Montana News
Episode 01: Five Billboards Outside Livingston, Montana
The Endangered Species Act helped bring the Yellowstone-area grizzly population back from the brink of extinction. It also sparked controversy over a question that looms over more species than just grizzly bears: How do we balance the needs of endangered wildlife with the needs of humans?
- Duration:
- 44m
- Broadcast on:
- 01 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
Last fall I was driving just a few minutes outside my house in Livingston, a town in southwest Montana. I was on this road that cut south, straight to Yellowstone National Park. Getting the first glimpse of the Absorca is just absolutely beautiful right now, snow-covered peaks, just jagged rugged, huge relief from the valley floor. They're just big, big mountains. It's a beautiful drive, just this wide open space. The Yellowstone River runs next to the road, elk and deer graze in the valley, and of course there are signs of people too, like the occasional billboard. This is the first one I see. Welcome to Paradise Valley, entrance to Grand Daddy of National Parks. Then there are ads for an RV park, some hot springs, a couple of restaurants, Old Saloon serving outlaws and cowgirls since 1902. Soon I round a corner, and one particular billboard jumps out at me. And here's a sign that says de-list grizzly bears to support a conservation success story. Grizzlies are protected by the Endangered Species Act, have been for almost 50 years, so this sign saying they've recovered enough that we should get rid of those federal protections. As I headed back to town, I encountered more grizzly billboards on the other side of the road. Let's save the grizzlies and just a big old image of a grizzly bear on it. Seconds later, I passed another one, and then another one, and then another. Four signs advertising the same basic message. No de-listing, no trophy hunting. A mom and two babies with a target on the mom. Grizzlies, these signs say, need our protection. Removing them from the Endangered Species List is a bad idea. These five billboards were in a kind of dialogue with one another, a back and forth battle from across the highway. And they reveal a major fight happening, both right here, on this landscape and in DC. It's not just about wildlife. On one side is folks who see grizzly bear protections as government overreach and a threat to lifestyle and livelihoods. On the other is people who want grizzlies back to make nature whole, and to bring back what we've lost to industry and development. It's a fight, in essence, about these competing worldviews that reflects these deeper divides that seem to keep getting harder to bridge, how it all plays out, whatever it means for bears could impact all of us. I was on the grizzly beat when I moved to Montana back in 2018, which is a thing here weirdly. It's a big state with a lot of wildlife and not a lot of people. Covering grizzlies, tensions were always high. I saw tears and yelling matches in meeting rooms, protests outside courtrooms, lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit. Something about the animal just seemed to grab people. Like us, they stand on two feet, they nurture and care for their young. They're either terrifying beasts, the word horrible is basically in their Latin name, or full of awe and mystery. Watching all this, it seemed to me that we were projecting ourselves and our views of the world onto grizzly bears. Makes me wonder what people driven by going down to the park. Think, why? Why have we picked this animal to divide us? The whole list or delist thing, it's about grizzly bears sure, but it's also about law. The way we've collectively decided to reckon with our power to cause extinction. Something called the Endangered Species Act or ESA. It's really a lot more about us than it is about animals. I got my first taste of what that law meant to people when I was just out of college well before I was a journalist. I was doing conservation work out in the desert west. I was at a diner, tired and filthy after a week cutting down trees to restore bird habitat. A rancher saw my faded government shirt leered at me and asked if I'd been surveying for threatened desert tortoises. "Know what those things are good for?" he told me. "Turtle soup." The ESA touches creatures large and small, grizzlies, tortoises, and so much more, in every corner of the country. And this series is a journey not just into the conflict over one animal or plant, but into the Endangered Species Act. What many call the most powerful environmental law in the world. For Montana Public Radio and the Montana Media Lab, this is the wide open, season one, threatened. I'm Nick Mott. Stay with us. Our story of the Endangered Species Act starts back in the early 1970s, when one man, tucked away in an office on the hill, quietly helped change the world. "Formally, I'm Curtis Boland, but I'm known as Buff." If you don't mind me asking, how old are you? "Well, let's see. Right now, I'm only 95." Buff grew up hunting and fishing in the northeast. He loved the outdoors, still does. When I talked with him, he was eager to get back outside and tend