Montana News
Poking the Bear
Back in the early 2000s, scientist Stephen Amstrop was above the Arctic Circle, looking for a polar bear den. A helicopter had flown him about 30 miles from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. That's the far, far north. It was winter, the time when everything's sub-zero and white. You can't easily tell where the land ends and the sea ice begins. Stephen worked for about three decades as lead of the United States Geological Survey's Polar Bear Project. The USGS, even though they just have geology in the name, is a Department of the Interior Agency dedicated to all things science, from polar bears and grizzlies to oceans and climate change to analyzing the country's energy resources. Stephen knew a bear and her cubs had been taking shelter in a den nearby, but there hadn't been any sign of the bears in over a week, so he was sure they'd moved out. So he started poking. We had these long poles and shovels and we were probing around on the snow to find exactly where the layer was because we wanted to get into it without damaging it. Probing for the den was hard work. Even though it was -20 degrees Fahrenheit out, he took off his jacket and set down the pistol he carried for protection against bears. Then he got back to stabbing the surface of the snow, waiting to feel the hollow of the den. Suddenly, poof, my right leg just went right through the layer of the den. But Stephen felt sure nobody was home, so he didn't panic. My right leg was just dangling and I hollered at my colleague, Jeff, I said, "Hey, I think I found it." Then he looked back into the blackness around him. "And about that time I looked and there was the head of the female bear about six inches from my thigh. If something falls through the roof of a polar bear den, the first instinct of the mother bears to attack." Months later, trapped just inches from the jaws of a polar bear, Stephen was able to rip his leg out of the snow. Then he lost his balance and tumbled down the hill. She came out after me, but she - I think she realized that this doofus who was rolling down the hill probably wasn't much of a threat, and so she didn't chase me very long. If you've heard about the Endangered Species Act, you've probably heard about the polar bear. While seeing the images, bears so thin they look like they're wearing ill-fitting fur coats the color of eggshells, loping across ice-free landscapes. Stephen's work helped make them the poster children for the urgent wildlife impacts of climate change. Still today, years later, he remembers looking at bear square in the face. "I look in that that bear's eyes, and it almost looked like she knew I was there to help her. Of course, that's pretty strong answer-promorphizing. Nonetheless, that was kind of the sense that I had." This is The Wide Open, Season 1, Threatened. I'm Nick Mott. The role of polar bears and climate in endangered species debates goes much farther than pulling on the heartstrings of National Geographic readers. This time, a polar researcher's studies in the far north trickle way down to the President's desk, forcing the question, "How far can and should the teeth of the Endangered Species Act go?" Stay with us. [Music] Stephen grew up in Minnesota in the 1950s. Even back then, he had bears on the brain. "I remember, as a kid, occasionally making a statement, something like, 'Wow, I wonder if there's bears here?' I just thought that bears represented- if there were bears there, it was a pretty wild place, and it was probably a good habitat for lots of other creatures that we've come to appreciate." He cut his chops, studying black bears in Idaho, and doing research on pronghorn and grouse. Then, in the late 70s, he got offered a dream job, establishing the U.S. Geological Survey's Polar Bear Research Program in Alaska, scientific understanding of polar bears in the Alaskan Arctic was in its infancy, but researchers were beginning to learn more about bears and suspected their populations had plummeted due to hunting. The bears had been harvested for millennia, but mostly by local indigenous people. By the 1950s and 60s, new technology, namely snowmobiles and planes, made accessing remote polar bear habitat easier than ever. "And that harvest was being done by people going out with super cub airplanes to spot polar bears on the ice and then landing and shooting them." "The polar bear, one of nature's strangest animals, who spends his entire life roaming the frozen Arctic wastes probably never touching land." This is from a 1950s documentary on a polar bear hunt. Even back in those days, the polar bear captured people's imaginations. "The moment is here and Pat boards the super cub with his pilot, and they're off for the ice pack." Suddenly, outsiders were streaming in, hunting polar bears was legal at the time. They didn't have any kind of special federal protections. Hunters from around the country wanted fluffy polar bear rugs and the harrowing Arctic hunting stories to go with them. "But for the rest of his life, he'll never forget his polar adventure. He'll often look at his polar bear run, and his thoughts will wander back to that super cub." Harvest of polar bear skyrocketed, and in response, countries across the far north started instituting bans on hunting the Great White Bears. And in the US, Congress passed a law that would shape their future in the early 1970s. It wasn't the ESA. Rather, it was the Marine Mammal Protection Act. It outlawed hunting for polar bears, for everybody but Alaska natives