Wolves are “ON THEIR OWN,” blared the alarmist headline on the Defenders of Wildlife website. What, haven’t you heard? Congress has offered up the wolf as a “sacrificial lamb.”
Let’s put aside that jarring metaphor of wolves and lambs. Environmental groups are up in arms over an item in the budget bill removing gray wolves in the northern Rockies from the protection of the Endangered Species Act.
“Never before has Congress stripped Endangered Species Act protections for one particular species, putting politics above sound science and our national commitment to conserving America’s wildlife,” proclaimed the Defenders of Wildlife president.
Did he say “sound science”? In fact, it was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that first tried to remove wolves in Idaho and Montana from the endangered list, in the Bush administration. A court rebuffed the attempt, and the Obama administration withdrew another delisting proposal when it took office.
But upon further review, Obama’s Interior Department — led by Colorado’s Ken Salazar — reached a similar conclusion: With the exception of Wyoming, wolves in the northern Rockies were no longer endangered.
Meanwhile, wolves remained on the endangered list in Wyoming because of a dispute between that state and federal officials over details of a management plan, not because the wolves weren’t thriving.
Appalled by the federal decision, environmentalists sued again and won, with a federal judge ruling the government couldn’t lift protection from one portion of a listed population while maintaining it elsewhere.
Invoke “sound science” all you like, but the Interior Department keeps a good many more scientists on its payroll than you’ll find in the typical federal courthouse.
In that sense, The New York Times got the wolf controversy exactly backward when it reported, “The fact that the (Interior) department is being required to do what it had originally intended to do did not take the edge off arguments from environmental advocates that Congress had crossed a crucial line.”
But of course Interior’s intentions take the edge off advocates’ arguments. They claim Congress is overriding science, when it is more accurate to say it is overriding a judge. They claim, as the Times also reported, that “Now, anytime anybody has an issue with an endangered species, they are going to run to Congress and try to get the same treatment the anti-wolf people have gotten,” when such a scenario isn’t remotely plausible.
And since when is Fish and Wildlife “anti-wolf”?
The importing of 66 gray wolves in 1994 from Canada to Montana, Idaho and Wyoming and their expansion to a population of more than 1,600 — well above original numerical and geographical recovery goals — qualifies as a conservation triumph. Nor is it in jeopardy. State agencies will not allow the wolf to be hunted again into oblivion, as occurred before 1930.
This is not to say the Fish and Wildlife Service is always the last word on sound science and dispassionate judgment. A few years ago, for example, the agency participated in a disgracefully political attempt to discredit Rob Roy Ramey, former chairman of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s zoology department, when his research disputed whether the Preble’s jumping mouse is a distinct subspecies qualifying for federal protection.
But are activists or judges more credible on such issues? A legal brief in the wolf case filed by environmental groups in 2009 maintains that the region’s wolf population “has not yet achieved recovery” and, incredibly, faults Fish and Wildlife for indicating that “We never intended, nor do we think it is realistic, to recover the species across the entire lower-48 States.”
The arguments over whether Fish and Wildlife may lift endangered species protections from only part of the wolf’s range involve esoteric interpretations of the law, which for the time being are moot. And the hysterical reaction to this fact says a good deal more about environmental activists than the future of the wolf.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
