Alaska Kills Wolves! (And Some Basic Wildlife Biology Lessons)

I once had a single bumper stick that emblazoned my first car, a beat-up smurf-blue Chevy, that simply stated, "Little Red Riding Hood LIED."

I grew up in an inner-city area. The only wild animals I ever saw were squirrels, pigeons and the occasional rat, and their wildness was in question. I never saw a deer or raccoon other than behind bars until I went away to college in a more rural and mountainous setting. My eyes opened up...

Before that, at my first university, I took a class in environmental and bio-medical ethics. I was assigned a project about wolves, which was the beginning of me embarking on some path I still haven't quite finished traveling on. At the end of the semester, the professor, an animal biologist with a compassionate streak for his subjects, bought me a book on wolves as a gift to foster my new passion. As he put it in my hands, he said, "When you understand the wolves, the rest kind of all comes together...it's like coming home to yourself."

Wolves are not the only subject of my fascination with nature, but they definitely marked the beginning and the pinnacle of it. Because of them, I put aside my poetry and my dreams of writing to pursue a path as a wildlife biologist and natural resource scientist. I couldn't underscore the significance of this enough even if I spent a whole book writing on it. I do not possess a naturally scientific mind; numbers scare me, and though I love nature, I still have a city girl's stubborn fear at being in it alone or for too long. Yet despite this, I went down this path, bringing with me a poet's perspective of our endangered wild world and marrying it to the science I learned over the course of the next several years...

ABRUPT BUT RELEVANT SUBJECT CHANGE:

Sometimes, I have to say, I find myself a bit putoff by the plague of ecological illiteracy that pervades our society.

The other day at an open reading, someone read a poem she wrote. At one point, she speaks of a family of ducks, describing the father duck and its role in the group. Something in me cringed because I know ducks by nature to be a promiscuous species. That is, the daddy duck doesn't stick around much after he's planted his seed, and he definitely doesn't invest in his children.

Geese, on the other hand, are monogamous and both genders work together to raise their young. I know this from my schooling. I also know a general rule of thumb for figuring out the sexual proclivities of many species: among animals, the species in which it's hard to differentiate gender because the two look nearly identical are usually monogamous and raise young together. However, when the colors differentiate wildly among an animal of the same species, this indicates the males are generally gigolos.

This is particularly true of the majority of bird species: consider the emerald green of a mallard's neck as compared to the dull, drab brown of the female, or the multi-eyed tail of a male peacock next to his intended. Now, think of the little brown sparrows that are everywhere, or the geese, and how you can never tell one from another, think of the lack of bright crisp colors among them all.

BUT GETTING BACK TO WOLVES....

Wolves, whose physical differences as accorded by are slight (some males tend to be slightly bigger than the females), usually mate for life.

Okay, so some of you may be finding my depiction of wolves as over-romantic, a case of the goggle-eyes for some specimen of charismatic megafauna.

I'll admit, yes, maybe I am romanticizing a bit. But when I lived in Alaska I never feared a wolf attack while walking through the woods (ask me about bears, and get a different answer). In all of our recorded North American history, there has only been ONE case of a healthy wolf killing a human being. I have often had to correct a zoogoer as she instructs her child of a wolf's man-eating nature. So, perhaps my romanticism is a backlash against the severe and overindulgent (and undeserved) hatred, fear and persecution we have subjected them to, as often begun in the cradle when our toddler ears first hear the words, "the Big Bad Wolf."

Our ignorance about wolves, runs deep and brings with it bloody consequences. Even in our supposedly civilized modern world, wolves are still shot from planes and helicopters and the mothers wolves followed home to the den of pups who are then gassed. In Alaska, this is known as an aerial hunting and predator program, and it claims the lives of hundreds of wolves every year.

In Alaska, and other places out West where similar programs are being considered, the politicians prey on people's basic ignorance of wildlife population dynamics. We are told the wolves overpopulate, that they are eating all of our livestock and wild prey, that they are a danger. That, even though it may sound sad, killing them off is an tragic necessity to ensure our race's own well-being and survival.