who hunted for subsistence. Less than a decade later, Stephen took the job leading the government's new polar bear research project. "I thought, 'Wow, giant white bears roaming around in an environment that looks like the moon. What could be more exciting than that?' So I said, 'Yes, pick me, pick me.' In a photo from back then, he has a mop of gently wavy white blonde hair framed by the fur hood of his parka. He's holding a polar bear cub in each hand, and there's this wistful, idealistic expression on his face. "My earliest paper actually was describing the recovery of polar bears in Alaska." In a very tangible way, a law saved polar bears. After the Marine Mammal Protection Act, polar bear populations started to increase. And in the following decades, Stephen's studies were kind of, well, niche. He published a paper detailing what happened when a polar bear ate antifreeze. He studied how helicopters impacted polar bears. He analyzed their genetics. And as years spent in polar bear habitat went by, Stephen started to see something troubling. "When I first went to Alaska in 1980, I could stand on the beach at Barrow or Prudow Bay or Cocktovik, and I could look out in September at the time of minimum sea ice, and the ice was right there. If it wasn't right against the shore, it was not very far away. You could see it. Certainly with binoculars, you could see the ice pretty clearly." Basically, even after the heat of Alaska summertime, with its endless days, there was still ice on the ocean. "In the latter years of my studies up there, the ice had changed so much that in September, it was so far offshore was beyond the curvature of the Earth." Today, most people know climate change is causing sea ice to melt. But at the time, Stephen wasn't concerned with why the ice was melting. He just wanted to know about the polar bears. "What is the impact of this changing ice on them?" Here's what Stephen's research found. Polar bears need sea ice to hunt their main food source, seals. You can think of a seal as the polar bear version of prime rib. Pals make super rich, fatty, calorie-dense meals for the bears. And the bears need it. They're huge and live in a really extreme environment. Thing is, seals are pretty hard to catch. They live under the ice and they swim way faster than polar bears. But they do have one fatal weakness. They have to come up to the surface to breathe. "So polar bears depend on the sea ice, not just to walk around, but as a platform that allows them to reach the seal." When Stephen arrived in Alaska, hungry polar bears just walked up to the holes in the ice, where seals come up for air like they were sitting down at a restaurant. They'd pick off a seal when it came up for air and eat it. A pretty easy meal. But by the early 2000s, the sea ice near shore started melting completely in the late summer and fall. "It was just open water." When there's no ice, snagging of fatty, oceanic prime rib is a whole lot harder. So bears started foraging for whatever they could find on land. They create animal carcasses, berries, human garbage, whatever else they could find. They went from an all-you-can-eat, seal-course meal at a five-star restaurant to dumpster diving, sometimes literally. And for polar bears, that's a life and death distinction. "We know that polar bears forced on to land lose about a kilogram of body weight for every day that they're on shore. So their days are numbered." They even understood the threat to polar bears, the diminishing sea ice posed. But he was too busy in the trenches of Alaska to study why the ice was melting. But thousands of miles from the Arctic, a young lawyer was beginning to do exactly that. In an office in California, an attorney named Cassie Siegel was working for the Center for Biological Diversity. You heard about that group's shift from monkey-wrench-style activism to suing over the endangered species' act earlier this season. At the time Cassie got her start, they'd begun their rise as environmental litigators, but they were still a scrappy crew of less than a dozen environmentalists. Cassie, more or less, fit the mold there. She grew up on the east coast, but craved and escaped from the city. "At my first opportunity, I went to Alaska during college, and then right after college I moved to Alaska to be as much in nature and the wild as I could." Cassie led rafting and camping trips in Alaska's wilderness in her early 20s. But I was still driven to do even more to protect the places and the animals that meant so much to me. So I went to law schools solely for the purpose of doing environmental law. Early on in her legal career, Cassie found her people. "Yeah, I have a very short resume. I went from leading those eco-tours to starting as an intern with the Center for Biological Diversity during my first year in law school, and I never left." The group's lawsuits had brought the logging industry to its knees in the southwest, had gotten millions of acres of critical habitat protected. The center at the time was looking to go bigger than they ever had before. Like Stephen poking through snow for the spot where the surface of the earth fell away into nothingness. They'd been poking, but hadn't yet found a limit to the power of the ESA. And they kept on poking. By the early 2000s, when Stephen Amstrip was watching polar bears struggle on diminishing sea ice, climate scientists by and large agreed, greenhouse gas emissions were causing the earth to warm, and they predicted that as long as we kept on