The Wolves of Yellowstone

Image Source: "First Outing," Todd Fredericksen from a film by Bob Landis, Trailwood Films Wildlife Art Gallery

According to today's Washington Post, 13 years after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowston, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took steps to remove the gray wolf of the northern Rockies from the Endangered Species List. "Environmentalists howled, calling it a last-gasp effort by the Bush administration to delist wolves."

The Post states that

for every 100 wolves at least six months of age, only 74 will live through the year, Bangs says. Of those that will not, 10 will be killed by government agencies because they attacked livestock. Another 10 will be killed illegally. Another three will die accidentally -- struck by a car, for example. And three will die from natural threats, including being killed by other wolves.

So how many wolves are there in the Rockies?

Last winter, Bangs says, there were 1,513 wolves in the northern Rockies. But the population has dropped this year, and there will probably be about 1,450 come winter......

Smith also suspects that there's an element of self-regulation of population. Yellowstone is now dense with wolves -- 171 of them spread among 11 packs. (The larger Yellowstone ecosystem has about 350 wolves.)

"At some point wolves control their own numbers through killing one another," Smith says.

I have read that there is good evidence that the wolves are a keystone species in the larger Yellowstone ecosystem, and that the predation of moose is resulting in changes in their grazing patterns that in turn is benefiting the plant communities. If they are a keystone species in Yellowstone, then I would guess they could be important in the larger ecosystem of the northern Rockies.

Comment: I can understand why the guys raising cattle and sheep want to eliminate wolf predation on their herds and flocks, but 1,500 is a very small population to maintain a species, and the northern Rockies is a very big space. The larger Yellowstone ecosystem, if it can support only 350 wolves is too small to protect the species.

I think this again is the Bush administration combining pseudo science, an ideological predisposition to distrust environmental regulations, and an unholy desire to pander to their (increasingly narrow) constituency that is pulling a fast one in the administration's dying days. This is worth a stand by all those interested in biodiversity, the protection of world heritage (The United States has had Yellowstone inscribed in the list of World Heritage sites maintained by UNESCO's World Heritage Center), the environment, and wolves specifically.

There must be a way to protect enough wolves to establish a sustainable population. The government could indemnify the owners of any calves or sheep killed by wolves. Laws could be more strongly enforced to prevent poaching. Research, if strongly supported over time, should provide means to keep the wolves within defined ranges and to reduce or prevent their predation on domestic animals. JAD

If we make the mistake of electing the McCain-Palin ticket, the wolves are probably in for a very hard time in the next administration. See my posting "Palin Versus the Wolves".

More About Wolves

Image source: My Barack Obama website

As I posted in the past, restoration of wolves to the Rocky Mountains has helped restore the environment to a more natural condition. While there are relatively few wolves in the wild, they have been the subject of controversy. Wolves are "charismatic", and many people want to know that packs exist in the wild, hoping to have the opportunity to see them personally at some time. Others, led by ranchers and farmers who consider them to be threats to their livestock and livelihoods, would be happy to see fewer wolves in the wild. In the U.S. laws that have been passed to protect the environment and endangered species have led to reintroduction of wolves into some areas of the country, and protection of the wolves in Yellowstone National Park and elsewhere. However, the interpretation of the law is done under the control of politically appointed officials as the executive branch of government passes regulations and implements the law. The dispute becomes political, with the Democrats tending to favor more environmental protection and greater efforts to protect endangered species, and the Republicans tending to side more on the side of farming and industrial interests.

Government scientists are charged with developing and interpreting scientific evidence relevant to the protection of wolves and to understanding of the role of wolves in the environment. During the Bush administration there has been considerable tension between government scientists (with their supporters outside government) and political appointees of the administration, with the latter being accused of failing to utilize scientific advice properly in policy making. This tension has been quite visible in the case of government policies dealing with wolves.

