Rewilding the land

    In North Dakota, the National Parks Service (NPS) has dropped a plan that would have seen about 200 wild horses, descended from those belonging to Native American tribes who fought the 1876 Great Sioux War, rounded up and removed from Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
    The scheme would have stripped the park of a cultural "emblem" of the future 26th U.S. President's time as a cattle rancher and hunter in the Dakota territory in the late 19th century, said the Republican North Dakota Senator John Hoeven, who helped secure their preservation.
    Meanwhile, in Washington, NPS has partnered with U.S. Fish and Wildlife on a plan to reintroduce grizzly bears to the North Cascades ecosystem. The threatened species has not been seen in the area for more than a quarter-century.
    “Our national parks are spectacular places that people expect to be set aside for wildlife, they expect wildlife to be there,” said Graham Taylor, north-west program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA).

“It's why we have multiple wilderness areas in the North Cascades, it's why we have big pristine national parks. They are supposed to be managed to protect their resources in perpetuity, and grizzly bears, all wildlife, are a resource of the parks. For one generation to have wildlife, and the next generation not, is not how they're supposed to be managed, so this really is the park service following their mission by protecting and trying to restore lost resources.” [...]
    The [wild horses], directly descended from those ridden by Sioux chiefs in the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, had “the potential to damage fences used for wildlife management, trample or overgraze vegetation used by native wildlife species, contribute to erosion and soil-related impacts... and compete for food and water resources”, an environmental assessment found.