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Wolf Reintroduction Controversy

The state’s newest governor is wasting no time getting down to business.

Ahead this week on New Mexico in Focus, debate and discussion on her first days in office from her cabinet appointments to the firing of the entire Environmental Improvement Board. Plus, the battle continues to rage over the future of the Mexican grey wolf. Both sides of the debate sit down with host Gene Grant to talk about the dispute and potential areas of compromise. All this and more on a show that’s involved, informed and in-depth.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 at 10:39 am and is filed under nmif. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Wolf Reintroduction Controversy”

  1. Jean Crawford Says:
    January 12th, 2011 at 11:36 am

    Hess Yntema’s comments on the Endangered Species Act made him one of my local heroes. This was the kind of thoughtful and deep statement that is missing in most political discourse.

  2. Scott M. Smith Says:
    January 19th, 2011 at 2:24 am

    The intractable nature of this issue speaks to the intractability of the human species within the global ecosystem and the future of this planet. What we are seeing is the demise of the natural world as an organic large-scale system at the hands of a cancer, Homo sapiens. Ranching is one of the many agricultural activities that is contributing to this process, which must be reversed if we care about the future of our own species, which in turn cannot be separated from the future of other life. It is certainly expected that much of the public, being members of the human species, is baffled by this issue and desperately looking for a “middle ground” as a solution to a problem very representative of, as was termed, “business vs. quality of life.”

    The stability of ecosystems, which are constantly having to resist a fundamental law of thermodynamics which tends to undermine that stability, cannot depend on whether a group of people feel satisfied that their culture and tradition are being preserved, or whether even the most rigorous human-made environmental laws are adhered to. It is well-documented that many pre-Columbian agricultural practices contributed greatly to the collapse of many Amerindian societies, and the present-day ranching community is not exempt from this ecological dynamic.

    What’s being missed is that things like “ranching values” and “multiple-use” banners are the hubris of our egocentric way of life. Ms. Cowan, with her diplomatic and moderate but firm presentation, stands for one thing and one thing only, which is the perpetuation of the ranching ideology at any and all costs. Once wolves and other large predators are gone, they will be forgotten just as the Passenger Pigeon. The attitude of individual ranchers is generally that if the environment must give in order for them to survive as a culture (as opposed to an integral element of a global human community) then so be it. Ranching needs to be opposed for many important reasons, not just its impact on endangered species recovery.

    Governmental blame is not due to some perceived unrepresentation of a special interest, but to its failure to regulate, and to regulate severely. No system survives without a highly intricate regulatory structure. Cells undergo biochemical and genetic regulation; ecosystems are characterized by a plethora of regulatory mechanisms; and societies will invariably collapse without self-imposed regulation.

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