The correlation between snow and wolverines is undisputed – where there is not one, there is not the other. But the debate over why wolverines need snow for survival, and when they need it, and how much they need has become a central sticking point in the polemic over whether the federal government should afford the species protections under the Endangered Species Act.
Scientific research has shown that the tough-as-nails member of the weasel family depends on snow for survival, and because temperature increases associated with climate change mean its abundance is diminishing, with it, so too is the wolverine’s chance at long-term survival.
Or so goes the argument for wolverine listing. But the federal government has challenged that basic premise, saying that predictions about climate change’s localized impacts remain “ambiguous” and rejecting the conclusions of the agency’s own scientists and leading experts.
In short, the best available science predicting the loss of snow in a warming world in which wolverines depend on late-season winter snowpack for denning and reproduction – its most vital currency – was not conclusive enough to warrant listing.
That line of reasoning didn’t gel with Montana U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen, who earlier this month issued a sharply worded order reversing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to not list the wolverine on the Endangered Species Act list, which could have broad implications for future decisions about species affected by climate change.
As Christensen wrote in his order, “the Service’s stance here borders on the absurd.”
“If evidence shows that wolverines need snow for denning purposes, and the best available science projects a loss of snow as a result of climate where and when wolverines den, then what sense does it make to deny that climate change is a threat to the wolverine simply because research has yet to prove exactly why wolverines need snow for denning?” Christensen wrote, calling FWS’ treatment of wolverine denning requirements “arbitrary and capricious.”
“If ever there was a species for which conservation depends on foregoing absolute certainty, it is the wolverine,” the judge wrote.
The agency previously agreed with the point.
In 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed the animal receive threatened status under the Endangered Species Act, saying that “climate warming over the next century is likely to significantly reduce wolverine habitat,” and that without interventions its survival “is in doubt.”
Then in 2014, the agency reversed course on its proposed decision, calling the science inconclusive. Conservationists filed a lawsuit against the reversal, arguing FWS had ignored solid scientific data. Backing the agency were the states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, as well as oil companies and snowmobile associations.
Wildlife officials from those western states have long opposed federal protections, saying the animal’s population has increased in some areas in recent decades and that they were equipped to manage the species without federal intervention. There are an estimated 250 to 300 wolverines in the contiguous U.S., clustered in small, isolated groups primarily in the Northern Rockies of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Washington, while larger populations persist in Alaska and Canada.
One leading wolverine researcher whose work was cited extensively by the Fish and Wildlife Service – and which has focused on wolverine populations inside Glacier National Park – said the agency’s about-face was politically motivated.
Former U.S. Forest Service biologist Jeff Copeland, the current director of the Idaho-based Wolverine Foundation, has studied the animal for decades, including an extensive research project inside Glacier Park.
Blaming the FWS decision on political pressure, Copeland said while there is room for debate within the parameters of wolverine research and the impacts of climate change, state agencies did not rely on science or new information to inform their position; rather, they discredited the existing science, and the scientists – including Copeland.
“Judge Christensen’s decision vindicated the science and vindicated the scientists who were slandered personally,” Copeland said.
He’s referring to arguments by officials with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which Copeland said sought to prevent wolverine protection by discrediting his research, as well as research by Kevin McKelvey.
Christensen wrote that the FWS’ reasons for casting aside McKelvey’s and Copeland’s research didn’t hold water, and that the reversal of the decision to list wolverines was the result of “immense political pressure” exerted by politicians and state wildlife agencies
“Of the numerous western states which urged the Service not to list the wolverine and attacked the agency’s reliance on McKelvey, not one provided any scientific evidence directly rebuffing the study’s conclusions,” Christensen wrote. “On the contrary, internal Service documents expose the likely motives – freedom from perceived federal oversight, maintaining the public’s right to trap – behind the states’ efforts against listing the wolverine.”
He continued: “Montana’s attacks against McKelvey and its authors, all scientists at the Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, are particularly weak and unsavory. Not only did Montana cavalierly dismiss the study as a ‘hypothesis,’ breezing right by its well-supported conclusions, but FWP accused the Service biologists of cooking the science in favor of listing with the intent of receiving additional funding. The states’ comments are insufficient to supplant McKelvey and the Service’s reliance on them was arbitrary and capricious.”
Bob Inman, FWP’s furbearer coordinator in Helena, wrote about the broad implications of listing the wolverine as threatened in his peer review comments of the FWS’ 2013 proposal, noting that “the magnitude of the precedent that this ruling establishes warrants careful scrutiny.”
That same year, in a letter to a U.S. House working group looking at Endangered Species Act reforms, Alaska’s Fish and Game director expressed concern about listing based on models asking, “Ultimately, what species could not be listed due to future threats such as climate change?”
It remains to be seen whether Christensen’s order leads to a host of future listings based on global climate change. But Tim Preso, an attorney with EarthJustice who represented eight conservation groups in the case before Christensen, said the judge’s order could force the FWS to do away with its strategy for denying listing based on climate change.
“The service had insisted on a level of certainty with respect to the impacts of climate change impacts that really would be impossible to attain until the impacts have played out and we had lost the wolverine,” Preso said. “That cannot be the standard. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s strategy for avoiding a bunch of climate-based listings was to require 100 percent certainty, which in the case of the wolverine was really to doom the species to extinction. Judge Christensen’s order throws that strategy out the window.”
As Christensen concluded in his opinion: “If there is one thing required of the [Fish and Wildlife] Service under the [Endangered Species Act], it is to take action at the earliest possible, defensible point in time to protect against the loss of biodiversity within our reach as a nation. For the wolverine, that time is now.”