Idaho Opposition May Declaw Plan to Bring Back Grizzly Bears

Almost four years after the timber industry and some environmentalists began an unlikely alliance to forge a stable future for both the threatened grizzly bear and the threatened timber worker, their pioneering plan to return the grizzly bear to central Idaho’s vast wilderness may be foundering for lack of political support.

The proposal to establish a new beachhead for grizzly-bear recovery in Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, where biologists estimate up to 300 of the bears could thrive and substantially lower the odds of the species’ extinction, has been endorsed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and blessed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

But even with the backing of their allies in the timber industry for a plan that would give local citizens unprecedented control over managing the bear, most elected officials in Montana and Idaho remain either hostile or too fearful of the political consequences to publicly support the reintroduction plan.

The proposal is at a critical juncture--public hearings were held the last two weeks in both states, and congressional opponents are threatening to scuttle the effort. “We are right there at the homestretch where we get support and succeed or this goes down the drain,” said Hank Fischer, the northern Rockies representative of the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife.

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Humans and grizzly bears coexisted uneasily in this region of the West for most of the nation’s history until grizzlies were killed off in large numbers by hunters in the 1940s. Once numbering as many as 100,000 and ranging throughout the mountains of the West and well into the plains, only about 1,000 grizzlies now hang on in a few isolated redoubts, with most of them in Yellowstone and Glacier national parks and Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Because the bear is so wide-ranging and fares so poorly in the company of people, only a few still-wild regions in the West are considered suitable for reestablishing populations. The massive complex in central Idaho formed by the Selway-Bitterroot and the Frank Church River of No Return wildernesses, with nearly 4 million acres of mountainous uninhabited terrain, is the best candidate.

“This block is so big you can drop the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island into it and still have lots of wilderness left,” said Chris Servheen, who directs the federal government’s bear-recovery program from Missoula, Mont.

But as much as bears require room to survive, they also require tolerance. As Servheen has learned over many years of trying to nurture the slow-reproducing grizzly back to health, “if local people don’t want the bears around, then you won’t have bears.”

That is why the timber industry, fearful that full protection for the bear under the federal Endangered Species Act would sharply restrict harvests on federally owned grizzly habitat, and environmentalists eager to expand the bear’s range have worked so hard to undercut local anxieties. “We have the major industries and the major unions promoting grizzly bears,” said Tom France of the National Wildlife Federation office in Missoula. “The bears will come into the region with a lot more tolerance than they would have in any other way.”

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But fears remain high, and not without reason.

Unpredictable, ferociously protective of its territory and its young, the grizzly will sometimes attack people when surprised and, rarely, even when unprovoked. Although statistics are on their side--there have been only 14 fatal encounters in Yellowstone and Glacier over many decades of high visitation--many people traveling in bear country have an understandable, elemental fear of a 500-pound predator that can sprint faster than a horse and kill with a single stroke of its powerful paws.

So, in the local vernacular, “shoot, shovel and shut up” is still the prevailing ethic for some Westerners despite stiff penalties under the Endangered Species Act.

Fear of predatory federal bureaucrats also underlies much of the opposition in Idaho and Montana. The heart of the plan to reintroduce an “experimental, nonessential” population of about 25 bears over five years is an innovative proposal to allow a citizens’ management committee appointed by the secretary of the Interior to make critical decisions about bear-management issues such as road construction in bear habitat. But many Idahoans and Montanans don’t believe the federal agencies will relinquish control.

Their suspicion is grounded in a provision that gives the Interior secretary veto power over decisions of the citizens’ management committee if he finds they are not leading to recovery of the bear.

“It’s a no-sale with a lot of people,” said Dick Willhite, a resource manager for Shearer Lumber in Elk City, Idaho, who has worked to win the support of hunters, outfitters and so-called “Wise Use” groups distrustful of the federal land-management agencies that control much of the West. “They think the secretary of the Interior is at the first opportunity going to regain control over the bear. It’s a very legitimate concern.”

But it is that very fear of federal control that has driven timber-industry officials to the table with their usual antagonists in the Defenders of Wildlife and National Wildlife Federation. Without some measure of local control, the industry fears, the bear will be reintroduced anyway, with the full power of the Endangered Species Act and all of the accompanying restrictions on timber harvest and recreational access that could go along with it.

“We don’t really support the bear,” Willhite said. “We’re just trying to protect our livelihood. The bear’s not what’s going to kill us; it’s the bureaucrats.”

The threat of full endangered-species protection helped temper opposition to reintroduction of the gray wolf in Yellowstone and Idaho two years ago under similar “experimental, nonessential” status that allows for more flexible management, including the removal and even the destruction of problem animals. But in the case of the grizzly, politicians in the region remain almost universally hostile, at least publicly.

Of the major political players in the region, only Montana’s Republican governor, Marc Racicot, has embraced the plan.

In Idaho, his counterpart, Gov. Philip Batt, a Republican, remains an implacable foe. “It seems to me that we are borrowing trouble if we welcome these fearsome creatures to Idaho,” he wrote in a newspaper guest editorial.

And on Capitol Hill, Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) won Senate approval of an appropriations rider that would have blocked completion of the environmental study necessary for bear reintroduction, before backing down in conference with the House. He likes the concept of citizen management, but Burns frets about federal veto authority and says he will work to kill it “until the people of the Bitterroot Valley feel comfortable about those bears being reintroduced.”

Other environmentalists also fault the plan, worrying that a citizens management committee appointed by politicians and with little scientific expertise will allow too much timber cutting and road construction in the recovery zone. They also believe the recovery zone excludes some of the region’s best potential bear habitat, and they oppose transferring even a few bears from already at-risk populations in Yellowstone and Glacier.

“Every individual bear will matter,” said Louisa Wilcox of Wild Forever, a consortium of environmental groups that works on grizzly conservation. “Having a committee with so little background and a political bent will put the whole effort at a disadvantage,” particularly with no restrictions on habitat alteration in place at the start.

Supporters of the innovative plan lament the attacks from segments of the environmental community but fret most about the lack of political support.

“This ought to be a politician’s dream,” said Fischer. “Look at their speeches: All they talk about is collaboration and working together. Here we have people working together for years and they’ve handed it to them on a plate, and they are still not willing to come forward. You get them to the altar,” he concluded, “and they can’t say ‘I do.’ ”