In the Eye of the Wolf

The latest battle in the Wolf Wars shows why environmentalism is such a quagmire

Stalemates are ugly affairs. Just look at the Ukrainian War, or the past decades in Gaza. Quick and decisive victories, whatever the results, are in some ways more humane than the constant meat grinder of a deadlock. During World War I, upwards of two and half million men lost their lives in the battles of Verdun, Somne, and Ypres, which resulted in minimal territorial gains. That the war didn’t end until years later reflects the tragic irrationality of two sides locked into a fanatical confrontation. No one has died during the Wolf Wars of the last decades. But deadlocked conservation conflicts have exhibited the same pathologies.

The biggest battle of the wolf wars came in 1995, when fourteen wolves were captured from around Jasper, Alberta and released in Yellowstone National Park. Reintroduction was the culmination of years of political struggle, demanded by major environmental NGOs and put into action by federal environmental agencies, but the animal’s resurgence has only continued to stoke antipathy throughout the West.

The prevailing story among environmentalists is that wolf reintroduction was an ecological necessity. As a “keystone” species, they could return balance to an off-kilter ecosystem, one where elks’ overgrazing prevented forest regrowth, which in turn prevented beavers from reestablishing themselves. Post-reintroduction evidence is actually pretty mixed, despite viral videos circulating online claiming otherwise. There are, no doubt, other reasons to reintroduce carnivores, but scientists have yet to confirm the hypothesis of rapid ecosystem restoration.

One viral video would like to inform you that “wolves change rivers.” If only we knew that for sure…

Just as the wolf occupies a special place within the minds of many conservationists, representing nothing short of ecological harmony itself, it strikes fear in a large chunk of residents of the rural West. And there are certainly material interests at play. Ranchers can lose hundreds to thousands of dollars for (uncompensated) loss of livestock.

The wolf is most dangerous as a symbol, as a political football. Depending on your position, it is either a magical lifeform promising to finally restore long last balance to human-degraded landscapes or an invader, a Trojan horse with which urban elites hope to finally conquer western states. Decades of battle between these fortified political trenches has stymied sensible politics.

Murder by Numbers

The latest battle in the wolf wars is happening practically in my backyard. Catron County, New Mexico residents have declared themselves to be in an “emergency” over the number of wolves in their vicinity. Ranchers claim to have lost dozens of cattle, and the animal has been spotted on camera, both in town and near local schools. Like other polarized political battles, however, strategic leveraging of partial facts and overheated rhetoric make it difficult to know what exactly is happening.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife estimate that a bit under 300 Mexican wolves roam between New Mexico and Arizona. That sounds like a lot. But, as I often point out to the astonishment of my fellow New Mexicans, there are over 1,600 wolves in across Germany, living in areas with a much higher population density and little remaining wildlands. Mexican wolves are credited with 100 depredation events, while their German cousins have tallied well over three thousand. Welcome to Germany, where even the wolves are highly efficient.

Wolves are especially prevalent in the eastern part of Germany, a region with 16 million people and an area roughly equivalent to Minnesota (so, about three times the population density)

Even then, it’s not clear that wolves are an especially grave threat. Available USDA data, albeit from 2015, found that wolves ranked alongside dogs, being responsible for a little over two percent of livestock losses. Cougars and coyotes were the cause of 44 percent and 26 percent, respectively. The wolf population has roughly tripled since then, and so have depredations. But it’s highly unlikely that wolves have taken second place away from coyotes. What gives?

The Call of the West

From Grimm’s Fairy Tales to that cringy t-shirt that you always see computer science nerds (or ironic hipsters) wearing, it’s clear that we’ve long found wolves captivating. But it would be a mistake to blame them for the state of American conservation politics. They were not really what sparked the battle, being more an affirmation of a decades-long transformation of the West’s political landscape.

I’m an academic, and even I want to punch this shirt in the stomach and takes its lunch money

The American West was long defined by traditional extractive industries: logging, mining, oil and gas extraction, and ranching. Apart from oil and gas, nearly all these other industries are a shadow of their former self. For all the ongoing talk of cattle overgrazing public lands, ranchers have stocked fewer of the animal practically every year since 1954. By 2014, Nevada’s herds were roughly one-third of their peak size. Other Western states show similar, but less dramatic, declines.

The declining fortunes of this “Old West” has been paralleled by the ascendance of a “New West.” Industries based in preserving and experiencing nature, rather than putting it into productive use, now equal or exceed the commercial value of agriculture. New, typically college-educated, residents came from the coasts and major metropolitan areas to open and staff rafting operations, ski resorts, nature retreats, and other boutique industries.

