Wolf recovery brings backlash in Congress

Bills introduced in Congress in recent weeks would either remove the act's protection of wolves in the Northwest or, as proposed by Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Texas, forbid any listing at all of the once nearly extinct predator. Biologists say that outcome could jeopardize recovery efforts in the Southwest and Midwest and in fledgling new populations in Washington and Oregon. The 1973 act, the nation's landmark species-protection law, rarely has been amended, and conservationists say the bills mark a significant shift in the enduring contest among mining, timber and ranching interests and the plants and animals often squeezed out by human expansion. "Heretofore, there's been fairly strong bipartisan support of the sort of Noah's Ark notion that if we're serious about our moral commitment to share the planet with our fellow inhabitants, we don't start throwing identified species off the ark," said Douglas Honnold of the public-interest legal organization Earthjustice, which has been fighting to expand wolf protections in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. "I think to a large degree it would really be unprecedented," said Andrew Wetzler of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If passed, any of these bills will rip the heart out of the Endangered Species Act and set a terrible precedent for wildlife management generally." Government officials in Montana and Idaho say that, after 15 years of trying to follow the letter of the law in restoring wolves in and around Yellowstone National Park, they have been rewarded with a large and growing wolf population that threatens livestock and game animals such as elk, as well as hunters and hikers in the backcountry...more