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CHAPTER 3

Conservation of Endangered Species

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The Mexican spotted owl is threatened by logging of its old growth forest habitat. Koalas face a variety of threats to their existence, including infectious disease and wildfires. The highly restricted relict darter has become endangered as a result of habitat destruction.

The morning of March 24, 1995, Yellowstone National Park was still blanketed in snow when six gray wolves—five males and one female—stepped out of their pen in the Lamar Valley. As they broke an infrared beam that spanned the opening of their cage, a radio signal alerted anxious park employees stationed at a distance. More than 24 hours later, Doug Smith, a field biologist with a bushy mustache, spotted the wolves for the first time, frolicking and exploring the unfamiliar landscape. “They were cavorting, playing and checking things out,” he told the New York Times. It was, he said, a celebration of their “recent liberation.”

This wolf pack was the first to set foot in one of the world’s most iconic national parks in more than 50 years. The canine predators had been eradicated from Yellowstone and the surrounding area by ranchers protecting their livestock and by the federal government, which had laid out poison carcasses to kill them, dynamited their dens, and offered bounties to hunters who brought in their heads and skins. Their 1995 reintroduction was hugely controversial among ranchers and others, who unsuccessfully sued to stop it. As that battle played out, the wolves were live-trapped in Canada, outfitted with radio collars, and housed at this pen where they were fed elk, deer, moose, and bison, while becoming accustomed to the sights, sounds, and smells of their new home.

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“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.”

Aldo Leopold, from Thinking Like a Mountain, 1949

By 2003, 31 reintroduced wolves had multiplied and Yellowstone boasted 174 wolves in a dozen packs. But the wolves ventured farther and farther outside the park boundaries, once again creating conflicts with ranchers. Over the years, Doug Smith became known as the “Wolf Man” and continued to follow the wolves’ movements and activities with radio collars. On October 3, 2009, he learned that an alpha female he had been following—wolf 527F—had been legally shot by a hunter in Montana. Smith was devastated. The cycle of exploitation and conservation had come full circle. “I have a deep-seated, fierce love of nature, and I’m afraid that slowly, piece by piece, we’re losing it all,” he later told the Christian Science Monitor.

In this chapter and the next, we focus on the challenge of restoring and conserving biodiversity in the modern world. Biodiversity refers to biological variety, from genes and species to diversity at the scale of ecosystems and the globe. Some of the reasons to conserve biodiversity are very practical. The extinction of species results in the irreplaceable loss of potential sources of food, medicinal drugs, industrial chemicals, and other materials and services potentially useful to humans. In addition, as we will discuss in Chapter 4, some species may play key roles in sustaining the health of the ecosystems on which all populations depend. Beyond these practical reasons, biocentric ethics, such as those expressed by Doug Smith, commonly counsel stewardship of nature and doing no harm to other species.

Central Question

How can we protect species in an increasingly human-dominated world?