spewing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, those changes would only intensify. Under President Bill Clinton, the federal government had started getting on board. The EPA found that CO2 and five other greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and welfare, specifically because they contribute to man-made global warming. For Cassie in the center, evidence that climate change was charging forward and posing a huge threat to plants and animals across the globe was hard to ignore. But at the same time, these were the days when news segments would feature climate deniers - along with climate scientists - to purportedly balance things out. And in DC, George W. Bush was in office, and he was actively denying that the earth was warming at all. As soon as he entered the White House, his administration started denying the reality of the climate change at every turn and working to undermine environmental and climate protections across the board. In Cassie's eyes, our democratic system was working too slowly to address one of the most urgent and pressing issues of our time. So if the government wasn't going to do anything on their own, maybe Cassie and the other lawyers at the center could force the government's hand through kind of a side door, one with teeth, enter the Endangered Species Act. We were sitting around and a colleague of mine had the idea that we really needed to try to do an Endangered Species Act listing petition for a species that was imperiled primarily due to climate change. They needed an animal with star power, a creature so charismatic that it could make people care about climate change. So Cassie became something like a Hollywood casting agent for the perfect creature, so they began a sort of audition process. First, there was a spider, then a seabird, even a species of coral. But none of those species had the sex appeal it took to get the public on their side and push the listing forward. Then Cassie and her team came across research coming from Steven and other Arctic experts. The science was there. The decline of sea ice clearly threatened the polar bear. And climate change was leading to the decline of sea ice. Maybe this species could be the one. So she started working on a petition to the federal government, a document that compiles a bunch of science and asks them to add the polar bear to the Endangered Species list. I did virtually nothing but work on the polar bear petition for those months. Twelve hours a day, I was sitting at the dining room table wearing my polar bear slippers, reading and taking notes and then writing to get this thing done. Cassie started puzzling together all the science that showed that climate change could cause polar bears to go extinct, or damn near it. Cassie knew this petition would have to be totally watertight. She was trying to do something unprecedented. Never before had the federal government listed a species because climate change threatened its existence. The center had used Mexican spotted owls to protect the old growth forests of the southwest. A southwestern willow flycatcher to protect riparian areas. A single species by their strategy could work like a shield to protect entire ecosystems from the forces that threaten them. Now the polar bear could stand in for the arctic, sure, but doing so would mean tackling the nation's addiction to fossil fuels. If Cassie could pull this off, it could be the largest scale application of the Endangered Species Act yet. I, as a younger attorney, really thought, I think like a lot of people, if we just raise awareness enough, then that will bring action. And then the second thought was, you know, the Endangered Species Act really has an important role to play here in reducing emissions. The petition took four months of work, and Steven's research provided key components to the whole document. She cited his work more than a hundred times. When it was all done, she wrote a press release and sent it to a bunch of news organizations with a note asking them not to publish about it until midnight. And then I went to bed. She was optimistic, but not convinced much would happen. And when I got up in the morning, there is an article and a big polar bear about the petition and a big picture on msnbc.com. It's the first thing I saw, and so the contrast, and then all that day, you know, there was more and more coverage. For a time, it seemed like polar bears were everywhere. An inconvenient truth, Al Gore's hit talk and movie talked about the plight of the animals. Queen Latifa narrated a documentary about them. What the animals of the ice kingdom can't know is that their ancient ways of surviving are about to be tested. The center had found the star quality climate character they'd been looking for. When polar bear scientist Steven Amstrup heard about all this, basically that kind of changed my life. Up to that point, Steven's work was focused on learning about the bears. He understood sea ice was declining, but the immediacy of climate change as a driver of that shift and a threat to the species wasn't so clear to him. Reading Cassie's petition, he realized the only way to save the bears was to drastically change the way people were using oil, gas, and coal. From there on, it was pretty clear that if we don't halt the warming that's causing the melting of the ice, polar bears are going to disappear. And just maybe, he thought, the ESA could be a major tool to force that change. Because the Endangered Species Act, I view it as kind of like a giant stop sign. The stop sign here