Constructing Yellowstone: Nature and environmental politics in the Rocky Mountain West (Wyoming, Montana, Idaho)

Recent academic work on the subject of nature has encouraged a reexamination of the foundations of environmental politics. Nature is no longer taken for granted as a simple, clearly defined, external object, but is instead understood as a concept constructed through social discourse: society defines what nature is, whether it should be preserved, and if so, in what form. While the social construction of nature in general has been addressed, little work has thus far examined the politics of nature: how particular ideas about nature are actually used in the public sphere to construct and influence environmental policy. This dissertation addresses this research lacuna by analyzing the activities of a single environmental organization, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, and the ways in which it strategically deploys a particular understanding of nature to further its political goals.; The empirical portion of the work is presented through three case studies, each a controversial environmental issue to which the Coalition devoted considerable organizational resources. The first explores the Coalition's opposition to a proposed high-altitude gold mine near Yellowstone National Park; the second addresses its attempt to construct and implement a new, ecosystem-level bison management program; and the third examines the organization's support for phasing out snowmobile use in the region's national parks (Yellowstone and Grand Teton). In each case, analysis proceeds along three dimensions, centered around (i) the strategies employed by the Coalition in the pursuit of its environmental goals, including legal interventions, legislative initiatives, grassroots organizing and media campaigns; (ii) the spatial scales (local, regional and national) at which those strategies were carried out; and (iii) the ways in which those strategies were underpinned by the Coalition's attempt to discursively construct and stabilize Yellowstone and other ‘natural’ objects in a manner which would appeal to the public and consequently garner support for the organization's position.; If we accept that nature is socially constructed, we must also ask: how, by whom, and for what political purposes? The main contribution of this work is to present an empirical study which begins to address these questions as they apply to environmental politics in the Yellowstone region.