IN Lake Superior lies a remote island, Isle Royale National Park, 134,000 acres of boreal and hardwood forests where a life-or-death struggle between wolves and moose has been the subject of the world’s longest study of predators and their prey, now in its 55th year.

Moose first appeared on this Michigan island in the first decade of the 20th century, apparently by swimming from the mainland. With no predator to challenge them, the moose population surged (interspersed by two crashes, from starvation) and devastated the island’s vegetation in search of food. Then wolves arrived in the late 1940s by crossing an ice bridge from Canada, and began to bring balance to an ecosystem that had lurched out of control.

Today, moose are essentially the only supply of food for the wolves, and wolf predation is the most typical cause of death for moose. But the wolf population is small, and decades of inbreeding have taken their toll. The ice bridges that allow mainland wolves to infuse the island’s wolf population with new genes form far less frequently because of our warming climate. With the number of wolves reduced to little more than a handful, they face the prospect of extinction.

The National Park Service is expected to decide this fall whether to save the Isle Royale wolves — a decision that will test our ideas about wilderness and our relationship with nature. This is because the park is also a federally designated wilderness area, where, under federal law, “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” If we intervene to save the wolf, will we be undermining the very idea of not meddling that, since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, has been the guiding principle behind the protection of 109 million acres of federal land?