Conservationists and retired park officials criticized a Yellowstone National Park threat assessment report as “superficial” and “myopic,” with one park official agreeing that it was anything but a comprehensive analysis of threats to Yellowstone.

Last week, park officials released a draft nine-page report on six issues that threatened Yellowstone in 1995 and have since been fully or partially resolved.

Yellowstone was having a rough year back in 1995 -- so much that the United Nations' World Heritage Committee placed the park on an international “in danger” list. In 2003, under pressure from the Bush administration, the World Heritage Committee removed Yellowstone from the list, but asked to be kept informed of those 1995-era threats via reports every two years.

Tom Olliff, chief of the Yellowstone Resource Center, said the nine-page report to the World Heritage Committee was limited in scope. He readily acknowledged that other threats have emerged since then, which were not addressed in the draft report.

Take threats to the cutthroat trout, for example. Back in 1995, Olliff said, park biologists had just discovered, to their horror, that lake trout had been introduced to Yellowstone Lake. The deep-water exotic species eats large numbers of cutthroat fingerlings and was one of the threats considered in 1995 in designating Yellowstone as “in danger,” he said.

“Since then, we have new threats, such as whirling disease and years of drought,” Olliff said.

Whirling disease is an exotic parasite from Europe. The parasite moves through the trout’s nervous system into the brain stem, where it causes inflammation and puts pressure on the brain, causing the fish to whirl in the water and die if the infected fish is young. The ongoing drought has lowered water levels in Yellowstone Lake so much that gravel bars now block access to the 80-some spawning creeks that feed the lake.

“We can’t do anything about whirling disease or the drought,” Olliff said, so the draft report focuses on what can be done -- reducing the numbers of lake trout in Yellowstone Lake.

'Superficial'

Bill Wade, chairman of the executive council of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, called the report “superficial.”

“Nothing is incorrect in the report,” he said. “It just doesn’t go far enough” and ignores issues such as the ongoing winter use/snowmobile controversy and efforts to eradicate brucellosis in Yellowstone bison.

That’s an assessment shared by Louisa Willcox, a conservation activist who played a key role in ultimately stopping the proposed New World Mine. In 1996, the federal government bought out the interest of Crown Butte Mines, essentially eliminating the chance that the gold and silver mine would reopen.

“Yes, we got rid of the mine threat, but now the park is faced by new threats that are just as big,” Willcox said. Those include the rapid disappearance of whitebark pine forests -- a major food source for grizzly bears -- due to blister rust, bark pine beetle and global warming, and real estate developments all around the park.

Willcox chided the World Heritage draft report for ignoring “the worst year ever” for cutthroat trout in 2007, citing the park’s earliest fishing closure and thermal kills of thousands of cutthroat as low water levels and high temperatures in streams combined for a deadly one-two punch.

The loss of whitebark pine poses impacts for more than grizzly bears, she said. Often the highest altitude trees in Yellowstone, the whitebark pines help regulate water flow by sheltering patches of snow from direct sunlight and early runoff.

While the loss of whitebark pine is the dominant threat in the high country, Yellowstone’s surrounding lowlands are seeing unprecedented development. Housing and commercial developments block wildlife migration routes in and out of the park, Willcox said, and “Yellowstone has no tools to deal with this threat."

And even though the United Nations is taking the threat of global warming seriously, she said, there’s nothing in this World Heritage report that suggests it is a problem facing Yellowstone.

“I have to view this as a public relations exercise,” Willcox said.

Stephanie Seay, spokeswoman for the Buffalo Field Campaign, said the draft report continues to ignore the science of bison and brucellosis management, in favor of catering to livestock interests in Montana and Wyoming. She said there is zero scientific proof that bison transmit brucellosis to cattle, although there is a political assumption that transmission is a real threat.

Seay said there is no feasible way to eradicate brucellosis in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem without a massive roundup and slaughter of bison, elk and other species that may carry the bacterium. It would be far more sensible to remove the 400 cattle bordering the park in Montana and shut down elk feedgrounds in Wyoming, where brucellosis is continuously spread when brucellosis-infected cows give birth, Seay said.

She said 2008 “will be a very bad year for bison,” predicting that 1,700 bison will be killed.

“That’s another thing the report never mentioned,” she said.