

It was the summer of 1967, driving through Yellowstone on an extended western road trip. I was a passenger in my friend’s sports car with the top down when he pulled into a turnout amid several cars, with both of us wondering what the attraction is. Moments later, the bear ambled over to our car, which was now trapped in the middle of a growing cluster of curious onlookers all safely inside their vehicles. Unable to move or to exit the car, I ended up in a face-to-face encounter with the black bear whose slathering mouth almost immediately alerted me it was looking for food—not an uncommon occurrence those days in Yellowstone. Once I got a good look at the large claws resting only inches away on the car’s doorframe, the potential seriousness of the situation was evident. The encounter ended without incident, thankfully, when the bear was distracted away. But the event left an indelible impression—one that has evolved over time, just as the park and the surrounding landscape has changed.

Little did I then know or contemplate that my professional career would take me back to Yellowstone repeatedly, and that I would witness the profound transformation that has occurred throughout the region, including revised bear-management policies. I grew up amid a national park controversy that played out a few hundred feet from our backyard, namely the 1950s battle to preserve the C&O Canal and the adjacent Potomac River corridor from a new highway designed to connect Washinton, DC’s burgeoning suburbs with the nation’s capital city. Though unable to stop what is now the Clara Barton Parkway, energized conservation groups succeeded in convincing the president and then Congress to protect the canal and river corridor, establishing eventually the Chesapeake and Ohio National Historic Park. Years later, I was a new law professor at the University of Wyoming when the opportunity arose to examine how Glacier National Park, named in 1980 as the nation’s most threatened park due to nearby development pressures, might address those impending external threats. It was soon evident that Yellowstone confronted similar problems in the form of clearcutting, energy leasing, and geothermal drilling on adjacent national forest lands, as well as a dwindling grizzly bear population. The ecological integrity of both parks was at serious risk.

A couple new ideas, however, offered hope these problems might be brought under control: the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) concept and the related ecosystem-management strategy. These seminal ideas viewed the expansive, jurisdictionally fragmented Yellowstone region as an integrated ecological system that should be managed as an interconnected entity with a focus on preserving its ecological integrity. A new, assertive conservation group, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, had seized these ideas and was promoting the need for a regional perspective in order to protect the area’s charismatic wildlife and stunning natural features that had given rise to the park and surrounding wilderness areas in the first place. These ideas soon proved powerful enough to take hold even beyond the Yellowstone country, injecting a new ecological mentality into the federal land-management agencies, though not without controversy aplenty. Since then I have continued to observe and study how these ideas have served to reshape longstanding natural resource-management policies and capture the public imagination.

Just as it was the genesis for the national park idea, the Yellowstone country incubated these ideas, serving as a critical testing ground for ecosystem conservation. Given the region’s jurisdictional complexities and the ongoing changes afoot in the region’s communities, the quest to preserve the GYE’s extraordinary natural character and free roaming wildlife has proven quite challenging at times, as evidenced by the strident local resistance to the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction initiative. Indeed, seemingly endless political battles as well as court cases have been fought and refought over grizzly bears, wolves, bison, wildfire, logging, mining, drilling, grazing, subdivisions, snowmobiling, property rights, state sovereignty, and the list goes on. Importantly, these conflicts have been—and are being—addressed within the context of the GYE idea and a mounting consensus supporting the need to preserve this far-flung region’s unique natural character.

This book seeks to recount how this widespread commitment to nature conservation at the ecosystem scale has taken hold, what that has meant on the ground, and implications for the future. It is a story about ideas, controversy, and change, abetted by science, politics, economics, law, and cultural evolution. It begins in the post–World War II era, with an emerging commitment to ecological science within the Park Service and Forest Service, the beginnings of conservation biology as a dimension of ecology, validation of the wilderness concept with passage of the Wilderness Act, the emergence of an assertive environmental movement, and dramatic changes in the nation’s social fabric and values. These developments soon coalesced in the Yellowstone country, bringing meaningful and sometimes painful change to the region’s public lands as well as the communities dotted around them—a process that continues unabated today.

To tell the story of nature conservation in the GYE, the book unfolds topically with a focus on the primary issues that have confronted the region during the past sixty years. The book begins, following a short introductory chapter, by describing the GYE, reviewing the relevant science underlying an ecosystem-based management approach, and outlining the political-legal framework governing GYE conservation policy, including a brief sketch of how these policies evolved during the latter half of the twentieth century. It then focuses on the GYE’s two national parks and critical resource-management challenges that Yellowstone and Grand Teton have faced. Next, it reviews GYE wildlife issues involving grizzly bears, wolves, bison, and elk that span the region’s jurisdictional boundaries and have regularly proven contentious. Then it focuses on the GYE national forests, where significant policy changes regarding timber, energy, mining, and livestock are evident, while wildlife, wilderness, and recreation concerns have risen in importance. It next explains the importance of the region’s privately owned lands, describes the emerging conservation initiatives taking hold on these lands, and examines the options available to communities and property owners, along with promising new landscape-scale initiatives. The ensuing penultimate chapter examines the impact ecosystem-based management has had on the GYE, the forces that have brought nature conservation to the fore as a regional priority, the conservation challenges that lie ahead, and the impact of the GYE ecosystem conservation effort elsewhere. The book concludes by extracting instructive lessons from the GYE experience with an ecological conservation approach, and with observations on the next-generation conservation challenges facing the region and its natural attributes.

While researching and writing this book, I regularly found myself returning to the fact that more than fifty years had elapsed since my initial encounter with Yellowstone and its bears. Though then awed by the park’s raw beauty and wildness, I had scant knowledge about its wildlife, ecology, or management, or its relationship to the surrounding landscape. And I was not alone. That has changed dramatically, however, throughout the region. Today, we better understand this unique, complex, and extraordinary place widely known as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem where wild nature still prevails. We appreciate more fully the interconnections with the surrounding region, as well as what is required to conserve the GYE’s wildlife, natural processes, and wilderness character. But change—warming temperatures, migration obstacles, wildlife diseases, and rampant subdivision activity, for example—is ever present, posing increasingly urgent challenges in the enduring quest to conserve this special place. Drawing upon our accumulated experience in pursuit of ecosystem conservation, as captured in the ensuing pages, we have the fundamental knowledge required to meet these impending challenges. The looming question is whether we have the will to employ this knowledge and the requisite commitment to carry these nature conservation efforts forward to preserve this iconic landscape.

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Robert B. Keiter is the Wallace Stegner Professor of Law, University Distinguished Professor, and founding director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah’s S. J. Quinney College of Law. His books include To Conserve Unimpaired, Keeping Faith with Nature, and The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. He currently serves on the National Park System Advisory Board and as a trustee for the National Parks Conservation Association.

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