Gray wolves are a wonderful way for examining our relationship with Mother Earth, which has been clearly out of whack for a long, long time. A small movement of the trim tab can create a great opportunity for the plane a small movement with wolf recovery can create a great opportunity for conservation in general. It's the trim tab that allows you that control. There's such great force over the wings, you need a mechanical advantage system of pulleys to be able to move the wing and manage the wing in a fashion that allows the plane to perform properly. A trim tab is a device in the plane that gives you a mechanical advantage over portions of the way to make the wing behave properly so the plane can be flown properly. ![]() You may not know what a trim tab is but many years ago, I learned how to fly small aircraft anticipating working in remote country where working out of a plane was sometimes essential. Wolves can be almost in ways be viewed as a trim tab. Wolf recovery, wolf restoration, wolf research is always about more than gray wolves. The wolf is a fantastic species for illuminating all sorts of problems that are only at best tangentially related to the gray wolf. The reason that wolves made so much sense to me as a lens for examining opportunities to contribute. And Ayana, I've had the good fortune to work on wolf recovery and conservation and research on a near-daily basis ever since. That was in 1981 that I began working with Dave. Now, do you have an opening?” And he did. Mech and I said, “Okay, well, you I do exactly what you told me to do. ![]() And as soon as I did that, within about a year, I went right back to Dr. So I took Dave's advice to heart and conducted a study of coyote food habits in Illinois and published that study. So Dave's program was the only game in town if you wanted to work with gray wolves. There were only maybe 1000 gray wolves in the northeast, in Minnesota, that was it. I suggest that you go study coyotes.” Back in the early 1980s, gray wolves were very, very uncommon in the United States. A wolf researcher by the name of Dave Mech said to me, “I don't have any room on my field crew right now. Mike Phillips My work with coyotes many years ago back - heaven sakes - it would have been in the early 1980s. ![]() And in your answer, perhaps you could also speak to the depth that these species bring to our ecological systems and the phenomenon of trophic cascades. Evolution drives by death.” And what has drawn you to build lifelong alliances with predators like the coyote and the gray wolf, so-called deliverers of death. In an interview with Mountain & Prairie Podcast you share, “all of life that we see around us, the fantastic forms so well adapted to local challenges are a function of death. And in preparing for this interview, I was immediately struck by the way you speak and write about the biological necessity of death. Thank you for having me.Īyana Young Well, within these circles, we often organize and orient around the notion of sustaining life. Mike Phillips Oh, Ayana, it is very much my privilege and my pleasure. I feel so grateful to be connecting with you today as a fellow conservationist, so deeply immersed in this work. In 2006, Mike was elected to the Montana legislature, where he served as the representative for House District 66 in Bozeman until 2012, where he was elected to the Montana Senate. ![]() He also conducted important research on the impacts of oil and gas development on grizzly bears in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, predation costs for gray wolves and Alaska, black bear movements in northeastern North Carolina, and dingo ecology and Australia. During his employment with the Department of Interior, Mike served as the leader of historic efforts to restore red wolves to the southeastern US, and gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Prior to that, Mike has worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service since 1981. Mike Phillips I came to wonder if all these many years, these decades, these centuries Mother Earth has been calling to us, hoping for us to respond by affirming her importance, hoping for us to respond by rising up in defense of the defenseless parts of nature.Īyana Young Mike has served as the executive director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund and advisor to the Turner biodiversity divisions since he co-founded both with Ted Turner in June 1997. Today we are speaking with Mike Phillips. Ayana Young Welcome to For the Wild Podcast.
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