Alaska’s bears have powerful governmental enemies, starting with the state of Alaska. This spring, state wildlife agents in helicopters gunned down 94 brown bears, including cubs. Agents also killed five black bears and five wolves.

Why were these animals destroyed? It was an attempt to eliminate carnivores in a misguided effort to grow a small caribou herd for hunters. By Alaska’s own admission, the aerial gunning went too far. An early assessment by a state biologist said fewer than 25 brown bears would be killed.

For now, in the lower 48 states grizzly bears are protected, though some Western governors and members of Congress support trophy-hunting seasons targeting bears.

In Alaska that’s already legal, although a 2019 study co-authored by conservation biologist William Ripple, and others, found that in addition to state-sponsored shooting and trapping of brown bears, trophy hunters have doubled their kill numbers for bears over the past 30 years.

That is not sustainable. Alaska’s population of some 32,000 iconic brown bears now face the same fate as their lower 48 cousins, which once numbered 50,000 but are reduced to 2,000 animals.

Alaska’s predator-control projects cater to a small number of hunters who want to bring home trophy animals, or who wrongly believe that fewer carnivores like bears and wolves will create more prey animals.

Alaska’s wildlife culls have been roundly criticized by many biologists as unnecessary. Numerous studies indicate that predator-prey relationships are always complicated by multiple factors. In this case, the caribou herd was plagued by brucellosis, a disease of ungulates, as well as inadequate food and poachers.

What is undeniable, say multiple biologists from North America — writing as part of a 2018 letter to the U.S. Department of the Interior — is that officials need to protect Alaska’s bears and wolves from too much trophy hunting.

Shockingly, Alaska’s bear-killing activities are funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, using Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act dollars, which is an excise tax on guns, ammunition and archery equipment. The Service also funds other controversial predator-control programs such as in Colorado and New Mexico.

What’s puzzling is why hunting would come first when Alaska decides the fate of its brown bears. Why is bear-related tourism — a growth industry — ignored?

Americans love to watch bears. Because of their popularity, brown-bear viewing opportunities in Alaska’s Katmai National Park had to be limited by lottery. What’s more, over 10 million viewers tune into bear cams annually to virtually watch Katmai bears fish for salmon.

Tapping into this fervor, the National Park Service began an annual Fat Bear Week contest at the park, based on grizzles gorging themselves to get ready for hibernation. In 2021, more than 800,000 voted for Otis, an aged, toothless fellow who lost out the next yearto 747, a colossus nicknamed “Bear Force One” by the Park Service.

Thousands of tourists travel to Alaska every year just to catch a glimpse of Alaska’s brown bears in the wild, a pilgrimage that pours dollars into the state. A 2011 survey valued wildlife-watching tourism in Alaska at more than a billion dollars and this number has almost certainly grown as appreciation for wildlife has expanded in the United States. A 2018 American Wildlife Values national survey showed that more Americans than ever before appreciate their wildlife alive.

The question almost asks itself: What sense does it make for Alaska to kill bears? The answer is none. Federal funding for state wildlife agencies to kill carnivores makes no sense.

The Fish and Wildlife Service needs to adopt the widely supported 2021 formal petition, led by the Global Indigenous Council and co-signed by 28 organizations and scholars, which asks the agency to set up a public comment process before Pittman-Robertson funds can go to states for killing projects.

Wildlife management ought to represent all the people who care about wildlife, and sound science should be the guide when it comes to deciding what animal gets to live or die.

Wendy Keefover is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is a senior strategist for the Humane Society of the United States.

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Residents across the West will recognize why so many came out that snowy night. A proposed development, called Holtan Hills, would expand our town’s footprint but include almost nothing affordable for teachers, firefighters, wait staff or others who comprise the soul of our community and drive its economy.

With no guardrails to support local homeownership, second-home real estate investors would likely gobble up the project’s predominantly high-end units. It’s happening already, with most shunning the long-term rental needs of a few thousand people in this south-central Alaskan community. New owners often offer nightly rentals or just leave their houses unoccupied.