could be bigger and more powerful than anything the ESA had made happen ever before. Because remember, the ESA says the government can't do anything that could harm a threatened or endangered species, or even its habitat. Now, if the threat to the species is climate change, think about it. Anything the government does that contributes to climate change could be in violation of the ESA, like, for example, oil and gas leases on federal public land all over the country. If polar bears got ESA protections, there was a chance that the government would have to show that a federal oil lease, thousands of miles away from the nearest polar bear on, say, federal land in New Mexico or Nevada, wouldn't contribute to climate change and harm the bears in the far north. For polar scientist Stephen Amstrum, Cassie's petition gave him hope. "If we're doing something wrong and we continue to do something wrong and it's clear, the ESA has a stop sign saying, 'Hey, we need to do something different.'" Ultimately, the question here wasn't just, "How do we save polar bears?" It was, "How do we save ourselves?" With the polar bear listed, we wouldn't have to collectively wait around for a president or Congress to do something about climate change. With the swipe of its paw, the polar bear could make things happen, fast. But things wouldn't turn out to be that easy, we'll be back. The White Open is supported by High Country News, a nonprofit, reader-supported publication that has been covering the land and communities of the West for more than 50 years. Information on how to receive a wide open listener subscription at hcn.org/subscribe with the code WideOpen2024. As Secretary of the Interior, he had the final say in whether to list a species. But the polar bear decision was a sticky one. The Bush administration was doing their best not to even acknowledge that climate change was a thing, and Dirk had a long-running personal relationship with the president himself. They were governors of Texas and Idaho at the same time, along with George W's brother Jeb, the governor of Florida. When we would go to National Governor's meetings, I would often see it next to Jeb across the large table from us would be his brother, George W. Jeb would often say, "Would you look at my brother? He can't hold still. He'd be bouncing pencils, etc., etc." By the time the polar bear petition landed on Dirk's desk, he'd already tangled with the Endangered Species Act back when he was a senator. "Too often with the Endangered Species Act, it's been a greater benefit to attorneys than it has to the species. And I wanted to change that." And now he had to decide whether to list the polar bear, but a decision he knew could make producing oil, gas, and coal across the country a lot harder. According to the law, the government has to look at if a species should be listed based only on the science, not the economics, the guiding principle being, "Economies can have them flow but extinction is forever." So Dirk tells government scientists to start doing that research. That directive reaches Stephen Amstrup, out on the tundra. Remember, he works for the USGS, which means that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is now his boss. Immediately, Stephen starts putting in overtime, melding climate science and biology. "We brought in extra people that were outside the lab. We did about three years' worth of work in six months and presented him with nine reports." And those reports described a bleak future for the bears. "We did an evaluation that suggested that by the middle of the century, we could lose two-thirds of the world's polar bears, and we might lose them all by the end of the century if we remained on our current greenhouse gas emissions pathway." The government was also required to gather public opinion on the listing, and more than 650,000 people submitted comments. At the time, officials said it was the most comments they'd ever received on a species proposed for listing. Here's Dirk Kempthorne again. "For about a year, I was asked to come to the White House on this topic. It was not to meet with the president, it was to meet with advisers, and they made it very clear to me that, under no circumstances, was I to list the polar bear." The polar bear to the administration could cause a total transformation of domestic energy production. If the bear was listed, it would make it, at the bare minimum, a lot more annoying and expensive to harvest oil and gas on federally owned land. For oil and gas companies, there was a lot to lose. Remember, we're not just talking about energy production on land where polar bears live. Greenhouse gas emissions from everywhere and the whole country contribute to climate change, and therefore melt sea ice and endanger the polar bear. So the downstream effects of listing the polar bear could apply to all projects that would lead to greenhouse gas emissions on all federally owned land. Eventually, Dirk gets the report back from Stephen Amstrup and the other government scientists. "It's an enormous document, three inches thick." "I read every page and some pages I had to read two or three times because it was technical." Dirk's team got a hold of NASA imagery that showed the polar ice caps over time. "It was very clear to me what was happening. We were losing significant portions of the polar ice cap. Ice was melting." He's convinced sea ice is melting, and that's driving polar bears toward extinction. To be clear, though, he didn't think people were necessarily responsible for