An open letter to the NC Hunt & Fish forum

This is an open letter to the NC Hunt & Fish forum* which contains a thread on red wolves. For some time now, posters have quoted and excerpted materials from my book, The Secret World of Red Wolves, to uphold their perception that the red wolf reintroduction program in northeastern North Carolina ought to be shut down. This is a cynical political ploy, as the central thesis of the book is that red wolves are unique, are native to the Southeast, and are so rare in the wild that extreme measures are necessary to conserve them.

Speaking of rare, I’m preemptively turning off comments for this post — something I’ve never even thought about doing previously. The reason behind this decsion lies in the uncivil, and at times aggressive and bullying, tone which is often taken on this forum thread, and which is sure to spill over here. This letter is intended to communicate my thoughts on the misrepresentations of my work — and my character —  on the forum. I do not wish for this post to become a place where anti-red wolf and pro-red wolf supporters lob firebombs at each other, as has played out in other online spaces.

Libel on the NC Hunt & Fish forum?

It has been personally and professionally disconcerting to see my writing misconstrued, misrepresented and quoted out of context on this forum. But most galling, poster “BR549” recently insinuated that I was dismissed from the Red Wolf Coalition Board of Directors because the group was displeased with my book, which (supposedly) the Board has only just now come to realize supports the position of shutting down the Red Wolf Reintroduction Program. (Post #1574)

Both suppositions are flatly untrue.

This claim is false, uninformed, and in my opinion it is libelous. It defames my character by insinuating my professional writing and research were poor, and that I lost my position on the RWC Board due to their displeasure with the outcomes of my book. Neither accusation is true; both are groundless; and both are intended to harm and degrade me, and my work, personally.

Although I’ve let slide for months the sometimes atrocious misquotes and misinterpretations of my writing on this forum, I can not let slide misrepresentations of my character. The poster rather narcissistically claims that since they alone have “connected all the dots” of facts represented in the book, that somehow they have made the RWC Board see the light and understand that my book undermines the red wolf program and supports the anti-red wolf crusaders. This is absurd. What the Board sees is that someone is misconstruing my work to misappropriate it for their own uses. And while none of us can control that, we can call out the egregious personal accusations made by poster BR549.

This forum is publicly available. It is indexed by Google. It’s users ought to be made fully aware that what they post there is governed by laws covering libel.

For the poster in question to make the above assumptions based solely on the appearance and disappearance of my name from the RWC website reminds me of Plato’s allegory of the cave. It’s impossible to discern true knowledge when one only casts their gaze upon shadows of reality.

Something fishy is brewing in Red Wolf Country: Will the red wolf program survive?

UPDATE #1: When I wrote this last week, I thought the review undwerway was a formal 5-Year Review (which is required periodically for endangered species programs) and it’s legally required that public notices for these are to be published in the Federal Register. However, this morning (9/2) I was informed by the Red Wolf Recovery Program assistant coordinator that it’s not a 5-Year Review; it’s a special review that was requested by the State of NC Wildlife Resources Commission, and then later requested by the NC Farm Bureau, and the NC Sportsmen’s Caucus. I’m not clear where this leaves things legally in terms of public notification requirements — although a lawyer involved in the recent red wolf/coyote hunting lawsuit against the State of NC told me she believes the FWS was legally obligated to announce the review in the Federal Register but that they hadn’t in order to (from her perspective) better fly under the radar and make the program dissappear overnight.

UPDATE #2: The assistant coordinator apparently had no knowledge that the FWS intended to issue their press release the Friday before a national Holiday, or that they were going to hold a press teleconference that afternoon. (I couldn’t call in due to previously scheduled appointments — which is probably exactly what the SE Regional Office of the FWS was counting on for most media members the Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend.) I find it triply suspicious that the regional FWS office failed to notify the Red Wolf Recovery program in advance of its intention to issue a press release and hold a press conference. (My earlier posting for Update #2 was based on a statement I misunderstood — the asst. coordinator clarified by email that she did know of the press release in advance, but not of the press teleconference. My apologies for disseminating incorrect information.)

