The Insufficiency of Wolf “Management”
Gray wolf. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
We trophy hunt and trap the phenomenally evocative subject that we call canis lupus. Throughout history, the grey wolf – like the wilderness itself – has stirred diverse human imaginings, from a figure of terror, nightmare, and disdain, to one of great awe and respect.
Organized collectives of “wolf advocates,” both academics and activists, typically argue for more ecologically defensible policies than those grossly insensitive and often sadistic and even genocidal practices that have recently resurged in governmental sanctioning and hunter-trapper values and practice.
But practitioners of “ecologically defensible policies,” advocating within the Establishment as they do, still use the discourse of the haters and exploiters. That is, they argue for better numbers of “take,” of “harvest,” and of improved “resource management” – THRoM. They seek to make peace with the insensitive contingent, the insensate political wing. They want to convince them of the intelligence of better “management.” Yes, their advocacy and their research are valuable and help to hold the line for survival of canis lupus. We cannot responsibly undervalue it.
And yet, crucially missing is a concomitant calling out of the immorality of all “sport” hunting and trapping of the wolf, of any calling it what it is: ignorance of desubjectifying the wolf, anthropocentric ignorance of THRoM. Like those philanthropic foundation-dependent wildlands advocates who defend as “practical and realistic” their collaborating and compromising about wildlands-destructive legislative designations, the wolf advocates I’m critiquing here paradoxically and ironically give credence to societal resistance to creating a profound respect for the wolf.
It is an oddity, although not surprising in contemporary culture, that both “wolf and wilderness advocates” – yes, both uncompromising wilderness advocates and their compromising contingent – do not openly and politically contextualize their work in terms of the human’s unprecedented point of inevitable and inherently continuous transformation. That is, we are at a point of far-reaching collective destruction or collective advancement hitherto impossible. We will transform one way or the other. Our increased ability to improve life concomitantly contains potential, technical destruction of the earth and of ourselves.
We positively transform our individual and civilizational worldviews and values – who we are and what we are, or we die.
The act of leadership often does, actually, require calling things by their real names. True human evolution, collective and individual, does not happen by passively going along with the immorality of the human subject and of civilization. For activists to work solely within the Establishment while eschewing an unrelenting call for the kind of transformation I am enunciating here, is – in brief – philosophically short-sighted and both ethically and aesthetically irresponsible.
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