We need new metaphors to cope with climate change.
There’s really no serious scientific debate about humanity’s contributions to changes in the global climate caused by increasing use of fossil fuels coupled with the deforestation and land conversion eating away at the planet’s lungs. Nor is there any immediate prospect of reining in the four accompanying horsemen of the ecological apocalypse: wholesale loss of biological diversity; transformation and loss of a diversity of ecosystems and the services they provide; environmental pollution; and human population growth and patterns of consumption.
At the same time, the weaving together of metaphors for our time — tipping points, regime shifts and the balance of nature — into a consistent narrative of environmental disaster that McKibben refers to in his book Eaarth (2000) as “collapse porn,” and which “[gives] us the slightly scary shiver of imagining our lives tumbling over a cliff” echoes the depiction of the sublime in late 19th and early 20th century landscape paintings. (For additional discussion of ecology, the sublime, and landscape art, see my 2013 paper “The suffocating embrace of landscape and the picturesque conditioning of ecology.”)
This new, contemporary sublime not only engenders feelings of awe in the face of forces larger than ourselves, it also threatens to lead us into a sense of powerlessness and paralysis when it comes to ameliorating or acclimating to these large changes. We need new metaphors — metaphors that embrace the chaotic dynamics of constant change, unsteadiness, and evolution — if we are to live on a planet that despite our wishful thinking about balance of nature to the contrary, has always been capricious, unpredictable and fundamentally uncaring. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1836 essay “Nature,” “[T]here is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith with us.”
In short, we may be on a new world, but this new world — McKibben’s Planet Eaarth — is still Hobbes’ nasty and brutish Planet Earth.
Tipping points are precarious and threaten our sense of balance. But what about the new regimes we enter after we pass tipping points? In the postcolonial world of the 1950s and 1960s, regime changes — after which newly emerging nations shifted their foreign alignments towards, for example, the Soviet Union or the nonaligned states — were cast in a negative light because they were antithetical to U.S. or NATO ambitions. The superpowers of the day did everything they could to prop up friendly regimes and maintain the stability of the status quo. In contrast, in our post-9/11 world, regime change has become desirable, especially when rogue states cross “red lines.”
But after what I recently dubbed “5/9” — that day in 2013 when we passed an atmospheric tipping point — regime change once again seem to be a bad idea. Although academics tend to use the more neutral term “regime shift” in an attempt to remove the value judgment inherent in “regime change,” regime shifts, such as the shift in global climate that we are undergoing now, are nonetheless generally seen as undesirable. Consequently, a large amount of effort, at least as measured by allocation of research dollars in the United States and European Union, continues to be focused on identifying early-warning indicators of impending regime shifts and developing strategies to avert them. (In the spirit of full disclosure, my own research on tipping points, thresholds, indicators of regime shifts and alternative states in aquatic ecosystems has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation.)
Where geopolitical actors look to regime change to re-stabilize a destabilized situation, ecologists and environmental scientists look for ways to maintain existing stability and avoid regime shifts. Common to both is an interest in stability — its continued persistence or its immediate return. When we think of stability, we think of equilibrium: a steady state in which interacting agents or forces balance each other, like equal weights on the scales of justice. For ecologists and environmentalists like Bill McKibben, a regime shift is undesirable because it threatens the “Balance of Nature,” the state in an ecosystem when the interrelationships of organisms are harmoniously integrated to a considerable degree.
The idea that nature is in balance has deep, rarely explored roots. In fact, the Balance of Nature is so deeply embedded in our discussion of these ideas that even in detailed analyses of environmental metaphors, the metaphor of a balance of nature itself is not even considered metaphoric. Rather, the focus is on if, and how quickly, social and ecological systems can return to a sustainable, equilibrium condition, albeit a new one, following some sort of “disturbance.” Equally penetrating is the idea — illustrated succinctly by the contrast between Edward Hicks’ 1830s painting The Peaceable Kingdom and Steve Sack’s 2004 updated version [both below] — that there is a prelapsarian, perfectly balanced nature out there, apart from people, and that human beings have destroyed this balance through science, technology, or, in fact, any activity beyond simple hunting and gathering.
Left: Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom (ca. 1830-1832; Metropolitan Museum of Art); Right: Steve Sack, The E.P.A.’s Peaceable Kingdom (2004), used with permission.
The Balance of Nature metaphor is completely at odds with the by now well-established facts of evolution: all life (on both Earth and McKibben’s “Eaarth”) is derived from a single common ancestor, and humans are as much a part of this continuously unfolding process as are all the other plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and viruses with which we share the planet. Evolution is a constant struggle for existence: More than 99 percent of all species that have evolved on Earth in the past 4 billion years or so have gone extinct, and there is no reason to presume that humans will, in the long run, fare any differently. Yet we persist in in removing humans from the natural world, which the Dictionary of Ecology defines as:
[a] term that is applied to a community of native plants and animals. ‘Future-natural’ describes the community that would develop were human influences to be removed completely and permanently, but allows for possible changes in climate or site. ‘Original-natural’ describes a community as it existed in the past, with no modification by humans. ‘Past-natural’ describes the condition in which the present features are derived directly from those existing originally, with relatively little modification by humans. ‘Potential-natural’ describes the community that would develop were human influence removed, but the consequent succession completed instantly (future changes in climate or site are not taken into account). ‘Present-natural’ describes the community that would exist now had there been no human modification. Because of the dynamic nature of any ecosystem, this condition may not be identical to the last original-natural state before human intervention began.
Climatologists, oceanographers, ecologists, evolutionary biologists and many others have repeatedly documented that nature is an ever-changing and at best ephemerally stable — on virtually any time scale — dynamical system, the state of which still can be reliably forecast only weeks in advance. In fact, as President Obama noted in his Georgetown speech, the most extreme scenario of climate change forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change significantly underestimates the dynamics and magnitude of climate changes we are currently experiencing. Our inability to forecast and manage regime shifts of the global climate system or to predict and direct regime changes using diplomacy or warfare spring from the same source: reliance on metaphors and derived models based on a Balance of Nature (or a Balance of Power).
So if the Balance of Nature is, and always has been, a will-o’-the-wisp, what do we do and how do we live? Many on both the extreme right and the extreme left would argue that the best path is laissez faire individualism, in which each of us builds the best fortress we can afford, complete with levees, storm shelters and well-stocked gun racks, and damn the consequences if the levees divert the floodwaters to our neighbors downstream, the storm shelters can only hold us and our close kin, and the guns keep spawning unforeseen chaotic events. A casual perusal of any daily newspaper, blog or Twitter feed suggests that this approach clearly has broad appeal. But after 5/9, McKibben’s prescription for living durably, sturdily, stably, hardily and robustly in small redoubts seems unlikely to work — and it didn’t work well in the past, either. Our best efforts to identify and forecast planetary tipping points in a world that isn’t now, and has never been, in a state of balance, can only fail while simultaneously raising unfounded hopes.
