Federal land bureaus are developing a new approach to the management of large areas of public lands called ecosystem management. Ecosystem management remains fraught with many conceptual and implementation difficulties. One of the most important of these difficulties concerns the relationship of scientific/professional modes of decision making with democratic decision processes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the first large scale attempt to implement ecosystem management in the Greater Yellowstone area and the difficulties that effort had in reconciling these modes of decision making. The paper concludes with suggestions as to how these two methods of resource decision making might be brought closer together.