Evaluation Essay

Introducing the Wolf

SHOULD HUMANS INTERVENE WHEN CLIMATE CHANGE THREATENS AN

ISLAND'S ECOLOGY?

By John A. Vucetich

Viewed on any map, Lake Superior resembles the head of a wolf, with an island for an eye. The

indigenous Ojibwe called that island Minong, "The Good Place." French explorers paddled by,

fished its waters, and proclaimed it Isle Royale. Today that island and the 450 surrounding

smaller islands and waters, all within the borders of Michigan, make up Isle Royale National

Park. Bathed by cold, forbidding waters, Isle Royale is an extraordinarily rare enclave of

wilderness. Spared the ax since the park's establishment in 1940, its boreal forests of spruce,

balsam fir, and aspen display a richness and beauty that once characterized most of the world's

northern forests. Its inhabitants include moose that are off limits to the hunter's bullet and gray

wolves that have lived free from human persecution.

As an island, Isle Royale has doubtless seen animal populations wink on and off in prehistoric

times through occasional colonization, local extinction, and recolonization. Historically, we

know that the island's current moose population was founded around 1900, likely by animals that

swam there. For the next half century, unchecked by predation, their population erupted. The

moose ate all that could be eaten. They starved. The population collapsed. Before the forest

could fully recover, moose erupted again. The wildlife biologist Adolph Murie recorded from his

observations in 1929 and 1930 that "no poplar reproduction was noted. � The winter moose food

is practically gone from the island," and "There was little else to eat except bark. � There are

areas in which the top of every tree is broken off."

In the 1930s and 1940s, during the process by which Isle Royale became a National Park, Murie,

Sigurd Olson, and Aldo Leopold--pioneering ecologists and architects of the American

wilderness movement--urged the National Park Service (NPS) to introduce wolves. They

believed doing so would have--to use Leopold's terms--made it "right" by preserving the

"integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community." The appeals fell on deaf ears, but

wolves established themselves on Isle Royale by 1950, after crossing an ice bridge that

temporarily connected the island to the mainland. Such ice bridges formed during most winters.

For the next thirty years, wolves, moose, and the forest lived dynamically intricate and

interconnected lives.

Now, however, the wolf population has fallen so low, from twenty-four wolves to two in the past

seven years, that the moose population is once again erupting, more than doubling every four

years. Scientists, including myself, have publically expressed concern that each passing year

invites devastating harm to the forest unless wolf predation is restored. These circumstances have

triggered controversy about whether to intervene and introduce a new population of wolves to

the island.

When America's first National Park, Yellowstone, was established in 1872, it still was home to

wolves, but they were already in decline throughout the region. Wolves were losing habitat to

agricultural development, and farmers and ranchers shot, trapped, and poisoned them to protect

livestock and promote the abundance of elk. They were routinely killed within the park as well.

The last pack in Yellowstone succumbed in 1926, although reports of single wolves continued

for some time. Unchecked, their primary prey, elk, responded by ravaging the vegetation. George

M. Wright, the first Chief of the NPS Wildlife Division, described the aftermath in 1932 as

"frightful":

One cannot find a juniper, or Douglas fir that has not been browsed to the reaching limit. Many

trees are dead from this. There is no reproduction. Willows are browsed and battered. The

sagebrush has been hammered down. � The soil has been packed by countless game trails and is

badly cut up. �

The pressure simply must be relieved or disaster will result. The suffering of the deer, elk,

antelope and sheep that are on this range is attested by its battered condition.

From 1995 to 1997 the NPS reintroduced wolves into Yellowstone, which encompasses parts of

Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The three-part rationale was that first, the purpose of protecting

areas like national parks is to ensure the health of the ecosystem; second, the health of

ecosystems inhabited by large herbivores depends vitally on the presence of predators; third, we

humans had caused the loss of predators, and so it was right for us to mitigate harms we had

caused against nature. This rationale is buttressed by the NPS's 1916 mission to "preserve

unimpaired" the natural and cultural beauty of the national parks "for the enjoyment, education,

and inspiration of this and future generations."

