I agree with Robert that the Wind River Reservation is the "wild card," not only with grizzlies, but wolves as well. While the Joint Business Council (representing the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone) have not taken formal action, I've had enough conversations with business council members to believe that the grizzly bear and the wolf may be welcome on the reservation's high country -- much to the consternation of Fremont County commissioners and livestock producers.
Conservationists shouldn't get too giddy at the prospect of Indians thumbing their noses at cowboys. As big as the reservation is (2.2 million acres), wolf and griz territories are more than likely to be as much off as on the reservation, leaving them exposed to either hunters or predator control agents.

I have to praise Bill Schneider for patiently wading through the ins and outs of a plainly complicated issue. And I appreciate the detail added by Robert Hoskins and Brodie Farquhar, because the devilish part of bear conservation in any part of the world is often in the details. And I spent 10 years tracking the politico-economic and biological, scientific data for all eight living species of bears on a full-time basis.

Because my own experience led me to see grizzly conservation in a context including all bear conservation, I'm biased toward the global view.
And there are some downright unfriendly trends afoot, including a climate in the process of what may prove to be a rapid kind of change.

Now, climate science may not seem the kind of science needed to evaluate the status of bears. Sure, we've known for years that polar bears would take some heavy hits, partly by losing their icy hunting platform, but more profoundly be losing their prey -- ringed seals, whose own survival depends on Arctic ice. And now the evidence is rolling in, confirming what many of us knew many years ago.

No bear will escape climate change, because nothing can. And grizzlies will face challenges of several kinds, more than I can detail here. But there are already some red flags waving, including flags of warning for the grizzly's food base.

In 2002, Nature published a review of 97 scientific reports on climate's impact on species. The authors concluded that, although we are only at the very early stages of climatic change now seemingly on a course to last one to three or more centuries, wild species from marine and terrestrial environments and all the way from the subtropics to the polar regions, are -- already -- responding.

For instance, Canadian grizzlies are now moving into areas of the North where they've never been seen. And they're doing it to follow the spread of food sources.

But food sources aren't all spreading, and some key species of high importance to the bear are entering a long-expected era of dieoff. The case of a pine beetle boom killing whitebark pine is a cause celebre in the Yellowstone instance. But that's far from the end of dieoffs that will be affecting the grizzly. For example, at a similar latitude, vaccinium is showing signs of endangerment in Europe, and for reasons driven by changes of temperature and/or precipitation.

This isn't the forum for setting out a complete inventory of how a changing climate will put pressure on wild species, including the grizzly. But the little outfit I work for has been circulating scientific publications to people who want to find out what's afoot for climate and species. So, please, if you have any interest in getting your hands on pdf files of the 2002 Nature article I cited above, feel free to contact me at


And if you need more detail on what the scientific community is expecting climate change to do to wild species, contact me again after you've read the good review of 97 scientific papers in Nature.

And what about de-listing? Given what I know or think I know about bear conservation in general, and the implications of climate change in particular, I think that de-listing would be an exercise in irrational enthusiasm, blind to a world on the cusp of serious change.

Lance Olsen
author, Field Guide to the Grizzly Bear. Sasquatch Books. Seattle. 1992. Revised 1996.

President, Great Bear Foundation 1982-1992 G