A recent commentator on the previous posting asked for help in finding good information on wolves. I am making this posting to provide some suggestions:

• The Wikipedia entry on the "Gray Wolf" (which is the species found in the United States) seems quite good. It is written for educated adults.
• The First People website has a gallery of great pictures of wolves.
• The Natural Resources Defense Council provides a news service related to the efforts to preserve wolves.
• Channel G has a nice video about the protection of wolves in British Columbia.
• The Western Watersheds Project webpage on "wolf restoration" provides a good description of the role of wolves in the environment, with a great set of links to other places where you can learn about wolves.

I hope this helps!

While wolves are alive and well in essentially livestock-free zones such as Yellowstone, the primary goal of wolf reintroduction in the West - to restore the ecological and evolutionary influences of a large predator across the landscape - is not occurring. Token wolf populations in Yellowstone or central Idaho, wonderful as these isolated examples are, do not contribute substantially to the long-term biodiversity goal of restoring wolves as the top predator on public lands in the West.
George Wuerthner
"The Cry of the Wolf in the West"

We need a new law!

Image source

Source: "Salazar's Wolf Decision Upsets Administration Allies," Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post, March 14, 2009.

According to the referenced article, based on the analysis of scientists in the Fish and Wildlife Service wolves are to be removed from endangered species protection and subjected to regulated hunting in Idaho and Montana "because the states have pledged to maintain at least 500 and 400 wolves, respectively, in the short term, and the animals will be able to migrate and interbreed with thousands of gray wolves in Canada." It is estimated that there are now 1650 wolves living free in the Rockies.

While it seems unintuitive that 400 wolves in an area as large as Montana are enough to maintain a viable population of the species, I defer to the scientists. Moreover, I am glad to read that the Secretary of the Interior is seeking to follow the law and the factual findings of government scientists.

The experience in Yellowstone has indicated that wolves are a keystone species, and that the return of wolves to the park has resulted in changes in the populations of many other species of both animals and plants. I would very much doubt that 1650 wolves are enough to maintain the Rocky Mountain ecology in anything like its pre-Columbian richness. We need a law that protects ecosystems by maintaining adequate populations of their keystone species, not simply a law that protects the most endangered individual species.

In the case of wolves, there are very many Americans who love these animals and who want to know that they exist in significant numbers in the wild. I, like many others, would love some day to see a wild wolf in the Rockies. There should be a law that supports our interest. Clearly wolves will kill some livestock if they roam free in the wild, and clearly there should be some recompense for the owners of those animals that are killed while in leased grazing areas. A law that protects keystone species in adequate numbers should also protect the people who live in affected areas from losses due to the action of the protected animals.

"Science, Mythology, Hatred, and the Fate of the Gray Wolf"

Image source: My Barack Obama website

I have been posting for some time about the need to protect wolves in the Rocky Mountains. Today VERLYN KLINKENBORG has an editorial in The New York Times challenging the recent federal government decision to leave the protection of wolves in Montana and Idaho to state regulation, withdrawing federal protection of the populations there.

Klinkenborg writes:

C. L. Otter, the Republican governor of Idaho, has pledged “to continue our policy of responsibly managing wolves for a viable, sustainable population that can coexist with our ungulate herds, our livestock and our people.” The very first step in “responsibly managing” wolves will be a wolf hunt.

And Mr. Otter’s idea of coexistence between wolves and humans doesn’t bear examination. He has said he’d be the first in line for a wolf hunting license, and he has also said he favors reducing the wolf population in Idaho to 100, way below the current level of more than 800 and well below the number required by the state management plan.

When it comes to wolves, federal law has been protecting what is, fundamentally, a mythic species. And when it ceases protecting them, they will be exposed to the worst aspects of that myth — a deep, ancestral hostility to wolves based on ... nothing.

Wolves do not kill humans. They are responsible for a minuscule number of livestock deaths in the West — less than domestic dogs — and there are federal and state programs specifically designed to compensate ranchers who lose stock to wolves.