Rather, we must re-envision the sublime and re-embrace the unpredictability unfolding daily around us. The real world, in which humans are just another organism, is a messy place, but messiness does not have to be bad, and we should celebrate its ever-changing tapestry. In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin described a struggle for existence between organisms and the world around them, a struggle that included not only the elements but other organisms. He concluded The Origin (6th edition) by writing:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
As Darwin knew, and as ecologists and evolutionary biologists have demonstrated time and again, although virtually all of the organisms that have evolved and lived on Earth have already gone extinct, evolution continues nonetheless. There are deterministic laws to evolution, but their actual operation leads to chaotic outcomes. But “chaotic” is neither chaotic nor unpredictable. Rather, in a chaotic system, fixed (deterministic) rules give rise to completely different, yet entirely predictable, outcomes depending solely on the initial state of the system. The real challenge is not in learning the rules, but in learning to ride the chaotic wave.
Perhaps we should stop pretending that we live in Dr. Pangloss’s best of all possible worlds and instead cultivate Candide’s garden. When we look around us, we will daily witness the ceaseless changes to our world where all the plants and animals, including us, are on chaotic stages — out-of-balance and just trying to survive. This dynamic, unpredictable and yes, unstable, ecological theater in which most organisms simply and indifferently eat other ones and push one another out of the way, is the decisive expression of the sublime — the terrible uncertainty and ultimate incomprehensibility of the world around us that includes us.
We can keep on trying to balance our unbalanced planet; tweaking, geo-engineering and ultimately destroying what our metaphors do not allow us to understand, or we can construct new metaphors so that we can more quietly observe the world around us and more gently live in it, on it and with it.
The Secretary of the Interior recommends reducing a "handful" of monuments.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke today submitted to President Trump his promised review of 27 of the country’s national monuments.
Exactly what that review contains remains a mystery. The contents of Zinke’s report were not disclosed and will apparently not be released to the public until after the president has himself reviewed them. Zinke did tell the Associated Press that he has not recommended any national monuments lose their status and that only a “handful” will be changed in any way.
A report summary issued by Zinke discussed the review’s methodology and said, “Existing monuments have been modified by successive Presidents in the past, including 18 reductions in the size of monuments, and there is no doubt that President Trump has the authority to review and consider recommendations to modify or add a monument.”
As Sean Hecht, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law, tweeted as part of a thread yesterday:
But Congress itself retains all authority to designate, or reduce size of, National Parks, National Forests or other land units. /17
Meanwhile, however, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, held a press conference today to announce that he will seek to review and update the Antiquities Act, calling previous presidential national monument designations “abuses” of power and a “politically motivated” “gotcha grab” of land.
Bishop has previously declared that he wants Bears Ears’ national monument revoked. Bishop provided no timeline as to when he would make his recommendations for updates to the Antiquities Act and did not define what changes he would request.
Zinke’s report summary acknowledged that the comments received during the public comment period for the national monuments review were “overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining existing monuments” but characterized that support as being the result of “a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations.” Bishop echoed that, calling efforts to conserve national monuments as something coming from groups that make “a nice income” through lawsuits, an obvious dig at organizations such as the Center for Biological Diversity, publishers of The Revelator.
Bishop also repeated a previously debunked talking point that the Antiquities Act was originally intended to protect lands of up to 320 acres. In reality, one of the earliest national monument designations was the 818,000-acre Grand Canyon in 1908. The Supreme Court upheld presidential authority to create the Grand Canyon National Monument in 1920.
Expect more on this story in the coming weeks and months.
Got knowledge about endangered species? A new toolkit tells you how to put it to good use.
Scientists who want to support the Endangered Species Act, or the species it protects, have a new toolkit available to help them to do just that.
“Advancing Science in the Endangered Species Act,” written by experts from the Union of Concerned Scientists, offers a primer on the conservation law itself as well as a series of easy steps scientists and other people can take to advocate for strengthening its impact.
The toolkit — one of several published by the organization — comes in response to the dozens of legislative threats currently facing the Endangered Species Act, ranging from riders to reduce protections for certain species to attempts to gut the Act or kill it entirely.
“Everything’s kind of crazy under this current climate,” says the toolkit’s lead author, Charise Johnson, research associate with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science & Democracy. “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, I’m just a wildlife biologist, I can’t do anything.’ Well, let me show you what you can actually do.”
For scientists the first steps in the toolkit involve familiar activities such as conducting new research, identifying species of concern, and gathering and submitting scientific evidence for plants or wildlife that are candidates for protection.
“We’re just encouraging people to do the things that they already do,” Johnson says. She adds that these are all actions which support the mandate for the Endangered Species Act to use the “best available science.”
More broadly the toolkit recommends actions such as providing expert testimony, conducting peer-review of scientific assessments, reaching out to legislative representatives to advocate for science-based decision-making, collaborating with other scientists, writing op-eds, and even using social media to promote broader knowledge of at-risk species.
“Small things like that really add up,” Johnson says. “Even using social media to educate others is a huge thing that you can do as a scientist. You already know these things. By talking to other people in your community, you’re already making a little bit of a difference.”
All of this comes at a time when many scientists feel their collective work on climate change and other topics is under attack and needs to be defended. “Right now we see a lot of scientists actually wanting to engage in advocacy, which is something they normally stay as far away from as possible,” says Johnson. “We have people stepping up, saying ‘I can call my local elected representative, or write a letter to the editor, or sign a comment.’ We have scientists saying, ‘Not only am I an objective scientist, I’m also a citizen and I’m concerned and there are things that I feel I should be doing as a citizen, as my civic duty.’ ”
The toolkit focuses on two main areas of the Endangered Species Act where people can participate: the listing and delisting processes for threatened species. “The ESA is a huge statute,” Johnson says. “We realized how daunting it would seem for people who wanted to get involved. We’ve made this to help people who don’t know where to start and help them find a place to start, to get their feet wet.”
Johnson says the toolkit could serve as an effective set of guidelines for anyone, regardless of their field of expertise. “It’s not just for wildlife biologists or plant biologists or ecologists,” she says. “It’s for any scientists, or any experts, whose work would inform part of a species listing.”
Nonscientists can participate, too. Johnson says people can find helpful tips in the toolkit, regardless of their professional expertise. The webpage for the toolkit also offers a letter anyone can send to his or her senators, asking them to support science-based safeguards to protect the Endangered Species Act.
“Everybody has their place,” Johnson says. “Everybody has something that they can do. We’re just trying to give people the tools they need to do that.”
Advisers press Trump administration to subject report to controversial “red team” review.
Earlier this month, someone involved in the government’s latest report on climate change provided The New York Times with a copy of the version submitted to the Trump administration for final approval. The main intent of the leak, according to several people tracking the report, was to complicate any attempt to suppress the study or water down its findings.
Publication of the document inflamed an already-fraught debate about climate change. Administration officials and Republican lawmakers accused the leaker and journalists of manufacturing a dispute. They said the report, which was required by law, was moving through a normal process of White House review.
The report was submitted in late June and the Trump administration has broad authority to review its findings. Any one of a number of government agencies can block its release, which is ultimately subject to presidential review.
Some of the scientists involved in preparing the document expressed concern that it might never see the light of day. Katharine Hayhoe, a lead author of the report and director of Texas Tech University’s Climate Science Center, said the motivation of its 50-plus authors — mix of government and academic researchers — was to convey to the public and government officials the scope of a building crisis.
“As a climate scientist, I feel communicating this science is a moral responsibility,” she said, noting that the contributors from academia were working without pay and taking away time from their teaching and scholarships. “We are the physicians of the planet,” she added. “Climate change poses risks to people and our economy.”