his garden. "I'm still handy with a chainsaw." In his younger days, Buff served in the Army, then worked for the State Department. He was a bit of an adventurer. One time he bought an Army surplus ambulance in Alaska, used it to fish his way across the state. "And then drove the ambulance all the way back, here, into New England, and used it skiing and duck shooting." Then, in the late 1960s, he joined the Department of the Interior. It's a government agency that manages most public land, wildlife refuges, national parks, that kind of stuff. And Buff had one of the highest positions in the agency, assistant to the secretary, who's the top dog. One day, he got a knock on his door. "I had a student approach me. To try to convince me, we had to do something about saving the Great Wales." To be clear, this wasn't Buff's student, just a curious and passionate college kid who believed government could get something done. So he talked to Buff about the plight of Wales. Even though the U.S. hadn't been a major whaling nation for decades, the country still imported about 30 percent of global whale products. Whale oil, greased machinery, went into livestock feed, even powered government submarines. Buff listened to this student. "Whales were really in trouble, and something need to be done about it." He talked with scientists, organized a conference, and eventually he began to act. Like a bureaucratic James Dean character, Buff became a rebel with a cause. He learned how to pull the right levers and work the system behind the scenes. The country had passed a handful of laws addressing wildlife declines, and there was a precursor to the ESA on the books. There was an endangered species list, much like we have today, albeit a much shorter list, and it was really about raising awareness, more than any kind of regulation. Buff submitted a rule to publish in the federal register that would add several species of whales to that endangered list. But then politics intervened. Buff's boss, the Secretary of the Interior, got fired over criticizing the war in Vietnam. When that happened, Buff says, "All hell started breaking loose in the department." "I got a call. You better get your butt down very quickly here because one of the White House people has moved into the Secretary's office and is firing him and all his staff." Buff himself didn't get fired, but the new boss did have some new priorities, and those didn't include whales. So Buff got the order to withdraw that rule that would list whales. Thing is, it was a weekend, and... "I didn't get around to doing that, and on Monday it was printed and became law. So that's the basis of how the eight species of great whales got on the endangered list." Wait, wait, make sure I'm understanding you as you were told to remove this from the register, and you just, and you didn't. Precisely. You could say I procrastinated, I suppose. I call that "very pointed procrastination." And even though he got his way, eight species of great whales made the endangered species list, he realized that precursor to the Endangered Species Act wasn't enough to stop a species going extinct. "The act had no teeth at all." No teeth as in no tools that could force meaningful action, and Buff couldn't let that stand. Because at the time, the problem wasn't just whales. We'd logged, and developed, and drilled, and poisoned our way into a full-on biodiversity crisis. The passenger pigeon, which had once blackened the skies, had been snuffed out. Wolves had been killed off everywhere in the lower 48, but near the Great Lakes. By the time Buff was in the Interior Department, even the animal symbolic of America itself, the bald eagle was on the brink. Several of us got together and decided we needed to amend that act, and the more we got into trying to amend it, the more we realized what was really needed was a brand new act. As Buff got to thinking about what the law needed to save wildlife, the political and social moment was ripe for this kind of legislation. "The time has come for man to make his peace with nature." Republican Richard Nixon was president, and lots of other changes were taking hold of society. Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring had documented the chemical DDT's impact on bird populations, and awakened the American public to the havoc we're wreaking on wildlife. The first Earth Day came less than a decade later, in 1970. The civil rights movement had shown that the grassroots could make lasting political change. And now, the public was demanding meaningful action on the country's air, water, and wildlife. "These problems will not stand still for politics or for partisanship." Buff, along with a few colleagues, got to drafting. Their goal was to create something that could last, that would stop the slaughter of whales, and that would go even farther. The language they decided on starts in a striking way. The very first paragraph of the act says, "The decline of the country's once abundant wildlife is, quote, a consequence of economic growth and development, untempered by adequate concern and conservation." America was a global powerhouse, and this was a radical statement. Buff's