The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem stretches across Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. It’s a big, biodiverse area, encompassing national forests and wildlife refuges, the Wind River Reservation and Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.
The Trump administration has made some big changes to the region in the last year: cutting jobs in different agencies, cancelling easement grants, compromising research programs and dismantling networks of collaboration. Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann sat down with Laramie-based writer Christine Peterson, whose recent High County News article recapped those changes.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hannah Habermann: You went on a llama packing trip last summer in the Winds in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. What did you run into while you were out there?
Christine Peterson: This particular trail, there was just so much deadfall on it. We ran into a big deadfall and we figured a way around it.
Then we just kept running into more and more logs over the trails. Some we could go around, but a lot of them, you just had to cut out. Llamas are not skilled at hop-skipping over big tangles of branches.
It went from fun adventure to ‘Where are we going to find a place to camp before it gets dark with this circus that we have?’
It felt really like an embodiment of just the chaos that has gone on over the last year. It was a really visceral sign of: We got rid of all these forest crews and laid off a whole bunch of people, and this is what it's going to be now.
HH: Why is the GYE [Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem] important, and what did the management and research landscape look like there before all these changes?
CP: It's this anchor of an ecosystem that the federal government created essentially by creating Yellowstone and then spawning off the Grand Teton and wilderness areas and national forests.
Then you include these huge chunks of private land and the Wind River Reservation, which is the seventh-largest reservation in the country.
All of that encompasses a really astonishingly large landmass that is responsible for keeping so much of what we Westerners love intact: the mule deer and pronghorn migrations, and moose and grizzly bears and wolves.
Before January and February 2025, I don't think anyone would say that everything was perfect there and ‘Boy, every federal agency just ran amazingly, and now it doesn't.’
Certainly lots of people could point to inefficiencies, but by and large people were making due and trails were, to some degree, getting cleared there. Lots of volunteers helped to do that, and research was getting done.
Then last year, people realized maybe what we had – you know, you don't know what you have until it's gone. It was like, ‘Oh, there are a lot of people doing a lot of work that now isn't getting done.’
HH: What are some of the short-term changes that have already happened in this region in the last year? I'm thinking about bathrooms and layoffs and funding cuts.
CP: Many millions of dollars worth of easement grants were canceled and grants for ecosystem restoration projects. A lot of grants. If it had climate change in the application, it was canceled.
Then folks that worked in the Natural Resource Conservation Service, the Farm Service Agency, a lot of those folks lost their jobs also, or moved on and weren't replaced. Then that meant landowners having a hard time getting ahold of somebody to help them figure out their project or help usher that easement through its final stages.
I think it was a lot of chaos and confusion in this last year.
HH: I feel like a lot of people think about park rangers or trail crew members getting laid off, but what about construction workers? Or, last year we talked to an IT worker who got laid off in Yellowstone. What slips through the cracks when those positions are understaffed?
CP: Somebody told me once for some of the reporting in this, that it's like, you could put off painting your house for a year. You can put off replacing windows for a little while. But you start putting all of that stuff off and then all of a sudden, your house falls down.
You know, you can get by. And last year there was a lot of getting by. There [were] a lot of people putting their fingers in holes and plugging things up and hoping stuff wouldn't fall apart.
But what I heard from everybody over the course of the last year is there's only so long that that can work for. With construction and IT, that means rescues may not happen when they're supposed to or when they should.
And construction projects, it's not sexy, right? Research is a little sexier, trail crews. But if people aren't maintaining roads and wastewater treatment plants, that's a big deal. That's a big deal to the visitor experience, and it's a big deal to an ecosystem.
HH: What are some of these longer-term impacts or longer-term projects, [like] research and infrastructure, that might be impacted or are already being impacted?
CP: There's a program based out of Montana that monitored mesocarnivore , your middle-range carnivores like wolverines and lynx and those guys. That program was just cut. It had always run on a shoestring, but it was out the window.
There isn't going to be a comprehensive gathering of a lot of this information and the ability to then take these big picture looks at, how are these species doing across their range? How have these species been doing? Are their populations increasing or decreasing? Are there areas of concern?
And that's what's going on, all this kind of scattershot, all over the place.
HH: When I think about the GYE, I think about a lot of collaboration. There's obviously a bunch of different agencies and the two tribal nations on the Wind River Reservation, Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, and a wide range of stakeholders. How do you think that collaboration has been impacted over the last year?
CP: One of the biggest issues is the loss of institutional knowledge, as a lot of these, especially senior level folks, either were fired because they ended up in a weird probationary status because they'd taken a new job or they took the “Fork in the Road” because they just couldn't deal with it anymore.
Those are a lot of relationships that are gone. All this collaboration works because people have been around for a while. They've met each other and they've gotten together at conferences and they've sat down and they've had coffee and they've built trust. When you have trust, then you can work together.
That's what ends up being missing when you cut out a ton of people, is that all these relationships that you maybe didn't even realize how important they were, they're gone.
You have to have somebody who cares enough to rebuild them or to know to rebuild them, and then spend the time to rebuild them. In the meantime, it's just a limbo.
HH: It's no secret that this ecosystem is facing a bunch of pressures. Population growth, chronic wasting disease, oil and gas development. What does addressing those issues look like with more fractured management, with less funding, with less personnel?
CP: I mean, to some degree it just means stuff doesn't get done. It is easy, to some degree, probably just to swing a little too far and say, ‘Nobody's there. Nobody's looking at anything. It's all falling apart.’ There's still a lot of good people on the ground and a lot of good people doing really good work and they care a lot.
But there ends up being a question of manpower and different priorities. There's the energy executive order and logging executive order, and that redirects people toward other priorities.
But then that means that climate change, which is objectively, as we've seen this winter, a really big issue facing not just the GYE but the West in general, this isn't going to get studied. Or certainly not get studied as much as it would have been otherwise.
HH: Toward the end of your story, you write, “So maybe the news from the Yellowstone region over the past year isn't like an obituary.” I'm curious, what would you call it?
CP: A bunch of warning signs. Really, a lot of flashing lights saying, ‘Hey! Hey, look! Hey, look at this! Hey, look over here!’ And it's not done, right? An obituary would imply that all this stuff is dead and gone and finished, and it's not.
But emergency lights are going on, its check engine lights are going on. I think we need to pay attention. An obituary would imply that we can all move on, and I don't think people should move on. People need to be paying even more attention now.
