All through my childhood, every summer, I attended a day camp called Nature Training School in a wooded expanse of north Worcester county in Massachusetts. My father had a summer job teaching there, so my tuition was free. NTS was born in the postwar, pre-Earth Day enthusiasm for what was then called “ecology” or, occasionally, “conservation.” (There were several copies of Aldo Leopold’s seminal Sand County Almanac in our tiny library. I first read it under a huge grandfather of an oak tree.)

It was a great place to be a kid. We learned about birds and trees. (You can’t fool me with a shagbark hickory or a yellow warbler. Don’t bring that weak-ass shit into my kitchen, Meat.) We caught frogs and turtles and the occasional snake. We learned how to make a fire and pitch a tent. We sang songs and, yes, even pledged allegiance every morning as the hawks cried in harmony above us. It was a great place to be a kid.

What was drilled into us as a fundamental truth of existence was that all life was connected. We instinctively knew about “food chains” before the word had passed into common parlance. We were taught about how every species is connected to every other one. This definitely included our own. Life was a domino theory that actually worked out. That is the lesson as deeply embedded in my basic education as any other.

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And it was a lesson that roused itself out of a long slumber when a friend sent me a link to a terrific piece in National Geographic about how all hell is breaking loose in Yellowstone National Park’s ecosystem. The wrong kind of trout have invaded the park’s waterways and they’re killing all the right kind of trout, so the eagles and other raptors have started killing all the other birds.

One of the first signs Smith spotted presented itself on the normally tranquil Riddle Lake in 2014. There, floating upside down, was a young trumpeter swan killed by a bald eagle. The cygnet was the last of an entire clutch of five siblings eaten by the mighty white-crowned raptors, an act that in one fell swoop wiped out all of the park’s newborn swans for the year. Smith discovered other grim clues while paddling a canoe across the southern reaches of Yellowstone Lake. Littering the glassy surface were patches of waterfowl feathers. Eagles were attacking entire flocks of ducks. They also tore apart and ate double-crested cormorants and American white pelicans. While an obvious next step would be to look toward the sky for answers, culprits in this whodunit can actually be found up and down the food chain. Swapping out and replacing just one fish species for another has set off a chain of events negatively impacting bears, eagles, ospreys, and more—and, in turn, spelling bad news for many of the park’s birds.

This is a multi-causal disaster, as most ecological disasters are. The climate crisis figures in there, as does human bungling.

Three converging forces have set off a lethal chain reaction: the rippling impacts of an exotic fish—lake trout—that have decimated what used to be the last major stronghold for native Yellowstone cutthroat trout; climate change altering habitat; and humans haphazardly displacing sensitive species. It’s a jarring glimpse, Smith says, into the challenges facing natural systems once thought stable. Native species that evolved in certain places are getting interrupted, pushed around, and sometimes eliminated. “The world as we’ve known it is being transformed. And if it’s happening in Yellowstone, it is happening everywhere,” Smith says. After wolves were restored to Yellowstone in the mid 1990s, the park was touted as the vanguard for an intact, fully functioning ecosystem with every major species present that was there when Europeans arrived on the continent half a millennium ago. Smith says that vaunted status is in jeopardy.

Let us pause for a moment to consider if anyone in this administration* really gives a damn.

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OK, that’s long enough.

Now, for the bloody underwater carnage.

Most startling is the broad pattern of “ecological mayhem” playing out at Yellowstone Lake, one of the largest high-elevation freshwater lakes in the world and the liquid centerpiece of the park. The lake is an important reservoir for the namesake Yellowstone cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii bouvieri), but calamity ensued after exotic lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) somehow found their way into its waters 25 years ago, park officials say. Lake trout, being voracious, deep-water-dwelling fish eaters, reduced cutthroat trout numbers by 90 percent. Todd Koel, Yellowstone’s lead fisheries biologist and author of a science assessment, wrote that in 1998 alone, the estimated 125,000 lake trout consumed between three million and four million cutthroat trout.

Because the cutthroat trout swim in relatively shallow water, they were a primary food source for the park’s other apex predators, especially bears. Now, though, with the cutthroat trout being massacred by the deep-swimming lake trout, the bears are starting to look for easier-to-obtain delicacies.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some hungry bears shifted their summer hunting to elk calves. Grizzlies now take more young elk than wolves do. River otters, too, were affected by having fewer cutthroat trout. (Exclusive video: 'Bear Bathtub' Caught on Camera in Yellowstone.) Yet Smith says the biggest cause-and-effect correlation has involved 16 species of fish-eating birds. In the early 1990s there were 62 osprey nests documented on Yellowstone Lake, with 67 fledglings in the summer of 1994. In 2017, there were just three osprey nests and one fledgling produced.

As we said, humans aren't getting a pass here, either. The Great Chinese Climate Hoax is just getting warmed up here, too.

Loons have been beset by human disturbance, eagle depredation and by abnormally high water—due to precipitous snowmelt in the spring— swamping their nests. Trumpeter swans and loons contribute much to the wild ambiance of Yellowstone, Smith says. Snow-white trumpeters have the largest wing span of any bird in North America and are known for their grace in flight and on the water. With loons, their haunting crepuscular trills are as primordial as any howling lobo.

(This is very true. The first time I ever heard a loon in the wild, I nearly flew up into a tree.)

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The question is what, if anything, the people fighting to preserve this wild place can do in the face of this cascade of crises. Remember now, this is federal land. Remember who the president* is.

“The rule of thumb we use is if impacts are natural, then we leave things alone. But if something is human-caused, then we will take action to provide remedies to problems,” Smith says. “Introduction of an exotic species is an example of that; so is human use and climate change.” Yellowstone’s mission is to protect park wonders, but if climate change has a deleterious effect on species, it could result in managers having to perpetually try to mitigate harmful impacts—a radical departure from current protocol that favors “letting nature take its course.”

“If you start to intervene, where do you stop?” Smith asks. “Do you always know what you are doing? And if you choose not to get involved and species disappear, can you live with inaction?”

In 1903, when laying the cornerstone for a new gateway to Yellowstone, President Theodore Roosevelt told his audience:

The only way that the people as a whole can secure to themselves and their children the enjoyment in perpetuity of what the Yellowstone Park has to give is by assuming the ownership in the name of the nation and by jealously safeguarding and preserving the scenery, the forests, and the wild creatures.

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Five years later, in 1908, he said this to a gathering of the nation’s governors:

We are coming to recognize as never before the right of the Nation to guard its own future in the essential matter of natural resources. In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit. In fact, there has been a good deal of a demand for unrestricted individualism, for the right of the individual to injure the future of all of us for his own temporary and immediate profit. The time has come for a change. As a people, we have the right and the duty, second to none other but the right and duty of obeying the moral law, of requiring and doing justice, to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible of development hereafter.

And decades later, at the end of the day at Nature Training School, we all used to sing this song, written by Carl Hahn in 1930.

I know a green cathedral, a shadowed forest shrine,Where leaves in love join hands above to arch your prayer and mine.

It was a great place to be a kid.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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