Several people involved with the study said the heat drawn by the early disclosure of the document might well have the opposite of its intended effect. They said there are signs that the Trump administration would subject the draft climate report to a “red team” vetting process in which a group of scientists would be invited to vigorously question its premises.
Government officials in intelligence and national security have long used the “red team” approach to stress test policy and intelligence conclusions about issues like Russian military strength. Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has called publicly for a “red team” review of the government’s position on climate science.
Sobering Science
In many ways, the 669-page “Climate Science Special Report” is utterly unremarkable. It is a review of existing science that concludes human activities are largely responsible for the warming of the planet. Worsening climatic and coastal impacts are almost inevitable unless the world’s industrial nations significantly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
Its contents came as no surprise to foes or supporters of polices aimed at cutting climate-warming emissions. Earlier drafts, with the same basic conclusions as those in the submitted document, had been publicly posted and in wide review since January.
The science report, due out in final form late in the year, is actually just one component of a much bigger, and congressionally mandated, document, the Fourth National Climate Assessment, scheduled for publication in late 2018.
A 1990 law has required such assessments every four years by an office — the U.S. Global Change Research Program — created in 1989 by Republican President George H.W. Bush to coordinate research on climate change and other global environmental issues across more than a dozen government agencies.
There have been tussles over these assessments from the start. In the final years of the Clinton administration, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which advocates for limited regulation and is heavily supported by industry groups, filed a legal challenge to aspects of the climate assessment process. The George W. Bush administration was accused by whistleblowers of blocking federal agencies from citing the 2000 report, which had been prepared under the Clinton administration.
That climate assessment projected temperatures in the U.S. would rise “more rapidly in the next one hundred years than in the last 10,000 years” and described “widespread water concerns,” but said agriculture could likely adapt while coastal regions faced rising danger with rising seas.
An “interim” version of the second climate assessment was published by the Bush administration in May 2008, but only after pressure from a critical Government Accountability Office report requested by Senators John McCain and John Kerry, and a successful lawsuit filed by environmental groups to force action.
It’s notable that the three full assessments produced so far — in 2000, 2009 and 2014 — were all published under Democratic administrations. More than a few analysts and experts involved in this arena suspect the next assessment will not appear before a Democrat wins the presidency.
Despite the requirements of the 1990 law, the White House has substantial power to derail such assessments, said Nicky Sundt, who managed communications for the global change program office through most of the two terms of George W. Bush. The law, for instance, doesn’t specify the scope or nature of the periodic assessments, said Sundt, who is now a senior fellow for climate at the Government Accountability Project, which in 2005 released documents showing that a political appointee had edited a different government climate report to soften its findings.
The climate science report at the center of the current dispute is being managed by a subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council, a body established in 1993 by President Bill Clinton through an executive order to coordinate science policy.
That body, in theory, is chaired by the president or a designated proxy, Sundt said. The subcommittee managing the report, she said, operates by consensus, with anyone from a host of agencies able to block approval. “That opens up the possibility of all sorts of delays and changes,” she said.
And the president has the final say on what goes forward.
Another issue at the moment, she said, is simply transparency, describing the administration’s actions so far on this report as “troubled and opaque.”
Trump administration officials declined to comment on the climate science report as long as it is in draft form.
In an interview last week with a morning talk show on WBAP radio in Dallas-Fort Worth, Pruitt criticized efforts to publicize the draft findings and described next steps.
“This is a report that’s issued every four years — it’s just an assessment,” he said. “We’re going to review it like all the other twelve agencies and evaluate the merits and demerits and methodology and efficacy of the report,” he said, adding, “Science should not be politicized. Science is not something that should be just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C.”
In the interview, Pruitt appeared to offer conflicting signals on the climate issue. He hailed “what we’ve achieved in our country in reducing our CO2 footprint.” Then, seconds later, he questioned the science that has identified greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels as the prime driver of global warming.
Red Team, Blue Team
Trump administration officials focused on climate remain in close touch with groups challenging global warming science and determined to undo climate polices adopted by President Obama. According to both the Washington Examiner and the news section of the journal Nature, the administration has been weighing lists of skeptical climate scientists provided by the Heartland Institute, an industry-backed group that has for years run conferences aiming to cast doubt on climate change research.
In a blog post in late June, Patrick J. Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute, a think tank that advocates for reducing government regulation, argued that the government’s climate assessments were driven by a mix of politics and self-interest.
He pointed to the website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which described the Third National Assessment as “a key deliverable in President Obama’s Climate Action Plan’.” He added this quip: “No politics there, just science (sarc).” Then he asserted that hundreds of government officials and academic researchers make a living from the perennial reviews and research budgets on climate change. “It has always been in their interest to portray global warming as alarming, and therefore in need of even more federal research dollars,” Michaels wrote.
His post laid out several options for Trump, including replicating the Bush-era delays. He added, “If there is going to be a 2018 version, it had better be at least a 2018red team/blue team report.'”
An op-ed article by Koonin in The Wall Street Journal in April was the inspiration for the plan by EPA’s Pruitt, first reported in late June by ClimateWire, to develop an adversarial “red team — blue team” exercise to probe climate change conclusions.
In a phone interview last week, Koonin said government reports like the national climate assessments could benefit from this kind of scrutiny, no matter who is in office, to separate spin from substance.
He said issues can arise as authors choose which papers to include or exclude, and even in phrasing, especially in the summaries most people pay attention to. “You can look at the same data and say 2018we have low confidence hurricanes are increasing’ or you can say 2018we have high confidence hurricanes are not increasing,” he said. “I would like to have that discussion.”
This proposal has been widely pilloried by scientists, including John P. Holdren, who was science adviser to Barack Obama through his two terms. In a recent Boston Globe op-ed, Holdren compared the “red team” notion to a “kangaroo court.”
Koonin said he was not calling for a reassessment of scientific findings that were published by reputable scientific journals. “I don’t think this is the kind of review that should be applied to the original scientific literature,” he said. “We have peer review for that. It’s not perfect tool, but it works.”
He said he’s spoken about participating in such an exercise with Pruitt and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry (who has endorsed the idea).
Asked about the potential for politicization, he said: “I would not become engaged in this myself unless I could do so with integrity, thoroughness and transparency. But if I can do that and it aligns with the administration’s plans, that’s fine.”
Can Climate Science Survive the Political Climate?
Prediction is inadvisable. But there still is a chance the report could survive relatively unscathed, according to interviews with a range of people involved with the process, or closely tracking it.
For one thing, while the report reaches conclusions at odds with the views of Scott Pruitt and others in the administration, it also contains long sections on the scientifically established uncertainties that surround critical questions. Given the longstanding and bipartisan Washington tradition of highlighting findings that suit some agenda, there’s plenty for everyone.
Here’s a look at the clear and murky.
Drafted and reviewed by dozens of scientists within and outside government and endorsed earlier this year by the independent National Academy of Sciences, the report details findings drawn from a host of studies that are as close to certainties as science can produce.
One example is a section on human-driven trends in extreme heat and rainfall. It includes these points:
“The frequency and intensity of extreme temperature events are virtually certain to increase in the future as global temperature increases (high confidence). Extreme precipitation events will very likely continue to increase in frequency and intensity throughout most of the world (high confidence).”
