Wolf not at the door

After decades of bitter legal feuds and culture war skirmishes over the fate of wild wolves in the United States, the Trump administration has tried to put a point at the end of the sentence.

In stripping gray wolves of their Endangered Species Act protection across the country, the responsible federal agency went against both science and public opinion and declared the species “biologically recovered.”

This delisting rule won’t stand up to scrutiny. More wolves will die as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service squares off, once again, in court against conservationists with strong arguments that there’s no evidence on which to base the agency’s claim that wolves will be just fine.

In his first weeks as president, Biden should take decisive action and direct federal wildlife agencies to embrace a science-backed full recovery of the wolf in the lower 48 states, which would hinge on restoring federal protections under the Endangered Species Act and keeping them in place.

If allowed to proceed unchecked, federal delisting will trigger a cascade of state management decisions that will bring more state-sanctioned wolf slaughters and doom the species’ recovery.

States such as Wisconsin mandate an immediate wolf hunting and trapping season upon federal delisting. Wolves that attempt to disperse from the western Great Lakes states to seek new territory in the Dakotas can be gunned down on sight without penalty. The fundamental purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to protect and recover imperiled species and the ecosystems upon which they depend. Most of us are now familiar with the many ecological benefits wolves provide, as illustrated by wolf re-introduction to Yellowstone National Park. Yet with delisting, we’ll never know how healthy wolf populations might transform their former habitats in the Adirondacks, Sierra Nevada, or Black Hills of South Dakota.

The uncertainty surrounding the status of wolves erodes faith in good governance and wildlife management—and even the value that people place on wolves. Protection under the federal Endangered Species Act remains the most powerful and effective means of undoing nearly a century of eradication efforts throughout the nation.

Without it, wolves will remain as they are now—pale shadows of their former selves, diminished symbols of a wild America now lost.