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Ghost Trees

By Cristina Eisenberg / On July 10th, 2012
The standing dead trees were everywhere, their boles weathered silver where the bark had peeled. The carcasses of their fallen comrades littered the understory, with few aspen sprouting from the deadfall. The occasional mangled saplings we observed provided graphic evidence of heavy elk browsing.
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Aldo Leopold and the Mark of the Wolf's Tooth

By Cristina Eisenberg / On August 4th, 2011
In the early 1900s, while cruising timber as a young forester, American conservationist Aldo Leopold, founder of the science of wildlife biology, encountered a female wolf with her pups. The common wisdom of that era was that the only good predator was a dead one, so he and his crew opened fire. But as he stood there watching the “fierce green light” fade in the wolf mother’s eyes, he felt a sharp, surprising pang of remorse. It would take him decades to parse out his feelings about her death.
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Earth Day at the Shack

By Cristina Eisenberg / On April 21st, 2011
Three springs ago I visited the Leopold Memorial Reserve—the depleted Wisconsin sand county farm Aldo Leopold bought in 1930 known as the “shack.” In the 1940s he recorded in his field notes that without large predators such as wolves to regulate their numbers, deer were eating aspens and other trees and shrubs to death. I wanted to see whether this was still so.
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Wolves and the Ecology of Fear in Action

By Cristina Eisenberg / On October 13th, 2010
Recently, I spent time with a friend in a northern part of the Rockies with thriving wolf population. My friend was skeptical about how wolves affect ecosystems—was—because an event that morning rapidly changed his mind.
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Combating Global Warming with Wolves

By Cristina Eisenberg / On September 10th, 2010
I recently attended the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the theme was global warming. Eminent ecologists presented models that projected climate change into a bleak future where species that require unique habitat may be unable to persist.

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