00:00:00.000For the Wild podcast is brought to you in part by support from our partner, the Calliopeia
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00:00:30.840Hi for the wild listeners, Ayana here.
00:00:33.820I'd like to take a moment and offer my gratitude to the city of Bend, Oregon for generously supporting our work.
00:00:40.500As we approach the new year, my mind takes me to the magnificent winterscapes of the Pacific Northwest.
00:00:46.840I imagine the forest glistening in its icy transformation,
00:00:50.960boughs hanging heavy with snow, and the scent of pine trees filling the cool air.
00:00:55.820From the contemplative silence of the forested Three Sisters Wilderness,
00:01:00.000to the dramatic slopes of Mount Batchelor's Peaks.
00:01:03.460This is such a special time of year to bundle up and explore the winter beauty of Bend.
00:01:08.300We are so thankful for those who tend these wild places
00:01:11.620and the experiences of reconnection, adventure, and reflection they inspire.
00:01:17.860Bend, Oregon is a member of Pledge for the Wild,
00:01:20.920a group of mountain towns committed to supporting sustainable tourism
00:01:24.100by encouraging visitors to give back to local organizations
00:01:27.520that care for these places throughout the year.
00:01:30.000If you're planning your next winter vacation, consider visiting Bend, Oregon and help preserve these majestic landscapes for all by giving back at PledgeWildBend.com.
00:02:19.760in defense of the defenseless parts of nature
00:02:24.760mike has served as the executive director of the turner endangered species fund
00:02:34.340and advisor to the turner biodiversity divisions since he co-founded both with ted turner in june
00:02:40.7401997 prior to that mike has worked for the u.s fish and wildlife service and national park service
00:02:48.140since 1981. During his employment with the Department of Interior, Mike served as the
00:02:54.240leader of historic efforts to restore red wolves to the southeastern U.S. and gray wolves to
00:03:00.400Yellowstone National Park. He also conducted important research on the impacts of oil and
00:03:05.860gas development on grizzly bears in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, predation costs for
00:03:11.560gray wolves in Alaska, black bear movements in northeastern North Carolina, and dingo ecology
00:03:17.860in Australia. In 2006, Mike was elected to the Montana legislature, where he served as the
00:03:25.060representative for House District 66 in Bozeman until 2012, where he was elected to the Montana
00:03:31.800Senate. Welcome to the show, Mike. I feel so grateful to be connecting with you today as a
00:03:39.500fellow conservationist so deeply immersed in this work. Oh, Ayanna, it is very much my privilege and
00:03:46.220my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Well, within these circles, we often organize and orient around
00:03:52.960the notion of sustaining life. And in preparing for this interview, I was immediately struck by
00:03:58.980the way you speak and write about the biological necessity of death. In an interview with Mountain
00:04:04.500in Prairie podcast you share, quote, all of life that we see around us, the fantastic forms so
00:04:11.200well adapted to local challenges, are a function of death. Evolution drives by death, end quote.
00:04:18.380And what has drawn you to build lifelong alliances with predators like the coyote and the gray wolf,
00:04:24.520so-called deliverers of death? And in your answer, perhaps you could also speak to the depth that
00:04:29.580these species bring to our ecological systems and the phenomenon of trophic cascades.
00:04:34.500My work with coyotes many years ago back, heaven's sakes, it would have been the early 1980s.
00:04:40.980A wolf researcher by the name of Dave Meech said to me, I don't have any room on my field crew
00:04:48.220right now. I suggest that you go study coyotes. Back in the early 1980s, gray wolves were very,
00:04:55.540very uncommon in the United States. There were only maybe a thousand gray wolves in
00:05:01.100northeastern Minnesota that that was it so Dave's program was the only game in town if you wanted to
00:05:06.540work with gray wolf so I took Dave's advice to heart and conducted the study of coyote food
00:05:12.220habits in Illinois and published that study and as soon as I did that within about a year I went
00:05:19.560right back to Dr. Beach and I said okay well you did exactly what you told me to do now do you have
00:05:24.400an opening. And he did. That was in 1981 that I began working with Dave and Ayana. I've had the
00:05:33.060good fortune to work on wolf recovery and conservation and research on a near daily basis
00:05:40.200ever since. The reason that wolves made so much sense to me as a lens for examining
00:05:46.700opportunities to contribute. The wolf is a fantastic species for illuminating all sorts of
00:05:53.420problems that are only at best tangentially related to the gray wolf. Wolf recovery, wolf
00:05:59.520restoration, wolf research is always about more than gray wolves. Wolves can be almost in many
00:06:06.420ways viewed as a trim tab. You may not know what a trim tab is, but many years ago, I learned how
00:06:11.140to fly small aircraft anticipating working in remote country where working out of a plane was
00:06:17.220sometimes essential. A trim tab is a device in the plane that gives you a mechanical advantage
00:06:23.620over portions of the wing to make the wing behave properly so the plane can be flown properly.
