The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission is nearing adoption of a wolf management plan for the state. The plan is being developed in conjunction with a variety of stakeholder groups. The Commission is the first in the nation to proactively plan for the recolonization of wolves in their former range. They should be congratulated for this foresight. You can find detailed information about this proposal at www.dfw.state.or.us/wolves/main.html.
Nonetheless, much can still be done to improve the plan’s goals and management strategies. This is particularly true with respect to the ethics of wolf recovery, which is entirely ignored in the plan. Correcting this and other oversights should be the Commission’s next task.
You can read the comments I sent to the OFWC below. I hope they may be of some help as you frame your own letters of support for wolf recovery.
Cheers, Bill
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ODFW Information and Education Division
3406 Cherry Ave. NE
Salem, OR 97303
30 November 2004
RE: Oregon Wolf Conservation and Management Plan
Dear Members of the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission,
At the outset, I want to thank you for having the foresight to plan for the natural recolonization of wolves in Oregon. As we have seen in several states, the re-migration of wolves into their former range can result in unnecessary hysteria and ill conceived control actions. I believe this is the first time a state natural resource commission has had the courage to directly grapple with this issue up front. You are to be commended for this.
Overall, I support the Oregon Wolf Conservation and Management Plan. I know from direct experience that such plans involve multiple stakeholders, differing ideas on the role and purpose of wildlife management, and difficult compromises between the negotiating parties. This plan represents a good faith and defensible effort to proactively prepare for the recovery of wolves in Oregon. Having said all this, the plan could be strengthened in terms of both its ecological and ethical foundations.
For instance, the plan should adopt a more ecologically robust vision of wolf recovery. Seven breeding pairs is a minimum number of questionable adequacy. It risks genetic and other catastrophic injury to a recovering population. It ignores the more nuanced aspects of packs, since their social structure is not biologically limited to breeding pairs and pups. Finally, it is a tiny percentage of the potential population of wolves in light of the carrying capacity of Oregon’s landscape, as well as our contemporary knowledge of wolves in the Rocky Mountains and Midwest.
Please recall that the landscapes of the United States have been impoverished — at times crippled — by the extirpation of wolves. Wolves perform a critical role in promoting the diversity and function of ecosystems. The evidence for this is plain wherever wolves have been either eliminated or restored. The damage done to the Kaibab Plateau when wolves (and other predators) were extirpated is a case in point. Another is the cascading recovery of biodiversity in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem after the wolf’s return in the 1990s. Moreover, wolves improve the fitness of prey populations through natural ecological dynamics, and have little to no impact on seasonal hunting opportunities.
The Kaibab illustrates the futility of trying to manage wildlife as if we could engineer the natural world. Wildlife management is primarily about managing the human relationship to nature. So frankly, I would not invest too much time hand-wringing over the exact number of wolves in Oregon. Allow them to find their own balancing point in light of prey availability, weather conditions, disease and other factors. Focus your efforts on fostering human tolerance and mitigating negative wolf-human interactions.
One aspect of the plan disappoints me — the absence of an ethics section. There is a discussion of economic values, but these are a small segment of the range of values having ethical significance in planning for and managing wolves. And while it may be argued that ethical sensibilities are already embedded in the plan, the Commission and the public would have been better served (and better informed) by an explicit discussion of ethics.
Simply stated, we have ethical responsibilities to both people and the natural world, and this includes wolves whether considered as individuals or a species. We ought to seek a biologically rich world, not a gulag of isolated relic landscapes and species. We meet our responsibilities to wolves through their fulsome recovery across their original range. We fail when wolves are restricted by artificially low populations, boundaries beyond which recovery is forbidden or undermined, or management practices that are not firmly grounded in ethics.
The ethical reasons for wolf recovery are diverse and mutually supporting. For some, wolves are a biological heritage we ought to restore and conserve for our children, citizenry and the world. Future generations will condemn us for failing to take reasonable steps in this regard. Many see in wolves the hand of a Creator for whom the natural world, including wolves, is good. Humans are thereby the stewards of Creation, and wolf recovery is a sacred obligation. Others believe wolves are more than functional units of ecosystems, more than resources for humans use. Rather, wolves are self-aware and social beings. This gives wolves, as it does people, a moral standing when it comes to human actions that, for better or worse, have consequences for individuals, packs, populations and species. In this worldview, wolf restoration is an act of restitution for past harms done to creatures with whom we share a common landscape. For still others, wolves are top predators contributing to the health and well-being of the larger community of life. Wolves generate a kind of ‘natural good’ that, while unintentional on their part, is indispensable to ethical adjudications of how we ought to live with the natural world.
Wolves are an indicator not only of the health of a natural landscape, but the moral health of our culture. A society that learns to live with wolves across a wide range of wild and humanized landscapes is a society that is making substantial progress towards respecting human needs, caring for other forms of life, and living sustainably with the natural world. I congratulate you on your efforts to plan for the wolf’s return to Oregon. Yet I urge you to embrace a deeper vision of wolves fully restored throughout the Oregonian landscape, a vision based on ecological and ethical criteria.
Sincerely,
William S. Lynn, Ph.D.
Senior Ethics Advisor
Practical Ethics
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Image: Tracey Brooks, 2003, Reflections.