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Red wolf puppies (FWS/Ryan Nordsven)

For a few weeks now, I’ve been suspecting that something awfully fishy is going on in Red Wolf Country. I can’t escape the premonition that higher-ups in the Fish and Wildlife Service are positioning their pawns to kill or significantly alter the red wolf reintroduction program. Three years have passed since I finished writing my book on red wolves, and it’s been one year since it was published. But so much has changed since then I can only shake my head in disbelief. All the hope I held onto when completing the book is wavering.

Red wolves are globally endangered, and though a captive population exists in some 40-plus breeding facilities across the U.S., the planet’s only wild red wolves, a mere 90 or so, inhabit 1.7 million acres on a spit of coastal swamp and forest known as the Albemarle Peninsula. The first reintroduced red wolves were released into Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on September 14, 1987. Nearly 27 years later, the FWS appears to be coming under intense pressure from anti-wolf advocates to shut down the red wolf program entirely.

On Friday, August 29, the FWS Southeast Regional Office issued a press release announcing the beginning of a 60-day review of the program and asking for public input. There’s information at the bottom of this post about how to submit comments. But first, there are a few importat things to note about what’s happened, and what hasn’t… taken together, something very fishy is brewing on the horizon:

(Review) Stand Up That Mountain, by Jay Erskine Leutze

Stand Up That Mountain (Cover)

For the past year or so I’ve struggled with a sense of helplessness about the environmental calamities we face now and in the future. Extinctions. Pollution. Biological invasions. Over hunting. Desertification. Dying rivers. Mountain top removal. Climate destabilization. The list goes on.

There are days, weeks even, when the only way I can muddle through is to wrap all of it up and push it aside. In short, I feel beat. Helpless, even. The part of me who wants to change the world rails against the part of me that knows I can’t actually change the Big Picture Things that desperately need it: I can’t save the red wolf, or halt the seas from rising, any more than I can prevent the lowly but numerous wooly adelgids from sucking the life out of all the hemlock trees in western North Carolina, until they too disappear.

It was amid this puddle of dark thinking that I began reading Stand Up That Mountain: The Battle to Save One Small Community in the Wilderness Along the Appalachian Trail. Originally I picked this book up because it’s an environmental story of regional interest to me — I live but a few counties southwest of the mountains where the story unfolds. But from the first page, Leutze’s writing sang and I knew this was a very special piece of work to be savored and studied.

Stand Up That Mountain is a true story, but it’s written as if it were a novel. It has a set of heroes who pit themselves David-and-Goliath fashion against a good-ole-boy villain and his minions to rescue their town from surefire environmental destruction. But Leutze doesn’t let any of his characters fall prey to trope or caricature: they are all complicated, real, flawed people who he portrays in all their strengths, frailties, quirks, and commonalities.

Florida’s Springs and Sun-Dappled Summer Memories

Springs Series painting, by Margaret Tolbert

This morning I was driving down our mountain through a 45-degree misty rain when I heard a familiar name float from the radio — Ichetucknee Springs State Park. A story on NPR about alternate spring break destinations in Florida had somehow landed in the sun-dappled summer memories of my childhood. Instantly, I was transported from the cold spring mountain rain of Asheville, N.C. to a refreshing, sunny subtropical river of my youth. I grew up a little bit southeast of the Ichetucknee River in northcentral Florida. The park was always a favorite destination for tubing during the summer when I was in high school. My friends and I would take turns floating along with a snorkel and mask while gazing at the bottom in the 72-degree waters, then clambering into a tube to warm up and sunbathe like lizards before slipping beneath the water’s surface once more. 

Later, when I was in college and began swimming laps to train for triathlons, friends invited me to swim the river. I thought they were nuts. The Ichetucknee is spring fed and is known for a swift, steady current which whisks tubers along at a fairly fast clip, faster than an average person strides. We would swim upriver, getting a good workout, going not only against the current but against a throng of tubers waving their beer cans at us in disbelief. I was more of a runner than a swimmer, and the only way I could keep up with them was to wear fins. After a mile or more we’d turn around and bolt back to the dock with the current amplifying the power of each stroke. I imagined that’s what swimming must feel like for Olympians.

