Another person for whom Isle Royale was the finest place on Earth was Bob Linn, a local park naturalist who participated in the first Winter Studies of wolves and moose at Isle Royale. Bob eventually became Chief Scientist of the Service in the 1960s, presiding over the rocky marriage between science and national park management to which Nevada alludes. Bob hated controversy, but three times he had to take action to help stifle political or bureaucratic interference in the study of Isle Royale wolves. One would think these wolves would hardly have an enemy in the world, isolated as they are from any hint of competitive threat to human interests. Bob marshaled the forces of good to quell threats as they arose, whether inspired by greed, hunger for power, jealousy or just plain orneriness; afterward, he modestly declared that scientists were simply viewed as “loose cannons on the deck.” The most serious challenge was certainly when James Watt was Secretary of the Interior under President Reagan; Park Service support was withdrawn and staff was recalled in the middle of the Winter Study in 1983. However, Watt was blameless, as I concluded years later after a rare conversation that demonstrated he didn’t even know Isle Royale existed, let alone was a national park that he’d been nominally responsible for conserving. So it goes…

Nevertheless, to this day the wolves of Isle Royale have survived, the study of them has survived and, elsewhere, the species is thriving in places where wolf recovery at one time was considered most improbable. This is ample testimony to the ability of the human mind to embrace, eventually, the true and unblemished facts about the way the world works and about the role we can play in securing our own sustainable future in it.