Transcript: MIKE PHILLIPS on Gray Wolves and the Vitality of Death [ENCORE] /275
Ayana Young Welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Mike Phillips.
Mike Phillips I came to wonder if all these many years, these decades, these centuries Mother Earth has been calling to us, hoping for us to respond by affirming her importance, hoping for us to respond by rising up in defense of the defenseless parts of nature.
Ayana Young Mike has served as the executive director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund and advisor to the Turner biodiversity divisions since he co-founded both with Ted Turner in June 1997. Prior to that, Mike has worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service since 1981. During his employment with the Department of Interior, Mike served as the leader of historic efforts to restore red wolves to the southeastern US, and gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park. He also conducted important research on the impacts of oil and gas development on grizzly bears in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, predation costs for gray wolves and Alaska, black bear movements in northeastern North Carolina, and dingo ecology and Australia. In 2006, Mike was elected to the Montana legislature, where he served as the representative for House District 66 in Bozeman until 2012, where he was elected to the Montana Senate.
Welcome to the show, Mike. I feel so grateful to be connecting with you today as a fellow conservationist, so deeply immersed in this work.
Mike Phillips Oh, Ayana, it is very much my privilege and my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Ayana Young Well, within these circles, we often organize and orient around the notion of sustaining life. And in preparing for this interview, I was immediately struck by the way you speak and write about the biological necessity of death. In an interview with Mountain & Prairie Podcast you share, “all of life that we see around us, the fantastic forms so well adapted to local challenges are a function of death. Evolution drives by death.” And what has drawn you to build lifelong alliances with predators like the coyote and the gray wolf, so-called deliverers of death. And in your answer, perhaps you could also speak to the depth that these species bring to our ecological systems and the phenomenon of trophic cascades.
Mike Phillips My work with coyotes many years ago back - heaven sakes - it would have been in the early 1980s. A wolf researcher by the name of Dave Mech said to me, “I don't have any room on my field crew right now. I suggest that you go study coyotes.” Back in the early 1980s, gray wolves were very, very uncommon in the United States. There were only maybe 1000 gray wolves in the northeast, in Minnesota, that was it. So Dave's program was the only game in town if you wanted to work with gray wolves.
So I took Dave's advice to heart and conducted a study of coyote food habits in Illinois and published that study. And as soon as I did that, within about a year, I went right back to Dr. Mech and I said, “Okay, well, you I do exactly what you told me to do. Now, do you have an opening?” And he did. That was in 1981 that I began working with Dave. And Ayana, I've had the good fortune to work on wolf recovery and conservation and research on a near-daily basis ever since.
The reason that wolves made so much sense to me as a lens for examining opportunities to contribute. The wolf is a fantastic species for illuminating all sorts of problems that are only at best tangentially related to the gray wolf. Wolf recovery, wolf restoration, wolf research is always about more than gray wolves. Wolves can be almost in ways be viewed as a trim tab. You may not know what a trim tab is but many years ago, I learned how to fly small aircraft anticipating working in remote country where working out of a plane was sometimes essential. A trim tab is a device in the plane that gives you a mechanical advantage over portions of the way to make the wing behave properly so the plane can be flown properly. There's such great force over the wings, you need a mechanical advantage system of pulleys to be able to move the wing and manage the wing in a fashion that allows the plane to perform properly. It's the trim tab that allows you that control. A small movement of the trim tab can create a great opportunity for the plane; a small movement with wolf recovery can create a great opportunity for conservation in general.
Gray wolves are a wonderful way for examining our relationship with Mother Earth, which has been clearly out of whack for a long, long time. And once we come to accept that fact, then we're on the road to finding a new relationship going forward where it's possible, I think, possible to imagine peace, prosperity, and justice for more of human life and, at least for me, nonhuman life which is essential too.
