You write about how the return of wolves to the West challenged the myth of Western independence, the ideal of being free of interference by outsiders. Do you think that the current attacks on the environment represent a return of that ethos?

What you see happening in the Bush administration right now is someone whose arrogance and presumption have yet to be checked by a humbling look into his own darkness. When you translate that into discussions around the environment, again I feel like it's part of the human hubris of conquering and controlling.

And one can just only hope and have faith that that presumption will be humbled. I'm always just astonished that we approach the natural world with this sense of our authority over it.

Do you think that you, and everyone else who worked on it, could have brought wolves back to Yellowstone in 2004? Or, do you think that it wouldn't have been allowed?

You have to think about this process from my perspective: I started getting interested and reading things and talking to people back in 1978. So, there was the whole Reagan administration and the Bush administration.

A good part of that time, there was what one would call unfriendly administrations. And it wasn't until really under Clinton and Bruce Babbitt and Mollie Beattie [the late director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] that we began to see the kind of affirmative action that was taken. I do think that it required a certain constellation of people and events to line up. But part of the reason they did line up is that so many people persisted for so long.

There are some times when the writing is on the wall, and people do succumb to that even when it's not something that the administration would normally favor. The fact that we could keep the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge protected this long, especially with the kind of engagement that this administration has with gas and oil exploration, just shows you that there is a tremendous amount of interest and strength behind people's sense of the importance of that Alaska wilderness. In the same way that people feel: Even if I never come to Yellowstone, it's important for me to know that wolves are there.

After all the work you did to bring wolves back to Yellowstone, how do you feel now when you see the hundreds of humans who hang around in the Lamar Valley in the park trying to see a wolf?

I have a friend who is kind of the Italian wolf biologist, and he calls them the "wolf freakers." I'm of the mind that it's a little bizarre -- all these people lining up. Some of them know the number and name of every wolf, and its lineage.

But to me it's an expression of the pulse of the whole wolf issue, where you have people with that kind of obsession and passion that hate wolves, and you have the same kind of passion and obsession in people who love wolves.

Personally, I'm not drawn to that element of wearing wolf T-shirts, and having posters of wolves and statues of wolves. But I feel like it's just one of the expressions of our reaching out for something that we've lost. I think it speaks much about our sense of loss, and how misaligned we are with our relationship with the wild.

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