Consider the grizzly bear, while you can. Gone from California since 1924, despite gracing the state flag. Gone from Utah the year before that, when Mormon Boy Scouts stoned to death a bear called Old Ephraim. In Colorado, the last grizzly was thought to have been killed in 1952, though one more was found and killed by a bow hunter in 1979.
Now in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho there is a move to remove--"delist"--endangered-species protection for the grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. These "recovered" bears would be subject to a trophy-hunting season should they venture--as they do--outside Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks.
Delisting is a terrible idea, motivated more by politics than science. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is seeking a splashy "mission accomplished" victory by "saving" an important endangered species. Western conservatives would like to see grizzlies, and everything else on public lands, controlled by individual states: a bewildering Balkanization of nature.
As to the condition of the bears, after 40 years of federal protection and intense conservation efforts, Yellowstone's grizzlies may have only a little more than doubled, to 700 or so, up from population estimates that ranged from 136 to 312 when the grizzly was declared endangered in the 1970s. (About 1,800 grizzlies now survive in the U.S. outside Alaska, scattered in less than 1 percent of their historic range.) However encouraging Yellowstone's slow rebound, these bears remain in jeopardy.
What science there is behind the delisting effort purposely avoids a full examination of the risks grizzlies still face. In even the wildest parts of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, the bear's richest food sources are vanishing. Pine nuts, the single most important food for female grizzlies with cubs, are disappearing along with the whitebark pine, a victim of the bark beetle and the warming climate. Mother bears with cubs are unable to feed on winter-killed bison, which are claimed by larger males.
Another diminishing resource grizzlies require: wide swaths of secure wild country without roads. Better yet, wide swaths of wild country that are connected, so the small remnant grizzly populations in the contiguous U.S. and Canada can intermingle.
The Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't deny such needs so much as ignore them. It justifies delisting the Yellowstone bears based primarily on the size of the population, even though its estimates are just that--a matter of sample counts and extrapolation (bears don't sit still for a census). Nor is the agency asking how many of the bears are females, or how old they are. It's no real science at all.
Big-game hunters and others argue that if Yellowstone's bear population falls precipitously after delisting, the federal government can come back in and declare the bears endangered again. But "relisting" is a lengthy process, sometimes requiring decades, and it is highly politicized.
The grizzly is the West's and the nation's most intriguing, complicated and sentient land mammal. It represents the gold standard of wildness.
It will be a historic mistake if the federal government delists the grizzly. The great bear deserves better. So does the great American wilderness.
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Rick Bass is a board member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council and writer-in-residence at Montana State University.
Editorial on 10/06/2016