By the 1930’s, grizzly bears were all but exterminated from the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho and Montana. Hunters were simply too eager to prove their mettle against the several hundred pound behemoths. They were also seemingly unconstrained by any notion of an honorable kill. Legendary 19th century hunter William Wright bragged about bagging five bears in five minutes with only five bullets, a tally that included a sow and her two helpless cubs. A hunting culture that had no notion of restraint, along with habitat loss, proved to be too much for the species.
For a brief moment, Americans had an opportunity to reintroduce grizzly bears to the Bitterroots. A rare coalition of timber industry representatives and wildlife activists agreed on a compromise plan. The bears wouldn’t enjoy the full protections of the Endangered Species Act, protections that would have shut out lumberjacks and ranchers and turned a good portion of Idaho into a bear “recovery zone.” Instead, the grizzlies would be an “experimental” population, a move that would ensure their introduction and at least leave the potential for more conservation protections down the road.
However, as Michael Dax shows in his book, Grizzly West, the political gulf between conservationists and local residents and industries proved impossible to bridge. Some environmentalists were aghast at the idea of compromising with the timber industry. They wanted conservation scientists, not citizens, to be in charge of deciding what protections the bear would receive and which restrictions landowners and local industries would have to shoulder. “When you crawl into bed with the enemy, you become the enemy,” argued one wildlife activist.
Mistrust ran just as high on the other side. A staffer for Idaho Senator Larry Craig argued, “This is more than just an experimental introduction, it is a bid for controlling the entire western way of life.”
Neither could many local residents be dissuaded from the belief that bears stalk and eat people: “I don’t care about statistics. I care about being eaten.” While the bear’s actual teeth and claws were probably not a threat to anyone, the more extreme “conservation biology” plan symbolized the demise of traditional “Old West” ways of life. The real danger wasn’t ending up in the belly of a giant ursine but rather being chewed up and spit out by policies that handed off land-use decisions to a distant scientific bureaucracy.
Unrelenting acrimony made the grizzly reintroduction plan easy to kill, especially when US Fish and Wildlife’s final recommendation required that the proposed citizen management committee be subservient “to the best available science.” After George W. Bush was elected in 2000, his secretary of interior simply withdrew support.
I wish the case of grizzly reintroduction was just an interesting historical anecdote. Instead, it is emblematic of the pathologies of environmental politics more general. Acting on behalf of nature is something ostensibly done best when purified from other “political” considerations, when purportedly governed by science and siloed off away from everything else that people might care about. But I think that approach to environmental progress lies at the heart of today’s gridlock and stalemates.
In the decades since the demise of grizzly reintroduction, the animal has made its way into the Bitterroot Mountains on its own. But the species doesn’t exist in the kinds of numbers that could lead to a self-sustaining population. Reflective of the typical litigious nature of American conservation politics, lawsuits from environmental lobby groups have forced US Fish and Wildlife to draft a new Environmental Impact Statement, to once again explore extending Endangered Species Act protections in the Bitterroots for the grizzly.
The demographic make-up of the American West has changed a lot since 2000. A lot of people there are now more sympathetic to the plight of bears, and excited to potentially catch glimpse of one while hiking, than they are empathetic with the residents who will deal with the animal’s inconveniences. So, perhaps a preservationist majority may simply get its way, and a big chunk of Idaho will soon be managed more with an eye for what bears might need than for the people who make their living off the land.
What seems certain, however, is that the battle with be unnecessarily antagonistic and nasty. Insofar as many of us insist that environmental issues ought to be considered only in isolation from everything else that matters to people, they will often be turned into zero-sum propositions. And opportunities for building coalitions, for collective actions that works for most people, will go ignored. Sustainable environmental progress will be far harder to achieve than it need be.
In the next segment of this series, we’ll take another look at New Mexico’s proposed Strategic Water Strategy, thinking about how the state could better ensure that a transition to a green energy economy not end up mired in the kind of problems that has traditionally plagued environmental politics.