The wolf in all of us

The return of the gray wolf to the American West isn't just a triumph for conservationists. It's a victory over the darkness in our own human nature.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Jun 10, 2004 | When the corpse of a female gray wolf turned up along I-70 west of Idaho Springs, Colo., on Saturday, it was the first confirmed wolf sighting in Colorado in 69 years. The young animal, identified as a member of a Yellowstone pack by the radio collar she wore, had traveled hundreds of miles south from Wyoming.

One dead wolf might not seem like much to get excited about, but the female canis lupus, who was likely on a long-distance search for a mate when she became roadkill, represents a new frontier in the return of wolves to the West. Reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, the wolves have thrived, multiplying in numbers and dispersing to form new packs and seek out new territories.

In just a decade, the presence of the predator has reshaped the park's ecosystem. Elk feeding behavior has changed so much that cottonwoods, willows and aspen are making a comeback, setting in motion a ripple effect for many other creatures.

"You had beavers that came back into the park for the first time in years and years. The dams they make create wetlands, and with wetlands you get a larger population of ducks and otters. It just kind of cascades down through the ecosystem," says Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit that has assisted the wolf comeback by financially compensating ranchers who lose livestock to the carnivore. "The return of the wolf has been called one of our great conservation success stories of the 20th century."

The gray wolf might be coming back, but, paradoxically, the animal is thriving at the same time that both national parks and many other endangered species are facing an avalanche of renewed threats. Although President Bush pledged early in his administration to "restore and renew" national parks, the nonpartisan watchdog group National Parks Conservation Association gives his administration a D-minus for its management of the nation's most popular public lands.

Over the last three years, the Bush administration has not voluntarily added a single animal to the protected list, per the strictures of the Endangered Species Act, says Schlickeisen. New species have only achieved protection via court order. The lack of interest in preserving wildlife makes the wolves' success story all the more remarkable: The gray wolf, historically one of the most hated and persecuted predators in the West, and even now still a source of resentment for ranchers and farmers in Wyoming and other states, is doing just fine, with help from the feds.

Few people understand the evolving story of wolves in the West more intimately than Renee Askins, a wildlife ecologist who spent 15 years advocating for the return of the carnivores to Yellowstone, as she relates in her memoir, "Shadow Mountain." The founder of the Wolf Fund, an organization that declared victory and shut down after achieving its singular goal of bringing the gray wolf back to the park, Askins has a breadth of knowledge about the history of the wolf that is unmatched.

For Askins, the fear and loathing that led to the elimination of wolves was an attempt to conquer and achieve mastery over the darkest of human fears. The resulting massacre was a moral wrong that only restoration can help assuage. By phone from Jackson, Wyo., she explained why the wolf embodies such psychological significance in the West -- and why the Bush administration, no friend to the environment, has stood up to those who would reexterminate the gray wolf all over again.

Next Page: A showdown between Wyoming and the federal government

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