00:06:31.280There's such great force over the wings. You need a mechanical advantage, a system of pulleys
00:06:37.460to be able to move the wing and manage the wing in a fashion that allows the plane to
00:06:43.040perform properly. It's the trim tab that allows you that control. A small movement of the trim tab
00:06:50.040can create a great opportunity for the plane. A small movement with wolf recovery can create a
00:06:56.800great opportunity for conservation in general. Gray wolves are a wonderful way for examining our
00:07:03.200relationship with Mother Earth, which has been clearly out of whack for a long, long time.
00:07:09.060And once we come to accept that fact, then we're on the road to finding a new relationship going forward where it's possible, I think, and impossible to imagine peace, prosperity, and justice for more of human life and, at least for me, non-human life, which is essential too.
00:07:29.000now on to trophy cascades well gee whiz as i said in that mountain prairie podcast it is true that
00:07:37.740the wondrous diversity of life that we see all around us is a function of all of that life trying
00:07:45.040to stay one step ahead of death and so we know predation matters predation is the process whereby
00:07:52.260death is delivered so if you're a predator like a gray wolf and you exist by delivering death
00:07:59.300you have to matter you have to matter in an evolutionary sense because it is death that
00:08:05.020sort of sits at the knife's edge of of evolution improving form so they can better stay one step
00:08:11.880ahead of death specifically with gray wolves there are very good studies that show that if
00:08:17.380wolves are common enough for a long enough period of time, their predatory activities will lead to
00:08:25.300a change in the system, principally by reducing the number of ungulates in an area. Ungulates,
00:08:31.680of course, I don't just hoofed mammals, deer and elk and moose, so ungulates, if wolf predation can
00:08:37.860reduce their numbers, if wolf predation can cause them to behave differently, forage differently,
00:08:44.580those changes in numbers and behavior on the part of the ungulates can bring about system-wide
00:08:51.100changes in the ecology of a setting that's fundamentally all a trophic cascade means is
00:08:56.700that the activity of one level of the trophic system the gray wolf would be one level of the
00:09:02.000food system the trophic system its activities can create a cascading effect through all the other
00:09:08.020levels. If elk in Yellowstone National Park, as an example, if elk are less common, that provides
00:09:15.000an opportunity for willows and aspen to experience a release. When the willows and aspens grow big,
00:09:22.220tall, and healthy, that creates lots of opportunities for other members of the system,
00:09:26.900like pastoring birds and beavers. And of course, the birds and the beavers operate and exist at a
00:09:33.360different level of the trophic system. So gray wolf predation can create this cascading effect
00:09:38.200that spills through the food chain, that spills through the trophic system, thereby creating
00:09:43.840greater ecological resiliency and integrity. But for gray wolves to operate as those ecological
00:09:49.840engineers affecting a trophic cascade, they have to be fairly common and they have to be in place
00:09:56.940for an extended period of time. And so really the take-home message from trophic cascades isn't
00:10:02.200gray wolves. No, that's not the case. Lots of things serve as predators, cougars and blackberries
00:10:08.620and grizzly bears and coyotes. They're all important predators too. The important part
00:10:13.640of trophic cascade that we should touch on today is predation, predation delivered by all of these
00:10:19.300species that make a living by killing things. Thank you, Mike, for explaining trophic cascades
00:10:27.520so beautifully I could imagine the ecosystem as you spoke. Simply. Simply. That's the best way
00:10:36.740for me to view things is simple. And the systems are exceedingly complicated, but the fundamentals
00:10:41.940are pretty simple. If life matters, then death matters. If prey matter, then predators matter.
00:10:48.460It really is just that simple. I'd like to dive into the conservation and restoration work you've
00:10:55.600done over the years with gray wolves, particularly within the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.
00:11:01.640And to begin, I think it could be helpful to ground our listeners in the history of
00:11:05.120this great species that once thrived in abundance across the so-called United States.
