Saturday, April 19, 2008

Edible Brooklyn & Edible Eastend Magazines

Its mid-April and the spring issue Edible Magazines are out. This quarter I shot 5 articles, two for Edible Eastend and three for Edible Brooklyn. The magazines explore the deeper meaning of food and our food systems, and shed light on the green, sustainable, healthy (for us as well as the earth) aspects of good grub, definitely worth picking up a copy! And the great thing is the Edible Community spans America, if you haven't already you'll probably find an Edible .............. Magazine for your area.




Click here to find out where the nearest Edible Magazine is to you.

Grey Wolves No Longer Endangered

I'm a little late to get to this one. But its a great story to start off this blog! The Grey Wolf is no longer endangered in the United States. What an achievement for conservation!

Wolves were once ubiquitous in the American West, but settlers and homesteaders who traveled west in search of they're own 160 acres made short work of the keystone species. By 1923 there were no wolves left in the Yellowstone region and in 1973 when the Endangered Species Act came into law only a handful of wolves remained in in Northern Michigan and Minnesota. What ensued was a series of intense debates in the struggle to re-introduce wolves. It wasn't until 1995 that the first wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone and Idaho.

Today the situation is very different.
"The wolf population is doing great. The ESA [Endangered Species Act] worked. We've got a lot of wolves in a lot of places," said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery co-ordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. At the moment there are an estimated 1,500 wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

Unfortunately the story doesn't end with a simple pat on the back for conservation and government intervention. No longer endangered means that the Grey Wolf can now legally be hunted. As a result some conservation groups are not happy, some even plan to sue the government, fearing that farmers and cattlement will once again make short work of a predator they feel threatens their livestock. Interestingly Ed Bangs feels otherwise and is quoted in Time Magazine saying, "Those states [Idaho, Montana, Wyoming] have done a superb job of managing their deer, elk and bear. I expect they'll do the same for wolves. If they don't we'll take it back."

We are entering some new and exciting territory for conservation science here. We have managed to prevent a species from going extinct and are now faced with a new challenge, the challenge, I suppose, of post-endangered species management. How do we re-envision our relationship to a species once threatened and now 'saved'? Will Grey Wolves be forgotten until they are once again endangered? Or can humans live in relative harmony with a deeply mysterious and often misunderstood species? I'd love to know the answer to these questions because they lay at the heart of the human-nature relationship. Endangered or not it is essential that we live with instead of against the biodiversity that sustains us.