The Ichetucknee River is so clear that a snorkeler can easily see the bottom five to ten feet below, though some sections are even shallower. It’s been almost seven years since I swam the river, but one memory that stands out from all others is the emerald green river grass undulating hypnotically in the strong current, conjuring fantasies of a mermaid’s algae-covered hair. Then I noticed a flash of orange and red. My mind spun in a state of cognitive dissonance until it slowly registered that a brightly colored crawfish was perched atop the flat-bladed grasses, its antennae waved in the current, and one claw was half-raised. It looked as if it were shaking its fist at us intruders. It was a reminder of the loveliness and fragility of the creatures that live in the Ichetucknee. 

Florida artist Margaret Tolbert has painted Florida’s springs for many years. Her painter’s eye for color have documented changes to the quality of the water in springs across Florida over time. Almost exactly three years ago I wrote this article on a book she produced called Aquiferious. It’s a visual feast, filled with her paintings of springs, but also essays by conservationists, naturalists and scientists about what makes Florida’s springs so unique. I’m reposting the article today because of NPR’s story:

Florida springs painter finds conservation “inescapable”

Springs Series depicting bubbles, by Margaret Tolbert

Margaret Tolbert’s experience of Florida’s springs changed dramatically the day she donned a mask and plunked her face below the water’s lens-like surface. She says she felt like Alice, crossing through the looking glass into an alter world, where nothing was as it seemed. Up until then, springs were something Tolbert was aware of — they were often in the background at family picnics when she was growing up — but she’d never experienced them.

That first swim birthed a creative channel in her that is still fueling her paintings of Florida’s springs nearly two and a half decades later. Today, she has an impressive art portfolio inspired by places that sometimes only local Floridians know intimately. Rainbow Springs, Peacock Springs, Fanning Springs, Gilchrist Blue, Manatee Springs, Juniper Springs, Wakulla Springs, Ichetucknee Springs, Fern Hammock, Telford Springs, Wekiva Springs, Volusia Blue Springs, Cyprus Springs and Rock Springs Run — to name just a few. With the colors and light of specific springs in mind, Tolbert’s swiped and twirled her brushes over an array of large and small canvasses that have found homes in private collections, art museums and institutions all over the world.

“I’m always attracted, as an artist, to weird visual experiences,” Tolbert says. At Gilchrist Blue, she is entranced by medallions of light floating in the water, and the way the surface bends light waves to make swimming bodies look like contorted pretzels. She loves slipping below the surface, which she calls a “lens,” and staring into the springs’ dramatic caverns. At Juniper Springs, it’s the sand boils that catch her eye. At Rainbow Springs, it’s the enormous discharge power that stimulates her senses.

Tweeting for red wolves

Captive red wolf, (c) FWS Red Wolf Recovery Program

Last week I had an interesting Twitter conversation with a young woman from the western Great Lakes area, Christine Wickham. I knew from our previous exchanges that she’s highly interested in gray wolf conservation, and that she’s been pretty upset by the sanctioned wolf hunts in her home state of Michigan. So I wasn’t too surprised when she replied to a tweet that I sent out that read, “Disappointing that national conversation on wolf conservation has yet to include the crisis red wolves face.” She replied to me wanting to know why this is, and I told her I’ve been contemplating this exact question for the past four or more years.

Why is it that red wolves are so unloved and unsupported by conservationists? Jan DeBlieu put it best when she wrote:

If wolves are animals of savage and demonic qualities, as myth and folklore portray them, then red wolves have been doubly damned. They are despised, on the one hand, by people who think of wolves as bloodthirsty and sinister, yet they are often overlooked by those who might be expected to rush to their defense. (Meant to Be Wild, 1993)

This quote spoke to me on so many different levels, that I placed it at the beginning of Part I of my book, The Secret World of Red Wolves. Christine’s question embodies the reaction most people have when they first learn of red wolves and their tragic conservation story. So I tweeted a few of my ideas as to why Canis rufus remains so underserved by the conservation community, and so abused by governmental policies that should be protecting them from extinction. Without further ado, here are my tweets:

(1) People get confused because of their ability to hybridize with coyotes, think they are not a “real” species.

(2) Because of this confusion over species status, conservation groups and leaders have lost interest.

(3) Conservation groups’ loss of interest in them leads to loss of exposure/education to the general public.

(4) Some believe bc of the hybridization issues, they can never be recovered, that they are “too far gone.” Too much trouble.

