Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Hi.
So, I have to start with a question. How many of you know what a wolverine is?
Ah, yes, great.
So, in 2009, I was in Mongolia looking for wolverines,
and I got into a conversation with some herder friends of mine
about wolves,
and they had been up the whole night before
defending their livestock.
They were kind of blurry, and kind of grouchy,
and I suggested to them
that they must really kind of hate the animals,
the way a lot of American ranchers do.
And I asked, "Would it be better if there were no wolves?"
Because we did that in the western U.S.; we got rid of all of our wolves.
And they were so offended by this question.
They said, "No, no, no, no, no; you don't understand.
Yes, wolves cause problems, but we love wolves."
And they explained to me that in Mongolian legend,
Mongolians are actually descended from a wolf,
and that Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongolian Nation
and the man who built the greatest land empire
the world has ever seen,
drew his power from a totemic relationship with the wolf.
In Mongolia, there's a saying:
"If you see a wolf, you gain power and you gain luck
because wolves carry power and luck.
If you kill a wolf, that's even better -
you get more power, and you get more luck.
But if you kill all the wolves,
there is no more power, there is no more luck,
and ultimately there is no more identity for people."
This conversation was a little bit mind-boggling
because it would be almost unimaginable
to hear a story of this degree of complexity and nuance
about a carnivore in the western United States.
Out here, the stories that we tell are a little more simplistic.
And I can't speak for the feelings of individuals,
which are undoubtedly more complex,
but the public debate about carnivores can pretty much be summarized like this:
There is one camp that loves carnivores
and wants them protected,
without end, forever and ever,
all of them,
with no human mortality.
And there's another camp
that would really prefer to see them off the landscape again
because they interfere with human activities.
So, statements like "Cattle and wolves cannot coexist"
quickly become absolute for both sides of this debate.
And yet, in Mongolia,
an entire nomadic herding civilization
has kept cattle on a landscape full of wolves, for thousands of years,
and they not only coexist,
they revere the animal.
So, Mongolia does have its own wildlife conservation problems -
I don't want to underplay that -
but what struck me when I was having that conversation with my friends
is the power of story, of narrative,
to form our relationships with the environment
and particularly with wildlife.
In so many aspects of our lives,
possibility is defined by the stories we tell ourselves.
So, it's possible for Mongolians to live with wolves
because they tell themselves a story
in which their fate is linked to the fate of the wolf.
Meanwhile, we here in the western United States
have been telling ourselves a story of impossibility, for decades.
It's a story that pits people against wildlife,
economy against ecosystem
and, ultimately, people against people
when we start to argue about our competing values in public.
So, by 2009, this had become -
the limitations of this story had become personally troubling to me
through my work on wolverines.
And at that time,
wolverines were virtually unknown to most of the American public.
So, I genuinely had conversations
where people thought someone was paying me to study either superheroes or -
for reasons that remain somewhat inexplicable to me -
werewolves.
That came up several times, okay.
(Laughter)
So, wolverines were an animal without a story,
and that presented a challenge and an opportunity.
My colleague and I knew that the wolverine's profile was going to rise
as more research was published and as listing became an issue.
And so,
we wanted to see if we could build a story about wolverines
that was different from the stories always told about carnivores,
out here in the West.
Now, this was personally important to me, I mentioned,
because - not just because my research on wolverine
is driven by big ecological questions,
but because I actually just love this animal.
I think they are amazing and inspiring,
and the last thing I wanted was to see this animal that I completely love
become the center of the kind of intractable controversy
that always develops around carnivores here.
So, I did what everybody who thinks they have something important to say
does these days,
and I started a blog.
(Laughter)
Yes.
And so the blog was a place to explore the research as it was published,
to talk about my adventures in Mongolia,
to ponder existential questions
like why certain strange people seem driven by deeply impossible quests,
like chasing a semi-mythological creature
around a country with no infrastructure, for example,
but the secret mission of the blog
was to build a new kind of story about the wolverine
that transcended the traditional divides over conservation in the western U.S.
Whether or not I was successful at that, the jury is ultimately still out.
But in the meantime, what is a wolverine and who cares?
aka "Your field guide to telling the difference
between a wolverine and a werewolf,"
in case you run into an unknown animal in the wild.
So, wolverines are, basically, big, snow-loving weasels.
Out here in the western U.S., they're found only in the mountains.
Why is that?
