A16 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALSATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2020
The federal government said
Thursday that it had decided
against protecting wolverines, the
elusive mammals that inspired a
superhero and countless sports
teams around America.
Despite fears that climate
change threatens the animals’
habitat in the lower 48 states, the
United States Fish and Wildlife
Service said Thursday that wol-
verine populations there were sta-
ble and that its own earlier con-
cerns about the effects of global
warming on the species had been
overstated.
“We expect there to be enough
snow where they need it, at the
time of year they need it,” said
Justin Shoemaker, a biologist with
the agency. Wolverines are
thought to depend heavily on
snow, in large part because fe-
males normally give birth in dens
they dig in snowbanks.
A coalition of environmentalists
responded by vowing to sue again.
“With this decision, the Fish
and Wildlife Service has aban-
doned its moral and legal obliga-
tion to protect these animals,” said
Jonathan Proctor of Defenders of
Wildlife, a group that advocates
for imperiled species. “But we will
not abandon our efforts.”
The case has pitted the advo-
cates against the federal govern-
ment and Western states where
wolverines are found. Farm bu-
reaus, snowmobile associations
and the American Petroleum In-
stitute, the main oil industry lob-
bying group, have also argued
against listing wolverines as
threatened or endangered.
Each side claimed to have sci-
ence on its side, but swirling be-
low the surface of the battle were
deep-seated cultural and political
beliefs about how best to protect
animals, how much power the fed-
eral government should wield
over states and even how humans
should interact with nature in the
first place.
“There is a group of people in
the Northern Rockies that traps
and snowmobiles and wears
Carhartts, and another group that
wears Patagonia and wants to see
a wolverine track in the snow,”
said Timothy Preso, a lawyer with
Earthjustice, a nonprofit envi-
ronmental law organization that
has helped lead the legal fight for
the coalition of environmental
groups. “A lot of these issues are
characterized by the tension be-
tween those people.”
At the center is a little-under-
stood creature that inhabits the
kinds of remote places humans do
not.
Only about 300 wolverines live
in the contiguous United States,
but scientists say there were
never many below Canada and
Alaska because of their naturally
low population density and need
for alpine habitat.
Wolverines range over vast ar-
eas of mountainous terrain on
large feet that act as furry snow-
shoes. Typically no more than
about 40 pounds, they punch
above their weight, sometimes
taking down prey as large as a
yearling bull moose. Their jaws
and teeth are so strong that they
scavenge from carcasses that are
frozen solid, opening them up forother creatures to finish off. Their
growl is deep and ominous.
Biologists, though, brush off
their ferocious reputation.
“The legend of the wolverine is
part of the mystique,” said Jeff
Copeland, who has studied wol-
verines for almost 30 years at
state and federal agencies and at
the Wolverine Foundation, a
group he started to gather and
publicize research.
Settlers all but eradicated the
species by the 1920s. Wolverines
were killed by poison meant for
wolves and coyotes. They were
starved when their prey base col-
lapsed because of overgrazing by
farm animals. They were trapped
for their long, thick fur.
After predator poisoning cam-
paigns stopped, wolverines began
to make a slow comeback in the
Rocky Mountains and the North
Cascades, reclaiming territory in
Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and
Washington.
Scientists estimate that the con-
tiguous United States could sup-
port perhaps 600 wolverines. Can-ada and Alaska, on the other hand,
are home to robust populations.
Over the years, the Fish and Wild-
life Service has seesawed on
whether wolverines in the lower
48 states should be protected as a
threatened population distinctfrom those north of the border. To
the dismay of advocates, Thurs-
day’s decision found that they
should not be.
“This is about our values as a
people,” Mr. Preso said. “Do we
want a nation where we’re going
to eradicate everything from the
lower 48 in the name of economic
progress and make Alaska our na-
tional museum?”
Starting in the 1990s, nonprofitgroups petitioned and sued the
federal government to list wolver-
ines as threatened or endangered,
classifications that confer legal
protection under the Endangered
Species Act. Again and again, the
Fish and Wildlife Service de-
clined. But under the Obama ad-
ministration, the agency found
the wolverines of the lower 48
states to be a distinct population
and proposed to list them as
threatened because of climate
change. There were already re-
ductions in snowpack in the Rock-
ies, with higher temperatures on
the way.
After 18 months of public com-
ment and peer review, however,
the agency reversed course.
“Even under conditions of future
reduced snowpack,” it wrote in
2014, “sufficient habitat will likely
remain.”
According to the agency, the
turnaround came down to sci-
ence: Under scrutiny, it stated, the
studies underpinning the decision
to label wolverines as threatened
had not held up.
But in 2016, Judge Dana L.
