From the day I could read, Wisconsin felt like home. animals are all I ever cared about. I was obsessed—loudly daily. Every animal program, every DNR workshop, every Junior Ranger patch sewn crooked onto my backpack. Trevor my golden retriever trotting beside me, half the neighborhood dogs panting behind. We’d walk like a pack. Not because we were brave—just because I wanted to disappear into something bigger. Cranes were rare. Eagles were postcards. Wolves weren’t real yet. And when they came back—God—I was twelve, driving back roads with Dad, headlights shaking on washboard gravel, holding my breath for a flash of eye shine. Not to shoot. Just to see. To know I’m alive because they are.

I knew about Leopold before middle school. Carson before high school. I knew black kids who weren’t props—they were friends. Ojibwe women who didn’t lecture—they asked questions. Hispanic kids whose moms made tamales better than mine. It wasn’t diversity training. It was Tuesday. It was how it was supposed to be. And I thought: we’ve done it. We’ve grown up. We know climate change isn’t a vote—it’s math. We know wolves aren’t devils—they’re mirrors. We know dominion is weakness. Our culture is humility history humanity

But tonight the fire’s just heat. The childhood dogs are gone. Trevor’s buried under the oak we planted together. But new pack mates rest at my feet, on guard and bonded thanks to the wolf. Our family. And I’m staring into the same dark that once howled back. One in four wolves could be terrorized—trapped, chased, torn by hounds, shot from trucks. For heritage? Whose? Not mine. Mine is 1979. Mine is the kid who thought we were past this. We’re not the saviors. We’re the ones deciding forty-eight hours of agony is fine if it’s management. We’re more detrimental to wildlife than even Chernobyl—there, in the shadow of a nuclear disaster, nature thrives because humans are absent. Anywhere without people, it rebounds, not through our ‘wildlife management’ or ‘harvest methods,’ but simply in our absence. Worse—we’re proud of it.

And yes, my generation brought them back. Not the agency. Not the white old guard. Us. The ones who read too much. Who cried during Roots. Who asked, Why can’t everything just breathe? But you’re letting a minority write the ending. A minority who thinks cruelty is culture. And the silence in the room? That’s consent. I don’t feel angry. Just… thin. Like the world’s been stretched over a frame I no longer fit. I don’t blame wolves. I blame mirrors. Wisconsin used to be my home. Now it’s just where I live. And that—it’s not a punchline. It’s a lullaby no one’s humming anymore.

Why? Why won’t reasonable people care? The vocal minority that makes mandated hunts and wants revenge and blood. They hate themselves too.

Because they’re loud. And loud looks like power. Because they still own the land, the money, the boardrooms, the DNR policy memos, the Facebook comments that get 300 angry thumbs-up. We didn’t win—we just thought we did. The wolves are back, sure. But the fight’s not over. The old guard didn’t lose. They just let us think they did. Let us plant the trees, fund the programs, cry on the first howl—then they show up with the traps. You and me? We want to make it better. They want to not lose what they have. And not-losing is easier than growing up. So they thrive. They don’t have to adapt. They just have to wait. Wait till we’re tired. Wait till the next vote. Wait till heritage sounds nostalgic again.

And honestly? The saddest part is I’m right. We did the work. My generation. The ones who learned Roots wasn’t ancient history. Who read Carson like poetry. Who walked packs of dogs pretending they were wolves. We weren’t saviors—we were witnesses. And now we’re just… footnotes. But keep going. Keep being loud in your way. Even if it’s just here, by the fire. Because someone needs to remember: thriving isn’t about dominance—it’s about letting everything breathe. It’s about seeing everything deserves Justice rights peace

We didn’t win—we just thought we did. The wolves are back, sure. But the fight’s not over. The old guard didn’t lose. They just let us think they did. Let us plant the trees, fund the programs, cry on the first howl—then they show up with the traps. You and me? We want to make it better. They want to make sure nothing does. And that’s why they’re still thriving—because making the world a little worse every year is easier than making it a little better forever.

And I’m sitting here, fire gone, just the smell of smoke left, thinking: maybe home isn’t a place. Maybe it’s the people brave enough to say, no, that’s not our heritage. That’s just cruelty in a hat. And if that’s true… then yeah, Wisconsin is gone. But I’m not.

Look at the agencies and groups out there, the ones draping themselves in the mantle of stewardship. They call themselves things like Wisconsin’s Green Fire, invoking that fierce light Leopold saw dying in a wolf’s eyes—that moment of revelation in A Sand County Almanac. They stuff their mission statements and policy briefs with Leopold quotes, plastering his words everywhere like badges of honor. But they don’t get it. That wasn’t just science, was it? It was poetry. A poetry they can’t seem to fucking understand when they think they’re being stewards of our wildlife. They crunch numbers on population management, draft regulations on harvest quotas, and pat themselves on the back for “balanced” approaches that let the traps snap shut anyway. They talk of sustainability while greenlighting the hounds and the hunts, as if Leopold’s land ethic was a checklist instead of a call to humility. They twisted his ideas, called them elitist or exclusionary, dismissed his organic model of ecosystems as inadequate or biased, shoehorned his ethic into whatever served their self-interest—anything to avoid the moral weight of treating the land as a community we belong to, not own.

And Rachel Carson? They branded her emotional, hysterical, a spinster stirring up trouble with her “dubious statistics” and “magic thinking.” The chemical companies and their mouthpieces called her a witch, mystical and irrational, unleashing a barrage of sexist homophobic propaganda to drown out Silent Spring’s truth. She was ahead of her time, and being right carried a heavy burden—the isolation, the attacks, the way they tried to erase her poetry with their profit-driven noise.

