Inside Out Outdoors

Why Bring Back the Wolves?

After decades of wolves being absent from the American Rockies, a push began to reintroduce wolves into their historic range throughout the Rockies.  This push had two primary motivations.  First, there are a lot of nature lovers out there (myself included) and popular culture has firmly established the wolf as a symbol of nature and of untamed wilderness.  It's understandable that people would want to restore these majestic looking canines to their once and former glory.  This first motivation is likely to be the one that you'll hear about in any public debate of the topic, even though it's fairly childish, simplistic, and easily dismissed.

The second motivation is considerably more sound from a logical perspective and is the one I recommend you consider when thinking over these issues.  The natural world is a horrendously complex entity.  It's what we engineers call an a highly uncertain and nonlinear system.  The "highly uncertain" part is pretty self-explanatory, the response of the system depends on hundreds of independent factors like the birth rates of all the various species, weather patterns, infant mortality, plant productivity, etc.  A precious few of these parameters can be measured to a reasonable accuracy, and even if you had unlimited funding and could determine all the requisite numbers for this year, you have no reason to expect that next year's numbers would be the same. 

The "nonlinear" part is a little more interesting.  Linear systems are the nice, friendly ones that most of us deal with in school.  A 5% change in the input of a linear system will cause a 5% change in the output of that system.  A 1% input shift moves the output 1%, and so forth.  Nonlinear systems on the other hand are pesky beasts by comparison.  The inputs and outputs of nonlinear systems are not so cleanly linked.  A large change in the input could produce no noticeable change in the output, or conversely, a minute input shift could cause the system to go careening out of control towards a highly undesirable outcome.

So, now that I've scared off half my audience with two paragraphs of technobable, you few brave souls who have persevered to this point in the post can now understand just how big of a deal it is when we describe a system as "highly uncertain and nonlinear".  We're essentially saying that we can give it our best shot, but we're never going to be able to control the system or even predict its outcomes with a high level of confidence.

In other words, we should be exceptionally careful with any tweaking that we do to ecological systems.  Because, no matter how advanced our models get, we will never know ahead of time whether or not we will be able to accurately predict the many effects of that tweaking. 

Nature has been regulating its systems for billions of years before we got here and did just fine, so that is always the safer option.  We should avoid attempts to exert control over ecological systems whenever possible, and when that option is not available (as is often the case) we should look to minimize the extent of our intervention.  Herein lies the strongest argument for the reintroduction of apex predators into ecosystems where we have exterminated them.  The removal of such a major piece of the ecological puzzle in undeniably an extensive intervention and, for the reasons outlined above,any such intervention should be avoided.  The safer course of action over the long term is to maintain the ecosystem in a state as close as possible to its historical condition.

-K.M.

A History of Predators in the US

Back in the 1800's (yes, another history lesson... suck it up Marine!) the prevailing philosophy amongst early conservationists was that predators were harmful to nature.  It seemed to make sense, predators killed and ate game species, they killed livestock, and they just plain looked scary.  It's as if they thought that nature couldn't handle herself she needed us humans to paternalistically step in and keep the big bad wolves from wiping out the poor little game species.

So, if predators are harmful to nature, then it only makes sense that if we want to preserve nature we should eradicate as many predators as possible. Right? Sure! What could go wrong?  For decades it was the official policy of the US government to exterminate as many predators as possible.   Bounties were placed on wolves and other predator species and they were culled en masse.  By the 1930's wolves were essentially extinct in the lower 48.  Other apex predators like mountain lions and brown bears fared only marginally better.  Then,  like in so many other environmental issues, one particular case became the canary in the coal mine and clued conservationists into the fact that there was something fundamentally wrong with their model of how nature works.  For the issue of predator culling that proverbial canary was the Kaibab Plateau.

In 1906 Teddy Roosevelt set up the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve on the plateau with the intention of  bolstering the native deer population.  In keeping with the conservation philosophy of the time, all of the natural predators living on the plateau were exterminated and hunting on the plateau was banned under the same reasoning.  The ecologists of the time predicted that this would lead to an unprecedented, thriving deer population.  For the first few years, the results appeared to confirm their predictions... until reality set in.

As the Deer population density soared, diseases were more easily passed between individuals and were soon running rampant.   However, the more drastic problem happened when the deer population began to bump up against that proverbial glass ceiling imposed by the ecosystem's carrying capacity.  The overinflated deer population soon decimated  almost all the vegetation on the plateau.  Without the plants' roots to hold the soil in place, erosion quickly swept away all of the fertile soil.  By the 1920's thousands of deer were starving to death and what remained of the population was addled with disease.  To make matters worse, the erosion had left the plateau barren, curtailing its productivity for decades to come.

The prevailing philosophy of the time was that the very presence of predators was harmful to the ecosystem in general and game species in particular.  The Federal Government carried this philosophy to its logical end and implemented it as fully as is possible on the Kaibab Plateau.  To call the results of that effort a total and unmitigated failure would be a forgiving description. 

You'd think that such a philosophy would be entirely abandoned nearly a century after having been so thoroughly disproven.

-K.M.