Now on to trophic cascades. Well, gee whiz, as I said in that mountain prairie podcast, it is true that the wondrous diversity of life that we see all around us is a function of all of that life, trying to stay one step ahead of death. And so we know predation matters, predation is the process whereby death is delivered. So if you're a predator, like a grey wolf, and you exist by delivering death, you have to matter, you have to matter in an evolutionary sense because it is death that sort of sits at the knife's edge of evolution, improving forms so they can better stay one step ahead of death. Specifically, with gray wolves, there are very good studies that show that if wolves are common enough for a long enough period of time, that predatory activities will lead to a change in the system, principally by reducing the number of ungulates in an area (ungulates, of course, are just hoofed mammals, deer and elk, and moose). If wolf predation can reduce their numbers, if wolf predation can cause them to behave differently, forage differently, those changes in numbers and behavior on the part of the ungulates can bring about system-wide changes in the ecology of a setting. That's fundamentally all a trophic cascade means, is that the activity at one level of the trophic system, the gray wolf would be one level of the food system, the trophic system, its activities can create a cascading effect to all the other levels.
If elk in Yellowstone National Park, as an example, are less common, that provides an opportunity for willows and aspen to experience a release. When the willows and aspens grow big, tall, and healthy, that creates lots of opportunities for other members of the system like pasture, birds, and beavers. And of course, the birds and the beavers operate and exist at a different level of the trophic system. So gray wolf predation can create this cascading effect that spills through the food chain, it spills through the trophic system, thereby creating greater ecological resiliency and integrity.
But for gray wolves to operate as those ecological engineers affecting a trophic cascade, they have to be fairly common, and they have to be in place for an extended period of time. And so really the take-home message from trophic cascades isn't gray wolves. No, that's not the case. Lots of things serve as predators: cougars, black bears, grizzly bears, and coyotes. They're all important predators too. The important part of the trophic cascade that we should touch on today is predation: predation delivered by all of these species that make a living by killing things
Ayana Young Thank you, Mike, for explaining trophic cascades so beautifully.
Mike Phillips Well, simply. Simply, that's the best way for me to view things is simple - and systems are exceedingly complicated but the fundamentals are pretty simple. If life matters, then death matters. If prey matters, then predators matter. It really is just that simple.
Ayana Young I'd like to dive into the conservation and restoration work you've done over the years, with grey wolves, particularly within the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. And to begin, I think it could be helpful to ground our listeners in the history of this great species that once thrived in abundance across the so-called United States. I imagine the nearly 250,000 to 500,000 wild wolves, they used to roam freely across the lower 48 states, later reduced to the brink of extinction in the 1950s, with numbers dipping into the low 300s. So could you share with us the story of the gray wolf, illuminating the differences between the vilified mythic wolf, and the adaptive, powerful creature that you've come to know?
Mike Phillips Sure. Ayana, I need to listen more carefully. But did you say historically 200,000 to 500,000 gray wolves in the United States?
Ayana Young That's what I was reading. Mm-hmm. A quarter of a million to half a million.
Mike Phillips I would guess there were far more than that. Which makes the story even more compelling. Gray wolves were historically one of the most widely distributed large mammals. In North America, you can find gray wolves everywhere from coast to coast, east to west and north to south. You could find grey wolves in the grasslands, you could find them in the forest, you could find them in the desert, you can find them in the swamps, you could find gray wolves everywhere where there was something bigger than themselves to eat.
A fundamental difference between coyotes and grey wolves is based on their food habits. Coyotes are on average designed to kill things smaller than themselves. That doesn't mean that a coyote won't on occasion kill a deer. But on average, they're subsisting on items that are smaller than themselves. In contrast, the gray wolf is designed physically, socially, intellectually, to kill things bigger than itself. This doesn't mean that a grey wolf won't kill a snowshoe hare on occasion. But it does mean that grey wolves are hardwired to kill things bigger than themselves.
Because of that, they were seen as a direct threat to the settling of the United States. Part of the Manifest Destiny that guided the settling of this country was at the wild places and wild things that early settlers encountered had to be subdued, they had to be commanded, so that they could be tamed, and controlled so that the landscape provided in a more predictable manner those things that the settlers wanted. We should find it quite intriguing that the settlers took what is arguably one of the greatest assemblages of mammalian biomass the world has ever produced in the form of the plains bison, they took their tremendous abundance of life and drove it to the brink of extinction. The massacre of the bison is a tremendously sad story in the history of this country. You know what they did in response, they replaced the bison with European cattle
They took this most common large mammal, a fantastic herbivore, and replaced it with what is, without doubt, an exotic species from Europe. All of the cattle that were used to settle this country came from Europe after the native bison had been nearly completely destroyed. Now it is true, they massacred bison as a way to promote the subjugation of Native Americans as well. But that was all part and parcel of settling the big wild landscape that was the United States back in the day. Part of that was also creating an opportunity to command gray wolves to near zero. And so the gray wolves were subjected to a war that lasted, oh my lord, Ayana, the war of the gray wolf lasted well over 200 years. It was the war that was fought with the most murderous means. And as the war ended, by the late 1950s - a war that began In the late 1600s, ended by the late 1950s - you could find this most common large mammal, the gray wolf, only in northeastern Minnesota, represented by a few 100 individuals and a few animals 10, 12, 15 animals on Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior.