00:11:10.920I imagine the nearly 250,000 to 500,000 wild wolves that used to roam freely across the
00:11:18.460lower 48 states, later reduced to the brink of extinction in the 1950s, with numbers dipping
00:11:24.480into the low 300s. So could you share with us the story of the gray wolf illuminating the
00:11:30.700differences between the vilified mythic wolf and the adaptive, powerful creature that you've come
00:11:36.160to know? Sure. I need to listen more carefully, but did you say historically 200,000 to 500,000
00:11:43.440gray wolves in the United States? That's what I was reading. A quarter of a million to half a
00:11:47.960million. I would guess, yeah, I would guess there were far more than that, which makes this story
00:11:52.920even more compelling. Gray wolves were historically one of the most widely distributed large mammals
00:11:58.020in North America. You could find gray wolves everywhere from coast to coast, east to west,
00:12:02.560north to south. You could find gray wolves in the grasslands. You could find them in the forests.
00:12:07.120You could find them in the desert. You could find them in swamps. You could find gray wolves
00:12:11.360everywhere where there was something bigger than themselves to eat. A fundamental difference between
00:12:17.260coyotes and gray wolves is based on their food habits. Coyotes are, on average, designed to kill
00:12:24.760things smaller than themselves. It doesn't mean that a coyote won't, on occasion, kill a deer.
00:12:30.140But on average, they're subsisting on items that are smaller than themselves. In contrast,
00:12:36.320the gray wolf is designed physically, socially, intellectually, designed to kill things bigger
00:12:43.380than itself. Doesn't mean that a gray wolf won't kill a snowshoe hare on occasion, but it does mean
00:12:48.620that gray wolves are hardwired to kill things bigger than themselves. Because of that, they were
00:12:55.880seen as a direct threat to the settling of the United States. Part of the manifest destiny that
00:13:03.080guided the settling of this country was that the wild places and wild things that early settlers
00:13:09.560encountered had to be subdued. They had to be commanded so that they could be tamed and
00:13:16.020controlled, so that the landscape provided in a more predictable manner those things that the
00:13:22.520settlers wanted. We should find it quite intriguing that the settlers took what is arguably one of the
00:13:29.480greatest assemblages of mammalian biomass the world has ever produced in the form of the plains
00:13:36.300bison. They took that tremendous abundance of life and drove it to the brink of extinction.
00:13:44.780The massacre of the bison is a tremendously sad story in the history of this country. You know
00:13:52.020what they did in response? They replaced the bison with European cattle. They took this most
00:14:00.820common large mammal, a fantastic herbivore, and replaced it with what is, without doubt,
00:14:09.040an exotic species from Europe. All of the cattle that were used to settle this country came from
00:14:16.460Europe after the native bison had been nearly completely destroyed. Now, it is true, a massacred
00:14:24.000bison is a way to promote the subjugation of Native Americans as well, but that was all0.96
00:14:29.580important parcel of settling the big wild landscape that was the United States back in0.97
00:14:35.780the day. Part of that was also creating an opportunity to command gray wolves to near
00:14:42.440zero. And so the gray wolves were subjected to a war, a war that lasted, oh my Lord, I honor the
00:14:50.080war and the gray wolf lasted well over 200 years. It was the war that was fought with the most
00:14:54.580murderous means and as the war ended by the late 1950s, a war that began in the late 1600s ended
00:15:03.520by the late 1950s, you could find this most common large mammal, the gray wolf, only in
00:15:10.760northeastern Minnesota, represented by a few hundred individuals and a few animals, 10, 12,
00:15:19.16015 animals on Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. We purposely took this most common
00:15:26.600large mammal, the gray wolf, and purposely drove it to the brink of extinction. Things improved,
00:15:32.620admittedly, in the mid-1970s with passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The gray wolf's
00:15:38.840one of the first species listed under that most important federal law. The listing brought forth
00:15:44.280recovery programs that eventually led to the restoration of gray wolves in the northern
00:15:51.420Rocky Mountains, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. It led to the recovery of gray wolves in the Great
00:15:57.020Lake states, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. It led to a hopeful recovery of the Mexican gray wolf,
00:16:03.460Canis lupus baleii, in the southwest. And so today, there would probably be, let's assume
00:16:10.3005,000 or so gray wolves in the Great Lakes states and 2,000 gray wolves in the northern Rocky
00:16:17.300Mountains and about 150 Mexican wolves in the border country. That would give us, well, a little
00:16:23.360over 7,000 animals that have been recovered across about 15% of the species historical range.
