EDITOR’S NOTE: Matt Barnes will be part of a panel discussion at the Ellen Theatre in Bozeman on Saturday night, August 29 that follows a special screening of In the Company of Wolves: An American Journey. The public is invited. We asked him to explain why the film is important. Barnes, who has been a conflict mitigation expert with the reintroduction of wolves to Colorado, is a scientific research associate with the Jackson Hole-based Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative that is sponsoring the film and discussion. He also is owner of Shining Horizons Land Management that offers consulting insights on how to improve rangeland health and reduce conflict with wildlife carnivores.
By Matt Barnes
We don’t need to choose between ranching and carnivore restoration. We can have both, but it won’t always be easy. We need to keep in mind that we are reintegrating wildness into working landscapes.
In the film, I’m in the company of a ranch manager, Blake, with whom I worked to reduce livestock vulnerability to grizzly bears and wolves. We worked together, using strategic grazing management and stockmanship, to change cattle behavior, improve grazing distribution, and had no confirmed livestock predation for the duration of the project.
This is important because it relied on behavioral ecology, and methods from ranching and range management, rather than gadgets. Instead of adding tools, we changed the tactics. The best methods for livestock-carnivore conflict prevention are going to be more livestock-centric than carnivore-centric.
This film is important because it gets at the deeper issues underlying social conflict about wolves—which is to say what wolves represent to different people.
Wolves, grizzlies, and many land issues are just the visible tip of the iceberg. When we treat these issues simply as technical problems, it’s like we’re trying to move the iceberg, by pushing on the visible tip—and indeed, the result often is it seems like we’re sinking. What we really need to do is discover the underlying issues.
At one layer down, we find social and governance issues: who has say over wildlife policy, and why? And how can we improve our institutions and policies, not just to be more scientific, but to be more fair and inclusive?
But there’s an even deeper layer, and that is the cultural, philosophical, or mythic. We’re often unaware of how our worldviews structure our perspectives on land and wildlife.
When people argue about wolves, they are often arguing for different visions for the future of the land, particularly for this mythic land we call the West. People are arguing for different relationships to nature. And of course we don’t just relate to nature, we are nature.
Debates about wolves and grizzlies reflect competing versions of the myth of the frontier. Of course, even the word “frontier” implies a Euro-American perspective. From a native perspective, it was dispossession and genocide. From a wildlife perspective, it was decimation.
For a century now, we have been building back our land and wildlife communities from the decimation of the frontier, market hunting, and widespread predator control.
I submit that the middle way is a place, here in the mountain West, where we can have wildlife restoration, ranching, and a fair chance to fill the freezer with elk or beef. That’s going to take more than stakeholder collaboration.
We are mostly unaware of how much our own mythos influences our thinking. In Zoroastrian-Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, paradise is always depicted as a garden, and the Fall results in exile to the wildlands. In Genesis, we are told that humans are essentially God’s hired gardeners. This is the underlying mythos of basically all Western agrarian civilizations, and to this day I believe it underpins many of the ideas in land and wildlife policy, especially those from agricultural perspectives. The wild or wilderness is always the backdrop against which civilization is contrasted.
For nearly all of human history, we’ve defended the human against “the wild.” Now the task is to defend the remaining islands of wild against the human tide. This moment calls for a new cultural mythos.
As the sages of all time have said in a thousand ways, out beyond our ideas of right and wrong is a field, or perhaps frontier where the wild and domestic run together; we’ll meet you there.
That mythic garden contained two trees. The first is he knowledge of good and evil, the pairs of opposites, or perhaps what Rumi called ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing. The second is the tree of life, and maybe it grows in Rumi’s field.
If what we are living through—acting out?—now is a debate between competing myths, I think that what we need is a better myth, one that includes and transcends the best of all that has come before.
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