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This is my second post in two weeks about wolves and the balance of nature. Go figure.

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“Sustainable Man” is an online movement that promotes peace, empathy, equity, justice, and environmental protection — as opposed to, you know, fear, greed, and consumption. The goal is to leave future generations a sustainable planet.

The idea originated with brothers Chris and Steve Agnos, who produce videos for their website to get their messages across. The brothers are environmentalists of particular intelligence and compassion; they probably don’t vote Republican.

If you have a scintilla of respect for Planet Earth, and if, like me, you despair about our future, then you may be encouraged by one especially excellent Sustainable Man video, “How Wolves Change Rivers.”

A link to the video and a transcript of the narration are below.

Please note that when the British narrator refers to the “deer” of Yellowstone National Park, he means, in fact, American elk. In Europe, “deer” often is an umbrella term for deer, reindeer, elk, and moose.

How Wolves Change Rivers

A video by Sustainable Man, narrated by George Monbiot

One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery of widespread trophic cascades. A trophic cascade is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down to the bottom.

And the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park in the United States when wolves were reintroduced in 1995.

Now, we all know that wolves kill various species of animals. But perhaps we’re slightly less aware that they give life to many others.

Before the wolves turned up -– they’d been absent for 70 years -– the numbers of deer (because there had been nothing to hunt them) had built up and built up in the Yellowstone Park, and despite efforts by humans to control them, they’d managed to reduce much the vegetation there to almost nothing. They had just grazed it away.

But as soon as the wolves arrived, even though they were few in number, they started to have the most remarkable effects.

First, of course, they killed some of the deer. But that wasn’t the major thing.

Much more significantly, they radically changed the behavior of the deer. The deer started avoiding certain parts of the park -– the places where they could be trapped most easily, particularly the valleys and the gorges.

And immediately, those places started to regenerate. In some areas, the height of the trees quintupled in just six years. Bare valley sides quickly became forests of aspen and willow and cottonwood.

And as soon as that happened, the birds started moving in. The number of songbirds and migratory birds started to increase greatly.

The number of beavers started to increase, because beavers like to eat the trees. And beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers. They create niches for other species. And the dams they built in the rivers provided habitats for otters and muskrats and ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians.

The wolves killed coyotes, and as a result of that, the number of rabbits and mice began to rise — which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes, more badgers.

Ravens and bald eagles came down to feed on the carrion that the wolves had left.

Bears fed on it, too. And their population began to rise, as well, partly also because there were more berries growing on the regenerating shrubs. And the bears reinforced the impact of the wolves by killing some of the calves of the deer.

But here’s where it gets really interesting.

The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers. They began to meander less. There was less erosion. The channels narrowed. More pools formed. More riffle sections. All of which were great for wildlife habitats.

The rivers changed in response to the wolves. And the reason was that the regenerating forests stabilized the banks so that they collapsed less often. So the rivers became more fixed in their course.

Similarly, by driving the deer out of some places, and the vegetation recovering on the valley side, there was less soil erosion, because the vegetation stabilized that, as well.

So the wolves, small in number, transformed not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park -– this huge area of land — but also its physical geography.

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Don’t give up. Don’t lose hope. Don’t sell out.

— Christopher Reeve