Managing high-profile public lands, especially national parks like Yellowstone and Grand Teton, often means navigating a minefield of public passions over hot-button issues like snowmobiles, wolves, bison and grizzly bears, just to name a few. Inevitably, it seems, disagreements over such topics end up being settled not in planning sessions, public forums or at bargaining tables, but in the courts.
Or worse still, even the courts appear unable to offer a final and workable solution for the most contested natural resource management issues, as has been the case for the past several years with snowmobiles, wolves, bison and grizzly bears.