Another Washington Post Article
Bush Shows No Fear in Grizzly Territory, by Blaine Harden. White House Takes on Popular Icon with Mining Plan.
Grizzlies are long-serving superstars of the environmental movement.
Since they came under the protection of the Endangered Species Act in 1975, the hirsute, meat-eating beasts -- "charismatic megafauna" in the activist argot -- have helped raise money and motivate voters for environmental causes.
"They are our big guns for mobilizing people and protecting places," said Tracy Stone-Manning, executive director of the Clark Fork Coalition, a conservation group in western Montana's bear country. "They represent all that is wild. You know, they can eat you."
Now, the Bush administration -- more than any White House in the past 28 years -- has been willing to take on the charisma of the big bears. The administration has made land-use decisions that it describes as sensible and scientifically based while largely ignoring howls from environmental groups about how those actions will harm Ursus arctos horribilis.
As a consequence, a painstakingly won consensus among federal experts and environmentalists about what is needed to protect grizzlies is breaking down. Some federal wildlife managers concede that, when it comes to grizzlies, no one trusts them anymore.
The latest episode came last week in a federally designated wilderness in Montana. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that a proposed silver and copper mine that would tunnel beneath the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness would not harm a small and vulnerable cluster of grizzlies, as long as precautions are taken.
If the Rock Creek Mine goes ahead -- environmental groups said they will sue to prevent construction -- it would be the first major mining project allowed beneath a wilderness area.
As notable, for an administration led by a man named Bush, is the provenance of some of the bears in the Cabinet wilderness. Four of them (three might still be alive) were imported from Canada as the result of an unprecedented grizzly-friendly decision made by the first Bush administration.
"In the early 1990s, under the first George Bush, we were the first place in the United States to bring in non-problem bears to augment an existing population," said Wayne Kasworm, a primary researcher of bears in the Cabinet wilderness for the Fish and Wildlife Service. "At the time, it was a very controversial move in northwest Montana."
Four female grizzlies were brought south from Canada in the hope that they would breed with a dwindling group of 30 to 40 bears that were considered to be at far higher risk of extinction than the relatively large and robust bear populations around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks.
The bears in the Cabinet Mountains are still at high risk of extinction, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. But in its decision last week, the service said it would be able to mitigate the bear-threatening effects of the proposed 10,000-tons-per-day mine.
The mine, expected to operate for as long as 35 years, would bring much more traffic to mountain roads, increasing the risk that bears would be hit by trucks or killed by poachers. The government would require the mining company, the Sterling Mining Co. of Spokane, Wash., to hire two bear managers, improve sanitation and acquire 2,400 acres of private land for bears. Sterling has said it has not yet decided whether to build the mine.
In explaining what he called a "very difficult decision," Ralph Morgenweck, regional director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the mine and the mitigation plan "will not substantially degrade the baseline habitat conditions for bears and will provide some beneficial effects."
Environmentalists and a number of grizzly researchers argued that the mitigation would be insufficient. They insisted that the grizzly population in the Cabinet Mountains is already so close to extinction that it would be reckless to introduce more people and more traffic.
"The whole thing appears to be driven far more by what is politically acceptable to the administration than by science," said Lee H. Metzgar, a bear population expert and retired director of wildlife biology at the University of Montana in Missoula. "In my view, the grizzly population in the Cabinet region is being managed for extinction."
A chorus of environmental groups said the Bush administration seems more interested in getting minerals out of the ground than in protecting endangered bears. Stone-Manning, director of the Clark Fork Coalition in Missoula, said the White House has been surprisingly confrontational when it comes to grizzlies.
"This is an ideological battleground for them," Stone-Manning said. "They are going after the charismatic megafauna."
Two federal officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed that the grizzly issue has become highly politicized under the present Bush administration, opening it to unnecessary criticism even when its decisions are based on sound science.
"It has given the environmentalist movement great ammunition to say that every federal decision about grizzly management is based on political trickery, which is certainly not the case," said one official, who holds a senior management position in the federal effort to protect the bears.
Most of that ammunition comes from a decision two years ago by Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton. She halted a Clinton-era plan to reintroduce grizzlies into a wilderness area in central Idaho.
