Coexisting with Large Carnivores: Lessons From Greater Yellowstone / Edition 1

by Tim Clark, Murray Rutherford, Denise Casey

Overview

As in the rest of the United States, grizzly bears, wolves, and mountain lions in and around Yellowstone National Park were eliminated or reduced decades ago to very low numbers. In recent years, however, populations have begun to recover, leading to encounters between animals and people and, more significantly, to conflicts among people about what to do with these often controversial neighbors.

Coexisting with Large Carnivores presents a close-up look at the socio-political context of large carnivores and their management in western Wyoming south of Yellowstone National Park, including the southern part of what is commonly recognized as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The book brings together researchers and others who have studied and worked in the region to help untangle some of the highly charged issues associated with large carnivores, their interactions with humans, and the politics that arise from those interactions.

This volume argues that coexistence will be achieved only by a thorough understanding of the human populations involved, their values, attitudes, beliefs, and the institutions through which carnivores and humans are managed. Coexisting with Large Carnivores offers important insights into this complex, dynamic issue and provides a unique overview of issues and strategies for managers, researchers, government officials, ranchers, and everyone else concerned about the management and conservation of large carnivores and the people who live nearby.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597260053
Publisher:	Island Press
Publication date:	05/05/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Tim Clark is a biologist by training who does most of his work now on questions of environmental policy. He divides his time between Yale, where he is an adjunct professor, and Jackson, WY, where he is the president and founder of the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, a successful nonprofit group with a good reputation, whose mission is creative, cooperative, practical problem solving in the conservation of nature.


Murray Rutherford is an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University and one of Clark's recent Ph.D. students.


Denise Casey is Secretary/Treasurer, Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, Jackson, Wyoming. Denise is a graduate of the geography department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a former librarian.

Read an Excerpt

Coexisting with Large Carnivores

Lessons from Greater Yellowstone

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By Tim W. Clark, Murray B. Rutherford, Denise Casey

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Island Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59726-005-3

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CHAPTER 1

Coexisting with Large Carnivores: Orienting to the Problems

Tim W. Clark and Murray B. Rutherford

Large carnivores mean vastly different things to different people, and these meanings are often associated with intense feelings. A sampling of quotes from articles and newspapers published in the American West makes this plain. For some people, large carnivores are an outlet for strong resentment about the course of recent history in the West. For example, Cat Urbigkit, a sheepherder and coowner of the Sublette County Examiner (a small newspaper published in Pinedale, Wyoming), reported in 2002 that county commissioners in several Wyoming counties had "outlawed" grizzly bears and wolves. "Fed up with mandates from the federal government," they took action, "adopting resolutions prohibiting the presence, introduction or reintroduction of grizzly bears and wolves within the boundaries of their counties." They "drew a line in the sand," by proclaiming that they would no longer tolerate these kinds of actions from the federal government. As Todd Wilkinson, a well-known writer on natural resource issues in the West, observed, some people just "hate wolves. They hate grizzlies. They hate government (except federal subsidies). They hate public education. They hate any law which constrains their 'personal liberty.'" They spin elaborate, sometimes slanderous, yarns about conservationists plotting to "'lock Americans out of public lands'; allegedly scheming to lure the U.S. into a 'one-world government,' headquartered by the United Nations; and finally [driving] all rural people off the land." Wilkinson suggested that "hatred of wolves could be a symptom"—we might also call it a symbol—"of something else: fear of losing control over things in our lives, which inherently are beyond our control."

In dramatic contrast, the return of large carnivores has been a welcome event for other people, evidence that the region's ecology is "healing" and returning to the "way it should be." According to noted author Tom McNamee, putting wolves back into nature "may have saved the ecosystem from ruin." Similarly, Robert Ferris of Defenders of Wildlife observed, "Restoration of these animals represents a major step in correcting earlier errors in public policy and in repairing ecological imbalances." And Greg Hanscom in High Country News said, "Restore the top predator and you restore the entire ecosystem."

