The Wilderness

Yellowstone National Park is 3500 square miles and have been a national park for one hundred and forty years. The large majority of the park has never been 'tamed' and remains as wild as it has been for ten thousand years. The author, Lee Whittlesey, thinks that preserving the wilderness is very valuable. However, he thinks that many people have an idyllic image of the wilderness as somehow friendly to human beings. Modern Americans have a romantic notion of the wilderness as 'natural' to man and therefore it won't harm them.

One of the entire points of Death In Yellowstone is to combat this myth. While the wilderness is valuable, it is not the friend of humanity. The plants, animals and geological formations of Yellowstone care nothing for humans. They are not 'in harmony' with man and are indifferent to whether children are melted in a hot spring...