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THESIS RAPID ASCENT: ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK IN THE GREAT ACCELERATION, 1945-PRESENT Submitted by Mark Boxell Department of History In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado Summer 2016 Master’s Committee: Advisor: Mark Fiege Ben Bobowski Adrian Howkins John Lindenbaum Jared Orsi Copyright by Mark Boxell 2016 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT RAPID ASCENT: ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK IN THE GREAT ACCELERATION, 1945-PRESENT After the Second World War’s conclusion, Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) experienced a massive rise in visitation. Mobilized by an affluent economy and a growing, auto- centric infrastructure, Americans rushed to RMNP in droves, setting off new concerns over the need for infrastructure improvements in the park. National parks across the country experienced similar explosions in visitation, inspiring utilities- and road-building campaigns throughout the park units administered by the National Park Service. The quasi-urbanization of parks like RMNP implicated the United States’ public lands in a process of global change, whereby wartime technologies, cheap fossil fuels, and a culture of techno-optimism—epitomized by the Mission 66 development program—helped foster a “Great Acceleration” of human alterations of Earth’s natural systems. This transformation culminated in worldwide turns toward mass-urbanization, industrial agriculture, and globalized markets. The Great Acceleration, part of the Anthropocene— a new geologic epoch we have likely entered, which proposes that humans have become a force of geologic change—is used as a conceptual tool for understanding the connections between local and global changes which shaped the park after World War II. The Great Acceleration and its array of novel technologies and hydrocarbon-powered infrastructures produced specific cultures of tourism and management techniques within RMNP. After World War II, the park increasingly became the product and distillation of a fossil fuel-dependent society. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS All histories are collaborative projects to some extent and a number of people were integral in helping me research, conceptualize, and write this thesis. No one is more deserving of my gratitude and respect than my advisor, Mark Fiege. Mark is generous with both his time and his ideas, and my fondest memories of my tenure at Colorado State will be of sitting in Mark’s office for hours at a time, surrounded by mountains of books, talking with him about current events, personal life experiences, the past, and how to tie it all together. Mark is a diligent proofreader and a demanding teacher of writing. Most importantly, though, he has fostered in me the intellectual curiosity that all scholars strive to satiate and maintain. I hope this thesis is a worthy testament to his mentorship. I first drafted chapter one of this thesis in Jared Orsi’s research seminar, and the lessons I learned in Jared’s class about writing, narrative structure, and research undergird the entirety of this thesis. Adrian Howkins has always provided probing questions and insights that helped me maintain focus upon the global context of the park’s history. Likewise, his skepticism of the Anthropocene idea always kept me on my analytical toes, and the following work is better for it. John Lindenbaum, a geographer at Colorado State, played an important hand in shaping chapter three, as well as pieces of the introduction that spell out the park’s spatial and energy history. Ben Bobowski, an ecologist and the acting superintendent at Rocky, also provided fruitful ideas, especially regarding concepts like adaptive management, which forms the core of the thesis’ conclusion. All along the way, park archivist Kelly Cahill martialed materials for me and gave me almost free reign to peruse the park’s archive. I hope I helped keep her company in the park’s cave-like museum storage facility! Finally, Nancy Rehe and Charlene Spencer, the Colorado State history department’s administrative assistants, always exuded kindness and grace, even as they iii guided me and others through various bureaucratic mazes. Their work is more essential than anyone’s, and they deserve to be recognized for it. I have commiserated with, worked with, and learned from a number of fellow graduate students in Colorado State’s history department during the last two years. Two in particular deserve direct mention. Dane Vanhoozer has always been up to join me on research trips to Rocky, and I came to crave our car-ride conversations about the West, environmental history, and contemporary politics. Will Wright also became a good friend during our time in Fort Collins. For me, Will has been a crucial sounding board for ideas and a model of diligent labor that I can only hope to approach. More importantly, Will has always been exceedingly caring and thoughtful in everything he does. Will is a frighteningly talented historian. But his patience and kindness are his most impressive virtues, and for that I’m thankful that