El Lobo: Readings on the Mexican Gray Wolf ed. by Tom Lynch (review)

3 2 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 7 E l Lobo: Readings on the M exican Qray Wolf. Edited by Tom Lynch. S a lt Lake C ity: U n iversity o f U tah Press, 2005. 257 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Sherry Booth San ta C lara University, C alifornia The shelf of my bookcase devoted to books on wolves has become satisfyingly stuffed, and Tom Lynch’s El Lobo is a welcome addition. This collection, divided into two sections, provides twenty-nine different selections and ranges widely in both the genres represented and points of view: state and federal wild­ life employees, academics, journalists, environmentalists, ranchers, and novel­ ists. The voices, stories, and reports Lynch includes bring both professional and personal perspectives to the story of Canis lupus baileyi in the southwestern United States. Few animals elicit such passionate (and opposing) reactions in humans as wolves do. Once plentiful across most of North America, wolves were con­ sciously and brutally eradicated from almost all of the United States and Mexico by the early twentieth century. Lynch focuses on the Southwest, where the plan to reintroduce the wolf ended in success in 1998. But before he takes us to this amazing moment in natural and human history, he provides multiple ways to think about and begin to understand the wolf—and the humans who have been involved in the wolf’s story. For the story of the Mexican gray wolf, he writes in his balanced and compelling introduction, is not just about the wolf but “about competing visions of life in the American West” (4). The myth of the frontier is “hard to resist” and the “icons of the Wild West, the cowboy and his cow, were in fact participants in a de-wilding process” (2). He reminds us that wolf réintroduction is not about “thrills” for humans; it’s about “healing the land” (6). A number of the selections detail the positive ecological results of bringing a top predator back into ecosystems, drawing from research on the Yellowstone wolves. In the first section,“To the Brink,” Lynch begins with Native American myths about wolves and introduces us to facts about wolves, their history in the United States, and the comments of a rancher in New Mexico whose piece opens, “My hatred of wolves goes clear back to my early boyhood” and ends by commending the Fish and Wildlife Service for the “determined warfare they have carried on against the lobo” (83). This view is followed by Aldo Leopold’s classic passage from “Thinking Like a Mountain,” where seeing the “green fire die” in the eyes of the wolf proves epiphanous. The contrast between those who champion wolves and support réintroduction and those to whom the wolf represents a threat to livestock and livelihood continues throughout the second section of the book and is one of its great strengths. By the end of the book, a reader who started not knowing much about wolves in general or wolf réintroduction programs is educated scientifically, historically, and emotionally. Whether or not wolf réintroduction will succeed is an open question; el lobo in b o o k R e v ie w s 3 2 3 the Southwest is protected only in designated areas, and wolves are travelers who don’t respect artificial borders. But wolf reintroduction also poses a crucial question: do we want wildness? If we do, we must share our planet with this social, curious, four-legged predator. Lynch’s book made me believe the answer must be yes. The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Qenre. Edited by Deborah A. Carmichael. S alt Lake C ity: U n iversity o f U tah Press, 2006. 248 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis Professor Em eritus, U niversity of O klahom a Readers may have some reservations about a book that masculinizes the name of scriptwriter Frances Marion; which contains the assertion that “no woman has won an acting award for a role...