We purposely took this most common large mammal, the gray wolf, and purposely drove it to the brink of extinction. Things improved, admittedly in the mid-1970s with the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, the gray wolves one of the first species listed under that most important federal law. The listing brought forth recovery programs that eventually led to the restoration of gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, that led to the recovery of gray wolves in the Great Lakes states in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, it led to hope for recovery of the Mexican gray wolf, Canis lupus baileyi, in the Southwest.
And so today, there would probably be in DC here, let's assume 5000 or so gray wolves in the Great Lakes states, and 2000 gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains, and about 150 Mexican wolves in the border country that would give us a little over 7000 animals that have been recovered across about 15% of the species historical range. That's good progress. It certainly does not detract from the fact though, that the gray wolf remains extirpated from approximately 85% of its historical range. The destruction of the gray wolf-like the American plains bison, like the passenger pigeon, represents a very, very sad chapter in the history of this country.
Ayana Young I was noting that the government's outright campaign of extermination against the gray wolf officially ended in the 1960s and since that time restoration projects have popped up across the west, like the infamous program in Yellowstone National Park in 1995. But despite these efforts, I think that these notions of proper cultivation, civilization, and domination over all that is wild continue to live on in our collective American imagery, particularly in the west. And I wonder how you see this era of human supremacy continue to play out in our cultural and policy handling with the gray wolf.
Mike Phillips I don't think it's a cultural predisposition to treat some wildlife with total disregard. I think it is principally a consequence of one camp. And as a biologist, your listeners need to know I'm a big believer that our evolutionary past matters. I think you are Pleistocene woman; I am Pleistocene man. Our Pleistocene roots made us who we are today, we can't deny the fact that for most of our evolutionary past, we existed in small bands of hunter-gatherers. For heaven's sake, agriculture hasn't been practiced for more than about 8000 years, and yet, you can find clear evidence of Homo Sapiens walking this planet 200,000 years ago, 300,000 years ago.
Let's assume that our evolutionary clock started 250,000 years ago. And over the last 8000 years, we've been able to grow crops and take advantage of domesticated animals, which means over 200-some-thousand years of our evolutionary past we were hunter-gatherers, Pleistocene men and women. They were decidedly tribal, very social with one another, but very, very tribal. That's how we survived. I think we're still tribal. And so I will have you believe that the principle problem of disregard for the wild is principally a function of one tribe. And I can pick at this tribe because it's my tribe. It's the old white guy tribe. It's the old white guys that still insist that we dominate landscapes. It's the old white guy tribe that insists that we kill wildlife needlessly.
Just a story to that effect: in the last legislative session in early 2019, I brought a bill to the Montana Senate that said we're going to prohibit the killing of coyotes by snowmobiles. In the state of Montana, you could hunt a coyote off a snowmobile. You can run it, and you can run it, and you can run it, you can run it so long and so hard that the coyote just drops with exhaustion. It's not dead, it's just so pooped it can't move. At that point, you can use your snowmobile to run it over repeatedly to kill it. In other words, it’s lawful to torture the coyote to death.
I said with my bill, “we're better than that, folks, we should pass a bill that says you can't torture the coyote to death.” At the point of killing the animal, you have to deliver the death blow humanely. You run it to the point of exhaustion. At that point, you have to shoot it, or kill it, somehow quickly and humanely. You can't run it over repeatedly with a snowmobile. Well, the bill did not make it out of the Senate Fish and Game committee.
