The Big Bad Wolf Makes Good

The Yellowstone Success Story and Those Who Want to Kill It

By Chip Ward

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175301/tomgram:_chip_ward,_a_west_raised_by_wolves/

At long last, good news.  Fifteen years have passed since
wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and the
results are in.  The controversial experiment has been a
stellar success.  The Big Bad Wolf is back and in this modern
version of the old story, all that huffing and puffing has
been good for the land and the creatures that live on it.
Biggie, it turns out, got a bum rap.

The success of the Yellowstone project is the kind of good
news we long for in this era of oil spills, monster storms,
massive flooding, crushing heat waves, and bleaching corals.
For once, a branch of our federal government, the Department
of the Interior, saw something broken and actually fixed it.
In a nutshell: conservation biologists considered a
perplexing problem -- the slow but steady unraveling of the
Yellowstone ecosystem -- figured out what was causing it, and
then proposed a bold solution that worked even better than
expected.

Sadly, the good news has been muted by subsequent political
strife over wolf reintroduction outside of Yellowstone.
Along the northern front of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming,
Montana, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado, as well as New Mexico and
Arizona, so-called wolf wars have added fuel to a decades-old
battle over the right to graze cattle or hunt on public land.
The shouting has overwhelmed both science and civil
discourse.  This makes it all the harder to convey the
lessons learned to an American public that is mostly
ecologically illiterate and never really understood why
wolves were put back into Yellowstone in the first place.
Even the legion of small donors who supported the project
mostly missed the reasons it was undertaken, focusing instead
on the "charismatic" qualities of wolves and the chance to
see them in the wild.

No Wolves, No Water

Here’s the piece we still don’t get: when we exterminated
wolves from Yellowstone in the early 1900s, killing every
last one, we de-watered the land.  That’s right -- no wolves
eventually meant fewer streams, creeks, marshes, and springs
across western landscapes like Yellowstone where wolves had
once thrived.

The chain of effects went roughly like this: no wolves meant
that many more elk crowded onto inviting river and stream
banks where the grass is green and the livin’ easy.  A
growing population of fat elk, in no danger of being turned
into prey, gnawed down willow and aspen seedlings before they
could mature. Willows are both food and building material for
beavers.  As the willows declined, so did beaver populations.
When beavers build dams and ponds, they create wetland
habitats for countless bugs, amphibians, fish, birds, and
plants, as well as slowing the flow of water and distributing
it over broad areas.  The consequences of their decline
rippled across the land.

Meanwhile, as the land dried up, Yellowstone’s overgrazed
riverbanks eroded.  Life-giving river water receded, leaving
those banks barren.  Spawning beds for fish were silted over.
Amphibians lost precious shade where they could have
sheltered and hidden. Yellowstone’s web of life was fraying
and becoming threadbare.

The unexpected relationship between absent wolves and absent
water is just one example of how big, scary predators like
grizzlies and mountain lions, often called "charismatic
carnivores," regulate their ecosystems from the top down.
The results are especially relevant in an era of historic
droughts and global warming, both of which are stressing
already arid Western lands.  Wolf reintroduction wasn’t a
scheme designed to undermine vacationing elk hunters or
harass ranchers who graze their cattle on public lands.  It
wasn’t done to please some cabal of elitist, urban
environmentalists eager to show rural rednecks who’s the
boss, though out here in the West that interpretation’s held
sway at many public meetings called to discuss wolf
reintroduction.

Let’s be clear then: the decision to put wolves back in
Yellowstone was a bold experiment backed by the best
conservation science available to restore a cherished
American ecosystem that was coming apart at the seams.

The Biggest Losers

Today, wolves are thriving in Yellowstone. The 66 wolves
trapped in Canada and released in Yellowstone and the Idaho
wilderness in 1995-96 have generated more than 1,700 wolves.
More than 200 wolf packs exist in the area today and the
effect on the environment has been nothing short of
astonishing.

There was one beaver colony in the park at the time wolves
were reintroduced.  Today, 12 colonies are busy storing
water, evening out seasonal water flows, recharging springs,
and creating habitat.  Willow stands are robust again and the
songbirds that nest in them are recovering.  Creatures that
scavenge wolf-kills for meat, including ravens, eagles,
wolverines, and bears, have benefited.  Wolves have pushed
out and killed the coyotes that feed on pronghorn antelope,
so pronghorn numbers are also up.  Riverbanks are lush and
shady again.  With less competition from elk for grass, the
bison in the park are doing better, too.

