“Eco-cultural Restoration” of Bison: A Euphemism Disguising Incompatible Goals

 

 

“Eco-cultural restoration” has been suggested for returning plains bison to the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Montana. The term can be a slogan for proposed co-management of a Refuge bison herd by an Intertribal Council with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Such attractive slogans can develop public support without revealing conflicts inherent in the proposal.

We interpret ecological restoration of bison as fulfilling the mandates of the Refuge Improvement Act (1997) to restore biodiversity and biological integrity of the Refuge’s biotic community. More, we consider this mandate to be a restoration of “wildness”. Wildness is the opposite, in a continuum, from domestication. Here, wildness includes bison and their genome, and their relationships with their surrounding biota.

Cultural restoration refers to bison management focused on needs and goals of Tribal nations. Tribes would influence to what extent such needs and goals would be emphasized in co-management on the Refuge. However, recent history indicates that nutrition and economic benefits are overriding needs of the Tribes. A current publication (Shamon et al. 2022) concurs and suggests that management practices for wildness and for Tribal needs are not mutually exclusive and can be merged on federal lands.

However, restoring and maintaining wildness of a bison herd requires maximizing natural selection (to the extent practicable, a standard in the Refuge Improvement Act). This requires minimizing genetic drift and artificial selection that weaken and replace natural selection. Minimizing genetic drift requires a large herd. Minimizing artificial selection requires foregoing most management activities that increase annual production of animals. (Only human harvest of bison facilitates both production and natural selection. Human predation has been a major selective force in the evolution of the modern bison species, as discussed elsewhere on this website.)

Across existing Tribal bison herds, numerous management interventions constitute artificial selection. These are: much constrained bison mobility on monotonous ranges; pasture rotations; frequent capture and handling; selective culling; a skewed herd sex/age structure; forced weaning, frequent or emergency feeding; vaccinations and other disease management; lack or control of predators; and maintaining a stable herd at only a moderate ecological density. These diminish restoration and maintenance of wildness, for both the bison genome and its associated biota.

Co-management of federal bison is a false panacea. Efforts to enhance overriding Tribal goals will diminish achievement of “ecological” goals, as interpreted here. Efforts to achieve ecological goals will diminish attainment of important Tribal goals.

In contrast, Tribal goals for bison should be maximized on numerous Tribal lands; whereas biological diversity and integrity – wildness – is reliably mandated only on National Parks and Federal Refuges. Currently, there are only 13 such federal bison herds, and only 2 of these have at least 1000 animals to effectively limit genetic drift. The few opportunities to achieve these mandates on federal lands should not be compromised.

Shamon et al. The potential of bison restoration as an ecological approach to future Tribal food sovereignty on the northern Great Plains. Frontiers in Ecology & Evolution. 28 January 2022. 

 

 

Interior Department’s Bison Conservation Initiative May Accept Defeat Redefining “Wildness”

 This decade of the 2020’s, with a focus on endangered species, has brought what environmentalists describe as a “war on wildlife”. Centered in this war are two Department of Interior agencies, the Park Service and the Fish & Wildlife Service. The battles are politically difficult. Rather than lamenting defeat, and informing Americans of our continuing demise, the Department of Interior may simply redefine “victory”.

The Park Service is mandated to save ecosystems and species “unimpaired”. The federal Refuge System is mandated to preserve biodiversity and biological integrity on refuge lands. These mandates were generated by an American interest and passion for “wildness”.

But as our human population grows, requiring occupation and conversion of ever-more landscape, many components of the natural world either disappear or adapt to and become dependent upon domesticated environments. Wilderness and wildlife are disappearing. In public dialogue, failing to reveal and emphasize this trend fosters public indifference, allowing an ever-faster demise of natural resources.

We define “wild” as one extreme in a continuum from the other extreme of domestication. Wildness requires a preponderance of natural selection over the forces of artificial selection and genetic drift. As preponderance of natural selection declines, wildness is lost by degrees. “Wild” is a qualitative, not absolute, condition. The decline of wildness is a gradual, insidious process.

In its Bison Conservation Initiative, the Department of Interior commits to maintaining the wild character of bison, allowing forces of natural selection to operate – to the extent possible. But a recent Department release (Foundations for Recognizing Bison as Wildlife) emphasizes that “not all forces of natural selection” are necessary for bison wildness. It provides little discussion of how human-caused artificial selection and genetic drift diminish and replace natural selection, of the many management practices that comprise artificial selection, that loss of natural selection leads to domestication of the species, or that possibilities for natural selection are “impossible” only because of economic or political constraints. A commitment to maximizing biological wildness, to the extent practicable, is not emphasized. Gradual depletion of wildness is not recognized. The Foundations document allows federal bison managers to rationalize and accept artificially maintained bison as “wild”.

The Foundations document implies that what is politically possible in preserving wildness is “good enough”. We see too many non-government conservation organizations embracing this idea. The public, often unwittingly, gives government agencies mandates while also providing little decision-space for their fulfillment. The legacy of wildness to future generations is at stake.