00:16:31.420That's good progress. It certainly does not detract from the fact, though, that the gray wolf remains
00:16:37.900extirpated from approximately 85% of its historical range. The destruction of the
00:16:45.160gray wolf was like the American plain spice and like the passenger pigeon
00:16:49.380represents a very, very sad chapter in the history of this country.
00:16:56.780I was noting that the government's outright campaign of extermination against the gray wolf
00:17:03.400officially ended in the 1960s. And since that time, restoration projects have popped up across
00:17:09.140the West, like the infamous program in Yellowstone National Park in 1995. But despite these efforts,
00:17:16.560I think that these notions of proper cultivation, civilization, and domination over all that is
00:17:23.320wild continue to live on in our collective American imagery, particularly in the West.
00:17:28.880And I wonder how you see this era of human supremacy continue to play out in our cultural and policy handlings with the gray wolf.
00:17:37.340I don't think it's a cultural predisposition to treat some wildlife with total disregard.
00:17:43.760I think it is a principally a consequence of one camp.
00:17:49.180And as a biologist, your listeners need to know, I am I'm a big believer that our evolutionary past matters.
00:17:56.380I think you are Pleistocene woman. I am Pleistocene man. Our Pleistocene roots made us who we are
00:18:05.280today. We can't deny the fact that for most of our evolutionary past, we existed in small bands of
00:18:12.120hunter-gatherers. For heaven's sakes, agriculture hasn't been practiced for more than about 8,000
00:18:17.280years, and yet you can find clear evidence of sapiens, homo sapiens, walking this planet 200,000
00:18:24.680years ago, 300,000 years ago. Let's assume that our evolutionary clock started 250,000 years ago.
00:18:31.880And over the last 8,000 years, we've been able to grow crops and take advantage of domesticated
00:18:38.880animals, which means over 200 some thousand years of our evolutionary past, we were hunter-gatherers,
00:18:46.460place to see men and women they were decidedly tribal very social with one another but very
00:18:54.980very tribal that's how we survived I think we're still tribal and so I will have you believe that
00:19:02.580the principal problem of disregard for well is a principally a function of one tribe and I can
00:19:10.600picket this tribe because it's my tribe. It's the old white guy tribe. It's the old white guys0.92
00:19:17.200that still insist that we dominate landscapes. It's the old white guy tribe that insists that we0.89
00:19:24.980kill wildlife needlessly. Just a story to that effect. In the last legislative session in early0.97
00:19:31.5802019, I brought a bill to the Montana Senate that said we're going to prohibit the killing of coyotes
00:19:39.220by snowmobiles. In the state of Montana, you can hunt a coyote off a snowmobile. You can run it and
00:19:45.560you can run it and you can run it. You can run it so long and so hard that the coyote just drops
00:19:50.740with exhaustion. It's not dead. It's just so pooped it can't move. At that point, you can use
00:19:57.460your snowmobile to run it over repeatedly to kill it. In other words, it's lawful to torture the0.99
00:20:04.380coyote to death. I said with my bill, we're better than that, folks. We should pass a bill that says
00:20:09.920you can't torture the coyote to death. At the point of killing the animal, you have to deliver
00:20:16.100the death blow humanely. You run it to the point of exhaustion. At that point, you have to shoot it
00:20:23.220or kill it somehow quickly and humanely. You can't run it over repeatedly with your snowmobile. Well,1.00
00:20:29.400the bill did not make it out of the Senate Fish and Game Committee. So I said, okay, okay, all right.
00:20:34.380As any senator, I then had the option to go to the full Senate and say with a motion,
00:20:38.980I move to remove my coyote killing bill from the Fish and Game Committee and bring it to the full
00:20:45.680Senate for a proper discussion. So when it got stuck in committee, I was going to blast my bill
00:20:52.300from the committee for consideration by the full Senate. Before I did that, a few days before I did
00:20:57.640that, I went to my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle and I said, please help me with
00:21:03.500this last motion. You may ultimately choose to vote against the bill, but let's at least have
00:21:08.880a proper discussion. Montana is better than allowing coyotes to be tortured to death.