That would mean more empty houses in a town with a severe housing shortage. The dozens who testified that night, and the hundreds who wrote letters, described the impacts.

They included Emma, who runs a fishing boat with her husband, and whose young-adult daughter can’t find a place to rent in the town where she grew up and now works. And Amanda, the pizza shop owner, who is overwhelmed trying to help her employees find housing, including the 65-year-old man whose landlord recently booted him out on short notice.

Erin described bailing on her long-held dream of raising a family here after 11 years of pouring her talents into nonprofit youth education programs. She reminded me of Autumn, my daughter’s former piano teacher, who recently moved away after years of teaching music to local kids. She had been unable to find steady housing.

Such stories swirled into that winter night from the heroes every mountain community knows — the ones who clean rentals, provide health care, build houses and teach our kids to speak, spell, ski and say “thank you.” Business owners were there, too, detailing how the lack of attainable housing causes employee shortages that curtail operating hours, leaving fewer visitor services.

Some who didn’t speak that night included the local workers who sleep in their cars or in drafty cabins on the edge of town. We also didn’t hear from the Filipino parents of my daughter’s close playmate, who are trying hard to remain in the town where their accounting jobs are located, and where their daughter is thriving.

Dozens of us highlighted how communities across the West have fought similar battles for an entire generation now. We talked about Whitefish, Tahoe, Breckenridge, Boise and other towns. We explained their use of sensible deed restrictions, limits on nightly rentals, incentives that promote local home ownership, and concessions from developers. All helped local workers attain housing.

I know the benefits. Living in Colorado in the 1990s, I accepted a financial incentive to put a deed restriction on my modest condo. After my wife and I sold the condo, the payment became seed money for our first house. Meanwhile, the condo still holds a deed restriction that helps locals enter the market. Under such reasonable measures, developers could still make buckets of money while workers gained access to housing.

Someone else who didn’t show that night was the developer, who instead dropped a guest column in the state’s largest newspaper maligning her project’s critics.

Some of our elected officials were equally indifferent. One blithely suggested that someone just needs to build a hardware store in town so that building costs could come down. Another asked why our town hadn’t solved the housing issue earlier. Others grilled residents on how many more houses it would take to solve the problem.

Of course, as with many Western communities, the issue is not an actual shortage of houses. It’s the blizzard of cash that second-home speculators and others can throw at any property that enters the market.

The meeting ran almost to midnight, as snow blanketed the cars outside. I imagined this must have been the scene two decades ago, as housing proponents in the West’s mountain towns spent nights eking out seemingly small wins. But those wins are now the proven programs that can help communities today.

We just need elected officials to understand that people can’t work here if they have nowhere to live.

Tim Lydon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He writes in Alaska.

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That’s because after years away, I’m back in the West, living in western Colorado, near millions of acres of public land. If the love of wide-open spaces defines a Westerner, then our region gives us lots to love.

Alaska, which is 95.8% public land, may be king among all states, with so much wide-open space available to everyone, but Nevada is close behind at 87.8%, and Utah is next at 75.2%. Idaho ranks third at 70.4%, and Colorado has 43.3%, with most of that land west of the Continental Divide.

Until moving back West, I hadn’t thought about public land being vital for anything as basic as cutting firewood. Yet in most states without much accessible public land, firewood is an expensive proposition. Here, from May through October in Colorado, it’s ours for the permit, which costs about $4 to $10 for a cord of wood. That’s enough to fill a full-size pickup bed four feet high.

How much do you need? I’m told three cords add up to “just getting by” in Montana or Wyoming, but true winter wealth is more like six cords. While you’re gathering wood, you can also scout for a Christmas tree. That requires just an $8 permit — a world away from pricey conifers grown on a tree farm.

Writer Dave Stiller’s firewood-gathering advice is to take blowdowns or the slash piles left by logging companies. Once you’ve finished gathering, according to the Forest Service, “revisit and monitor the effects of your harvest… Become a steward of that place as you study the plants and how they respond.” In other words, think like an owner who cares about the land over the long haul.