Comment: Sounds like we are putting the fox in charge of guarding the chicken coop. JAD

The New York Times Editorial Supports Wolf Conservation

I quote from the NYT editorial:

Once the season opened in Montana, some of the most-studied wolves in Yellowstone, including a female that scientists had been tracking for years, were killed almost immediately just outside the park, jeopardizing several scientific studies. The reaction from the state’s wolf program director? “We didn’t think wolves would be that vulnerable to firearms harvest.” By the time Montana’s season ended on Nov. 17, 72 wolves had been shot — 3 short of the state’s quota — out of a total population of some 500.

Nothing lays bare the true point of the wolf season more than Idaho’s recent decision to extend its hunt by three months, ending on March 31. The reason is that hunters have simply not killed enough wolves — only half of the state’s quota of 220 so far.

Environmental groups and other wolf advocates argued, before protections were lifted last spring, that populations across the Northern Rockies had not in fact reached sustainable levels. Having lost that argument, they are now insisting on stronger state management plans, and a moratorium on hunting until such plans can be formulated. This is a fair request. What matters is the survival of not just a few token wolves, but strong, genetically healthy wolf populations.

Comment: Of course the wolves are a keystone species, and their loss results in a major ecological shift of the area they inhabit. The animal populations controlled by the wolves control the spread of weedy species, and so it goes....

This is a prime example of the conflict between local economic interests -- a few farmers, some of whom may be grossly uninformed, and a few hunters in the West versus the vast majority of Americans who want our national parks and wilderness areas to be protected as they were before Columbus arrived.

I vote with the scientists, the conservationists, and those who feel that the National Parks were America's greatest idea! JAD

CONSERVATION BIOLOGY: Research Wolves of Yellowstone Killed in Hunt

Source: Virginia Morell, Science 23 October 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5952, pp. 506 - 507

On 3 October, a few weeks after Montana opened its first legal wolf-hunting season in decades, a hunter killed a female wolf in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, less than a mile from the border of Yellowstone National Park.

This brought to five the number of wolves from Yellowstone's most studied pack that have been killed by hunters. Researchers are essentially going to have to start over with another wolf pack after seven years of data collection.

The experience to date shows however that wolves were a keystone species in the Yellowstone ecology, and if we want to protect Yellowstone as the best example of pre-Colombian North America, we have to permit wolves to live there. Millions of visitors to Yellowstone would agree!

So what does Montana's Fish, Wildlife and Parks say about this?

"We didn't think that wolves would be that vulnerable in the backcountry, so the level of harvest there has been a bit of a surprise," says Carolyn Sime, FWP's wolf program coordinator in Helena, who added that the hunt was designed to target wolves that kill livestock, not wilderness or park wolves that have never caused problems in that area.

I don't think we can trust the governments of states dominated by agricultural interests to adequately protect world heritage!

Wolves in Yellowstone again under peril

CREDIT: GARY KRAMER/U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE

A letter to the editor in the August 26, 2011 issue of Science from Bradley J. Bergstrom informs us that:

In May 2011, the Northern rocky mountain gray wolf was removed from the federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife in the first legislative delisting of an endangered species since the 1973 U.S. Endangered Species Act (1) was passed into law.

 Delisting of wolves is described as the result of pressure by western politicians, ranchers and hunters.

(E)lk in Yellowstone National Park increased substantially before wolf reintroduction in 1995 and have decreased substantially since, but they have not been extirpated. In fact, state biologists say that Wyoming's elk herd should be reduced in order to maintain the health of the herd and the habitat. Meanwhile, the park's wolf population has not increased exponentially but rather declined 44% since 2003 and stabilized at fewer than 100. Critics' concerns about livestock are also unfounded: Confirmed cattle deaths due to wolves in Wyoming, as well as the number of wolf packs responsible for cattle deaths, have declined steadily from 2006 through mid-2011, even as Wyoming's wolf population has increased. Overall, protecting the wolves has positively affected the ecosystem), which was a key intent of the 1973 Endangered Species Act.

