America's Serengeti and What That Comparison Costs
Near Cooke City, Wyoming
People call the Lamar Valley America's Serengeti. The comparison is meant as a compliment: bison in the thousands, pronghorn, grizzlies, wolves, eagles, all visible from the road. The wildlife density here is genuinely extraordinary by any standard. But the analogy reveals more than it intends.
The Serengeti is not uninhabited. It is home to Maasai communities whose cattle-grazing practices have shaped its grasslands for centuries. The pastoral movement of Maasai herds across the ecosystem is not incidental to the Serengeti's biodiversity; it is part of the system. Wildlife managers argue about the balance. The Maasai are not invisible. They are present and counted.
The Lamar Valley was shaped by the Tukudika Shoshone for thousands of years before the park existed. Their seasonal burns managed the grasslands. Their hunting shaped the prey populations. Their knowledge of the terrain was specific and cumulative, passed across generations that lived in this valley the way the Maasai live on the Serengeti. When the United States Army enforced Yellowstone's boundaries after eighteen eighty-six, the Tukudika were expelled. The landscape they had managed became the 'pristine wilderness' the park advertised.
The wolves that were reintroduced here in nineteen ninety-five are sometimes called a restoration of the natural order. What the trophic cascade research doesn't usually address is the question of which natural order: the one that existed before the wolves were killed by federal hunters in the nineteen twenties, or the one that existed before the Tukudika were expelled in the eighteen eighties. Those were different ecosystems. Both have been lost.
The Lamar Valley is magnificent. The name it carries is more complicated than the brochure suggests.
