Skip to main content

Never Cry Wolf

By


I noticed that one of the stories getting a lot of press these days is the proposal to take gray wolves off the endangered species list.  Most of the articles view this is yet another plot by the Republicans, and worse Obama, to vilify wolves.  Yet, this is a proposal put forward by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, not partisan lawmakers.

The Fish and Wildlife Service notes that gray wolves have made tremendous gains in the Rocky Mountains and Great Lakes region.  Director Dan Ashe wants to call attention to a far more pressing problem in the Mexican gray wolf, which is struggling in the Southwest states.  Ashe feels that the northern gray wolf population can fend for itself.

To show how outdated these alarmist stories are.  The Rocky Mountain wolf was removed from the endangered species list in 2011, which was supported by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, because the wolf was posing a threat to elk, moose and deer.

It seems you really have to dig through the news today to find the original sources.  What's worse is that the stories are often truncated into memes and spread across facebook by political activist organizations.  I'm sure there are a lot of Republicans who would like to see wolves removed from the endangered species list all together, since in general they are against any form of regulation, but in this case the proposed removal was the result of careful study, not political wrangling.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more