Yellowstone National Park is a World Heritage site, and its value as part of the natural heritage of mankind would seem to be reduced by the decision to allow hunting of wolves in Wyoming. I value having wolves in the wild per se. I am happy just thinking of the Yellowstone ecosystem, recalling the park as one of the most inspiring places I have ever visited. I also think that the United States should live up to its treaty obligations, and we are obligated under the World Heritage treaty to protect the sites which we have nominated that have been accepted as World Heritage sites.

A second letter to the editor, this by Werner T. Flueck, states:

J. A. Estes and coauthors highlight the far-reaching changes to ecosystems that result from the loss of apex consumers. In particular, they point out large reductions in vegetation brought about by unregulated herbivore populations in such systems. This leads me to point out yet another important consequence of losing large terrestrial predators and their top-down effects (1). When photosynthetic capacity is reduced, not only does atmospheric CO2 increase, but heat dissipation through evapotranspiration is reduced. Some models estimate that evapotranspiration's contribution to global warming is greater than that of CO2 by one to two orders of magnitude (2, 3). The trophic downgrading discussed by Estes et al.thus not only alters ecosystems as they describe, but reduces the rate of entropy production, which increases surface temperature variation. These indirect effects may have substantial consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem functions.

In simpler terms, killing the wolves leads to increases in the elk population; the elk graze more plants and the loss of plants increases CO2 and decreases the heat used in vaporizing water. This contributes to global warming, which in turn adds to global warming and further deterioration of the environment and loss of biodiversity.

Rescuing Wolves from Politics: Wildlife as a Public Trust Resource

Here is the abstract of the article from Science magazine by 

Jeremy T. Bruskotter, 

Sherry A. Enzlerand 

Adrian Treves:

In April 2011, the U.S. Congress removed Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections for gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains. In an unprecedented action, Congress sidestepped the provisions of the law, removing protections via a legislative rider (1). Absent these protections, management authority has returned to state governments, which, citing wolves' impacts on domestic livestock and wild game, have exhibited hostility toward wolves. We examine the wildlife trust doctrine as a tool for promoting the conservation of wolves and other imperiled species under state management. We argue that this doctrine is best understood as establishing a legal obligation for states to conserve species for the benefit of their citizens. However, for the wildlife trust to act as a check against interests that promote exploitation over conservation, courts must use the doctrine to hold states accountable rather than grant excessive deference to management agencies.

This is still another instance in which the Congress is acting in the interest of those who have the funds to lobby and special interests, but not in the public interest. The government owes future generations as well as those now alive to maintain our heritage of great natural spaces! Wolves are key members of the biological communities that keep those spaces natural.

For Want of a Wolf, the Lynx Was Lost?

I quote from Science magazine:

The Canadian lynx (Lynx canadensis) is thriving in Canada but is a threatened species in the United States. The chain of events that led to the mysterious decline of lynxes in the United States, scientists now say, may have begun with the extirpation of another species: the gray wolf (Canis lupus), which was hunted to near extinction in the United States during the 20th century. Today, wolf populations are growing in parts of the west and Minnesota. 

The loss of the wolf may have set in motion an “ecological cascade,” William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University, Corvallis, and his co-authors write 30 August in Wildlife Society Bulletin. Without wolves, populations of coyotes and herbivores (such as elk and deer) have soared—leading to a double whammy for the lynx's primary prey, the snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus). First, there are more coyotes to hunt them; and second, elk and deer consume the shrubby cover hares eat and seek for protection from predators. The result: fewer snowshoe hare for the lynx to hunt. Climate change may be another factor; snowshoe hare and lynxes thrive at high elevations with deep snow packs, but milder winters open up these areas to coyotes. 

Since their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, wolves have sharply curtailed the coyote population, altered the behavior of both coyotes and herbivores, upped the number of snowshoe hare, and helped restore overall ecosystem health, the authors say. So wildlife managers should consider wolves' “ecological role”—and value as top dog—when deciding their fate.

