etc. pondering wolves in the scheme of things

I'm a firm believer in the proposition that nature knows what it's doing.

We tinker, I think, at our peril. For example, some say life would be better in numerous ways if we got rid of the wolves. Look what happened to Little Red Riding Hood, for goodness sake.

I'm partial to wolves. I used a pair of white wolves, Lord and Lady Snowdrift, out of Montana's history as minor characters in Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey because they helped illustrate the insanity of one man who killed wolves with the relish of a preacher charging after Satan.

Learning to live with nature instead of separate from nature is, I think, not only good citizenship and good stewardship, but pragmatically essential to our own survival in our finite world. When we do not consider the consequences of our quick fixes to such challenges as living with wolves, a domino effect of consequences often occurs.

Case it point: removing wolves from Glacier National Park was previoulsly a death warrant for news stands of aspen trees returning to fire-damaged areas. And that's just the beginning. Bringing wolves back has, however, helped the aspens. Why? Without the wolves, there were too many elk, and too many elk meant a lot of hungry critters munching their way through the trees.

Turns out, we need the wolves more than we thought we did. In fact, a whole ecosystem depended on them being there.

Conservation biologist Cristina Eisenberg has much to teach us as she explores the relationships between predators and prey in her wonderful book The Elk's Tooth . While all of us may not need to read this book to craft a positive attitude toward nature as it was meant to be, the concept of trophic cascades--habitats, biodiversity, the food change from top to bottom--is an idea worthy of consideration each time we get the urge to tinker with an ecosystem that is already perfect.

As for how we might keep an excessive number of Little Red Riding Hoods in check, that is a challenge I'll leave for the philosophers to ponder.

--Malcolm