Richard West Sellars

Such a neutral title for a book that narrates the struggle of the National Park Service to come to grips with changing American values and a desire to "meet the people's needs"! Sellars is a NPS historian, and filled the last 100 pages with notes to the various documents referenced in writing this history. Politics, funding, science, and the shift from eradicating wolves to bring them back to Yellowstone, the struggle is not a straight line.

For someone not in a federal land management agency, this book would become boring very fast - maybe even so for those in the agencies as well. The subject is for those who really want to know the history of conservation in the National Park Service, how the concept of protecting natural resources in parks dedicated to cultural resources emerged within the agency.