These contrasting quotes make two things very clear. First, carnivores symbolize many other issues, and second, the differences among these "meanings" pose a serious practical management challenge. Finding common ground is indeed an uphill task.

Nowhere is the conflict over meaning and management sharper than in the area of the West on which this book focuses—western Wyoming south of Yellowstone National Park, including the southern part of what is commonly recognized as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Greater Yellowstone is one of the largest and most important systems of protected areas in the United States and one of the more significant regions for conservation in the world. As figure 1.1 shows, the area covered by this book encompasses about 22,000 square miles and includes all of Bridger-Teton National Forest, other federal and state lands, and private lands. The overall boundaries are not rigidly defined, and large carnivores range widely in and out, but in recent years human-carnivore conflicts seem to be clustered in this area (see figure 1.1). This is the stage on which a public policy play is currently being acted out, and it can serve as a field laboratory for us to learn how to secure a future for large carnivores in a dynamic human context.

The difficulty of coexisting with large carnivores is less about the carnivores than it is about us and our views. The basic problem is how we go about interacting with one another over troubling public issues and collectively deciding how we want to live. We can manage large carnivores. However, it is much more challenging to manage ourselves in cooperative ways that will give large carnivores more room than they presently have.

Grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions were eliminated or reduced to very low numbers in most of Greater Yellowstone decades ago. But in recent years many Westerners, along with others nationwide, have called for the restoration of these animals. This has led to more active conservation, restoration, and reintroduction programs. Since the early 1990s, grizzly bears and wolves have moved south from Yellowstone country into western Wyoming, and the number of mountain lions may also have increased. This has led to conflicts among people about what to do with their new and sometimes unwanted neighbors, which occasionally eat sheep and cattle in addition to deer and elk. The intense feelings that people have about carnivores, the return of these animals to areas from which they have long been absent, and the new conflicts occurring among people and between carnivores and people have combined to make management of large carnivores a complex and messy political problem. It can also be highly personal and costly for some of the participants. Managers, ranchers, and environmentalists have occasionally been vilified or glorified in the media. They too have become political symbols.

So what are the real issues behind the symbolism? Can anything be done to change these interactions so that people and wildlife can live in sustainable coexistence with one another? Grizzly researcher Steve Primm, with the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, says the answer is decidedly "yes!" Steve is working to develop a community-based grizzly management process near Ennis, Montana, and is building food storage poles in backcountry campsites south of Yellowstone. He believes that we must deal with the real bears and the real problems they sometimes cause, while recognizing at the same time that these bears are highly symbolic (Primm elaborates on these views in chapters 4 and 6). Wildlife biologist Timm Kaminski also says "yes!" Now with the Mountain Livestock Cooperative, Timm is working to show people who want to protect bears, wolves, and mountain lions, and those who earn a living from the land, that people can and do solve difficult carnivore management problems by learning from each other. These two experienced field workers are among a growing number of individuals who believe that carnivore management can be much more effective in promoting and achieving coexistence between people and carnivores.

In this chapter and throughout this book we argue that to achieve coexistence with large carnivores we must think and act in ways that were unthinkable a few, short decades ago. We must minimize local, on-the-ground conflicts between people and predators, while finding ways to change what carnivores mean and symbolize. We must be adaptive and use "practice-based learning" to build on our past successes—drawing on experiences in actual situations to learn what works (and what does not work) to solve or minimize problems.

Carnivore Management as a Social Process

Managing large carnivores is a complex, dynamic, ongoing, social process. It directly reflects the feelings, beliefs, and values of the many people who participate in one way or another. Understanding this complex social process is a vital first step to envisioning how we can change things for the better.

