Camenzind knows predators from first-hand experience

By Todd Wilkinson

Like Bozeman, Jackson Hole has been a bright light within the firmament of the American conservation movement. Between individuals whose profiles have risen to the national stage, and organizations emanating from them, the list is indeed impressive.

Among those who have either resided in the Tetons or parked themselves there for respites are Olaus and Mardy Murie; Adolph and Louise Murie MacLeod; John and the late Frank Craighead; Laurance Rockefeller; Luna Leopold; Ansel Adams; the late David Love.

Along with these luminaries, there is an equally distinguished list of others: Ted Major, for example, who helped establish the Teton Science School; and a cast of characters involved with the visual celebration of nature, including but not limited to Wolfgang Bayer, Tom Mangelsen, Jeff Foote, Peter Pilafian, and Franz Camenzind.

We forget that before Camenzind became director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, he was a well-known wildlife researcher turned documentary filmmaker.

After National Geographic did a documentary on his Elk Refuge coyote work in 1973, Franz started spending time behind the lens. He was the first person to film pandas in the wild, and also served as producer/cinematographer on films about coyotes, wolves, grizzlies, antelope, California and Andean condors, black rhinos and black-footed ferrets.

His work as a conservationist, like the Murie and Craighead brothers, is informed by personal experience on the ground. He's not a shoot-from-the-hip environmentalist. I've always found his opinions to be pragmatic.

Where am I going with this? It is an understatement to say that Camenzind looks at the shenanigans playing out in Fremont County, Wyo., with a shake of his head.

Camenzind honestly believed the West had gotten past the era in which a few politicians, in this case Fremont County commissioners, could make any assertion, no matter how misinformed, and somehow pass themselves off as authorities.

I'm speaking here of individuals trying to stir their constituents into an anti-government lather, using far-fetched claims about wolves and grizzlies to create civil unrest.

Camenzind is particularly chagrined by recent statements that if left unchecked with bullets, poison, and traps, bears and lobos will proliferate without limit until they gobble up the world. What's worse is that some impressionable reporters, too lazy to look at the scientific research, are content to publish ANYTHING these people say.

What does Camenzind make of it? "Coyotes provided me with firsthand evidence showing that they, like most large predators, will control their own numbers," he says. "It is not just food-driven control, but also behavioral as in socially driven control. Witness the recorded killings of pack mates both in Yellowstone and recently in Grand Teton. Left alone, large carnivores will limit their own numbers."

Camenzind is hardly naive to power these animals hold as symbols and he says it provides a rich opportunity to exploit our fears. "I believe many humans view predators as direct threats to their lives," he notes. "That they can be dangerous harbors some truth, but the perception far exceeds reality. Some people have been injured or even killed by large predators, but more humans are killed each hour in this country by drunk drivers than all of those mortalities put together over the last century."

Camenzind says one of the problems inherent to the current wolf-grizzly debate is the commodification of wildlife. "Large carnivores can be competitors by taking our livestock and our wildlife, and it is the impression that wildlife is our personal property that lies at the root of the prejudice," he says. "Wildlife belongs to everyone and no one. It becomes a moral question as to whether or not we are willing to provide space for all forms of life to exist and even more to play out their genetic potential on a landscape large and intact enough to be free of significant human interference."

Is that really possible in our own backyard? "The greater Yellowstone ecosystem is as close to that place as anywhere in the continental U.S., and if not here, where?" he asks.

"Does this generation want to be recorded as the one that deliberately eliminated a species? Not me," he says. "I do not want my children or their children to know of this landscape with all its life forms only from films, books and photographs."

As a scientist who made a name for himself in cinema, Camenzind knows that when it comes to experiencing the real power and truth of nature, nothing is more revealing than the real thing.

Todd Wilkinson lives in Bozeman. His column appears here every week.

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