After much discussion and public comment, forty-one wild wolves from Canada and

northwestern Montana were released into Yellowstone. By 2015 there were more than a hundred

wolves counted in the park, where eleven packs were recorded. Hundreds more have spread

beyond the park, and the question of whether gray wolves ought to be listed as endangered in any

or all of the adjacent states has been the subject of ongoing political debate. A wolf population

on an island, of course, is less likely to cause friction of this kind.

How should the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone inform a decision about Isle Royale?

On Isle Royale, the life-and-death drama that is routine for any predator and prey blossomed for

the first three decades of wolves' presence--about eight generations by the clocks that wolves

keep. Then in 1980, the wolf population collapsed. Moose abundance tripled over the next

fifteen years. The forest took another hit. By the mid-1990s the forest had been depleted, and the

moose population crashed in 1996. Later we determined that the drastic decline in wolves very

likely had been triggered by canine parvovirus (CPV), a disease that humans inadvertently

spread to Isle Royale wolves. It is widely believed that CPV was transmitted by a visitor's dog;

although dogs are not allowed on Isle Royale, the rule is occasionally broken.

In 1997, a year after the moose population had collapsed and quite by coincidence, a new wolf

reached Isle Royale by crossing an ice bridge. By that time the wolves had been suffering greatly

from inbreeding. The immigrant offered a vital infusion of new genes. We investigated the

heritage and importance of the immigrant by analyzing DNA extracted from a decade's worth of

wolf scat stored in our freezers. Genetic analyses, field observations, and some deductive

reasoning combined to suggest that such genetic rescues must have occurred from time to time in

previous decades as well.

But the occasional genetic rescue of years gone by was only made possible by the frequent

formation of ice bridges. That frequency has decreased over the past five decades from about

eight per decade to about one per decade. The culprit is climate warming. Ice bridges are already

too rare for Isle Royale wolves to mitigate inbreeding on their own. With further warming, the

trend will only continue. Without intervention, the present population of wolves is almost certain

to vanish from the island, and the species will be unable to recolonize it.

Unlike bullets and poison, climate change is an insidious killer, hidden beneath a mantle of

multicausality. The evidence, however, is that by burning fossil fuels, humans are largely to

blame. The wolves of Isle Royale then present us with a question: what is our obligation to repair

unintended harms, harms that are an indirect consequence of our actions, harms arising from the

confluence of our actions and other circumstances beyond our control?

Today, only two wolves remain on the island. Although they are a female and a male, they are

terribly inbred--the female is the product of the male's mating with his own mother. It is unlikely

the population will recover on its own. One response to this situation is to "let nature take her

course." Isn't that the ultimate purpose of a protected area? The essential nature of Isle Royale is

its insularity, and local extinction is assuredly a natural phenomenon on small, isolated islands.

The loss of wolf predation should not be mitigated, but accepted, even celebrated.

In the summer of 1983, a young William Newmark packed his car, unfolded his map of western

Interstates, and toured the national parks. He was less interested in being awe-struck by grand

scenery than in meeting with park naturalists, looking for answers to two questions: What

mammals live in this park today? What mammals lived here decades ago, when this place first

became a park? The answers earned Newmark a Ph.D. and a place in the history of conservation

science for demonstrating one of the most basic principles of conservation. Most of the parks had

lost a number of species. They went locally extinct, quite naturally, because we had turned parks

into small, isolated islands--rich habitat surrounded by an ocean of land taken over for human

use.

A related, but distinct response to the loss of predation on Isle Royale is to simply argue against

intervention. Not so much because the value of extinction as a natural process should override

the value of predation, but because we should simply refrain. We interfere with nature

everywhere. Please, can't we set aside just a few, small places where we agree to simply keep our

hands off? Well-intended, robustly reasoned intervention is a slippery slope, and too often leads

to disastrous, unforeseen consequences.

