The Problem and the Solution:

The Gallatin area is a dichotomy of two issues - the river and the forests. Both suffer from a misuse and overuse of one source - US! The problem is we are loving our mountains, our forests and rivers to death. Too many people wanting to do too many things. The problem is easy to diagnose, but finding the solution - not so much! GWA is trying to protect both, but due to the popularity of each, all have become a source of contention among many in the Gallatin Valley.

We'll start with the river first. The last five years has given rise to algae blooms in the Gallatin River. The summer of 2022 has made it the 5th year of such occurrence. Much of that is from the over supply and abundance of nutrients being applied in the Big Sky region. GWA has brought suit against the Big Sky Water and Sewer District for what we thought were leaks in the holding ponds at the Sewage Treatment plant in Big Sky. A die test proved our concerns were real, but they were minimized in court. Needless to say, we lost that battle. But we realize, there are other problems at Big Sky. We feel that DEQ has not taken the appropriate measures necessary to monitor and to enforce Clean Water Act standards.

Other problems are the relentless pursuit of entities at the Yellowstone Club and Spanish Peaks of the Big Sky region to use treated sewage wastewater to make snow for skiers and it is also being applied on the several golf courses of the region. Of course, with this treated wastewater are also unknown contaminants that threaten our quality of water such as pharmaceuticals. Those issues are in the courts as well. It has been a long slog, but a fight we believe worth the effort. We have to ask ourselves, how much deterioration of water quality do we want in the Gallatin River? There are some groups who seem to state, they are willing to compromise some of that quality away. Our question is, how do you do that? Why would you do that?

GWA, Montana Rivers and Cottonwood Environmental Law Center joined forces to pursue the likelihood ofgetting the Gallatin River and Madison River, both set aside as Outstanding Resource Water. This was a huge feat as this meant we would have to go to gain 31,000+ signatures and get placed on the November ballot as a ballotinitiative. We realized this was only going to happen if we gained significantunderwriting of financial support and we would get approval to gather electronic signatures on line. Unfortunately neither one of those things happened. As a result, GWA pulled out of that process on May 25, 2022.

Time will tell what remains next in our fight for a clean Gallatin River. Sometimes you get the feeling that we want this more than the general public. WE will continue to fight for a clean Gallatin River, if not for us - then for the wildlife and fisheries dependent upon that river. Stay tuned to this spot.

The Forests:

The Millie Fire: Ten Years After

The day was a Tuesday and the date was August 28, 2012, ten years ago, from when this picture was taken and when the Millie Fire began to burn on the now Custer Gallatin National Forest. We invite readers and members to go back and look at the news articles as they appeared in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle at that time. One link can be found here.

This lightening caused fire2 burned more than 10,000 acres of public land along Storm Castle Creek Drainage in the then known Gallatin National Forest. It is reported that the hot fire caused severe damage to the vegetation4. Perhaps that explains the condition of the lands today.

The once deeply covered forested, but steep slopes along Storm Castle Creek are no more, not in the area where this fire raged for days. The fire once estimated around half an acre on the first day had grown to 500 acres by that afternoon1. From that first day, the fire grew in size to 10,000 acres by August 293. By September 10, the fire was considered 40% contained5, by September 25, the fire was 80% contained6. Slopes of Engelmann spruce, subalpine fir, limber pine, lodgepole pine and yes, even whitebark pine are no longer evident in the burned area.

In a time of climate change, we wanted to go back and take a look. What’s changed? What has grown back? Before we do, however, we need to also report attempts to replant species on the then bare covered mountain sides of Storm Castle Creek Drainage. The Bozeman Community Coop purchased 2,500 whitebark seedlings, 2,500 of the 16,000 which was transplanted to replace those trees which were lost7. Whitebark pine is an all-important food source for many species, but perhaps none more iconic than the grizzly bear. This was primary grizzly bear habitat after all.

But that is not all. We invite readers and members to view this YouTube video8 by the National Forest Foundation. Here they say, they have planted 200,000 trees in the Custer Gallatin National Forest in an effort to rejuvenate the forest.

But in reality, how much difference can reforestation really do? We found this interesting article on reforestation. In an online article entitled “Tree planting efforts aren’t replacing burned U.S. forests- not even close”9, there is this statement.

“Most U.S. wildfires burn on U.S. Forest Service land. The agency replants around 6% of its land that needs replanting after wildfires.”

And then there are these statistics and quotes from the article.

