The Bears Are (Not) Back in Town
Why we need a more strategic environmentalism (Part I)
Legendary 19th century hunter William Wright once 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, soon proved to be too much for the species. Today’s political culture keeps it from coming back.
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. And, as cases like William Wright illustrate, they were also seemingly unconstrained by any notion of an honorable kill.
But for a brief moment in the 1990s, Americans had an opportunity to reintroduce grizzly bears to the Bitterroots. That effort failed. And it failed because of a similar lack of restraint, namely people’s inability to tolerate compromising between “science” and “politics”, and the mutual mistrust that undergirds much of the West’s political dysfunctions.
The possibility of returning grizzlies to the Bitterroot Mountains was born out of the wolf wars, the political battle over reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Hoping to avoid a repeat of that decade’s acrimony, a rare coalition of timber industry representatives and wildlife activists agreed on a compromise reintroduction 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 making concessions to 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.
The case of grizzly reintroduction isn’t just an interesting historical anecdote. 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 exactly 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 work for most people, will go ignored. Sustainable environmental progress will be far harder to achieve than it need be.
Although many environmentalists might recoil at the comparison, they actually politick a lot like how William Wright hunted. Constantly shooting down “political” compromises, even the easy ones, they cause the possibilities for successful conservation to go extinct.
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.
Note: Post revised on 10/28/2024 to make it serve as a writing example for my Fall class on Biodiversity, Nature, and Society.
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