I heard belatedly last night, just a couple of hours before the event, that a former Frostburg State University ecology student, just granted her PhD at Washington State University, would be giving a lecture on the re-introduction of the Gray Wolf into something like its historic range in the West.
The good lecturer and new PhD was Dr. Zoe Hanley. She was a comfortable and knowledgeable speaker, with a lot of field work, data and slides behind her talk, which centered on the realities of the conflicts - or not - between re-introducing the Gray Wolf and the extensive grazing that occurs on behalf of cattle and sheep ranchers in the West.
Based on their field monitoring, Zoe and her collaborators (including the major federal agencies (USDA, Forest Service, USFWS...and relevant Western state Fish and Game agencies...Idaho, Wash. State, and so on....) what they found was that the vast majority of food taken by the newly introduced wolves was deer, moose and elk in that order, and that cattle and sheep kills were less than 3% of the mortality rates for the livestock: diseases, fires, adverse weather accounting for the bulk of the losses.
OK, that's the good news and the straight forward part. I want to take nothing away from Zoe; I had the chance to talk for about 20 minutes with her parents after the event, as I was waiting in line to ask another question...seemed like good people.
But here's what was going through my mind at another level as I watched this event unfold.
What struck me was the total silence about the historic range of the wolf: East of the Mississippi! Hey, isn't that where Frostburg sits, geographically? In the Appalachian Mountains? I did learn from the lecture, however, the distinction between the Eastern Timber Wolf and the Western Gray Wolf, separate species, apparently (and I have some trouble with this, since all dogs are 97% percent Gray Wolf genetically, even Dachshunds, if you can believe it... unmentioned was the genetic difference between the two wolves...if it exists...).
Dr. Hanley is a negotiator and peace maker by the necessities of her calling: she needs the co-operation of ranchers to even begin to get the tracking and monitoring done for the baselines of her studies. So I fully understand that she can't get into the background issues, of the political economy, of the use of public lands, the way major national environmental groups have, if my memory serves me correctly. They have told us, repeatedly over decades that you, we, the federal taxpayer, vastly subsidize the Western grazers who depend big time on using public, federal lands in our national forests, parks and so on. They don't pay much per acre, are paying less in 2014 than in 1981, and it sounds like one of the problems tossed up by the re-introduction of the historic top of the food chain "keystone" predators is that these ranchers don't like to conduct "labor intensive" operations. Translation: they don't have a lot of cowpokes, on foot or horses. Horses are needed because of the vast distances of the grazing lands and the “rotation system, covering many miles, to supervise where the livestock roam. Greater human hands-on supervision would reduce the interactions with the hungry new wolf packs, which can range in size from 5-20 individuals, the larger packs, not surprisingly, causing more problems when they overlap with intensive grazing areas. In a comment from the floor, I suggested this was a great potential job opportunity for our yet to be realized green Civilian Conservation Corps. The one our Congressman John Delaney doesn’t seem to have any interest in. And, by the way, bounties are paid to the ranchers for the losses caused by wolves. It used to be federal, which makes sense, since it is federal Endangered Species policy driving the re-introduction of wolves. Zoe now says state agencies pay. I’m scratching my head over this. Federal program, federal mandates, require federal subsidy if we want to maintain the peace. Western Property Rights forces are some of the strongest drivers in the movement to abolish federal ownership and turn it over to states, which will be an ecological disaster in most cases.
Here’s a sample on the money aspects public lands from the Introduction of a study by the Center of Biological Diversity, a good, sound science group:
“Public lands grazing has been a billion-dollar boondoggle over the past decade and hasn’t come close to paying for itself,” said Randi Spivak with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Livestock owners pay less to graze their animals on publically owned land in 2014 than they did in 1981. Today the monthly cost of allowing a cow and calf to graze on federal lands is about the equivalent of a can of dog food. This damaging and expensive grazing program has been broken for years and needs to be fixed. Taxpayers, and the land we all own, deserve better.”
(Source: https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2015/grazing-01-28-2015.html ).
OK, so much for the science and deference’s. Watching the public lectures at the Appalachian Science Labs of the Univ. of MD at Frostburg, and FSU is like watching re-runs, which I have called for, as a national wake-up call, of the movie Cabaret (a Broadway revival would be welcome too)...the translation of which is that a society of microcosms and sub-cultures consumed by their own fragmented and isolated visions - and personal love relations (in the movie, at least) , a reflection of the modern world's great and minute and getting more so by the hour - fine-tuned division of labor- as the whole enterprise threatens to fall apart - in short, "whistling past the graveyard" - our own, economic and ecological. With Cabaret supplying an entertaining, tragic window onto, a dress rehearsal, if you like, of when another great educational and scientifically advanced culture, the Germany of the late 19th and early 20th century, and more specifically, the Weimar Republic, descended into the abyss, the greatest collapse of civilization since the end of the Roman Empire. What did all those fine academics at the great German Universities tell themselves as Germany voted for Hitler in 1933? No, we are not there yet, let’s be clear, but I don’t want to get any further along the road of comparisons.