So I said, okay, okay. As any senator, I then had the option to go to the full Senate and say, with a motion, I moved to remove my Coyote Killing Bill from the Fish and Game committee, and bring it to the full Senate for a proper discussion. So when it got stuck in committee, I was going to blast my bill from the committee for consideration by the full Senate. Before I did that, a few days before I did that, I went to my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle, and I said, “please help me with this blast motion, you may ultimately choose to vote against the bill. But let's at least have a proper discussion. Montana is better than allowing coyotes to be tortured to death.”
So I stand up two days later on the Senate floor, and I say, “Mr. Chairman, I'm moved to remove Senate Bill 212 from the Senate Fish and Game Committee and bring it before the full Senate for consideration. Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” (as is the habit), then the chairman says “Senator Phillips,” and I have a moment or two to speak on the rationale of my blast motion. So I said to my colleagues in the Senate, I said, “members of the Senate, this is an important bill we should consider as a full body. As you consider that, note that if we knew of a 12-year-old boy in our neighborhood that was using his bicycle to run over the local cat, we would be deeply concerned for that young boy's mental health. This is no different than that. Please vote for this blast motion, so we can properly consider this bill.”
At that point, we voted and my last motion failed on a party-line vote, 18 Democrats, myself and my 17 colleagues, voted yes. 32 Republicans voted no. I was deeply embarrassed by that vote. I had served with many of these people for 14 years. I knew them. I considered them colleagues, I considered some friends. I was asking something very simple, let's not torture coyotes to death. And they said no. They wouldn't even join me to stand up and at least have a discussion.
Ayana, at that point I could no longer pray with them. Every day when the Montana Senate begins its work, and I don't know what other state legislatures do, but I know what we do every day we would stand, and we would pray, and then pledge allegiance to the flag, and then begin to work. From that day forward, at the beginning of any session, I would step out into the anteroom, and I would stand quietly and wait for the prayer to end. And then I would step back into the chamber and I would pledge allegiance, then I would take my seat. I could no longer pray with my colleagues, my friends because I could no longer accept their hypocrisy. I'm quite confident that God holds coyotes in high regard, and would not want his coyotes to be tortured to death. It’s the old white guy tribe, I know, that continues to get in the way because we have this gross inability to accommodate wild and self-willed nature.
Ayana Young Oh, my goodness, Mike, your story touched me so much. And I just am taking a moment to let your response sit. And I want to tell you in this moment that I am so grateful for you and I respect you so much for your courage and your convictions. You're really such a unique person. And I think a lot about this typical American Western identity, or as you put it, this white man tribe identity, and it's as one that has been forged around a shared sense of pride, and wilderness, and outdoorsmanship, and a settler mentality of conquest and rugged individualism. And I feel a sense of hollowness around this profession of belonging and ownership.
The grizzly bear that remains at the center of the California flag, but only in its symbolic form, as a species has vanished from our forested landscapes, our mountains, our waters, and these creatures remain at the center of our collective mythology, but they're simultaneously revered and hated. And just listening to your stories and how you are connected so deeply to the land and these creatures. It gives me pause and I just want to say thank you before we continue.
Mike Phillips You're welcome. I wish I was more effective. But I learned a long time ago, I can't be responsible for other people's decisions. I can barely figure out how to make my own decisions. And I will say that we sometimes celebrate wildness in symbols only, like grizzly bears and the California flag, in part because we're increasingly living in a world of ecological illiterates. People don't understand that everything that we need, and when you cut it deep enough, everybody needs food, cover, water, space: all living organisms in one form or faction need food, cover, water, space.
Most people, 99.999% of the people today, buy what they need. You buy food, cover, water, space. There are not enough subsistence hunters left in the world to matter in a numerical sense. Everybody's buying food, cover, water, space. So the marketplace really matters and yet, we place so much emphasis on the marketplace, that we forget that it sits on landscapes the world over. Absent healthy landscapes, the world over marketplaces struggled, if marketplaces struggled, all of those of us who buy our food, cover, water, space, have no choice but to struggle too. We are burdened with ecological illiteracy. I'm on with you today because I think these types of podcasts can promote literacy. And I think from the perspective of living in greater harmony with one another and Mother Earth, we need to be more literate.
Ayana Young Mm-hmm. I absolutely agree with you, Mike. And there's so much to say about that.