00:21:15.920So I stand up two days later on the Senate floor and I say, Mr. Chairman, I move to remove
00:21:22.800Senate Bill 212 from the Senate Fish and Game Committee and bring it before the full Senate
00:21:28.660for consideration. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As is the habit, then the chairman says, Senator Phillips,
00:21:34.440and I have a moment or two to speak on the rationale of my blast motion. So I said to
00:21:39.440my colleagues in the Senate, I said, members of the Senate, this is an important bill. We should
00:21:44.040consider it as a full body. As you consider that note, if we knew of a 12-year-old boy in our
00:21:54.160neighborhoods that was using his bicycle to run over the local cat. We would be deeply concerned
00:22:01.240for that young boy's mental health. This is no different than that. Please vote for this blast
00:22:06.820motion so we can properly consider this bill. At that point, Ayanna, we voted and my blast motion
00:22:15.240failed on a party line vote. 18 Democrats, myself and my 17 colleagues voted yes. 32 Republicans
00:22:22.760voted no. I was deeply embarrassed by that vote. I had served with many of these people for 14
00:22:27.920years. I knew them. I considered them colleagues. I considered some friends. I was asking something
00:22:34.580very simple, let's not torture coyotes to death. And they said, no, they wouldn't even, they wouldn't
00:22:40.680even join me to stand up and at least have a discussion. Ayanna, at that point, at that point,
00:22:46.300I could no longer pray with them. Every day when the Montana Senate begins its work, and I don't
00:22:53.740know what other state legislatures do, but I know what we do every day, we would stand and we would
00:22:58.560pray and then pledge allegiance to the flag and then begin our work. From that day forward,
00:23:05.760at the beginning of any session, I would step out into the anteroom and I would stand quietly
00:23:53.620And I just am taking a moment to let your response sit.
00:24:01.940And I want to tell you in this moment that I am so grateful for you and I respect you so much for your courage and your convictions. You're really such a unique person.
00:24:17.540and i think a lot about this typical american western identity or as you put it this white
00:24:27.620man tribe identity and you know it's as one that has been foraged around a shared sense of pride
00:24:34.460and wilderness and outdoorsmanship and a settler mentality of conquest and rugged individualism
00:24:40.220and i feel a sense of hollowness around this profession of belonging and ownership
00:24:45.040the grizzly bear that remains at the center of the california flag but only in its symbolic form
00:24:51.200as this species has vanished from our forested landscapes our mountains our waters and these
00:24:57.880creatures remain at the center of our collective mythology but they're simultaneously revered and
00:25:03.300hated and just listening to your your stories and and how you are connected so deeply to the
00:25:11.840land and these creatures it gives me pause and i just want to say thank you before we
00:25:18.800continue on yeah you're welcome i wish i was more effective uh but i learned a long time ago i can't
00:25:27.480be responsible for other people's decisions i can barely figure out how to make my own decisions
00:25:33.020And I will say that we sometimes celebrate wildness and symbols only, the grizzly bear and the California flag, in part because we're increasingly living in a world of ecological illiterates.
00:25:48.880People don't understand that everything that we need, and when you cut it deep enough, everybody needs food, cover, water, space.
00:25:58.220all living organisms in one form or fashion need food cover water space most people today 99.999
00:26:07.040percent of the people today buy what they need you buy food cover water space there's not enough
00:26:13.600subsistence hunters left in the world to matter and in the miracle sense everybody's buying food
00:26:20.320cover water space so the marketplace really matters and yet we place so much emphasis on
00:26:25.960the marketplace, that we forget that it sits on landscapes the world over. Absent healthy
00:26:34.180landscapes the world over, marketplaces struggle. If marketplaces struggle, all of those of us
00:26:42.880who buy our food, cover water, space, have no choice but to struggle too. We are burdened
00:26:51.880with ecological illiteracy i'm on with you today because i think these types of podcasts can promote
00:26:59.620literacy and i think from the perspective of living in greater harmony with one another
00:27:08.480and mother earth we need to be more literate i absolutely agree with you mike and oh yeah there's
00:27:16.520so much to say about that and i feel like it's also impossible but there's things and well but
00:27:23.480there's things to do there's things that we should i mean i i'm not guided by despair i'm guided by
00:27:28.600hope but my hope is guided by what i think are good facts rooted in reality like many people
00:27:35.240don't understand how systems operate they don't understand the importance of wild and self-willed
00:27:40.440nature to humankind's future. I am guided by a determination to try to contribute to a better
00:27:47.840way forward. So I don't want the listeners to get down in the dumps. I'm sorry I shared my
00:27:52.320coyote story and my inability to pray. But it drives home the fact that nearly everybody that
00:27:57.480voted against my coyote bill, well, on the Republican side of the aisle, in the 2019
00:28:03.580session in Montana. They were all old white guys except one woman, I'm sorry, two women0.73
00:28:11.480and one Native American. So there's 38 of them, 35 were all white guys.0.87
00:29:27.540It's impossible to tell these stories without calling upon the colonial roots of land management
00:29:40.080in the U.S. that have perpetrated egregious acts of violence, often in the name of conservation
00:29:45.640itself. And I feel like you were speaking a bit to this at the beginning of our conversation.