“Our systems just haven’t kept up,” said David Lytle, the service’s director of forest and rangeland management and vegetation ecology. “The change to these larger, more severe wildfires has dramatically ramped up our reforestation needs.”

“According to Lytle, the problem is not tactics or expertise, but funding. The U.S. Forest Service spends over half its budget fighting and preventing fires. Last year, Congress granted it $7.4 billion in discretionary appropriations. Meanwhile, the amount available for post-fire replanting has not grown since the 1980s. The agency says it does not have enough money or resources to fully reforest burn areas.”

So, here we are. What’s the landscape look like today – 10 years after the initial burn? Pictures are below. From what we can tell, looks mostly like grasses, wildflowers and shrubs. We don’t know if the small pines we see in the pictures are a result of replanting or natural growth. Perhaps 10 years isn’t enough time to measure or draw conclusions. There would need to be a sincere scientific study done to draw any conclusions as to if this forest will grow back. It most likely won’t be anything like it once was prior to August 28, 2012.

The next article explains the “why” on that thinking.

“Is this the end of forests as we’ve known them?”

Such is the title of an article found in the Guardian magazine, dated March 10, 2021 by Alastair Gee. This question answers the question of why we ask why. Climate change is having that much of an impact on our planet. Life as we know it, may not be the same in the future due to climate change. In some ways, we can already state that. The health of our planet, its resources, the biodiversity is already not the same as we remember it.

“Trees lost to drought and wildfires are not returning. Climate change is taking a toll on the world’s forests - and radically changing the environment before our eyes”. This is what science is telling us, so it is our job then to do something about it. In the article there is this quote from Camille Stevens-Rumann, a researcher with a PhD at Colorado State University in the Department of Forest, Rangeland and Watershed.

“But starting in about 2013, she noticed something unsettling. In certain places, the trees were not returning. For an analysis she led of sites across the Rocky Mountains, she found that almost one-third of places that had burned since 2000 had no trees regrowing whatsoever. Instead of tree seedlings, there were shrubs and flowers.”

We invite readers and members to click on the analysis link above and review the science yourselves. From another quote in the article.

“In western North America, huge swaths of forested areas may become unsuitable for trees growing to climate change, say researchers. In the Rocky Mountains, estimates hold that by 2050, about 15% of the forests would not grow back if felled by fire because the climate would no longer suit them. In Alberta,

Canada, about half of existing forests could vanish by 2100. In the south-western US, which is experiencing a “megadrought”, as much as 30% of forests are at risk of converting to shrubland or another kind of ecosystem.”

This answers the question as to why we ask “why”. We wonder if the Millie Fire landscape will return to what it once was. If not, perhaps we should think our policy of forest management. We can’t do much about all fires upon the landscape. Fire is a natural tool that nature uses to keep the forest healthy. But we can control “what we log”, “where we log” and how we can prevent man-made fires near that wildland-urban interface. That we can control. Very few fires are natural caused compared to those caused by man. But it is also why we should preserve what we have and fight climate change by keeping our forests intact.

That takes us into another subject matter of carbon sequestration, one which we won’t go into here at this time. But think of this in the meantime. “in one year a mature tree will absorb more than 48 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen in exchange.”

We highlight this to ask ourselves one question. In the world of natural resources, what is our National Treasure? If this is it, what in the world are we doing to our National Forests?

There is a remarkable new article out on our mature and old-growth forests. We want to provide that link to you here.

https://news.mongabay.com/2022/10/new-study-identifies-mature-forests-on-u-s-federal-lands-ripe-for-protection/

George Wuerthner: ‘Temporary’ roads cause more than temporary damage

In the May 18th edition of the Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington), George Wuerthner had a great article on how temporary roads constructed for timber harvesting can have more damage than the Forest Service and proponents of such activities claim.

Temporary Roads - not Temporary Damage

For that discussion we urge you to turn your attention to the link above.

A Message about Wildfires:

No, We can’t — and shouldn’t — stop Forest Fires

Shouldn't Stop Forest Fires

By Chad Hanson and Mike Garrity September 26 at 9:26 AM

Chad Hanson is a research ecologist with the John Muir Project and is co-editor and co-author of “The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix.” Mike Garrity is executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

The American West is burning, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) tells us in his recent Post op-ed. He and officials in the Trump administration have described Western forest fires as catastrophes, promoting congressional action ostensibly to save our National Forests from fire by allowing widespread commercial logging on public lands. This, they claim, will reduce forest density and the fuel for wildfires.

