America’s experiences with Indian tribes should alert us to consequences of changes in rights, especially when imposed from higher authority. When rights to land or valuable resources that flow from it are unclear and changing, conflict naturally follows.

A sense of ownership can come from traditional uses that engender psychological entitlement. Leigh Anderson and Dick Zerby of the University of Washington recently applied this in reference to lands taken from various American tribes.

Their framework offers insights regarding two self-identified “tribes” in the states surrounding Yellowstone: Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. These are the Greens and the “cowboys.” These two groups are contending for management of and traditional rights in “Greater Yellowstone,” some 20 million acres.

In today’s vocabulary, the Greens are generally blue and their preferred car is a Prius. The more adventuresome drive Subaru Outbacks, often with a bike or kayak rack. Few of the “cowboys” are involved with livestock, but ranchers are their icons. These folks prefer diesel pickups.

From the Civil War until Earth Day, the states surrounding Yellowstone had a coherent culture, politics, and economy. The glue holding this together was the use of natural resources. Water was to be dammed for mines and irrigation, trees cut for lumber, and grass grazed by livestock. Big game exists to be enjoyed and hunted. Many hunters and the outfitting industry organize their lives around fall hunting, mainly for big game.

Roughly half of this land is in federal and state ownership. The public lands not in parks were traditionally available for livestock grazing and big game hunting. For every person holding grazing permits on these public lands there were thousands holding a big game license. Together the ranching and hunting interests make a powerful and vocal constituency.

The U. S. Biological Survey killed the last wolf in Yellowstone Park in 1927. A few years after Earth Day in 1970, a few individuals began studying, and others advocating, reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone Park. In 1994, the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on wolf reintroduction generated over 150,000 comments. The Wyoming Farm Bureau protested with a lawsuit and the Idaho state government opposed wolves’ return.

Demonstrating a shift in control, in 1995, 66 Canadian wolves were released in Yellowstone Park. The population numbers has since expanded by a factor of 15 to 25 and their range grew far beyond the Park boundaries. In Yellowstone Park, elk comprise up to nine-tenths of the winter diet of wolves, some 22 ungulates per wolf annually, twice that predicted by the EIS.

During the 2004 hunting season, the elk permits issued by Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks for the hunting districts contiguous to Yellowstone Park dropped by 50 percent. The next year it went down to 100, less than one twentieth the number issued in 1995.

Wolves have expanded their range far beyond the Park boundaries. Our place is 78 miles north of West Yellowstone, a Park entrance, and wolves kill elk in the Cottonwood herd that winters on our and nearby ranches. Some big game outfitters claim that their business, often marginal at best, has been devastated by wolves.

Wolves also kill some livestock. A family we know just north of Dillon, MT lost 121 sheep one night. However, death isn’t the only cost of wolf predation. There is a loss of grazing, cows avoid areas frequented by wolves. Successful pregnancy rates are reputed to be lower and stress leads to weight loss. I know there is also a huge psychological and monitoring cost accompanying predation.

While wolves account for only a low percent of total livestock losses, it is culturally huge, a bright marker of the transfer of control from the cowboy “tribe” to the Greens. In terms of population, wolf reintroduction has been a great success. It represents a shift of control from one “tribe” to another. The conflict so evident in impassioned letters to the editor is an expected result.