What Can Americans Agree On? Wolves.

For generations, America waged a war against the wolf; now with the animals repopulating the Mountain West, the wolf war has taken on a new shape: pitting neighbors against neighbors as they fight over how to manage wolves.

Environmentalists believe that wolves not only deserve a place in the environment but also can help repair it, while livestock producers often feel they shoulder too many costs of living alongside an animal that city dwellers simply want to gawk at. These disagreements have boiled over into fraught political battles, most recently in Colorado, where conservative ranching interests fought a narrowly passed ballot measure to reintroduce wolves to the Rockies right up until mid-December, when 10 wolves were released into the wilderness.

But there’s another way to see the latest chapter in the story of America’s wolf population: In expanding pockets of the West, citizens across the political spectrum are finding common ground as they adjust to living beside the wolf. It’s a lesson in how even in extremely polarized times, it’s possible to make heated issues less divisive.

The predominant narrative of the Big Bad Wolf, which has its roots in biblical stories and Northern European fairy tales, arrived with colonization of America. Government-funded extermination programs incentivized the killing of wolves, largely as a project of “civilizing” the wilderness, an offshoot of Manifest Destiny. By the mid-20th century, wolves in the contiguous United States had been shot, poisoned and trapped almost to extinction, with just a few stragglers in the Upper Midwest.

Public opinion began to shift with the birth of the modern environmental movement, and in 1974, wolves were among the first animals to receive protection under the Endangered Species Act. But by the time wolves were reintroduced to the Rocky Mountains in the 1990s, the animal had become a pawn in a proxy war over American values. One portion of the country saw a chance for atonement for a desecrated wilderness and the promise of a restored ecosystem. Another — big game hunters and livestock producers — saw wolves as a threat to their livelihoods. Protected by federal law, the wolf became a vessel for their larger resentments about governmental overreach.

In his memoir “Wolfer,” the trapper-turned-government-wolf-biologist Carter Niemeyer recounted seeing an Idaho sign in the 1990s that read, “Kill all the goddamn wolves and the people who put them here.” The more polarizing wolves became, the more their fate got caught in volleys of partisan legislation. In 2020, the Trump administration decided to remove wolves from the Endangered Species Act, and four months later, Wisconsin authorized wolf hunting during breeding season. Within three days, 218 wolves had been killed, and before long, conservative state legislatures throughout the West were allowing hunters to shoot and kill wolves with impunity. Ed Bangs, the biologist who led wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told a journalist that the slate of wolf-hunting legislation was all “about making snowflakes cry.”