How Many Biologists Does It Take to Count a Dead Grizzly?

On December 17, 2004, Louisa Willcox of the Natural Resources Defense Council convened a collection of U.S. grizzly bear advocates in Bozeman, Montana, with a call to arms. Under threat of lawsuit from the governor of Wyoming, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service planned a fast-track removal of Yellowstone’s grizzly bears from the protections of the Endangered Species Act. Convinced that such a move—under the sorts of conditions proposed by the agency—could send the park’s grizzlies on a downward spiral toward extinction, Willcox figured the activists and lawyers gathered had about a year to either derail the process, or get ready to sue. Those responding to her call were the heavy-hitters of northern Rocky Mountain nonprofits: conservation lawyers who had successfully defended Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction program, and built a tenuous consensus around the idea of reintroducing grizzlies to the remote Selway-Bitterroot wilderness of central Idaho and western Montana; attorneys from the firm that won the case (if only temporarily) for Bill Clinton’s roadless initiative, who stopped Crown Butte from digging its New World Mine cyanide heap leach gold mine at the northeastern corner of Yellowstone, and who won their case to phase snowmobiles out of that park. It was not, however, an amiable gathering. Within minutes, old alliances and grudges reared their ugly heads...CounterPunch