basically arguing that the progress that marks our success as a country comes at a terrible cost. Under the policy as Buff wrote it, there were two categories of species in peril, endangered, which could go extinct, and threatened, which were in danger of becoming endangered. "I had to testify another time, a number of times, for the act, and I organized, for instance, some of the top scientists in the country to come and testify in favor of the act." What was the sentiment in Congress towards the act? "I don't remember at all much opposition." The act got through the Senate unanimously, and in the House only 12 people voted against it. "Maybe some people may have never read it, which is not uncommon on the Hill, and I guess they didn't really understand the strength of it." Did you have any idea of how strong this would be? "Well, that's why I wrote section 7." Under section 7, federal agencies can't do anything that could jeopardize the existence of a listed species, or even hurt the habitat those species depend on. And here is where those teeth of the law take shape. "Probably only five or six of us understood the impact of that one section of the act." A little later, the act goes even farther. Section 9 outlaws taking endangered species. That means any kind of killing, but also hurting, chasing, shooting, harassing, and trapping. It even applies to hurting habitat. It was a far-reaching law in other ways, too. It said any citizen could petition the government to list species, and sue over enforcing the act. Listing decisions, it said, must take into account only the best available science, not the economic costs and benefits of protecting species, and just three days before the page turned from 1973 to 1974, Richard Nixon quietly signed the Endangered Species Act into law. The American public and media mostly didn't take notice. It got just one sentence in the New York Times. "Back in those days, both sides of the aisle work together. Although I was appointed by a Republican, I've always been non-political entirely. I could work with the Democrats, of course, the aisle. And it was a whole different way of life then." The Nixon administration passed nearly all of our bedrock environmental laws. Along with the ESA, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the largest and most powerful slew of environmental regulations signed by any president before or since. And even lined up with that armada of laws, many lawyers and historians and activists have spoken with, called the Endangered Species Act the strongest environmental law in the world. Today, it protects more than 2,000 species. It's not just in rural areas like Paradise Valley, where those billboards stand. At the time I'm recording this, there are 18 protected species here in Montana. And they're threatened and endangered species in every state. Texas has 111. California has nearly 300. Hawaii? Nearly 500. Everywhere you look, there's pressure on wildlife that will be detrimental. Species do die off naturally. History is punctuated by mass extinctions. Often, catastrophic natural disasters are the culprit. An asteroid hitting Earth, say, or a massive volcanic eruption. But today, scientists estimate species are going extinct as much as 100 times faster than what would occur naturally. Some call this a sixth mass extinction. And as we collectively spewed greenhouse gases into the air and paved and plowed over vital habitat, this one's driven by us, humans. In short, the engine pushing those die-offs is on overdrive, and we're at the helm. But despite that urgency, Buff says, "You never get this act through the Congress, period. No way. They'd be a greater awareness, perhaps, of what such an act would do. And it's bound to hurt constituents in every state." At the time, you're saying builders and developers and oil and gas drillers and just all these interests had no idea what it would mean for what they do. Is that right? Yeah. Yes, yes. Buff's law, set in motion changes all over the country. It would force government, industry, and ordinary people to reckon with their role in ecosystems. And it planted the seeds that would blossom into that billboard battle in Paradise Valley. We'll be back. I'm going to tell you one endangered species act story in one place. As grizzly bears came back just out my back door in Montana, the world around them wasn't quite ready for what that recovery meant. Maloo Anderson Ramirez is in her early 40s, with dirty blonde hair, grew up in southwest Montana's Gallatin Mountains, just over the northern border of Yellowstone. She was raised in a ranching family, though the Anderson's definitely don't fit the typical ranching bold. I'm a mystic. I really believe that the energy we put out is tremendous, and it means something. Maloo's lived through species recovery in a way that numbers about bear population just don't convey. As Maloo grew up here, in these green hills of the Gallatin's, the only grizzly populations of any size left in the lower 48 were in and around Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. Around here, grizzlies had hung on by a thread, and part because they were fed out of trash dumps