The appeals court vacated the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to remove Great Lakes gray wolves from the endangered species list using Distinct Population Segment as a basis for its decision.
The appeals court said the agency does not have the power “to delist an already-protected species by balkanization.” In a unanimous decision, the court ruled the agency “cannot circumvent the Endangered Species Act’s explicit delisting standards by riving an existing listing into a recovered sub-group and a leftover group that becomes an orphan to the law.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service used a similar approach when the agency removed the Yellowstone grizzly population from the endangered species list without considering the impact of that action on the surviving grizzly populations.
“The Endangered Species Act is intended to restore critically imperiled species across their native habitat, not to claim a recovery success story by restoring an isolated subpopulation alone, and effectively turning our National Parks into proverbial zoos,” says Kelly Nokes, carnivore advocate for WildEarth Guardians, a Missoula, Montana conservation group.
The upcoming legal clash between the Fish and Wildlife Service and environmental groups (including the Center for Biological Diversity, which publishes The Revelator) over the legality of removing the Yellowstone grizzlies from the endangered species list comes with high political risk.
Some conservation organizations, including the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, are worried that a successful legal challenge to the Yellowstone grizzly delisting rule may create a serious backlash with possible negative outcomes for the bear.
Byrd, the group’s executive director, says it is unlikely that a new grizzly bear delisting rule written under the Trump administration would be better than the current rule that was primarily developed under the Obama administration.
She also worries that Congress may react by passing laws that would remove all grizzly bears from the endangered species list. And, even more devastating, she says, is the possible gutting of the Endangered Species Act, which is already under unprecedented attack from conservative members of Congress.
“It’s a high-stakes game right now that we all find ourselves immersed in,” says Byrd.
But grizzly experts like Mattson say it is worth the challenge.
“This is about a whole lot more than even just bears on the ground,” he says. “It’s also about our vision of ourselves in the world relative to animals like bears and what is the place in the world for them and how do we consider their recovery in the face of the severe threats that are being propagated everyday by us. Climate change and development, you name it.
“Do we have such an ungenerous and poor vision that we think 500 bears confined to an isolated ecosystem is enough to constitute recovery?
“To my mind, that’s representative of the impoverished spirit.”
* Update: The Greater Yellowstone Coalition has retracted statements made by two of its officials in a taped interview with The Revelator that Grizzly bears, including a female and two cubs, are in the Tobacco Root Mountains. The group is now stating that reports of Grizzly bears in the mountains are a “rumor.” The Revelator has deleted references to Grizzly bears in the region from the story.