Role reversal

There was a time not so very long ago when American conservationists and biologists looked north across the 49th parallel with hope. They saw a vast wilderness full of grizzly bears they thought would always be able to augment flagging populations of Ursus arctos in the lower 48 states.

Those days are long gone. Now, as Americans contemplate the delisting of the Yellowstone grizzly, many Canadian conservationists and biologists are looking south to figure out how to reverse the continuing decline of grizzly bears and the habitat they depend on in the Canadian West.

Nowhere is this truer than Alberta, where the political and legislative climate is so hostile, and grizzly bear habitat so degraded, that the future of the grizzly is as uncertain as it is anywhere on the continent.

From the perspective of the grizzly bear, the history of the Canadian West is similar to that of its southern neighbor. Grizzly bears once roamed as far east as the Manitoba-Ontario border, but as trappers and fur traders moved west in search of beaver, grizzly bears, buffalo and most other mammals became increasingly scarce.

By the time settlers started flooding the prairies in the late 19th century, grizzlies were all but gone from the Great Plains, relegated instead to the boreal forests and tundra of the North and to the foothills and mountains of southern Canada.

Today, most grizzly bear "populations" on the Canadian side of the border are considered threatened or nearly so. Only two, British Columbia’s Flathead and South Purcell grizzly bear "population units" contain "viable" populations, and only the Flathead provides the potential for meaningful connectivity with a recovering, though not recovered, population in the U.S.'s Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem.

In Alberta, the provincial government's own Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended that the Alberta grizzly be listed as a threatened species, but the government has refused to adopt the recommendation and has done little to reverse the trends threatening grizzly bears everywhere they still exist.

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"The Yellowstone recovery plan is still the high bar, and we’re nowhere near that in Alberta."

– Mike Gibeau
Biologist and Banff National Park warden

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It may come as a surprise that Alberta harbors arguably the most threatened population of grizzly bears in Canada, if not North America. This situation has less to do with ecology or biology and everything to do with politics.

South of the border, grizzly bears are protected by relatively strong legislation (the Endangered Species Act) and a science-based and well-funded recovery plan. While not perfect, these measures, kept on track by a reasonably robust environmental movement, seem able to ensure grizzly bears, perhaps even the small, isolated populations that hang on in places like the Selkirk, Cabinet-Yaak and Cascade mountains, will receive the attention, and habitat, they require to recover.

The success of the recovering Yellowstone population, which has doubled over the last 30 years, is a good example of what is required to recover declining grizzly bear populations.

Biologists have long recognized that access management is the key. Keeping road densities low and ensuring enough secure core habitat exists across the recovery zone are key components of recovering grizzly bears, and have worked well in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

"The Yellowstone recovery plan is still the high bar," said grizzly bear biologist and Banff National Park warden Mike Gibeau. "And we’re nowhere near that in Alberta."

There are no reliable estimates for the Alberta population. The process used by the government to estimate population size and set hunting quotas between 1988 and 2002, one that suggested the population had grown by almost 50 per cent over the last 15 years, was determined by a government analysis to have used "questionable practices" that "are not scientifically defensible," leading to predictions that are "not biologically possible."

Expert opinion suggests there are between 500 and 700 of some of the slowest-reproducing grizzly bears found anywhere in North America. They survive in approximately 260,000 kilometers of western Alberta, though the amount of habitat "occupied" by females with cubs is likely much smaller than that.

This so-called recovery zone is so riddled with roads and cutblocks it is unlikely that any significant patch of grizzly bear range (outside of the national parks) would meet even the weakest standards used in the United States for road density and core secure area.

The deplorable state of grizzly bear habitat in Alberta wouldn't be so alarming if the government was committed to do what is needed to recover grizzly bears in the province. But it is not.

After 15 years, virtually none of Alberta's 1990 Grizzly Bear Management Plan has been implemented. When the Alberta Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended that the grizzly bear be listed as a threatened species in 2002, the Alberta government decided, for the first time ever, to ignore the recommendation, choosing instead to continue the hunt north of Calgary, although it did decrease the number of tags available.

In an absurd twist reminiscent of a Franz Kafka novel, the government did convene a team in 2003 to develop a recovery plan for a species that is still being hunted for sport. Two years later, the multi-stakeholder recovery team, dominated by industry hacks and pro-industry government bureaucrats, submitted a draft plan to the Alberta government.

Although the plan contains some important ideas and strategies, it is extremely weak, based not on science but on the political manipulation of science.

(There is not enough room here to include a detailed critique of the recovery plan. For more information, see www.grizzlybearalliance.org.)

Even if the draft recovery plan is implemented as rigorously as possible, it will do little to slow the continued decline of grizzly bears in Alberta.

If Alberta is to begin the long, slow road to recovering its grizzly bear population, it will need to develop, fund and implement a recovery plan that is similar in scope and detail to the Yellowstone recovery plan that has proven so successful to date.

Inevitably, this will require Albertans to restrain their activities in grizzly bear habitat and to repair decades of damage that has been ignored for too long.

But in the long term, the investment will have been worth it, for as Andy Russell wrote more than 40 years ago, grizzly bears can teach us something of what it means to live with nature, which is something we will be forced to learn, whether we like it or not.