When Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. Tracing a course from the founding of the national parks through the tangled twentieth-century growth of the conservationist movement, Smith gives the lie to the portrayal of national parks as Edenic wonderlands unspoiled until the arrival of Europeans, and shows how virtually every attempt to manage nature in the parks has only created cascading effects that require even more management.
Prologue -- American Eden. Los Angeles ; American Eden ; Yosemite and Yellowstone ; Appalachian spring ; Frank ; The balance of nature ; Berkeley ; Claypool ; Smitty ; Trout Creek -- Natural regulation. The big kill ; Starker ; Prometheus ; Observable artificiality in any form ; Reconstruction ; Cole ; The night of the grizzlies ; Natural control ; Bad blood ; Bear management committee ; Firehold ; The temptation of Starker Leopold ; Natural regulation -- Take it easy. Last straws ; Take it easy ; Old Faithful ; The search for Harry Walker -- Human nature. Martha shell ; B-1 ; The discipline ; The verdict ; The appeal -- Epilogue -- Afterword.
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