Patrick Hunter, a Sustainability Studies student at Colorado Mountain Community College in Carbondale, thinks our public lands embody a “generational legacy” that’s become a cornerstone of our democracy. From young to old, the diehard fans of public lands are volunteers from nonprofits who “adopt” a trail, constructing and advocating for them.

Political cartoonist Rob Pudim tells of hiking a trail he’d worked on for several summers and feeling an onrush of possessiveness: “I own this land,” he recalls thinking. In a way, he’s right. We do own this land, though it is managed — even if we rarely see a ranger — by federal agencies.

No one knows how many people have gone to public land with one solemn purpose: to throw ashes of their dead into a stream or launch them into the air from a mountaintop, a practice that’s allowable in most Western states’ national forests. It forever connects someone to that particular place outdoors.

And for a lot of us, the best of life can be what happens during a summer of camping, mushroom hunting, fishing, wildlife watching or just “getting out there.” Some hunters also become advocates for wildlife and public lands, championing public access.

Still, the damage we’ve done to public lands in the West is visible and remains — mining, drilling, dam building, nuclear bomb testing, dumping nuclear waste piles along rivers and other sensitive places. Because of that legacy, the Superfund program, finally established in 1980, aims to restore these lands, some so altered that no real fix is possible.

Public land also serves as a link to modern history. Throughout the West we can still see architectural marvels built by Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago. And ghost towns that were once small cities continue to fascinate us as we think about the economic jolt that triggered their abandonment.

Today, we’re experiencing a similar jolt as increasing aridity alters how the West works. Or doesn’t work. Meanwhile, as we struggle to figure out what we’ve got to do to adapt, at least I know what I’ll say this Thanksgiving. I am forever grateful to the public land that gives us room to breathe.

Dave Marston is publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to lively discussion about the West. He lives with his family in Durango, Colorado.

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When they re-emerged seconds later, they’d lined up along the crest of the pass we were hiking toward. They looked as if they were poised to attack.

Then … nothing happened. Once the wolves figured out what we were, they turned around and vanished. But for those few anxious moments, I tingled with adrenaline, fearing the worst even as I thought how thrilling it all was.

I knew, and I hope most people know, that wolf attacks on humans are extraordinarily rare. In fact, even minor attacks by predatory animals are rare, yet it doesn’t take much to get our imaginations to run wild with fear of fangs and blood. It’s the realization that we aren’t always at the top of the food chain — that we could end up as some other animal’s dinner.

Years ago, on a camping trip, I participated in a predator-prey game that gave me a taste of that vulnerability. I played a mouse, and everyone else in the game was out to eat me. I spent most of the time slinking between hiding places, worried that any movement might get me spotted. Ecologists call this unease the “landscape of fear,” when everything is suffused with hyper-awareness and a sense of vigilance.

But the evidence doesn’t support that kind of fear of wild animals. Yellowstone National Park has, on average, some 4 million visitors annually. According to park data, just one person is injured by a bear each year on average. Since 1892, bears have killed only 18 people in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

That doesn’t make the attacks that do happen any less terrifying or tragic, though. This summer, a woman in Montana was attacked and killed in her tent by a grizzly bear; in April, a grizzly killed a man near West Yellowstone, Montana; and in Alaska this June, a sleeping couple was mauled in Alaska’s Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. This is the stuff of nightmares. 

During our hunter-gatherer days, wild animals truly posed a danger, and we were right to fear them. But these days, attacks by predators — gruesome and terrifying as they are — cause only a handful of deaths around the planet. Yet there are lots of other animals we should worry about, but usually don’t.

According to a 2019 report by researcher Michael Conover, 47,000 people seek medical attention each year after being attacked or bitten by wildlife, and roughly eight of them die. Most of the culprits are snakes, birds, rodents and raccoons: 27,000 rodent bites — meaning mice, rats and squirrels — versus less than one bite annually by wolves.

Elk attacks resulted in three injuries that required medical treatment, while grizzlies were responsible for 0.8. Alligator attacks were more common, with an average of 9 bites per year and one fatality. Meanwhile, some 30,000 Americans die in car crashes every year.