(5) Fish and Wildlife Service, at higher levels, has historically underplayed the program because of fear of failure.

(6) They don’t fit our cultural idea of what a wolf should be: they are smaller, not as aggressive = less charismatic.

(7) State of NC has never embraced the program, has even worked against it, so very little political will to recover them.

(8) ESA listing status was conferred to provide flexibility in recovery, but has produced weak state and federal protections

(Review) Collared: Politics and Personalities in Oregon’s Wolf Country

Cover of COLLARED, by Aimee Lyn Eaton (OSU Press 2013)

No matter where people and wolves share the same landscape, conflict inevitably arises. Sometimes the conflicts are based in reality; sometimes they are not. Few animals other than wolves are able to consistently elicit in us deep emotional and political responses — responses that polarize us as stakeholders in their well-being, or polarize us as community members.

When wolves were reintroduced to the Northern Rocky Mountains in 1996, from two source populations released in Yellowstone National Park and in central Idaho, it was with the understanding that they would eventually tread beyond these places and reclaim lands long lost to them. Oregon was predicted to be one of the first states to receive dispersing wolves seeking new home ranges and hunting grounds. Livestock ranchers in Oregon braced for these events with trepidation. In the spring of 1999, the first wandering wolf crossed the Snake River and into Oregon’s Hells Canyon Wilderness — the young female yearling’s arrival occured about seven years earlier than predicted. That was all it took to wake Oregonians to the possibility of wolves in their midst.

Aimee Lyn Eaton’s new book, Collared: Politics and Personalities in Oregon’s Wolf Country, takes a fine-scaled in-depth look at the political process of Oregon’s preparations for receiving gray wolves. But she also puts stakeholders in her cross-hairs and reports on the multiplicity of perspectives held by biologists, ranchers, rural citizens and conservationists.

(Review) Big, Wild, and Connected, Part 1: From the Florida Peninsula to the Coastal Plain, by John Davis

What does the East look like to a dispersing panther? What obstacles might they face?

What does the American East look like to a panther that seeks to paw its way from southern Florida up into Canada? How do wide-ranging quadrupeds like black bears find safe crossings where interstates and highways lace their habitat? What does the southeastern U.S. look like to a red wolf wishing to reclaim its former haunts?

In Big, Wild, and Connected adventurer and author John Davis sets out to answer these questions, and to see if there is still a chance to create a continuous wildlife corridor spanning the North American East. This e-book, a part of of the Island Press e-essentials series, transports readers along a human-powered 7,500 mile journey over ten months in 2011 of hiking, cycling and paddling from the southernmost tip of Florida to Gaspe Peninsula, Quebec in maritime Canada. Called TrekEast, Davis and his partner organization, The Wildlands Network, did a fabulous job promoting the adventure with social media; and you can still visit this online map to explore Davis’s journey and click on starred “trail stories” which link to blog posts that (as the name suggests) record anecdotes along the route.

Davis, a former board member of The Wildlands Network, wanted to draw awareness to the need for an Eastern Wildway — an eastern parallel to the more widely known Western Wildway, which seeks to connect a corridor for wildlife from Mexico to Canada along the spine of the Rockies. An eastern continent-scaled wildlife corridor was first proposed by Dave Foreman in Rewilding North America (2004), and Davis wanted to find out if Foreman’s vision for such an ambitious wildway was still feasible — or if it was too late. Big, Wild and Connected is the three-part story of Davis’s awareness-raising campaign for this unrealized corridor vision. (Each of the  three parts is sold as a separate e-book.)

(Review) Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World, by Stephen Kellert

Where do you find everyday nature?

After reading about the sometimes ragged, sometimes technical, and always human-influenced future of wild nature and conservation strategies  in Rambunctious Garden (Emma Marris), I decided to dwell a little in the aftermath of her book and reflect on the idea of what nature means to people. Whereas Marris’s book focused on what conservation efforts might look like in the future, it didn’t step into the fuzzier realm of why nature is important to people personally, culturally, spiritually, psychologically or otherwise. Enter Yale University professor of forestry and environmental studies Stephen Kellert. His book, Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World promised to examine “why human beings need to connect with nature and what is lost when they are disconnected from the natural world.” I thought the two would be interesting to read back-to-back, to let their ideas bump into one another in my head—and I was right.

