Doing, Not Doing:

Reflections on Conservation, Wildness, and the Dao by Jason Kirkey

At 5 a.m. I pulled myself out of bed into the still-dark morning. It was late May but cold in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park as I loaded into a car with three other people and my graduate adviser’s spotting scope. Later this morning I would be driving north with my adviser to a study site in Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta to join her field crew. While in Yellowstone I had seen a grizzly, a pair of moose, and more bison and elk than could be counted—but no wolves. I had seen, looking down the valley, a wolf-killed elk carcass in a stream and watched it until nearly dark. I had seen the long line of cars, following Rick McIntyre’s bright-yellow Xterra, like the wolf paparazzi, as he searched for a signal from the wolves’ radio collars. Still no wolves. This morning I would join the throngs of enthusiastic wolf watchers before leaving Yellowstone. I had come west to study the effects of wolves on aspen forest communities. I thought I ought to make an effort to obs…