Heresy Snowboarding

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Back in March 2008, I visited the Northern Lights wolf education centre in the Northern Purcells near Golden, BC (Canada) whilst on my way to Kicking Horse. I posted about it here, with some photos of the beautiful creatures here.

What struck me most was the quiet pride in the wolves. As I gazed at them, all the noise (business, work), quieted from my head – was quelled entirely. I was awed by their serenity and peace.

I listened as the keeper described how wolves were hunted out of Yellowstone, with dire consquences to the entire ecosystem, and how the Canadian government was going to allow wolf culling in the Purcells so that hunters had more deer and elk to shoot. I know, I know – WTF right?

Anyway, here is a petition in aid of the wolves. The US government has upheld a decision to remove the wolf from the endangered species list in 8 states – stupid.

This is not restoring nature or science to its rightful place in wildlife management. Countless scientific papers have shown that wolf populations are entirely depended [ed: sic] on the prey available, and that the environment benefits from their presence. A recent paper has even shown evidence that the presence of wolves in the yellowstone region has acted as a buffer against the effects of global warming for carrion dependent species and others have shown that wolves increase biological diversity of plants and animals wherever they occur. Science needs to be paramount in our wildlife management plans, and it was clearly ignored in the government approval of these incredibly disastrous state management plans. I hope that you reconsider your responsibility to uphold conservation and provide the protection of all wildlife and our precious natural environments…. This is part of the government’s sworn duty….

From a New Scientist article about conservation:

T ALL started with a wolf named Pluie. One rainy day in the summer of 1991, the 5-year-old female crossed paths with a team of researchers in the Peter Lougheed Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. They captured her and fitted a collar and satellite transmitter. For the next two years, they watched in amazement as Pluie went on an epic journey – one that would ultimately inspire a new kind of conservation.

Pluie wandered across two Canadian provinces and three US states, spending time with five different packs (see map). In 1993, the signals from her collar ceased, and the battery from the transmitter was eventually found with a bullet hole in it. Nevertheless, Pluie survived for another two years until, in December 1995, a hunter shot her dead, together with her mate and three pups. By then she had covered terrain spread over an area of 100,000 square kilometres.

This is the sort of thing our planet and its animal inhabitants, who really are at our mercy, need.

It’s heartening to see awareness of this being raised, efforts to create wildlife corridors, and real efforts to protect species.

Climate change really is bringing home to roost the interconnectedness of us all. No healthy ecosystems = no healthy planet = no business. People finally are realising this, and it’s better late than never.

Time magazine and The Monthly just published two great articles on this, here (Climate Progress has a great wrap up on the Time article) and here.
From The Monthly article:

As I write, in mid March, a geriatric sandy-coloured rat wanders his enclosure at the Alice Springs Desert Park. Death can’t be far off for the poor creature, which would hardly matter except that, as far as anybody knows, he’s the last central rock-rat on Earth. The species once abounded in the rocky ranges of Australia’s inland, and in places like the MacDonnell Ranges you can still find the occasional quandong seed cached by them long ago among the rocks. Seeds carried off and cached by the rats sometimes grew into quandong trees but now, with the rat gone, the quandong is declining. That’s the way of things when extinction strikes. Living networks start to unravel, and because we’re part of those networks too we inevitably feel the consequence.

It’s more than 50 years since an Australian mammal became extinct, so my generation has been spared the shame of the loss of the thylacine and any of the other 20 unique creatures to have vanished from Australia since European settlement. Many of us believed we’d won the war to preserve Australia’s biodiversity – that a more caring attitude towards our wildlife, more national parks and better management practices by rural Australians had brought the extinctions to an end. But now we know better, for the extinctions are about to resume, and there is no doubt that without urgent action they will build into the biggest extinction wave of all.

Please visit the Wolf Petition and sign it. More on this soon.

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