There was a fascinating documentary put out by National Geographic about the impact reintroducing the wolves back into Yellowstone had. It’s called “trophic cascade.”

I had reason to bring that up on a homesteading Face Book page. The page has a very conservative, Republican spirit, but we have some interesting conversations some times.

A guy came on immediately and said that the documentary had been debunked. I said that since it was put out by Nat Geo it was going to take some pretty convincing evidence to change my mind.

Well. He tried. He sent a link to Wolf.org. That article said virtually nothing, except that the cascade effect wasn’t true.

It had a link to an Accuweather article. That was the first I heard that Accuweather as anything but a weather forecaster. I read the article, though. All that did was to claim the video simplified the process. I can agree to that. It was designed to reach everyone with at least a 4th grad education. It wasn’t written for scientists.

Within the Accuweather article was a link to Wolf restoration project. That dealt with the restoration project, and did nothing to debunk the cascade effect of the last 20 years.

The next link was to a National Science Foundation article, which only discussed the role beavers play in Yellowstone. Again, it barely touched on the cascade effect.

The very last link was to a Yellowstone Science publication which was a dead link.

So, what I took away from it all is that the video oversimplified the process. That isn’t debunking anything, in my mind.

What do you think?