The plan, six years in the making before it was scuttled, had won the support of timber companies and organized labor, and it was enthusiastically embraced by bear experts at the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Some of those experts had worked on the bear-relocation plan that, under the first Bush administration, imported Canadian grizzlies to the Cabinet wilderness -- where the current Bush administration last week approved the silver mine.
There were solid scientific reasons behind the plan to reintroduce grizzlies in central Idaho. Scientists wanted to create a travel corridor that would connect -- and enrich the genetic diversity of -- grizzly concentrations in Glacier and Yellowstone.
But the Republican governor of Idaho, Dirk Kempthorne, sued to stop the plan. He denounced the Clinton administration for trying to force "massive, flesh-eating carnivores" into his state.
Norton said she shelved the grizzly-relocation scheme to ensure "the support of the states, local communities and all interested stakeholders." But the move was widely interpreted in the West as a political payback to Kempthorne for his support in electing Bush.
Since Norton's decision, some federal officials involved in grizzly recovery say they have lost credibility in the scientific community.
This year, for example, the federal government announced plans to begin removing some groups of grizzlies from the endangered species list. There is solid evidence, for example, that the 400 to 600 grizzlies in the Yellowstone ecosystem are healthy and expanding their territory.
But the move to delist some grizzlies has been met with denunciations from many major environmental groups.
"Because of Secretary Norton's decision to manage grizzlies based on politics, instead of science, all actions by the Bush administration need to be given a lot of scrutiny," said Bart Semcer, the Sierra Club's senior staff member in Washington for wildlife issues.
With a breakdown in the federal-environmental consensus on how to protect grizzlies, there is increasing concern among bear biologists for the peaceful coexistence of the big bears with the humans who increasingly live among them. There has been rapid population growth in the Rocky Mountain West, with thousands of new homes being built in prime bear habitat.
Some federal officials fear that anti-grizzly sentiment could spread, if political rancor over the bears continues to increase.
"The future of grizzly bears is going to be built on the hearts and minds of the people who live here," said Chris Servheen, who for 22 years has been in charge of grizzly recovery for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Environmentalists such as Stone-Manning agree. She said that "us against them" confrontations risk alienating the very citizens whom environmentalists need to win over -- and could reduce the chances of grizzly survival.
May 18, 2003
Copyright 2003 The Washington Post Company
Since they came under the protection of the Endangered Species Act in 1975, the hirsute, meat-eating beasts -- "charismatic megafauna" in the activist argot -- have helped raise money and motivate voters for environmental causes.
"They are our big guns for mobilizing people and protecting places," said Tracy Stone-Manning, executive director of the Clark Fork Coalition, a conservation group in western Montana's bear country. "They represent all that is wild. You know, they can eat you."
Now, the Bush administration -- more than any White House in the past 28 years -- has been willing to take on the charisma of the big bears. The administration has made land-use decisions that it describes as sensible and scientifically based while largely ignoring howls from environmental groups about how those actions will harm Ursus arctos horribilis.
As a consequence, a painstakingly won consensus among federal experts and environmentalists about what is needed to protect grizzlies is breaking down. Some federal wildlife managers concede that, when it comes to grizzlies, no one trusts them anymore.
The latest episode came last week in a federally designated wilderness in Montana. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that a proposed silver and copper mine that would tunnel beneath the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness would not harm a small and vulnerable cluster of grizzlies, as long as precautions are taken.
If the Rock Creek Mine goes ahead -- environmental groups said they will sue to prevent construction -- it would be the first major mining project allowed beneath a wilderness area.
As notable, for an administration led by a man named Bush, is the provenance of some of the bears in the Cabinet wilderness. Four of them (three might still be alive) were imported from Canada as the result of an unprecedented grizzly-friendly decision made by the first Bush administration.
"In the early 1990s, under the first George Bush, we were the first place in the United States to bring in non-problem bears to augment an existing population," said Wayne Kasworm, a primary researcher of bears in the Cabinet wilderness for the Fish and Wildlife Service. "At the time, it was a very controversial move in northwest Montana."
Four female grizzlies were brought south from Canada in the hope that they would breed with a dwindling group of 30 to 40 bears that were considered to be at far higher risk of extinction than the relatively large and robust bear populations around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks.
