Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

The Big Bad Wolf Makes Good

The Yellowstone Success Story and Those Who Want to Kill It

By  Chip Ward

At long last, good news.  Fifteen years have passed since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and the results are in.  The controversial experiment has been a stellar success.  The Big Bad Wolf is back and in this modern version of the old story, all that huffing and puffing has been good for the land and the creatures that live on it.  Biggie, it turns out, got a bum rap.

The success of the Yellowstone project is the kind of good news we long for in this era of oil spills, monster storms, massive flooding, crushing heat waves, and bleaching corals.  For once, a branch of our federal government, the Department of the Interior, saw something broken and actually fixed it.  In a nutshell: conservation biologists considered a perplexing problem -- the slow but steady unraveling of the Yellowstone ecosystem -- figured out what was causing it, and then proposed a bold solution that worked even better than expected.

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