The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) recently announced that it plans to continue listing grizzly bears as an endangered species, but while bear advocates are celebrating this announcement, it may undermine grizzly populations in the long term. The protections afforded to grizzlies under the Endangered Species Act are often onerous for states and landowners who live with the species every day, and they can inspire animosity when the federal government enforces them.
Under this proposed rule, bears will continue to be afforded federal protection across Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington. But past legal battles over wolves suggest those protections may not last if neighboring communities are alienated by federal regulations they feel are too restrictive. If people don’t have a way to directly contest the bears’ listed status with FWS, they will be more likely to lobby their representatives to congressionally delist the species and give total control back to the states. In this scenario, the federal government will lose any oversight authority it currently has, and will have to defer to state population preferences.
Last summer, I conducted 12 interviews with state and federal officials, legal scholars, and conservation groups to explore this issue in greater depth. My goal was to understand how attitudes about living alongside grizzly bears are influenced by government policies. I found that while the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has saved species like bald eagles and alligators from extinction, it often fails to provide a viable path for returning species management to states. As grizzly bear populations in Montana and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem continue to rise in concert with increased human activity, encounters are becoming more common. This necessitates a more flexible, pragmatic approach to foster lasting coexistence.
Grizzly bears used to occupy most of western North America, ranging from Alaska to Texas and across much of the Great Plains. Today, they are limited to four distinct populations in the lower 48 states, mostly in and around national parks, national forests, and other public lands, plus a larger population in Alaska. With the latest decision from USFWS, those four lower 48 populations will all be lumped together and stay listed until that overall population is deemed recovered. Since being classified as endangered in 1975, the total population has already grown from around 700 animals in the year 2000 to more than 2,000 animals across these different zones, a remarkable recovery.
This progress is due largely to the protections afforded to grizzly bears under the ESA. Alongside Florida panthers and gray wolves, the grizzly bear was one of the ESA’s first flagship species. The goal of listing was to someday connect the few ecosystems where the animals still survived to establish a larger, more genetically diverse and durable population. As their numbers have increased, the historically distinct population segments around Glacier National Park and Yellowstone have almost achieved this goal and are now separated by only 35 miles. This gap will (hopefully) be closed soon, and this could be facilitated by physically relocating bears from each ecosystem to accelerate the genetic exchange.
This success has not come cheaply, though. The USFWS, along with relevant states, spent $200 million on bear recovery between 1994 and 2020. As these costs have continued to mount, and bear encounters have become more common, states like Montana and Wyoming have sued the federal government to delist the bear and cede management to the states. This would allow the states to legalize annual “harvesting” (hunting) of grizzly bears at a level they deem sustainable to keep the population in check. The bears’ most ardent defenders argue that 2,000 animals do not constitute a huntable population, even if that exceeds the original ESA recovery goal, but the states say otherwise. There is no objective answer to this question, which highlights the sociopolitical influences on “science-based” wildlife management.
The debate over grizzly management is often framed as a binary choice between strict federal protections and complete state control, but this is a false choice. We do not have to choose between grizzlies on Main Street and a reckless population cull. The Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center has called for a phased delisting that embraces the flexibility of Section 4(d) of the ESA and offers a more durable path forward. This section’s rules allow for more tailored management of species that are protected under the ESA but not classified as endangered in the sense that they are not facing extinction. A 4(d) classification extends protections to species by listing them as “threatened,” but this is a lower level of protection than a more at-risk, “endangered” species would enjoy.
A gradual delisting process would demonstrate to Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming that the federal government was willing to shift its role from being an enforcer to an active conservation partner. The current application of the ESA is undermining the law’s integrity by continuing to list a species that has met its population recovery goals. This in turn alienates states and landowners who feel hamstrung by what they see as excessive red tape. Under Section 4(d), though, a modest change in the ESA’s application could allow for more community input and increase the region’s social tolerance for grizzly bears with more market-based incentives for coexistence. These incentives could include things like paying landowners for providing habitat, compensating them for the costs of guardian dogs and electric fences, and offering carcass removal.
As the 4(d) rule is currently being applied, the Fish and Wildlife Service is not taking full advantage of its flexibility. This is particularly important now, given the recent decision to keep grizzlies listed until populations recover across each of the historically distinct population segments, which are now being reclassified as a single metapopulation. If this is the new standard for delisting, the recovery goal-posts will have been moved once again, and the grizzlies will remain indefinitely “endangered” unless the Trump administration or Congress says otherwise.
If the ESA functions solely as a last-ditch effort to prevent extinction, it will remain an important tool in conservation. But it will fail in its broader mission: achieving full species recovery with management being turned over to the states. The use of a 4(d) rule may offer a more practical alternative. Crucially, it would do so without handing the states complete autonomy over a species that could slip back into vulnerability if aggressively hunted. This phased approach, in which the states would be gradually (and conditionally) given more control over species management, could act as a show of good faith from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service while upholding the agency’s duty to return management of recovered species to the state wildlife agencies.
If the goal is to promote continued species recovery, which it should be, then federal policy must not alienate landowners and communities, as it so often does currently. Failing to do so will result in lower social tolerance for bears, and has even led to instances of poaching. In some cases where bears have come into conflict with rural livestock owners, people have adopted a practice referred to as “shoot, shovel, and shut up,” in which bears are simply shot and buried in retaliation for (or fear of future) livestock predation. With risks like this, states have a responsibility to uphold their end of this bargain, too, and would lose the right to manage grizzlies if they proved unable or unwilling to do so responsibly.
The grizzly population continues to grow and expand as bears spill out of the mountains into more populated human areas, but that comes with real risks for people. This expansion bodes well for the species overall, but only if those adjacent communities are given the tools to live safely and sustainably alongside the bears. So long as grizzlies are wholly handled by the federal government, though, it will be difficult for these communities to feel like they have a say in how the animals are managed, which only inspires resentment. This same resentment led to the 2011 congressional delisting of grey wolves in Montana, when Sen. Jon Tester attached a rider to the federal budget bill that removed protections for the wolves in his state. Since then, hundreds of wolves have been killed via numerous methods that the federal government has been unable to regulate. With congressional delegations across Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho clamoring for a similar delisting of grizzlies in 2025, the bears could meet the same fate if the Fish and Wildlife Service does not offer a compromise like 4(d). If bears are congressionally delisted and aggressively trapped and hunted, the ensuing population decline may land them back on the list and perpetuate an increasingly litigious cycle.
The grizzly bear is a proud icon of the American West, but it, like every species in our modern world, still requires some degree of management. To let its population flourish, we need to make sure that the people who make that expansion possible on the front lines aren’t bearing excessive burdens to do so.
