The Realities of Regional Resource Management: Glacier National Park and its Neighbors Revisited

Abstract

Twenty years ago Glacier National Park was considered the park most at risk from external threats, such as mining and timber harvesting on adjacent lands. This finding led to an earlier Article that examined whether Glacier officials were effectively defending the park from these external threats. We concluded that the park’s non-confrontational strategies were tenuous at best, but that some protection had been achieved by strong laws enforced by environmental advocates. We also noted the park’s early efforts to promote a regional management vision. Since then, the concept of a regional ecosystem that must be protected across formal borders has progressed significantly, though still imperfectly. This Article, based on detailed interviews and documents, is a twenty-year reassessment of resource management in the Glacier region, revisiting controversies from our earlier study and examining several new ones too. It also evaluates the actual forces that drive – and that impede – efforts to manage land in accord with habitat and watershed realities, rather than boundary lines drawn on a map.

Keywords: public lands, national parks, ecosystem management, glacier national park, regional resource management, natural resources, external threats

JEL Classification: H42, H82, K11, K42, N50, P11, P16, Q00, Q20, Q23, Q24, Q26, Q28, Q30, Q38, Q40, Q48, R00, R52