Still, most of us don’t think about dying when we get into the car, while a lot of us worry when we hike in grizzly country. It’s built in. And encounters with wildlife are increasing as we compete with them, in their own habitat, for limited space and food.

The recent increase in mountain lion attacks is likely due to the blurring of the urban-wildland “interface.” In Colorado, the Parks and Wildlife agency has documented 25 mountain lion attacks since 1990, with four since 2019.

But in our national parks, rangers report a different problem: Tourists get into trouble when they treat wild animals like pets. Tom Smith, biology professor at Brigham Young University, told National Geographic that most bear attacks are avoidable if people just remember that bears react instinctively.

“Bears don’t have a unique response for humans,” Smith said. “If we unwittingly trigger that bear-on-bear response, then it’s full-on, and you’d better be ready.”

I don’t ever want to be attacked by a wild animal, but I appreciate the intensity and humility I feel in their presence. It’s humbling to know that these wild, beautiful animals don’t care who we are or what we do. We have entered their turf, after all, and it’s up to us to watch our step.

Molly Absolon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She loves to explore the West from her base in Idaho.

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With the United States among the world’s top methane polluters, and the Biden administration promising tighter nationwide rules, these two Western states set a bar for other states to follow.

For decades, the oil and gas industry has freely discharged the colorless pollutant from tens of thousands of wells as a cost-savings measure. Then this March, New Mexico banned the wasteful venting and flaring of natural gas, which is comprised almost entirely of methane. New Mexico is only the third state, after Colorado and Alaska, to ban the practice.

This May, New Mexico also proposed a final rule to staunch leaking of methane from across the state’s oil and gas supply chain, which includes part of the mammoth Permian Basin it shares with Texas. The leaking occurs at well pads, pipelines, compressors, storage facilities and more.

It’s a system-wide problem that generates methane plumes large enough to detect from space.

The proposed rule on leaking, now up for public comment, improves on a December draft that offered broad loopholes. When it’s made final, it will require regular inspection and repair of leaky equipment, which today goes largely unmitigated as yet another industry cost-savings measure.

The state effort means New Mexico is catching up with Colorado. In 2014, Colorado became the first state to regulate methane and has twice strengthened its original rule. Colorado has also modernized its oil and gas regulatory agency’s mission so that it includes safeguarding public health. And it is reworking oil and gas bonding requirements so taxpayers don’t get burdened with plugging leaky “orphan wells” abandoned by producers.

Colorado’s rules were a model for the first national methane regulations, implemented under President Obama in 2016. Unfortunately, the Trump administration dismantled those rules.

Controlling methane is a climate imperative. Because the gas has 80 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide, it’s a potent driver of climate change. NASA says it has fueled a whopping 25 percent of the human-caused global warming that today increasingly jeopardizes Western water, agriculture and recreation.

Research also shows that methane is entering the atmosphere from sources such as wetlands or thawing permafrost. In the latter, warming tied to methane begets more methane. It is the ominous type of feedback loop that global warming alarmists have warned us about for decades.

But the good news is that methane only survives in the atmosphere for about 10 years, unlike the centuries-long lifespan of carbon dioxide. Consequently, methane rules today could produce swift returns on climate as the world grapples with the harder problem of carbon dioxide.

But methane and associated pollutants also contribute to harmful ground-level ozone, which is linked to premature birth, respiratory sickness and other illnesses. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham made this part of her campaign for regulation, pointing out that poor air quality disproportionately harms poor communities.

That concern helped build support from Indigenous and other groups, outweighing fears that new regulations would detract from drilling royalties, which provide over a third of New Mexico’s revenue for education, health and other services.

Part of the New Mexico governor’s strategy in winning support for methane control was focusing on fiscal accountability. Venting, flaring, and leaking — all monumentally wasteful practices — send an estimated $43 million in potential state revenue into New Mexico’s thin air every year.