It isn’t only that those working in Old West industries feel increasingly nullified, economically and culturally speaking. They find themselves on the wrong side of increasingly lopsided demographics. Most rural counties have been hollowing out for decades, which means that legislative and public approval to reintroduce carnivores has become a relatively simple matter: city denizens simply impose it on rural counties. Take Colorado’s vote on wolf reintroduction, where most of the “Nays” came from counties faced with wolf impacts, and “Yays” came primarily from Denver and affluent ski-towns.

The geography of New West and Old West

Feelings of risk and safety are never just about statistics. The nuclear energy industry is, one hopes, finally waking up to the fact that atomic fears are not really about the objective risks of radiation. Nuclear fission fills many of us with dread, because it is a man-made and insidious hazard, acting invisibly until one is truly sick. Nuclear power has been in a state of arrested development, because many citizens don’t trust nuclear power plant operators to responsibly manage the hazards. Accidents of Three Mile Island and Fukushima transformed the energy source, in many people’s minds, from a technological marvel into an unnecessary risk imposed upon humanity by a cadre irresponsible nuclear technocrats.

Something similar has happened to the wolf in the eyes of many rural residents. While the animal’s danger in the statistical logs of federal bureaucracies looks to be modest, a stubborn nearsightedness for the numbers blinds us to the fact that the wolf has become politically radioactive. When ranchers look at a wolf, they don’t just see a threatening carnivore, but also the species that urban environmentalists believe to be more important their livelihoods. They see the vision of a future West that neither wants nor needs them. Within the zero-sum thinking of polarized politics, the wolf’s gain is their loss.

Of course, that’s not all of it. The matter is as much psychological as political. Studies find that livestock farmers experience increased anxiety and sleep difficulties when wolves are known to be predating local livestock. The AP story on Catron County mentions a crying farmhand, traumatized by the sight of a mother cow having been mauled by wolves while giving birth. Cowboys exhibit the duality of man as much as the rest of us. The fact that they raise animals for slaughter doesn’t detract from the reality that they also care very deeply about their livestock.

Of course ranchers and other rural residents are often fanatically opposed to wolf reintroduction, sometimes unwilling to see the animal’s presence as anything other than an unmitigated threat to their way of life. But that fananticism didn’t come from nowhere.

Getting Out of the Trenches

The chorus of an antiwar song by the German rap troop KIZ goes “Na klar sind wir für Frieden. Doch erst müssen wir gewinnen.” This roughly translates to, “Of course, we want peace. But we have to win first, don’t we?” Such seems to be the attitude of both sides of the wolf conflict, which prevents a ceasefire and keeps up locked into the political meat grinder of a never-ending culture war.

KIZ “Frieden.” Yes, it slaps. Also, good German-language practice!

The situation in Catron county continues to escalate. During their latest meeting, the county commission called for “lethal control” against local wolves. Conservationists, for their part, aren’t helping things. The Western Watersheds Project’s deputy commissioner is quoted as implying that residents were just ignorant of the real risks and needed informed of best techniques to deescalate a wolf confrontation, which is like telling city-dwellers worried about being victimized by criminals to just carry pepper spray.

A letter writer to my local newspaper argues that frightened Catron County residents only need to Google nonlethal control strategies. However, had the letter’s author done some Googling themselves, they would have learned that the head of the county commission also heads the County Livestock Loss Authority, which helps ranchers apply for compensation and funds wolf conflict avoidance measures, such as hazing. Like other polarized political battles, basic curiosity has been the first causality of the Wolf Wars. It *must* be that the other side is ignorant. There can’t possibly be political complexities meriting our attention!

What wolf opponents seem to want most is to feel heard by US Fish and Wildlife. Regardless of what the agency is currently doing, locals believe that the wolves aren’t being “managed.” The species’ presence on the endangered species list makes wildlife officers hesitant to intervene the same way that they would if a bear or cougar came into town. Organizations like Wester Watersheds and the Center for Biological Diversity are ready to sue should the agency’s actions fail to match what they think the “best available” conservation science says. Locals are wise to these incongruencies.

The Mexican wolf is a problem in dire need of a de-escalation. But the structure of the United States’ endangered species law makes those kinds of solutions difficult. The Mexican Gray wolf’s recovery has only been thanks to environmental NGOs continually suing the federal government to force reintroduction through, and frequently over the objection of state and local governments.

Modern conservation has been a battle of brute force and attrition, waged by high-priced lawyers debating scientific assessments in courtrooms, not through what most of us would call democratic politics. Ranchers and other rural residents are imagined as primarily barriers to the restoration of ecological harmony, to the recreation of environmental perfection, one despoiled by humans’ meddling in the landscape.

Such a vision has no place for people, neither within the landscape nor as participants in self-governance. Squaring environmentalism with democracy will require conservation of the people, by the people, for the people. But are environmentalists willing and able to trust their fellow citizens enough to let that happen?