Christensen of Federal District
Court in Montana proposed an al-
together different reason in a blis-
tering rebuke of the agency’s han-
dling of the case. “The natural re-
flex in a situation such as this is to
ask, ‘why?’ ” Judge Christensen
wrote. “Based on the record, the
court suspects that a possible an-
swer to this question can be found
in the immense political pressure
that was brought to bear on this is-
sue, particularly by a handful of
Western states.”
He called the agency’s discred-
iting of the studies “arbitrary and
capricious” and pointed to inter-
nal Fish and Wildlife Service doc-
uments that “expose the likely
motives — freedom from per-
ceived federal oversight, main-
taining the public’s right to trap —
behind the states’ efforts against
listing the wolverine.”
He ordered the Fish and Wild-
life Service to re-evaluate
whether the species should be
protected.
Thursday’s decision is the re-
sult.“We started over,” said Jodi
Bush, the agency’s Montana
project leader. “This decision was
based on an analysis that was
done by scientists in the field
based on the best available infor-
mation. It was not a political deci-
sion.”
There is disagreement about
how it will affect wolverines.
In Montana, Bob Inman, the
carnivore and fur bearer coordi-
nator for the state, said he thought
local control would help him per-
suade landowners to grant ease-
ments for wolverine corridors,
connecting one mountain peak’s
wolverine population with an-
other.
“People get the perception that
‘the feds are coming to take my
land,’ ” Mr. Inman said. “That’s not
the way to be successful. The way
to be successful is to convince peo-
ple that they would be part of
something important.”
He has been working with
Western states’ wildlife agencies
to connect, restore and monitor
wolverine populations.
Mr. Copeland, on the other
hand, said he believed that federal
protection would have helped.
The animals may already be suf-
fering from an increase in snow-
mobile use and backcountry ski-
ing in their habitat, he said. Their
small, fragmented numbers and
lack of genetic diversity make
them particularly vulnerable.
“Some of the places I worked in
the ’90s, where I was able to read-
ily capture wolverines, they’re
gone now,” Mr. Copeland said.
“These little sub-populations
could blink out and be gone with-
out us even knowing.”
California and Colorado would
like to reintroduce the animals.
Thursday’s decision makes it
harder for regulatory and finan-
cial reasons, wildlife officials in
those states said.
“We might be able to increase
the population by a third, because
there is so much suitable, unoccu-
pied habitat” in Colorado, said
Eric Odell, species conservation
program manager at Colorado
Parks and Wildlife. “Now we’re
back to square one.”Wolverines Denied Federal Protection, but Activists Vow to Keep Up the Fight
By CATRIN EINHORNEnvironmentalists say climate change is affecting the wolverine, which gives birth in snow dens.NHPA/PHOTOSHOT, VIA SCIENCE SOURCEA long battle over a
misunderstood and
rarely seen animal.
LAFAYETTE, La. — The outer
bands of Hurricane Delta lashed
communities across coastal Loui-
siana on Friday, prompting flash
flooding and storm surge warn-
ings as weary residents restocked
their pantries, boarded up their
homes and prepared to ride out
yet another major storm.
Delta, which weakened to a Cat-
egory 2 storm, was expected to
make landfall on Friday evening,
just six weeks after Hurricane
Laura devastated parts of the
state and left an estimated $8 bil-
lion to $12 billion in damage. But
thrashing rain and heavy winds
moved in much earlier, submerg-
ing spots as far east as Baton
Rouge, where nearly two dozen
emergency calls included high-
water rescues.
Across the southwestern part of
the state, officials braced for even
a slight rerun of Laura.
“People are frustrated, people
are emotional, people are fa-
tigued,” said Nic Hunter, the may-
or of Lake Charles, where power
was finally fully restored this
week and where thousands of
homes remain inhabitable.
Mr. Hunter said he worried that
residents would try to ride out
Delta in compromised structures
that could collapse completely,
though he added that more people
had evacuated this week than for
Laura.
Still, there was no escaping the
bruised feelings.
“We just went through a major
catastrophe,” he said, “and in our
wildest dreams, no one would
have thought that six weeks later
we would be going through the
same thing.”
At a news conference on Friday
afternoon, Gov. John Bel Edwards
of Louisiana said he was praying
that Hurricane Delta, the 25th
named storm of the busy 2020 At-
lantic hurricane season, would
rush quickly through the state,
and stay on a projected path that
kept it to the east of Lake Charles,
sparing it from the storm’s more
destructive eastern flank.
Even so, Mr. Edwards said,
“We’re confident that there will be
hurricane-force winds felt in and
around Lake Charles and in other
areas of southwest Louisiana that
are very damaged. And so we
know this is going to exacerbate
what is already a bad situation.”
Louisiana has been in the path
of six major storms since June,
and along with the wildfires in the
West, they have brought fresh at-
tention to the effects of climate
change, which has likely contrib-
uted to the intensity of the storms
and the persistence and size of the
fires.