At the Center: People and Their Perspectives

Although we often focus our attention on grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions, we should never forget that people are involved. Many people think that carnivore management is a fairly cut-and-dried activity, carried out by technical experts (scientists and managers working for government) who are objective and neutral and who operate with the public interest in mind. In fact, carnivore management is an ongoing process in which many people—managers, scientists, ranchers, environmentalists, and those with other interests—make decisions about what we all value (although we don't all value the same things). Carnivore management is a political process that is only partially scientific. It is a "transscience" issue that involves science, but goes well beyond what science can offer. Symbols and symbolic victories are at least as important as real successes. Biases figure prominently, even on the part of experts.

To some people, carnivores should simply be destroyed. They argue that our frontier forebears virtually eliminated large carnivores half a century or more ago because they were so damaging to ranching and that, even though the populations of these animals are now much smaller, they continue to threaten livelihoods and pose unfair costs. These people claim that predators stand in the way of progress and should be eliminated, much reduced, or restricted to distant regions. To other people, though, these same animals symbolize "free nature" and a "healthy environment." They make the counterclaim that carnivores should be left alone to live in the "wilderness" with other wildlife "as they were meant to." They see carnivores as beneficial and say that local people should adjust to them, even if it means going out of business or ending generations of family tradition. These claims and counterclaims in the discourse about carnivore management show that strikingly different perspectives are at play, which are being symbolized in words, advocacy, and agency politics and programs. Consequently, conflict is typically at center stage when communities try to decide how to live with large carnivores.

Regardless of which side of the issue people are on, there is a tendency to label those on the other side as misguided, wrongheaded, ignorant, in need of education, or even malevolent or untrustworthy. Humans have a predisposition to stress group identity and exclusivity of membership and to use labels such as these to divide the world into "us vs. them." Terms such as "rancher" and "hunter" are examples of group identity labels that take on added meaning when contrasted with other labels such as "environmentalist" and "conservationist." Similarly, state agents may identify themselves in opposition to federal agents. The notion of "we and they" is the central theme that holds groups and societies together by creating individual and group meaning. Our core identities are formed around such groups, regardless of whether we tend to be parochial or cosmopolitan in our worldviews. This dynamic is clearly evident in large carnivore management.

To be more successful in carnivore management, we must work with this dynamic of identity formation and be sensitive to the needs and wants of all the people and groups involved. We need to learn what is most important to people, how we can balance one group's demands with those of other groups, and when and where to apply leverage to get people to compromise, work together, and set their sights on common goals. To do this, we need to strengthen the institutions associated with carnivore management and build in the capacity to learn from on-the-ground experiences with people and animals.

The Institutional System of Wildlife Management: Meeting High Standards, Serving Common Interests

We often think of wildlife management as doing something good for animals or their habitats. But as the foregoing examination of human social process has made clear, actually we are managing not the animals, but ourselves. For example, it is people's behavior that we target when we decide not to kill carnivores, or log a forest, or run sheep without herders, or hike or hunt in grizzly country, or leave wilderness areas littered with human food. To understand carnivore management, then, we need to understand ourselves and how we make decisions through the institutions of wildlife management. As we discuss in more depth in chapter 7, an institution is a "well established and structured pattern of behavior or of relationships that is accepted as a fundamental part of a culture." Among other things, institutions embody and prescribe the norms and rules for our decision making and actions. The many institutions associated with managing wildlife constitute a system that we call the "institutional system of wildlife management." For better or worse, it is this institutional system that we must work with to find a balance between people and predators. If this system fails, we must find ways to restructure it to serve people and nature better and to ensure a healthy future for ourselves.

