“If you spend a million-plus dollars to put a question before voters and they turn it down, you don’t have any leverage with policymakers going forward. Get more stories delivered right to your email.

Phillips has stuck with it not because he’s particularly obsessed with wolves, but because wolves are powerful advocates for the cause that really animates him: the preservation of biodiversity in an age of extinction.Wolves are useful in a practical sense because they require sprawling protected lands with minimal human presence, conditions that tend to benefit all sorts of other animals, plants, and insects. (Is it just me or did I totally miss my calling as a poet?) Coloradans react to Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s pick for VP Democratic ticket largely wins praise as pair prepares to challenge President Trump. From a biological perspective, the reintroduction has been a fantastic success. 12 Things That Will Always Make Coloradans Think Of Home. By then, he was advising the federal recovery team for Mexican wolves, which were reintroduced to New Mexico and Arizona in the late 1990s. Ballot measures are blunt and narrow instruments. (If you answered yes, you have obviously never visited the majestic Centennial State! “It’s not a fucking black-footed ferret,” Phillips says.Wolf people like Phillips have had an eye on Colorado for decades for a simple reason: It has ample and obvious wolf habitat in the form of millions of acres of public lands rife with deer and elk. Wolves were largely erased from Colorado by the 1930s, with the last one likely killed in 1945. “We have a lot of risk of losing more private land in western valleys,” she says, “and it’s really critical land.” Mountain ranches are central to the character and aesthetic appeal of rural Colorado, and they provide habitat for birds and small mammals. Fish and Wildlife Service would eventually have to turn to Colorado. This November, Centennial State voters will have a historic opportunity to decide if the state should bring The old and weak animals that carnivores typically pick off saw their lifespans extended, and large elk herds mowed through willow and aspen saplings, degrading stream corridors. It’s a beautiful story, but not a tidy one.Initiative 107’s proponents are well aware of the complicated nature of the Yellowstone story, but they argue it would be wrong to conclude that wolves hold no ecological value for Colorado. The animals began to make their living the same way many people did—on both game and cattle—so settlers used guns, traps, and poison to eliminate the competition. The pro-wolf campaign implores Coloradans to “restore the balance.” “It’s so vague,” Perry says. The new carcass and tracks, plus that video evidence, had led CPW officers to an extraordinary conclusion: After forceful extermination 75 years earlier, wolves appeared to again be making a home in Colorado.Wittingly or not, Carney had waded into the wolf wars, and he had done so with uncanny timing. “For the longest time I kept saying, ‘The feds are going to come,’” he says. Another hunter had spotted six large canids back in October, just a couple of miles from where the elk carcass had been found, and he’d caught two on video. In 1995, 29 wolves captured in Canada were released into Yellowstone National Park on the Wyoming-Montana border and the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho. A vote for wolves is a vote for a future in which the natural world is a little less flattened by human influence and a little more complete.“In places like Colorado, people embrace wildness; they embrace ecosystem restoration,” Smith says. Good thing Coloradans have @C4HCO https://t.co/ChQrAUDEmo” By Claire Cleveland. In the park, the absence of predation—from humans and animals—allowed elk populations to balloon.