The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed delisting grizzly bears that live in the Greater Yellowstone National Wildlife area from the endangered species list Thursday.
Grizzlies are currently listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which was enacted in 1973. The brown bear was initially delisted in 2007, but reappeared in 2009 due in part to heavy litigation.
“This commonsense decision is long-awaited. While I support finally allowing more state rather than federal management of grizzlies, I wonder why it took so long when states have been properly managing grizzly bears for years,” Committee Chairman Rep. Rob Bishop, a Republican from Utah, said in a press statement Friday.
Bishop added: “This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough. We need a streamlined delisting process to speed up non-controversial policy proposals like this one.”
Environmentalists consider the news a good omen, showing that the grizzly population in the Yellowstone ecosystem is making a comeback.
“This is really momentous, bigger than recovering the bald eagle,” Todd Wilkinson, an environmental writer in Montana, told reporters Thursday shortly after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed delisting. “This is recovering a fearsome and inspiring large mammal.”
Critics suggest it is too soon to delist the grizzly, which has seen an explosion in population, moving from a low of 136 bears to a high of 700 to 1000 bears in the Yellowstone National Park.
Roger Hayden, managing director for Wyoming Wildlife Advocates in Jackson Hole, said the announcement is “a couple years too early.” Global warming is still effecting the bear population, he added.
“The question we keep raising is, ‘What is the rush to delist and why can’t we wait to delist them for a couple years?'” Mr. Hayden says.
The Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity mirrored Hayden’s concerns, arguing the grizzly bear population could still be ebbing – a record 59 died in 2015.
The federal government, however, chalked the uptick in deaths up to signs the Yellowstone area has reached grizzly bear capacity.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy decided in 2009 to reinstate the bears, arguing then that keeping them protected would help forestall global warming.
Grizzlies are omnivorous, meaning they eat both plants and animals. One of the their primary sources of food, the judge said at the time, is bark from a tree in Yellowstone called whitebark pine. But global warming has allowed pine-killing beetles to munch on and decimate the tree’s population, according to the Associated Press.
Listing the brown bear as endangered allowed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service the ability to prop up the population until the whitebark pine made a comeback.
“Even if the monitoring were enforceable, the monitoring itself does nothing to protect the grizzly bear population,” the judge wrote in his order. “Instead, there is only a promise of future, unenforceable actions. Promises of future, speculative action are not existing regulatory mechanisms,” he said.
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