by ERIK MOLVAR
The Tim Ferriss Show just released a two-hour podcast this week, interviewing Mike Phillips, one of the biologists who spearheaded the successful wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park in the early 1990s, a long-serving Montana legislator, and currently a professional conservationist leading efforts to get gray wolves restored to the mountains of western Colorado.
According to Phillips, all it would take is 20 to 40 wolves in an initial reintroduction, which would increase naturally to a viable population of 250 wolves within a couple of decades, with a great deal of certainty and minimal intervention from humans. The successful reintroduction in wolves in Yellowstone demonstrates how readily, humanely, and cost-effectively it can be done.
Human society, too, benefits from the return of the wolf to the Colorado high country. Phillips argues that reintroducing wolves into their former habitats in western Colorado also has transformative potential for humanity, providing a measure of redemption to counterbalance the tremendous destructive force that our species has leveled at the natural world.
“I believe that restoring gray wolves to western Colorado has tremendous power,” says Phillips. “We spoke about the Sixth Great Extinction Crisis. It’s tightening its grip on the planet, compromising all that is really important. But restoration reminds us that we can choose to be something other than misguided gods. It illustrates how we can change. It makes clear that restoration is an alternative to extinction.”
The interview also takes on the fairy-tale fearmongering that is so deep-seated and prevalent in EuroAmerican culture. “People embrace the mythical wolf,” Phillips observes. “The real wolf is not even a shadow of its mythical self. … First and foremost, we know that gray wolves are not a threat to human safety. They just aren’t. I never dismiss anybody’s fear. If they truly are concerned about their safety because of gray wolves, their fear is their fear and they’re entitled to it. I simply say, ‘Well, I appreciate your fear; it’s unfounded.’” Indeed, the number of people killed by wolves in North America throughout EuroAmerican history is vanishingly small.
The interview also discussed opposition to wolves from the livestock industry. Phillips pointed out, “Wolf depredations on livestock do not represent a threat to the livestock industry. Depredation events are just too uncommon. For example, in Montana, with eight or nine hundred gray wolves on the ground in Montana, there’s about fifty head of cattle killed a year. Fifty head of cattle, out of over two million [in the state] is not a threat to the industry.”
The substantial wolf population in Montana also has failed to put a dent in elk numbers, despite the fears expressed by some hunting groups. “For years, I served as the ranking minority member of the [Montana] House Fish and Game Committee, and then I was the ranking minority member of the Senate Fish and Game Committee,” says Phillips. “Most of the time, people were coming to our committees to express concern about too many elk! Most of the elk management units in the State of Montana are either at management objective, as decided by Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks, or over objective. … There are simply no data to support the claim that gray wolves are going to kill enough elk or deer to cause the big game apple-cart to fall over.”
“I think the gray wolf will continue to be protected under federal law in places like Colorado,” says Phillips. “And as I said earlier, the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project and the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund both aim to move the notion forward of recovering the gray wolf to this great big patch of opportunity that is in Western Colorado.” Volunteers are currently gathering signatures to launch a ballot initiative in Colorado to reintroduce gray wolves in the state’s western mountains, so this issue could be presented to Colorado voters as soon as November 2020.
In response to Phillips’ insights, Tim Ferriss pledged a $100,000 matching grant to help keep the campaign to return wolves to Colorado sustain its momentum. Members of the public can donate here by August 28th, and their donations will be matched by Tim Ferris. From Western Watersheds Project’s perspective, returning wolves to the Colorado Rockies would redress an ecological void that was created when wolves were extirpated in Colorado in the 1940s. Its return would help rebalance ecological problems like the chronic damage that overpopulated elk are doing to vegetation communities in Rocky Mountain National Park, and the echo of wolf howls among the peaks of the fourteeners would add tremendously to the wilderness experience for the millions of residents and visitors who venture into the Colorado high country each year.
Erik Molvar is a wildlife biologist and executive director with Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group dedicated to protecting and restoring watersheds and wildlife throughout the American West.