That's my way at getting at FSU's great evasions: that all this academic talent, training, striving, if you throw in FSU, Allegany College and Garrett from our Western Maryland region - we must have more than a thousand faculty...seeming to have so little impact on ...let's be blunt...our region’s citizen’s voting 65-30 or thereabouts for Trump. Trump who has to be the anti-thesis at least, in my mind, at minimum, of the means and methods of modern scholarship, the scientific method and everything a college teacher is supposed to stand for in the modern world...(although we know that at least some, if not more, in the history, economic and other departments surely supported Trump...)… So how does reason get thrown out the window of our politics? (From this Bernie Sanders supporter who now reads polls showing him the most popular politician left standing in America…Ponder that, Dan Rupli, who was all in for Hillary in Maryland.) For my own essay on how this happens, happened in 2016, please visit here, my essay: “Major Miscalculations: Globalization, Economic Pain, Social Dislocation and the Rise of Trump - http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue79/Neil79.pdf
How does this happen? In exactly the same way Dr. Hanley can be a model lecturer, conflict smoother and scientific research and never address the big gap on the map: what about the re-introduction of wolves into the remoter areas EAST of the Mississippi, with our rampant, out-of-control deer populations at 3 to 10 times or more of their historic densities; when the great eastern forest that James Fennimore Cooper wrote about, at the time General Braddock met his fate in the mid-18th century, the General Braddock whom so much “out here” is named for, and the last of the Mohicans was prefiguring the loss of the great predators? How about their relevance in controlling Lyme disease, and the deer in so many places (don't look now, but right from our great hiking and bike trail) eating the entire next generation of forest away, the young trees and entire understory (unless it has spikes and stickers)...not to mention the obliteration of wildflowers...the stark fact and looming conflicts with hunters who have abysmally failed to control deer populations? Not even a mention?
Are there any wolves now east of the Mississippi? Apparently not, according to Dr. Hanley in a brief exchange with me well after the talk...perhaps in Southern Canada, rural Quebec, but isolated from migration south by the St. Lawrence River....hard to believe, from my sense, that there are not a few packs in the Adirondacks . I'll let you know when I finish the next two volumes of Annie LaBastille's three, or is it four volume biography...the late Annie LaBastille who built herself a small cabin in the Adirondacks and did a feminist version of Thoreau in the 1970’s…but stayed longer and wrote more about it…
Also tip-toeing past, last night’s lecture did, the stark realities being elected with the Trump administration, that there has been, since the rise of the Reagan forces in the 1980’s, the rise of the hard Republican Right, a major land-rights movement in the West (and yes, all over the East, even in NJ), ranchers (yes, of what type though? Desperate small land-owners, most at risk; giant corporate owners or hobby Hollywood-Silicon Valley billionaires...it makes a big difference in shaping public policy) forming a good part of the backbone (trust me on this)...of this reactionary movement based on a very distorted view of the history of property rights ( that’s “Takings” - Fifth Amendment legal terrain: example: The Farm Bureau writ large) who want to do away with vast amounts if not all of federal public lands and turn them over to the "producers": miners, fossil fuel exploiters, ranchers, big ag...and so forth...and state level authority: a last burst of the American Dream entirely on human terms...the hell with multiple use and the rights of nature...their enemies are "us" : feminists, environmentalists and the old labor left, the three great driving (and competing, often conflicting, forces within the left) not the corporate predators who are the ones tearing up the terrain of the "Homeland"
Wendell Berry, he of many books and a great Jefferson Lecture in 2012, and quite relevant for the matters at hand, has a great Letter- to- the- Editor to that effect in the current issue of the NY Review of Books, disputing Joan Didion’s new book’s (of old travel notes) findings on the West and South - ah sorry, but FSU doesn't think it can afford the NYRB because its students wouldn't be interested...!) Here’s the link to Berry’s Letter: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/05/11/southern-despair/ and to the original article of the review of Didion’s travel observations: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/joan-didion-deep-south/
All to be resolved peacefully and let us all live happily ever after, in Western Maryland and all of red-state America. Science - and diplomatic silences, which FSU and the Appalachian Science Labs of the University of Maryland, with offices just outside, off campus, here in Frostburg… seem to specialize in...Hiding the Cabaret realities of America's lurch into a stalemated state...or worse …and 1850's scale differences which our system does not seem to be able to resolve. Ah, but good science, optimism and tactful peacemaking, ala Dr. Hanley and her Wildlife mentors will.
I, however, live and think in some other, additional realities.
I guess it comes down to a question of who is, or isn’t, sleep walking through these times. In the same sleepwalking spirit, perhaps, as having a Tibetan Culture week at Frostburg Univ. , in the midst of Trump's first 100 days. Yes, I know, scheduled probably long in advance of even the hint of the toxic election results of November of 2016, but still, there as a symbol: let us have our worldwide exposure to culture here – cultural exposure as distant and murky and planed clear of conflicts as the Democratic discussion of their role, the Clinton’s role especially Bill’s, in the rise of China. Which is, by the way, crushing Tibet.
Here again, courtesy of the lonesome New York Review of Books, too adult for the shelves of the FSU library, despite being one of the best windows onto what the best minds in the world are thinking and writing about – and my politics is to the left of where most of the major economic and ecological judgements of the reviewers come out, so this is not an uncritical plug. Here is what they said about China and Tibet: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/how-tibet-is-being-crushed-while-the-dalai-lama-survives/
Like I said: "whistling past the graveyard."
Provocations not for the sake of them or for the sake of controversy, but to jolt us back to reality.
Best,
Billofrights
Frostburg, MD
In Constructive Exile.