Bringing the Wolves Back
The figures are striking: across parts of Canada where wolves have vanished, unchecked populations of deer and elk have climbed so high that their relentless, season-after-season overgrazing strips young trees bare and leaves whole mountain valleys entirely without regenerating forest. Supporters of "rewilding," a movement that has gathered considerable momentum, argue that reintroducing a single missing apex predator can, by itself, reverse such accumulated ecological damage. A few parks have already attempted it, with consequences that scientists are still painstakingly measuring, and the genuinely difficult question now confronting administrators is how far park authorities should reasonably go in putting long-vanished predators back into landscapes that have changed in their absence.
