Doug had said the same thing, but shared concern about the “social carrying capacity,” the level to which we as a society are willing to tolerate and live with wolves, and wondered if we’ve already surpassed it. When wolves were stripped of their protection in 2011 in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, liberal hunting regulations leapt into place. Already, close to two thousand wolves have been killed in those three states. Thirty-plus years ago they were labeled endangered, twenty years ago they were brought back and allowed to reestablish, and now the governments in states where they live are working hard to bring their numbers back down to the legally mandated minimum. In Montana, that’s thirty breeding pairs. In Wyoming, outside of Yellowstone itself, ten. In Idaho, fifteen. In Utah, poised to deal with state management if the federal endangered species classification is terminated, that means two breeding pairs. Some people are in an uproar over this. Others want even more wolves killed. And then there are those who have reached their caring capacity, who are tired of the hubbub, who no longer really care about wolves at all. Some people are embittered, angry that their lives are affected by so many outside forces, and scapegoat the wolf. Some shy away from these controversies, overwhelmed by the shifting world—changes in climates and economies—believing the solutions are out of their hands.
Doug believes man and wolf can coexist. The problem, he says, is that not only do we compete for prey, but we are too similar. Wolves form life-long bonds, use highly sophisticated non-verbal communication, parent their young, make use of extended family, defend their territory, and are the top predators in their natural environment. Man’s desire to be the hunter places him in direct competition with a powerful, competent creature. In some, Doug says, wolf hatred runs deep.
Unearthing the roots of today’s anger toward wolves is something many, from Barry Lopez in his book Of Wolves and Men, to Doug Smith, have attempted to do. Ralph Maughan, who hosts the Wildlife News—a website chronicling wolf news from the start of the reintroduction in 1995 to the present day—believes he has one answer. He claims it wasn’t until almost a decade into the restoration that a “militant anti-wolf narrative” developed, led by key politicians in wolf-recovery states, and some who aligned themselves with the Tea Party or similar anti-government groups. The wolf became a scapegoat for the recession, any decline in ranching economy, and the fact that a hunter was unable to track and kill his intended prey. Today, Ralph claims, what we see is cultural conflict. He argues that the current controversy over wolf restoration in the West is not really about wolves at all.
It’s the end of Liz’s work day, and she’s stayed late just to talk with us. I don’t believe I’ve accessed Liz Bradley’s true feelings about managing wolves in Montana, but I realize she wants to keep her job. She likes working with wildlife, and it’s clear that she loves working with wolves. Before we part, she bends forward, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and rests her elbows on her thighs. She leans into her words.
“The most important thing we can do today is have our children develop a love and appreciation for the natural world. Once that’s established, the rest of the decisions come easy.”
Not so very long ago there was a mountain. As mountains go it fell somewhere between Sagarmatha—Nepal’s Goddess of the Clouds—and Magazine Mountain, a bump in the flats of Arkansas. It was an ordinary mountain, unnamed and taken for granted by all who lived upon or traveled its sloping sides. That number was significant, from insects and earthworms burrowing in its soil to the bushy-tailed foxes in their earthen dens to the red-tailed hawks and robins, warblers, thrushes, and hummingbirds whose nests dotted the aspen whose roots hugged each other deep below the pine-needle- and brown-leaf-covered soil. At the seam where the mountain met another, where the creek flowed, lived a beaver colony, replete with fish and frogs, water striders, bluebirds, mallards, grebes, and songbirds, whose voices soared from the glade.
If we were to count the flowers, the penstemon, the lupine, all of the balsamroot and Indian paintbrush and wild hollyhock, the lives supported by the mountain would climb to numbers we can barely comprehend. Thick with conifers, aspen, scrubby oak, the occasional twisted and gnarled juniper, the undergrowth is springy and green, gathering sunrays filtered by towering trees. Last fall’s leaves and needles carpet the soil which is rocky, nutrient rich, bustling with insects and earthworms that tunnel and commune.
This mountain hosts visitors as well. Those who come to graze, to find sustenance. Those who come to hunt. Those who come to die. Deer, elk, moose, these solid thick-haunched creatures find plentiful saplings, willow growth, grasses, and plants. Hawks, ravens, turkey vultures, and eagles circle above the mountain, searching out what has died. And the mountain welcomes its top predator, the wolves that trot along its flanks and edges, the wolves searching for the wounded deer, the weary elk, the very young, the old.
This is Aldo Leopold’s mountain, the one that need not fear its deer, its elk, for it is a mountain well-familiar with the howl of a wolf. It is a mountain in natural harmony, full of life, full of death. Decomposition begets new life, the mountain active in each step of the circular process. Leopold, considered by many a father of the conservation movement, described an ecological ethic that resonates with me for its simplicity and inclusive view of the universe. His land ethic
. . . simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land . . . a land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.
On Leopold’s mountain I share responsibility. Flora and fauna are rife with cellular knowledge telling them how to grow, how to behave, how to participate. Because this is my home, too, I am obligated to sink into my deeper self, to connect with my own cellular knowledge that guides me to think and behave in ways that benefit the earth. I deserve to live among richly varied, healthily functioning, glorious, green mountains, and I accept accountability for their health. I know I am one part of a brilliantly complex, interrelated existence.
Leopold suggested it possible to view the earth as a coordinated whole, its parts—oceans, land, crust, atmosphere, and so on—similar to the organs of a body, each having its own, definitive function. In the 1970s, decades after Leopold’s death, chemist James Lovelock took this a step further and presented his Gaia principle, a theory suggesting our planet was indeed a self-regulating, complex system formed by organisms—biota—interacting with their inorganic surroundings. Joseph Campbell, one of the world’s foremost authorities on mythology, challenged the biblical condemnation of nature, instead seeing man as part of nature, embracing the Gaia principle. He viewed the entire planet as a single organism, human beings as of the earth, the consciousness of the earth. Campbell was adamant that we must learn to again be in accord with nature, to “realize again the brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.”
I am neither biologist, nor chemist, nor naturalist. Nor mythologist. I’ve never called myself an environmentalist. Politically I often sit on a buck rail fence—I picture my pigtailed ten-year-old self perched there—leaning left but never hopping completely off my perch. I pay taxes. I vote. I use canvas bags at the grocery and turn lights off when I leave a room. I compost coffee grounds and vegetable peelings. But my yard is not xeriscaped, and I don’t drive a hybrid.
I care deeply about this earthen world, and passionately about my own small section of it. I ride my bike through canyons and mountain passes in the West that retain some of their wildness. Before daybreak the canyon is dark and mysterious, filled with birdsong, scamperings, chirping, and the silence of a hawk floating through the air, its body silhouetted against a lightening indigo sky.