Out of the Park
Snowmobile Ruling A Judicial Victory for Conservation
SOURCE: AP/Craig Moore
A U.S. district court reminds the Park Service that the agency ignored its own scientific assessment of snowmobiling’s threats to wildlife, air quality, and natural quiet in Yellowstone National Park.
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A recent federal court decision overturning the Bush administration’s plan for snowmobile use in Yellowstone National Park probably won’t be the end of a dispute dating back to 1997. But U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s ruling was a ringing endorsement of the National Park Service’s conservation mandate and a sharp indictment of how the agency violated that obligation by ignoring its own scientific assessment of snowmobiling’s threats to wildlife, air quality, and natural quiet.
In his September 15 decision, Judge Sullivan, of the Washington, D.C. district court, wrote that the Park Service’s own studies had shown that a plan to allow 540 snowmobiles a day in the park would “increase air pollution, exceed the use levels recommended by [agency] biologists to protect wildlife, and cause major adverse impacts to the natural soundscape in Yellowstone.” Yet, he added, the Park Service had “found that the plan’s impacts are wholly ‘acceptable,’ and utterly fails to explain this incongruous conclusion.”
As is sometimes the case with incongruous conclusions, this one involved politics trumping science and a federal agency reversing course in response to a change in administrations.
“[T]he court finds that NPS has failed to articulate why a plan that will admittedly worsen air quality complies with the conservation mandate.”
A little history. At the very end of the Clinton administration in early 2001, in response to a settlement of a 1997 lawsuit by environmental groups, the Park Service completed a new winter use plan for Yellowstone and Grand Teton. The service concluded that snowmobile use was harmful enough to park resources that it violated the Organic Act, the 1916 statute establishing the national park system.
The Organic Act defined the central purpose of America’s national parks: “…to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
In its 2001 rulemaking, the Park Service called for phasing out all snowmobile use, replacing it with mass transit snow coaches, essentially multipassenger vans and buses that have treads instead of wheels. Published the day after President George W. Bush took office, the rule was immediately blocked by the incoming administration. In 2003, responding to lawsuits by the snowmobile industry and individuals who use them, a new environmental impact statement was finished that would have allowed 950 snowmobiles per day in Yellowstone.
Other lawsuits followed, and the Park Service then settled on a temporary three-year plan: allow 720 snowmobiles per day, require that the machines be less polluting and noisy, and that snowmobilers be accompanied by trained commercial guides. The Bush administration’s current winter use plan, just overturned by Judge Sullivan, replaced those temporary rules.
As with so many disputes involving the national park system, this one has always been about how to balance the Organic Act’s directive to both conserve park resources and allow people to enjoy them. Many court decisions have affirmed the primacy of the conservation mandate, yet there are constant disagreements over what kind of enjoyment is acceptable and what kind of enjoyment undercuts conservation.
As Thomas C. Kiernan, president of the National Parks Conservation Association, testified before Congress in 2006: “Over the 90-year history of the NPS, there has been much debate over whether the NPS is achieving the proper balance between uses of the parks for today, and conserving them unimpaired for future generations….(T)here is no credible debate over whether parks should be used by the American people, the debate centers on how the use occurs, or sometimes when or where.”
In his decision Judge Sullivan rules that the Bush administration plan “clearly elevates use over conservation of park resources…” in violation of the Organic Act. The directive to provide for the use of parks, he wrote, “is not blanket permission to have fun in the parks in any way the NPS sees fit.”
The Park Service in hearings before the judge argued that the Organic Act allows adverse impacts if they are unavoidable and appropriate. Citing the Park Services own research into the effects of snowmobiling on air quality, noise and wildlife, Sullivan found the agency’s logic and reasoning twisted. “As with soundscapes and wildlife, the court finds that NPS has failed to articulate why a plan that will admittedly worsen air quality complies with the conservation mandate,” he wrote.
For those involved in the longstanding dispute over snowmobiling in Yellowstone and Grand Teton, there will likely be no rest. The International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association, in a statement on its website, called Judge Sullivan’s decision “the first round of what is likely to be a busy fall of litigation.”
Indeed. A related case is before the U.S. District Court in Wyoming, where snowmobilers have found more judicial favor in the past than they have in the federal court in Washington.
Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at Western Progress.
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