Will wilderness bring back wolves?

The Return of the Wolf: Reflections on the Future of Wolves in the Northeast; four essays, edited by John Elder; published by University Press of New England and Middlebury College Press as part of the Middlebury Bicentennial Series in Environmental Studies; 175 pages; hard cover.

reviewed by Bethany M. Dunbar

If Vermont becomes more wild, will wolves return?

Should they be brought back by humans as has been done in other places?

These are two core questions explored in the four long essays within this book.  The answers are as hard to pin down as the shadow of a wolf in a northern forest.

The four authors could no doubt all be classified as environmentalists, but do not get the impression the book is one-sided.  Instead it raises and explores many questions about the possible environmental, economic, social, and political effects of wolves.

Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, says bringing wolves back would be good for the human spirit, but he wonders if that act would really be more for our benefit than for the wolves.

John Theberge, a scientist, writes about the complicated nature of the changing ecology in the Northeast and discusses what affect wolves might have.

Kristin DeBoer, director of the environmental group RESTORE, describes her own reasons for working on this effort.

And novelist and nature writer Rick Bass gives impressions from Montana, where he has been personally involved in environmental protection.  He writes about how sustainable forestry practices and “green” certification for forest products can help.

“A species is not easy to define,” writes Mr. Theberge, the scientist, in a section of his essay called, “The coyote connection.”

In Ontario and North Carolina, coyotes and wolves have interbred in a process he calls “gene swamping.”

“Coyote-wolf hybrids are common today throughout the northeastern United States, and they push the vacant wolf niche.”

He says eastern coyotes eat deer and beavers rather than settling for mice and rabbits.  They behave more like wolves, too, running in packs.  He suggests that instead of trying to establish a pack of wolves with pure wolf genes, a goal might be to allow the two species to interbreed in hopes that a larger, more wolf-like coyote would be the outcome.

“Such a goal for species recovery — gene pool shift rather than species reproduction — is unique, never having been attempted or even contemplated before.  The Northeast offers a grand opportunity to try it.”

Mr. McKibben’s essay talks about the social reaction to wolves.

“The Red Riding Hood crowd is smaller now, and mostly older,” he says.  “At least as many people have some Farley Mowat story stashed away in their hearts.  When Defenders of Wildlife commissioned a poll in 1996, a huge majority of New Yorkers, and a substantial majority of Adirondackers, favored bringing back the wolf....”

“We need something new to consume. We need wolf howl.”

That howl might, ironically, provide us as a culture with an antidote for consumerism, he suggests.

Kristin DeBoer writes about dreams of wolves, and her work as a wolf advocate.  She is an advocate not only for wolves, but for the wilderness that will provide their habitat.

“During the last century, the recovery of wild nature has occurred only as a result of our choices — whether intentional or unintentional.”

Her essay includes a definition of wilderness, spelled out in federal law in 1964, as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

She says that right now there might be enough habitat in the Northeast, but there is no guarantee of that in the future.

“Ultimately, the wolf’s fate will be decided in the meeting houses and halls of democracy.  And democracy can be messy.  Animated by passions, our citizens’ voices are often loud and hard to listen to.  But this is where we must place our trust for wolf recovery to succeed.

“Wolf recovery is not about us versus them.  It is about creating a culture of acceptance and generosity, not only for the wolf and other wildlife, but for each other.  It is about recognizing the rights of the wolf, as one of the original citizens of the North Woods....

“It is about dreaming a big enough dream to restore and heal a broken landscape.”

The essay by Rick Bass is the longest and most poetic of the four.

One of his main points is that we need wilderness to counterbalance all the power of giant corporations.  The wilderness areas are “places where people can go, on our hands and knees, if necessary; places where the corporations cannot follow.”

He hopes there is still room for some middle ground as habitat for most of us humans.

Mr. Bass uses a glacier as a metaphor for social and political changes that might allow wolves back into the physical landscape.  A glacier would seem to be moving slowly or not at all if one human watched it.  But that’s only from the confines of time as we can feel it, one by one.

The passage that sticks in my mind most from the whole book is this one:

“Again and again, watching a raven fly through the bright summer sky, I’ll have that repeated thought; that wolves are comprised of light.  The plants that deer eat grow in that sunlight, convert by the mysteries of life’s code that sunlight into cell material, which the deer eat, before in turn being eaten by the wolves.  (After the wolves catch the deer, the ravens, too, share briefly, in this feast of light.)”

If so, then we humans must have a little of that light in us too.  Let’s hope we use it well.

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