THE ENVIRONMENT : What Price the Howl of the Wolf?

Wolves are on the prowl again in the northern Rockies. After nearly a century of silence, visitors to Yellowstone National Park may hear wolves howl as early as this summer. Yet, this “success” endangers the wolf more than any crusty old rancher with a rifle: It pits natural allies against each other in a fight the wolf will lose--and politicians, bureaucrats and special interests will win.

Don’t hearken to the anti-wolf lobby’s howls about danger to humans. In the European-era history of North America, no one has found a single record of a healthy (i.e. rabies-free) wolf attacking a human. About 1,700 wolves live in Minnesota’s dairy-farm country, where little girls sport red riding hoods with abandon. Wolves and humans share territory in Alaska and Canada. So why the fuss?

Consider an economist’s thumbnail Law of the West: The winners are those who turn public assets into private gain--and those who turn private costs into public liabilities.

Everyone in the wolf controversy seeks to master this sleight-of-hand. Taxpayers would do well to understand the magic that keeps us rhetorical rugged individualists on the federal dole. Consider the environmentalists first.

In a made-for-TV appearance, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt himself helped carry caged wolves into Yellowstone. Then he told the nation, “This is an incredible victory that has been a long time coming.” Is Babbitt right? Is the return of the wolf to public lands a victory for environmental quality and ecological integrity? Or is it a victory for special interests and their allies in the federal bureaucracy and Congress?

Who really speaks for the wolf? When tax dollars and political power are involved, I suspect that the wolf would do better to speak for itself by naturally reoccupying its former habitat via migration from existing populations in Canada.

The wolf’s federally aided return threatens to shrink to the merely symbolic, empty of ecological value. Environmentalists and bureaucrats, by this argument, become free riders, forcing the true costs of their wolves onto the taxpayers, in general, and ranchers, in particular. For it is the ranchers (and not the primarily urban environmentalists) who must bear the costs of the wolf’s presence.

In the same way, taxpayers and ranchers must bear the costs of federal mismanagement that has resulted in too few grizzly bears and too little fire. In ecosystem management, you can never do just one thing, so these miscues have led to too many publicly owned elk and bison in too many ranchers’ private hayfields.

Almost every ecologist who does not work for the National Park Service agrees that Yellowstone has too many elk and too many bison. In nature, winter and wolves might combine to thin the herds to match local carrying capacity. But how can the wolves eat their way through a federal program that feeds alfalfa pellets to thousands of Yellowstone’s elk and bison every winter at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson, Wy., just south of the park? Thanks to this and other misguided federal management policies, there is little that is natural about Yellowstone.

Now apply the Law of the West to the ranchers and their congressional allies. Last year, they soundly defeated Babbitt’s modest proposal to raise fees for grazing on public lands to a larger fraction of their market value. Their victory means that they continue to pass on the costs of a predator-free, degraded range to taxpayers. We pay federal bureaucrats to kill predators and to indulge in range-reclamation projects whose ecological and economic returns are wildly out of proportion to the tax dollars invested.

In a rare moment of honesty, Karen Henry of the Wyoming Farm Bureau told the Associated Press, “The issue is not wolves. The issue is control of the land. This (wolf reintroduction) is part of a bigger agenda from the Interior Department to control the West.” Wyoming’s Gov. Jim Geringer added that the federal wolf program was running roughshod over states’ rights, allowing as how he was “personally offended” that Babbitt carried wolves into Yellowstone (most of which is in Wyoming) without even informing the elected officials of the “host state.” And Idaho Sen. Larry E. Craig threw in his two-cents’ worth: “I am not going to be a party to sticking the taxpayer with that bill.” Someone should ask Henry, Geringer and Craig about their constituents’ status as “free riders” on the public range.

Craig was referring to yet another funding request, now pending before Congress, for an additional $6.8 million to complete the wolf project. So far, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has already spent all the $6 million allotted for the entire life of a program that is supposed to last until 2002. That means going to a hostile Congress for money to pay for trapping, tranquilizing, testing, transporting and releasing an additional 30 wolves a year for the next two to four winters. But that’s just the first step, according to the government’s own environmental-impact statement.

Though we know a lot about the ecology of wolves in other settings, we know little about how these particular wolves will (or will not) fit into their new home. Through radio collars, periodic trapping and endless testing, scientists will have to monitor all their travel, health, breeding and predation patterns. Far down the line, in 2002, the government proposes to remove the wolf from the Endangered Species List--but if and only if its population has reached the level of 10 breeding pairs and 100 wolves in each of the two areas, northern Idaho and Yellowstone.

Is there a better way? Wyoming environmentalist Renee Askins has spent the last 10 years working for the wolf’s return. She started the Wolf Fund to make her dream come true. Nickel by painful nickel, she raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from people who feel that the Rockies and the wolf deserve each other. Oddly enough, the Wolf Fund owns neither land nor wolves. Nor does it propose to do so. Askins says, “Laws don’t protect wolves. People protect wolves.” Incredibly, she seems to feel that a change of heart will somehow save the wolf from both sides of a controversy that is more about power and greed than it is about ecology.

Yet, in another sense, the earnest Askins is right. Properly motivated people would protect wolves. Private property owners tend to protect their land’s values in every sense of the term. As the Endangered Species Act presently stands, only federal bureaucrats and designated states may “own” an endangered species like the wolf. The political gridlock we have achieved over the wolf serves neither the wolf nor the taxpayer, neither ecology nor economy.

Why not “privatize” ownership of endangered species? Is it the welfare of the species we care about--or our own chunk out of the federal pork barrel?

A basic principle pertains for economics as for ecology: scarcity confers value. So why not create the conditions where the free market could protect the wolf? Why not break the deadlock--and the federal monopoly--by introducing some new players to the game? In a stunning reversal of misguided federal policies, Congress recently downsized the notorious Bureau of Indian Affairs and handed home rule to some Indian tribes. Why not give the Indians a free hand to recover their own working relationship with fire, elk, grizzly, wolf and bison? Healthy populations of these animals are as integral to Indian culture as they are ornamental to ours. And, anyway, the Indians could not do worse than we have.

Nor could private entrepreneurs do worse than the federal bureaucracies have done under the flawed and failing Endangered Species Act. The West brims over with large private ranches where wolves would get the care they deserve. And the woods are full of competent, conscientious wolf biologists. Most of them work for federal bureaucracies, and most of them know that their valiant efforts on behalf of the wolf are doomed. If we allowed an endangered-species recovery program to create real work, those who wish to hear the wolf howl could do so, as long as they were willing to pay for the privilege.

Similarly, ranchers might start to manage for what is rare and valuable--for the species that stands astride the food pyramid--for the wolf. News from Idaho reports that a rancher has shot one of the newly introduced wolves, claiming it killed a $500 calf. A different system would make a different sort of sense to that rancher. The cost of each reintroduced wolf under the federal system is $65,000. You figure it out.