Enviros sue to keep wolf protections
By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer
As expected, a collection of 17 environmental groups has sued the federal
government, hoping to reinstall the full suite of protections once
afforded to wolves under the Endangered Species Act.
The suit also aims to keep state governments from eventually taking over
wolf programs.
“Many of these state governments are in the grip of anti-wolf hysteria,”
said Roger Schlickheisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife, the group
leading the legal challenge.
“That’s an unfortunate characterization,” said Ron Aasheim, spokesman for
the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “Those people are
entitled to their opinion.”
Last March, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service changed the status of
wolves from endangered to threatened, which offers fewer protections for
the wide-ranging carnivores.
FWS also is moving ahead, if slowly, on a plan to remove all protections
for wolves and let states manage them.
There are roughly 700 wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming and thousands
more in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Montana has written a wolf plan that calls for maintaining about 15 packs
of wolves in the state, roughly the number that are here now.
Aasheim noted that a wide diversity of people, including Defenders of
Wildlife, worked on that plan.
Some agricultural and hunting interests have criticized it as being too
soft on wolves.
“The real difficult thing is just finding the balance,” Aasheim said.
While the environmental groups are critical of state wolf plans in the
Northern Rockies — especially those of Idaho and Wyoming — their main
complaint is that delisting wolves here will mean there won’t be enough
legal muscle behind efforts to reintroduce wolves in places where they
once lived, but can’t be found now.
“FWS is declaring wolves recovered across vast stretches of the species’
historic range despite having made no progress whatever toward recovering
the species in these areas,” the suit says.
Places where they want to see wolves include upstate New York, California,
Colorado, Maine, Oregon and Washington.
“FWS has decided that wolves in Minnesota constitute wolf recovery in
northern New England and New York,” said Mollie Matteson, of Forest Watch
in Vermont. “Not only do they need to do better science, they need to
learn some basic geography.”
Ed Bangs, FWS wolf recovery coordinator, was unavailable Wednesday and a
Department of the Interior spokesman in Washington, D.C., did not
immediately return a phone message.
Bangs has said in the past that FWS does not interpret wolf recovery as
returning the species to all of its historic range. Once a population is
established and adequately protected, recovery can be declared, he has
said.
Others disagree.
“The government’s wolf plan is a smoke-and-mirrors exercise in tokenism,”
said Rob Edwards of Sinapu, a Colorado group and one of the plaintiffs in
Wednesday’s lawsuit.
The other plaintiffs are groups from states all over the country, mostly
the Northeast and the Pacific Coast states.