Last winter, under pressure from the elements, bison left Yellowstone National Park in search of a bite to eat, and were killed. As a professional grizzly bear watcher, I had heard the story many times before.
The problem is quite simple. U.S. Army General Phil Sheridan recognized it at the beginning of the park’s creation, when he observed that the park’s boundaries had not been drawn to accommodate the natural migrations of its wildlife.
Aye, there’s the rub. Yellowstone National Park was drawn too small. The park is no more a complete ecosystem to its bison and grizzlies than it is to its migratory birds that spend winters in Mexico.
Therefore, it was interesting this past winter, while buffalo blood was soaking into Yellowstone snow, to read Park Service biologist Mary Meagher’s remarks on the causes of the bison slaughter. Meagher said, as I understood her, that the bison population had outgrown its habitat in Yellowstone.
Meagher said that, after the killing, the bison population was probably down to what the park could hold. By killing bison when they came off the reservation, officials limited the herd to numbers that could survive within a tightly limited landscape. But can that limited area support enough bison to provide a viable population?
Ditto for the grizzly, of which there are almost certainly not enough, but which are often treated as if too many. The bear’s future depends on its achieving and maintaining a “viable population,” which Alaska bear biologist John Schoen estimated could be anywhere from “hundreds up to thousands.” A group of Canadian bear experts puts the number at 3,700, which is more than 10 times the number of grizzlies in Yellowstone.
Having enough grizzlies requires having enough land, and this is the difficult part. Grizzlies are now confined to 1 or 2 percent of their habitat in the lower 48 states and will never be permitted to recover their losses. There will never again be wild grizzlies freely strolling the shores of San Francisco Bay. Nor will grizzlies ever again know the banks of the Missouri River at Great Falls, Mont., where Lewis and Clark watched them gather to feast on the carcasses of drowned bison.
Those days are gone, and unless we give grizzlies more than shreds of wild land, they will always be on the edge – a perpetually endangered species. This is particularly true because grizzlies respond to adverse conditions just the way Yellowstone’s bison do: In times of drought, they spread out in search of food. But when they sprawl outside protected areas, they are killed.
So we can’t save grizzlies by saving them in Yellowstone alone, because the park can’t handle a viable population. We should view Yellowstone’s grizzlies as the southernmost tip of a larger population that extends northward into southern Canada. This means grizzly conservation requires saving Canadian bears in order to save bears in Yellowstone. And it means saving Yellowstone bears in order to save bears in Canada. We take the whole package, or we lose each of the pieces.
I left bear conservation in 1992 in large part because the fundamental challenges in conservation of grizzly bear habitat seemed intractable. Environmental groups were fighting within and among themselves, wise-use groups worked hard to pit endangered species against property rights and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
The bear’s plight is not much different today. Indeed, much of the life-giving roadless forest that provides security from human harassment, disturbance and killing has been lost in the past five years.
However, there has been one change for the better. A growing number of environmental groups recognize that piecemeal habitat conservation won’t suffice for the bear, and that large-scale landscapes are needed. I see the Montana-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies as the advance guard in this emerging trend.
The heart of its conservation plan is the protection of remaining roadless areas. Equally important is the protection of the arterial corridors of travel and exploration that can, with luck and patience, tie the tattered population together. If these basic requirements can’t be met, all the other forms of treatment can be called off, because the bear will be doomed.
I’m also encouraged by the alliance’s proposals for “wildlands recovery” in areas that have already been damaged by excessive logging and road building. In this and other proposals, the alliance hasn’t pretended to have all the answers. But its ability to stress the basics, and to put some trust in the ability of all of us to work out a successful program from that point forward are, in my opinion, the best hope on the grizzly’s horizon.
Lance Olsen lives in Montana and is working on a book about wildlife politics.
For information, contact the Alliance for the Wild Rockies at P.O. Box 8731, Missoula, MT 59807 (406/721-5420), e-mail: awr@igc.apc.org.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Saying goodbye to the bear.
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