"The greatest single cause of declining grizzly bear populations is the loss of habitat. Our rapidly growing population's increasing demands upon the land and its resources, and human intolerance of grizzlies, are the greatest cause of habitat loss or alienation." - "A Future for the Grizzly: British Columbia Grizzly Bear Strategy" - June 1995 report published by the Ministry of the Environment and the BC Government.

Bear information page:
The Natural History of Genes, Why is genetic diversity important? ....
"One might predict that being the strongest, biggest, and meanest member of a species would maximize survival. Lets test this hypothesis. Suppose there is a population of Pink-Eared Blue Bears ..."

Some say bears should never be hunted for sport.
Phooey. This amounts to feel-good, warm-fuzzy environmentalism. Human overpopulation has caused the reduction, insularization and fragmentalization of habitat for bears and other "SANI-tized" species. Environmentalists on the left and their right-wing counterparts, the anti-environmentalists are still vehemently in denial of this simple fact. The reasons why both groups resist the big picture appraisal of reality are complex and share common denominators. We don't have time presently to expound on this ridiculous state of affairs, but we may do so in the future. In the meantime if you have kilobucks, we don't see sufficiently compelling reasons for not registering with the proper authorities and participating in personalised management of wildlife, if one so desires. Carnivores, herbivores and omnivores have oscillating and dependent patterns of population change.The artificial substitute for natural ecosystems, national parks, and other remote areas which are at least temporarily protected from overt human encroachment are the places inhabited by bears. The oscillating patterns of predators and their prey need to be managed to suit the changing whims and fancies of the human gardeners. When these patterns vary too much one way or the other, nature institutes population control by starvation. The case against hunting becomes a question of whether starvation or hunting is the best means of population management, does it not? Well, one would think so. But not for American environmentalists and many European environmentalists as well. Heck no! They are hopeless ecological myopics, and darn proud of it, too. They wouldn't know cause or effect if it bit them on the elbow.

Bear Hunting
Hunting in Alberta

The Road to Grizzly Extinction
"In a very real sense, the fate of all the bears may be decided in the next 10-20 years."

Bear Conservation Around the World
by Christopher Servheen

"The world's eight bear species have been eliminated from more than half of their historic range and what remains will continue to dwindle unless serious conservation efforts for all the species are made. Like most other large mammals, bears have declined and continue to decline in numbers because of

mostly to fill human needs for living and agricultural space, and to commercial exploitation of natural resources. People also kill bears for a variety of reasons, depending on the species and its distribution. Bears are hunted legally, poached for their parts and products for use in traditional medicine and for food, and killed as pests.

A major problems facing bears today is population insularization, in which subpopulations of bears become isolated from one another and each isolated subpopulation lives in a relatively small area with limited resource diversity. Already many isolated subpopulations of some species, including brown bears and American black bears, have gone extinct."

Habitat Loss and Endangered Species Management

"A century and a half ago, nearly one hundred thousand grizzly bears, Ursos arctos, roamed the mountains and plains of the western United States. Today, fewer than a thousand remain south of the Canadian border, scattered among the last strongholds of the once vast American Wilderness. The grizzly bear is listed as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, requiring that the federal government take action to recover the species to a population level that will remove the bear from the threat of extinction. To do this, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated (or in the case of the central Idaho-Bitterroot area is in the process of designating) six recovery areas, five of which lie in the Northern Rockies of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and northeastern Washington. Population goals, land management practices and recovery strategies for the bear remain very controversial, and have been the subject of dozens of court cases and legal appeals."

What the heck are concerned scientists concerned about?
You may visit....

But really, what action can the federal government take? Neither sides in these court cases on the left or on the right, ever, ever make mention in the courtroom of the reason for the demise of the bears, the soaring human population and its concommitant soaring technological development.

Consider a quote from Allan Bloom. "There is a continuous skewing of the historical perspective towards religious explanation. Secularization is the wonderful mechanism by which religion becomes nonreligion. Marxism is secularized Christianity; so is democracy; so is utopianism; so are human rights. Everything connected with valuing must come from religion. One need not investigate anything else, because Christianity is the necessary and sufficient condition of our history.

Environmentalism is secularized Christianity.

The left-leaning environmentalists maintain an anthropocentric bias which differs only slightly in degree from the anti-enviromentalists on the right. Their political passwords are jobs, development, technology, and eco. Sometimes they don't say jobs very loudly, though. They believe in god given rights which grant them the freedom to insist on the illusion that whatever American political correctness is currently in vogue is universally applicable as good. Some believe that the moral imperatives hilighted by the extinction of so many of our fellow life forms merely augment traditional religious morality. But some have a more radical notion that traditional religious morality is superceded. In either case they devotedly practice their form of secularized Christianity. They believe that if only we had more rules, regulations and precise definitions, our world could become perfect. People around the world have noticed that since the end of the Viet Nam war, a majority of Americans, including of course those leaning left, in an obstinate, albeit subliminal effort to exculpate themslves from several cultural faux pas have, become inveterate nitpickers. Some are able to split a hair into two parts. Some are able to split the hair into three parts. Those practitioners belonging to the legal profession have nitpicked and quibbled incessantly to extent that they have seven meticulously defined divisions of tort law which have proven useful to confound juries and attack the anti-environmentalists. But except maybe for whales, they come up short when asked to define rights of animals in nature and don't even try to define rights of plants, fungi or bacteria.

