Get the latest tech news
Is It Time to Stop Protecting the Grizzly Bear?
The Endangered Species Act has a major problem. An unlikely move could help save it.
In the early 1900s, long before smartphones and selfie sticks, tourists flocked to Yellowstone National Park—not for the geysers or scenery, but for a grotesque show: a nightly spectacle of grizzly bears raiding cafeteria scraps from open-pit landfills like desperate, starving pirates. Their already fragile population in the Yellowstone region dipped to fewer than 250, though one publication says the number could have been as low as 136, according to Frank van Manen, who spent 14 years leading the US Geological Survey’s grizzly bear study team and now serves as an emeritus ecologist. Today, more than 1,000 grizzly bears live in and around Yellowstone alone, and tourists who visit the park by the millions every year can observe the bears—no longer desperately feeding on trash but lumbering in and out of meadows with their trailing cubs, or sitting on their haunches feasting on elk carcasses.
Or read this on Wired