we’ll be enmeshed together in this profession for years to come. Finally, I have to thank my parents, Bob and Marta, for setting the foundation that this thesis is built upon. My parents taught my brother and me to think for ourselves, to work hard, and to act on our own ambitions. They taught me how to read, the most important skill for any historian to master. And whether they realized it at the time or not, both of my parents instilled in me a politics centered upon human dignity, fairness, and thoughtfulness, all attributes that I covet and that I hope will always be present in my writing, both here and in my work to come. Studying history at Colorado State has helped me tap into those ideas and convictions at a deeper level. But Bob and Marta laid the bedrock and have continued to do so for nearly a quarter-century. For that I’m eternally grateful. iv DEDICATION To Grandpa Boxell v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………iii DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………………….v INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 1. CHAPTER I—LISTENING TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE IN RMNP…....19 2. CHAPTER II—GLOBALIZING HIDDEN VALLEY……………………………………….49 3. CHAPTER III—MILITANT MANAGEMENT: ELK MANAGEMENT IN RMNP………..85 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………119 NOTES…………………………………………………………………….……………………127 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………138 vi Introduction “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” From the Economist to Bloomberg, various publications have, over the last several years, heralded this new epoch in the Earth’s natural history. What exactly it is that we as a species are welcoming is simple enough. First proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000, the concept of the Anthropocene describes a new epoch in the planet’s geological history, a period in which humans have altered the Earth’s natural systems in ways stratigraphically and functionally distinct from the Holocene period.1 According to this concept, humans have displaced rock, altered the chemistry of the planet’s atmosphere and soil, and covered vast stretches of the planet in steel and concrete, to the extent that the species has become a force of nature.2 In the Anthropocene, humans have transformed the Earth in ways that rival or exceed the effects of plate tectonics, glaciation, and global weather systems. These changes derive from a globalized system of fossil fuel-use, from a world where people have erected a network of carbon-consuming machines and modern infrastructures which stretch across land, sea, and air, even infiltrating wilderness abodes like Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP).3 Ultimately, the Anthropocene idea is a useful tool for better understanding the contemporary global ubiquity of fossil fuel dependency, a dependency which reveals how even nominally wild places like RMNP are in fact distillations and productions of a hydrocarbon-centric society. There are a host of scientific markers which undergird the relevance of the Anthropocene concept to RMNP’s history. Climate change, and more specifically the rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that has coincided with the mass burning of fossil fuels, is the most familiar sign of humanity’s vast effect upon the Earth system. But human-induced impacts go further. Industrial agriculture has altered the planet’s nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulphur cycles.4 1 Our species has harnessed rivers around the globe to provide water and energy to arid locales, reshaping both desert and riverine ecosystems to an extent whereby technological and ecological systems are no longer independent of one another.5 Recently, rocks formed from an amalgam of plastic, volcanic rock, sand, seashells, and coral have begun to wash up on the beaches of Hawaii, representing geological examples of humanity’s effect upon the planet’s natural systems.6 Finally, humanity appears to be triggering the planet’s sixth great extinction.7 In the past, cataclysmic events, asteroid impacts and ice ages among them, drove the mass extinction of various species. Now, humans appear to be inciting a global-scale mass extinction on par with nonhuman natural catastrophe. Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, argues that geologists living a hundred million years from now will be able to detect these human-induced transformations to the Earth system in the planet’s stratigraphy.8 Zalasiewicz’s assertion that evidence of the human epoch will endure in geological layers is what separates the Anthropocene from other eras of anthropogenic environmental change. Humans, like all other organisms, always have shaped the planet’s biological systems. While premodern hunting and agriculture certainly had major effects upon the planet’s biota, such activity likely did not leave a record in the Earth’s strata. According to many geologists, that has changed in the Anthropocene. Through accelerated industrialization and modernization on a global scale, humans have transcended their status as biological actors and become engines of geologic change.