In the Shadow of the Wolf: Wildlife Conflict and Land Use Politics in the New West
Federal reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in the mid-1990s was widely hailed as one of the great conservation successes of the 20th century, and has become an emblematic touchstone for rewilding – an emerging discourse and set of practices for...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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eScholarship, University of California
2020
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| Online Access: | https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zk5g54g https://escholarship.org/content/qt6zk5g54g/qt6zk5g54g.pdf |
| Summary: | Federal reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in the mid-1990s was widely hailed as one of the great conservation successes of the 20th century, and has become an emblematic touchstone for rewilding – an emerging discourse and set of practices for conservation in the Anthropocene. As wolves have grown in number and range, however, so too has socio-political conflict, particularly around predation as threat to livestock production. Reaction appears to far exceed wolves’ material impacts, however, and persists 25 years after reintroduction despite development and deployment of compensation measures and coexistence strategies. The wolf is thus also an exemplary instance of human-wildlife conflict, an increasingly prominent and intractable concern for megafauna conservation around the world. And while volumes have been written on wolves in Yellowstone, there has been relatively little scholarly attention to Idaho even as it highlights the challenges of shared space across the working landscapes of the American West.Between 2015 and 2018, I conducted a case study of the Wood River Wolf Project (WRWP), a collaboration between sheep ranchers, environmental organizations, and governmental agencies in Blaine County, Idaho that has pursued wolf-livestock coexistence for over a decade. Grazing thousands of sheep on its project area in the Sawtooth Mountains while boasting the lowest depredation loss rates in the state, the WRWP has garnered international attention as a model of nonlethal management, holding out the possibility of a peaceful end to the wolf wars. Based in ethnographic and archival research and drawing insights from political ecology and critical “more-than-human” geography, I ask what we might learn from this critical case, guided by two overarching questions: First, how can we account for the persistence and seemingly disproportionate intensity of conflict surrounding wolves in the American West? And second, what are the necessary preconditions for and ... |
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