Points North

Points North Killing wolves is the real issue

By Shawn Perich

The gray wolf is a political animal. On October 29, days before the election, the Trump Administration announced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was announcing the successful recovery of the gray wolf and delisting the species from the federal protection of the Endangered Species Act. While most wildlife biologists and conservationists agree that the wolf population in the Upper Great Lakes and northern Mountain West has met biological recovery goals for many years, the timing of the recent delisting probably wasn’t coincidence. The Department of the Interior news release contained laudatory statements from politicians, farm groups and hunting organizations celebrating the delisting and the subsequent return of wolf management authority to states and tribes.

Their figurative backslaps and high fives may prove to be premature. Wolf advocates have successfully blocked the USFWS’ previous attempts to delist the wolf in Great Lakes States. Most recently, the wolf was delisted in 2012, leading Minnesota to hold regulated hunting and trapping seasons for three years through 2014. Then a court ruling to a lawsuit challenging the USFWS delisting returned federal endangered species protection to the wolf.

Wolves are among the few wildlife species where the federal government, rather than states, has management authority. Nearly all wildlife, game and nongame, is the responsibility of the states. For game and furbearing species, the state’s responsibility includes setting seasons and bag limits to ensure sustainable harvests. Wildlife managers in this state and others do a good job of maintaining a relative abundance of these species. There is absolutely no reason to believe they would do any differently with wolves.

Let’s get the nut of the wolf issue. When it comes to wolves, the word “manage” is a euphemism for killing. The wolf is an animal that comes into conflict with humans. When that occurs, the outcome may be lethal for the wolf. Under endangered species protections, Minnesota wolves that prey on livestock or pets are trapped and killed by government-authorized trappers. In recent years, they have killed from 132 to 263 wolves. Livestock owners are financially compensated by the state for verified losses. Pet owners are not.

When the state has assumed wolf management in the past, the government depredation program has continued. That’s not the only way Minnesota chose to kill wolves. The state also held a lottery-based hunting and trapping season which concluded when

The real issue in Minnesota is not whether wolves are endangered with extinction, but rather if members of the public

will be allowed to kill them. | RYAN PENNESI

participants reached a harvest quota. A significant portion of the wolf kill was taken firearms deer season by deer hunters who’d drawn a wolf permit.

This brings us to the flip side of the word “manage.” In addition to being a euphemism for “kill,” the word also has a social aspect. “Managing” wolves is really about managing people. It is no secret that some deer hunters see wolves as competition. Allowing deer hunters to shoot a few wolves does little to improve their hunting, but provides at least an illusion that they are doing something to “help” the deer herd.

Every action has a reaction. Wolf advocates viewed regulated hunting and trapping as reprehensible. By the same token, most advocates seem to view the wolf depredation program as a necessary evil, because it allows wolves to exist on a human-populated landscape.

Actually, going from endangered status to regulated hunting and trapping a year or two later is pretty big leap of logic.

Wildlife biologists and hunting advocates often seem to believe that wolves need to be removed from a fully protected status so we can immediately begin killing them through hunting and trapping. While this may make some sense to professional biologists who understand wolf population dynamics and hunters concerned that wolves eat too many deer, it’s a hard sell for the general public. After all, unless you are biologist, hunter or livestock producer, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about wolves unless they are in the news.

Our past history with wolves is enough to give many folks pause when it comes to reinitiating hunting and trapping. Wolves were placed on the Endangered Species list in the 1970s, after they were wiped out everywhere in the Lower 48 with the exception of northern Minnesota. Prior to that, wolves were unprotected. You could kill a wolf whenever you saw one. At various times and places, wolves were relentlessly pursued for a bounty, and subjected to eradication attempts that included poisoning and hunting from airplanes. For more than a century, wolves were considered a scourge on the landscape. Some folks still view them this way.

Biologists correctly argue modern wolf management, including regulated hunting and trapping, is a far cry from the killing free-for-all of the bad old days. Unfortunately, some of the rhetoric spewed by folks who don’t like wolves, and there are plenty of them, is enough to give pause to anyone who is inclined to give the wolves a break. Sure, wolf management may begin with regulated hunting and trapping, but what assurances does the public have that regulations won’t eventually devolve into killing more and more wolves in an attempt, even if misguided, to create wolf-free zones for livestock producers or to bolster deer and moose populations? In states such as Alaska and Idaho, such policies already exist.

Changing demographics play a role as well. The majority of the nonhunting public accepts hunting for food. They are far less tolerant of hunting for trophies. Since we don’t eat wolves, it is unlikely they will look favorably upon wolf hunting. Those who do support regulated hunting and trapping need to bear this in mind.

At this juncture, we don’t really know what Minnesota will do with its newly acquired wolf management authority. The state is in the process of updating its wolf management plan and has convened a broad-based citizen’s committee as well as soliciting public input for guidance. It is reasonable to assume the state will continue a depredation program to assist livestock producers and perhaps establish regulations that allow folks to kill a wolf to defend either livestock or pets from an attack. As for authorizing hunting and trapping, it wouldn’t be surprising if the state took a slower, phased-in approach.

