States take the wheel in grizzly recovery

In mid July, the Secretary of the Interior and three governors gathered near Yellowstone National Park to celebrate the remarkable recovery of grizzly bears. Rather than declaring their work done, they announced an innovative approach to implementing the Endangered Species Act — one that allows states to earn greater management authority by demonstrating a species’ recovery.

To this point, grizzlies have embodied both the best and worst of the Endangered Species Act. The positive is that the bears, especially around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, have achieved an impressive recovery spurred by clear goals. For 30 years, those goals have motivated federal agencies, states, ranchers and conservation groups to collaborate on conservation.

And they have. When the species was listed in the 1970s, only 136 grizzly bears roamed the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service set recovery at 500 bears in the region. Thanks to decades of effort, there are more than 1,000 bears in the area today.

The negative is that grizzly recovery has been mired in conflict. The Yellowstone population reached its recovery goals in the early 2000s. But successive efforts to delist the population — first during the Bush administration, and again during the Obama and first Trump administrations — have been blocked by courts demanding more analysis.

One reason for that conflict is that the stakes of delisting are enormous. One day, a species is fully controlled by the federal government. The next, the species is delisted and control moves to individual states. Such dramatic shifts create unnecessary uncertainty and fear. To an environmental activist who has spent decades fighting for a species, this can feel like jumping straight from a toddler taking her first steps to giving her the car keys. 

Of course, states are not toddlers. They are the nation’s primary wildlife managers and have proven effective at sustaining the recovery of formerly endangered species. The federal government has delisted 73 species in the U.S. following successful recoveries. None has been relisted due to backsliding under state management. But, given the stakes, there’s a persistent fear that the next species will prove the exception to this rule. 

For that reason, the Endangered Species Act has long needed a more gradual and predictable off-ramp. The government’s new approach would provide it. 

In 2020, during a species status review, my organization, the Property and Environment Research Center, urged the Fish and Wildlife Service to let states earn expanded management authority as grizzly populations meet recovery goals. Last year, we partnered with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Boone & Crockett Club and Wyoming Wildlife Federation in a comment proposing how the Fish and Wildlife Service could put this idea into practice. The proposed rule takes that path, giving states substantial authority to manage bears while they remain listed and the federal government retains some control, including a hunting prohibition. This breaks the all-or-nothing pattern and makes state authority dependent on achieving and maintaining recovery goals. 

Some areas already exceed their recovery goals and could see expanded state management soon; others are close, giving states extra incentive to clear the bar. And accountability is built in through the use of objective criteria that would trigger a shift back to federal management.

This approach wouldn’t end conflict over the bear’s status. But it would give the federal government and the states something like an insurance policy against future conflict, locking in greater flexibility now rather than conditioning everything on delisting.

While the agency deserves credit for embracing this novel solution, the proposal could be improved. Rather than setting recovery goals in the regulation, the proposed rule creates a new bureaucratic process for the federal government and states to negotiate key details later. That decision has caused environmental groups to speculate that standards will be set too low. It could equally let a future administration withdraw states’ authority regardless of their success. But this uncertainty can be easily fixed by incorporating clear, objective standards into the rule.

Many other species would benefit from this model. Shifting authority to states gradually as species progress toward recovery goals would create the needed incentives for states, landowners and conservation groups to invest in the recovery of struggling species. It would also allow states to build trust with the conservation community by allowing them to demonstrate they can effectively manage a species in advance of a delisting. 

For more than 50 years, the Fish and Wildlife Service has had the flexibility to condition regulatory relief on recovery progress — but hasn’t used it. Instead, the agency has reflexively regulated threatened species the same as endangered species, ignoring opportunities to tailor regulations to spur and reward recovery. Its recent decision to rescind this policy opens the door to more thoughtful and creative approaches, like the grizzly bear proposal, informed by science rather than lazy one-size-fits-all presumptions.

That’s critical to improving the Endangered Species Act’s performance. Examining every species for which the Fish and Wildlife Service has set a projected recovery date, my organization found that, of the 300 species projected to recover by 2023, only 11 actually did. Flexibility and incentives are essential to close this recovery gap. Ultimately, the goal is to get every species to follow the grizzly’s lead to recovery.