Homo Bureaucraticus Meets Ursus Horribilis

The one true symbol of the wilderness today is the grizzly bear - Ursus horribilis. Grizzlies and humans just don't get along. More humans, fewer bears; fewer bears, less wilderness. And since the larger part of American history has been that of humans subduing wilderness, the bears have not fared well.

When the Endangered Species Act became law back in the early '70s, the grizzly was one of the first on the list. Today, in the lower 48 states, about 800 grizzlies survive in three shrinking islands of wilderness.

Glacier National Park, in northwest Montana, holds about 500 grizzlies; Yellowstone National Park, about 300. Further west in a couple of mountain ranges in Idaho, about 50 bears survive.

A couple of sinister memoranda disclosed in mid-July that all three of these grizzly zones now face crisis brought on by hom. sap. voracissimi, otherwise known as park managers, ranchers, timber companies and the oil and gas industries.

Grizzlies are the original sylvan Luddites, frightening tourists, occasionally taking one out, shredding pretty North Face tents, requiring relocation in distant portions of the parks and generally raising hell in the neighborhood.

You can hardly blame the grizzly. One example: After the bear was put on the endangered list in the mid-'70s, the National Park Service sanctioned a huge resort complex on the shores of Yellowstone Lake, in favored grizzly habitat. Bears went fishing for cutthroat trout as they'd done since time immemorial and got caught up in the tourist traffic.

First-time ursine intruders got drugged up with sodium pentothal (which turned them into psychotics), and they were airlifted to remote regions of the park. Two strikes and you're out. Repeat offenders were shot to death.

Twenty years of this, and the feds have had enough. Over the last two years, there's been threatening talk about taking Ursus horribilis off the Endangered Species List. That moment is now upon us. A Fish and Wildlife Service update, issued on July 17, sets the stage for de-listing the grizzly in Yellowstone.

The rationale for such de-listing from the Endangered Species List is an old stratagem of Homo bureaucraticus, namely a robust declaration of victory. The update declares flatly that the government has achieved its "recovery plan population goals" in the Yellowstone region. This is as if the U.N. forces in Bosnia were to withdraw today, declaring that the security of the Bosnian Moslems is now assured.

Grizzlies, for obvious reasons, are hard to count. But most non-government scientists believe there are fewer female grizzlies in both Yellowstone and Glacier than there were when the bear was first listed. Does this mean that the Endangered Species Act is a failure? No, it means that the federal bureaucrats lacked the will to enforce it.

If those bureaucrats were truly going to defend the bear, they would be obstructing the designs of some of the most ruthless lobbies in America for whom Ursus horribilis has been an irksome obstruction to making money. The grizzly stands in the path of oil and gas companies such as Chevron, which wants to sink wells in the Rocky Mountain Front (as the geologists call it) east of Glacier Park; in the path of Plum Creek, which wants to log off the remaining 6 million acres of wild forest in the northern Rockies; in the path of the Canadian-owned Noranda Gold, which wants to mine in the Absaroka range on the border of Yellowstone Park.

Facing these opponents, where may the beleaguered grizzly turn for succor? An apparent ally would seem to be the wildlife lobby, but here too, peril lurks for Ursus horribilis in its hour of need.

An internal memorandum of the National Wildlife Federation, prepared in consort with Defenders of Wildlife, written on July 11, sets forth a plan for establishing a "grizzly recovery zone" in central Idaho.

Alas, the grizzlies won't in all likelihood be given much of a chance to recover. Plowing through the virtually impenetrable prose of the memorandum, we find that the two green organizations have placed some codicils on the end of their plan. Oversight of the recovery zone is entrusted partially to such interested parties as the timber industry.

Its designated name in the plan is somewhat of a giveaway, as any alert Ursus horribilis skimming the contents would speedily realize. The grizzly is reclassified as "a non-essential experimental species," who may be shot at and killed by any rancher or hunter who claims thereafter that lives or livestock were endangered.

To continue the Bosnian analogy, it's as if the United Nations offered a plan to airlift Bosnian Moslems to a "recovery zone" somewhere east of Belgrade, in Serbia, with appropriate definitions of "non-essential experimental species" and "harm" appended thereunto.

Under these conditions, give the grizzly maybe 50 years at most in the lower 48. No grizzlies, no wilderness.

(Copyright, 1995, Creators Syndicate, Inc.)

Alexander Cockburn's column appears Thursday on editorial pages of The Times.