I recently posted on the decision of the U.S. government to allow hunting of wolves again in the Rockies, including in Wyoming. Here is more information on research that shows how complex is the web of life, and how sensitive that web is to the top predators in an ecosystem, as the wolves are in Yellowstone.

I think all Americans (with the exception of some cattle ranchers and western politicians) want our national parks to remain pristine, and especially want Yellowstone to remain as a reminder of what this continent was like before 1492. Moreover, the United States committed itself internationally to preserve Yellowstone as a natural World Heritage site for our descendants and our neighbors.

So lets stop hunting wolves, at least until they become more common in Yellowstone than they were in 1492, and thereby help maintain the Yellowstone ecosystem more as it once was!

Gray Wolves Back on the Endangered List

Image source: 

Article Source: Virginia Morell, ScienceInsider, August 6, 2010

"Hunted last year in Montana and Idaho, the Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf (Canis lupus) is once again on the federal endangered species list. Yesterday, a federal judge in Helena overturned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's (FWS's) decision last year to remove the wolves from the list in those two states but leave them on it in Wyoming.

"Conservationists applauded U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy's decision, but state wildlife officials in Montana and Idaho argue that the wolves' rebounding population needs to be better managed, including being hunted."

Read more!

This is good news for those who are happy just to know that these animals can continue to live in the wild in the United States? There are now close to 2000 wolves in the three mountain states. The wolves were eradicated in the United States, but some came down on their own from Canada and others were reintroduced. 2000 is a very small number of animals to maintain a species, and the existence of a subpopulation in Canada, while great, is not a substitute for one in the continuous 48 states.

"Scientists Protest Plan to End Wolves' Safeguards"

According to the Washington Post's "Washington in Brief" column today:

More than 230 scientists have signed a letter opposing plans to remove wolves in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho from Endangered Species Act protection. The scientists said wolves still face threats there because their numbers remain relatively small and because the wolf populations in the Yellowstone National Park area, in central Idaho and in northwest Montana do not intermingle......The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that figure is more than four times the number of wolves needed to consider removing a species from federal protections.

Comment: It used to be that I had faith that the scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service did a good job, and that the agency reported their conclusions fairly. Now I wonder whether the Bush administration is overriding scientific judgments in order to please a conservative constituency in the West. JAD

How Wolves Change Rivers

The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone has helped to restore the Yellowstone ecosystem towards its natural state, as the video shows. However, the wolves are under continuous threats due to political pressures against the protection of wolves. Apparently the politics in Wyoming and Montana are especially opposed to federal government efforts to protect national parks and especially sensitive to the fears of people owning sheep and cattle.

Ranchers vs. Bison Huggers (Don't Try Hugging a Bison at Home!)

I quote from a column in The Economist:

THE most original political book of early 2015 is not formally about politics at all. Instead “The Battle for Yellowstone” by Justin Farrell, a young scholar at Yale University, ponders venomous rows that have shaken Yellowstone National Park in recent decades, and why they are so intractable. The rows turn on such questions as wolf re-introduction, bison roaming-rights and snowmobile access to that lovely corner of the Rocky Mountains....... 

(Sociologist Farell) spent two years asking folk in and around Yellowstone why they are so cross. Beneath debates about science and economics he found arguments about morality and the proper relations between humans and nature—though those involved often do not, or will not acknowledge this. In short, all sides purport to be weighing what is true and false, while really arguing about right and wrong. 

Pro-wolf biologists and officials call themselves dispassionate custodians of a unique place. But they give themselves away with quasi-spiritual talk of wolves restoring “wholeness” to a landscape damaged by man. Indeed, when the first Yellowstone wolves were released in 1995, the then-interior secretary, Bruce Babbit, called it “a day of redemption”. While living with pro-bison activists, a startled Mr Farrell heard them telling various furry specimens “We love you,” or “We are here to protect you, you big sacred boy,” and spouting bowdlerised Native-American teachings about the animals’ ancient souls (while simultaneously insisting, in many cases, that they distrusted religion and its works). 

