Wolves

[Gandalf]

Back in the day, when wolves, bear and coyotes controlled the herds, elk were plains animals roaming over most of the continent. The wolves could not impact the herds like they are able to now. The elk have been slowly pushed by human encroachment into literal pockets in comparison. A fact of life never to be removed. Now, only a few packs can place a HUGE burden on the herds. If you're going to place predators back into a human created ecosystem, then you have to allow a season for them as well. Protectionism of only one artificially impacting species of predators does not work.

I will probably REALLY open up a can of worms, now, but: "Why protect any species at all?" And I am serious. People seem to think that the best and prettiest creatures exist today and we want to "preserve" them for "future generations". BUT 'ol Darwin has already said that species evolve and, eventually, die off, it is a part of life and the history of life forms on this planet (99% of all species that have appeared on the planet have gone extinct). By us deciding what species are worthy of saving, we are also potentially keeping another species from evolving and filling in the "gap" (for lack of a better word) that would have appeared when the one species died off.

I also take issue with how many "environmentalists" tend to separate mankind from the "natural" (beyond the religious argument). They call everything mankind does "artificial", yet nothing that mankind has done is "artificial", although I will say that even though I believe all that we do is "natural" it does not mean that it is good for the environment, etc., I just mean that we cannot do or make something that is not "natural". We burn oil that is supposed to be leftover from the earlier stages of life (i.e. fossil fuels), even make plastics from that oil. All materials we make are made from the raw materials found on this planet, which originated somewhere in this universe, if not on planet Earth. Yes, we may change the state of the raw materials to something not found already on the planet, like plastics I mentioned, stainless steel, vulcanized rubber, etc., but these are still made from raw materials found on this planet and there is no reason to believe that somewhere else in the universe stainless steel or the various plastics can not be found as a raw material. Now if you really want to get out there, you can claim that we can and have made new elements not found on Earth in the laboratory, absolutely true, most of which are unstable and only last nano-seconds, but some are stable and last longer, even if we were to find a niche that some of these "unnatural" elements can fill and we manufacture it/them on a large scale, there is still no reason to believe that they do not exist as a raw material somewhere in the universe under the right conditions.

Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox. I am sure I have lit a fire, so I'll put my natural asbestos fiber suit on.

Paul