At the national level, President Biden campaigned on restoring federal methane regulations rolled back under Trump. Biden issued executive orders on his first day in office that set a September goal for proposing a new strategy. Crafting new federal rules are expected to take years, but New Mexico and Colorado now offer strong examples. By applying rules to both new and existing oil and gas infrastructure, they exceed the original Obama regulations, which only addressed new permits.

Today, Western states, along with heavy oil producers Texas and North Dakota, offer only a patchwork of tax incentives and voluntary targets. Limited rules, however, often tilt in industry’s favor. Now, with fossil fuel production ramping back up and global temperatures rising, New Mexico and Colorado show that tougher regulations are the way to go.

Tim Lydon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes from Alaska.

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The answer is Bristol Bay’s wild salmon fishery, and it is no exaggeration to say it is the world’s most productive. Every year, some 40-60 million salmon return to the bay’s headwaters.

Yet in late July, the Army Corps of Engineers gave the proposed gold and silver Pebble Mine the go-ahead in its final environmental review. For the Trump administration, it’s been full speed ahead even though opposition continues to gain momentum.

More than 80 percent of Bristol Bay residents are against it. Prominent jewelers like Tiffany & Co., Ben Bridge and Zale’s have expressed their opposition to the Pebble Mine and vowed not to use any gold extracted from it. Even Donald Trump Jr. opposes the mine.

Commercial fisherman, churches, restaurants, seafood processors, hunters and anglers, Earthworks, the Wild Salmon Center and grocery-store companies all support protection of the Bristol Bay salmon fishery over large-scale mining. And nobody has been as steadfast in their opposition, or stands to lose as much, as the Native tribes who live around this magnificent bay.

“We are salmon people,” said Alannah Hurley, executive director of United Tribes of Bristol Bay, when she testified before a Congressional committee last year.  “But salmon are more than food for us. Salmon are central to our cultural identity, our spirituality and our sacred way of life that has made us who we are for thousands of years in the Bristol Bay region.”

In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency completed a scientific assessment and proposed safety limits on disposing mine waste in Bristol Bay waters to ensure that salmon wouldn’t be harmed by mining. But in its evaluation of three possible scenarios, the EPA found that even the smallest mine would result in “unacceptable adverse effects.”

And what does “small” mean when talking about a massive open pit and tailings dam for storing 1.1 billion tons of mine waste? There would also be a 270-megawatt power plant, a 188-mile long natural gas pipeline that crosses Cook Inlet, an 82-mile transportation corridor, and a port on the Alaska coast. And it’s worth noting that Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., the Canadian company behind the mine, has promised its shareholders that Pebble will inevitably expand to its full size, thanks to subsequent permit expansions.

In any case, the Trump administration withdrew the proposed safety limits in 2019, and the mine has been fast-tracked through the environmental review process, led by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Yet state and federal experts have repeatedly critiqued the adequacy of the environmental review. The chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure recently called for a delay in the release of the Final Environmental Impact Statement due to the Corp’s failure to properly consult with tribes.

Then in late August, two major events: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reversed its July go-ahead and gave mine operators 90 days to explain how they would offset “unavoidable adverse impacts” to more than 3,200 acres of wetlands.  Reuters reports that the next day, shares in the company owning the mine fell by 25% as investors weighed in.  In addition, Alaska’s two Republican Senators came out against the mine. 

The final environmental review predicts a mind-boggling variety of impacts to the Bristol Bay watershed. One example: permanent damage to over 100 miles of rivers and streams and 2,000 acres of wetlands.  I can’t think of any other mine in North America—and perhaps the world—that would have such a devastating effect on clean water.

The Bristol Bay salmon fishery is a renewable resource; the legacy of the Pebble Mine promises perpetual pollution.

The ore will likely be shipped overseas to Asia, while the lasting impacts stay in Bristol Bay. In contrast, if the pristine water and wild salmon habitat of the watershed gain protection, the fishery can continue to feed our nation and power our economy forever.  

It’s hard to imagine a more irresponsible mining project than the Pebble Mine. The silver lining: There’s still time for Congress to act before a permit to mine is issued this fall, and for mine opponents to be heard, loud and clear. This mine must be stopped.

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