Kellert argues that human health and well-being are indelibly linked to nature, and that having a connection with nature is an essential birthright of being human. Whereas Marris dove deep into the idea of what qualifies as “nature,” “natural,” and “wilderness,” Kellert spends little time on this (birds in the backyard will do), and instead focuses on the characteristics of our interactions with nature. He believes that our intellectual and emotional capacities, even our ability to find meaning in life, hinge on our relationship with nature. And in a world where people increasingly live indoors, with less direct experience of nature, he believes that we are losing vital elements of ourselves: our health, our intellect, our capacities for affection and reason.

Along with E.O. Wilson, Kellert was a developer of the biophilia concept. He writes that it’s a complex process, involving not just a “love of life,” but also a framework that describes how we “attach meaning to and derive benefit from the natural world.” Attraction, reason, aversion, expolitation, affection, dominion, spirituality and symbolism form the warp and weft of this framework, according to Kellert and Wilson’s theory. These categories also form the structure for Birthright, with each one becoming a chapter unto itself.

(Review) Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, by Emma Marris

What makes something “natural”?

Grist.com wrote that Rambunctious Garden is “Potentially the most optimistic and controversial work about the future of nature to appear in years.” I don’t know about the optimistic part—pages of the book left me feeling utterly deflated, but I whole-heartedly agree with the controversial part. Reading Rambunctious Garden is akin to embarking on an intellectual and philosophical rumination over what comprises the concepts of nature, wilderness, and conservation. The ground Emma Marris covers, figuratively, is a fertile landscape fraught with high-stakes debates about how to preserve, conserve, and manage our natural world.

Marris is a talented and gifted writer. She seamlessly links one idea to the next with grace and skill. She presents issues and then pokes around  each one to expose all sides. The book is thoroughly researched and wonderfully organized as it leads the reader through increasingly complicated conservation conundrums and scenarios. Every single chapter challenged my thinking about how we classify and define what is natural, what’s worth saving, why, and how to got about it. However, I must admit, I began reading with the expectation of spending some time communing with, well, nature. But this book dwells less on experiential factors and more on the meta: it dives deeply into the thinking and philosophical frameworks that undergird the conservation of nature today.

Marris first asks the reader to redefine nature and our ideas about pristine places—an exercise that I found valuable. I live on the eastern outskirts of Asheville, where it’s a relatively short hike from manicured neighborhood lawns to wooded trails leading up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and into the Pisgah National Forest and Black Mountains (which contains the highest point in the East). Black bears and coyotes are just as apt to turn up in my backyard as are groundhogs, red-tailed hawks, morning doves, and starlings. In my eyes, the land here is not so much bifurcated into “developed” and “wild” as it is on a continuum from “disturbed” to “less disturbed.” But why do I think of it this way? Likely, because I implicitly have an expectation that even the conserved land surrounding my valley was disturbed by pioneers when the East was first settled by Europeans and their descendants several centuries ago—and that it’s never been quite the same since.

Pub Day! The Secret World of Red Wolves

I couldn’t have asked for a better cover.

It’s official—my book, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America’s Other Wolf, is out. Finally. What a trek it’s been to get to this day!

If you pick up a copy, this is what you’ll find on the inside jacket: Red wolves are shy, elusive, misunderstood predators. Until the 1800s, they were common in the longleaf pine savannas and deciduous forests of the southeastern United States. But red wolves were nearly annihilated by habitat degradation, persecution, and interbreeding with the coyote. Today, reintroduced red wolves are found only on peninsular northeastern North Carolina within less than one percent of their former historic range. In The Secret World of Red Wolves, nature writer T. DeLene Beeland shadows the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s pioneering program over the course of a year to craft an intimate portrait of the red wolf, its natural history, and its restoration. Her engaging portrait of this top-level predator traces the intense effort of conservation personnel to restore a species that has slipped to the verge of extinction. Beeland weaves together the voices of scientists, conservationists, and local landowners while posing larger questions about human coexistence with red wolves, our understanding of what defines this animal as a distinct species and how climate change may swamp the only place it is currently found in the wild.