00:29:50.160The wars waged against Gray Wolf, the grizzly, the coyote, the buffalo, have also been wars
00:29:55.700against the indigenous peoples that have actively tended the lands and waters of turtle island
00:30:00.440since the beginning of time in what is now yellowstone national park for example the u.s
00:30:06.420army was stationed from 1886 to 1918 and forcibly displaced the awanichi from their tribal homelands
00:30:14.860this logic of extermination that sought to sever the sacred bonds of life in these places0.96
00:30:20.780pave the way for the construction of untouched quote-unquote wilderness for the exclusive use
00:30:26.740of recreation mass tourism and resource extraction so do you see indigenous sovereignty as an
00:30:33.580important thread to weave into a new model of conservation and how can these lineages of
00:30:39.060violence inform how we go about protecting spaces in the future well certainly i agree that
00:30:46.000Indigenous sovereignty matters, sovereignty has to matter, or nations all across the planet don't have sufficient standing.
00:30:56.640In our own small way, at Team Turner, we're working to promote, for example, bison restoration on tribal lands throughout the United States as a celebration of the tribe's sovereignty.
00:31:08.000Create a future of their own making, and ideally that future would include Plains bison as a fixed feature on their landscapes.
00:31:15.300How does that translate into more open lands conservation, if that was your question?
00:31:23.800I think that large-scale changes, changes that operate at sufficient scale to matter, have to be effective through a political process.
00:31:33.660As much as I regret my ineffectiveness as a politician, I have thought long and hard about the great collective endeavor that is politics in the United States and accepting for the marketplace.
00:31:50.720I don't know of any greater collective human endeavor across the long sweep of our history
00:31:58.580than politics. It's how we move forward when we were small bands of hunter-gatherers. It's how
00:32:07.680we move forward as great nations of people. And I would hope that your listeners, if they're
00:32:15.480committed to a more peaceful, prosperous, and just future for human and non-human life,
00:32:20.500they would consider putting their name on the ballot and running for office. Many of the issues
00:32:25.540that touch on peace, prosperity, and justice for human and non-human life are not properly considered
00:32:32.360in a political context today because people serving aren't sensitive to the issues. One
00:32:40.180that has guided our work at the Turner Endangered Species Fund and certainly guides our work
00:32:45.440to advance wolf recovery to Western Colorado, which is the next great and probably the last
00:32:51.900great restoration campaign for the gray wolf in the United States, is acknowledgement of
00:32:56.900the increasing seriousness of the extinction crisis.
00:33:00.940And I know when you think about that, it is a most unique circumstance.
00:33:05.500It is truly a crisis of the most damning kind.
00:33:11.120We know from history that along the big sweep of time that this planet has supported multicellular
00:33:17.660life, let's say 300 million years, 400 million years, there have been, prior to the current
00:33:26.100extension crisis, five previous such events.
00:33:30.140The fifth occurred about 65 million years ago when an asteroid measuring something like six miles across and traveling at something like 25,000 miles an hour slammed into the planet off of the coast of what is now the Yucatan Peninsula.
00:33:48.380And fundamentally, in a geological instant, ended the reign of dinosaurs.
00:33:56.940It's been in place at least since the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s.
00:34:01.600Probably, technically, we could find evidence of the crisis dating back centuries, if not thousands of years before that.
00:34:10.720Humankind has always been hard on the planet and the non-human components of life.
00:34:16.120So when you think about the extinction crisis, I would have you believe it's the clarion call for recognizing and need or adjust our relationship with Mother Earth.