as people watched from bleachers inside Yellowstone. Outside the park boundaries, they'd been lassoed and made to fight bulls and perverse rodeos. Shot, trapped, poisoned, and hunted for sport and bounties. Much of the population's decline was to make room for humans, and particularly ranching. Grizzlies, the logic went, killed cows. They had no place near livestock operation. As a kid on the ranch, Maloo spent a lot of time outside. You know, we were working hard at a young age, and so, yeah, wood gathering, and livestock feeding, and... For more than the first decade of her life, she never saw a grizzly on her family's land. But she remembers one day, when she was 11 or 12, she was watching the sheep, looking out for predators with her brother. Back then, it was mainly coyotes that we were concerned about. And then they spotted this hulking shape in the distance. With population numbers so low, it was a remarkable occurrence. A grizzly bear. There, near her family's livestock. We all ran home and, you know, called the grandparents and called whoever was around, but, you know, I was 11 years old, and it was the first one that I had seen. In 1975, grizzlies got listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. That meant the teeth of the law went into full effect. There would be no killing bears without federal approval, no government projects that threatened their habitat. The state and feds agreed to specific guidelines that would govern any activity in grizzly habitat. That grizzly, Maloo and her brother spotted while watching their sheep, was her first inkling of what all this would mean for the area. Because over time, the population of grizzly bears, one of the slowest reproducing mammals in the world, began to grow. Fast forward to the fall of 2013, about 40 years after grizzlies got protection. Maloo was pregnant with her first child and managing a ranch just down the road from where she grew up. Things had changed. Grizzlies were showing up in Maloo's pastures. At first, it seemed like a trickle, and then the bears came in like a flood. The record number of bears was like 23 bears in the meadow. And so that was wild, just alone. For decades after they got protection, grizzlies in the area spent much of their time in the high alpine. But a changing climate and a growing bear population in search of food would force a major shift in their behavior. As grizzlies weaned off the trash dumps of Yellowstone, much of their diet existed in a sort of symbiosis with other mountain animals. Birds dispersed the seeds of a tree called white bark pine throughout the high mountains. Squirrels cashed the seeds of those trees and piles, and grizzlies dug up those caches to chow down and bulk up before hibernating. Ecosystem changes often take place over generations. Time scales too long to fathom in a single human lifetime. But to rip off something Ernest Hemingway once wrote, sometimes ecological changes can happen gradually. And then suddenly... We didn't know what was going on. All of a sudden we were seeing a lot more caraway in the field. We were curious about this plant. It was a new plant. It sort of came in at the same time, drastically as the grizzly bears. Caraway is this non-native plant, probably spread by cattle grazing. It looks a bit like a carrot. It has a calorie-rich root. And by that fall of 2013, it was sprouting up everywhere in the basin where Maloo worked. And this happened at the same time as this other enormous shift. Due to climate change, wildfire, and beetle infestation, Whitebark pine was on the decline. So Maloo suspects, as bear numbers went up, they came down from the mountains looking for food. And they found it in the caraway. And not long after, in the ranch's cattle. We were having two kill each night, so it was a pretty serious situation. Since Maloo was so close to Yellowstone, she was one of the first ranchers to experience living with these predators as their population expanded. There is no manual for this, no textbook to teach how to ranch and harmony with grizzlies. After all, bears have been killed off in part to protect cattle. So drastic times called for drastic measures. I was just that desperate at this point. I was like, I cannot have any more of these animals killed on my time. So my husband and I just camped out with the cows. She means literally camped out. They drove their Chevy Suburban out into the meadow. Parked it among the cows and the grizzlies and slept inside. Those cows somehow sensed that the car meant something close to safety. They would just like all sort of lay around the suburb. And it was just wild times. And while they were out there sleeping under the stars, they got another idea. We had 80s music playing as well. How did the choice for that particular music? I know. I think it was just, you know, it became a joke over the years, but I think it was like the one radio station that we could like get that would play in like literally one of those old boob boxes. The plan was the bears recognized both that car and the music as distinctly human. And these are wild animals. They don't want to be around us, so they'll stay away. Classic rock, hip hop, death metal. It all could have worked just as well. But I like to think something about those synthesizers sounded like a whaling police sire into the grizzlies. And I will admit, I've many times said in my very mystic self, you know, talking to the bears, like, please, just please behave. You know, it's a lot easier if we all just behave. Bears, of course, don't always behave. 