climate change. Even today, in our interview, he talked about how the changes we're seeing in the climate are cyclical. But back then, he was in a tough spot. The ESA clearly states that he has to list a species if the science shows that it's threatened by extinction. But the order has come down from up high. His boss and friend, President George W. Bush, doesn't want the bear listed. So behind the scenes, there was this push and pull over what to do about the bear. The administration blew past deadlines to make the listing decision. Cassie sued over that, too. Here's a clip from CNN. "Cassie Siegel is with the Center for Biological Diversity." "The process has now dragged on for over three years, and it's supposed to be completed in no more than two years." As time dragged on, and the push for listing grew louder and larger, the political battle lines were drawn, largely on the basis of party. This was the same era the wars over wolves in grizzlies picked up steam. Polar bears were taking these partisan ESA debates to the next level. This is Randall Luthi, the Department of the Interior official at the time. "Our national security, our economy, and our quality of life are dependent upon energy." Here's political commentator Glenn Beck. "Coming up, polar bears. They eat people. They make gas more expensive. They do. And that's why I say two reasons. We should eat them. Oil and gas, the argument went, forms the backbone of our economy. And I should add, oil companies were spending millions to make sure it stayed that way. So now, it's 2008. The pressure is building, and it's reaching Dirk Kempthorn. He says one day he meets the President's Chief of Staff, Josh Bolton, in the West Wing to discuss the decision. "Josh Bolton shut the door, and he said, 'I don't want any witnesses.' And I said, 'I concur,' and I said, 'Josh, I know the decision that the White House wants. It's been made painfully clear to me. But I cannot, and I will not give you that decision.'" He's decided to list the polar bear against President Bush's wishes. Ideologically, Dirk Kempthorn was about as far from Cassie and the folks at the Center for Biological Diversity as one could get. But with the public screaming that we needed to do something about polar bears, and looking down the barrel of more litigation from Cassie's group, he had a choice, politics or the law. And he chose the law. "I told Josh, I said, 'I didn't come here to rub your stamp, what a bunch of advisors that haven't taken that same oath, tell me what I'm to do. I was hired to make the best decisions and be an effective secretary of the interior, and that's what I intend.'" He knew what the political consequences could be. The Chief of Staff told him, "He said, 'I'm stumped. I do not know what to do. I'm going to take it to the President of the United States tonight, and you must be prepared in the morning to be fired. And I said, 'Sobia.'" The next morning, these are the words President George Uppy Bush, quote, "I am inclined to agree with my advisors, but what is most important to me is the comfort of my secretary, and I made the decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species. There's no question. I had the data." In May of 2008, things got official. Dirk made the announcement. He remembers looking around the room. There were people dressed as polar bears, ready to jump up and protest if he didn't protect the bears. But he did. "Today, I am listing the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act." At the same time, he didn't hide the fact that the law had backed him into a corner. "I believe this decision is most consistent with the record and legal standards of the Endangered Species Act, perhaps the least flexible law Congress has ever enacted." Finally tonight, a creature battling for survival, the polar bear, the Interior Department today placed it on the list of threatened species, but is that enough to save the bears? Cassie and many others thought the species should have gotten even stronger protections, been listed as endangered rather than threatened. But all things considered, Stephen Amstrup was encouraged about the listing. With the help of the ESA, he thought, "Polar bears might stop their backslide toward extinction." "I thought, well, this is going to have a major impact." For him, it was a moment of triumph, of hope that the ESA could be the razor's edge of a new weapon poised to lead the battle against climate change. But how sharp would that blade be? That's after the break. The Wide Open is supported by the Murray and Jan Ritlin Fund, the Santa Bar Foundation, Humanities Montana, and listeners like you, ways to contribute and make this kind of journalism possible at mtpr.org. Welcome back to the Wide Open. In May 2008, the polar bear gets endangered Species Act protections. The Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorn, has defied the wishes of the oil and gas industry and the President of the United States himself. But he does have reservations about the whole thing. He doesn't believe the Endangered Species Act should be the legal tool used to battle climate change. Here he is again during that listing announcement. Using the polar bear as threatened can reduce avoidable losses of polar bears. But it should not open the door to use the ESA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. How can he have it both ways? If the ESA is like a big stop sign for government actions that jeopardize listed species, and the polar bear is threatened due to climate change, shouldn't