On January 8th, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a big announcement about the future of grizzly bear management. Host Nick Mott breaks down the news and what the reaction to it means looking ahead.
I’m Nick Mott, welcome to The Wide Open. Today, I have something pretty different from the usual stuff. And that’s because on January 8, huge news happened in the world of grizzly bears and the Endangered Species Act. I’ll get to what happened, but to understand it, I gotta tell you the backstory.
For years, the federal government’s been thinking about removing protections for grizzlies outside of Alaska. It’s a long and complicated saga, and I explained parts of it in episode 1 of the show. So here’s the refresher: Bears in the lower 48 got listed under the ESA in 1975. Back then, there were really only two populations of any size left, those in and around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. In the decades since, both those populations grew, and grizzlies started occupying places they hadn’t been seen in a century.
So by the mid-2000s, the feds thought that grizzlies in the Yellowstone area specifically had met the goals they set for them. They were, in essence, recovered. So the feds tried to delist the bears. Their plan back then was to remove protection for grizzlies, population by population, as they got healthier.
Then came the courts. Environmental groups sued, and a judge put the bears back on the list. The feds tried again in 2017, and the same thing happened: lawsuits and relisting.
Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming are the only states outside of Alaska that have any grizzlies, though now they’re being reintroduced in the North Cascades, too. And in 2021, those three states petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to delist grizzlies in one place or another. There were delays, lawsuits, then more delays. But the question was: Are bears recovered enough to get delisted?
As somebody covering and watching this all, and talking with all kinds of folks in the grizzly world, I actually thought I knew what to expect. The government would probably try to delist, and we’d see the whole lawsuit rigmarole start over again. I mean, they’d tried to remove protections twice before, they clearly thought bears were recovered. So why not try again? The question this time would be if the feds would try to delist Glacier-area bears too, and if it would all stick in court.
So last week, I got word that the decision was coming out. And sure enough, a couple hours later as I refreshed my browser there was the Fish and Wildlife Service press release. And a whole bunch of other supporting documents, too. Hundreds of pages of them.
What was in those pages blew me away. Because I was dead wrong. The government took the opposite approach.
Here’s what the decision said: Grizzlies will stay protected. Instead of delisting grizzly populations one by one as they recover, the government will instead draw this much bigger box around all the grizzlies in the Northern Rockies, from Washingston state over to the middle of Montana. The logic was this: As bear numbers have grown and populations have started occupying new areas, it’s more biologically sound to think holistically about a broader, bigger, connected grizzly population rather than these siloed, island groups of bears.
In the wake of the news, lots of conservation groups were elated with the decision. And everybody I talked with was also more or less as surprised as I was. This was a move lots of folks really didn’t see coming.
The backlash came fast too.
Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, filmed himself giving an almost minute and a half long statement that day.
He’s looking straight into the camera, the seal of the state of Montana and the American flag in the background. And I found this really striking because this kind of direct, public, vocal statement is pretty uncommon for him. But grizzlies staying protected really seems to have riled him up.
"The state of Montana has proven we are ready to manage this fully recovered species. This decision makes it clear that Joe Biden has embraced a scorched earth strategy on his way out the door," Gianforte said.
To me, Gianforte’s sentiment really sums up lots of the backlash. Opponents say the move was political — a big middle finger from Biden to Trump. To the states of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, and in years past to the federal government too, grizzlies had surpassed all the goals set out for them to recover. And now, there was this whole new framework for recovery. State management, this thing that briefly seemed so close, was now way, way in the distance. So lots of people were, to me, understandably frustrated that the goalpost had moved.
"We look forward to working with the incoming Trump Administration to explore a new path forward. Together we will return the management of the grizzly bears to the state of Montana and protect our Montana way of life," Gianforte said..
So what’s next? I think lots of people expect the Trump administration to do something. But nobody knows exactly what. One possibility is that grizzlies go the way of wolves and get delisted congressionally. The Senate, House, and presidency are all likely to be sympathetic to that idea. Another is that executive action could do something. But nobody’s quite sure what that would look like. There’s really no precedent for it.
At the same time that a new administration figures out how to deal with their grizzly headache, the Fish and Wildlife Service is gonna finalize a new rule that could relax how bears are managed in some places. Right now, it looks like this rule is specifically designed to give a bone to landowners. There’s a lot that’s still in the preliminary stages at this point, but it could make it easier for the state or landowners to kill bears that are giving them trouble, especially in areas on the periphery of bear habitat that aren’t crucial to conservation or connectivity.
LikeI said, there are a lot of unknowns here and the final rule will be informed by what comes next: A 60-day public comment period and a few public meetings. So you can actually voice what you think the rule oughta do in its final form.
Really, what this tells me is that the story of grizzlies and the ESA is far from over. AndI’ll keep you updated as all this plays out.
Thanks for listening.
Questions and Answers: Grizzly bear lower 48 revision and 4(d) rule
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