But this position is out of step with current science and is based on several myths promoted by commercial interests.

The first myth is the notion that fire destroys our forests and that we currently have an unnatural excess of fire. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a broad consensus among scientists that we have considerably less fire of all intensities in our Western U.S. forests compared with natural, historical levels, when lightning-caused fires burned without humans trying to put them out.

There is an equally strong consensus among scientists that fire is essential to maintain ecologically healthy forests and native biodiversity. This includes large fires and patches of intense fire, which create an abundance of biologically essential standing dead trees (known as snags) and naturally stimulate regeneration of vigorous new stands of forest. These areas of “snag forest habitat” are ecological treasures, not catastrophes, and many native wildlife species, such as the rare black-backed woodpecker, depend on this habitat to survive.

Fire or drought kills trees, which attracts native beetle species that depend on dead or dying trees. Woodpeckers eat the larvae of the beetles and then create nest cavities in the dead trees, because snags are softer than live trees. The male woodpecker creates two or three nest cavities each year, and the female picks the one she likes the best, which creates homes for dozens of other forest wildlife species that need cavities to survive but cannot create their own, such as bluebirds, chickadees, chipmunks, flying squirrels and many others.

More than 260 scientists wrote to Congress in 2015 opposing legislative proposals that would weaken environmental laws and increase logging on National Forests under the guise of curbing wildfires, noting that snag forests are “quite simply some of the best wildlife habitat in forests.”

That brings us to myth No. 2: that eliminating or weakening environmental laws — and increasing logging — will somehow curb or halt forest fires. In 2016, in the largest analysis ever on this question, scientists found that forests with the fewest environmental protections and the most logging had the highest — not the lowest — levels of fire intensity. Logging removes relatively noncombustible tree trunks and leaves behind flammable “slash debris,” consisting of kindling-like branches and treetops.

This is closely related to myth No. 3: that dead trees, usually removed during logging projects, increase fire intensity in our forests. A comprehensive study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences thoroughly debunked this notion by showing that outbreaks of pine beetles, which can create patches of snag forest habitat, didn’t lead to more intense fires in the area. A more recent study found that forests with high levels of snags actually burn less intensely. This is because flames spread primarily through pine needles and small twigs, which fall to the ground and soon decay into soil shortly after trees die.

Finally, myth No. 4: that we can stop weather-driven forest fires. We can no more suppress forest fires during extreme fire weather than we can stand on a ridgetop and fight the wind. It is hubris and folly to even try. Fires slow and stop when the weather changes. It makes far more sense to focus our resources on protecting rural homes and other structures from fire by creating “defensible space” of about 100 feet between houses and forests. This allows fire to serve its essential ecological role while keeping it away from our communities.

Lawmakers in Congress are promoting legislation based on the mythology of catastrophic wildfires that would largely eliminate environmental analysis and public participation for logging projects in our National Forests. This would include removing all or most trees in both mature forests and in ecologically vital post-wildfire habitats — all of which is cynically packaged as “fuel reduction” measures.

The logging industry’s political allies have fully embraced the deceptive “catastrophic wildfire” narrative to promote this giveaway of our National Forests to timber corporations. But this narrative is a scientifically bankrupt smoke screen for rampant commercial logging on our public lands. The American people should not fall for it.

Custer/Gallatin National Forest

Renounces Concern for Imperiled Species

In developing a new long-range plan, the Custer/Gallatin National Forest is using the Forest Service 2012 planning rules for the first time. This has produced a serious decline in Forest Service recognition of and support for rare and declining species on the Custer/Gallatin Forest.

The current Forest plan recognizes a 2011 list of sensitive species identified across Region 1 of the Service. The new plan will replace these species with a list of “species of conservation concern” on the Forest.

Currently, Custer/Gallatin recognizes 29 vertebrate wildlife as sensitive species, affording them enhanced concern in management decisions. Of these, 27 are on the Custer Forest; 14 are on the Gallatin Forest. (Twelve occur on both Forests.) The draft Forest plan proposes replacing these with only 2 species – sage grouse and white-tailed prairie dog.

Threats to wildlife, including extinctions, extirpations, fragmented populations and degrading genomes, have been increasing for decades. Thus, the declining focus on imperiled wildlife, from 29 species to 2, seems absurd. Moreover, the draft plan states, as a desired future condition for the Custer/Gallatin: “A complete suite of native species is present, with sufficient numbers and distribution to be adaptable to changing conditions for long-term persistence.” 