Here's a quick ecology lesson: in natural conditions (like Alaska), top-food chain predators such as wolves self-regulate their populations. It hits a threshold and levels off. Through some sheer miracle of biological intuition the wolves themselves are not conscious of, their breeding and birthing cycles are dependent upon availability of food, the amount of territory they have, and the harshness of the season, among other factors. A female wolf's body will literally self-abort fertilized eggs under strained conditions. Also, with wolves, it is usually only the alpha pair in a given pack that has puppies, further restricting population growth. Prey species on the other hand, do not self-regulate, and in the absence of top-chain predators will grow unrestrained, overbrowsing their territory and eventually committing a collective suicide.

Now, here's what happens in Alaska: wolves are blamed for killing off moose populations--nevermind that most studies on the subject show that wolves actually have a relatively low success rate in killing an adult moose (Have you ever seen a moose up close? They are mighty big MF'ers; one quick kick of their hind legs to a wolf's head will crack its skull open).

Now, we are told that the people of Alaska need to hunt moose for subsistence, especially indigenous people, and that the wolves are competing too much with people for basic food(again, a moose stands a much better chance with a wolf pack than a single well-aimed hunting rifle). What politicians like ex-governors Frank Murkowski and Palin won't tell you is this: out-of-state hunting tourists bring in a nice revenue, and the state wants to keep them coming. Essentially, Alaska is harvesting more moose by instituting mass culls on their predators in select areas (often areas that get a lot of out-of-state tourists looking to bag the biggest bull moose they can find) to keep to money flowing (though I don't think it's all money, some deap-seated stereotypes and hatred is also playing a part).

Here's what happens with the wolf culls: they kill a bunch of them willy-nilly, shooting them from the air like it's a video game target. In the absence of the wolves, moose populations EXPLODE. Then either one of two things happen, which is that the sportshunters have a field day picking off the vast abundance of moose, or the moose now overbrowse their territories and so eat themselves out of their own food supply. Their populations then crash. This usually happens right around the time wolf populations are recovering. Then we get to blame the wolves again, and authorize more killings, and so the cycle goes on. And on. And on.

When I lived in Alaska, I worked with the Alaska Wildlife Alliance (AWA), on this issue. I collected signatures for a ballot to overturn the program (the state's people voted twice to get rid of it by ballot, though by an admittedly small majority). First observation: individuals of inidigenous origin were resoundingly against the program (perhaps because, like biologists, their rich heritage gives them a deeper understanding of the predator-prey relationship than the rest of us).

Second observation: People in favor of the program liked to pin on the opposition hyperbolic assumptions--that we are crazy, PETA-loving vegans. This was ironic because even though they called us the zealots, they were the ones often pelting rocks at our table and screaming things like, "The only good wolf is a dead wolf." Now, almost everyone in Alaska, even in the cities, either hunt, fish, or has someone in the family who does it. The people of the AWA are no different. They have buck hides drying in their garages, too. But there's a difference, in both biology and ethics, between hunting an ungulate (often shot at close range in a clean kill) for the purpose of food, and killing a predator by gunning it down in a plane because it threatens our sense of the heirarchy. A lot of the predator control proponent will say the science is on their side. It's not, as my basic biology lesson up above illustrates, as well as the fact that the state of AK never bothered really to take many censuses of wolf and moose populations to back up their claims.

Don't believe me? Well, then I defer to the findings of the National Academies of Science NRC, the foremost scientific authority in the country (and one of the biggest in the world), which also concluded in an extensive study that such programs can rarely be justified scientifically, and in fact, may inflict longer-term damage on both the predator and prey species and the larger ecosystem.

If you want to put an end to Alaska's egregious predator control program, please call the Governor's office to express your dismay. Also, consider becoming a member and contributing to the Alaska Wildlife Alliance.

Why Straws Suck (And Not in the Literal Sense)

Even though I consider myself fairly low impact in most of my everyday practices, giving up the plastic straw was an oversight I didn't finally address until fairly recently. I had been on the way to weaning myself slowly off of excess waste: bringing my own tupperware to restaurants to pack leftovers (and simply not eating out as much), refusing paper and plastic bags in favor of my own canvas ones, and bringing my own reusable mugs and cutlery in my bag as part of a permanent carry-along item, along with my wallet, keys, and the ever-present pen & paper that always is on a self-identified writer's person.

But as for straws...well, when did my vendetta against them begin in earnest? I had, these past few years, intermittenly refused them at restaurants, though it didn't bother me so much if I forgot to or not (which I often did). If they still adorned my glass, I took it in stride and shrugged it off. I don't eat meat, rarely drive and hang-dry my clothes, so I have done my part...there are so much bigger things to worry about, right?