00:34:25.220because it is so absolute. There is no workaround to the extinction crisis. It is patently
00:34:32.820absolute. Another heaven and earth would have to pass, along with a great deal of luck for any
00:34:39.400extinct species to ever rise again. That makes it, I think, a clarion call. And it's also a
00:34:46.400clarion call because it should matter no matter who you are. No matter who you are, the extinction
00:34:52.100crisis should matter so let's assume you're a person of faith well i would pose the question
00:34:58.640how can you love the creator and not love the creation and if you love something how can you
00:35:06.500stand by and watch it needlessly destroyed without rising up in defense or let's assume
00:35:13.020for a moment that you're a secular humanist and rather than faith you believe that what matters
00:35:20.780most is facts and data and logic and empiricism well the best science tells us that the fate of
00:35:28.520humanity has always been and will always be connected the health of local landscapes the
00:35:35.420world over the extinction crisis makes clear that those landscapes are not the least bit healthy
00:35:42.340no matter who you are the extinction crisis should matter
00:35:46.720mm-hmm yes i'm with you mike i'd also be curious to hear about your thoughts around a future of
00:35:57.320coexistence with gray wolves and i know this can be an incredibly polarizing issue especially on
00:36:03.420the front lines of reintroduction projects where people have competing visions of land use whether
00:36:09.080towards conservation hunting or livestock production and as an advocate for the gray wolf
00:36:14.440within this highly debated arena, how do you present the case of restoration to people
00:36:20.220who perhaps feel fearful or in defense of their safety and livelihood?
00:36:25.520And what is needed to ultimately reconcile these differences?
00:36:29.700Great wolves are actually really easy to coexist with.
00:36:34.040The only thing that's ever gotten in the way of wolf recovery,
00:36:38.580the only thing that stands as an obstacle to coexisting with great wolves
00:36:43.560is the mythical wolf people have this sense that gray wolves have an almost supernatural ability
00:36:50.840to exercise their predatory will on a whim and by doing so they create a wake of death and
00:36:59.000desolation and destruction everywhere they go oh gee was nothing could be further from the truth
00:37:04.180for the gray wolf life is a daily struggle to survive most hunting attempts by gray wolves
00:37:10.800failed. Starvation is a common cause of death. Hunting is a dangerous activity. I did a study
00:37:17.500years ago of over 200 gray wolf skulls that had been collected by the Alaska Department of Fish
00:37:24.660and Game. These were animals that Alaska Department of Fish and Game had shot in an attempt to
00:37:30.260minimize predation pressure on a local caribou herd or a local moose population. So these animals
00:37:35.280were killed by being shot. I looked at their skulls for evidence of blunt force trauma. How
00:37:42.220often did they get kicked in the head by a moose, for example? Fully a quarter of the skull showed
00:37:49.060a broken jaw, broken nose, broken skull. A good friend of mine, Rolf Peterson, Dr. Peterson from
00:37:55.060Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, has studied prey wolves on Isle of
00:39:39.220I really appreciate your deep understanding of this issue
00:39:42.360and how you're able to speak with so much compassion
00:39:45.040to the many sides of this complex topic.
00:39:48.480I'd also like to take a step back and look at this from more of a systemic level.
00:39:54.100An article published in National Geographic by Emma Maris reports that, quote, today, only 4% of the world's mammals by weight are wild. The other 96% are livestock and ourselves, end quote.
00:40:07.180And this statistics illustrates such a staggering image of our biosphere, and I think speaks to the way industry has privileged certain species over the lives of many others, creating landscapes stripped of all biological diversity purely for human consumption of one kind or another.
00:40:25.500So could you speak to the ways that cattle ranching and grazing rights have been prioritized both in the past and present terms?
00:40:33.100Well, we've already spoken about the destruction of the Plains Bison.
00:40:39.400That was very much justified on the grounds that the grasslands needed to provide forage for European cattle.
00:40:48.880We spoke about the destruction of the gray wolf.
00:40:52.380It was the cattlemen that developed a pathological hatred of the gray wolf to make room for European cattle.
00:40:59.340The grizzly bear was pushed to the brink of extinction in the United States to make room for cattle.
00:41:04.900Even to this day, even to this day, predators continue to be persecuted to make room for cattle.
00:41:11.900We have achieved recovery in both a biological and legal sense for the gray wolf in the northern Rocky Mountains, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho.
00:41:20.660But we continue to persecute them with a great deal of determination.
00:41:25.620In Montana, as an example, there may be eight or nine hundred gray wolves that live in the western quarter of our great state.
00:41:35.480Every year, eight or nine hundred animals.
00:41:38.480In an average year, oh, gee whiz, up to 300 of those animals are killed.
00:41:44.500I saw some data recently that indicated the average age of a gray wolf in Montana, outside of highly protected areas like Yellowstone Park.