Mike Phillips But there are things to do. There are things that we should… I mean, I'm not guided by despair. I'm guided by hope but my hope is guided by what I think are good facts rooted in reality, like many people don't understand how systems operate. They don't understand the importance of the wild and nature to humankind's future. I am guided by a determination to try to contribute to a better way forward, so I don't want the listeners to get down in the dumps. I'm sorry I shared my coyote story and my inability to pray but it drives home the fact that nearly everybody voted against my coyote bill. Well, on the Republican side of the aisle, in the 2019 session in Montana, they were all old white guys except one woman - I'm sorry two women and one Native American - so of the 38 of them, 35 were old white guys.
Ayana Young It's impossible to tell these stories without calling upon the colonial roots of land management in the US that have perpetrated egregious acts of violence, often in the name of conservation itself. And I feel like you were speaking a bit to this at the beginning of our conversation. The wars waged against the gray wolf, the grizzly, the coyote, the buffalo, have also been wars against the Indigenous peoples that have actively tended the lands and waters of Turtle Island since the beginning of time. In what is now Yellowstone National Park, for example, the US Army was stationed from 1886 to 1918 and forcibly displaced the Ahwahnechee from their tribal homelands. This logic of extermination that sought to sever the sacred bonds of life in these places paved the way for the construction of untouched “wilderness” for the exclusive use of recreation, mass tourism, and resource extraction. So do you see Indigenous sovereignty as an important thread to weave into a new model of conservation? And how can these lineages of violence inform how we go about protecting spaces in the future?
Mike Phillips Well, certainly I agree that Indigenous sovereignty matters, that sovereignty has to matter, or nations all across the planet don't have sufficient standing. In our own small way, at team Turner, we are working to promote, for example, bison restoration on tribal lands throughout the United States, as a celebration of the tribes' sovereignty to create a future of their own making. And ideally, that future would include plains bison as a fixed feature on their landscapes.
How does that translate into more open lands conservation, if that was your question? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think that large-scale changes, changes that operate at sufficient scale to matter, have to be affected through a political process. As much as I regret my ineffectiveness as a politician, I have thought long and hard about the great collective endeavor that is politics in the United States and accepted for the marketplace. I don't know of any greater collective human endeavor across the long sweep of our history than politics. It's how we moved forward when we were small bands of hunter-gatherers. It's how we move forward as great nations of people. And I would hope that your listeners if they're committed to a more peaceful, prosperous, and just future for human and non-human life, would consider putting their name on the ballot and running for office. Many of the issues that touch on peace, prosperity, and justice, for human and nonhuman life are not properly considered in a political context today because people serving aren't sensitive to the issues.
One that has guided our work at the Turner Endangered Species Fund and it certainly guides our work to advance wolf recovery to western Colorado, which is the next great and probably the last great restoration campaign for the gray wolf in the United States, is acknowledgement of the increasing seriousness of the extinction crisis. And I know when you think about that, it is a most unique circumstance, it is truly a crisis of the most damning kind. We know from history, that along the big sweep of time that this planet has supported multicellular life, let's say 300 million years, 400 million years, there have been prior to the current extinction crisis, five previous such events. The fifth occurred about 65 million years ago, when an asteroid measured something like six miles across and traveling it's something like 25,000 miles an hour, slammed into the planet off the coast of what is now the Yucatan Peninsula. And fundamentally in a geologic instant ended the reign of the dinosaurs.
The sixth crisis is now in place. It's been in place, at least since the Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s. Probably, technically, we could find evidence of the crisis dating back centuries, if not 1000s of years before that. Humankind has always been hard on the planet and non-human components of life. So when you think about the extinction crisis, I would have you believe it's the clarion call for recognizing a need to adjust our relationship with Mother Earth because it is so absolute. There is no workaround to the extinction crisis. It's patently absolute, another Heaven and Earth would have to pass along with a great deal of luck for any extinct species to ever rise again. that makes it, I think, a clarion call.
And it's also a clarion call because it should matter no matter who you are, no matter who you are, the extinction crisis should matter. So let's assume you're a person of faith. Well, I would pose the question, “how can you love the creator and not love the creation. And if you love something, how could you stand by and watch it needlessly destroyed without rising up in defense?” Or let's assume for a moment that you're a secular humanist. And rather than faith, you believe that what matters most is facts and data and logic and empiricism. A lot of the best science tells us that the fate of humanity has always been, and will always be, connected to the health of local landscapes the world over. The extinction crisis makes clear that those landscapes are not the least bit healthy. No matter who you are, the extinction crisis should matter.
