SAVING THE GRIZZLY BEAR

Reaching up to 800 pounds and 8 feet tall when standing, grizzly bears boast tremendous size and physical strength and have almost no natural enemies. Or just one — humans. But we’ve proved formidable.

BACKGROUND

As human settlers from Europe settled in and expanded westward across North America — motivated both by fear and the desire for profit — we undertook a massive kill-off of bears. Federal predator control of bears, which began in 1915 when grizzly numbers were already greatly diminished throughout the mountains of the West, eliminated bears from much of their remaining habitat. In 1975, when they'd been wiped out almost entirely, grizzlies in the lower 48 were placed on the endangered species list. Today they remain in only about 6% of their original range.

Grizzlies now occupy four areas: the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (including Yellowstone National Park), the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem (including Glacier National Park), the Selkirks in northern Idaho, and the Cabinet-Yaak in northeastern Idaho and northwestern Montana.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also listed the Selway-Bitterroot area in Idaho and Montana and the North Cascades in Washington as critical recovery zones for these bears, though no known grizzly population currently lives there.

Just a few of the threats faced by these persecuted predators are loss of major food sources due to climate change, genetic isolation, and, primarily, increased human-caused mortality.

OUR CAMPAIGN

The Center advocates for an expansive and realistic recovery strategy for grizzly bears. Through a petition and other efforts, we’ve been pushing the Fish and Wildlife Service to recover bears in more of their historic range, including areas in Colorado and Utah, and to reintroduce bears into the Selway-Bitterroot area in Idaho.

We also fight to ensure that growing populations of grizzly bears retain the lifesaving protection of the Endangered Species Act. So far attempts to prematurely strip Yellowstone grizzlies of federal protection have been thwarted by Tribal groups and conservation groups, including the Center. In summer 2020 the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a federal court’s 2018 ruling that the Trump administration acted illegally when it stripped Endangered Species Act protection from Yellowstone grizzly bears. We continue to fight efforts to strip federal protection from grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems, which would pave the way for trophy hunting of the bears in parts of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

Responding to a lawsuit filed by the Center and allies, in 2023 the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s authorization to kill up to 72 grizzlies on public lands outside of Yellowstone National Park — a move intended to appease livestock operations — violated federal law. Separately, that year, a federal judge ruled in our favor in scrapping the massive Black Ram logging project in Montana’s Kootenai National Forest, which threatened a small and imperiled population of grizzlies in the Yaak Valley. And we won an injunction halting the Knotty Pine logging project, also in the Kootenai, which would have hurt the same grizzlies.

The Center and partners won a key victory in early 2024 when a federal judge prevented wolf trapping and snaring to prevent accidental capture of grizzlies in Idaho’s Panhandle region, as well as in the Clearwater, Salmon and Upper Snake regions on both public and private land.

Thanks in part to the Center’s litigation, federal officials in the spring of 2024 approved a plan to restore grizzly bears to Washington state’s North Cascades. Grizzlies lived in the region for eons, but the last official sighting was in 1996. The hope is to bring three to seven grizzlies into the North Cascades each year for five to 10 years to establish an initial population of about 25 bears.

Meanwhile, to mark the centennial of the extirpation of California’s official state animal, a member of the California Legislature has proposed a resolution declaring 2024 the Year of the Grizzly. We’re hoping that will ultimately push forward the conversation about returning grizzlies to the Golden State.

Check out our press releases to learn more about the Center's actions for grizzlies.