00:41:54.280the average age of a gray wolf is about three years my lord three years is nothing a gray wolf
00:42:02.220if left to her own devices and not killed by people would live to be eight or nine or maybe
00:42:10.340ten you know they don't live for that long but they certainly have capacity to live longer than
00:42:15.800three years the biggest hurdle to wolf recovery in western colorado and when people think about
00:42:24.000It is tremendous opportunity. Western Colorado is God's gift to gray wolves. Over 17 million acres
00:42:32.780of federal public lands across which gray wolves will receive priority consideration. A robust
00:42:38.000prey population consisting of deer and elk, unlike anything in the world, anything in the world,
00:42:45.000reliable studies clearly indicate Western Colorado could support a viable population of gray wolves.
00:42:50.900That population is mandated. The existence of that population is mandated by the Federal Endangered Species Act. It's also mandated in a softer fashion, but nonetheless mandated by state law.
00:43:04.640And yet it's principally the livestock industry that stands in opposition because they just can't imagine how their operations could be conducted in wolf country, even though many of their operations are based on federal public lands.
00:43:20.900and they're already heavily subsidized to use those lands. We don't charge public land ranchers
00:43:29.420an amount of money for the grass that their livestock consumes that's actually
00:43:33.880equal to what that grass is worth. We as a country have said, we're not going to charge you
00:43:39.420what the grass is worth because we recognize ranching and remote western range lands owned
00:43:47.340by the federal government. That's a tough business. That's a risky proposition. So we're
00:43:51.280going to help by charging you a fraction of what that grass is actually worth. And still,
00:43:59.300that helping hand is not enough. It's not enough. They would rather the landscapes be wolfless.
00:44:06.800They don't want another challenge. Even though we know from reliable studies conducted over
00:44:12.060decades that it's the atypical wolf that depredates on livestock. We know that in the
00:44:16.620northern Rocky Mountains, nearly 100% of the livestock that would call Montana home, nearly
00:44:23.660100%, 99.995% of those livestock will never be involved in a wolf depredation. Depredations are
00:44:33.040so uncommon to be of little interest to the industry. Now, if you're the rancher who lost
00:44:39.380a cow last night, you've got a problem. And I readily acknowledge that. But as I said,
00:44:44.560And fortunately, we've got good tools at the ready for resolving such conflicts when they do occur.
00:44:51.420Very good tools at the ready for preventing such conflicts from ever occurring in the first place.
00:44:57.220You know, we can put an astronaut on the moon and bring her home.
00:45:02.620We can take your heart out of your chest and put it back better than before.
00:45:07.100I promise you we can coexist with the gray wolf.
00:45:10.760But the livestock industry stands in sharp opposition.
00:45:14.560So we continue to bow down to the great hamburger.
00:45:21.080Oh, Mike, I really appreciate those metaphors.
00:45:25.620I'm wondering, as we wrap up this part of the conversation around gray wolves, I'd be
00:45:29.560curious to hear about what kind of future path you envision for gray wolf reintroduction
00:45:34.120and any updates surrounding your partnership with Rocky Mountain Wolf Project in Western
00:50:30.940Now, Mike, faced with a constant deluge of shocking reports and articles, I think it can be easy to numb ourselves to all of the loss that we're facing on a planetary scale at this time.
00:50:43.320And that said, I want to take a moment to name the current extinction crisis and voice the gravity of living in this time of the Anthropocene.
00:50:51.580I'll read a short passage from The Song of the Dodo, a beautiful and tragic book by David Quammen.
00:50:58.380quote the song of the dodo if it had one is forever unknowable because no human from whom
00:51:05.820we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the murition forest and listen end quote
00:51:11.580and i could ask you to recount more scientific data or name the species that sit atop the
00:51:17.660endangered species list but i'd really like to ask you as someone who has their heart and hands
00:51:23.100on the ground, what are you listening to right now? And what messages from the non-human realm
00:51:29.020are emerging in the stillness? And maybe a second part of that question is, what brings you energy
00:51:35.080to continue on in the struggle and fight to make spaces for these species in our human-centered
00:51:39.860world? Well, first, let me say thank you for reading from Song of the Dodo. David Quammen is
00:51:44.780a good pal of mine. He lives down the street from me, and I hold David in very high regard.
00:51:51.640Song of the Dodo is a fantastic and important book.
00:51:54.560So thank you for drawing attention to it.