50 years after the Endangered Species Act was signed into law, there are lots of realities of wildlife recovery, buff, and the politicians who voted on the law never saw coming. The impact on ranchers like Maloo is one of them. Today, over a decade after they started showing up in droves, the sight of grizzlies in the meadow isn't a surprise. It's an everyday affair in the fall. I rolled up the gravel road to the ranch where Maloo was working a decade ago on a fall evening last year to watch the spectacle unfold. Holy shit, there's so many cars. There are more than two dozen at all, at least 50 people. Where are y'all from? New Orleans. Oh, yeah. And there are folks here from all over the country. Alabama. We're from Massachusetts, Kentucky. We're from Pennsylvania. We're from the Gulf Coast to southeast Texas. So it's flat, right? This is beautiful up here. It's everything we thought and more. Everyone is looking in the same direction through spotting scopes and binoculars. They're watching three grizzly bears grazing among bugling elk, sedate cattle, and cottonwoods and aspen glowing gold in the evening autumn light. For me, it was just as interesting to watch the people as it was the bears. So we have three grizzlies, and they're called nightmare grizzlies because they're so big. This is our entertainment. Smiling grizzly bears. Folks have made their own little feasts and picnics. People told me they were finally able to tick grizzlies off their Yellowstone Wildlife checklist. We've seen everything except for bears. People are ecstatic. Several folks bring up God. For us, we're religious, so we think about our creator and how he's made all these things for us to enjoy. They watch as the animals intermingle and interact. Every now and then, a riled up bull elk thrusts his antlers menacingly at one of the grizzlies. This is a regular show here. A matinee in the morning as the sun rises and a reliable evening spectacle at dusk. Going from car to car, a meet a guy in overalls leaning on his four-wheeler named Sean Watley. He says he's been making the trip up here from Oklahoma for over a decade. We've seen 15 bears out here a couple of days ago. It was all 13 this morning. So it's funny to turn around and watch them and it looks like somebody's opening up a cage and letting one out and then here comes another one and then here comes another one and here comes another one. Watching all the animals coexist on private land, he gets nostalgic, wax is poetic. It takes me back into years and years before and just thinking what we see now, the magnitude and the magnitude of what was here before then. It's interesting to look back over our shoulders and remember where we've come from and where we are now and try to make for sure that everybody that's coming after us can come up here and see these same things into it and then get pushed out or key old or anything else. To me, Sean and these other onlookers marveling at the bears reflect buff's intention with the ESA back in the 70s. They're witnessing wildlife restored. It's a simple and a beautiful picture like Sean describes, an ecosystem closer to the way it was before we messed things up. I've actually been out to that pull out a number of times with my parents, with friends, hiking and hunting and just enjoying it all. It's about an hour from my house and whenever I head there, I think a lot about those billboards because the vast majority of tourists who come here likely have to drive by those competing signs in the valley. And witnessing the comeback of this species, they're grappling with the question that could decide their future. What's the bear's role here and what's ours? I wanted to talk with one other rancher about this idea. Hey, Mark. Hey, how's it going? Mark Rose is sort of a rancher gentleman. Button up shirt, handkerchief in his pocket, his dog greeted us at his door. Our producer, Mary Allenai, drove along the edges of that very same meadow where Maloo used to sleep in her van among the bears to meet Mark. Mark has Maloo's old job. In fact, Maloo's working just a couple miles down the road these days. So those tourists were looking down at a landscape. Mark is managing. My mission every summer is to keep cattle alive, but that's not my only mission. That's not my only mission. My larger mission in my view is not to screw things up because through my management of cattle, I could really screw up this basin. I could really screw this ranch up. And maybe I am, actually. I always wonder if I am. And that's good to wonder about because it not makes you watch things and study things and pay attention. Today, the bear population in and around Yellowstone has more than quadrupled since it made the endangered species list. Grizzlies are showing up in places they haven't been seen