Many findings directly contradict assertions of top administration officials. Here’s what the draft says about evidence for a human role in recent warming:
“[I]t is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation … Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are primarily responsible for the observed climate changes in the industrial era.”
In an appearance in March on CNBC, Pruitt emphatically disagreed with that assertion.
“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet … We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”
The report also lays out in detail sources of uncertainty around some of the most critical questions for the intended audience: institutions and individuals in the U.S., from the local to national scale, charged with protecting coasts, cities, croplands and other areas at risk from rising seas and disrupted weather patterns.
After noting three different sources of uncertainty about the pace of warming in the 21st century, the report says that changes in precipitation — often the critical interface between climate and human welfare — are even harder to predict:
“Due to the greater level of complexity associated with modeling precipitation, uncertainty tends to dominate in precipitation projections throughout the entire century, affecting both the magnitude and sometimes (depending on location) the sign of the projected change in precipitation.”
In a section on how the frequency of hurricanes and cyclones is likely to change, the report cites what’s been called a “hurricane drought” — a remarkable gap, “unprecedented in the historical records dating back to the mid-19th century” — in the U.S. being hit by storms category 3 or higher.
“In this case the assessment reaches conclusions inconvenient for political advocates on both sides — but that is how science works,” said Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a political science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who’s been writing on the evolution of the global change research office since its early days and has frequently been called on by Republicans in Congress to testify about climate policy.
He said concerns about possible suppression were “misplaced,” noting the science report is being produced under procedures laid out in the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which includes transparency provisions that make it difficult to disrupt.
“As we’ve seen, the report couldn’t be suppressed even if they wanted to,” Pielke said. “It has been public, it is public, it will continue to be public. There are plenty of things to be concerned about — this report not seeing the light of day or somehow being reclassified is not one of those things.”
The best defense of the climate report’s integrity going forward may simply be how it reflects the scientific process itself, said David Hawkins, who directs the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council and worked at the EPA during the Carter administration.
“Thank goodness we have science-based institutions and dedicated professionals who work there,” he said. “Absent a dark ages, science is relentless. Trump may be able to sit on a report that the government is required to issue but he can’t issue a report with alternate science — at least not one signed by credentialed scientists.”
A healing visit to America’s public lands reveals their history – and their continued importance.
As I slouched against the trunk of an old juniper tree in the heat of the afternoon, I thought of that Seinfeld episode when George Costanza announces his idea for Jerry’s new sitcom. “It’s about nothing,” he says. I was a few yards off the Continental Divide Trail in northwestern New Mexico, and that was not nothing. But I was pretty sure that for most people, my 10-day escape would appear a bit, well, lacking.
I was taking a long-needed respite from a stressful couple of years: moving from a beloved community in West Virginia to New Mexico, starting a new job, mourning the death of my father, and through it all, dealing with a complicated health condition not easily resolved. “Take half a tablet twice a day for a month, then get your labs redone,” my specialist in Roswell had said a few weeks earlier. “Then start the nasal spray, four times a day immediately after that. We’ll talk a few weeks later.”
Fine, I thought, but I’m also going to take the Teddy Roosevelt cure.
Teddy Roosevelt, known as our first conservation president and a robust outdoorsman, was sickly as a child. As a young man, he traveled west from his home in New York to build his strength and recover from the tragic same-day deaths of his wife and mother. In the Dakota Territories, he felt rejuvenated and fed his deep love of the outdoors with riding, roping and living in the wilderness. Later he reportedly claimed he never would have become president if he hadn’t gone West.
Like Roosevelt I was a health refugee from the East. Over several years my body had quietly developed a sensitivity to mold in a home built in a perpetually humid environment and then damaged by a major plumbing leak. Late one summer those once-silent symptoms emerged with a bang. It took months to diagnose the problem, even longer to remediate and sell the house, and longer still to find a safe place to live. My sensitivity appeared to be genetic, dormant until triggered by an extreme event. Apparently, my doctors told me, it even made me susceptible to chronic Lyme as well.
That news was enough for me — I was outta there. Lyme disease had exploded in the Mid-Atlantic over the previous decade, spreading from its initial stronghold in New England and New York down to the forests (and lawns) of Virginia and West Virginia. I’d known too many people with Lyme and heard the horror stories of chronic cases. Virtually free from that threat in New Mexico, it was a relief to be able to hike again with little fear of infectious, nearly invisible ticks secretly burrowing their way into my skin. Rattlesnakes I could deal with, I decided; at least I’d know when they bit me.
My ongoing struggle had left people worrying about me. “How are you even awake?” my sister had asked me the week before when I shared my lab results with her over the phone. Like me she suffers from thyroid problems, and my numbers were off the charts, a likely complication of my mold woes. “I am pretty exhausted,” I had to admit. The months of constant packing, moving, working and medical appointments had caught up with me. So what would she think if she knew that instead of napping for a few weeks, I went camping and hiking instead?
Each day on my trip I would hike in the morning to avoid the unrelenting heat and sun of June afternoons in the high desert. I rested and read in the afternoons. Gradually, my energy improved, my symptoms declined, and even my back pain — earned through long days propped at the computer on harsh dining-room chairs — magically dissolved. I was alone most of the time, with joy, relief and luxurious lethargy intermingling as I reveled in the wild isolation. I encountered almost no one else on the trails, and the modest campground where I planted my tent remained underused, housing a small, transient community of (mostly) quiet campers.
Despite the soothing calm of my trip, I couldn’t fully leave the rancor of America’s divided politics behind. As I hiked and camped on federal lands — at two national monuments, a designated wilderness area, and a national conservation area — I knew what was going on back in Washington. The secretary of the Interior was slashing his own department’s budget and reevaluating the designation of more than two dozen national monuments across the country.
This felt so contrary to the intentions of that past president who had traveled to the West more than a century earlier. After those life-defining experiences, Teddy Roosevelt established the first national monuments soon after Congress passed the Antiquities Act of 1906; the law that gave presidents the power to protect sites of historic, prehistoric or scientific interest. In fact, I was camping in one of Roosevelt’s first designated sites — El Morro — marveling at the ancient ruins at the top of the mesa, pondering the petroglyphs etched in stone at the base of the cliff, and deciphering the signatures of Spanish explorers and American pioneers who passed by centuries later.
Over time national monuments have proven to be popular with Americans, and studies show that they help drive local economies. Now the Trump administration was claiming that past presidents had locked up lands and failed to consult properly with the public. Progressives believe that mining and drilling interests are behind the review, and that ideological conservatives want to open up more public land for oil and gas drilling. Although El Morro wasn’t on the administration’s hit list, I couldn’t help feeling angry. The breathtaking landscape around me suggested a compatible mosaic of public, private and tribal lands supporting conservation, tourism, ranching, housing and small businesses. What exactly was the problem? And could the stroke of a pen preclude future escapes elsewhere?
