TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/110689/p13

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 7KB | 122 lines

AMERICAN SCENE, Page 13

Yellowstone National Park

The Brawl of The Wild

A plan for reintroducing wolves touches off a howling argument

By John Skow


    Wolves roam through our racial memory, howling beyond the fire
light, scaring the hell out of us. But they no longer roam in
Yellowstone National Park, except as rare transients, prowling
south from Canada. The last resident wolves in the big park were
exterminated by Government hunters by the late 1920s. That was a
time when animals were thought to be good (elk and bison, for
instance) or bad. Wolves had been pursued in the West as if they
were not merely bad, but evil. Cattlemen lost entire herds to
harsh winters, then spent enormous, irrationally large sums of
money taking vengeance on wolves. Barry Lopez, in his haunting book
Of Wolves and Men, tells of wolves drenched with gasoline and set
afire, wolves pulled apart by horses. You can't dismember an April
blizzard.

   Should the gray wolf, today an endangered species in most of the
U.S., be re-established in Yellowstone? An old stockman at a
meeting at Laramie, Wyo., shakes with rage at the notion; the idea
is like reintroducing smallpox. But to wolf partisans, the bedrock
argument is a brooding, circular truth: without wolves, there are
no wolves. These complex, mysterious animals are their own
justification. Beyond that, biologists see predators as balance
wheels in ecosystems. No wolves mean too many elk, which is what
Yellowstone has now, starving by the thousands in winter die-offs.

    Yellowstone can seem grand and wild, or it can resemble a big,
hokey theme park, an example of what happens when man meddles too
much with nature. Policies shift with political winds, and under
former National Park Service director William Penn Mott, a wolf
enthusiast, Yellowstone officials pushed hard for the wolf's
reintroduction. Now Mott has been replaced by fence-sitter James
Ridenour, and political pressure is reaching Yellowstone. Two weeks
ago, a traveling Park Service slide show on wolf reintroduction
was canceled. An elaborate study asked for by Congress seems
certain, when it is released at year's end, to recommend the return
of wolves, but political maneuvering has blocked the drafting of
the necessary environmental-impact statement. The major national
environmental groups support wolf reintroduction, and one, the
Defenders of Wildlife, is raising $100,000 to reimburse stockmen
in the northern Rockies for livestock the wolves might kill. Last
month Defenders agreed to pay $1,700 to cattlemen for kills by a
wolf pack that had migrated from Canada into Montana.

    Natural migration probably cannot restock Yellowstone, which
is why the political jostling goes on. Big, burly Dave Mech, widely
accepted as the world's leading authority on wolves, says
Yellowstone is ideal for Canis lupus. Alston Chase, the
cantankerous philosopher who wrote Playing God in Yellowstone,
thinks the U.S. has a moral obligation to return wolves to the
park. But the wolves' most effective ally maybe Renee Askins, 30,
of Moose, Wyo., a wildlife ecologist who stumps for an advocacy
group she founded called the Wolf Fund.

    When Askins speaks, the setting can resemble an old-style
western movie, several scenes before the shoot-out. She has blue
eyes and long brown hair, and her manner is that of the pretty,
courageous schoolmarm standing up for truth and decency in words
the fearful townspeople would just as soon not hear. Yes, she says,
wolves get their living by killing. No, they are not sweet and
docile. Yes, stockmen are having a hard time economically. "But if
we can't preserve wildness in Yellowstone, where can we preserve
it?"

    Hunting outfitters and stockmen scuff their cowboy boots in the
dirt, unconvinced, as Askins talks. Some of them like to draw a
line between Eastern ecobabblers, who puff wolves as gallant
symbols of wildness, and true Westerners, who know them as cruel
and cowardly and who can be relied on to "shoot, shovel and shut
up," as the brag goes in the cowboy bars. But, Brad Little, a
stockman from Emmett, Idaho, concedes, "It's not so much wolves
we're afraid of, it's wolf managers." Exactly. The wolves
themselves, though they are sure to range beyond park boundaries,
are likely to be more an annoyance than a danger to farmers. In
northern Minnesota, where some 1,200 wolves forage in a
cattle-ranch and sheep-farm area, the highest annual payoff by a
Government program set up to compensate stockmen for wolf kills has
been a modest $21,000. (Problem wolves there are killed by federal
hunters, as would be true around Yellowstone.) There have been no
documented cases in modern times of wolves attacking people in the
U.S. But it is taken as a home truth that wolves will bring federal
wolf bureaucrats, whose regulations will drive honest ranchers
nuts. Carl Haywood, legislative assistant to Idaho Republican
Senator James McClure, says voters fear that the wolf will be used
as a surrogate by environmental extremists, whose real agenda is
"getting ranchers, miners, loggers and motorized recreationists off
public lands."

    U.S. Representative Wayne Owens, a Utah Democrat, has 76
cosponsors for a bill calling for wolf reintroduction, but its
chances are dodgy unless lawmakers from the Yellowstone states
change their minds. This may happen; polls show that voters favor
the idea. Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson, once an
antiwolf diehard, talked like a moderate at a recent hearing on
Owens' bill and says only, "Let's take care of grizzlies first."
He means get the bears off the endangered species list and out from
under federal protection, so they can be shot beyond park
boundaries.

    The wolf's listing as an endangered species is the important
difference between a Park Service plan and one floated by Idaho's
Senator McClure. McClure has a problem, which is that wolves have
been sighted frequently in central Idaho. If packs from Canada
establish themselves in Idaho, as they have in Montana's Glacier
National Park, they will be protected as an indigenous endangered
species. Instead, McClure's plan would de-list wolves immediately,
and let state game laws treat them as predators, outside designated
havens in Idaho's Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and in Glacier and
Yellowstone parks. Environmental groups support the park strategy,
which would de-list wolves only after ten breeding pairs are
established in Yellowstone and Glacier parks and the Idaho
wilderness.

    When will Yellowstone hear wolves howl again? Later than
sooner, probably, but sooner than never. Askins, mean while, weary
of fighting and fund raising, insists that wolves will be
re-established not because of political wrangling but because
Westerners respect wild things. "And the wolf," she says, "is one
of the wildest of things. At its heart, the real is sue is one
of making room. There is still a little room in the West for
outfitters, for livestock, for wildness, for wolves."