Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
There’s more time to comment on a federal proposal to keep grizzly bears listed as “threatened” in the Northern Rockies under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
There’s already almost 50,000 comments, and now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has extended the deadline to May 17 to “give all interested parties adequate opportunity to comment,” according to a federal memo.
About a third of the comments so far have come through the advocacy group EarthJustice, which is supportive of keeping the bears listed but is pushing back against proposed measures that could increase grizzly deaths.
“This is counterproductive to the long-term recovery of grizzly bears on the landscape,” the comments say.
Some western states in favor of delisting, however, disagree. Idaho’s Governor’s Office of Species Conservation and the Idaho Department of Fish & Game say the proposed rule strays from ESA requirements.
“Persisting in this flawed proposal would be detrimental to the conservation of robust grizzly bear populations and conservation of species that are truly imperiled,” the agencies wrote.
‘An emergency room for wildlife’
This all comes as members of the Trump administration and Congress have said they support removing all federal protections for the bears. They and others say the
ESA isn’t being used how it was intended.
“The Endangered Species Act was designed to be like an emergency room for wildlife,” said Montana Public Radio journalist Nick Mott, who recently produced the podcast, The Wide Open, on the act. ”Like once [an animal is] a little bit healed and it doesn't need that sort of critical care, it goes back to more traditional management.”
But Mott said only about 3% of animals that have been listed have been taken off. At the same time, he said the act has been incredibly effective at keeping animals from going extinct, including grizzly bears.
Amid ongoing debate about the future of grizzlies, Wyoming Public Radio sat down with Mott to talk all things ESA.
Hanna Merzbach: So, your podcast, The Wide Open, explores all these different legal battles over the Endangered Species Act over the last couple decades. What motivated you to do this?
Nick Mott: I started, in large part, because of grizzly bears. The tensions over grizzlies were very acute. And they seemed to represent something so much bigger: The values that swirl around this species and what the species stands for here.
And as it turned out, there are all these other battles going on over other endangered species across the country. So the podcast starts back in the 1970s. It explores everything from tiny little fish in Tennessee to bigger fish in the Northwest to grizzlies out here to African oryx in Texas.
HM: What was the ESA intended to do at the start, versus what it actually does now?
NM: Well, in a lot of ways, the Endangered Species Act snuck under the radar from the outset. What nobody realized back then is how many species were in trouble. It's bugs. It's plants. And all of these species can impact business and the economy and, to some people, their freedom to do stuff.
I've been grappling with a whole slew of critiques of the Endangered Species Act, and I think this current battle over grizzly bears embodies one of them, which is, how do we get species off the list when they recover? In practice, it's been incredibly difficult to get species recovered and delisted from the Endangered Species Act. It becomes what some lawmakers called the “Hotel California,” where you can check in, but you can never check out.
HM: I know it's this ongoing litigation that makes it so hard for species to “check out.” Why else is it so hard to check out?
NM: I think fundamentally we cannot agree on what recovery means. Grizzly bear numbers have grown exponentially since the 1970s when they were protected, in the Yellowstone area in particular. At the same time, they still only exist in less than 3% of the habitat they did, so how can we call that recovered? We have these two very conflicting worldviews.
HM: Yeah, you say in your podcast that the fight over grizzly bear protections may not actually be entirely about the bears. It's about humans as well.
NM: Sure. I mean, if you talk to anybody about grizzly bears, most people actually quite like them, even if they want them off the endangered species list, even if they want to hunt them. What the battle over removing protections is actually about to me is about our role in the natural world as humans, the sorts of battles over state's rights versus federal government rights. It's just deeply laden in values.
It has all to do with the history here of extraction, whether it be timber or grazing or mining, and this really new world where there's this giant tourism economy and recreation economy. Certain people feel marginalized and left behind as their ways of life are challenged, and they see these bigger picture economic changes.
HM: It seems like that includes some of the landowners that you talked to about grizzly bears.
NM: Sure. I don't want to paint with too broad a brush on landowner perspectives on grizzlies, but I'll talk about one guy in particular who I met. His name's Mark Rose. He's the livestock manager at a ranch right on the edge of Yellowstone. He has this field where people actually line up to watch bears on the side of the road, and I think the record that anybody's seen at one time is 28 bears.
So anyway, I drove down through that field, and I met up with him. He thinks that sort of tourism view is missing a lot about the reality of what grizzly bears mean on the ground.
Mark Rose: My dad asks, he always asks, ‘Well, how many, how many do you need?’ There's lots of people that think, well, obviously more is better. More, more, more is always better. Well, is it?
NM: He deals with grizzlies eating cattle, and margins are really, really small, he told me. Fundamentally, he likes bears, but at the same time this view that grizzlies are only just this sort of zoo-like creature that you can watch grazing on the grass in the distance just doesn't match up with reality.
HM: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of us expected that bears could be delisted soon. I think that's something you said you were expecting.
NM: That's absolutely right. I mean, the federal government has tried to delist Yellowstone area grizzlies twice before. Both times failed in court, and after petitions from Wyoming and Idaho and Montana, they were thinking about doing it again. There were all these delays, and when it finally came out, it turned out, no, they're not going to delist.
Instead of looking at grizzlies as these different discrete ecosystems, they're going to look at grizzlies across the northern Rockies as one larger, so-called “distinct population segment.” That to a lot of people in the West who want a delisting was really moving the goalpost.
HM: Right, and the feds introduced this proposal in the final weeks of the Biden administration. Another part of that plan gives landowners more flexibility around “taking” — or killing — these bears when they threaten livestock.
NM: That's a big part of what we're going to learn more about when the final rule comes out, which is likely, according to what has been published, going to be January 2026. There were supposed to be some public meetings that got canceled shortly after President Trump took office where we could have learned more. What it seems to me from reading the document is there will be some concessions to landowners all over the place, but especially sort of on the peripheries of grizzly habitat.
The fate of this rule is still very unclear. There's been almost 50,000 comments, but we know that the federal government does not want grizzly bears listed. We heard that in congressional testimony from the new head of the Department of the Interior, Doug Burgum. He said to Senator Steve Daines from Montana, “I'm with you.”
Doug Burgum: We should be celebrating when species come off the endangered species list, as opposed to fighting every way we can to try to keep them on that list.
NM: Though to get them off the list is this big bureaucratic effort. One thing that I might expect to see is a big push to delist grizzly bears congressionally, rather than through the Fish and Wildlife Service.
HM: And it seemed like you were kind of coming to this conclusion of maybe the ESA isn't the answer of how we protect these species and find this right balance.
NM: I wouldn't say the ESA is the wrong tool. I think it's one tool in the toolbox. There's big pushes for collaborative conservation and for working with landowners, for example, who live in areas home to grizzly bears to steward the landscape in ways that can benefit both their operations and wildlife. I think that's where we see a lot of success.
The Endangered Species Act sort of silos species. It might be better to be thinking even bigger picture about the health of entire ecosystems. Of course, we don't really have a law that can do that. So the Endangered Species Act is what we have, and especially in a time of increasing threats to the environment and the natural world, we got to work with what we have.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