in a century or more. The view from the pull-out shows how recovery looks from a distance. Up close, things are messier. I think we have a tendency to sanitize the experiences from people. I really do. I really, really, really bothers me. You can describe it all you want to people, but until they really see the effects, I don't think they have a perspective at all, matter of fact, kind of an imbalanced perspective. I have a folder over here of pictures of a line attack, of a bear kill, of a wolf kill. These days, it's obviously not just coyotes and bears eating livestock in the basin mark lives. As the state and country put in place more protections for wildlife, wolf and mountain lion numbers started climbing too. Would you be ever showing us that that folder? Yeah. Would you like to see it? Okay, I'm good. Morning here, things are going to get kind of, well, grizzly. I'm going to describe some stuff out loud. This is like a brown folder and inside. Yeah, there are. Each, there's several photos, each labeled with an animal at top, grizzly, mountain lion wolf. And the photos are very graphic. Yeah. See, to me, these are actually kind of carefully selected to not be so appalling. We look at the first image. This is a picture of the back end of a yearling calf. This calf had been bitten by a wolf on these hindquarters. A massive chunk of the calf's back leg is missing. Like a hunk of meat has been carved out of it. You can see through the red muscle and ligament to the bone. Did this in this calf survive? He did. Yeah, there was, there were three of them that I doctored for about a month every day for a month. We turn our attention to the next photo. This one shows a cow that did not survive. It's been attacked by a grizzly. The bears, they're really impressive on how they kill, really impressive in how they kill. Wolves attack from below, Mark tells us. They want to take down an animal, get at his vitals. But this grizzly bit from above. And what that bear did was he, is he just bit that calf on top of his backbone and ripped his backbone out. So that wound is only the size of a bear's mouth. That's all you see. Okay. That's very telltale, that there's no question a bear killed that calf. In the next photo, Mark skinned back the wound. Under the surface, you can see the sheer force of the bite. Red lines run like a massive bruise along the animal's muscle. Tourists watch bears through binoculars and spotting scopes. The view from the meadow is remarkably peaceful, but distant. The intimacy of all this, the bite wounds and bloodshot muscle. The care it takes to treat a wounded animal and keep a watchful eye on the whole herd. It complicates that picture. To mark, grizzlies do have a role here. But so do humans. He says the stakes are a lot higher than one rancher in one place. The margins in ranching are so small. And that's where a lot of the rub is, is you add another element of take. You take that margin and make it smaller. It makes it impossible to make a living and stay on the land. Take is a term buff wrote into the ESA. It could mean killing a grizzly, messing with one, even just messing with its habitat. But to mark, the take worth talking about is the kind grizzlies cause ranchers. He says he's lucky. The owner of this ranch is a philanthropist who prioritizes coexisting with carnivores. But that's far from the norm here in grizzly country. These images to mark make it undeniable that grizzlies have an impact on people. And he's getting at an even bigger point too. He says ranches aren't just for cattle. They preserve habitat for everything from wolves and grizzlies to elk and moose. About two thirds of species protected by the ESA rely on private land to survive, land like this. So to mark, the laws designed to penalize and regulate people who, to him at least, are doing the most to steward the landscape. If a ranch becomes, say, a development, that habitat is gone. If you lose that, then everything loses. Everybody loses, because it normally doesn't go back into the wilderness. It normally goes right into the subdivision wilderness. You know, the great sea of houses. This up close view of bears gets to attention at the heart of the Endangered Species Act. What does recovery mean? Back before white settlement, there are about 50,000 grizzlies in the lower 48, all the way from the coast of California out to the Great Plains. And today, there are lots of ways thriving. Purely by numbers, they've well overshot recovery goals bear managers set for the species decades ago. But still, grizzlies exist only in two or three percent of the area they once did. So recovery looks a lot different depending on your baseline. My dad asks, he always asks, well, how many? How many do you need? There's lots of people that think, well, obviously, more is better. More and more and more is always better. Well, is it? Mark isn't the only one asking how many grizzlies belong around Yellowstone. After the break, that question gets legs that take it beyond Montana, or even just grizzlies. The wide open is supported by the Murray and Jan Ritlin Fund, the Cinnabar Foundation, Humanities Montana, and the listeners of Montana Public