As for anti-wolf types, when offered financial compensation for wolf-attacks on their livestock, some turn it down—suggesting that more than economics is at stake. Dig a bit, and a culture war is raging between the “old West” of rugged ranchers and hunters, who once earned respect and status by taming nature, but who now find themselves called environmental menaces by “new West” incomers with big-city ideas about animal rights and natural ecosystems. Behind that local clash—pitting folk with gun racks on their trucks against those with bike racks, as Mr Farrell puts it—there lurks a still larger suspicion of the federal government. Many “old West” types see a plot to drive ranchers from the land. They talk of “federal wolves” undermining their property rights, and challenging the God-ordained duty of humans to protect their own families, and exercise dominion over Creation.

Mr. Farell's book is not out yet, and I assume that the author of the article could not due it justice in a short space. I think there is a good point that the people most passionately arguing about Yellowstone are making their arguments based on ideological positions that are deeply held -- indeed, part of their view of themselves.

I see Yellowstone as a unique place, both for its beauty and the richness of its biodiversity. I want it preserved for that reason, while I am quite willing to see most of the country modified to meet human demands. I suspect that the ranchers who live near Yellowstone see it as part of their neighborhood. I am not happy when deer from the woods miles from my house get into my yard and eat my wife's tomatoes, and I suspect that the nearby ranchers have similar feelings related to Yellowstone.

Too bad! My view -- that the National Parks are a great American idea -- is widely shared by Americans and by the people all over the world, and in our democracy our will has prevailed for more than a century.

Palin Versus the Wolves

Sarah Palin, soon after assuming the office of Governor of Alaska announced a $150 bounty per wolf killed. According to the Defenders of Wildlife, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and the Alaska Chapter of the Sierra Club the Governor was overstepping her legal authority in doing so.

When Rep. George Miller, a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, introduced federal legislation last year to end Alaska's policy of allowing people to shoot wolves from airplanes, according to a California paper, Governor Palin objected:

"Congressman Miller doesn't understand rural Alaska (and) doesn't comprehend wildlife management in the North," the Alaska governor said in a statement issued last September.

A letter was signed by many scientists in 2007 beginning with the following paragraph:

As scientists and other wildlife professionals , we urge you to strengthen the application of science-based wildlife management to sound policy decisions, especially for those Alaska programs related to predator control. We are concerned with potential problems of managing and conserving large mammalian carnivores and their ungulate prey resulting from recent approval of predator control programs designed to severely reduce populations of gray wolves, black bears and brown bears. We strongly urge the State of Alaska to gather data necessary to justify, implement, monitor and evaluate these programs so that management practices will ensure sustained populations of both predators and prey.

Check out a great blog

The Wolves of the High Arctic blog presents research results of a multi-year project that is following a pack of wolves that is perhaps the least disturbed by human presence (read "hunting") in the world. Thank goodness for people like David Mech!

The world is complicated!

When you change one thing, others change in response. You may not realize what the overall impact of your action will be.

 When they killed off the wolves of Yellowstone, they did not realize that they were changing the ecology of the National Park -- something that the nation had decided must not be changed. Fortunately, restoring wolves to the park is helping to restore the ecology.

Sarah Palin on Science

The Wikipedia article on Sarah Palin has information that suggests her attitudes toward science. Sarah Palin has a bachelor degree in communications-journalism, and her only job outside government was apparently that of a television sports reporter. It seems to me that there are three "hot button" issues that set the tone: environment, reproductive biology and stem cell research, and evolution versus creationism.

