Welcome to The Wide Open, I’m Nick Mott. I have one more very quick grizzly bear update for you. Because earlier today — I’m recording this on Monday the 27th, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced they were cancelling these public meetings scheduled across grizzly country over the next week or so about the agency’s new rule that would impact bears.
I told you about this new move in the last extra I released on the feed. But as a quick reminder, there was a big announcement a couple weeks back that took a lot of people in the grizzly world by surprise.
Steve Daines: The Fish and Wildlife Service denied Montana and Wyoming’s petitions to delist the greater yellowstone ecosystem and NCDE grizzly bears because these two populations have exceeded recovery targets by so much that the service no longer believes these populations are even distinct.
That’s Senator Steve Daines, a Republican from Montana. He was not enthused about this announcement.
Steve Daines: It’s really completely backwards.
Now, I’m playing you Daines talking about this because he was talking grizzlies at a Senate committee confirmation hearing for Doug Burgum, the new administration’s pick for Secretary of the Interior. So Daines wanted to know: What will the Trump Administration do on the grizzly bear front?
Steve Daines: Will you acknowledge that the data shows the recovery of these two populations, and commit to working with me to delist them?
Here’s what Burgum said:
Doug Burgum: I’m with you. We should be celebrating when species come off the endangered species list as opposed to fighting every way we can to try to keep them on that list.
So this little interaction is the very first lens we have into how the Trump Administration’s gonna handle grizzly bears. And just days after taking office, the administration got to it. Last week, Trump released an order that was very wonky and weedy, but in a nutshell it froze all kinds of federal rules proposed in the days before the administration changed, including this grizzly rule. So that’s why these public meetings are cancelled. The Trump Administration is reviewing what Biden tried to do with grizzlies, and deciding what’s next. And that’s all we know for now.
A Fish and Wildlife Service representative told me over email that they don’t have anything else to share at this time. So, for now, those public meetings are cancelled, grizzlies are still listed as threatened, and there could be big changes afoot in the weeks or months to come. We’ll keep you in the loop.
Keep an ear out for next week, when I’ll have one more extra for you that’s not grizzly-related at all.