Whatever occurs, whether the state is able to move forward and implement its management plan or a lawsuit returns the wolf Endangered Species protection, the outcome will matter more to people than it will to wolves. In Minnesota, wolves will remain.

Shawn Perich’s POINTS NORTH online

Follow outdoor writer Shawn Perich as he reports on conservation issues and explores the North Shore wilderness with his dog Rainy.

Based on historical Finnish farmsteads, the project employs a shallow frost-protected

foundation to minimize excavation and protect existing site hydrology. | A. RUGG

This projects spans two hills and takes advantage of a natural col to direct both water and people through the site.

| J. GREER

When Land and Life become Home CHERYL FOSDICK’S COMPELLING DESIGNS

As many in the Northern Great Lakes have, I came in on a midwestern contour, from Chicago through St. Paul to Duluth, and continued bending with the compass around the big lake. For more than 30 years, I have conceived buildings on sand and rock, open to gales or protected by woodland- designed for incomparable individuals and in the name of family legacies. Every project has a unique site and distinct stories that have been my pleasure to discover and merge through my design practice.

In 1991, I opened a branch office of a Minneapolis architectural firm, Mulfinger Susanka—in Duluth. I had not yet grasped the “local soul” of Duluth. Within 3 years a new Duluth firm and partnership was founded. Our work and value grew quickly. Our last co-designed project was the Gooseberry Falls Visitor Center in 1996. I spent a few years teaching at the U of MN School of Architecture, which I still do occasionally now in the College of Design, while working through several regional projects. The combination of an affordable storefront in a depressed section of downtown Duluth and an entrepreneurial ambition had me up and running with a new firm in 1999.

My current architectural firm, CF design, has now lived at 230 East Superior Street in Duluth for 22 years. I added an office in Bayfield, WI in 2009. My talented staff and I carefully design residential projects at a variety of scales, from cabins and cottages to family compounds. In all cases, we create homes, fit to a specific site a home depends upon and for specific people that inhabit our projects. We are still in our original office, and Cheryl Fosdick. | SUBMITTED

now sit quite happily at the center of the highly active Duluth Arts and Theater District. Patience regarding Place most certainly paid off. We are happy here—a place I can always hear the deep bass of the Edwin Gott as she passes under the Lift Bridge and watch peregrines fly from the roof of the Greysolon Plaza. Some things, delightfully, never change.

In fact, we all have experiences in our lives related to place-making and communing with environments, whether urban, rural, settled or pristine. Qualities of places we have loved alone or together with others stay in memories in the form of scale, color, aroma, texture and sound. That we are comfortable in a leggy forest or an open valley, on a breezy promontory or a rolling grassland is palatable. We know what we like because we recognize the feeling.

Memorable qualities we find in places, if only partially present, are ingredients of an important objective of design. Namely, to recognize, incorporate, and delight in both pleasing harmonies and contrasts between building and site. Before a building program or list of necessities is even penned, a site “in step with a lifetime” generates ideas and desires about inhabiting, using all our senses.

Everyone has a story to tell—a family yarn to spin. When a home is designed for a couple, for instance, collective practices and habits are as important as individual aspirations and memoirs. While our houses should speak to our comforts, motivations and strengths houses also communicate our stories. At their best, our homes represent us—our inheritance, our recollections and our current culture. Designing a home is an opportunity to celebrate ourselves, and our place in the bigger shared community around us. A well-designed home improves many lives, in many ways. In residential design, to be in a hurry is to neglect opportunity. Nothing designed hastily is truly designed well. Sometimes, revelations can occur with the passage of seasons or new love, for instance. It is important to take time in the process to stop and think and to wander outside of our preconceptions. From a business standpoint, the unpredictability of a design process that encourages “pausing at will” is the enemy of good cash flow. As a consumer of the design service, however, it is beneficial to depressurize the process—to pay for time worked and to save when resting with ideas. At my office, we carry many active projects, at

Overlooking a watershed this project designed around daylight opportunities extends indoor space to the outdoors

in all directions. | A. RUGG

various stages of evolution, knowing that Time is everyone’s greatest asset. It is crazy making, but it works. We are still here.

I am always interested in projects at any scale. If you imagine you would enjoy a conversation about your land or structure, let us have a discussion. We suggest an exploratory meeting and hope to include a visit to your site. There is no fee and no obligation. It is an opportunity for us to find our “common ground” and learn a bit from each other. Let us help clarify our process of design and subsequent construction.

Engaging in a design process can be intimidating, but engagement is important: listening, criticism and speculation are the engines driving good work and good work is a matter of confident, committed, diligent—even painstaking practice, mixed with ample magic. Yes. Magic—a belief that creative dexterity and storytelling results in beauty, commodity and performance in built work.—Cheryl Fosdick

CHERYL FOSDICK

CF design ltd.

o: 218.722.1060 m: 218.343.0983 a: 230 E Superior St.

Suite 102

Duluth, MN 55802 w: www.cfdesignltd.com e: cheryl@cfdesignltd.com