Use Of Commercial Bacteria To Benefit Yellowstone

Yellowstone National Park will benefit from efforts to commercially use bacteria found in the park’s hot springs through an extra measure of protection, according to the National Park Service’s director.

Roger Kennedy says commercial scientists will eventually have to pay to prospect for profitable microbes in Yellowstone, but he added the primary gain for the park will be the resulting encouragement to protect areas where the microbes developed.

“These places that we have continually saved, so far, have got to be protected so they continue to evolve in their own ways without us contaminating them inadvertently,” he told the Billings, Mont., Gazette.

The growing demand for the microbes reflects the fact that national parks are invaluable because they provide protection for items such as bears and geysers and allow a continuing evolution of nature seen in few other places, Kennedy said.

Kennedy drew a comparison between the proposed return of wolves to the park and work to protect microbes in the hot springs.

“We’re talking about the same thing, how big is the relevant space within which you hope to protect the evolution of these forms of life?” he said.

Figuring into that question are activities outside the park, such as the proposed development of a gold mine north of Yellowstone, Kennedy said.

“How much spillage from pollution can you tolerate without imperiling life forms of one kind or another?” he asked. “Our activity can have consequences we can’t imagine. We’re setting forth in a voyage of exploration into very unknown territory.”

Change occurs constantly within the park, as proven by the discovery of the microbes that can be used in laboratory and industrial procedures, Kennedy said.

“These life forms take time to evolve and it takes time, decades often, to come to understand them just a little bit,” he said.

Kennedy said the Park Service must return to Congress with the Old Faithful Protection Act, a bill designed to buffer Yellowstone from geothermal drilling. He added the agency must also make sure that commercial interest in the hot spring microbes does not become so intense that it damages the area where the organisms are found.

“We need to protect uncontaminated the natural evolution of the other species with whom and with which we share Yellowstone, however big and small they may be,” he said.