From the New York Times

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: June 1, 2013

The 1973 Endangered Species Act provides federal protection — breathing space, in a very real sense — to plants and animals threatened with extinction. Had this task been left to the states alone, almost none of the species that have returned to health would have done so.

But the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service now plans to remove wolves from the endangered list in all 48 contiguous states and transfer control over their fate to the states. This may save the department from running battles with Congress, state officials and hunters about protecting the wolf. Whether it will save the animal is another matter.

Thanks entirely to federal protections, wolves have rebounded remarkably in some places. There are now about 4,000 in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, and 1,600 or so more in the Rocky Mountain states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Interior has gradually delisted the wolves in all these places because, it says, their numbers are enough to guarantee survival. And it is not necessary to their survival, the service says, to protect wolves elsewhere.

But many scientists argue, persuasively, that these delistings are premature — that the service is giving up on recovery before the job is done. For one thing, they note a 7 percent decline in Rocky Mountain wolves since they were delisted and controlled hunts were authorized. They also note that other recovered species — notably the bald eagle and the American alligator — were allowed to expand into much of their historical range before they were removed from the list.

The historical range of the wolf is nearly the whole contiguous United States. There is suitable habitat all across the West still unoccupied by wolves, including the Pacific Northwest, Northern California and Colorado. A recovering wolf population isn’t static. It spreads as wolves rebound. The northern Rockies and the upper Midwest are proof of that. Can wolves recover suitable parts of their historical range without federal protection? The answer is almost certainly no.

Interior’s plan has little to do with science and everything to do with politics. Congress bludgeoned President Obama’s first interior secretary, Ken Salazar, into delisting the Rocky Mountain wolf. But there is no reason his successor, Sally Jewell, has to accept a plan to delist the wolves everywhere. It is hard enough to protect species that occupy hidden ecological niches. Politics has made it harder still to protect an intelligent, adaptive predator living openly in the wild.