“Just like old times,” my husband commented when he visited one weekend night, leaving his work in the city behind. He studied me intently as I relaxed in a canvas camp chair, my dusty legs crossed lazily in front of me. He was referring to our graduate school days. Back then we’d rent a cheap house or apartment for the summer and spend much of our time in the searing plateaus of central Wyoming while he mapped rocks for a geology thesis. Now we were back in a similar situation: We’d given away most of our belongings to rid ourselves of any lingering mold spores, and we were living temporarily in a furnished apartment in Albuquerque while we sorted out a more permanent home.
For the moment, the difficult years slipped away and the world consisted of just us, stripped down to our most basic needs in a landscape that had sealed us as a couple so long ago.
Soon after he left, I had to face my own return to civilization. I hated the thought of leaving the peace and safety of the desert for the uncertainty of modern life again. The doctor’s primary prescription for my recovery was to avoid contact with any water-damaged building so that my hyped-up immune system could calm down. That was proving unreasonably difficult to do when surrounded by countless unfamiliar buildings. A leaky roof, a broken pipe — all hidden from view — could set me off again.
Hence the nothingness of my vacation, an escape from the invisible detritus of the built environment to the vast emptiness of wild places. Roosevelt’s escape to the West set the stage for his presidency, which allowed generations of Americans like me to find relief on our public lands. I was grateful for his foresight, and for our common experience. Like him, from the nothingness of wildness, I hoped to recover everything.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity, or their employees.
The Trump administration this weekend announced it has disbanded the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment, the 15-person panel responsible for long-term climate-change planning. The committee’s responsibilities include the National Climate Assessment, next due for publication in 2018. NOAA told the Washington Post on Saturday that the updated assessment would not be affected by the committee’s dismissal, although the report has already been a hot-button topic inside the administration.
Toxic algae can threaten our drinking water, but a new study also reveals that it causes economic harm. According to The Toledo Blade, research from Ohio State University reveals that algal blooms in two of the state’s lakes over the past six years have cost homeowners an amazing $152 million in property values. The blooms have also had an impact on recreational fishing, affecting not just the fishing industry but nearby businesses that rely on the tourism. A summer-long bloom could cause more than $5 million in economic harm to the angling industry, according to the researchers.
On the cusp of historic ESA success, feds move to permanently isolate iconic bears.
ISLAND PARK, Idaho – From the top of 9,898-foot Sawtell Peak, just outside the western boundary of Yellowstone National Park, I imagined I was a young male grizzly bear on the move, seeking new territory beyond the park’s safety.
Grizzlies (Ursus arctos horribilis) — powerful and omnivorous — are able travelers and often on the lookout for new habitats. That’s especially true for younger bears, which must disperse and find their own personal territories away from established, ornery, solitary males, which are known to kill cubs.
Dispersing grizzlies which happen to wander beyond the national park, where hunting is prohibited, must run a gauntlet of human dangers: highways, tempting-but-deadly garbage piles, tasty and easy prey such as sheep and, most of all, people, whose first instinct oftentimes is to reach for a gun, a trap or a poison.
The essential question becomes: How do grizzlies, which were nearly wiped out in the Yellowstone region and most of their historic range in the lower 48 states more than a century ago, naturally expand their current range and grow their numbers so that extinction is no longer a threat?
It’s not theoretical. A few weeks ago the Trump administration took Yellowstone’s grizzlies off the endangered species list, renewing questions about how — and whether — these bears will ever connect with other grizzly populations in the northern Rocky Mountains. In the long run, bear experts say, that connectivity will be critical to a healthy population of bears in the lower 48.
Conservation organizations and academic biologists support this natural dispersion and connectivity, where grizzlies could move through protected corridors across a vast landscape and find other grizzly populations. There, they can mix their genes and improve their odds to survive as a species.
On the other hand, state and federal government wildlife managers support an approach where isolated populations of grizzly bears are confined to within highly controlled “Demographic Monitoring Areas” that limit natural connectivity to reduce the bears’ impact on human activities. If and when the grizzlies need a genetic boost to secure their long-term survival, breeding animals can be translocated from one location to another.
The long-term fate of about 700 world-famous Yellowstone grizzlies and about 1,100 other grizzly scattered across pockets in the Northern Rockies — and the fate of how the Endangered Species Act will be implemented in the future, particularly when it comes large, wide-ranging predators such as grizzlies and wolves — hinges on which management approach is ultimately adopted.
The grizzly bear is the oblivious star in a high-stakes legal and political battle that is now unfolding that will determine how and where grizzlies will share the upper Rocky Mountain landscape with human beings.
From my perch on Sawtell, I had a grand view of a fork in the grizzly trail, one that is fraught with danger — and the other with a fragile promise of unclaimed territory.
Grizzly trail. Photo: John Dougherty
To the south lies the resort community of Island Park, where the summer population swells to more than 10,000 as visitors flock to summer homes, RV parks, cattle ranches and campgrounds scattered throughout the Caribou-Targhee National Forest. U.S. Highway 20 bisects the community. Its 70-mile per hour speed limit and heavy truck traffic pose a significant obstacle for a young grizzly in search of new turf.
If a bear meanders through Island Park, it risks creating a ruckus by delving into garbage cans, ripping down bird feeders, munching on dog food or preying on livestock — all actions that could attract attention from wildlife managers who could decide to take lethal action on the “problem” animal. Even if the bear escapes that gauntlet and heads to the southwest, it will descend into a valley filled with hostile farmers — a certain dead end.
But if a grizzly heads northwest towards Henry’s Lake at the base of Sawtell Peak, and manages to avoid a couple of campgrounds and ever-encroaching subdivisions, and ascends into the Centennial Mountains that cut to the west, it has a chance to roam far and wide and help recolonize long-lost habitat.
Henry’s Lake subdivision. Photo: John Dougherty
Grizzlies on the Move
Despite the formidable obstacles, Yellowstone grizzly bears are steadily expanding their range, often using the Centennial Mountains as a springboard to the west and to the north. Yellowstone grizzlies are now found throughout the Gravelley and Snowcrest ranges north of the Centennials.*
Centennial Mountains. Photo: John Dougherty
Meanwhile, the same grizzly dispersion dance is occurring 370 miles north, where another population based in and around Glacier National Park is also steadily expanding. The Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem of grizzly bears numbers about 960 and they are dispersing down river valleys and across mountain ranges. Intrepid young males range far and wide, making headlines in community newspapers.
Courtesy Frank van Manen
“There are places throughout the ecosystems where bears probably haven’t been for over 100 years,” says Frank van Manen, a U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist and the supervisory research biologist for the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, which conducts research on grizzlies and monitors their populations and death rates.
The gap between dispersers from the two grizzly populations is steadily narrowing. Wildlife biologists hope that Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem grizzlies, which have a strong genetic base supported by breeding with grizzly populations in Canada, will connect and breed with the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzlies, which have been isolated for more than 100 years.
“I think we are probably less than a decade away from that if the populations keep expanding like they have been,” van Manen says during an interview in his office near the Montana State University campus in Bozeman. “The edges of the distribution are now only separated by about 70 miles and that’s close to striking distance of a dispersing male. So we’re pretty close.”
One or more grizzlies dispersing possibly from the Northern Continental Divide population were sighted last year in the Upper Big Hole River Valley.
Courtesy Caroline Byrd
Caroline Byrd, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a Bozeman-based grizzly bear advocacy group that works to reduce conflicts between bears and humans, puts the distance between to the two populations at only 40 miles.
