New federal rule acknowledges historic conservation win, addresses current conservation needs.

The Boone and Crockett Club celebrates today’s proposed rule for grizzly bear conservation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It is an innovative fix for the current stalemate in which bears have recovered but have not been removed from the list of Threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Recognizing the extraordinary increase in bears and the problems and opportunities coming with their abundance, the FWS rule authorizes state and tribal wildlife agencies to activate their own management plans for grizzlies in coordination with FWS.  States and tribes will begin participating in managing grizzlies and deterring bear conflicts in areas where bear numbers exceed objectives – for example, in the Greater Yellowstone area, bear populations have grown from 136 animals in 1975 to more than 1,000 today.

“Director Nesvik, Secretary Burgum, and the entire leadership of the Department of the Interior have found a way to declare a conservation victory under ESA and to provide for continued conservation under state management,” said Simon Roosevelt, the Boone and Crockett Club’s executive vice president of conservation, research, and policy. “The rule advances grizzly conservation from the now-resolved problem of too few bears to the now-emerging realities of abundant bears. The predictable and misleading criticism of this will be that bears are losing protection. The accurate view is that bears and people are gaining the benefits of sustainable management.”

The grizzly bear was listed under ESA in the 1970s under a policy that changed in 1996. The 1996 policy governs new listings but fails to describe how previous listings can be removed when recovered. As a result, every attempt to de-list the bear has been challenged by tactical litigators who exploit this policy omission to overturn decisions based on sound science. This politicized maneuvering to keep the grizzly as a listed species in areas where it now thrives has the perverse effect of diverting necessary resources away from the more than 1,000 other species still rightly listed under the ESA.

“This rule bridges a gap in ESA policy,” Roosevelt concluded. “Until the 50-year-old law can be updated to enable de-listing upon recovery, today’s rule enables bear conservation to proceed.”