Buck In Brief

A Tale of Two Bears

In Brief: Is the Bush administration finally taking action on global warming and the threat it poses to wildlife? All is not as it appears....

01/19/07

Two days after Christmas, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced that the Fish and Wildlife Service would propose to list the polar bear as a "threatened species" under the Endangered Species Act, based on the threat to the bear's survival posed by global climate change in the form of a shrinking cover of summer ice over northern polar seas. The proposal came in response to a citizens' petition submitted by environmental groups in 2005, which was ignored by FWS in accordance with its standard but illegal practice until the agency was finally prodded by a lawsuit to respond. The agency will spend the next 12 months to gathering more information, including comment from the public about its proposal, before making a final listing decision.

The story's seemingly simple outline and the polar bear's symbolic power have kept it  in the news.  Has the current administration finally seen the light about cutting emissions of heat-trapping combustion gases and protecting imperiled species? Will the White House now join the other industrialized countries that support the Kyoto Protocol simply to prevent the polar bear from becoming extinct?

No, and no. First of all, FWS has not actually listed the polar bear but merely suggested that it might. Although the bare possibility has gotten folks like the Wall Street Journal's editors and Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe worked up, the Bush administration hasn't played its cards yet.

Yellowstone grizzly on a snowbank

Photo: NPS

For a better idea of how the administration intends to deal with the effect of a warming world on creatures in danger of extinction, one need look no further than the grizzly bear, another iconic species that has long been a focus of Earthjustice's work. Grizzlies in the lower 48 have been listed under the ESA as a threatened species for more than 20 years, pushed to the brink by the destruction and fragmentation of their habitat as the result of logging, road construction, energy development and livestock grazing. The bears survive in small, isolated populations as small as a few dozen animals that occupy scattered islands of remaining forest.

Even though grizzlies are listed, the Bush administration has been keen to exploit the habitat that bears need to survive, with no compunction about jiggering the science when it suits the purpose. (In December, for example, Earthjustice succeeded in overturning a 2004 Forest Service plan to keep open 8,500 miles of old logging roads in the Kootenai, Lolo, and Idaho Panhandle National Forests.) Late in 2005, FWS proposed that Yellowstone grizzly bears be removed from the list of protected species altogether, claiming that they no longer warrant protection because population levels had temporarily climbed to between 400 and 600 bears.

The long term survival of grizzly bears, like that of polar bears, is jeopardized by warming temperatures. In the grizzly's case, global warming will mean reduced food supplies in the form of whitebark pine nuts that allow reproducing grizzly females to put on the weight needed for healthy cubs and larger litters, and to avoid the risk of bear/human conflicts often fatal to grizzlies when they forage for other food closer to people. Whitebark pine trees in areas once protected by cold winters from insects and disease are already dying from an escalating epidemic of mountain pine beetle outbreaks. Global warming may make the places that grizzly bears now occupy unable to sustain them in much the same way that the shrinking summer sea ice is less and less able to support viable polar bear populations.

The survival of listed species in the future, no less than species like the polar bear that have yet to be listed, requires that the current and future effects of global climate change be taken into account in determining what protections are needed. The Bush administration has been unwilling to do even that -- much less act on the bears' behalf to address the cause of our warming climate. It wants to strip grizzlies of existing ESA protection and open up their habitat to development without even considering what will happen to the bear's chances of survival as changes in weather and temperature become more pronounced.

There is little reason to think that the polar bear listing proposal signals that the Bush administration is now ready to control greenhouse gas emissions in the name of species protection. More likely instead is that FWS will revert to form. But Secretary Kempthorne's acknowledgement that a warming world threatens the polar bear's existence will force the Bush administration and the energy industry into a new stage of the climate change debate and what it means -- both for polar bears and humankind. The all-or-nothing choices that sound so simple now will become complicated rapidly.

Vawter "Buck" Parker, Executive Director
buckparker@earthjustice.org