Like wolf restoration activities in the West, the proposal to reintroduce wolves into the Adirondacks has generated intense public debate. The idea of returning top predators to settled landscapes raises complicated questions on issues ranging from property rights to wildlife management to obligations to present and future generations.Wolves and Human Communities brings together leading thinkers and writers from diverse fields -- including Timothy Clark, Daniel Kemmis, L. David Mech, Mary Midgley, Ernest Partridge, Steward T.A. Pickett, Joseph Sax, Rodger Schlickeisen, and others -- to address the complex ethical, biological, legal, and political concerns surrounding wolf reintroduction. Contributors specifically explore the social, cultural, and ecological values that come into play in the debate, as they examine: the views of stakeholders in the Adirondack decision historical trends in public perception of restoration the legal and policy context for species preservation, and the challenges to the current system of property law biological and political lessons learned from Yellowstone, Isle Royale, and the Great Lakes states the meaning of wildness, both in ourselves and the wolf The final chapter by Niles Eldredge takes the point of view of evolutionary time and ecological scale, challenging us to develop a new consciousness regarding our position in the natural world.Wolves and Human Communities offers a thought-provoking examination of interactions between human and wild communities, and represents an important contribution to debates over species reintroduction for policymakers, researchers, ecologists, sociologists, lawyers, ethicists, philosophers, and local residents.

In 2020, it will have been twenty-five years since one of the greatest wildlife conservation and restoration achievements of the twentieth century took place: the reintroduction of wolves to the world’s first national park, Yellowstone. Eradicated after the park was established, then absent for seventy years, these iconic carnivores returned to Yellowstone in 1995 when the US government reversed its century-old policy of extermination and—despite some political and cultural opposition—began the reintroduction of forty-one wild wolves from Canada and northwest Montana. In the intervening decades, scientists have studied their myriad behaviors, from predation to mating to wolf pup play, building a one-of-a-kind field study that has both allowed us to witness how the arrival of top predators can change an entire ecosystem and provided a critical window into impacts on prey, pack composition, and much else.
 
Here, for the first time in a single book, is the incredible story of the wolves’ return to Yellowstone National Park as told by the very people responsible for their reintroduction, study, and management. Anchored in what we have learned from Yellowstone, highlighting the unique blend of research techniques that have given us this knowledge, and addressing the major issues that wolves still face today, this book is as wide-ranging and awe-inspiring as the Yellowstone restoration effort itself. We learn about individual wolves, population dynamics, wolf-prey relationships, genetics, disease, management and policy, newly studied behaviors and interactions with other species, and the rippling ecosystem effects wolves have had on Yellowstone’s wild and rare landscape. Perhaps most importantly of all, the book also offers solutions to ongoing controversies and debates.
 
Featuring a foreword by Jane Goodall, beautiful images, a companion online documentary by celebrated filmmaker Bob Landis, and contributions from more than seventy wolf and wildlife conservation luminaries from Yellowstone and around the world, Yellowstone Wolves is a gripping, accessible celebration of the extraordinary Yellowstone Wolf Project—and of the park through which these majestic and important creatures once again roam.