Timothy Rawson

I picked up Changing Tracks when I visited Denali National Park a few years ago and finished it while still in Alaska. The book covers a bit of the history of the park, but mostly the politics of park and wildlife management, and Adolph Murie's role in crafting the policies now in place.

It seems like the book is probably somebody's thesis scaled out a bit for a more general audience, but it still makes for a fascinating read and covers the evolution of predator management in the national parks quite well. Whenever I read something like this it always kind of amazes me how little often well-intentioned people understood about the complex systems they decided to "fix". For example the idea that the sheep needed to be protected from wolves, ignoring the fact that wolves and sheep had both been there for a very long time & were both abundant. Or the biased and willful ignorance that drove decisions to cull the wolves, such as the estimate of 1 sheep or caribou killed per wolf per day provided by a man who admitted to having never seen a wolf actually do either.… (mais)