Last year, I attended the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Madison, Wisconsin. During the evenings, there were small informal dinner meet-ups. You could choose what meet-up to attend by a general "theme" for discussion--my meet-up group was to discuss something generic like "creating a collective mindset for sustainability." As such informal talks do, our discussion weaved and bobbed between the very serious (our potential imminent extinction) to the mundane, to abstract esoteric thought and even gender arguments (are women more environmental than men?). And then, very simply, one of my colleagues picked up a straw out of his glass to prove a point of how prolifigately wasteful we humans can be.

"Do we really need these?" he asked, the offending straw pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Indeed, we don't, and we all nodded and stared at the offenders that took up residence in all of our own drink glasses, shaking our heads in shame...

I wish I could say from then on, I ardently objected to the straw, but it wasn't a strong enough motivator to make me kick the habit for good. Like most people, I sometimes need a visual cue, often something strongly visceral, before I can really change a bad behavior (or even come to really understand the consequences of a societal behavior), and this was no exception.

That visual cue came only a month or so later, while I was perusing an article in either Discover or National Geographic on the phenomenon of plastic waste in our ocean, which tends to aggregate into large patches that come to resemble evil science fiction creatures. I turned a page and then--BAM!--a picture of a biopsied duck, its belly gorged with remnants of our plastic waste, mostly drinking straws. It hit my own stomach like a sucker punch, crept into my cranium and stuck there. It gave me a bad dream.

I once wrote a short story about a woman who can't stop dreaming about being forced to eat glass. The dream disturbs her to the point where she can't stand the sight of glass, and looking at it nauseates her. The same thing happened to me: the sight of straws now sickens me, and I can't separate it from the split-open gut of some poor duck who never did a thing to hurt me.

Ducks don't eat straws because they are dumb. Bits of plastic straws, especially glimmering in the obscuring underwater view, resemble the iridiscent fish and aquatic vegetation that comprise many a seabird's savory meals. And are the ducks really so dumb to think that there would be fish and vegetation in the water as opposed to our garbage?

A similar thing happens with our plastic bags, that we so often see dancing on the streets in the wind (as so poetically portrayed in the movie "American Beauty") that almost always eventually drift into our oceans, lakes and rivers: sea mammals like seals and whales mistake them for jellyfish (also the same fate of most of the balloons we find romantic as we set them "free" into the sky at the peak of their buoyancy, seemingly forgetting or denying that they are inevitably destined to deflate and litter elsewhere out of our sight).

Imagine swallowing a plastic bag, it's not a pretty way to go. Most of these animals won't immediately choke to death, but rather the bag will take up residence in their GI tract, where it will strangle their disgestive organs. Just because you are good about throwing away your trash, well, in the trash, does not mean it stays out of the ocean, either: storms and winds cause a lot of trash to migrate, the smaller the plastic item (straws), the more likely it will end up elsewhere, usually someplace wet.

If I seem to be making too much of a big deal about one little straw, consider this: in the United States we discard of HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF STRAWS EVERY YEAR! Think of that number. Think of how many straws you might have even blown through this week. Most likely, in your lifetime, the amount of straws you threw out could build several makeshift homes in developing countries. The drinking straws I am decrying are also made of PLASTIC, and are a direct product of the petrochemical (translation: oil and oil refinery) industry, an enormous market, one large outlet of which exists on the Gulf Coast.

By supporting plastic, we are also supporting continued oil production and dependence. Not to mention, as a product made of petrochemicals, straws and other plastics are chock-full of known carcinogens like Bisphenol A (BPA), that leech both into our drinks through straws and into the ocean when they wind up there as waste. This is something those with young parents might especially want to consider when offering their children another sippy straw-equipped drink box.

And now ask yourself, as I did: what are they good for?

I mean, straws were something that didn't really come into vogue until a few decades ago. Before that, we lived well without them. For the bigger things like driving, we can argue that we sometimes NEED to do it--that because of the way our society is structured, we sometimes simply can't get from point A to point B without getting into a car--and if point B is a hospital or a job, what choice do we have? Even the most adamant of the ecologically-conscious occasionally drive. They do it because never driving requires a change that extends way beyond personal choice, and many of us simply can't afford the more efficient or sustainable alternatives such hybrids, or running them on biodiesel.