Along a wide swath of the north-
ern Gulf Coast, which was heavily
battered by Laura in late August
and Sally in September, life is still
not back to normal. Those storms
caused extensive property dam-
age and several deaths.
That dangerous right side of the
storm, sometimes known as “the
dirty side,” appeared likely to
strafe a rural stretch of the Acadi-
ana region, home to little towns
that serve as repositories of the
state’s Acadian and Creole cul-
tures. A measure of anxiety was
also palpable in Lafayette, popula-
tion 126,000, the cultural and eco-
nomic capital of the region.
Lafayette Parish had been un-
der voluntary evacuation since
midweek, and as Delta churned
ever closer, residents were divid-
ed on whether to stay or go.
Across the street in a lot next to
a city-owned community center
on Thursday, half a dozen people
filed into an ad hoc intake center
operated by local housing advo-
cates. They signed up with case
managers who promised them
rides on the midmorning caravan
to a mega-shelter in Alexandria,
about an hour and a half north
along the hurricane evacuation
route.
Betty Blaine, 57, stooped to coax
her two mix-bred terriers — Creek
and Angel — to drink from a yel-
low water bowl. She and her boy-
friend, Troy Daigle Jr., 56, waited
for a squat paratransit bus to take
them away.
The pair lived together in Lake
Charles in a senior living high rise
called the Chateau Du Lac, which
was shredded by Laura in late Au-
gust. After decamping to a Marri-
ott in New Orleans, Ms. Blaine and
Mr. Daigle packed west to Acadia
Parish, between Lafayette and
their native Lake Charles, to stay
in a friend’s camper.
Unsafe there, they cast their lot
with the critical transport caravan
and the shelter in Alexandria.
“With these hurricanes, you
don’t know what they going to do,”Mr. Daigle said through a dispos-
able surgical mask.
By Friday afternoon, even with
a downpour of rain, cars were still
out on the road and forming a
drive-through line that wrapped
around Kevin’s Seafood for fried
catfish and shrimp. But most
other gas stations, stores and
restaurants had already shut
down, and before long, as the sky
grew darker, the traffic largely
vanished from many streets.
There were no hotel rooms left
in the city, officials said, so people
evacuating from other communi-
ties in the path of the stormneeded to bunk with relatives or
friends or travel farther. For those
remaining in the city, officials
urged them to stay at home.
Mr. Edwards said that while
Delta, which struck Mexico earli-
er in the week, had lost some of its
strength, it was still forecast to
bring a surge as high as 11 feet and
rainfall of 10 inches or more. He
noted that some flash flooding
from outer rain bands was already
occurring beyond the storm’s im-
mediate path, including the Baton
Rouge area, which saw as much as
nine inches of rain in some places
on Thursday night.With Delta, much like Laura,
state officials were forced to find
emergency shelter for large num-
bers of displaced people while tak-
ing into account the risk of spread-
ing the coronavirus.
Mr. Edwards said there were
more than 9,500 Louisianians in
shelters as of Friday afternoon,
most of them evacuees from the
previous storm. But another 800
were being housed because of
Delta, many of them in the mega-
shelter in Alexandria.
The shelter there, Mr. Edwards
said, could typically accommo-
date thousands of people, but itscapacity was reduced to 833 be-
cause of virus restrictions. After
reaching capacity, evacuees were
moved farther north to the cities
of Bastrop and Shreveport.
Still, many others chose to ride
out Delta with a shrug — a re-
sponse that might be interpreted
as coolheadedness or insouci-
ance.
In Rayne, a small city on the Ca-
jun prairie west of Lafayette, win-
dows were boarded up and gener-
ators were full of fuel. A woman
jogged along a two-lane highway
through the heavy rainfall that
had already begun. And the regis-
ter was getting a workout at
Queen City Discount Liquor and
Tobacco.
Marcus Carmouche, 30, set out
on Friday morning with the hope
of finding a generator. He had no
luck. Instead, he came to the store
with his cousin, who gathered up
armfuls of bags of chips.
Mr. Carmouche said he would
take it as it came. “It isn’t going to
do nothing but tear out a few trees
and knock power lines down,” he
said, noting that the last storm,
Hurricane Laura, had left his fam-
ily without power for about a day.
His plan, he said, was to stay
home and play video games until
the lights went out. “We’re just go-
ing to chill,” he said.Barely Able to Catch
Its Breath, Louisiana
Braces for Next Storm
By RICK ROJAS
and RICHARD FAUSSETResidents in Bell City, La.,
watched as the outer bands of
Hurricane Delta approached.
Several storms have already
hit the state this year, including
Hurricane Laura, which
caused heavy damage, at left.WILLIAM WIDMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESEMILY KASK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESReporting was contributed by
Chelsea Brasted, Richard Fausset,
Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio,
Rick Rojas, John Schwartz and
Derrick Bryson Taylor.
‘People are frustrated,
people are emotional,
people are fatigued.’