The elimination of wolves from Yellowstone National Park is a testament to the importance of protocols in contexts where problem management is a superior strategy to problem solving.
Wolves, bears, and other predators of sufficiently frightening size, pose serious problems to people. They’re both destructive and deadly. The obvious short-term solution is to just get rid of them. That’s what happened with the wolves in Yellowstone, whereas bears are typically managed in a more tolerant fashion.
We pay the costs of problem management and the costs of realized accidents, because the existing problem is actually a good one to have. In other words you want to have dynamic non-events, not pure non-events. Killing wolves to create a safe park is analogous to stopping highway construction to eliminate road worker accidents. Eventually it will usher in a worse problem
I suspect this may open up a much bigger debate around ‘rewilding’ where there’s been a number of perspectives, but your post and the recent SoP talk on fire protocols reminded me of the history of fire management in Yosemite, where a similar pattern of opting for safety through suppression caused other problems.
I appreciate how the author describes the state of the ecosystem back in the 1930s, as compared to 1968, and today. Taking care to understand how the ecosystem is currently functioning as compared to earlier times will be important. The ground is always shifting underneath one’s feet and assuming a steady state can lead to additional, unintended consequences. Dare I say a vicious cycle! I’m curious to see how they approach their “rewilding” keeping this in mind.