There’s an increasing possibility that grizzly bears may soon be removed from the endangered species list, maybe in 2025, though due to expected legal fights, I suspect “that soon” is unlikely.
Not everyone is happy about it, but I am. Delisting is a sign of success; evidence the Endangered Species Act, adopted in 1973, can marshal the resources of state and federal agencies to recover a species on the brink of extinction.
It’s especially remarkable when that success involves complicated animals like grizzly bears.
Griz need a lot of room to roam. That’s one of the challenges of managing a large, apex predator. You can fit a lot more herd animals on the landscape than you can loner bruins.
Of course, there’s also the complication of what happens when humans encounter grizzly bears. They’d rather avoid us, but we all know griz are perfectly capable of killing humans. While it may be soothing for some to wax poetic about how we’re just interlopers sharing the planet with the wild critters, no biologist who understands the assignment prioritizes wildlife recovery over human life.
Wolves are another complicated species, yet the species has been delisted in the Northern Rockies. While management of wolves remains a contentious political issue, there’s little chance wolves will again be wiped out in Montana.
These days we’re arguing about how many wolves are enough, not if they will exist at all.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates the number of grizzlies living in the Lower 48 at just under 2,000. And four of the six recovery areas identified as suitable grizzly habitat host at least a few. The bulk are in the Northern Continental Divide and Greater Yellowstone recovery zones, while there are small populations in the Cabinet/Yaak and Selkirk recovery zones. There are hopeful signs the bears are moving into the largest remaining chunk of unoccupied grizzly habitat — the Bitterroots — on their own.
The last unoccupied zone is the North Cascades in north-central Washington. I’m not holding my breath on that one.
There will always be a constituency that wants wolves and bears eliminated from the landscape. The persistence of that contingent is one of the unexpected things I’ve learned since wolves were reintroduced to the Bitterroot and Yellowstone in the 1990s. Before that, I assumed the correction of human extirpation of wolves from the landscape marked a turning point for the way we managed wild things and places. I assumed returning wolves to places like Yellowstone and the Bitterroot would lead to a growing acceptance of their presence.
For the most part, that’s what happened.
But the anti-crowd has only dug its heels in deeper and political leaders, at least on the right, are inclined to cater to those constituents. Contrast today’s political environment with the one in the 1990s, when conservative Republican Gov. Marc Racicot supported a grizzly reintroduction plan for the Bitterroot. It was also supported by labor leaders because of the blue-collar jobs created by all the restoration work the plan funded in griz habitat.
Those halcyon days of the “bipartisan” 1990s seem more like political archeology than they do an environment we could slide back into with a little clever legislating — like that Republican-supported, labor-friendly Bitterroot reintroduction plan. Still, anything resembling a grizzly eradication effort in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem today would unleash a hurricane-force political reaction that would shut down the slaughter of grizzlies (or wolves) fast.
So I don’t worry a lot, but I do a little. Even when fully restored — a hard thing to precisely describe, but it certainly will include a robust and healthy population in the Bitterroot Mountains and maybe a limited population in the North Cascades — grizzlies will never again dominate the continent of western North America.
Grizzly bears may be a force of nature, but they will forever require our acceptance and assistance to survive.