Radio. We used to contribute and make this kind of journalism possible at mtpr.org. Starting almost 20 years ago, the fate of grizzlies left the ranch lands of the Yellowstone area and entered the realm of politics. That battle started fairly inconspicuously, much the same way buff got whales on the endangered species list with a rule filed in the federal register. The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing protections for Yellowstone area grizzlies, delisting them. 30 years ago, grizzly bears were so rare in the Rocky Mountain West that the federal government put them on the threatened species list. To the feds, grizzly numbers had climbed enough they could turn management of the species, at least in the Yellowstone area, over to the states. From their angle, bear recovery was a conservation triumph. Against all odds, they'd come back from the brink and gone well over the population numbers the Fish and Wildlife Service had set as an objective. But that delisting proposal kickstarted a legal back and forth that continues to this day. Environmental groups sued, saying it was far too soon to delist. Courts agreed and overturned the delisting, keeping grizzlies on the endangered list. More than a decade after that first attempt began, the whole saga repeated itself. The government again tried to delist Yellowstone bears. The first grizzly hunts in decades were planned. There was a public outcry, celebrities got involved. We must show these bears tolerance and give them room to roam, especially the explorer bears that are important to connectivity. Jeff Bridges, aka the dude from the Big Lebowski, has a house not too far from where those billboards are today. Again, lawsuits shut down the delisting attempt. Each side in the grizzly debate saw their own story, as the Fish and Wildlife Service did its damnedest to get bears off the endangered list. Stubborn environmentalists getting in the way of endangered species act recovery, or government bending to the demands of industry. I watched this play out in the courts as a journalist, and to me, the battle really wasn't about grizzlies at all. Bears were caught up in an argument about what the West is for. For more than a century, the West was a place where rugged individualism rained, and industries like ranching, mining, and logging ran the show. But the region is changing. Those industries are fading, as livelihoods and culture tied to sightseeing and tourism flourish. Today, many people live in this area because of its wildlife, rather than despite it. This one drama over grizzly bears intensified this even larger debate over the future of how we protect endangered wildlife, and how we balance that with the needs of humans. As the one person in the Congress, the only one that voted for the Endangered Species Act, please beat me with a whip. The late Don Young, a Republican from Alaska, was the last remaining House member who voted on the act back in '73. By this hearing on the ESA a few years ago, you'd come to see things very differently. But you have to understand, when we had this act before us, and by the way, it passed pretty much unanimously, we were told it was to save leopards and other species. It was never for grass, grouse, and fonda, and mussels, and flies, and snails, and turtles, and giggigs. And I don't know what a giggig is, but it's endangered. For years, there have been hearings like this one, and bills proposed to strengthen the ESA, or to gut it. This happened along with the bigger shift. Our country and politics became more partisan, defining ourselves along party lines, especially when it comes to the environment. Like Buff said, today's politics are a far cry from the aisle crossing days of your. I think we should be celebrating the ESA. This is a historic and popular conservation law, which has prevented countless species from going extinct. This is Jared Huffman, a Democratic representative from California, and hearing just last year. It's almost hard to believe that 50 years ago, this landmark legislation was spearheaded by Republican environmental champions. Today, Republican environmentalists are the most critically endangered species in politics. By the time those billboards went up in Paradise Valley, the ESA had arrived in this really peculiar spot as simultaneously one of the most loved and hated pieces of legislation on the books. Right now, it might be about to happen all over again. The government's thinking about delisting Yellowstone grizzly bears for the third time, and that vitriol and conflict filters from DC in courtrooms down to rural Montana. It's not just the billboards. It's something I can hear and feel around town, in breweries and coffee shops where I live. It's the same from Maloo. Talking with neighbors, she says, she avoids saying grizzlies and wolves the way you avoid saying Trump and Biden at your family Thanksgiving dinner. I have been happily married for many years now, but before that, in my old life, you know, I was the rodeo was, you know, team roping, rodeo, like that was my life. And these were the people of my partners. And I often think those relationships would have never worked for me. I came close to marrying someone that would, it would have never worked because of this. What do you say because of this? You mean because of that relationship and viewpoint towards wildlife? