Photo by Glenn Phillips.
Montana’s Paradise Valley is aptly named. Sitting between two towering mountain ranges, it cradles the mighty Yellowstone River that flows from its headwaters in America’s first national park and provides critical habitat to the native species still present 200 years after Lewis and Clark’s expedition, including grizzly bears, wolves, and wolverines.
Yet, the Forest Service decided to expand cattle grazing on six federal allotments on the valley’s east side, including in grizzly bear recovery zones, It is a formula for destruction of native vegetation, sedimentation in cutthroat spawning streams, and dead wolves and bears – which is why United States Magistrate Judge Kathleen DeSoto issued her Findings and Recommendation Order in favor of the Alliance, Native Ecosystems Council, Western Watersheds Project, and six other wildlife and ecosystem protection advocacy groups on March 27th.
In addition to several of the allotments located in grizzly bear recovery zones, the agency also expanded the area and lengthened the livestock grazing season, putting the bears at increased risk of being killed in response to foreseeable conflicts with private, for-profit cattle operations. Our lawsuit also named the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a defendant because the agency is supposed to be protecting endangered and recovering species, but failed to adequately consider the impacts of the grazing decision on grizzly bears in the Lower 48 states.
The Court ruled in our favor on four out of five of our National Environmental Policy Act claims including: (1) failure to analyze the effects of putting cattle on the allotments early in the spring; (2) failure to analyze habitat connectivity, which is an important factor for grizzlies; (3) failure to analyze the cumulative effects related to activities on private lands in the area; and (4) failure to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement.
The six grazing allotments lie just north of the border of Yellowstone National Park and encompass a portion of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, within an important habitat connectivity zone. Increased grizzly bear mortality in this area on the edge of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem will not only slow grizzly bear range expansion, it will keep the Yellowstone grizzly bear population genetically isolated, leading to irreversible inbreeding.
In recent decades, grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem have experienced a drastic decline in two of their main food sources, whitebark pine nuts and Yellowstone cutthroat trout, That’s led to an increase in meat consumption by grizzly bears, including livestock that continue to be grazed in areas where conflict is virtually certain.
Providing secure travel corridors between the Yellowstone ecosystem to the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem is essential to grizzly bear recovery. The Forest Service’s decision puts private cattle on the public’s national forest one month earlier, when calves are still very small and tempting targets for hungry grizzlies after waking up from a long winter nap.
Since Montana alone has more than two million cows – compared to less than 1000 grizzlies in the entire Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, our lawsuit and the Court’s Order ensure that grizzlies are protected and recovered as required under federal law.
We would like to thank the Western Environmental Law Center for representing us.
Please consider helping us continue to fight to truly recover grizzly bears and their habitat.
© Counter Punch
