Alberta's grizzly bears must have breathed an
audible sigh of relief when Alberta's Minister of Sustainable
Resource Development David Coutts announced on March
3, 2006 that the spring grizzly bear hunt had been suspended
for three years. If they didn't hear the actual announcement
from the sheltered warmth of their winter dens, then
they surely must have heard the loud cheer from thousands
of Albertans who had been waiting for just such a decision
since the Alberta Endangered Species Conservation Committee
(ESCC) made the recommendation 2002. (For a detailed
history of the recovery process, see “Role
Reversal,” Western Perspective) As one anonymous
Albertan wrote in an e-mail to me shortly after the
announcement: "YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"I don't know what to do," said Nigel Douglas, a decidedly shocked conservation specialist with the Alberta Wilderness Association, in an interview with the Globe and Mail. "I'm not used to good news."
This decision is as good as it gets in Alberta, for which the government should be congratulated. As the ESCC made clear in its 2002 recommendation to list the Alberta grizzly bear as a threatened species and suspend the hunt, the population is perilously small and mortalities notoriously high. But as everyone who knows anything about recovering ailing grizzly bear populations, hunting is not the problem, and suspending it in the short-term will not be enough.
"'Regulated hunting' and 'sustainable harvests' are not the 'cause' of grizzly bear declines in Alberta," wrote Dr. Charles Schwartz, the leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, in his recent review of Alberta's draft grizzly bear recovery plan. Dr. Schwartz is one of two experts (the other is Dr. Chris Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to whom the Alberta government has turned for advice on its recovery efforts and plans. "Closing hunting seasons gives the false impression to the public that all will be well for the bears if hunting is stopped. Hunting is in fact a very minor symptom of a much greater erosion of habitat by humans."
No, the significance of this announcement has less to do with beginning the actual recovery of Alberta's threatened grizzly bear population and much more to do with the possibility of a political climate in which effective grizzly bear recovery may have a chance of even taking place. You see, Alberta is a province that has been governed by the same party—the oxymoronically named Progressive Conservatives—for 25 years. This is a government that makes the George Bush-led Republicans look like card-carrying members of Greenpeace. Despite boat loads of rhetoric and more money than it knows what to do with, it has been loathe to adopt the principle of sustainable development or protect the threatened and endangered species that roam its timber- and oil-rich lands. Alberta has no meaningful endangered species legislation, and public participation is seen by the government not as a right but a privilege, which it uses judiciously in any case.
And despite the suspension of the hunt, and much scientific evidence to the contrary, the ministry responsible for managing Alberta's wildlife continues to promote the hunting of grizzly bears as a means of keeping bears wary, people safe, and bear populations bigger and healthier. As Minister Coutts said less than a week after his announcement, the grizzly bear hunt will resume once he has a better idea of how many bears there are. “The hunt has always been part of bear management in this province. It helps get rid of older bears, particularly the boars that may have diseases and leave the females.” Huh?
So please pardon the anthropomorphic jubilation by Albertans and their bears, for the suspension of the hunt does warrant some celebration by those of us who hope to see grizzly bears remain part of Alberta's cultural and geographical landscape. And there is hope, there is always hope.
But hope alone will not get the job done.
Grizzly bear recovery will depend most on how well Albertans
can convince a recalcitrant government to improve habitat
security for grizzly bears. The key, as biologists have
known for more than a decade, is not managing bears
but managing people. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,
where the recovery of grizzly bears has become the only
working model, this has meant maintaining what biologists
call “habitat security” by limiting the
amount of development in grizzly bear habitat, especially
roads and cutlines that allow heavily armed men to drive
four-wheel drive vehicles wherever they want to go.
Dr. Schwarz defines “secure habitat” as
“any [roadless] area 10 acres or larger [that
is] 500 meters or more from a road.” Secure habitat,
he says, is a key indication of survival.
We already know, based on studies done to date, that the amount of secure habitat in Alberta is perilously low. Consider: Secure habitat in the Yellowstone recovery area averages 86 per cent. Secure habitat in Kananaskis Country, a much-touted matrix of protected areas and multiple-use lands south of Banff National Park, is a measly 52 per cent.
The implications are obvious. Even in the Foothills Model Forest, a 27,5000-square kilometer area south of Hinton, Alberta that is supposed to be a “model” of sustainable forest management, the future for the grizzly bear appears bleak. A recent scientific paper by Dr. Scott Nielsen from the University of Alberta predicts that the amount of forestry and oil and gas development planned for the Foothills Model Forest, and the roads that accompany it, will likely mean the decline and disappearance of grizzly bears outside of the national park within 30 years.
The decline is already underway. The results of a recent DNA-based population estimate for this same area found fewer than half the grizzly bears biologists had expected. “These [recent population estimate] results are shocking to me,” says Dr. Stephen Herrero, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary and one of the world's foremost experts on grizzly bears. “Both numbers and distribution [of grizzly bears] have collapsed between the TransCanada and Yellowhead highways.”
Improving this situation will be a tall order. At less than two percent, Alberta “boasts” the lowest percentage of provincially managed protected areas in Canada, and Alberta bureaucrats have never been shy about voicing their anti-park sentiments. Most of the rest of the “working landscape” in Alberta, the notion of which is second only to God in the government's estimation, is riddled with roads at densities three, four, even five times higher than standards used in the Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide recovery zones. At the first meeting of the grizzly bear recovery team, which was set up to draft a recovery plan for a threatened species the government refuses to list as such, it was made perfectly clear that the recovery process would not be used to “lock up” large tracts of land that were perfectly suited to development. Being asked to recover grizzly bears under these conditions is much like being asked to swim across a lake with your hands tied behind your back: You have your legs, so you might be able to do it, but the chances are high that you will fail—and drown.
So the team settled on small tracts, four of them, each approximately 2500 square kilometres in size. If the current draft recovery plan were implemented as is, it would see a total of ~10,000 square kilometers designated as Grizzly Conservation Areas in the 260,000 square kilometer recovery zone. Assuming currently designated national and provincial parks and wilderness areas (~27,000 to 30,000 square kilometers) provide adequate protection for grizzly bears, the total area managed for the needs of the grizzly bear would become roughly 15 per cent of the recovery zone. This is woefully inadequate compared to the 68 to 85 percent that is being used in the Northern Continental Divide and Yellowstone recovery zones, respectively. Clearly the number and size of the proposed Grizzly Conservation Areas will need to be increased if the recovery plan has any chance of being effective.
But all of that was before the Alberta government turned over a new leaf and, like a drunk eschewing the bottle, suspended the grizzly bear hunt, an announcement that hints, at least, at the possibility of positive change. Which is the closest thing to good news grizzly bears and the Albertans who care about them have heard in decades.
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