The bears in the Cabinet Mountains are still at high risk of extinction, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. But in its decision last week, the service said it would be able to mitigate the bear-threatening effects of the proposed 10,000-tons-per-day mine.
The mine, expected to operate for as long as 35 years, would bring much more traffic to mountain roads, increasing the risk that bears would be hit by trucks or killed by poachers. The government would require the mining company, the Sterling Mining Co. of Spokane, Wash., to hire two bear managers, improve sanitation and acquire 2,400 acres of private land for bears. Sterling has said it has not yet decided whether to build the mine.
In explaining what he called a "very difficult decision," Ralph Morgenweck, regional director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the mine and the mitigation plan "will not substantially degrade the baseline habitat conditions for bears and will provide some beneficial effects."
Environmentalists and a number of grizzly researchers argued that the mitigation would be insufficient. They insisted that the grizzly population in the Cabinet Mountains is already so close to extinction that it would be reckless to introduce more people and more traffic.
"The whole thing appears to be driven far more by what is politically acceptable to the administration than by science," said Lee H. Metzgar, a bear population expert and retired director of wildlife biology at the University of Montana in Missoula. "In my view, the grizzly population in the Cabinet region is being managed for extinction."
A chorus of environmental groups said the Bush administration seems more interested in getting minerals out of the ground than in protecting endangered bears. Stone-Manning, director of the Clark Fork Coalition in Missoula, said the White House has been surprisingly confrontational when it comes to grizzlies.
"This is an ideological battleground for them," Stone-Manning said. "They are going after the charismatic megafauna."
Two federal officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed that the grizzly issue has become highly politicized under the present Bush administration, opening it to unnecessary criticism even when its decisions are based on sound science.
"It has given the environmentalist movement great ammunition to say that every federal decision about grizzly management is based on political trickery, which is certainly not the case," said one official, who holds a senior management position in the federal effort to protect the bears.
Most of that ammunition comes from a decision two years ago by Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton. She halted a Clinton-era plan to reintroduce grizzlies into a wilderness area in central Idaho.
The plan, six years in the making before it was scuttled, had won the support of timber companies and organized labor, and it was enthusiastically embraced by bear experts at the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Some of those experts had worked on the bear-relocation plan that, under the first Bush administration, imported Canadian grizzlies to the Cabinet wilderness -- where the current Bush administration last week approved the silver mine.
There were solid scientific reasons behind the plan to reintroduce grizzlies in central Idaho. Scientists wanted to create a travel corridor that would connect -- and enrich the genetic diversity of -- grizzly concentrations in Glacier and Yellowstone.
But the Republican governor of Idaho, Dirk Kempthorne, sued to stop the plan. He denounced the Clinton administration for trying to force "massive, flesh-eating carnivores" into his state.
Norton said she shelved the grizzly-relocation scheme to ensure "the support of the states, local communities and all interested stakeholders." But the move was widely interpreted in the West as a political payback to Kempthorne for his support in electing Bush.
Since Norton's decision, some federal officials involved in grizzly recovery say they have lost credibility in the scientific community.
This year, for example, the federal government announced plans to begin removing some groups of grizzlies from the endangered species list. There is solid evidence, for example, that the 400 to 600 grizzlies in the Yellowstone ecosystem are healthy and expanding their territory.
But the move to delist some grizzlies has been met with denunciations from many major environmental groups.
"Because of Secretary Norton's decision to manage grizzlies based on politics, instead of science, all actions by the Bush administration need to be given a lot of scrutiny," said Bart Semcer, the Sierra Club's senior staff member in Washington for wildlife issues.
With a breakdown in the federal-environmental consensus on how to protect grizzlies, there is increasing concern among bear biologists for the peaceful coexistence of the big bears with the humans who increasingly live among them. There has been rapid population growth in the Rocky Mountain West, with thousands of new homes being built in prime bear habitat.
Some federal officials fear that anti-grizzly sentiment could spread, if political rancor over the bears continues to increase.
"The future of grizzly bears is going to be built on the hearts and minds of the people who live here," said Chris Servheen, who for 22 years has been in charge of grizzly recovery for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Environmentalists such as Stone-Manning agree. She said that "us against them" confrontations risk alienating the very citizens whom environmentalists need to win over -- and could reduce the chances of grizzly survival.
May 18, 2003
Copyright 2003 The Washington Post Company