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Grizzly Bear Outreach Project [GBOP] |
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Two opinions on the recently announced delisting plans for the Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly bear population: Grizzly
program a success story By
Tom France 8.27.05 The
federal government's proposal to take grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone
ecosystem off the Endangered Species Act's threatened species list represents a
tremendous achievement. It also demonstrates America's enduring commitment to
wildlife conservation. The
National Wildlife Federation - one of the nation's largest conservation groups,
with 4 million members and supporters - has reached this conclusion only after a
thorough review of the facts and documents on which the proposal was based. Two
major reasons led us to our decision: Success
on the ground. Because of the law's protections and the focused management
efforts it has stimulated, the grizzly population in the Greater Yellowstone
ecosystem has been growing at a rate of 4 percent to 7 percent a year for at
least the last 15 years. There are now more than 600 bears in the population,
and all demographic and distribution parameters in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service Grizzly Recovery Plan have been met or even exceeded. According
to the Endangered Species Act, once a species meets the goals set for its
recovery, federal protection as a listed species must cease as long as adequate
regulatory mechanisms are in place so the species will not again decline. To
ensure adequate regulatory mechanisms, a comprehensive strategy has been
developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, and the
state fish and wildlife agencies in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. This
comprehensive strategy specifies the habitat and population protections for the
grizzly population and its habitat following delisting. It represents a good
deal for grizzly bears. Central
to the strategy is the identification of a 5.9 million-acre Primary Conservation
Area, where grizzly bears will be the management priority of land managers. The
standard for this landscape, which is 98 percent federally owned, is that secure
habitat will be maintained at 1998 levels, and no new development will be
permitted without compensatory reductions in human activities elsewhere. Based
on the amount of secure habitat and the bear population it can support,
researchers have estimated that there is a 99.2 percent probability that the
Greater Yellowstone bear population will persist for 100 years, and a 96 percent
probability of persistence for 500 years. But
there's much more to the strategy than protecting the core habitat. The
bear-management plans adopted by Montana, Idaho and Wyoming establish goals for
expanding the grizzly range far beyond the intensively protected core area.
Through these state plans, and a Forest Service commitment to adhere to them, an
additional 6 million acres of habitat, with different levels of protection, are
available for Yellowstone's growing grizzly population. Beyond
the biology and the management plans, the future for Yellowstone's grizzlies is
bright because many other initiatives are underway that will benefit both bears
and the people that live with them. The Gallatin National Forest, for example,
with support from the National Forest Foundation, is bear-proofing campgrounds
outside the core, so conflicts will be avoided even as the bear population
grows. The
Predator Conservation Alliance and the Natural Resource Conservation Service are
preventing bear attacks on livestock by providing ranchers with herders and
range-riders. Defenders of Wildlife continues to offer financial assistance to
landowners who propose projects that reduce bear conflicts. The Sierra Club is
working with resorts such as Big Sky in Montana on better sanitation and
educational outreach. None
of these programs depend on listing under the Endangered Species Act, and all
will continue after grizzlies are delisted. The
success in Yellowstone stands as a sharp rebuttal to those who claim the
Endangered Species Act doesn't work. America's largest carnivore, a species that
requires millions of acres of high-quality habitat, has been recovered in one
key area through the hard work of many people, organizations and agencies. Tom France is an attorney for the National Wildlife Federation. He is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org) in Paonia. Yellowstone's Grizzlies: Not out of the woods yetby Doug HonnoldYellowstone: Grizzly bears and geysers. People have been coming from around the world to see the national park’s main attractions for decades. But the grizzly’s future is by no means assured: The Bush administration wants to remove the Yellowstone grizzly from the list of species protected by the Endangered Species Act. Such delisting is premature. We need more bears, more habitat for bears, and we need to start truly protecting them from killing and development, before we can safely remove them from the list. First and foremost, grizzly bears need protection from unnecessary killing. Most of the bears that die in the Yellowstone area are killed by humans. Last year, game hunters killed 10 grizzly bears; bear managers killed seven more for crimes such as eating improperly stored human foods or attacking livestock. Yet another grizzly was run over by a car. All told, 26 grizzly bears died in the Yellowstone area last year, one of the highest annual totals for grizzly deaths in recent memory. Without the Endangered Species Act’s protection, the number of bears killed will only increase. Wyoming, Montana and Idaho have all announced plans to hunt Yellowstone’s grizzlies on public lands outside Yellowstone Park as soon as the bear is delisted. Four Wyoming counties that currently host grizzlies have already passed county ordinances to kill bears on sight. Delisting proponents contend that there are plenty of bears in the Yellowstone area, and that we can afford to lose a lot of them. But their assurances that bears have met recovery goals are cold comfort. Bears are not meeting recovery goals. Last year, female grizzly bears were killed at a rate that is unsustainable even by the government’s own standards. And the recovery targets are themselves deficient: In 1995, a federal judge rejected the grizzly recovery plan as inadequate to ensure a recovered bear population. That plan has never been fixed. Meeting a flawed plan’s arbitrary recovery targets is passing the wrong test. If we really have enough bears, why is the government planning to truck in an outside grizzly every 10 years to prevent genetic inbreeding in the park? Does this sound like success? The truth is we need to increase the size of Yellowstone’s bear population to reach true recovery. That means protecting habitat, which is the real sticking point for the Bush administration. Yellowstone’s grizzlies need more than just Yellowstone National Park, they need the surrounding national forest lands as well. The picture for grizzly bears does not look good if the Endangered Species Act is no longer a roadblock to the aggressive oil and gas drilling, logging, road-building, and mining championed by the Bush administration. Are we willing to make room for the grizzlies, or do we expect the bears to learn to read imaginary lines on a map? A third of the habitat currently used by Yellowstone’s grizzlies gets no protection under the government’s delisting plan. The government says it wants to maintain Yellowstone’s current bear numbers. But it has no plans to protect the more than 2 million acres of national forest lands where grizzlies are currently living, let alone the additional national forest lands where bears could roam if we were willing to hold back the coming sea of development. And how do we know that the government will deliver on its half-measure promises to protect habitat outside the national parks? Delisting proponents claim that we can protect the bear’s habitat through Forest Service plans — the same forest plans that the Bush administration says are "aspirational," not binding. This is not the time to take more habitat away from bears that are already contending with declining food sources. Yellowstone’s grizzlies rely heavily on the seed cones of whitebark pine. In good years, whitebark pines produce lots of seed cones, feeding the bears and keeping them in the high country, away from trouble. In years when the whitebark pine cone production falters, grizzlies produce fewer cubs, have many more conflicts with humans, and are killed by humans at an unsustainable level. Unfortunately, whitebark pines are under attack from a variety of fronts: a foreign disease called blister rust, mountain pine beetles, and a warming climate. That orange hue increasingly seen in Yellowstone’s forests is not a good sign for bears. The upshot? More dead bears every year. The agencies’ response? We’ll monitor the decline of whitebark and figure out what to do when the crash occurs. We’ve come too far in protecting Yellowstone’s bears to give up the game now. It’s not time to call it quits — it’s time to save the grizzlies’ last remaining habitat while we still can. Let’s build on our progress, not reverse it. Doug Honnold is the managing attorney of the Earthjustice office in Bozeman, Montana, and has been working to protect grizzly bears for more than 20 years. |
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