Elk are the sole species that has been diminished -- and
that, after all, was the purpose of putting wolves back in
the game in the first place.  The elk population of
Yellowstone is still larger than it was at its low point in
the late 1960s, but there are fewer elk today than in recent
decades.  The decline has alarmed elk hunters and the local
businesses that rely on their trade.

Worse yet, from the hunting point of view, elk behavior has
changed dramatically.  Instead of camping out on stream banks
and overeating, they roam far more and in smaller numbers,
browsing in brushy areas where there is more protective
cover.  Surviving elk are healthier, but leaner, warier, far
more dispersed, and significantly harder to hunt.  This
further dismays those who had become accustomed to easy
hunting and bigger animals.

A lively debate is underway among game wardens, guides, and
wildlife biologists about just how far elk numbers have
declined, what role drought and other non-wolf variables may
be playing in that decline, and whether elk numbers will --
or even should -- rebound.  State wildlife agencies that once
fed hay to bountiful populations of elk to keep them from
starving during harsh winters depend on hunting and fishing
licenses to fill their coffers.  Predictably enough, they
have come down on the side of the frustrated big game
hunters, who think the wolves have killed too many elk.
Hunters have been a powerful force for conservation when
habitat for birds and big game is at stake, but wolf
reintroduction hits them right in the ol’ game bag, and on
this issue they seem to be abandoning former conservation
allies. Of course, wolves themselves can be hunted and
selling the privilege of doing so has proven lucrative for
state wildlife agencies.  Montana recently expanded its wolf-
killing quota from 75 to 186, while Idaho licensed 220 wolf
kills in 2009.

Beyond the Bovine Curtain

As wolf reintroduction took hold and wolves migrated out of
Yellowstone as far as Oregon to the west and Colorado to the
east, it became clear that surrounding states needed plans to
deal with their spread.  Once regarded as an endangered
species and legally protected by the Endangered Species Act,
wolves were taken off the formal list of protected creatures
wherever states created plans for restoring and managing
them.  The intention of the federal government was to allow
states to participate in, and so take some control over, the
recovery process in the West.

As it happened, however, most states took a strikingly
hostile approach to their new wolf populations, treating them
as varmints.  A federal court took away Wyoming’s power to
regulate wolves within its borders when it decided that the
state’s management goal would be no wolves at all outside of
the Yellowstone and Teton national parks.  Other Western
states are now planning to keep their numbers as low as
possible without triggering a federal takeover, too low to
play their ecological role, or even survive over the long
run, according to conservation biologists.  After wolves were
"delisited" in Idaho in 2009, 188 of them were killed by
hunters before the year was out.

In August 2010, a federal judge ruled that wolves everywhere
but in Minnesota and Alaska (where wolf populations are
plentiful and healthy) must be relisted as an endangered
species and afforded more protection. How this major decision
will shape the debate from here on out is uncertain.  Since
relisting precludes sport hunting, state wildlife agencies
are now making plans to kill more wolves themselves to keep
their numbers low. Critics worry about a return to the days
when wolves were routinely shot, trapped, poisoned, and
gassed in their dens.

Up until now, where wolves and cows mix, cows have ruled.
What wildlife advocate George Wuerthner calls the "bovine
curtain" limits full wolf restoration to within Yellowstone’s
park boundaries.  Outside the park, where the feds have less
power and control, wolf packs continually form but are often
slaughtered, usually at the insistence of ranchers who can
legally shoot wolves that attack cattle.  They are also
compensated for wolf- kill losses from both state funds and
privately donated ones.  Wolf predation accounts for only
about 1% of livestock deaths across the northern Rockies, but
those deaths generate disproportionate resentment and fear.

Ranchers are the first to understand that, in the arid West,
a cow may require 250 acres of forage to live.  In the states
where wolves are spreading, cows wander wide and don’t sleep
safely in barns at night as they do in the east.  Wolves need
room to roam, too.  Overlap and predation are the inevitable
results.  If wolves are ever to effectively play their
ecological role again across the West, significant changes in
animal husbandry, like adding range riders and guard dogs,
would be required, as well undoubtedly as less grazing
overall.  The implied threat to limit grazing provokes fierce
opposition from cattlemen’s associations, a powerful and
influential Republican constituency throughout the West.
Real cowboys don’t sip tea, but as anger over those wolves
builds they may be riding off to the nearest tea party
nevertheless.

