Wolves

2019 ◽  
pp. 234-252
Author(s):  
Belden C. Lane

The story of Francis and the wolf of Gubbio occasions the author’s trek into the Absaroka Mountains near Yellowstone, entering a territory where gray wolves have thrived since being reintroduced the 1990s. The inordinate hatred of wolves in Western thought is contrasted with Francis’s concern not to kill (or even to tame) the wolf, but to welcome it into a larger family where all species can thrive. Over the centuries the wolf’s stealthy elusiveness has led us to project a sinister quality onto these extraordinary animals. Barry Lopez speaks of our theriophobia, our irrational, deep-seated fear of the “beast.” It evokes an impulse to kill what we don’t understand. Yet gradually we’re learning to appreciate wolves without demonizing (or romanticizing) them. By the time Aldo Leopold wrote his Sand County Almanac, you could discern a shift in societal perceptions of apex predators. He spoke of grieving as he knelt beside a wolf he had shot, watching “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” He also noticed how the absence of wolves allowed the deer population to explode, with every edible tree stripped of its leaves.

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (48) ◽  
pp. 30531-30538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bischof ◽  
Cyril Milleret ◽  
Pierre Dupont ◽  
Joseph Chipperfield ◽  
Mahdieh Tourani ◽  
...  

The ongoing recovery of terrestrial large carnivores in North America and Europe is accompanied by intense controversy. On the one hand, reestablishment of large carnivores entails a recovery of their most important ecological role, predation. On the other hand, societies are struggling to relearn how to live with apex predators that kill livestock, compete for game species, and occasionally injure or kill people. Those responsible for managing these species and mitigating conflict often lack fundamental information due to a long-standing challenge in ecology: How do we draw robust population-level inferences for elusive animals spread over immense areas? Here we showcase the application of an effective tool for spatially explicit tracking and forecasting of wildlife population dynamics at scales that are relevant to management and conservation. We analyzed the world’s largest dataset on carnivores comprising more than 35,000 noninvasively obtained DNA samples from over 6,000 individual brown bears (Ursus arctos), gray wolves (Canis lupus), and wolverines (Gulo gulo). Our analyses took into account that not all individuals are detected and, even if detected, their fates are not always known. We show unequivocal quantitative evidence of large carnivore recovery in northern Europe, juxtaposed with the finding that humans are the single-most important factor driving the dynamics of these apex predators. We present maps and forecasts of the spatiotemporal dynamics of large carnivore populations, transcending national boundaries and management regimes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-52
Author(s):  
Diana Ana Sari

Abstract: The presence of epistemology in western philosophy is very influential in life, especially in regulating the strategy of power or power to achieve goals. The style of western thought brought a big change in the knowledge of thinking, perspectives, and behavior that became the motors of civilization. Two main influential schools in the study of western philosophy such as rationalism and empiricism are conflicting. Both favor reason and five senses, but also inseparable from the weaknesses of each that will be revealed by researchers. Likewise the negative impact behind the superiority of western epistemology on the nature and development and existence of humans.


Author(s):  
Michael Ruse

Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Kant thought we were stuck with it, and even Darwin, who profoundly shook the idea, was unable to kill it. Indeed, purpose seems to be making a comeback today, as both religious advocates of intelligent design and some prominent secular philosophers argue that any explanation of life without the idea of purpose is missing something essential. This book explores the history of purpose in philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical thought, from ancient Greece to the present. The book traces how Platonic, Aristotelian, and Kantian ideas of purpose continue to shape Western thought. Along the way, it also takes up tough questions about the purpose of life—and whether it's possible to have meaning without purpose.


Author(s):  
Sorin Geacu

The population of Red Deer (Cervus elaphus L., 1758) in Tulcea county (Romania) The presence of the Red Deer in the North-western parts of Tulcea County is an example of the natural expansion of a species spreading area. In North Dobrogea, this mammal first occurred only forty years ago. The first specimens were spotted on Cocoşul Hill (on the territory of Niculiţel area) in 1970. Peak numbers (68 individuals) were registered in the spring of 1987. The deer population (67 specimens in 2007) of this county extended along 10 km from West to East and 20 km from North to South over a total of 23,000 ha (55% of which was forest land) in the East of the Măcin Mountains and in the West of the Niculiţel Plateau.


Author(s):  
Asaad Abdullwahab AbdulKarim ◽  
Waleed Massaher Hamad ◽  
Salah Ibrahim Hamadi

Abstract     The Frankfurt School is characterized by its critical nature and it is the result of the Marxist socialist thought as it contributed to the development of the German thought in particular and the Western thought in general through important ideas put forward by a number of pioneers in the various generations of the school and most notably through the leading pioneer in the first generation, Marcuse, and the leading pioneer of the second  generation, Habermas, whose political ideas had an important impact on global thinking and later became the basis of the attic of many critical ideas. In spite of the belief of the school members in the idea of the criticism of power and community, each had his own ideas that distinguish him from the others.


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