Controversial Wildlife Chief Steps Down

Someone once told Colorado wildlife chief John Mumma that working with him was like following a person who goes around with a stick and whacks wasps’ nests.

“He said, ‘They’re just swarming all the time,’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, somebody just gave me a stick,’ ” said Mumma, a lanky fellow who at 60 still has the aura of an all-American boy.

Controversy has swirled around Mumma during his career, first as a U.S. Forest Service manager in Montana, then as director of Colorado’s Division of Wildlife.

His push to reduce logging in national forests and reintroduce the wolf and lynx made him a conservation hero to some and a pariah to others.

After five years as Colorado’s wildlife chief, Mumma plans to retire June 14 in favor of hunting, fishing and spending time with his grandchildren at his home near Durango, close to where he grew up.

But Mumma couldn’t resist one more swing at a wasps’ nest, recently bemoaning legislators’ micro-management of wildlife.

“You have a populace that’s more interested in the broadest-scale definition of wildlife management. It’s evolved in this country past a hook-and-bullet organization,” Mumma said.

Some legislators, though, still represent traditional interests, viewing wildlife as game or predators.

Mumma predicted there will be a Colorado ballot initiative to transfer management of wildlife to an independent body if lawmakers do not catch up with public sentiment. That happened in Washington state, he said.

Mumma says his passion led to the end of his 30-year Forest Service career in 1991 when he complained the logging quotas set by agency officials in Washington, D.C., were too high.

Mumma, then regional forester in Missoula, Mont., said he couldn’t permit the levels without breaking environmental laws, so he quit rather than take a forced transfer. Forest officials denied his charge during congressional hearings in 1992.

He and Lorraine Mintzmeyer, former regional National Park Service director in Denver, said they were targeted for fighting attempts to weaken environmental protections in a 1991 management plan for Yellowstone National Park after development interests complained.

Mumma also was at odds with ranching and logging representatives in 1991 when, as a member of a national task force, he recommended restoring wolves to Yellowstone. Congress rejected the plan, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service essentially adopted Mumma’s proposal and released gray wolves in the park in 1995.

Mumma has been at the forefront of several issues, said Hank Fischer, director of the regional Defenders of Wildlife office in Missoula. Colorado’s program to restore lynx is a national model, he said, and will give the state more control if federal officials demand the cat be returned to its historic territory.

“The point of the spear is the first to hit the target, and John was the point of the spear. And he paid a price,” Fischer said.

Not all conservationists see Mumma as one of them. The Missoula-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies said it was environmentalists, not Mumma, who slowed logging.

Other groups opposed the plan to designate wolves released in Yellowstone as “experimental,” meaning they don’t get the full protection of the Endangered Species Act. Mumma initially designated the plan as a compromise.

And he has critics in the Colorado Legislature.

Sen. Ken Chlouber (R-Leadville) said Mumma’s decision to reduce the amount of fish stocked in rivers and lakes is hurting fishing and tourism in rural Colorado. The wildlife agency is trying to reduce whirling disease, which attacks the nervous system of fish, and has said the disease started in Colorado hatcheries.

“John is a great guy,” Chlouber said, “but the Division of Wildlife has been in chaos ever since he took over.”

Arnold Salazar was on the Wildlife Commission when Mumma was hired. Mumma immediately faced “a laundry list” of changes mandated by the Legislature, he said.

Salazar, whose term since expired, said Mumma was criticized for things the commission told him to do: the lynx program, attacking whirling disease and reducing hunting licenses in some areas.

“We asked him to come in and do the impossible,” Salazar said, “and he exceeded our expectations.”