Bowling Green, Ky. - Four Western Kentucky University students have returned from Yellowstone National Park where they participated in a five-day class examining the controversy surrounding wolf reintroduction.

Cabrina Hamilton of Springfield, Michelle Hart of Elizabethtown, Adam Turner of Park City and Christopher Whitfield of Bowling Green spent May 30 to June 3 in Yellowstone talking to biologists, environmentalists and local business people about how the reintroduction of wolves to the Yellowstone ecosystem has affected the environment and people living in the area.

The successful reintroduction of wolves, and the compromises that were met to minimize the negative impacts on the local ranchers, is being used as a case study for the American Democracy Project.

The American Democracy Project is an initiative to educate students about how democracies function and the importance of civic engagement for sustaining democracy. The ADP Stewardship of Public Lands initiative hopes to instill in students a sense of civic duty to manage public resources for long term sustainability. In that vein, ADP is supporting adaptive governance, a new model of governance that incorporates viewpoints of multiple stakeholders in government decision making.

Along with hearing from local stakeholders, the students were able to watch the wolves interacting with each other, and their preferred prey, elk, in their natural habitat. “There was an elk that chased a younger wolf, and we got to see some of them using dominant behavior, and even eating off an elk carcass” Whitfield said.

The students also saw grizzly bears, bison, moose, eagles and a wide variety of other animals.

During the trip, each student kept a journal that will eventually be put on the WKU American Democracy Project’s Stewardship of Public Lands website at http://bioweb.wku.edu/adp/.

The website and student journals will be used in classroom activities to introduce incoming freshmen to adaptive governance. In the future, WKU plans to examine local land use conflicts to get students involved in the community and active in local government.

The students’ trip was sponsored by WKU’s American Democracy Project. Partial support for the student’s tuition and travel expenses came from the Provost’s Initiatives for Excellence, Ogden College of Science and Engineering, College of Education and Behavioral Sciences, Potter College of Arts and Humanities, the Political Science Department, and the Department of Biology.

For information about the trip, contact Dr. Philip Lienesch at (270) 745-6006 or philip.lienesch@wku.edu.

More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.

For information, contact Philip Lienesch at (270) 745-6006.

-WKU-
"A leading American university with international reach"

Office of Media Relations
Western Kentucky University
1906 College Heights Blvd., Bowling Green, Ky. 42101-3576
Phone: (270)745-4295 - Fax: (270)7455387 - E-Mail: western@wku.edu