Although most people in this country support having a national park system, and the number of visitors to those parks continues to increase, there are controversies about how to manage the national parks. There is debate about how to manage fire and how to limit the impact of the numbers of visitors. There is debate about how to deal with introduced species of plants and animals which do not belong in a particular ecosystem. Finally, there is debate about reintroducing animals, such as the wolf or the grizzly bear, who have become extinct in a particular region. The focus in this essay is on the reintroduction of the wolf, which has aroused strong feelings in both opponents and supporters of that reintroduction.
The wolf has already been reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and reintroduction is being considered for the Olympic National Park in Washington state. Both of these reintroductions should be supported, because the reintroduction of the wolf is both ecologically and symbolically important.
In Washington state, a feasibility study has been performed to explore the impact of reintroducing wolves and allowing them to grow to packs of up to 60 individuals. Supporters of this effort indicate that reintroduction of the wolf would simply restore the balance of the park system, including the balance between predators and Roosevelt Elk(Gantenbein, 1998).
The gray wolf is the wolf that was common in the Olympic Park system, but it was extinguished by the 1930s. The wolf is absent from this and other locations because of previous myths about the dangers of the wolf and because of cruel policies that rewarded bounty hunters for exterminating as many wolves as possible. The wolf did not disappear because of natural causes, but because of unnatural causes. It belongs in national parks which were designed to preserve wild lands and both plant and animal species.
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