In contrast, the justification for restoring wolf predation on Isle Royale flows from the idea that

the purpose of a protected area is to protect the health of its ecosystem. That raises the question:

what does it mean for an ecosystem to be "healthy"? That term is thorny enough when applied to

an organism. Environmental thinkers have been plagued by not knowing precisely how to

respond and have tended to consider only two kinds of answer, each of which suffers a serious

flaw.

To some, ecosystems are healthy to the extent that they are pristine, untouched by humans; that

is an essentially misanthropic view. To others, ecosystems are healthy to the extent that they

satisfy human interests--where the interest may be rather basic, such as clean water and products

made from wood, or the interest may be far less essential, such as the enjoyment of backpacking

or picnicking in an ecosystem brimming with native biodiversity. In any case, the shortcoming

with this view is its being essentially anthropocentric. This perspective is also very much aligned

with the rather stark thought that "there are just two things on this material earth--people and

natural resources," stated by a man known to some as a father of conservation, Gifford Pinchot.

These anthropocentric views frame a contemporary debate over whether conservation should be

motivated and guided primarily by an interest in human well-being or also by an interest for

nature itself--even in ways that have no bearing on human well-being.

That pair of impoverished answers can be circumvented by accepting the difficulty of defining

ecosystem health but also recognizing that the health of ecosystems inhabited by large herbivores

does depend on predation. That recognition is reflected in, for example, a report commissioned

by the NPS in 2012 to address climate change. That report (Revisiting Leopold: Resource

Stewardship in the National Parks), prepared by an august group of scholars, indicates that

ecosystem integrity "describes the quality of ecosystems that are largely self-sustaining and self-

regulating. Such ecosystems may possess � naturally functioning ecological processes such as

predation."

With those understandings, the justification to restore predation on Isle Royale continues with

the acknowledgment that we humans, to the extent that we are contributing to global warming,

are responsible for the loss of top predators on the island. Furthermore, Isle Royale was one of

the last forests, and perhaps is the last, where the ecological interactions among top predator,

large herbivore, and the forest were all spared human exploitation. We should use that

knowledge and reasoning to inform our relationship with the island.

Recall also how one response to the loss of predation on Isle Royale is to let nature take her

course. That thinking rises straight from the metaphysical (and misanthropic) belief that humans

and nature are fundamentally separate--that our interventions are inherently unnatural, and in that

respect harmful. An oft-repeated rejoinder to this belief is that humans and nature are one and the

same. That, however, may mislead many into thinking that well-meaning interventions cannot

really be so harmful. The wolves of Isle Royale resurrect an old conundrum: are humans and

nature fundamentally separate or one and the same?

For another perspective, consider that of the Ojibwe, who ceded the island by treaty to the United

States Government in the 1840s. They believe the wolf is their brother--not metaphorically, but

literally. Shortly after creating Heaven and Earth, Gichi Manito, the Great Spirit, created

Anishinaabe, the original human, and Ma'iingan, the wolf. They were created as brothers and

tasked with traveling throughout all creation together to honor the plants and animals by giving

them names. Anishinaabe and Ma'iingan grew close and realized they were siblings with all the

animals and plants. When the two had completed their task, Gichi Manito informed them that

they would go separate ways. The Great Spirit foretold that both would be hated, hunted, and

misunderstood; ultimately, they would share the same fate.

Discovering the right relationship with a sibling is often difficult. But isolation, alienation, and

refraining from intervention as a matter of principle are certainly not solutions. We cannot

protect parks from all the harms of climate change. Understanding what can and should be

protected will be fiercely difficult. Given the distinctiveness of what has been lost and the ease of

restoration, the wolves of Isle Royale seem worthy of our reparation. Our response to climate

change could bring redemption, but only if it encourages us to realize that we are siblings with

nature.

The National Park Service has received thousands of public comments on this issue. About

eighty-six percent of them express the view that wolves belong on Isle Royale even if their

presence requires human intervention. The most common reason cited is to protect ecosystem

health. To learn more about the Isle Royale project, visit www.isleroyalewolf.org.