POLLUTED BY WOLVES: Those who know me well know that I love wolves. Other girls had horse phases; I had a wolf phase. Such a long and intense phase, in fact, that I will not be at all surprised if some relatives send me wolf paraphernalia this Christmas. I sold my copy of White Wolf: The Wolves of Ellesmere Island (yes, they’re gorgeous, but I wanted to buy more Dostoyevsky), and I think I gave my old stuffed lupine companion Rosebriar to the pregnancy center, but I still think wolves are pretty awesome.

However. The only wolves I’ve seen up-close-and-personal were safely behind bars. I do not see wolves padding down 16th Street, slinking through Rock Creek Park, or dining on Bambi carpaccio out in darkest Virginia. And this suits me just fine.

I was reminded of my preference for a wolfless habitat when I read an account of a Close Encounter of the Wolfen Kind in Portland, Ore. Wolfie had his snout stuck in the trashcan behind a local eatery. Raised his head, spotted customers leaving the restaurant, and went into classic stalking-wolf mode. The customers backed away very slowly, and the wolf retreated.

I really don’t deal much with nasty beasties in my daily life. (“Who’s that in that nasty car? –Nasty beasts!”) Rats, big weird swamp-type bugs, that’s about it. I see deer in the Park quite often, and many years ago one wandered into the Capitol, smashed through a plate-glass window, and stumbled around in a daze until it was captured and removed. I don’t have to back slowly away from the Tastee Diner dumpster because some carnivore is rifling through the garbage; I don’t have to worry that when our cat escapes some fangtoothed coyote or Canis lupus will snuff him. This is great. This happened because humans changed the “natural world” we found around us.

The separation between humans and the rest of nature goes back to Genesis, of course–we were given dominion over the creepycrawlies and the flittering things and, importantly, the clawed and jagtoothed wild animals. But that separation between us and them was predicated on our dominance. We, not they, stood at the top of the Great Chain of Being.

Later philosophies, in which humans become just another part of nature, had a much harder time justifying that dominance. (You could read the book that seduced me into nine years of vegetarianism if you want a utilitarian take on the subject–an accurate, consistent utilitarian take, I might add… which is one of the problems with utilitarianism.) Attempts to justify humans’ use of other animals too often rely on a “group rights” approach (what’s really valued is rationality, and humans are the kind of critters who can be rational [as demonstrated by, say, our use of language, or our ability to make moral choices], so all humans get protection under the “umbrella” of rational-animals even if the particular humans in question have severely impaired rationality, have not yet developed rationality, or aren’t exercising their rationality at a given moment).

There are some benefits to viewing ourselves as just another part of nature–for example, this viewpoint helps us see why the changes humans make to a landscape aren’t necessarily any less “natural” or moral than the changes other animals make. (Virginia Postrel has a great example of this in The Future and Its Enemies, in which an environmental group tried to recreate an American forest as it would have existed before Columbus. The attempt failed, because the greenfolk refused to burn down trees that would be burnt by the American Indians who had lived there. Without this periodic culling, some tree species quickly crowded out others; some trees took over, while others vanished. In order to recreate the supposed “beautiful nature,” humans would have had to intervene, since we inadvertently had created the species diversity that gave the forest its majesty. Because humans were viewed as intruders, usurpers in the Wild Kingdom, the Greens failed to see that we were actually helpful players in the biological drama.)

However, if we view ourselves as only one species among others, we can have no justification for our dominance or use of other animals. (Or we end up with justifications for using beasts that also turn out to justify using other humans.) This justification of human dominance is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult problems for philosophy (especially secular philosophy); it’s ignored simply because most people either don’t think about the outliers (non- or not-yet-rational humans; clever pets), or simply laugh when they’re asked to take Peter Singer’s claims seriously. (Three cheers for common sense on this one, by the way–I’m thrilled that people reject human/beast equality, even if arguing the case from modern secular premises is tougher than we usually realize.) So people who don’t have a good sense of what differentiates us from the beasties around us often retreat into a hazy romanticism about “nature.” Natural good, manufactured bad!

Eugene Volokh came up with a good way of thinking about pollution that avoids this problem: Pollution is nasty stuff in the environment that causes disease. Here are the relevant paragraphs: “How can I say that the world has gotten cleaner, given all the smog, toxic waste, etc.? Well, there’s certainly pollution out there, which I would define as material in the environment that can cause disease. And there’s more chemical pollution, I suspect, than there was, say, 300 years ago.

“But there’s vastly less biological pollution. For much of human history, the species was literally plagued with a vast range of material in the environment — bacteria and viruses — that can cause disease. Some of this was an artifact of people living next to each other, but it happened with population densities much lower than we see today. And biological pollution has generally proven to be much more lethal than chemical pollution.

“On aggregate, then, the world is much cleaner today than at any time in at least thousands of years, as defined in what I think is the soundest way: There is far less disease caused by the ‘unclean’ stuff in the environment than there ever has been.”

This view seems to me to get it right: The emphasis is on what humans need (we’re dominant) and what we can control (both manufactured and biological “pollution”). We’re neither entirely separate from nature (in which case our actions would be inherently “unnatural,” and usually “anti-nature”) nor merely another cog in the Green Machine. So yes, under certain circumstances–when they threaten human life, limb, or livelihood–wolves can be classified as pollution. I say that with tongue in cheek; I think “pollution” is, in general, stuff we don’t want around at all, rather than critters we like in zoos and off in the wild where they can’t mess with anyone. But the way of thinking Volokh proposes strikes me as entirely sensible. The world is cleaner today than it was, and that’s good. That shouldn’t stop us from trying to make it cleaner still, but that’s a very different argument about technology, economic development, and trade-offs (how much chemical pollution will we bear now in order to maintain a booming economy that ultimately benefits us greatly?).