That's essentially technocracy. I think some amount of technocratic decision-making is good in a government, but at the end of the day you still need that government to be informed by the needs/desires of the people (democracy, more or less). Democracy should be informed by the technocrats, not replaced by technocracy. In this case, I think voters should be listening to ecologists to understand the effects that reintroduction of wolves will have, but it's good that it's still up to the voters to decide whether to prioritize restoring the ecosystem versus making life easier for those in the agriculture industry.

So they can only make part of the decision correctly: that there should be some sort of reintroduction, and what aspects of it are scientifically/biologically required for success. They are not a good sole party to address the economics, social/cultural/community issues, or a number of other aspects of programs like this.

Wolf reintroduction is major change with the potential for disproportionate impact on a small group of people (or at least there's a huge fear of it), and combined with a very real sense that some outside elite authority is just autocratically dictating without listening there is great potential for it to go sideways. (Keep in mind that centralized power structures dissipate with distance/isolation - witness rural sheriffs refusing to enforce specific laws in some states, etc.)

In general there should be a second angle: how to support the community, make the program successful, and have buy-in. This means maybe there should be some combination of communication, support, insurance, or grants to mitigate community concerns, and that it should be treated as an ongoing back-and-forth that tries to balance concerns for long term success, not as a dictate to people who are ignored.

We wouldn't be without a ballot initiative anyway. The article clearly states that hunters and powerful lobbying interests are fighting tooth-and-nail against re-introducing wolves. So, this isn't just down to biologists, there are interest groups coming in from multiple angles.

> It's about challenging more than a century of U.S. wildlife management.

Sounds like maybe said ecologists and biologist were part of the original problem?

"Shouldn't we be letting biologists and ecologists make this decision?"

No. In a Democracy, we should be letting voters decide.

That's a very appealing idea — after all, biologists and ecologists are the experts at biology & ecology. But what if the biologists and the ecologists disagree? E.g. maybe the wolves would be great in one biological aspect but bad for the ecosystem?

Of course any decision has multiple impacts: even if biologists and ecologists agree, what about stakeholders? Should farming and ranching experts have a seat at the table? What about climatologists (after all, maybe wolf flatulence better or worse than deer flatulence)? What about mining interests, who might need to adjust physical security? What about suburban homeowners, who might need to do likewise? What about urban renters, who might really want to see those suburbanites move into the city?

And of course even if we limit the discussion strictly to scientists who can be strictly objective about the decisionmaking, they can still be wrong, because the settled science at any point in time can be incorrect (cf. phrenology, the safety of leaded gas and the immediacy of self-driving cars).

At the very least, if we make the vote democratically, whatever happens can be blamed on everyone collectively.

Uhhh, no. Why would we? Their interests aren’t the only interests in the world. We live in a democracy not some sort of Orwellian world where we just do what the experts say. That would never work out well.

shouldn't people simply wait until they re-migrate back?

Wolves are back in my country, and we didnt do anything special for it? Usually things go wrong when humans intervene.