Every Community Needs Its Wolves

My husband and I made the thirty minute drive into The Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park right before dusk.

It was June, and we’d been in the park for nearly a week. Most days we made this drive, pulled over, settled into camping chairs, and stared off at the thousands of dark bison below. We were among dozens of others searching for wolves. 

The story of wolves in Yellowstone really starts with the elk, which are perhaps the most fascinating creature due to their abundance.

Each summer between 10,000 and 20,000 elk roam the valley in herds. They’re herbivores, so they graze and compete with other mammals for grasses and vegetation, such as bison and bighorn sheep. When there are too many, grasses get trampled and overeaten, and dependent populations decline.

That’s where wolves came in. Wolves historically roamed from Canada to Mexico until they were largely exterminated at the turn of the 20th century.

While bears and mountain lions eat elk, for decades they weren’t a significant enough predator to control the population and balance it on behalf of the larger ecosystem. It was a trophic cascade. An essential “check and balance” was missing.

The predator-prey relationship is central to supporting a normal, healthy ecosystem: When there are too many elk, the land and competing herbivore species compete and deplete.

In 1995, 41 wild wolves from Canada and Montana were finally reintroduced into Yellowstone to (re)create a natural predator for the elk.

Now, 85 percent of elk kills throughout winter in Yellowstone are by wolves. Once again, they’re a keystone species in the larger Yellowstone ecosystem, and righted the historic imbalance. 

In the valley that night, we drove pull-out to pull-out for hours pointing our cheap binoculars out the window to scan the hills for movement.

On our very last stop, we hopped out of our Ford Explorer and wandered out onto a bluff. I lifted the binoculars to my eyes and saw something sprinting among the bison. I passed them to my husband. He peered and said, “I see it, it’s running like a dog.” I grabbed the binoculars back, and saw the faces of two exuberant wolf pups chasing one another through the velveteen twilight in the tall grasses. 

We had finally seen a wolf.

I was so excited that I ran along Lamar Valley road screaming, my chanclas from a day trip to Ciudad Juárez slapping along the concrete. Before dozens of cars pulled over trying to spot the wolves themselves, for a few brief moments in the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park, they were ours alone.

I’m years removed from Yellowstone now, yet I still remember feeling how I’d never been so in tune with what I really needed to survive, and seen myself as a part of an organism much larger than myself. 

That’s because the laws of nature are not theoretical. They are concrete.

In Yellowstone, the badger preys on ground-nesting birds, their eggs, and gophers. But they, in turn, are preyed upon by bears, mountain lions, and wolves. The recovery of the system through the reintroduction of the wolf shows that species diversity is an evolutionary necessity. The existence of the wolf to kill certain creatures creates so much space for others. 

Since the beginning of recorded time, wolves have been controversial. Ranchers don’t like them because they can prey on livestock, and so we’ve made them endangered.

But stepping back and seeing this wide ecological web makes one realize how invaluable every single piece of the food chain — any food chain — is to one another. 

Democracy also works best when it follows these basic biological principles that ultimately build resilience across ecosystems. Central to that is the diversity embedded in geography, beliefs, and viewpoints throughout the United States.

That diversity, much like the wolf in the kaleidoscope of Yellowstone’s ecology, creates a tighter weft in the net that allows the democratic whole to be resilient and bounce back so that ecosystem-wide impacts can be absorbed.

The wolves’ reintroduction in Yellowstone shows that removing diversity within the park weakened it, but reapplying it helped a long-standing ecosystem heal.

There are arguably at least 15 different nations throughout the U.S.. But over two hundred and fifty years of messy democracy and nation-building, these regions — with their different values, politics, and history — developed a need for one another to function. Few have them have the resources to survive on their own.

Despite these clear needs, threats to a sound democracy for the whole—a free press under attack, antagonism towards science, and shrugging off simple facts and laws—are rampant, and threaten the entire ecosystem.

On August 1, and following major budget cuts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it is “winding down its operations”. This vital entity has distributed money to NPR and PBS for over half a century, long enough to be a vital cog in our educational machinery, instructing everyone from kids to older people, through Sesame Street and Next Avenue, to everyday radio news programs.

Without these entities, without their freely available educational programs, the citizens of the United States will find it increasingly difficult to make informed opinions about our world. 

Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health, which funds scientific research studies that find cures and treatments for all kinds of illnesses, saw programs abruptly cut off from federal funds if they so mentioned words like diversity, equity, and inclusion. This includes decades-long studies on women’s health and cancer research, which benefit every single citizen. 

All of these factors contribute to the kind of cascading breakdown that researchers have seen in forests and oceans, and saw in Yellowstone when there were too many elk, and no wolves. Breakdown was inevitable. The long chain of accompanying species became terribly fragile.

All of the animals in Yellowstone create a system to survive. We do, too.

For nearly three years I’ve spent most of my time outside of my country, and it’s only until you do so that you realize that for all of our social and cultural debacles, we’re threaded together with much more in common than we have different. 

Major cities are hubs for jobs, education, and markets to be able to sell products that are produced in rural communities, like food, art, technology, and machinery. For example, even though electric vehicles are most popular in California, Texas, Florida, and New York, in 2024 Tesla announced that it was opening a new distribution center in Greenville, South Carolina. Its existing manufacturing umbrella is scattered throughout the country in small towns and rural communities alike.

And for all of the news Medicaid cuts have made recently, the states with the most Medicaid enrollees are California, New Mexico, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and New York. That means that someone working in Chicago is inherently paying their federal taxes in part to ensure that a child in West Virginia has access to health care. All of these social systems depend on diversity and cooperation. 

That’s the beauty of our country: We have parks we can get lost in, and endless land to explore. We have the privilege of living in a bubble that comes from a land mass so large and precious, protected by two oceans, where there is always more to learn within it.

The elk and the wolves have their lessons, and if we can step outside of ourselves, we may very well discover that our own diversity has its own lessons for humanity, too.

Democracy becomes vulnerable when essential functions like the press or right to vote or to free speech are eliminated from the system. Just like Yellowstone needed wolves to fulfill their role as predators, democratic systems require different communities to fulfill their essential roles like those above.

When any of these functions are fully removed, the whole system becomes fragile.

Yellowstone’s ecosystem is stronger than it has been in a century, and through its diversity, is better prepared to weather change on a long-term basis.

How miraculous is that? 

Plenty of other places in the world suffer in silence with true authoritarian rule, and limited power in the press. Some very vital news remains completely unknown, because if journalists write about them, they’ll be assassinated. It’s a purposefully, unnatural erosion, not dissimilar to the grasses with too many elk.

Our noisiness, debate, and brashness are the stuff of life in the same way that a wolf sinking its teeth into a bison’s neck looks brutal to the naked eye, but it is necessary for so many beings beyond itself.

The wolves of Yellowstone are above the culture wars of their existence. They don’t care. They live their life, chase their elk, run with their pack, and play in the tall grasses. They work with each other to hunt. 

Local communities can build resilience by stepping back and seeing how different groups have long fulfilled complementary functions that benefit the whole, focusing their energies on cooperation and bipartisan efforts that allow everyone to contribute their essential role — perhaps even more than ever before.

In these troubled times, focusing on the doom of what could happen belabors the preventative ways the human ecosystem of our country can repair itself.

It requires not walling off into factions, but recognizing that different communities each contribute essential functions to the whole, like the wolves, elk, beavers, and vegetation all play necessary roles in Yellowstone.