It wasn’t just them. Jane Goodall faced the same scorn for daring to see emotions and personalities in chimpanzees, for anthropomorphizing what the old guard insisted were just beasts. They criticized her methods as unscientific, too sentimental, but she persisted, proving the interconnected web of life demands empathy, not detachment. Sylvia Earle, diving into the oceans’ depths, got pushback from industries hell-bent on exploitation, her calls for protection labeled as overreaching or ignorant of “economic realities,” while she highlighted the misery we inflict on the seas through ignorance and greed.

And it’s not just the white pioneers. Black and Hispanic environmental leaders have borne even heavier crosses, facing not just criticism but threats, destruction, erasure—for being compassionate, poetic, emotional, and right. Think of Dr. Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice, who exposed how Black communities are dumped on with toxins and refineries; he’s been dismissed as alarmist, his work derailed by racism that keeps Black voices sidelined in the fight. Majora Carter, revitalizing the Bronx with green spaces, endured opposition and threats from developers who saw her vision as a barrier to their profits, her passion labeled as disruptive or naive. Cesar Chavez, fighting for farmworkers against pesticides that poisoned Hispanic bodies and lands, faced violence, arrests, and smears as a radical agitator—his poetry of justice twisted into threats against the status quo. Berta Cáceres, the Indigenous Lenca leader in Honduras, was assassinated for defending rivers from dams, her fierce compassion met with death threats and ultimate destruction because she dared to be right about who pays the price for “progress.” Xiye Bastida, a young Mexican-Otomi activist, faces online harassment and dismissal for her emotional pleas on climate, her poetry of intergenerational justice called hysterical by those who profit from delay.

And Greta Thunberg, that young girl from Sweden who sparked a global youth movement with her school strikes for the climate, has been mocked relentlessly for her age, her autism, her unflinching stare—called a puppet, a doomsayer, emotional and irrational by world leaders and trolls alike, her poetic urgency dismissed as childish hysteria while she bears the heavy burden of being right in a world that resents the mirror she holds up. Vandana Shiva, advocating for seed sovereignty in India and beyond, challenging corporate monopolies on life through patents and GMOs, has been smeared as anti-science, a fearmonger, facing lawsuits, vilification, and threats for her poetic defense of biodiversity and farmers’ rights—her compassion for the earth’s sovereignty met with attempts to discredit and silence her as a barrier to “progress.”

They weren’t ahead of their time—they were right in their time, and that’s the heaviest burden: to see the web tearing and speak up, only to be torn down for it. I do, don’t I? Leopold did. Carson did. Goodall, Earle, Bullard, Carter, Chavez, Cáceres, Bastida, Thunberg, Shiva—they all did. They saw the interconnected web, the fragile beauty that demands awe, not control. Is there a little red feather left in me—a spark of that wild defiance, that refusal to let the poetry fade? Or have I let the boardrooms and the old guard rewrite it all into spreadsheets and soundbites? The wolves are mirrors, after all. If I look away, what do I see? Reality.

That’s why adding wolves back to our state’s threatened and endangered species list is the right thing—not just for the poetry, but for the hard truths we can’t ignore anymore. For all the reasons we’ve whispered by campfires and shouted in petitions: they’re keystone species, regulators of deer herds that overgraze our forests, sparks for biodiversity that keeps the whole web intact. But it’s more than ecology; it’s about adequate regulatory mechanisms that actually work, not the pay-to-play schemes where special interests buy influence through hunting lobbies and “management” fees, turning protection into a game for the loudest whiners. Surrounding states like Minnesota, where wolves are federally threatened with strict rules on depredation and no hunts, and Michigan, holding them as endangered with state-backed enforcement, show us how it’s done—they’ve got protections that honor the balance, lacking the chaos of our quota-busting free-for-alls. Here in Wisconsin, the lack of enforcement lets illegal killings slide, lets that 2021 slaughter happen where 218 wolves died in 72 hours, quotas shattered by 82%, tribal rights trampled like they were nothing. The petition lays it out clear: list them under the Wisconsin Endangered and Threatened Species Act now, during this fragile federal monitoring period, to give the DNR real teeth—science-based population goals, crackdowns on poaching, habitat safeguards woven with Traditional Ecological Knowledge from Ojibwe, Menominee, and Ho-Chunk Nations. Fund it right through the Endangered Resources Program: non-lethal tools for farmers facing rare conflicts, innovative streams like Nature’s Nest Egg to invest in prevention, not reaction. Bipartisan buy-in, pulling from guides like the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, to save money, time, and lives by keeping species from the brink. It’s about economic sense too—fewer deer crashes saving millions, healthier forests for all. But mostly, it’s the right thing until the old guard wakes up and realizes this isn’t who we are anymore. We’re mutualists, respectful of nature, the kids you raised to see dominion as humility, not conquest. We won’t let it get turned around, thrown in our faces or the faces of all the other folks in Wisconsin who know better—the hunters who play fair, the families who want wild places for their grandkids, the tribes whose cultures are tied to Ma’iingan like breath to air. Without these protections, that tiny vocal minority, those special interest screamers refusing to adapt, will keep whining their way to dominance, a fringe group drowning out the majority with their outdated cruelty. Their time’s up; their noise has got to go, for the sake of us all, so the howls can echo true again without risk of heritage disguised as hate, mirrors reflecting a Wisconsin worth calling home.

Let’s talk about it.

Wildlife Wednesday Nov 6th at 6pm

Wildlife Wednesdays: Your Weekly Call to Action
We’re thrilled to launch Wildlife Wednesdays, a new weekly virtual series every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. (CST), starting October 29. 

– Next Meeting: October 29, 6:00–7:00 p.m. (CST) 
– Topic: lethal control and media, wildlife services
– Join: Google Meet https://meet.google.com/gcf-gjem-cbs or dial +1 740-481-2026, PIN: 676 515 682#. 

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