Scientist who recovered grizzlies warns Trump’s assault on conservation risks irreversible losses

In fewer than 100 days, the Trump administration has promoted drilling, mining and development of public lands while undercutting the science, scientists and laws that protect the environmental fabric of the West, conservationists say. The president maintains he is pursuing his agenda in the name of national security and a better life for Americans.

But the administration is sacrificing science and an American heritage on the altar of affluence, said the man most responsible for preserving a North American wildlife icon.

“Decisions on land management and wildlife management depend on science and facts,” said Chris Servheen, who for 35 years coordinated research and management of grizzly bears in the Lower 48, including their successful recovery in the Yellowstone ecosystem. He made his comments in an impassioned interview that centered on the species he spent a lifetime restoring.

Without science and scientists, “all the decisions we will make will not be informed,” he said. “It’ll be management based on ignorance, and that’s a losing approach.”

Servheen criticized the administration as Trump and his cabinet this week continued its attack on the conservation of natural resources, critics say. Trump on Easter Sunday called the country’s energy development “far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs,” and declared a national energy emergency that would dump environmental safeguards that hinder energy production.

His executive order follows the Bureau of Land Management’s plan to sideline conservation by rescinding the agency’s Public Lands Rule that would have put environmental sustainability on par with development. At the BLM’s parent Department of the Interior, a four-year draft strategic plan leaked to Public Domain and published Tuesday would “restore American prosperity” by using natural resources to lower energy costs and “increase … affordability.”

Biological research

Trump would eliminate the budget for biological research at the U.S. Geological Survey, the nation’s science research center, according to the journal Science. That federal research is the arena in which Servheen staked his career in public service.

Servheen and others are skeptical that the $307 million annual federal work in the Ecosystems Missions Area could be replaced by universities, as proposed in an internal USGS email that Science obtained. The agency’s targeted Biological Research Division involves cooperative research at 44 universities, including the University of Wyoming and tackles invasive species, climate-change-driven wildfires, chronic wasting disease that’s now infected numerous Wyoming winter elk feedgrounds, and similar threats.

“A management system based on ignorance … results in bad decisions and loss of resources,” Servheen said. “I don’t see how that’s a benefit to the American public. There certainly isn’t a benefit to me as a US taxpayer, and it’s not like, you know, my taxes are going to be reduced.”

Servheen pointed to his career as “Exhibit A” in his support for the federal research. The Grizzly Bear Study Team he led determined “where they live, what they ate, how they related to humans, how they related to each other [and] what were the main causes of mortality,” he said. The team determined the survival rate for cubs and females necessary to increase and stabilize the population, one of the country’s great wildlife success stories.

“Without the study team and the Endangered Species Act, there would be no grizzly bears in the Yellowstone Ecosystem today,” he said. “They would be gone.”

Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first national park set aside for enjoyment and preservation, would be diminished today had it not been for the federal research, he said.

Grizzly bears, still listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, are “the No. 1 species that people want to see in Yellowstone,” he said. “Hundreds of millions of dollars of tourist income flow into all the communities because of that interest.”

Why are grizzlies special?

“People ask me why grizzly bears are special,” Servheen said, “and I think [it’s] because they’re a magical animal.

“Years after I see a grizzly bear, or you see a grizzly bear, you can tell us what time of the day you saw it and what the bear was doing and what the weather was like, and who you’re with,” he said — “all burned into our memory.

“When we’re in grizzly habitat, we’re more aware or more alert, we have a more full experience of nature and wild nature. That’s what grizzly bears bring us.”

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Servheen dismissed notions that genetic engineering, including the so-called resurrection of the extinct dire wolf, could fulfill the country’s desire to preserve species’ natural systems.

“The Endangered Species Act is to recover species that need assistance,” Servheen said. “It’s not to create genetic models of them and put them in zoos.”

The law is popular, Servheen said. “The majority of the public likes that idea.”

But in Trump’s beltway and Mar-a-Lago Club orbit, “there’s no interest in the maintenance of natural systems,” he said. “All they care about is money and releasing the natural resources for development and destruction for profit, for the corporations and the wealthy of the United States.”

“If we sterilize the environment so that these animals can’t live anymore and we destroy their habitat and we put a few facsimiles of them in zoos,” he said, “that is not maintaining the natural ecosystems that are part of the heritage of the American West.”

A perfect storm brews

Administration actions come at a perilous time for wildlife and natural systems, Servheen said.

Climate change is altering bears’ food and distribution, Servheen said, ticking off threats that need to be monitored. “We have accelerating private land development in grizzly bear habitat, with all the risks that that development brings.

“We have increased recreation pressure in grizzly bear habitat … and that displaces bears, and increases stress, mortality risk,” he said. “We have the elimination of the science team that allowed us to recover the grizzly bear, so we won’t be monitoring them, and we won’t know what’s going on with them if this is allowed to continue.”

DOGE cuts to the federal workforce are contributing to the risk, he said. “We have decreased agency staff — they’re being fired, thousands of them from the Forest Service, BLM, etc.,” he said. “We have the government destroying the very agencies that can manage things like recreation and impacts on wildlife.”

The push extends beyond Western forests, fields and mountains to bedrock environmental protections, he said.

“The key issue here is the destruction of the major laws that got us sound environments and careful management of animals like grizzly bears,” Servheen said. As an example, he said the administration wants to redefine or eliminate “harm” from environmental laws — a term used to protect critical habitat, the destruction of which would hamstring, but not immediately kill, a protected animal.

“And so you have fewer protections for bears and bear habitat and everything else,” Servheen said. “It’s all happening right now, and this is not a good thing for the future of our environment, our public health, and certainly for animals like grizzly bears, which are extremely vulnerable to what we do.

“Once we lose the resources that we have, the natural resources on our landscape, whether it’s grizzly bears or clean air or clean water, it’s going to be almost impossible to bring those things back … to give that magic to our grandkids.”