Community perspectives on the role of power and place-based knowledge at the frontline of gray wolf (Canis lupus) return

Abstract

Conflict and coexistence between large carnivores and human communities can be shaped by tolerance , or people’s willingness to absorb the impacts and benefits of large carnivores within shared landscapes. In the last decade, hazard acceptance models (HAMs) have become one of the most popular psychological models for characterizing the drivers of an individual’s tolerance of large carnivores. However, quantitative psychological models designed for individuals do not fully capture the influence of power and local context on community-level tolerance of threats and hazards. Here, we examined the importance of power, cultural context, and hazard psychology in southwestern Washington communities, where a wolf pack established in 2022 after an 80-year absence in an area with a divisive history of human-carnivore conflict. We interviewed 37 residents spanning a range of political and economic backgrounds to understand the willingness of people to tolerate wolves at this early stage of reestablishment. Qualitative analysis of themes from these interviews revealed strong support for elements of individual psychological drivers captured in HAMs. However, they also point to the importance of power relations and local economic and cultural contexts within a community in creating the conditions for intolerance, which can be hard to overcome once entrenched. Our results show how HAMs developed for individuals are embedded within critical, community-wide sociocultural and political contexts. We therefore propose several complements to existing HAM frameworks and argue that while quantitative measures are valuable for testing individual psychological variables, these quantitative examinations will be most robust when they are accompanied by qualitative approaches capable of capturing the more complex dynamics of power, community cohesion, and economic transformation. We also show that community-engaged research can help build trust and create pathways for tolerance at the earliest stages of carnivore recovery.