Environment: "Palin has strongly promoted oil and natural gas resource development in Alaska, including in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)....When asked about climate change after becoming Senator McCain's presumptive running mate, she stated that it would 'affect Alaska more than any other state', but she added, 'I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.'......In May 2008, Palin objected to the decision of Dirk Kempthorne, the Republican United States Secretary of the Interior, to list polar bears as an endangered species. The State of Alaska filed a lawsuit to stop the listing amid fears that it would hurt oil and gas development in the bears' habitat off Alaska's northern and northwestern coasts. She said the move to list the bears was premature and was not the appropriate management tool for their welfare." According to Slate, Governor Palin is also in favor of programs that would shoot wolves from aircraft in order to increase the population of moose.

Reproductive biology: She "has described herself as being as 'pro-life as any candidate can be.'" I find this 2006 Q&A from the conservative Eagle Forum Alaska on a blog:

Q: Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?

SP: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.

According to CBS:

She takes the militant position of opposing allowing women to choose to terminate pregnancies even in cases where they have been raped. She also opposes allowing abortions in cases of incest.......

She opposes embryonic stem-cell research and other scientific initiatives that might give sick people the option of choosing treatments that could cure them or at least allow them to treat their ailments.

Creationism versus Evolution: The Lang Report states:

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin wants creationism taught in science classes. In a 2006 gubernatorial debate, the soon-to-be governor of Alaska said of evolution and creation education, "Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

Comment: This appears to be someone who has little understanding of nor respect for science. JAD

A Thought on Reading Professor Appiah

In his book, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, Kwame Anthony Appiah differentiates among three conceptual constructs:

• Racialism, the belief that "there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, which allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race."
• Extrinsic racism, the belief that moral distinctions can be made between races because they believe that the racial essence involves certain morally relevant traits.
• Intrinsic racism, the belief that moral distinctions can be made between races quite independent of the morally relevant traits of individuals of those races, much as we make more distinctions between "our family" and "others not of our family".

I would point out that we also associate race with geography. For example, there are all sorts of medically relevant heritable characteristics, such as proclivity to Type II diabetes or gout, which could be used to divide people into groups, but we would not say that the diabetes prone are a race.

Appiah points out that racism presupposes racialism. If you can not divide people into races, then how can you attribute distinctions to membership in those races. He also points out that racialism, as he defines it, does not presuppose moral distinctions. We might differentiate the tall from the short, the blond from the red head or the twin from the single born, without assuming that there are any morally relevant characteristics of such distinctions.

I suppose that something like intrinsic racism is possibly an evolved, inherited characteristic of man. It seems clear that there is an evolutionary advantage to individuals who protect their direct lineal descendants, and so feeling a moral responsibility to take care of your kids and grandkids seems likely to have been built into us. We are social animals joining with a group to provide mutual protection and support seems also to have had survival benefits and thus to have been an evolved trait which we see as moral responsibility -- we would feel bad were we not to help those with whom we live and work. On the other hand, it would not have been a survival trait to help all the others that we came into contact with. The sheep do not do well be nurturing the wolves. So one expects there to have been an evolved distinction between those we feel we have to help and those for whom we have no such feeling.

I would guess however that the distinction between us and them is cultural, even if it builds on an innate tendency to treat others of "us" differently than one treats an "other".

The problem would seem to be that racialism is based on a naive understanding of the determinants of human behavior. There are more than 20,000 human genes, each of which may have several variants. While behavior, which would seem to be the only basis for morally relevant traits, may have a genetic component, it would appear to be the result of combinations of complex sets of genes as well as environment and "nurture". Moreover, there seems to be little reason to believe that any of the genetically based traits that are open to simple observation are closely related to any of the behavioral traits that might be morally relevant. Tall people might thereby have an advantage at basketball and people with fair skin might have an advantage producing vitamin D in low sunlight, but it is hard to see how these traits could be morally relevant.

RecreationParks.Net: Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park is a World Heritage Site. The vast natural forest of Yellowstone National Park covers nearly 9,000 km²; 96% of the park lies in Wyoming, 3% in Montana and 1% in Idaho. Yellowstone contains half of all the world's known geothermal features, with more than 10,000 examples. It also has the world's largest concentration of geysers (more than 300 geyers, or two thirds of all those on the planet). Established in 1872, Yellowstone is equally known for its wildlife, such as grizzly bears, wolves, bison and wapitis.