Ayana Young Yes, I'm with you, Mike. I'd also be curious to hear about your thoughts around a future of coexistence with grey wolves. And I know this can be an incredibly polarizing issue, especially in the frontlines of reintroduction projects where people have competing visions of land use, whether towards conservation, hunting, or livestock production. As an advocate for the gray wolf within this highly debated arena, how do you present the case of restoration to people who perhaps feel fearful or in defense of their safety and livelihood, and what is needed to ultimately reconcile these differences?
Mike Phillips Gray wolves are actually really easy to coexist with. The only thing that's ever gotten in the way of wolf recovery, the only thing that stands as an obstacle to coexisting with grey wolves, is the mythical wolf. People have this sense that grey wolves have an almost supernatural ability to exercise their predatory will on a whim. And by doing so they create a wake of death and desolation and destruction everywhere they go. Nothing could be further from the truth for the gray wolf life is a daily struggle to survive. Most hunting attempts by grey wolves fail; starvation is a common cause of death.
Hunting is a dangerous activity. I did a study years ago of over 200 gray wolf skulls that had been collected by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. These were animals that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game had shot in an attempt to minimize predation pressure on a local caribou herd or a local moose population. So these animals were killed by being shocked. I looked at their skulls for evidence of blunt force trauma: how often do they get kicked in the head by a moose for example. Fully a quarter of the skulls showed a broken jaw, broken nose, broken skull.
A good friend of mine, Rolf Peterson, Dr. Peterson from Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, has studied grey wolves in national parks since 1972. Rolf has never done any necropsy of grey wolves (necropsy is just an autopsy of an animal). He's never done a necropsy of a wolf that has not shown evidence of blunt force trauma, broken leg, broken rib, broken nose. It's very difficult to make a living in the woods with your teeth. But people are unwilling to accept that fact. They are more willing to embrace the mythical of this devil incarnate that exercises its predatory will on a whim. Unfortunately, the myth is as strong as it is wrong. As I said, life is a daily struggle for the real wolf. The real wolf, and reliable data collected over decades, the gray wolf is one of the most studied large mammals in the world. We know a lot about gray wolves. We know without doubt gray wolves do not represent a threat to human safety. They do not represent a threat to the livestock industry. They do not represent a threat to the big game hunting industry. If you're willing to embrace an honest portrayal of the species, gray wolves are relatively easy to coexist with. When problems do arise, we have very good tools at the ready for resolving conflicts and very good tools at the ready for preventing conflicts. It's the mythical wolf that gets in the way of the future of the real wolf.
Ayana Young I can absolutely see that. I really appreciate your deep understanding of this issue and how you're able to speak with so much compassion to the many sides of this complex topic. I'd also like to take a step back and look at this from more of a systemic level. An article published in National Geographic by Emma Maris reports that “today only 4% of the world's mammals by weight are wild, the other 96% are livestock and ourselves.” And these statistics illustrate such a staggering image of our biosphere and I think speaks to the way industry has privileged certain species over the lives of many others, creating landscapes stripped of all biological diversity purely for human consumption of one kind or another. So could you speak to the ways that cattle ranching and grazing rights have been prioritized both in the past and present terms?
Mike Phillips Well, we've already spoken about the destruction of the plains bison that was very much justified on the grounds that the grasslands needed to provide forage for European cattle. We spoke about the destruction of the gray wolf. It was the cattlemen that developed a pathological hatred of the gray wolf to make room for European cattle. The grizzly bear was pushed to the brink of extinction in the United States to make room for cattle. Even to this day, predators continue to be persecuted to make room for cattle.
We have achieved recovery in both a biological and legal sense for the gray wolf in the northern Rocky Mountains, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, but we continue to persecute them with a great deal of determination. In Montana, as an example, there may be, oh, 800 or 900 gray wolves that live in the western quarter of our great state: every year 800 or 900 animals. In an average year, oh, gee whiz, up to 300 of those animals are killed. I saw some data recently that indicated the average age of a gray wolf in Montana, outside of highly protected areas like Yellowstone Park, the average age of a grey wolf is about three years. My lord, three years is nothing.