The Custer/Gallatin analyzed 91 vertebrate species for possible listing as species of conservation concern. However, ultimate decisions come from the Regional Forester. Apparently, the Forest suggested 6 species for listing – the 2 cited above and 4 that were rejected by the Regional Forester. These 4 are western toad, arctic grayling, westslope cutthroat and Yellowstone cutthroat trout. In a brief meeting with the Regional Forester, Gallatin Wildlife was unable to ask for an explanation of these rejections.

The Forest list of analyzed species failed to include 2 species from the current list of sensitive species – greater prairie-chicken and wolverine. Other notable omissions were moose and swift fox.

Much of the decline in Forest Service emphasis upon imperiled wildlife stems from the “new” 2012 planning rules. New rules require that concern for population viability must be “substantial”. Species that are suspected, but not clearly known to be perennially present on a Forest are not allowed for listing as “of concern”. (Note that this rejects special concern for native species that have been extirpated from the Forest.) The rules allow the Regional Forester to reject listing if a species is present on only a small fraction of the Forest – and missing from most of its native Forest range. Lastly, species may not be listed as of conservation concern if evidence about the species presence, abundance, trends or distribution is considered “insufficient”. 

Having limited local information on rare species is common. The Forest Service rule indicates that the Service is more willing to risk loss of a native species than to risk an erroneous, but conservative, conclusion that a species is imperiled. Nineteen species were cited as having insufficient information in the Custer/Gallatin analysis. Sixteen of these were not identified as “secure”, but were not listed as of concern.

Notably rejected as being of conservation concern are bison (absent from almost all its large native range on the Forest) and bighorn sheep (persisting in small, somewhat isolated herds that, according to much available science, are not adequate for maintaining genetic quality and long-term persistence).

The Forest Service contends that the abandoned category of sensitive species is similar to the new category of species of conservation concern. It seems similarity is quite limited when the Custer/Gallatin goes abruptly from 29 sensitive species to only 2 species of conservation concern.

The real danger lies in the implication that, of all the vertebrate wildlife on the Custer/Gallatin, so many species are not of conservation concern. While the inadequate list of species of concern may diminish Forest Service support for imperiled species, the implication is also misleading to the public.

Clearly, the application of the 2012 planning rule by the Forest and Regional Forester is a step away from wildlife conservation on our National Forest.

Jim Bailey, Belgrade  April 12, 2019

GWA's Support for

 Wildlife Crossings:

One of GWA's goals is to establish corridors for wildlife, avenues of travel if you will where species can move and roam as there ancestors did before the European settlers arrived on the scene. For many of those species, they need to have that ability to move, to find food, for protection and to escape from predation. It is in their genes and their social behavior patterns to do so. Man has taken much of that ability away from them through habitat intrusion, building of roads, domestice livestock grazing, etc, etc. Learn more on what you can do to help in this cause by reading below and getting involved with the Gallatin Wildlife Association.

This video below was shown at the 2020 Bozeman Wild and Scenic Film Festival. It is about the idea, the construction and application of human ingenuity of how mankind can repair the damage done to wildlife and their pathways of mobility. Please watch and learn more.

GWA would like to thank Montanans for Safe Wildlife Passage (MSWP) and Center for Large Landscape Conservation (CLLC) for providing these videos on wildlife crossings. GWA has long been a proponent of furthering wildlife connectivity and stories such as these in Nevada and Washington are examples of what could be done here in Montana. We would like to see more attention given to these success stories and to that effort, GWA is a proud member of MSWP. For the reason of habitat and corridor fragmentation, wildlife is being prevented from reaching their normal range and habitat. The Wildland Urban Interface is taking its toll on wildlife and because of that it is magnifying the need for big ideas.

One of Our (GWA) Goals: A Wildlife Crossing over I-90 at Bozeman Pass

Help us work toward that end!

We view one of our most pressing needs is to help facilitate a wildlife crossing over I-90 at or near the vicinity of Bozeman Pass between Bozeman and Livingston. We would like to protect the existing use of a wildlife corridor that is present; perhaps allowing this to become a permeable barrier (rather than an impermeable barrier) to wildlife. That terminology of a permeable barrier is key to use when we write our comments on the Custer Gallatin National Forest Revision Plan. The existing Gallatin-Bridger Connectivity Corridor is one and is part of the totality of wildlife corridors which exists between the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem.

