Fifteen conservation organizations urged the Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday to update a 31-year-old grizzly bear management plan and start treating the iconic species as one overall population.
The petition, led by Earthjustice, comes as the FWS nears a set of decisions that could well include a proposal to remove the Yellowstone-area grizzly bear population from the list of threatened species. The mix of national and local green groups contend in the petition that grizzlies are vulnerable as Western states adopt new wildlife management schemes.
“In the past few years, there has been a political backlash, with anti-predator attitudes and misinformation in some of the states,” wildlife biologist Christopher Servheen said at a briefing, adding that “grizzlies are at risk because many of the legislatures and governors in these states are passing legislation and implementing harmful anti-carnivore policies that demonizes predators.”
Servheen was coordinator of the FWS’s grizzly bear recovery program from 1981 to 2016, and he led the team that wrote the existing recovery plan for grizzly bears in 1993.