A gray wolf, if left to her own devices and not killed by people, would live to be eight or nine or maybe 10. No, they don't live for that long but they certainly have the capacity to live longer than three years. The biggest hurdle to wolf recovery in western Colorado, and when people think about this tremendous opportunity, western Colorado is God's gift to gray wolves: over 17 million acres of federal public lands across which gray wolves receive priority consideration, a robust prey population consisting of deer and elk, unlike anything in the world. Reliable studies clearly indicate western Colorado could support a viable population of gray wolves. That population is mandated - the existence of that population is mandated by the federal endangered species act. It's also mandated in a softer fashion, but nonetheless, mandated by state law. And yet it's principally the livestock industry that stands in opposition. Because they just can't imagine how their operations could be conducted in wolf country, even though many of their operations are based on federal public lands and they're already heavily subsidized to use those lands.
We don't charge public land ranchers an amount of money for the grass that their livestock consumes that's actually equal to what that grass is worth. We as a country have said, “we're not going to charge you what the grass is worth because they recognize ranching and remote Western range lands owned by the federal government, that's a tough business. That's a risky proposition. So we're gonna help by charging you a fraction of what that grass is actually worth” and still, that helping hand is not enough. It's not enough they would rather the landscapes be wolfless. They don't want another challenge even though we know from reliable studies conducted over decades that is the atypical wolf that depredates on livestock. We know that in the northern Rocky Mountains, nearly 100% of the livestock that would call Montana home, nearly 100%, 99.995%, of that livestock will never be involved in wolf depredation. Depredations are so uncommon to be of little interest to the industry. Now, if you're the rancher who lost a cow last night, you've got a problem, and I readily acknowledge that.
But as I said, fortunately, we've got good tools at the ready for resolving such conflicts when they do occur. Very good tools at the ready for preventing such conflicts from ever occurring in the first place. You know, we can put an astronaut on the moon and bring her home, we can take your heart out of your chest and put it back better than before. I promise you we can coexist with the gray wolf but the livestock industry stands in sharp opposition. So we continue to bow down to the great hamburger.
Ayana Young Mike, I really appreciate those metaphors. I'm wondering as we wrap up this part of the conversation around gray wolves. I'd be curious to hear about what kind of future path you envision for gray wolf reintroduction, and any updates surrounding your partnership with Rocky Mountain Wolf Project in western Colorado.
Mike Phillips Yes thank you. The folks need to know there's this tremendous effort brewing to restore gray wolves to western Colorado. It's been underway for many years. It is now very muscular, very capable. It is predisposed to succeed. It's represented by two organizations that have related different roles. The first organization is Rocky Mountain Wolf Project. The website is just RockyMountainWolfProject.org. The project is a coalition of conservation visionaries and conservation organizations that believe that if Coloradans simply embraced an honest portrayal of the gray wolf, they would conclude that coexisting with the species is a straightforward affair that requires only a modicum of accommodation. That conclusion, of course, advances restoration. But by itself, that conclusion is probably not enough to affect change.
So the Rocky Mountain Work Project stands alongside what could be seen as a companion organization, known as the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund. That website is just www.WolfActionFund.com. The Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund is a political organization. It's not a coalition. It is a lean, mean, fighting political machine that aims to allow Coloradans to decide if the wolf has a future across the great public wild lands of western Colorado by vote. The Action Fund intends to place a wolf restoration initiative on the 2020 general election ballot, and let Colorado decide by November of 2020 whether the wolf should be a part of the state's great future. The project has done well educating, drawing attention to the real wolf. The Action Fund has done well advancing the political campaign to give Coloradans a chance to vote.