One of the highlights of the MSWP summit in December 2018 was the presentation of a 30 min film on the history and construction of the project near Snoqualimie Pass in Washington State. That film can be found on YouTube but we also will present that here for you to view. This will provide a better understanding of what has to be done, the scope of the work, time tables, etc. The video is below.

 

The Story on Wolves: As Reported in the BDC

One of the more accurate storytellings of wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem was recently published in the Chronicle. The full article can be found here.

Others contend that wolves are biologically recovered, and populations need to be managed sustainably for ungulates and the people who live among the apex predators. It’s a debate that might not even be happening without Phillips’ work 27 years ago.

Reintroducing wolves in Yellowstone National Park was — and remains — controversial, but Phillips has never chosen the path of least resistance. That would lead him on a trivial journey, he said. The project started decades after wolves were wiped out in government backed predator control programs. In 1994, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed establishing an experimental gray wolf population in the park.

Phillips at the time already had about a decade of experience reintroducing red wolves in North Carolina. That project was the first attempt by biologists to reintroduce a carnivore species considered extinct in the wild. He led the reintroduction from 1994 to 1997. His team released 31 radiocollared Canadian gray wolves and tracked how it impacted the ecosystem over time.

Doug Smith, the park’s senior wildlife biologist, served as a biologist on the project at the time Phillips led it. He took over as project leader when Phillips left. In May, Smith received the Craighead Conservation Award from the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative for his career working with gray wolves. The award is in honor of Frank and John Craighead, twin brothers and biologists renowned for their work with grizzly bears. Smith was not available for an interview before deadline. Phillips left the wolf project to found the endangered species fund with

Ted Turner in 1997. They later built out the Turner Biodiversity Divisions. “The fund and the divisions have collectively stood as the most significant private effort in the world to use reintroductions to restore imperiled species as redressing the extinction crisis,” Phillips said.

Less than a decade after helping found the fund, Phillips decided to enter another arena: politics. From 2006 to 2021, he served in the Montana Legislature as a Democrat — first in the House of Representatives, later in the Senate. “It’s not common for scientists like myself to put their name in a ballot and jump into the moshpit of

politics …. That matters because application of reliable knowledge — application of science — only counts if it’s applied,” he said. “I served in Helena to drive home the point that science matters.”

Twenty-six years after it began, the wolf recovery program has turned into one of the most detailed studies of a large carnivore in the world, according to Yellowstone Forever, the park’s official nonprofit arm. It offered scientists an opportunity to study and understand how a translocated species can recover, said Dan Stahler, the project’s lead biologist, in a video from the park. It has also driven research on genetic health, population diversity, behavior, diseases and predator-prey dynamics. While scientists researched Yellowstone’s packs in the decades following the reintroduction, the animals expanded their ranges, inhabiting parts of surrounding states. That drew opposition from livestock producers and others out on the landscape. “Wolves have to live with people outside of Yellowstone, and that does create conflict,” Smith said in a video from the park. “It is true to say that life is easier without wolves than with them. They can compete with us for elk and deer and they do occasionally kill dogs and livestock, and so they need to be managed outside the park.”

Wolves in the Northern Rockies were federally protected until 2011, when a legislative rider shifted management back to Montana and Idaho. Wyoming assumed management of the species in 2017. Montana and Idaho established wolf management plans, which were vetted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Populations fluctuate annually in part because of regulated hunting and trapping. Last October, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife ruled that gray wolf populations were biologically recovered in the entire lower 48 states. The agency gave management back to states, a move that prompted a lawsuit from conservation groups represented by Earthjustice. The delisting happened just before the 2021 legislative sessions in Montana and Idaho.

This spring, bills designed to increase wolf harvests and deregulate hunting and trapping passed Republican-dominated state legislatures. They were signed by Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte and Idaho Gov. Brad Little, both Republicans.

Montana.

Wolf numbers are over objective in some areas of the state, according to minimum requirements set in Montana’s Wolf Management Plan, he said. Supporters of his bills claimed that elk numbers were suffering because of wolves.

Fielder and Brown did not respond to a request for interviews. On Friday, the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission approved wolf regulations for the 2021 through 2022 season. The new regulations were an attempt to incorporate the intent of the new wolf legislation into on-the ground rules.

