The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 brought many changes, but one of the more unexpected was that it enabled the wolves of Eastern Europe to begin expanding their range west, where they had been practically unknown for more than a century. Few large mammals, people included, had been permitted to cross from East to West before the Berlin Wall came down. From the guard towers along the border, soldiers had shot bears for fun.
Today there are more than 21,500 wolves on the continent, a species of least concern. Their revival, a beacon of hope in the biodiversity crisis, is testament to what can be achieved when conservation policies do not stop at borders. But the recent freedom under which wolves have thrived in Europe is once again in peril.
The wolf was once the most widespread terrestrial animal on the planet, but by the mid-20th century a campaign of persecution had pushed it almost to extinction. In Europe, they reached their nadir in 1965, hanging on in just a few small pockets. In North America, estimates for the number of wolves killed from 1850 to 1900 range between one million and two million. “The numbers no longer have meaning” wrote the essayist Barry Lopez.
But as the European Union expanded, it continued to favor the lives of wolves. Scientists could share knowledge freely across the continent. Environmental legislation, ratified by every member state, listed the large carnivores as species requiring special protection.
Slavc (pronounced sh-lough-ts) was a wolf pioneer. Born in 2010, in southern Slovenia, at a year old he was collared with a GPS tracker by biologists researching wolf behavior. Soon afterward he set out, alone, on a walk of more than a thousand miles through the Alps, in search of the same three things we all want: enough space to live; enough food to eat; a mate.
He crossed Slovenia, and then Austria, and four months later he was in Italy, in the mountains just north of Verona. It was there that he crossed paths with a female on a walkabout of her own. Possibly she came from France, although her exact provenance is unknown. Incredibly, perhaps the only two wild wolves for thousands of square miles had somehow found each other. When they bred, they became the first pack in those mountains for over a century.
Slavc’s journey was astonishing not only in its distance but in how successful he ultimately was. His pack became the basis for the repopulation of these mountains: there are now more than 200 wolves in the region. For my book, “Lone Wolf,” I walked Slavc’s path a decade after him. I wanted to see how those learning to live alongside the wolf were coping with its presence. But there was more to it than that, because the return of wolves is by no means the only change that is facing Europe.
In 2022, when I began my walk, the European Union’s Schengen area, intended to facilitate free movement, was surrounded and subdivided by 1,273 miles of border fences, 19 separate constructions. In 1993, when the union formed after the fall of the Iron Curtain, there were none. At that time, border fences felt practically medieval, but today a new politics is shaping the globe and the European Union’s internal and external borders are hardening by the year.
Wolves have always had a curious way of mirroring human concerns. As I walked Slavc’s trail, I frequently heard wolves and refugees spoken of in the same breath: “I’m not against them, but there’s no room for them here.” “We were here first.” Life in the Alps has always been hard, but just now things feel particularly acute. Climate change; escalating prices for energy and animal feed; young people abandoning rural farms for the cities. Both the wolf and the refugee are being used as scapegoats for complex problems in these hinterlands, with local tensions inflamed by populist politicians chasing the rural vote.
Wolves have scant concern for people, and yet, like all wild things, they are not permitted to ignore us. Between Slovenia and Croatia, I saw where fences of razor wire intended to hold back refugees had sliced through the territories of wolves, playing havoc with pack dynamics. This is not particular to Europe.
In 2021, an endangered Mexican gray wolf left its pack in Arizona, driven by the same imperative as Slavc, only to find its movement south blocked by a 30-foot-high wall at the United States-Mexico border. His GPS collar showed him pacing alongside the obstruction for five days before turning back north. The Fish and Wildlife Service maintain that Mexican wolves can recover without the vulnerable populations on either side of the border interacting, but undoubtedly it is not only humans who suffer when a landscape is cleaved in two.
As obstructions proliferate worldwide, species are suffering everywhere, forced into genetic bottlenecks and tangled in wires. It is happening at barriers between China and Russia, between India and Myanmar, between Poland and Belarus. A 2021 study by the Natural Environment Research Council found the U.S.-Mexico border wall disrupts the movement of 122 mammal species attempting to relocate as they adapt to a warming world.
The Europe that permitted wolves to thrive is fracturing. As a Briton, I could no longer do my walk as a single hike, because since Brexit I am not allowed to be on the continent for more than 90 days at a stretch. Anti-E.U. parties are surging, buoyed by a fear of migration and courting farmers who are angry about what they perceive as onerous environmental demands, including the protection of large carnivores.
Bowing to that pressure, the bloc last week rolled back its protections. With the wolf no longer “strictly protected,” individual member countries will once again determine its management. Slavc’s journey, already miraculous, could be suicidal today.
As species push against these political divides, driven by degraded environments, changing climates and life’s imperative, it remains to be seen whether hard borders can resist a changing world. In times of crisis, we move. Wolves, persecuted for millenniums, have always embodied this truth.
During my walk I came to see wolves as disrupters, as symbolic as ecological. They demand answers. Can we cede space? Can we sanction risk? Can we fall back in love with the world?
To follow Slavc across Europe was to get a feel for the unvanquished desire for life to thrive. And to see that humanity, terrified of change, will forever attempt to hem it in.
Adam Weymouth is the author of the forthcoming “Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness.”
Source photographs by Jena Ardell, Corbis Historical and SzymonBartosz, via Getty Images.
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