The Big Bad Wolf Makes Good: The Yellowstone Success Story and Those Who Want to Kill It

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:



The Big Bad Wolf Makes Good
The Yellowstone Success Story and Those Who Want to Kill It

By Chip Ward


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. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175301/tomgram%3A_chip_ward%2C_a_west_raised_by_wolves/#more (the story follows a brief intro)

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[pscot]

2. If something frightens us

our reaction is to kill it. We're easily frightened.

[truebrit71]

3. I was fortunate enough to see a wolf in Yellowstone this summer...

...a truly magically moment for me..

[Kolesar]

4. Nothing says you have to patronize the cow industry

Hit them where it counts. It's vegetables seasoned with Mrs. Dash for me.