“There’s a lot of open habitat where there’s room for bears to expand and move through,” she says.
Allowing the Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide populations — which have been separated for more than 100 years after grizzlies were hunted to the brink of extinction in the lower 48 — to naturally reconnect and interbreed would mark a monumental success for the Endangered Species Act, wildlife biologists and conservation groups say.
“I would consider it a victory for the Endangered Species Act, and a major stepping stone toward (grizzly bear) recovery,” says Dr. Jeremy Bruskotter, an associate professor at Ohio State University’s School of Environment and Natural Resources, whose extensive writings about the Endangered Species Act include an in-depth examination of how to define what part of a species’ range is protected.
“Eventual connectivity between populations would be a tremendous achievement,” adds Erin Edge from Defenders of Wildlife.
But that natural connectivity may never happen.
Feds Remove ESA Protections
The Trump Administration’s July 30 removal of the Yellowstone grizzly bear population from the endangered species list — a process begun years earlier under the Obama administration — sets up new barriers for natural grizzly connectivity. Conservationists and academic experts say it is another in a series of steps by the government to reduce the size of habitat considered necessary to recover threatened and endangered species.
The decision turns over management of Yellowstone grizzlies to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, which all plan to institute regulated trophy hunting on the perimeter of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. If state wildlife managers institute a hunt this year, which is currently considered unlikely, up to 20 bears could be legally shot. (See our story, “Yellowstone Grizzlies: How Many Could Hunters Kill?”)
Trophy hunting has generated a firestorm of protest, despite the relatively low number of bears that could legally be hunted based on 2016 population and death rates. A potential bear hunt would impact fewer than the 23 grizzlies killed in 2016 by wildlife managers because of livestock conflicts. Last year, a total of 58 bears are known to have died, most of which from conflicts with humans. Eleven bear deaths are under criminal investigation possibly related to poaching.
Van Manen doesn’t believe trophy hunting will have any impact on maintaining a stable Yellowstone grizzly population. The study team has set overall mortality rates for independent male and female bears that are designed to keep the long-term population stable at about 674 bears. If the Yellowstone grizzly population falls below 600, no hunting will be allowed; culling would be reserved in the case of risk to human life. But the number of bears could fall as low as 500 before revisions would be required to a grizzly conservation plan signed by the states.
“The way I look at it as a scientist is that the hunting mortality is just one other form of mortality,” van Manen says. “Whether managers remove an animal or whether it actually gets killed by a hunter, is very different in terms of how society might look at that, but in terms of the number-crunching, it’s really the same thing for us.”
Academic researchers who study large carnivores say resuming any hunting on a species just removed from the endangered species list — especially a predator such as grizzlies, which has one of the lowest reproductive rates of all terrestrial mammals — makes no sense.
Courtesy Brad Bergstrom
“Why did we spend all of this money to just get them beyond the threshold where they can kind of sustain themselves only to risk pushing them back down by hunting?” says Dr. Brad Bergstrom, a biology professor at Valdosta State University and an expert on large carnivores.
“Would you consider doing that to the bald eagle?” he asks. “Start shooting them immediately after taking them off the endangered list? It’s absurd. To me it just violates the spirit of the law.”
Ring of Fire
The furor over grizzly trophy hunting has overshadowed an even greater institutionalized risk to the bears in the West.
The federal management plan laid out in a 131-page rule creates a second perimeter beyond the state-managed hunting zones where the deaths of grizzlies that move into this area and die, for any reason, will not be measured as part of the overall Yellowstone population.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has determined that bears dispersing from the 16,000 square mile “Demographic Monitoring Area” that surrounds Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and adjacent national forests, wilderness areas and an Indian reservation are “not biologically necessary” to maintain the Yellowstone population.
The grizzly bears recently sighted in the Upper Big Hole River Valley that could provide the long-awaited genetic connectivity between the Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide populations are included in the no death-count zone.
These potential deaths are important because they will understate overall grizzly deaths and not be included in a federal formula to determine hunting quotas within the Demographic Monitoring Area that is designed to maintain a long-term stable Yellowstone grizzly population.
Bears that disperse outside the Demographic Monitoring Area but within the much larger Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem now fall solely under state jurisdiction and the states can set whatever hunting quota they wish. If a dispersing grizzly manages to get beyond the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem boundary, it once again falls under Endangered Species Act protections, for now.
Grizzlies that die in “no count-death zone” will not be included in annual mortality census.
A Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokeswoman says the state plans to take a “very conservative” approach to hunting in the area outside with Demographic Monitoring Boundary and within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The state recognizes the importance of connectivity between the Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems, but its stated goal is to manage grizzly bears as a game species and “allow for grizzly populations in areas that are biologically suitable and socially acceptable.”
No definitive grizzly hunting plans have been released.
Courtesy David Mattson
Dr. David Mattson, a leading expert and former member of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, says bears found outside the Demographic Monitoring Area will fall into a “free-fire zone” that could create a death trap for dispersing grizzlies.
This “will almost certainly reduce the odds of connectivity that would have otherwise likely happened with (Endangered Species Act) protections,” he says.
The Fish and Wildlife Service appears to be following a similar approach of creating a no death-count zone around the Northern Continental Divide population when the agency removes that population from the Endangered Species Act, which it intends to do.
According to the 2013 Montana grizzly management plan, if a no death-count zone is created around Northern Continental Divide Demographic Monitoring Area, it would border the Yellowstone no death-count zone. Taken together this would create a vast area between the two largest core populations of grizzlies in the lower 48 where grizzly deaths would not be counted and hunting would be controlled by Montana with no federal oversight.
Federal plans call for creating a “no death-count zone” around the Northern Continental Divide grizzly population that would abut the Yellowstone “no death-count zone,” creating a vast area where grizzly deaths are considered biologically unimportant.
Cattle ranches dominate the rural economies in the region between the Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems where bear deaths wouldn’t be counted if the Fish and Wildlife Service follows the same delisting plan with the Northern Continental Divide population as it has done with Yellowstone.
“I guarantee you that grizzly bears are not going to stop depredating on cattle,” Mattson says. “It’s not likely they are no longer going to be a problem for ranchers, like getting into garbage. I guarantee you that the more likely response, even now, in the states is going to be to kill bears and most of those conflicts are going to be concentrated on the periphery.
“Bears that maybe were being given a path before (under Endangered Species Act protections), will not have that any longer,” he predicts.
The Long Road to Recovery
There were once an estimated 50,000 grizzly bears in the western half of the contiguous United States. As European settlements spread across the West, most of the animals were shot, trapped or poisoned — the victims of the same kind of hostility that confronted wolves, mountain lions and other large carnivores. Grizzlies in the West had been pushed back into a few pockets in the Northern Rockies that constitute less than 4 percent of their former range.
By the time the isolated Yellowstone grizzly population was protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, there were as few as 136 bears. The Yellowstone population had been sharply reduced after open-pit garbage dumps that were favorite grizzly feedings grounds were closed in Yellowstone. After they were protected the Yellowstone grizzly population steadily expanded throughout the 1980s and 90s. Their numbers leveled off after the turn of the century.
Grizzly bear range expansion in GYE 1990-2016. Credit: Dan Bjornlie, Wyoming Game and Fish Department and Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. Public domain.
