Dec. 28–Grizzly bears, bull trout, lynx, gray wolves and white sturgeon have been among the beneficiaries of the Endangered Species Act with profound impacts on the Montana landscape over the last 40 years.
The law, enacted on this date in 1973, is at once celebrated by many for its successes but viewed with derision by others because every endangered-species listing has come with varying degrees of costs, consequences and controversy.
The law is credited by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for fully recovering 31 species nationwide.
There currently are nine listed species in Montana, including the charismatic grizzly bear that is on the cusp of delisting in and around Yellowstone National Park and in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem.
“I think the recovery of grizzly bears is one of the greatest success stories of the Endangered Species Act,” said Chris Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It has been a great benefit to the grizzly bear. There’s three times as many grizzly bears today than when we started in 1981. They occupy places they had been extinct from for 100 years. The only reason that happened was because of the cooperative efforts under the ESA.”
Servheen said the listing of grizzly bears mobilized government agencies and the public over time to bring about significant changes that have made recovery possible.
Prior to listing, Servheen said, there was a certain blindness and disregard among agency officials and the public to the plight of grizzly bears in the northern Rockies.
“There was a general feeling that it was no big deal, that the grizzly bear was doing fine,” Servheen said. “When the bears were listed, they weren’t fine at all.”
For starters, “there were sanitation problems everywhere,” Servheen said. Even in places such as Glacier National Park and Yellowstone, there were dumps attracting bears, and no food or garbage storage rules.
“There were lots of roads in bear habitat and road building was ongoing without any consideration for the impacts on bears and other species,” Servheen said. “Everyone just did what they wanted to do, and they just got rid of bears when they were problems.”
The endangered-species listing changed the way bears were regarded. Human-caused bear mortalities dropped sharply and over time there was a significant increase in habitat security and perhaps most significantly, “we’ve developed more public understanding on how to live with grizzly bears,” said Servheen, who credits bear management specialists with a major role in reducing bear-human conflicts.
Whether that involves working with rural residents to secure garbage and other attractants, providing electric fencing to protect livestock, cleaning up grain spills on train tracks or educating the public about the use of pepper spray, grizzly bears have benefited greatly.
“The bear managers are where the rubber meets the road,” Servheen said. “They are on the front edge of the human-bear interface. They’ve done a tremendous amount of work.”
While grizzly bears are still protected, legal and procedural work is underway to bring about delisting in Yellowstone and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. Populations in the Cabinet-Yaak region, the Selkirk Mountains and the Northern Cascades still require recovery efforts, Servheen said, “but we’ve come a long way.”
In Montana, Endangered Species Act listings have come with heavy costs well outside the billions of dollars that have been spent by government agencies to bring about species recovery.
Hundreds of miles of forest roads have been closed on the Flathead National Forest alone to improve habitat security for the grizzly bear.
Logging projects have been blocked by courts, sawmills have closed, jobs have been lost and recreational access has been diminished on public lands — all with connections to the protection of the grizzly bear alone.
The more recent listing of the Canada lynx is beginning to have similar influences. Gray wolves were delisted in Montana in 2011, but even now they continue to have impacts on big-game wildlife as well as domestic livestock.
“If there is ever a study on the ranching business, and of course timber, mining, oil and gas, all resource extraction, the value of the costs [associated with Endangered Species Act listings] would be staggering,” said Fred Hodgeboom, a member and past president of Montanans for Multiple Use, a group that has staunchly opposed forest road closures.
Like other critics of the wildlife law, Hodgeboom is disenchanted by the way the law has evolved through case law and the way it has been applied over time by the Fish and Wildlife Service.
“I think a lot of people thought it was a good idea when it was passed but the implementation over the years hasn’t turned out how a lot of people thought it would,” Hodgeboom said. “It has been used as a fundraiser for a lot of nonprofits that continually litigate over endangered species. They litigate over everything.”
Hodgeboom contends that the original vision for the federal law was to save easily identifiable species, “but now they are litigating over bugs and flowers and tiny little bait fish.”
To the average person, many protected species are indistinguishable from other nonprotected species, but they are genetically distinct, creating a nearly endless potential for petitions to protect obscure species, Hodgeboom maintains.
“It goes on and on. It’s just totally bankrupting many of our natural resource industries, including ranching and farming,” he added.
Another big problem with endangered-species listings for Hodgeboom is that many of them seem to be perpetual. Some species are so difficult to inventory that the goalpost for recovery can never be reached. In other cases, there are no signs of recovery despite costly efforts.
That is the case for the Kootenai River white sturgeon, a species that has been almost entirely unable to reproduce in the wild since the construction of Libby Dam in the early 1970s. While the wild population of the ancient species continues to age and die off, the Kootenai River population has been sustained by hatchery reproduction.
Libby Dam operations have been altered and habitat improvements have been made, all with a price tag, in hopes of improving sturgeon spawning conditions in the Kootenai River.
But those expenditures could pale in comparison to the overall economic impacts of the bull trout being listed as a threatened species.
Most recently, the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes have proposed gill netting lake trout, a bull trout competitor, from Flathead Lake in an effort to accelerate bull trout recovery.
Opponents fear the effort will decimate lake trout — the only recreational fishery in the lake — with far-reaching economic impacts.
Arlene Montgomery played a leading role in the listing of bull trout, with her organization, Friends of the Wild Swan, petitioning for a listing in 1992 and being involved in litigation until a formal listing came about in 1998.
“I do think that the law is a success and I think that is due in part to the fact that citizens can be involved in protecting species,” said Montgomery, who lives in the Swan Lake area. “I think that is a key part in how species have either been recovered or they have been listed.”
Citizen advocacy for an imperiled species is actually necessary in many cases, Montgomery asserts, because agencies charged with recovery often aren’t active or effective enough in their recovery efforts.
Recovery, she said, “doesn’t just happen. It requires some pressure.”
Montgomery said obtaining a listing for an imperiled species is important because it raises attention and attracts resources for recovery, including enhanced scientific research.
That needs to be followed by a critical habitat designation for the species that “hones in on where the important places are that need to be protected in order to achieve recovery,” she said.
In the case of bull trout, a critical habitat designation didn’t happen until 2010 after another series of lawsuits that involved Friends of the Wild Swan.
Finally, a threatened and endangered species needs a recovery plan that is actually implemented, she said. It’s a process that can take years.
“Sometimes you’re facing decades of declines from when the alarm bells started ringing,” she said.
Montgomery rejects any suggestion that her group’s involvement with litigation is motivated by financial reasons.
“We can certainly say that we haven’t gotten rich off it,” she said. “Our mission is to protect wildlife and habitat. If that means having to use our laws that aren’t being properly applied, then that’s what it takes.”
On a final reflection on the Endangered Species Act, Montgomery said the protection of one imperiled species can benefit many other species. Bull trout recovery, for instance, is tied to maintaining water quality that other fish species depend on as well.
“Some species are the canary in the coal mine,” she said. “If it’s good for bull trout, it’s good for other fish, and it can be good for people, too.”
Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at [email protected].