Restoring the Balance

In 2020, Colorado voters passed Proposition 114 which established C.R.S. 33-2-105.8 requiring Colorado Parks and Wildlife to have wolves on the ground by the end of 2023.

Polls found that many Coloradans were supportive of restoring Colorado’s natural balance. Scientists and wildlife biologists agree on the need to restore Colorado's natural balance. Wolves, by nature’s design, belong on Colorado’s wild landscape to promote healthy wildlife, to improve quality of life for Coloradans, to ensure those benefits for future generations, along with respect for other users of Colorado’s wildlands, and to restore wolves as valued members of our heritage.

How do we know that wolves will benefit us? The case for that conclusion is found in a constellation of wolf studies; outstanding among them one that began in 1958 on Isle Royale, and continues today. John A. Vucetich is the current leader of those studies, in which he has been engaged for a quarter century. In his book, RESTORING THE BALANCE: What wolves tell us about our relationship with nature (2021. Johns Hopkins U.), he explores that and many other questions about wolves.

Among wolf biologist Vucetich’s conclusions in Chapter 10.: Restoring the Balance, is this statement on P. 296: “The health of ecosystems inhabited by large herbivores depends on the cascading trophic effects of predation.” On the next page, he examines the question, “What is it good for?” “Like this: the material well-being of many human communities depends on healthy forests and grasslands. Those ecosystems can be degraded with overbrowsing and overgrazing by large herbivores - moose, deer, elk, gazelles, and so forth.The risk of detrimental overconsumption is greatly reduced when the abundance of large herbivores is limited by large carnivores - wolves, lions, lynx, wolverines, bears, and so on, What are carnivores good for? They’re good for humans.”