RecreationParks.Net provides information on Yellowstone National Park. Josef Carlo B. Velina has requested that we make the website known to our readers. It is one of some 60,000 parks in the United States he has described on his website, using USGS data and other sources.

The Environment -- Knowing the Cost but not the Value

The Economist has a tutorial on economic measurement of "ecosystem services". It identifies four approaches:

• If the service has an output, then it is sometimes possible to value the environmental input. Thus an estimate of the value of bees has been made based on the value of the crops that they pollinate.
• "(I)f market prices are affected by nature, a value can be derived from them. Thus an apartment in New York with a view of Central Park is worth considerably more than one without such a view."
• "(P)eople’s behaviour—for instance the costs that they are prepared to bear to visit a national park—reveals the value that they place on unpriced goods."
• "(P)eople can be asked whether and how much they prize aspects of nature." This method applies primarily to non-use value.

Perhaps there is another way. Think about the smog that now makes life miserable in Chinese cities. In some way, it may be compared to the air pollution that once afflicted London. London cleaned up its air, and then cleaned up the buildings that its air pollution had soiled. It was willing to pay the costs of substituting other fuels for coal and cleaning those buildings. That cost, updated to current conditions, might be an estimate of the value of clean air in a city (of a given population size). Other major efforts to clean up air and water (reduction of smog in Los Angeles, the U.S. Clean Air and Clean Water programs, etc.) might suggest values people attach to environmental quality.

The article goes on to state:

Some of the numbers derived from these methods are distinctly dodgy, but conservationists argue, fairly reasonably, that it is better to have mediocre estimates than none at all. They lend force to environmentalists’ arguments and can usefully be fed into cost-benefit analyses. Governments thinking of planting forests or creating nature reserves, for instance, can put sensible numbers on the value people attribute to them, and thus work out whether the land in question would be better used for agricultural or recreational purposes. 

I am not sure that mediocre estimates are always better than none, especially if they will be misused. A decision to forego an environmental service because a government is unwilling to pay the preservation cost might be taken to suggest -- inappropriately -- that the value of the service is less than the cost would have been to protect it. It may simply be that the government was short sighted, or that it failed to find means to mobilize financial mechanisms to capture the needed portion of the value.

I think of "natural resources". How much are oil and gas fields worth before they have been located? How much were the fields now being exploited by fracking worth before the fracking technology was developed to exploit them, and the costs of alternative sources became high enough to justify the development and application of the new technology? How much were the off shore or the deep water oil reserves worth before they were located, before the technology was developed for their exploitation, and before alternative, lower cost sources were running out? The point is that something becomes a resource only when the technology exists to find it and it is found, and when the technology exists to exploit it.

So how many "natural resources" are to be found in biodiversity and other aspects of nature about which we know little or nothing now. Assuming that there is no value because we have not yet developed the technology to create value seems a serious mistake.

How about other approaches.

Rights

What if we were to say that great apes and other primates have a right to exist as species? Rights "trump" cost-benefit analysis. We do now take a rights based position on the treatment of animals used in research. They have to be housed, fed and treated humanely, even if it costs a lot to do so. Indeed, it appears that chimpanzees are no longer to be used in medical research because they have suffered too much in the past from such use, and because the species is in some danger as a species.

Perhaps rhinos, elephants, whales, bison, wolves and other species have similar rights to exist. Indeed, perhaps they have rights to exist in nature, and not merely in zoos or gene banks.

Duty

The World Heritage Convention implies that countries have a duty to protect things because they are of such cultural or natural value that they must be preserved for future generations. It would I suppose be possible to value Yellowstone and Yosemite by what the government could get selling them off as real estate -- that would be at least a lower bound on the actual monetary value. But would it not be better to simply say that we have a duty to future generations to keep these wonders pristine?