Volume 66 Issue 2
Summer 2017
In this Issue
Read a rundown of the numerous attempts thus far in the 115th Congress to weaken the Endangered Species Act. Examine the evolutionary fallout of "sustainable use" as a model for wildlife management. Learn how one Texas teacher is promoting compassion for all Earth's inhabitants in her classroom and how AWI is lending a hand to help the Kenya Wildlife Service ward off poachers with aerial patrols.
About the Cover
Each year in the United States, hundreds of thousands of muskrats are trapped for their fur. State wildlife agencies typically set limits on trapping, hunting, and fishing based on “sustainable use” models—how many animals can be removed without causing the species’ population to dip below desired numbers. But this reliance on simple replacement numbers ignores the social and ecological contributions of the individual, and often results in a form of “unnatural selection”—an evolutionary monkey wrench that robs the gene pool of its fittest contributors. Read more on why sustainable use is a suspect concept for managing wildlife.
