But the ESA was only meant to safeguard against \u201creasonably foreseeable future threats,\u201d Willms argues. Congress has the ability to protect species indefinitely\u2014like it did for wild horses under the 1971 Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act or for numerous species of birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. But those were specific, deliberate laws.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there are other reasons why somebody or groups of people think grizzly bears should be protected forever, then that is a different conversation than the Endangered Species Act,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
But this power works in the opposite direction, too. If grizzly bears stay on the list for too long, Congress may well decide to delist the species, as lawmakers did in 2011 when they removed gray wolves from the endangered species list in Montana and Idaho.<\/p>\n
Those kinds of decisions happen when people living alongside recovered species, especially the toothy, livestock-loving kind, spend enough time lobbying their state\u2019s lawmakers, says Dunning, the wildlife conflict researcher.<\/p>\n
When Congress steps in, science tends to step out. A political delisting doesn\u2019t just sideline biologists, it sets a precedent, one that opens the potential for lawmakers to start cherry-picking species they see as obstacles to grazing, logging, drilling, or building. The flamboyant lesser prairie chicken has already made the list of legislative targets.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, the idea of scientific research has lost its magic quality,\u201d she says. \u201cWe get there by excluding people and not listening to their voices and them feeling like they\u2019re not part of the process.\u201d<\/p>\n
And when people feel excluded for too long, she says, the danger isn\u2019t just that support for grizzly bears will erode. It\u2019s that the public will to protect any endangered species might start to collapse.<\/p>\n
The Case for Delisting the Grizzly<\/p>\n
For Dan Thompson, Wyoming\u2019s large carnivore supervisor, the question of delisting grizzlies is pretty simple: \u201cIs the population recovered with all the regulatory mechanisms in place and data to support that it will remain recovered?\u201d he says. \u201cIf the answer is yes, then the answer to delisting is yes.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why Thompson believes it\u2019s time to delist the grizzly. And he\u2019s not alone. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem population is \u201cdoing very well,\u201d says van Manen. In fact, grizzlies met their recovery goals about 20 years ago.<\/p>\n
Getting there wasn\u2019t easy. After the landfills closed and the bear population plummeted, it took a massive, decades-long effort from states, tribes, federal biologists, and nonprofits to bring the grizzlies back. The various entities funded bear-proof trash systems for people living in towns near the national parks and strung electric fences around tempting fruit orchards. They developed safety workshops for people living in or visiting bear country, and tracked down poachers.<\/p>\n
And little by little, it worked. Bear numbers swelled, and by the mid-2000s, more than 600 bears roamed the Yellowstone area.<\/p>\n
Given this success, the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed delisting the grizzlies for the first time in late 2005. Environmental groups sued, arguing bears needed continued federal protection as whitebark pine, an important food source, diminished. Bears could starve, groups maintained, and their populations could plummet again. But a subsequent federal study of what, exactly, grizzly bears eat, found that while grizzlies do munch whitebark pine seeds during bumper years, they don\u2019t depend on the trees to survive. In fact, grizzlies consume no fewer than 266 species of everything from bison and mice to fungi and even one type of soil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But the ESA was only meant to safeguard against \u201creasonably foreseeable future threats,\u201d Willms argues. Congress has the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":41209,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3425,32593,4788,945,9562,746,159,67,132,68,837],"class_list":{"0":"post-41208","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-animals","9":"tag-climate-desk","10":"tag-conservation","11":"tag-ecology","12":"tag-endangered-species","13":"tag-environment","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}