The wildlife management process requires us to ask and answer many questions of ourselves. For example, what should be our goal—coexistence or elimination of carnivores? If we decide on coexistence, what do we mean by that, given the context in which we are operating? Should we limit our own actions that harm carnivores? If so, which ones, when, where, and how? How can we inspire adequate, constructive debate about these and other matters among all the people that matter? Should we work to improve our understanding of these species? What kind of scientific information—both biological about the animals, and social about ourselves—should we gather? How do we integrate this information so that we understand the situation and the problems realistically? What is the best way to learn about, to frame, or to define any problems? How can we be sure that we have fully explored all the options to fix the problems? What management practices should we carry out to ensure that we overcome the problems we have identified? How can we fairly distribute the burden of living with carnivores among all of the people and interests involved? What kinds of rules, plans, and actions are needed to guide and coordinate our work? How can we ensure that the community's decisions will be implemented promptly, fairly, and effectively? In what ways can we best monitor our actions and the responses of both people and carnivores to our decisions and their implementation? How do we reveal our own assumptions in all of this to ourselves, so we can take these assumptions into account in the entire decision-making and -implementing process? How should we use the answers from these questions and the feedback they give us to improve our science, debate, decisions, implementation, and monitoring? If we decide that we need to change some previous decisions and practices that aren't helping us to achieve our goals, what is the best way to phase them out and initiate more effective, justified decisions and practices?

It is self evident from the few questions posed here that a comprehensive, fair, and ultimately successful management process must include a broad range of participants—in fact, anyone who will in any way be affected by the decisions that are made. Management must be a careful, deliberative, lengthy exploration of logistics, ramifications, justifications, and other considerations. By asking these and numerous other questions, we can ensure that the institutional system of wildlife management takes advantage of the valuable learning opportunities that are currently available. We need to examine what we have done in the past, build on successes, and avoid repeating less successful practices (or continuing to do the same old thing even though circumstances have changed).

To repeat, the carnivore management process is really about people—what we believe and value, how we interact, and especially how we set up and carry out practices to limit harmful impacts on each other, on wildlife, and on the environment. Because this management process determines what happens to a public resource, it should incorporate the highest standards in decision making. It should be open, fair, comprehensive, reliable, creative, rational, integrative, effective, constructive, timely, dependable, independent of special interests, fully contextual, respectful, balanced, prompt, ameliorative, reputable, and honest. These standards are ideals, and although they may never be perfectly achievable, we should still make every effort to meet them. They are designed to ensure that decisions serve the common interest; to strive to meet them is fundamental to democracy. The challenge for those who are concerned about large carnivore management is to take a hard look at whether these ideals are being met in the existing institutions of wildlife management, and whether they are even being pursued.

At present all kinds of special interests are competing to influence the carnivore management process. Rather than working toward their common interests, each of these interests is promoting its own definition of the problem and its own preferred solution. The concepts of "common interest" and "special interest" are familiar to most people. Common interests are those widely shared within a community (e.g., having safe drinking water and a healthy ecosystem). Special interests are those that benefit only one group at the expense of others (e.g., poaching wildlife in a national park). There are many kinds of special interests, but all tend to mask their claims in the symbols and language of the common interest. It is not easy to sort out valid common interest demands from those of special interests, nor is it easy to determine which types of interests are presently served by the institutions of wildlife management. Nevertheless, it is only by sorting these things out that we will be able to find win-win solutions and learn how to coexist with one another and with large carnivores.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Coexisting with Large Carnivores by Tim W. Clark, Murray B. Rutherford, Denise Casey. Copyright © 2005 Island Press. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

About Island Press,
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Preface,
Part One: - Context,
Chapter 1 - Coexisting with Large Carnivores: Orienting to the Problems,
Chapter 2 - Management Context: People, Animals, and Institutions,
Part Two: - Cases,
Chapter 3 - Mountain Lion Management: Resolving Public Conflict,
Chapter 4 - Grizzly Bear Recovery: Living with Success?,
Chapter 5 - Wolf Restoration: A Battle in the War over the West,
Part Three: - Exploring Alternatives,
Chapter 6 - Participatory Projects for Coexistence: Rebuilding Civil Society,
Chapter 7 - The Institutional System of Wildlife Management: Making It More Effective,
Chapter 8 - Coexisting with Large Carnivores: Lessons from Greater Yellowstone,
Appendix - Making Carnivore Management Programs More Effective: A Guide for Decision Making,
Contributors,
Index,
ISLAND PRESS BOARD OF DIRECTORS,