Modern-day humans seem to hate predators, often without realising that we are predators ourselves. In fact, it is likely the main reason we have engaged in killing off as many as we can ever since we evolvedinto an upright, fully bipedal species. Why? To my mind, there are two primary reasons: competition and fear.
Bears, tigers, lions of all varieties, some snake species—and certainly wolves—have struck fear in humans since our earliest existence. Nonetheless, many early societies learned how to co-exist with these predators, even reverenced them in their cosmologies. Conversely, in our Western culture, there aremany so-called fairy tales that negatively characterise these animals as evil, shadowy, rapacious creatures. But for Van Tighem, wolves “were the ultimate expression of wildness and ecological wholeness.
Van Tighem points out that “Western Canada has been wolf country since it melted out from beneath glacier ice fifteen thousand years ago.” Yet the southern Rocky Mountains area in which he grew up wasdevoid of wolves. They’d already been killed off or pushed out of the region, whether by cruel poisons (e.g., 1080 and strychnine), by bounty hunters, or by farmers and ranchers protecting their livestock.
In The Homeward Wolf, the author chronicles the re-emergence of wolves in the landscapes around the mountain national parks of the Rockies, most notably in the Banff area. He says, “Wolves are coursing predators…wandering widely in search of prey.” In winter, travelling the frozen rivers and lakes, they can cover 75 km in a day. “Wolves, by nature,” he says, “are creature of the whole landscape.” Maybe it is this characteristic that so brings wolves into conflict with humans, who also have a habit of claiming wide swaths of land for their (our) own use, be it for logging, ranching, mining, urbanisation, or other landscape-consuming activities. Added to assaults on the wolves themselves, these widespread habitat alienations made it nearly impossible for wolves to survive, let alone thrive. The growth of the tourism industry, especially in and around the mountain national parks, was fuelled by the oil industry; along with tourism and industry came increased road building. All these activities also degraded important habitats of ungulates, a staple in the diet of wolves.
With widespread loss of habitat and over five million residents and visitors by the early 1980s, Van Tighem says, “We suspected the Bow Valley was too far gone to support wolves,” but we were wrong. “When it comes to wolves, it’s easy to be wrong.”
In one of his early field trips as a biologist doing an inventory of wildlife for the Canadian Wildlife Service, he had to camp for the night. He awoke in the early morning to wolves howling “only a few metres away.” He thrilled to the realisation that wolves were slowly returning.
By the beginning of the 21st century, it was obvious that wolves had returned to the Bow Valley. He describes the details of this return and the increase of wolf packs in the region. A major factor in their return was that without predators around, prey numbers had eventually exploded, resulting in even more devastated landscapes—overgrazing of shrubs and grasses, riparian areas, trees—all of which changed landscapes in ways that caused the loss of other species and ecological services. The knowledge that the restoration of wolves into Yellowstone in the USA allowed local ecologies to rebound, for example, proved that wolves are a valuable component of the landscape. While there were some people dead set against it, public opinion—and science—supported it.
The Homeward Wolf is a true modern story of wolves—from near extermination to public, and eventually some degree of political, support. He talks about the physical landscape of wolves vs the unseen landscape of human imaginings in which wolves can only survive if that landscape is favourable to them. This book is about restoring at least some degree of predator-prey relationships to the region; about humans learning to understand and accept the reality of “Nature,” not simply a picture postcard lure into the tourist havens of the mountain parks.
Van Tighem’s writing style is infinitely poetic yet grounded in real-life, on-the-ground experiences. Whether you care about the reintroduction of wolves or you don’t, the book, in one sense, is a metaphor for the reintroduction of hope into the “wilderness/environmental movement.” Long focused on “saving” what few places are left, which he says is the “hopelessness of the last best place,” he calls forth Wallace Stegner’s “geography of hope,” which focuses more positively on the “next best place.”
While a comparatively small book, in size and in number of pages, this book is eminently readable. For me, it’s a keeper; it has many “WOW!” bits. It weaves in the threads of all the relevant topics from the effects of climate change on species—both plant and animal—to the political bungling of habitat management by bureaucrats who shunned science. It presents every aspect of what not to do and what should be done to allow Nature to manage itself.
Rocky Mountain Books, Manifesto Series
RMB has created one of the most unique non-fiction series in Canadian publishing. The books in this collection are meant to be literary, critical, and cultural studies that are provocative, passionate, and populist in nature. The goal is to encourage debate and help facilitate change whenever and wherever possible. Books in this uniquely packaged hardcover series are perfect for general readers, academic markets and book lovers. See more at: http://www.rmbooks.com/
The Homeward Wolf, one of 19 books in this series, won the 2014 Mountain Literature / Jon Whyte Award, Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival. (See more at: http://www.rmbooks.com/).“Wolves have become a complicated comeback story. Their tracks are once again making trails throughout western Alberta, southern British Columbia and the northwestern United States, and the lonesome howls of the legendary predator are no longer mere echoes from our frontier past: they are prophetic voices emerging from the hills of our contemporary reality. Kevin Van Tighem’s first RMB Manifesto explores the history of wolf eradication in western North America and the species’ recent return to the places where humans live and play. Rich with personal anecdotes and the stories of individual wolves whose fates reflect the complexity of our relationship with these animals, The Homeward Wolf neither romanticizes nor demonizes this wide-ranging carnivore with whom we once again share our Western spaces. Instead, it argues that wolves are coming back to stay, that conflicts will continue to arise, and that we will need to find new ways to manage our relationship with this formidable predator in our ever-changing world.”
Hardcover, 142 pages, $16
ISBN 978-1-927330-83-8
Rocky Mountain Books, Manifesto Series www.rmbooks.com
