Inter Lake editorial

U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy has raised the bar to insufferable heights when it comes to recovering a species under the Endangered Species Act, so much so that, if his ruling were upheld, American jurists should be prepared to slave over ESA litigation for eternity.

Molloy's recent ruling that restored ESA protections for Yellowstone grizzly bears must have U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials wondering just what it will take to succeed with recovery. Molloy ruled their conservation strategies and plans for grizzly bears, developed through years of expensive efforts, were inadequate. Guidelines and standards for monitoring and managing bears and their habitat are "discretionary" and "unenforceable."

This was not a go-back-and-adjust-your-approach ruling. It appears it will require some type of binding legislation - maybe even with guaranteed funding - to ensure that grizzly bear management, monitoring and habitat protection will be in place forever.

The ruling also asserts that Yellowstone grizzly bears are inextricably dependent on a single food source, whitebark pine nuts.

"The identifiable best available science indicates that whitebark pines are expected to decline due to a variety of causes, including climate change, increased forest fires, the mountain pine beetle epidemic, and infection by white pine blister rust."

We think the Wildlife Service reasonably argued that grizzly bears could adapt to changes in pine-nut availability, considering that the blister rust fungus long ago caused a rapid mortality of whitebark pine trees. The grizzly bear population still managed to grow.

But the ruling cites studies and concludes that "the record contains scant evidence for this proposition" that bears can adapt to a food source decline.

"In the face of a shortfall in nutritious foods, bears move widely in search of food, which may bring them into contact with humans (and) substantially increases the risk of direct human-caused mortality," the ruling states.

So, climate change, forest fires and all manner of other influences on an ecosystem are on the platter for environmental litigants to pursue, regardless of whether a species successfully responds to those influences.

The mountain to climb for recovering and delisting grizzly bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem just got much steeper. There's good reason to believe that it can never be conquered.