But none of this can be said about the straw. In almost every situation but a couple (say, you have a handicap that prevents you from having mobile use of your hands and arms), they are nothing but frivolous and contrived conveniences, so small by itself, but so much a part of a larger desctructive whole--how much smaller (or even non-existent) would these ocean plastic patches be if we went sans straws and other superfluous plastic items (cutlery, cups, etc.)?

Unlike car culture, our plastic culture is subject to a paradigm shift that can be instigated more from the bottom up than the top down: personal choice trumps political will here. That is why straws are in fact the ultimate symbol of both our profound tendency towards being needlessly wasteful, as well as our extreme potential towards achieving a more sustainable society through our smaller personal choices. This is one way we can change which won't hurt us at all.

Finally, for those rare situations that actually warrant the need of a straw (or if, simply put, like me, once in awhile you'd like to use one without the thought of inflicting bodily damage on a duck), there are numerous alternatives that are both affordable AND more sustainable.

As if fate understood the direction I was heading, the same conference that first gave birth to my straw-consciousness also had a pitch slam where free magazines were distrubuted by the attending editors to us journalists. One magazine, SIERRA (the official magazine of the Sierra Club), did indeed have a small news blurb about the environmental destructiveness of straws, but also a list of alternative straws and places to buy them. This includes stainless steel straws and glass-blown straws, that are reusable and are dishwasher safe.

The notorious klutz that I am, I opted for the steel straws as I knew the glass ones would shatter probably within a month of purchase (for proof of this, you can ask my partner about the state of our wine glass collection, but it's a sore subject between us). If neither steel nor glass catches your fancy, a quick web search also yields straws made out of bamboo and paper (I suspect the former to be more sustainable). For those who can't be bothered with more washing, there are also disposable straws that are made of biodegradable material, and can be composted.

You can look through the choices available on Amazon, as shown on the advertisements preceding this article, and order some for yourself!

Currently, I always carry a couple of stainless steel straws in a pouch, along with a lightweight titanium spork and a butter knife (I hope to add reusable chopsticks to this little array). I still get discouraged, however, when I order a drink and make sure to verbally stress "no straw, please," only for it to arrive a few seconds later with one insidiously gleaming inside my intended glass. I'll even admit, that it can sometimes ruin my mood for a few minutes, as that dead duck rears into my mind. I then wonder if maybe I should just abstain from society more, hole up alone in my apartment and be my own permanent bartender and barista.

But then I remind myself of all the times in recent months my fellow beverage drinkers and even waiters and bartenders have inquired about my reasons for requesting "no straw," the dialogue my actions have solicited, and then understand I am being an active participant in creating some of the change we need to secure a healthier, greener future. It's not an Earth-shattering change, but I'll take it.

For more on the the ills of straws, please see the following links:

http://www.greenerpackage.com/experts/scott_dyvig/blog/straw_man
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/green-living-tip-avoid-drinking-straws.html
http://www.plasticsindustry.com/plastics-environment.asp

FB groups raising awareness on the environmental degradation caused by straws:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=65358216643&ref=ts
http://www.facebook.com/search/?post_form_id=80467e7fcf63cd3c50b2d619838615ac&q=straws&init=quick&sid=0.020001567571680312#!/pages/STOP-USING-DRINKING-STRAWS/127911987227062?ref=ts

Other things you can do:

Consider petitioning your local bars and restaurants to go straw-free, only offer straws if patrons specifically ask (like they do in many countries overseas), or to make the switch to reusable and/or biodegradable straws!

Short Hiatus, but WIll Be Back After the 10th!

Happy July!

I am taking my second and last MTEL (Massachusetts Test for Educational Licensure) in the subject of English, so that I can become a licensed Middle School and High School English teacher in the great Commonwealth. The test is scheduled for Saturday, July 10th. So, it's crunch time! As such, my blogging is going on a teeny hiatus till after the test.

Actually, I can't promise that. Sometimes studying makes me procrastinate, and blogging is a great form of proscrastination. So, when my mind becomes to crammed with Jeopardy-like quizzing on world literature, I may just stop by to blog why straws suck (the theme of my next planned post!)....so, maybe check in mid- to late week next week, but if there's nothing here, please don't panic. I will definitely be back the week after...in the meantime, have a happy 4th!