The regulations require that the commission consider in-season adjustments after a harvest of 450 wolves is reached statewide. Following that, commissioners must consider more in-season regulation adjustments at intervals of 50 wolves killed. In accordance with the new laws, the commission also voted to increase bag limits on wolves, allow snaring of wolves during the trapping season, extend the dates for the trapping season, permit baiting of wolves on private land and allow people to hunt wolves at night. The motion proposed by Vice Chair Pat Tabor passed 3 to 2.

Commissioners Patrick Byorth and KC Walsh both opposed the proposal, citing concerns over night hunting and baiting of wolves. “We know that we have a responsibility to manage this population, but from my perspective, we need to manage it responsibly,” Tabor said. “This is going to allow the commission to monitor this very closely and

not allow the population to get run on, but have very specific control over it.”

Byorth said state legislators gave the commission a number of tools for managing wolves, but commissioners were only required to do two things: reduce the wolf population and permit the use of snares. “My largest concern is that we are selling our souls in fair chase in order to provide methods that are unnecessary and more likely to have repercussions and unanticipated outcomes,” Byorth said.

Montana’s Wolf Management Plan requires the state to support at least 150 wolves and at least 15 breeding wolf pairs. There were about 1,177 wolves in the state at the end of 2020, according to estimates by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Hunters and trappers killed 328 wolves that year. Ken McDonald, wildlife division administrator for Montana FWP, said at Friday’s commission meeting that it’s difficult to know to what degree wolves are affecting trends in ungulate populations.

The relationship between predators and prey in ecosystems is complex, especially when taking into account different habitat types and different predator and prey species out on a landscape, he said.

The new laws in Idaho and Montana alarmed conservation groups nationwide. In July, 70 groups led by the Western Watersheds Project sent a formal petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service urging the agency to relist gray wolves as an endangered species. Clint Nagel, president of the Gallatin Wildlife Association, one of the groups that signed the petition, said the point of the wolf reintroduction was to stabilize the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, but increased hunting pressure and livestock depredation by wolves brought opposition. “If (wolf numbers) get too low and they are not protected from that point on, the likelihood of the species getting back to where it should be is probably not going to happen,” he said. “Then, when you look back to all the science and investment and money that was put into the reintroduction into Yellowstone — all of that was for what?”

Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Property and Environment Research Center, said that new wolf laws are extreme, but instead of pushing for a relisting, conservation groups should try to better understand the concerns of people who live with wolves out on the landscape. Programs that compensate ranchers for livestock losses to wolves are critical for building more tolerance for the species, Regan said. Still, the programs aren’t perfect and some costs aren’t compensated. To Regan, the worst way to honor the legacies of the people who reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone is to erode trust in wildlife management institutions. “When we frame these issues as us versus them, everyone loses,” he said. On Friday, a top official with the Biden administration told the Associated Press that federal officials would back the decision to remove gray wolves in the lower 48 states from the Endangered Species List. “It’s shocking that Biden officials are backing Trump’s ruthless decision to strip protections from wolves. This move means more of our nation’s wolves will be slaughtered in states where politics have trumped science,” said Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a news release. “Biden can’t say his administration supports science-based decisions and then let Wisconsin, Montana and Idaho turn into a bloodbath for wolves.”

The Center for Biological Diversity was one of the groups represented by Earthjustice in the suit over delisting of wolves.

Phillips said the bills that significantly liberalize killing of gray wolves in Montana and Idaho were based on opinions rather than reliable knowledge. They passed based on the opinions that there were too many wolves in the state and that the impact of wolves on the hunting and livestock industries were unacceptable, he said. There are no data that support those claims, according to Phillips. Elk management units are over objective in many areas of the state, and wolves rarely prey on livestock, he said. When they do, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks has programs to compensate ranchers for their losses. “I’m offended by people who are so ecologically illiterate that they downplay, disregard, completely overlook the importance of predation as an ecological process,” Phillips said. “If they do that, by default, they overlook, downplay, disregard the importance of predators.”

Phillips said predation is an important process for ensuring the health of local landscapes, and the role of predators is to deliver death. If life is one of the most important forces in the universe, the flipside — death — has to be near equally important, he said. “The diversity of life is a reflection of everything that’s alive trying to stay one step ahead of death,” Phillips said. “Death has to matter almost as much as living or as life. Consequently, predators have to matter.”

Helena Dore can be reached at hdore@dailychronicle.com.