GRIZZLY BEAR RECOVERY POLICY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 29Grizzly Bear Recovery Policy and Its ConsequencesG. Sidney Silliman California State Polytechnic University, PomonaThe Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, its member agencies, and theGrizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator have implemented a range of programs torecover the grizzly bear population in the lower-48 states since the bear was listedin 1975 as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Therecovery targets set by the Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan for the Yellowstonepopulation have been met. The long-term survival of the grizzly bear in theconterminous states, however, is still threatened because the grizzly is restrictedto only five isolated areas of its ancestral range. As an alternative to current policy,the grizzly bear should be returned to the remaining wild habitat in the RockyMountains and the North Cascades.IntroductionThere is a high probability today that most any visitor to Yellowstone National Park, witha bit of luck and some patience, might observe a grizzly bear. Visitors watching over theAntelope Creek drainage early in the morning or before sunset on a spring day are especiallylikely to find a grizzly bear or even a sow and her cubs searching for food in the meadows. Onthe other hand, visitors to the Plateau area of Targhee National Forest immediately west ofYellowstone National Park are much less likely to see a grizzly; in fact, even a seasonedwildlife manager would be hard pressed to find a grizzly bear in the Plateau region.The differing probabilities between the areas reflect more than the element of chance thatis part of wildlife observation. In 1983, Yellowstone Park officials, out of a growing commitmentto limiting grizzly bear mortalities, established bear management areas where human usewould be restricted and bears protected. Antelope Creek is one of those management areas.Richard Knight, head of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team from its creation in the early1970s until 1997, maintains thatthat was the most successful thing we’ve ever done, that closure. Now it’s a placepeople can go and see bears, and it wasn’t that way before the park closed it(Varley 1998, 5).The backcountry closures are one of many actions taken by the National Park Service toconserve the grizzly bear population in Yellowstone, and management plans are oriented tokeeping bear mortality down. Park dumps and the garbage dump in nearby Cooke City, whichhabituated grizzlies to feed on human sources of food and often led to human-bear conflicts,were progressively closed. Scientific research on grizzlies and their habitat has increasedunderstanding of not only the bear and its needs, but of ways to reduce human impact on thegrizzly. As a consequence, in Yellowstone, the decline in the grizzly bear population evidentin the 1960s and 1970s has been reversed.In contrast, the Plateau Bear Management Unit of Targhee National Forest, which wasstripped of 70 percent of its vegetation (mostly through logging and, to a lesser extent, throughforest fires) between 1981 and 1992 and which is crisscrossed with 1,000 miles of new loggingroadshas one of the poorest records for bear production within the core bear protectionzone as specified by the Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan…. The Forest Service30 G. SIDNEY SILLIMAN Fall 2002wanted it exempted from the requirement of having to sustain perpetual year-round bear occupation (Wilkinson 1998, 81).As a result of failing to protect this habitat, there are no residential grizzlies in the Plateauportion of Targhee National Forest (Willcox & Ellenberger 2000, 7).The two areas aptly symbolize the status of the grizzly bear in the lower-48 states aftermore than twenty-five years of government action to protect and conserve the grizzly bearunder the Endangered Species Act. Although recovery targets for the Yellowstone bearpopulation set by the Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan have been met, implementation of grizzlybear recovery policy since 1975 has effectively restricted the grizzly bear to only five isolatedareas of its ancestral range in the conterminous 48 states, with the result that the long-termsurvival of the grizzly bear is still threatened.The ESA FrameworkBefore the European settlement of the American West, as many as 100,000 grizzly bearsroamed freely from the Great Plains to the California coast and south into Texas and Mexico.However, by the 1920s, the grizzly bear was extinct in over 95 percent of its ancestral rangein the conterminous United States; the last of the California grizzly bears were gone by 1922.In the 1970s, there were fewer than 1,000 bears confined to less than two percent of thegrizzly’s original range. Only the Yellowstone, Northern Continental Divide, Selkirk Moun-tains, Cabinet-Yaak, and North Cascades ecosystems contained small and isolated popula-tions. Almost universally the cause of the grizzly bear population decline and the nearextinction of the bear has been direct human-caused mortality and associated habitatusurpation by human beings (Mattson & Craighead 1994, 102). Humans have been theprimary agent of grizzly bear deaths for over one hundred years. Logging, road building,mining, and development have so reduced grizzly bear habitat that grizzlies today survive onlyin extensive wilderness areas.The Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973 sets the direction of federal policy relativeto the surviving grizzly bear populations. Section 2(b) of states:The purposes of this Act are to provide a means whereby the ecosystems uponwhich endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved[and] to provide a program for the conservation of such endangered species andthreatened species.Reflecting the national priority to protect endangered and threatened species from extinction,the grizzly bear was listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) as a “threatened”species in 1975, thereby accorded the legal protections of the ESA. A grizzly bear recoveryplan, as mandated by Section 4(f) of the Endangered Species Act, was prepared in 1982. Arevised Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan was later developed by the USFWS in 1993. The goal inboth plans “is to identify actions necessary for the conservation and recovery of the grizzlybear” (1982, 1 and 1993, 15). After a “recovered” population has been established, the grizzlybear might be removed from threatened status in the lower-48 states.Coordination of grizzly bear recovery efforts was at first