Now, listeners might say, “well, that's great for Colorado. But what does that have to do with me?” Well, really, the wolf Action Fund is launching a national campaign to use direct democracy to elect the wolf to restore the wolf. And the reason it's an actual campaign is that the great wolf, Canis lupus, remains fully protected under federal law. Consequently, Americans all over the country have the right, some would say the responsibility, to concern themselves with the future of the gray wolf in places like western Colorado. And the second reason that the Wolf Action Fund is launching a nationwide campaign is that the landscape of relevance to wolf restoration in western Colorado is federal public lands. Americans all over the country can fairly claim ownership of the San Juan National Forest in southwestern Colorado, for example. So because the gray wolf is considered protected by federal law, and because the landscape restoration landscape of relevance is federal public lands, Americans all across the country can choose to engage. They won't be able to vote, that's true. But they could choose to offer support in the form of donations, in the form of moral support, in the form of intellectual support. It is a nationwide campaign. There are people all over the country that are going to rise up in support of the ecological integrity of the federal public lands of western Colorado that can be improved with the restoration of the endangered gray wolf.
Ayana Young One of the challenges we ask ourselves daily at For the Wild is how we can help our listeners become more active participants and resilient Earth defenders. We are constantly orienting and reorienting within this question to try and figure out how we can bridge a connection of caring to what might otherwise feel like distant lands or distant problems. As such a fierce advocate for imperiled species and a public servant. I'd like to turn this question back to you: how have you sought to inspire your constituents to care differently and tune into the multiplicity of beyond human worlds that turn alongside our own human experience? And how do you feel like people can continue or just begin to be more active participants and Earth defenders?
Mike Phillips I think the problems are now so systemic, that nothing less than a grand systemic solution will suffice. And I know of only two encompassing activities that could bring about the types of systemic solutions that will make the planet a more peaceful, prosperous, and just place for human and non-human life. And the one that matters here today is politics. I'm proud to have served in elected office, I still sit in my state senate seat. I'll hold that seat until the end of 2020 when I'll be term-limited, but will have had 14 years of service as a state legislator; I'm proud. I don't see politics as a problem, I see politics as an important part of the solution of moving us as a collective forward to a better place.
So I would say to the listeners, become more involved in the political process, insist that candidates are aware of the extinction crisis. They're aware of the climate change crisis, that they're aware of the pressing need for a new energy future, that they're aware of the fact that the fate of humanity has always rested on the health of local landscapes. Insist the cost of an item is accounted for today fully, the cost of production, consumption, and distributions accounted for fully so we're not passing the future generations a bill that we should have paid long ago. And the best way, I think, to move forward, and I will challenge your female listeners, we need more women in decision-making positions. The world will be a more peaceful, prosperous, and just place if women rise up and say to the old white guy tribe, “you've had access to the power levels long enough, long enough, get the hell out of the way. Because now we're going to take over because you don't have the skillset that is needed to bring people together to go forward and celebrate a future that is more peaceful, and more prosperous, and more just.” Serve an elected office, put your name on a ballot, get behind candidates, and drill down in the electoral process. Contribute to this country by serving as an informed voter, and if you can put your name on a ballot and recognize that this country needs more women leaders.
Ayana Young I wish you could see my face as you were saying that. I was grinning from ear to ear. Thank you.
Mike Phillips I can tell you, I was so proud: in the State Senate here in Montana, we were in a deep minority hold, that's true. There were only 18 of us: there were 32 of our colleagues on the Republican side, but of the 18 Democrats 12 were women. And I was so honored to serve in a caucus that was guided by such a steady hand and thoughtfulness. And I am convinced that this country will do better when we have more women in positions of decision making.
So can I end with a joke? Let’s end with a joke. Okay, here's my only endangered species joke, and it will be my final word. There was some time ago to condors flying around, and of course, condors are scavengers. They're flying around and they see this clown had died on the side of a road. And as condors do, they flew down, and they landed, and they began eating this clown because that's what scavengers do. And after a few minutes, one condor said to the other condor, does this taste funny to you? That's the joke. It was a clown. Right?
Ayana Young Thank you for making us laugh because I agree, we do need laughter at this time. And I appreciate that. And Mike, this has been so wonderful to have you on the show. And I think we're all going to garner so much from hearing your words. So thank you so much.
Mike Phillips Well, it was been my privilege and my honor. Thank you so much for the chance to contribute.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana young. The music you heard today was from Mac DeMarco. I'd like to thank our wonderful podcast production team, Aiden McCrae, Andrew Storrs, Cameron Stallones, Carter Lou McElroy, Erica Ekrem, Eryn Wise, Francesca Glaspell, Hannah Wilton, and Melanie Younger.