No one knows for sure how many grizzlies are roaming Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and the adjacent national forests and wilderness areas and beyond that make up the Demographic Monitoring Area. The best that can be done is to make reasonable estimates.
The estimated total population of grizzlies within the Demographic Monitoring Area is based on a complex model called the Chao2 estimator which extrapolates the overall population from the number of female bears with newborn cubs counted each year.
Van Manen says the Chao2 model underestimates the number of grizzlies, particularly as the population increases. “When we say there are around 700 bears in the ecosystem, that is severely underestimated,” he says. “The bias is as much as 40 to 50 percent.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been trying for years to declare Yellowstone’s famed bears a conservation victory by removing them from the endangered species list. But that effort has been the source of long-simmering controversy and litigation. The agency delisted the bears in 2007, but environmentalists sued and federal court decisions put the bears back on the endangered list in 2009.
At that time, the court ruled that the Fish and Wildlife Service failed to evaluate the impact of the collapse of whitebark pine forests throughout the Yellowstone region. The pine seeds serve as a major food source for some grizzlies. The agency spent the next few years studying the impact.
In 2013, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team found no relationship in the decline of whitebark pine and the overall health of grizzly bears, which are famous for being opportunistic omnivores and very flexible in their diet. A second study in 2015 came to similar conclusions.
“We are not seeing for either males or females that the percent of body fat is declining, which would have to happen for these changes in food resources to start taking a toll on the population,” van Manen, one of the authors of each study, says in an interview.
Now, one of the key points of contention is whether the population in and around Yellowstone can be considered recovered in isolation from several other populations in the lower 48 that remain very much a work in progress.
The American Society of Mammalogists and the Society for Conservation Biology sent a joint letter in May 2016 opposing the Fish and Wildlife Service’s then-proposed piecemeal strategy of removing the Yellowstone grizzlies from endangered Species Act protections before the entire grizzly population in the lower 48 states is recovered.
“In our professional judgment,” the letter stated, “both the best available science regarding carnivore recovery and the plain language of the ESA obligate USFWS to manage the metapopulation of grizzlies in the lower 48 states, not just each population individually.”
A metapopulation is a group of populations of the same species that are separated by space. These spatially separated populations interact with individual members moving from one population to another.
“What conservation geneticists have argued for some time is that the focus ought to be on preserving for the long term the whole metapopulation,” says Bergstrom, the Valdosta State professor. “Then, you have to look at how each subpopulation plays into that ultimate goal.”
Van Manen says he isn’t concerned about the loss of genetic diversity if the Yellowstone and Northern Continental bears are prevented from naturally connecting. He says there is no indication now or in the near future of genetic depression with the Yellowstone bears.
He points to a 2015 research paper that concluded the Yellowstone population is “sufficiently large to avoid substantial accumulation of inbreeding depression, reducing concerns regarding genetic factors affecting the viability of the Yellowstone grizzly bears.”
And if genetic depression becomes a factor, van Manen supports the approach of translocating bears. “There would be an easy solution by moving animals from another ecosystem into Yellowstone and make sure they breed and produce offspring. It only takes a few animals in every generation to do that.”
The same research paper states that over many generations the grizzly population “could benefit from increased fitness following the restoration of gene flow particularly given the unpredictability of future climate and habitat changes.”
Conservation groups including Defenders of Wildlife and Greater Yellowstone Coalition stated in a 2015 letter to the U.S. Forest Service concerning grizzly recovery plans that relying on “human assisted trans-location does not support the notion that the [Yellowstone] population has been restored to where it is again a secure self-sustaining member of its ecosystem.”
That supports the conservation researchers’ contention that natural grizzly bear dispersal between the subpopulations helps strengthen the entire metapopulation and would support creation of a healthy regional ecosystem that can support the West’s largest predator and other species such as wolverines.
“So, from the standpoint of greater Yellowstone it is very important that it be allowed to play its role in providing emigrant dispersers to other populations and vise-versa,” Bergstrom says. “Its own health, ultimately in the long term, over many generations, relies on receiving immigrants.”
Connectivity Roadblocks
Grizzly researchers who support natural connectivity versus relying on translocating bears between highly controlled, isolated populations say corridors need to be established between the six grizzly bear recovery zones created by the Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1982 Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan.
So far, none exist. Thirty-five years after adopting the recovery plan, only two of the six ecosystems have a significant number of grizzly bears.
The largest grizzly recovery area is the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, with about 700 bears, in northwest Wyoming, southeast Montana and eastern Idaho and includes Yellowstone and Grand Tetons national parks. The Yellowstone ecosystem includes 34,375 square miles, according to the National Park Service, which notes the “size(s), boundaries, and description of any ecosystem can vary.” The Yellowstone Demographic Monitoring Area rests within the Yellowstone ecosystem.
The Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, with about 960 bears, covers 16,477 square miles in northwest Montana and includes four wilderness areas and Glacier National Park.
In addition, there are about 146 grizzly bears scattered among three of the four ecosystems in Idaho and Washington:
The Selkirk Mountain Ecosystem encompassing 2,200 square miles in northeastern Washington, northern Idaho and southern British Columbia. It has approximately 88 grizzly bears.
The Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem encompassing 2,600 square miles in Northern Idaho is believed to have approximately 48 grizzly bears.
The North Cascades Ecosystem encompassing 9,500 square miles in north central Washington has between five and 10 grizzly bears and is considered the most at-risk population in the lower 48.
The Bitterroot Ecosystem in central Idaho is one of the largest contiguous blocks of public land in the lower 48 and includes the Frank Church-River of No Return and the Selway-Bitterroots wilderness areas. The 5,600 square mile ecosystem is considered by the Fish and Wildlife Service to be prime habitat for grizzly bears. There are currently no known grizzlies.
The Fish and Wildlife Service’s current policy of recovering grizzly bears by separate populations rather than connecting the existing metapopulation is counter to warnings the agency issued in 2000.
“Wildlife species, like grizzly bear, are most vulnerable when confined to small portions of their historical range and limited to a few small populations,” the agency stated in its failed attempt in 2000 to reintroduce grizzlies to the Bitterroot Ecosystem.
That effort went nowhere because of strong opposition from Idaho, whose former Gov. Dirk Kempthorne famously stated in 2000: “I oppose bringing these massive, flesh-eating carnivores into Idaho.” Kempthorne later served as Secretary of Interior, which oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, under President George W. Bush.
Jim Peaco, Yellowstone National Park
Grizzly bear advocates now hope that dispersing Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide grizzlies will eventually end up in the Bitterroot Ecosystem, on their own.
“The biggest available unoccupied habitat that we have for them is the great wilderness areas of Central Idaho,” says Byrd of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. “The Frank Church, The River of No Return, the Bitterroot Selways — that’s our biggest wilderness area in the lower 48 and they don’t have any bears in them.”
She hopes that over time the bears will migrate there, which will give her group the opportunity “to keep building social tolerance, keep working with the land owners and ranchers and livestock operators to say, ‘We are here to help you with conflicts with bears and wolves.’”
The Fish and Wildlife Service policy, however, is creating obstacles that may be impossible to overcome.