that mean that ESA protections would force action to stop greenhouse gas emissions, the driver of climate change? There's a loophole deep in the weeds of the Endangered Species Act that would shape the future of how we collectively dealt with climate change. Under Section 4D, the government can tack on rules for threatened species that make protection stronger or exempt certain things from regulation. These rules generally allow for things like killing grizzlies that are eating cattle, say, or accidentally catching a Sonora chub while fishing for something else. But for the polar bear, the government did something pretty wild. Greenhouse gas emissions, the rule said, were fundamentally different than, say, pollution from a factory or a highway paving over a wetland, where the impacts from one given project to one particular habitat were direct and clear. So this rule said activities outside the polar bear's range in the far north wouldn't trigger the law. I said there is no causal relationship to what's happening in Alaska, in the polar ice camp, and the lower 48. This is a big deal. For the polar bear, it meant the ESA couldn't force any kind of change about the root of their suffering, climate change. Those oil and gas projects on federal land down south could go on. And then, a few months later, the government made another even bigger bombshell move. Here's Cassie. There's a guy named David Bernhardt, who was a lawyer in the Solicitor's Office at that time who wrote this memo called the Bernhardt memo. You might have heard of this guy. He went on to have Dirk's job, Secretary of the Interior, under Donald Trump. And this memo was kind of what you might imagine, seven pages of legalese full of subsections and footnotes, all the boringness of any bureaucratic note. It wasn't a law or formal rule. Think of it more like the legal, ideological, and scientific underpinning that lays out why the government does what it does. Buried within the document was the next tactical action by a government hell-bent on not doing a thing to combat climate change. Recognizing that polar bears warranted ESA protection could open the floodgates, all kinds of species could be at risk from climate change. So the memo said greenhouse gases have been accumulating since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, from all over the world. The science just isn't there to trace the emissions from one specific project to one on the ground impact from rising temperatures. So an oil and gas project in Nevada, according to the Bernhardt memo, you couldn't draw a direct link between that project and a dead polar bear in Alaska. Or dying coral in the ocean, or the elimination of stone fly habitat as glaciers melt. This is the major move here. This memo wasn't just for polar bears. It's said that for any species, greenhouse gas emissions won't trigger the teeth of the Endangered Species Act. And it was signed at the very bottom by Dirk Kempthorn. He found a way to obey the law and list polar bears under the ESA, and at the same time, avoid all the fallout that so worried industry and politicians. The ESA could recognize the harm climate change was causing to species, but it couldn't do anything about it. Moving back, he still thinks it was the right move. We threaded a needle, and that's what was necessary. The future of climate policy, in some ways, came down to this behind-the-scenes memo circulated at the highest levels of government. It made waves for those immersed in the weeds of climate policy in the Endangered Species Act. Here's Stephen Amstrup. Who would have thought that polar bears were listed as a threatened species because of the risks caused by our emissions? Who would have thought that polar bears would be listed for that reason, but yet the ESA wouldn't be able to consider emissions in evaluating impacts? It's like a what? And yet for Dirk Kempthorn, this all made perfect sense. Here he is on Idaho Public Television back in 2009. There are those that hoped that the listing of the polar bear that that then would allow for a loophole, a backdoor opportunity to regulate greenhouse gases. If in fact the Endangered Species Act became the vehicle to regulate greenhouse gases, you would have a bureaucracy that would be setting some dramatic policies. That should be left to the executive and to Congress to have an open, transparent discussion about climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, what do you do about them instead of having a law that was written in 1973 when there was no discussion about climate change. And that is to be focused upon the species. Cassie had made the polar bear a star, but her strategy to force the government to take action on climate had fallen flat. We shouldn't just sit around and wait for our polarized dysfunctional government to take action, she thought. Climate change is happening, and we need action now. Our flagship environmental laws are the strongest in the world and they're all set up and ready to go. They've successfully addressed acid rain, they've successfully reduced lead in our environment. Those gases are no fundamentally different, they're set up and ready to go. And you shouldn't do it this way, you need a different way. That is an oil industry talking point. But by then Cassie also wasn't the naive young lawyer she once was. I don't think that I was surprised. Like we knew that we had a long road ahead of us, right? I mean, anybody that works in climate knows that this is not an easy battle, this is the existential battle of our lives. So she put her head down and kept on fighting. Just a few months after the Bernhardt memo came out in October of 2008, Barack Obama took office. He'd campaigned on taking large-scale action on climate. So Cassie and the center began a campaign of their own to get the memo off the books. There are dozens of letters to the editor and newspapers all over the country, petitions with tens of thousands of signatures. And with how we talked about climate change, you might think Obama saw things like Cassie. 