The genuinely toxic tale is that we sat around for 69 years before we decided to fix things.
Most people like to argue that “people didn’t know better back then.” That’s absolute bullshit. There were ecologists and scientists fighting to preserve wolves in the 1920s, and conservatives and capitalists chose to ignore the best advice of educated experts because killing wolves was easier and more profitable.
For the sake of argument, even if they didn’t know any better (shame on them for not knowing better), they could’ve easily recognized the problem and fixed it much sooner than 1995.
Well I for sure learned in school that our ancestors called wolves the nurses of the forest. In our culture anyway. They’re very important because by hunting old and sickly animals preferentially instead of killing indiscriminately, they improve the overall health of populations of other animals like deer or elk. Obviously it’s also not great for any population to get too large because they’ll destroy their own food supply. Again, release the wolves.
The system is geared towards negative presumption of the recent past even as it glorifies and reveres the long past (ancient philosophers and religious figures).
Just in case most of us figure out that anything we think of as new or intractable problems are things that we knew about and were deliberately ignored or actively campaigned against by the same forces that do it now.
PETA is still against it. Adding to the evidence that PETA is not a serious organization.
How much of that was seeing what all those decades actually DID, and a generation later realizing it needed to be changed.
Still it’s crappy we are so crappy with our home. I do think we should work exceptionally hard to fix things here. Find real solutions to problems. Else what’s the point of going to other planets? We need those same skills to survive, terraform, geoengineer, know the potential for ecology, etc.
We’re reintroducing wolves in my state now and its been problematic so far.
https://coloradosun.com/2025/03/05/gray-wolves-depredation-payments-colorado-wildlife-commission/
Nb: I don’t have a side in this. Just sharing recent news.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ecm.1598 more on this topic, it is open access
I wonder if anyone knows whether ranchers in WY / MT lost income & were compensated by the state as well?
2065: the entire population of Montana is wolves.
spoiler
Don’t ask about Idaho or Wyoming.
Is 31 wolves enough for genetic diversity?
How did wolves affect all of this?
The wolves were supposed to be the bouncers at the hip new club “Yellow Stone” and they were shirking their duties and started working at a different club called “The Underworld.” Because they weren’t there to stop those horny bastards, they fucked all those trees. It’s called wood for a reason, amirite? /s
without the wolves, there is nothing stopping the deer population/elks from exploding, and when theres a ton of deer or elk theres an increase the trees, bushes being stripped for food since deers like to eat them. Also the drastic increase in parasites that would affect other animals the deers, have like ticks and tickborne diseases.
trees and bushes die from all thier leaves getting stripped constantly, unless its a super poisonous tree(which is more common in the tropics), and birds dont have nests, and insects wont able to pollinate certain plants,etc.
My understanding is that this has been wildly oversimplified and puts much more emphasis on the Wolf conservation efforts. To be fair, there is also a lot of places in and around Yellowstone that still teach this same trophic cascade idea.
https://wolf.org/wolf-info/wolf-magazine/do-wolves-really-change-rivers-part-two/