Well, they are basically an ice-age mammal;
they seek tundra habitat,
they're tied to the cold and the snow,
and here, that habitat is found only at elevation.
So, female wolverines give birth in snow-dens,
somewhere around mid-February.
And they keep their kits in these dens
until somewhere between the end of April and the middle of May, roughly.
So, worldwide, with very few exceptions,
wolverines are found only in places
that have snow on the ground until the end of the denning period.
That means climate change is going to be a problem for them,
especially here at the southern edge of their range.
Also, important for building a new kind of story about wolverines -
those are wolverine kits; they're cute -
wolverines don't do any of the things
that carnivores usually do that cause problems for people.
So, they don't depredate on livestock;
they don't prey on game animals that are valued by hunters and outfitters;
they live in places we can't easily develop
for resource exploitation or human habitation;
and even though they're this kind of crazy symbol of rugged wilderness,
they don't seem that bothered by things like snowmobiles in their habitat.
So, all the things we usually fight over when we fight over wildlife conservation,
they don't even apply in this case.
Isn't that great? What is not to love about this amazing animal?
(Laughter)
Right.
But ultimately, the need for a new kind of story
is about more than just loving an animal and wanting everybody else to love it too.
Ultimately, it's about the challenge posed by this species
to conservation in the United States.
Climate change will be the number one challenge
for wildlife conservation in the 21st century,
and we have no real idea how to cope with this problem.
We don't know what we'll do;
we don't have the legal tools,
and we don't even really, at this point, have the conceptual tools to deal with it.
I don't know what the solution is going to be, but I do know
it is going to take society-wide effort and a tremendous amount of political will.
So, fighting the same old fights about the same old issues
is ultimately going to put us at a disadvantage.
What we need more than a story about an amazing, inspiring animal
is a story that gives us all a stake in that animal's fate.
What does that story look like?
Again, my Mongolian friends provided me with a bit of insight
when they mentioned that they depend on snow in the mountains
to keep their pastures green through the summers.
And suddenly I realized the wolverine is the first big, charismatic animal
at risk due to climate change
that shares the landscape with a large number of people.
So, polar bears in the Arctic are the iconic symbols of climate change,
but most of us are never going to the Arctic,
and most of us don't depend on that ecosystem for our livelihoods.
So, it takes a certain highly evolved sense of compassion to care what happens.
But wolverines live in our backyard, in our mountains,
and think about it, they depend on the one thing
that pretty much everybody else out here depends on - snow.
So, if you're a skier, if you're a ski bum,
if you're a young person who's come out here to make a living
and are drawn to this region because of the snow and the skiing,
you are out here because of the snow.
If you're a rancher or a farmer,
then you, like my Mongolian friends,
depend on snowpack to fill the rivers, to water your crops,
and to keep your pastures green through the summer.
And if, like me, you prefer your rugged outdoor adventure
tempered by a nice hot shower
and a conversation with friends
at your local vegan, locally-sourced organic restaurants
(Laughter)
in the town like Bozeman, Montana,
then you are also depending on snowpack to fill the reservoirs
that allow us to live in these amazing little towns and cities.
So, when we talk about the loss of snow,
and caring about the loss of snow,
it's not just concern for the loss of wolverine denning habitat;
it's concern for the loss of our cultural habitat, as well.
Of course, Mongolians have a word for wolverines.
They call them the "hoy-zay."
Sometimes they call them the "hangrezay,"
but they frequently refer to them as a "hedagreyancum,"
and this is a word that means it's sort of like a useless animal.
They sort of think it's a joke that I'm so interested in this species,
instead of something more charismatic and story-worthy like the wolf.
But the next time they ask, here's what I want to tell them
about why I spend all of my time hiking and skiing and climbing and interviewing
throughout their country to find out more about this animal.
So, we may not have a story in which we're descended from wolverines,
and believe me when I say
that I am so deeply saddened by the fact that we do not have a national myth
in which our founding fathers drew on wolverines to establish our nation,
although if anyone wants to start spreading that around, I'm totally game.
(Laughter)
But we can still tell ourselves a story
in which our fate is linked to the wolverine,
and it's a true story because if the wolverine disappears,
it means a diminishment of all our diverse identities:
as Americans, as Westerners, as Mongolians;
as skiers, as ranchers, as herders.
And it's also a story of possibility
because if we can find a way
to see that the wolverine remains on the landscape,
then our power and our luck and our identities also endure.
Thank you.
(Applause)