The agency’s policy of removing individual ecosystems from the endangered species list, creating a no death-count zone around the bears’ conservation area and turning over management to the states with game and fish commissions strongly biased against predators, supporting elk and deer populations and emphasizing predator trophy hunting may end dispersal, Mattson and others say.
“Watching them (the Idaho, Montana and Wyoming game and fish commissions) on what they have done with black bears, what they have done with mountains lions, and what they have done with wolves, is that to the extent that they perceive these predators to have negative impacts on harvestable surplus of large herbivores, they will kill these large carnivores,” says Mattson, who is sharply critical of the scientific methods employed by government scientists claiming they are biased to support political agendas.
“And to the extent that these large carnivores are a pest for ranchers and agricultural interests, they will kill predators,” he adds.
Raising the Stakes
To legally justify its decision to remove the Yellowstone grizzly population from Endangered Species Act protections before the rest of the grizzly population is no longer threatened, the Fish and Wildlife Service determined the Yellowstone grizzlies constitute a “Distinct Population Segment” that has reached the carrying capacity of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and therefore should be removed from the endangered species list.
Multiple lawsuits potentially to be filed later this summer are expected to argue, in part, that the use of a Distinct Population Segment was primarily intended to allow the Fish and Wildlife Service to list isolated populations under the Endangered Species Act, not as a mechanism to delist an isolated population like the Yellowstone grizzlies without first assessing the overall impact of removing the Yellowstone population on the remaining bears.
The Washington, D.C. circuit court of appeals issued a decision Aug. 1 that could undercut the government’s Distinct Population Segment approach to removing grizzly bears from the endangered species list. The appeals court vacated the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to remove Great Lakes gray wolves from the endangered species list using Distinct Population Segment as a basis for its decision.
The appeals court said the agency does not have the power “to delist an already-protected species by balkanization.” In a unanimous decision, the court ruled the agency “cannot circumvent the Endangered Species Act’s explicit delisting standards by riving an existing listing into a recovered sub-group and a leftover group that becomes an orphan to the law.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service used a similar approach when the agency removed the Yellowstone grizzly population from the endangered species list without considering the impact of that action on the surviving grizzly populations.
Kelly Nokes, provided
“The Endangered Species Act is intended to restore critically imperiled species across their native habitat, not to claim a recovery success story by restoring an isolated subpopulation alone, and effectively turning our National Parks into proverbial zoos,” says Kelly Nokes, carnivore advocate for WildEarth Guardians, a Missoula, Montana conservation group.
The upcoming legal clash between the Fish and Wildlife Service and environmental groups (including the Center for Biological Diversity, which publishes The Revelator) over the legality of removing the Yellowstone grizzlies from the endangered species list comes with high political risk.
Some conservation organizations, including the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, are worried that a successful legal challenge to the Yellowstone grizzly delisting rule may create a serious backlash with possible negative outcomes for the bear.
Byrd, the group’s executive director, says it is unlikely that a new grizzly bear delisting rule written under the Trump administration would be better than the current rule that was primarily developed under the Obama administration.
She also worries that Congress may react by passing laws that would remove all grizzly bears from the endangered species list. And, even more devastating, she says, is the possible gutting of the Endangered Species Act, which is already under unprecedented attack from conservative members of Congress.
“It’s a high-stakes game right now that we all find ourselves immersed in,” says Byrd.
Jim Peaco, Yellowstone National Park
But grizzly experts like Mattson say it is worth the challenge.
“This is about a whole lot more than even just bears on the ground,” he says. “It’s also about our vision of ourselves in the world relative to animals like bears and what is the place in the world for them and how do we consider their recovery in the face of the severe threats that are being propagated everyday by us. Climate change and development, you name it.
“Do we have such an ungenerous and poor vision that we think 500 bears confined to an isolated ecosystem is enough to constitute recovery?
“To my mind, that’s representative of the impoverished spirit.”
* Update: The Greater Yellowstone Coalition has retracted statements made by two of its officials in a taped interview with The Revelator that Grizzly bears, including a female and two cubs, are in the Tobacco Root Mountains. The group is now stating that reports of Grizzly bears in the mountains are a “rumor.” The Revelator has deleted references to Grizzly bears in the region from the story.
The total number of grizzly bears that will be available for hunting inside the Yellowstone Demographic Monitoring Area each year will depend on the annual estimated grizzly population.
The Demographic Monitoring Areas covers 16,000 square miles and includes Yellowstone and Grand Tetons national parks, surrounding national forests and wilderness areas and the Wind River Indian Reservation.
Up to 20 grizzly bears could be hunted in 2017 based on 2016 population estimates and acceptable federally set mortality limits. Trophy hunting is highly unlikely in 2017 because the three states bordering Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks intend to hold public hearings before hunting rules are finalized.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has set an annual population goal of 674 bears within the Demographic Monitoring Area, which is the estimated average population between 2002 and 2014.
The agency has set total mortality rates for independent males, independent females and dependent young in order to maintain the target population. The mortality rates increase as the population rises above 674.
Last year there were an estimated 695 bears in the monitoring area. The maximum mortality limits for independent males at this size of population was 20 percent and for independent females and dependent young 9 percent.
The estimated number of independent males in 2016 two years and older was 238. The estimated number of independent females two years and older was also 238. The estimated number of dependent young was 213.
Based on these numbers, the total acceptable mortality for independent males last year would have been 47.6 (20 percent of 238). The total acceptable mortality for independent females would have been 21.4 (9 percent of 238). The total acceptable mortality rate for dependent young would have been 19.17 (9 percent of 213).
If mortality from all causes other than legal hunting is less than the total number of allowable deaths based on the mortality percentage at corresponding population levels, then the difference can be allocated to the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho for possible trophy hunts. Source: Federal Register/Vol. 82, No. 125/Friday, June 30, 2017
According to the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team 2016 annual report, the actual number of independent male deaths within the monitoring area last year was 37. The total number of independent female deaths was 12. And the total number of dependent young deaths was 9.
This means that if hunting is allowed in 2017 the total number of independent male grizzlies that could be shot would be approximately 11 (47.6 – 37 = 10.6). The total number of independent females that could be killed by hunters would be approximately 9 (21.4 – 12 = 9.4).
Hunting of dependent young will not be allowed within the monitoring area.
Wyoming is allocated 58 percent of the total number of bears that can be hunted each year; Montana will receive 34 percent and Idaho 8 percent. If hunting is allowed in 2017, Wyoming would have the right to hunt approximately 12 grizzly bears, Montana 7 and Idaho 2 (allowing for rounding).
If the total estimated population falls below 600, no hunting will be allowed unless necessary to address human safety.
The are no limits on the number of Yellowstone grizzlies that can be hunted in the zone between Demographic Monitoring Area boundary and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem boundary. Each state will determine how many bears can be hunted in this region.
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The toolkit — one of several published by the organization — comes in response to the dozens of 
Van Manen doesn’t believe trophy hunting will have any impact on maintaining a stable Yellowstone grizzly population. The study team has set overall mortality rates for independent male and female bears that are designed to keep the long-term population stable at about 674 bears. If the Yellowstone grizzly population falls below 600, no hunting will be allowed; culling would be reserved in the case of risk to human life. But the number of bears could fall as low as 500 before revisions would be required to a grizzly conservation plan signed by the states.
By the time the 
The largest grizzly recovery area is the 