97% of scientists, including by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest. They've acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it. So the question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it's too late. But his administration kept abiding by the Bernhardt memo and Cassie kept on pushing. There were more lawsuits, more letters, but that boring memo didn't have that same special something as the sexy polar bear. Most people have never even heard of it. And today, more than a decade and a half after polar bears got listed, the Bernhardt memo is still on the books, stopping the ESA from regulating greenhouse gases. It is just a travesty that this, you know, incorrect anti science memo is actually still a heart of government policy and it would be very quick and easy for the Biden administration to simply say, you know, we withdraw it. Since the polar bear was listed as threatened, companies have been extracting more and more fossil fuels on federal land. Summertime sea ice in the Arctic has been steadily declining. Every five years, the government's supposed to release a review of how listed species are doing for polar bears. The newest one came out in 2023. It had some pretty strong language. The single most important act for polar bear conservation is decisive action to address Arctic warming, which is driven primarily by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, the report says, short of action that effectively addresses the primary cause of sea ice decline and it is unlikely that polar bears will be recovered. So this is where we're at with how the most powerful environmental law in the world deals with the most pressing environmental issue of our time. Basically, it doesn't. Still, Stephen Amstrup has continued trying to get the memo off the books. Just last year, he put out a paper aiming to connect the scientific dots. To be able to draw the line between, say, a barrel of oil produced on the plains of Wyoming and a polar bear giving up on its search for seals as the ice goes away in the Alaskan Arctic. So the ESA isn't going to solve global warming by itself for sure, but it's one more tool that we now have combined with other tools that are out there in the regulatory environment that can give us a hand. We need action at all levels. Maybe we can drag our policy leaders along kicking and screaming. Since that polar bear listing, lots of other species have gotten ESA protections explicitly because of climate change. There are glacier melt stone flies and white bark pine trees and wolverines, and that's just here in Montana. Globally, studies estimate that thousands of species are threatened with extinction as the world warms. For some of those species, you can take little stopgap measures to slow the worst of the impacts. Humans like stabilizing beaches to preserve piping plover habitat as sea levels rise, or relocating endangered key deer to areas that aren't about to be underwater. But unlike every other force pushing species towards extinction, the Endangered Species Act doesn't mandate any action to stop the root cause, climate change. The polar bear, it's fair to say, didn't save us. They're continuing to fight legal battles over climate and the ESA, but the Center for Biological Diversity spent the last three decades poking and prodding, using the Endangered Species Act to go bigger and bigger. And now, finally, they found a limit to the law's power. It looks like they've fallen into the polar bear den. Next time on the final episode of the first season of the wide open, where do we go from here? We are always able to adapt. Let's find ways to adapt that benefit everything in the best way, especially when it comes to mother nature, because, you know, this is our mother, she sustains us. We've got to take care of our mothers, too, you know? This episode was reported and written by Mary Ald, with editorial support from me, Nick Mott, along with Jule Banville, Lee Banville, and Corin Kate's Carney. Our story editor is Lacey Roberts. Jesse Stevenson created art for the season. Our theme music is by Isaac Opatz, arranged and produced by Dylan Rodriguez, featuring Jordan Bush on Petalsteel. Other original music is by Dylan Rodriguez, Jake Birch mixed this episode with help from Alice Soder. Web design and marketing is by Josh Burnham, and fact-checking is by Victoria Traxton. Special thanks goes to Leah Swartz for the conservation education and support. And also, huge thanks to Cassie Siegel, Stephen Amstrup, Dirk Kempthorn, Roo Ramos, Robert Thompson, Brendan Cummings, and everybody else who talked with us about polar bears. Please follow the show wherever you get your podcasts, like us on social media, rate us on those apps, leave a review, help us spread the word. I'm Nick Mott. Thanks for listening. [Music] 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 MTPR.org. The wide open is supported by the Murray and Jan Rittland Fund, the Cinnabar Foundation, and Humanities Montana. [BLANK_AUDIO]