Here’s some good news:
In Yellowstone National Park, the cottonwood groves are thriving.
Cottonwoods are a key element in the Yellowstone ecosystem, but not
so long ago it seemed that they were doomed by dense herds of elk
that clustered along the park’s rivers and browsed the trees
so heavily that no young saplings survived.
Then, nine
years ago, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone after a 70-year
absence. The wolves quickly learned that elk in the river valleys
were easy hunting. Today, Yellowstone elk have drastically changed
their behavior in response to the threat of wolf attack and are
much more scattered, easing pressure on the cottonwoods. Biologists
have come up with a term to describe such far-reaching effects of
predators on the behavior of their prey: “the ecology of fear.”
Fear, it turns out, is not simply an emotion. Fear is a
powerful force in the world, a force whose impact may far surpass
the direct effects of what is feared. Biologists are learning that
many aspects of animals’ lives are a response to the fear of
predation. Take away that fear, and behaviors that were assumed to
be genetically determined may simply disappear. Reintroduce that
fear, and old patterns quickly return, even if it has been
generations since the species faced predators.
On Sept.
11, 2001, a particular sort of fear was reintroduced to an American
population that had long ago come to take security as our
birthright. When hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center
towers and struck the Pentagon, almost 3,000 people died. It was a
horrible moment in our nation’s history, and the enduring
tragedy of those deaths continues to reverberate through the lives
of all of us.
And yet, these deaths are far fewer than
the 42,900 Americans who died in 2001 from traffic accidents, not
to mention the 700,142 who died of heart disease or the 553,768 who
died from cancer and all those who died from a myriad of other
diseases. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 400,000
Americans die every year as the result of poor diet and inactivity,
though poor diet and inactivity cause us to feel, if anything, mild
guilt and not paralyzing fear. Clearly, our reaction to being
attacked on our home ground transcends the simply rational.
It has become a truism that Sept. 11 “changed
everything.” Who would dispute that our country today is radically
different from the America we lived in before the attacks? These
sudden deaths convinced most Americans that we were “at war.” That
conviction made possible not only the immediate retaliation against
Afghanistan, but the war in Iraq, even though we now know that the
Iraq invasion was unjustified by any threat posed to the United
States by Saddam Hussein or his ties to Al Quaeda.
At
home, opinion polls indicate that most Americans will willingly
sacrifice some freedom in exchange for security, and, sure enough,
our civil and privacy rights have been drastically reduced as a
result of the Patriot Act. Most telling of all, we have just passed
through a presidential campaign that seemed a contest between a
vision of hope and a vision of fear. In the end, the fearful vision
prevailed.
It is impossible to know exactly what fear
feels like to an elk as it scans the hills, looking for the sight
of an onrushing wolf pack. But it must be a very, very bad feeling
— bad enough for the elk to change its way of life in order to
avoid that fear. This, it seems, is what we are trying to do. But
the more we try to escape fear, the more it pursues us.
It is America’s misfortune that at this moment in our history
we have ceded power to those who use fear to gain and maintain
their position. In the presidential campaign, a television ad
featured wolves circling ever closer to the camera, as the narrator
intoned, “Weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America
harm.” Immediately following those words, we heard, “I’m
George W. Bush and I approve this message.” Delivering his message
in the nearly instinctual language of fear may have made all the
difference in this election.
Over the next four years,
all of us will learn just how far the ecology and politics of fear
will transform the America we thought we knew.
Pepper
Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is a biologist
and writer in Ashland, Oregon.
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