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and politics, because interestingly enough, it sort of goes into those directions as well. Just to get to the grocery store or run some errands in town, both Mark and Maloo drive by those billboards. They're right there on the highway, these standing symbols of an argument that just feels out of touch with their reality. Mark brought up the signs in our interview, specifically that collection of four billboards that say, effectively, don't delist. And it infuriates me quite honestly when I drive by it. It's a, it's a wonderful picture of a little bitty cub grizzly bear and standing on his hind leg like a human with his paws up in the air, like a, like a very small child. And it's as cute as can be, right? So it elicits, it elicits that emotions, especially from parents of a child. There's a lot of those folks that get home and then that's their, that's their lasting view when they leave the area. It's not a, it's not a balanced view of what's going on. That's troubling. Let's just say it's less than on or bore less than honest and not very helpful, quite honestly. What would be helpful? What is missing? These pictures. Mark taps his finger on that folder full of photos of dead cattle. These pictures and that's, and that's my little way of, of, of showing the other side of it. You were talking about kind of like these different views of the, you know, of this issue of big predators being on the landscape. And I, I mean, I feel like I look at these pictures and I'm like, it makes me think like, I don't want this to happen to calves. And then I look at the billboard with the cute baby bear and I think like, of course, I want them everywhere, you know? What is the truth with do you think? Where, where is that? Well, it's obviously somewhere in between. It is somewhere between these pictures and that billboard, you know, that truth lies in the middle there somewhere, for sure. The ESA went from a bipartisan idea that we can and should use federal law to save species to one of the most contentious pieces of legislation on the books. So what happened? This series is about how we got here. As I set out to explore that, I wondered if digging into stories of species protections and the human dramas they spurred, not just for grizzly bears, but for creatures big and small, furry and slimy all over the country, could tell us something much broader than how we think about ecosystems and economies. I was curious if we could learn something about how we relate to each other and if we could find a shared vision again, something close to that middle ground Mark Rose called for, looking ahead, as we navigate together, living in this era of mass extinction. And this journey starts with a tiny fish in a crystal clear stream in Tennessee. They were going to take my community. They were going to ruin my where I lived and ruin everything I knew, and I didn't like that one I owed of a bit. Supreme Court has agreed to hear what has become a classic example of the conflict between environment and development, the case of the snail doctor. All you have to do is lose once and it's gone. You have to keep on winning. That's next time. This episode was reported and written by me, Nick Mott. It was produced by Mary Auld with editorial support from Jewel Banville, Lee Banville, and Corn Cates Carney. Our story editor is Lacey Roberts. Jesse Stevenson created art for the season. Our theme music is by Isaac Opatts, arranged and produced by Dylan Rodriguez, featuring Jordan Bush on Petal Steel. Other original music is by Dylan Rodriguez. Jake Birch engineered the episode. Web design and marketing is by Josh Burnham and fact-checking is by Victoria Traxler. Mike Toda tapesinked for us. Special thanks goes to Leah Swartz for the conservation, education, and support. Along with Maloo Anderson Ramirez, Buff Bolin, and Mark Rose, I also want to thank Hannibal Anderson and all the bear watchers who gave me their time, along with the innumerable folks who've given me extraordinary important information for this episode and for the whole series, which are far too many to name here. Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts, leave a review, post on social media, do all the things to help us spread the word. I'm Nick Mott. We'll be back in a week with another episode of The Wide Open. This project was produced in collaboration with the Montana Media Lab at the University of Montana School of Journalism. The lab is a center for audio storytelling and journalism education that elevates perspectives from underserved communities in the West. Learn more at montanamedialab.com. The Wide Open is also a production of Montana Public Radio. MTPR enriches the mind and spirit, inspires a lifetime of learning and connects communities through access to exceptional programming. More information at mtr.org. The Wide Open is supported by the Murray and Jan Ritland Fund, the Cinnabar Foundation, and Humanities Montana.