Once upon a time Goldilocks was hiking across northwest Wyoming and she met a big fierce grizzly bear.
Grizzlies were once severely endangered throughout this part of the West, down to just over 100 bears in the 1970’s. But today more than 600 of these hostile bruins haunt the Yellowstone area. And this summer in the Yellowstone area grizzlies killed two people, while 63 problem bears had to be relocated, euthanized, or put in zoos.
“This bear is flourishing too much!” she exclaimed.
So the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and the Department of Interior proposed removing the grizzly from the endangered species list to allow for population management through trophy hunting. The bears were removed from the endangered species list in 2007, but environmental groups protested that the population was not robust enough to resist threats from climate change and a district court forced the US Fish and Wildlife Service to restore the bears’ endangered status in 2009. Now, with the bear population — and conflicts — up again, delisting is back on the table.
Goldilocks kept traveling north until she reached the coast of British Columbia where she encountered a rare Canadian spirit bear or Kermode bear.
About one out of ten individuals in this subspecies of black bear carries a pair of recessive genes that makes it pure white.
So a team of international conservation photographers came to the coastal rainforest to document the bears and tell the story of threats to their largely unprotected habitat from logging, trophy hunting, other resource extraction, a proposed pipeline from the Alberta oil sands and a proposed deepwater port for tankers to pick up that oil. Two conservation groups are using the photographs of the bears and other wildlife to launch a worldwide campaign with which they hope, “to secure a legislated ban on oil super tanker traffic in the Great Bear Rainforest and stop the Enbridge pipeline.”
Goldilocks walked on until she reached the Alaskan Arctic. There she met a polar bear with two little cubs floating on a block of melting sea ice.
“This bear is just right!” she exclaimed.
So the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finalized designation of 187,000 square miles of critical habitat to protect the threatened polar bear. The designation, which is 96 percent sea ice, covers an area larger than Oregon and Washington combined. Any development proposed there will undergo serious review from the federal government and could be blocked if it poses too great a threat to the bears. Goldilocks and the bears were very glad to have their home protected from development, but then they learned that small development projects may be able to chip away at the protected area. Worse, the greatest threat to the bears comes from greenhouse gas emissions causing the Arctic to warm and melting the icy critical habitat. Unless the US and other countries can stop or even reverse greenhouse gas emissions, keeping development off the ice won’t mean much.
If Goldilocks really wants to help polar bears, she better rush down to the UN climate conference in Cancun and get the world leaders who are meeting there to take some decisive action to stop greenhouse gas emissions. After 16 years, the potential for these climate meetings to actually address the threat of climate change sounds like little more than a fairy tale.
Emilene Ostlind is an editorial intern at High Country News.
Photograph of a Kermode bear and cub by Steven Kazlowski from the Daily Mail Online.
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