At public hearings across the rural West wherever wolves are
rebounding, near-hysterical locals claim that their children
will be carried off from their yards by those awful beasts
set loose by evil Obamacrats willing to sacrifice life and
limb to win favor with tree-hugging easterners.  In New
Mexico, such hostility has led to poaching that has decimated
an endangered species of gray wolves reintroduced 12 years
ago after the last survivors of that species were trapped,
bred in captivity, and released into the wild.

Eco-Commodities or Ecological Communities?

Today’s wolf wars pit opposing perspectives on how (or even
why) our public lands should be managed against each other.
The disagreement is fundamental.  On one side is a
historic/traditional resource management paradigm that sees
our Western lands as a storehouse of timber, minerals, and
fresh water; on the other side, a new biocentric orientation
driven by conservation biologists who see landscapes as whole
ecosystems and all species as having intrinsic value.  At one
end of the spectrum lie strip-mining coal companies; at the
other, deep ecologists.  In between you can find conflict,
contradiction, and confusion as we sort out a new consensus
about how to manage vast public land holdings in the West.

In the beginning, Americans assumed that nature was
inefficient (if efficiency is defined as getting the most
bang for the buck) and that humans could manage the planet
better than Mother Earth.  Wild rivers, after all, spill
their liquid bounty where they will and then empty themselves
into the sea.  What a waste!  In the same way, forest fires
were viewed as a prime example of Nature’s wanton
destruction.  To a rancher who is leasing public land, wolves
and cougars are monsters of inefficiency.

It’s far clearer now that nature is, in fact, efficient
indeed, if creating healthy, viable ecosystems is what’s on
your mind.  Matter and energy are never wasted in food webs
where synergy is the rule.  Because we have come to
appreciate how rich nature’s interconnections are, we are now
committed to protecting species we once would have wiped out
with little regard.  Health (including the health of the
planet), not wealth alone, is becoming a priority.  Think of
wolf reintroduction, then, as a kind of hinge-point between
the two paradigms.  After centuries of not leaving the
natural world’s order to chance, micro-managing wherever we
could, we are now encouraged to take a chance on Nature, to
trust the self-organizing powers of life to heal ecosystems
we have wounded.

While organizing campaigns to make polluters accountable, I
learned that citizens generally won’t take them on until they
grasp that the deepest link they have to their environment is
their own bloodstreams. Once they understand the pathways
from a smokestack or a poisoned watershed to the tumors
growing in their children’s bodies, they can become a
powerful force. But first they have to know what’s at stake.

In this regard, ecological literacy is not a side issue. It’s
a prerequisite for survival.  The articulation of reality is
more primal than any strategy or policy.  If greed is turning
the Earth into a scorched planet of slums, ignorance is its
enabler.  Just as American farmers once realized that erosion
follows ignorance and learned how to plow differently, just
as most of us finally learned that rivers should not be used
as toxic dumps, so today we must learn that environments have
the equivalent of operating systems.   Predation by large
carnivores is written deep into the code of much of the
American landscape.  Today, a rancher who expects to do
business in a predator-free landscape is no more reasonable
than yesterday’s industrialist who expected to use the
nearest river as a sewer. Living with wolves may be a
challenging proposition, but it’s hardly impossible to do --
as folks in Minnesota or Canada can attest.

Hard days are ahead as the weather, once benign and
predictable, becomes hotter, drier, and ever more chaotic.
Western landscapes are already stressed -- whole forests are
dying and deserts are becoming dustbowls.  To maintain their
vitality in the face of such dire challenges, those lands
will need all the relief we can give them.  We now understand
far better the many ways in which nature’s living communities
are astonishingly connected and reciprocal.  If we could only
find the courage to trust their self-organizing powers to
heal the wounds we have inflicted, we might become as
resilient as those Yellowstone wolves.

[Chip Ward lives in Capitol Reef, Utah, where songbirds are
eaten by housecats, housecats are eaten by coyotes, and
coyotes are eaten by mountain lions.  He is the author of
Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope’s
Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land.  His
essays can be found at chipwardessays.blogspot.com.]

Copyright 2010 Chip Ward

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