The Wolves and Humans Foundation is a British charity dedicated to conserving wolves and other large predators in Europe. When it was founded in 1985, wolves worldwide were hunted as dangerous vermin and were in danger of extinction. Since the breakthrough of 1995 when wolves were re-introduced into Yellowstone National Park in the U.S., hard lobbying by conservationists has meant recovery to the point where the challenge now is to manage the same wolf-human territorial overlap that caused the original threat.
One goal of Wolves and Humans is wolf re-introduction, and the other is education on how people might live with expanding wolf populations. Where once “human settlement” meant an isolated farm or community of homesteaders protecting their sheep, now it means cities, highways, railroads and industrial sites. Accordingly, a conference held in Scotland in September 2008 explored ways of making room for both large wildlife (bear, lynx and wild boar as well as wolves) and contemporary agglomerations of people.
Large predators are being re-introduced at Scottish sites such as the Alladale Wilderness Reserve in the Highlands, where 500 acres has been enclosed by fencing. As well as deer and elk, fifteen wild boar have been released there, each wearing a GPS collar by which it can be monitored hourly in a program linked to Oxford University’s Conservation Unit.
We can either preserve or exploit and destroy a true wilderness.
Basically, then, a wildlife park or open zoo is being created -- but just how “wild” is fifteen boar wearing collars and living within 500 fenced acres? British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest, by contrast, is still an actual wilderness containing the wolf, bear, ungulate and bird species and old growth forest and salmon rivers that co-evolved in that zone before human depredation took over. How rare and precious such large tracts of wilderness are in the world today is brought home by the Scottish efforts. Individuals in British Columbia (BC) are still in a position to make a choice. We can either preserve or exploit and destroy a true wilderness. We don’t need to leave it to future generations to create re-introduction campaigns that are a pale imitation of the real thing which we squander today, in the name of corporate wealth derived from logging, mining and oil and gas development.
There is no limit to the number of wolves hunters and licensed guides are allowed to kill, and a unique coastal salmon-fishing sub-species is being starved out because humans take up to 90% of each year’s salmon stock.
We could protect B.C. wolves now, in the same manner that Europe did not protect and conserve theirs. Grey wolves once roamed the whole North American continent; now only B.C. contains wolf habitat. Yet under the present Great Bear Rainforest agreement, which is due to expire at the end of March 2009, no one pack’s full territory is protected from logging, road-building, mining and tourism. There is no limit to the number of wolves hunters and licensed guides are allowed to kill, and a unique coastal salmon-fishing sub-species is being starved out because humans take up to 90% of each year’s salmon stock.
A minimum of 70% of the Great Bear Rainforest needs to be protected to ensure the health of the ecosystem.
A minimum of 70% of the Great Bear Rainforest needs to be protected to ensure the health of the ecosystem. At present, 30% is somewhat protected. To join the fight for the rest, readers can get campaign information from the Raincoast Conservation Society or the Sierra Club. And take note: it is not only the logging and mining industries that threaten large mammal habitat. A company interested in creating “alternative energy” from wind farming proposes looping 150 kilometers of transmission lines from the coast through the wilderness, which it calls “empty space”. Empty? One of Earth’s largest remaining wildlife ranges, teeming with the wealth of plant and animal species that only an ancient undisturbed landscape can produce, is being called empty.
The Sierra Club also urges us to lobby on behalf of the other large mammal with which B.C. is still blessed and for which Europe can only envy us: the migrating caribou. Several new titles this fall champion our wild species. The caribou are represented by Monte Hummel’s Caribou and the North: A Shared Future (Dundurn Press, 255 pages, $50). The illustrations are what make this book special. There is something particularly stirring about photos of seething masses of caribou stretching to the horizon, or of a sea of antlers in a river as herds swim across during their B.C. to Alaska migrations.
Compared to the Scottish situation, it seems surprising at first glance to realize that our huge herds are suffering “range retraction”, but once again development, resource extraction, road building (which increases access for hunters) as well as non-compliance by locals make it hard for officials to enforce conservation goals. Now, on the American side, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska is another threat that seems to have become acceptable to all parties.
About the B.C. wolves, nothing can beat Ian McAllister’s The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Great Bear Rainforest which was published last year. McAllister spent many patient years getting up close – eyeball to eyeball with a mere couple of meters between them – to individual animals whom he got to know well.
Other species are represented by several strikingly illustrated titles this fall:
Lonesome For Bears, by Linda Jo Hunter (The Lyons Press, 129 pages, $22.95). Hunter decided that the only way to learn about wild species was to get out there and track them, which she did before becoming a wildlife guide in Alaska specializing in bear tours. She learned the antics, habits and personalities of many bears over the years which she describes chattily, leaving us to mourn the fate of some who we too get to know but who will be forever unknown to the hunters who killed them, acquiring for themselves nothing but a rug.
Deer World, by Dave Taylor (The Boston Mills Press, 398 pages, $39.95) is arranged as a calendar, each page adorned with striking photos not only of deer but also of their companion species and predators – birds, grizzlies, mountain goats and moose. The built human world which we know to be encroaching is not shown in these photos of species in their natural settings. For a moment, we forget the menace that exists outside each shot.
By contrast, Steve Bloom reminds us in Untamed (Abrams, $32.95) that “environmental destruction is accelerating” all over the world, and that where he was once relaxed about it, he now takes wildlife pictures “with a mixed sense of urgency and foreboding.” Bloom likes to zoom in on eyes and faces of hippos and parrots, lizards and gorillas. His penguins are particularly fetching. All dramatize for us the extent of the impending loss of the wild, which is entirely different than the re-introduced.
Barbara Julian is a writer and reviewer who can't get over her old librarian's habit of telling people what to read — especially from among the ever-blooming crop of nature and animal books: http://www.animalit.ca/
Show/Hide comment form
written by BC Parks , April 14, 2010