Deepening the darkness? Alfred Russel Wallace in the Malay Archipelago Dispelling the Darkness: Voyage in the Malay Archipelago and the Discovery of Evolution by Wallace and Darwin John van Wyhe (World Scientific Publishing Co., Ltd., Singapore; 2013) ISBN: 978-9-814-45879-5

disrupt their society and destabilise their packs. Packs may split into smaller packs made up of younger animals, with a greater influx of unrelated individuals. And younger, less-complex packs may kill cattle or approach humans for food,” Eisenberg writes. Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s and are protected within its boundaries. Using the example of a pack resident in the park, but also straying beyond its boundaries, Eisenberg describes in detail how the disruption of the social structure caused by hunters killing the lead animals ultimately led to further conflicts with humans and more killings. After these problems started in late 2012, Eisenberg writes, “the FWP [Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks] Commission tried to close areas adjacent to the park to hunting and trapping because too many Yellowstone wolves were being killed. When anti-wolf groups sued, FWP removed the buffer. This left park wolves vulnerable in places like Gardiner, Montana, an elk wintering ground immediately outside Yellowstone. This July, Congressman Peter DeFazio requested a wolf buffer zone around Yellowstone.” Elsewhere in the US, the fate of a different wolf species, the red wolf (Canis rufus) currently hangs in the balance, as the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) assesses the state of the population in North Carolina, where these animals were reintroduced three decades ago. Now they are under threat from hunting and from hybridisation with the local coyote population (Science (2014) 345, 1548–1549). All these experiences suggest that returning wild nature to our doorsteps isn’t going to be all that easy, and it won’t sort itself out naturally. Many people want to see more wildlife in the open, and the opportunity to reclaim space that is no longer needed for agriculture or industry is clearly there, but it will be important to have an informed debate on what kind of nature we want to recreate, how we are going to live with it, and exactly how wild we want to go.