The rightists believe themselves to have god given rights which grant them the freedom to be what Saull Bellow has described as culture peddlers and to enforce the peddling of their culture. To culture means to grow. Their passwords are: jobs, development, technology and eco. They have assimilated the unabashedly anthropocentric term wise-use as well as the oxymoronic term sustainable growth into their vernacular. Their justification comes from the one and the only true source. Genesis, chapter one, verse 28. "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

That part of Genesis is all the excuse that 2SD of Christians need. 85% of Americans are Christians, (a fact not ignored by the ever watchful Japanese), and so are a similar majority of Canadians, Europeans, and South Americans. They uphold and defend their religious beliefs which support economic and political systems against conflicting or competing ideas. Limits is a conflicting idea up with which they can not put. Agriculture is now the functional equivalent of both ecosystem and biodiversity. Noticeable extinction of the highly visible organisms, especially those higher up in the food chain, strengthens the notion that there is human overpopulation and that limits exist. The reminder that destruction of nature has taken place is annoyingly unavoidable. The notion that American ideals are universal and good is weakened. This is why huge and ultimately futile efforts to prevent the extinction of visible species especially large carnivores such as bears and cats must be undertaken. Americans have been steadfastly in denial of even the possibility that humans could ever become overpopulated since that rumour surfaced several decades ago. Being able to see and to point out living members of large carnivorous species of organisms, be they in zoos or in highly restricted national parks, prevents one from saying that they are extinct. Nobody cares that their presence is artificial and man made. Nobody cares that their existence is not due to a biodiverse supporting foundation. That biodiverse foundation has been irreversibly eroded away and destroyed. That's why they are being extincted in the first place. Humans are overpopulated and have caused massive reductions in Species Absolute Numbers Index, SANI, values. This has led to continuing mass extinctions during the past two centuries on an unprecedented monumental scale. In hundreds of millions of years, no other species has done so.

Environmentalists are the most obstinately in denial of this reality. Keeping a few bears alive gives them warm fuzzies and helps them sleep soundly at night believing the world isn't overpopulated with humans. Rightists just don't care and are able to quote from Genesis with confident pride.

What can one say with a high degree of certainty? The pointless legalistic wrangling will continue. Technological development will increase. Human populations will increase both their numbers and the living area they expropriate.

And guess what? There will be more and more...

Not good news for bears.

"Who gives a hoot about habitat?"

This little graph shows the increase in human numbers in the last few thousand years. In this case, the distance from 1,000 million to 7,600 million is 7.6 times the distance from zero to 1,000 million. 7.6 billion is demographers' mid projection. Graph curve is from Learning Tools, KQED TV, San Francisco, a PBS educational tv station. Overpopulation denialists right and left have asked about the source, so now you know. The leader of the Task Force on Amphibian Decline living in Britain objected calling the graph extreme and, "off the scale." But it isn't. It is simply demographer's mid projection.

Usually when such a graph is drawn, a short time scale is used. But an evolutionarily significant time scale can more easily show relevant amounts of increase per unit of time.

The distance from 1,000 million to 7,600 million is 7.6 times the distance from zero to 1,000 million. The graph is an accurate representation.

Source:
Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb
video of the PBS program available to eligible schools and non-profit groups. 60 minutes. To Order: Call Films for the Humanities, 1.800.257.5126
http://www.pbs.org/kqed/population_bomb/hope/teacher.html
Some Buddycom members have been watching and enjoying KQED since the sixties. Some have even been charter members of the station. Now you can see why. And you can get some idea of why the rightists wanted to use leaner budgets after tax cuts as a means of defunding the PBS.
Fraid not, jellybean.
Get back to Kansas where evolutionary time need not be considered. The state legislature has legally sactioned ignorance of evolution in its institutions of "learning."

What are concerned scientists concerned about?

Bear composite population graph

Bears have gone from tens of millions to tens of thousands. If you do the math you find that's about 99% down, 1% left to go. Can you say top of the ninth? Looks like we need a hero. Maybe we could get Ichiro and the Dai Ma Jin to help us out.

That's a little question in an almost extinct language. It means, "for what purpose?" For what purpose would one wish to make a population graph?

Many folks make a living which is dependent directly or indirectly upon bears or some other animals. For these people, Buddycom recommends a practical graphing technique such as the one shown above. This graph uses a smaller, more recent time frame which makes evolutionary relevance irrelevant. The big picture is not emphasized. The precipitous drop in bear populations of the last two hundred years is not shown. At some point later in time, say, ten years from the present, the rate of decline can be expected to continue. But the beauty of this practical graph is that it is adjustable. In ten years, when the population drops at least another ten percent, the starting point can be moved up ten years. That way only a decline of the same magnitude is shown for the thirty year period. Pretty nifty, huh? You never have to show more than a ten percent dropeach decade. Which means there is always ninety percent left. And who is going to get upset if we always have ninety percent of what we started with?

In fact, denialists on both the left and the right can be made happier and happier. That's because as the time scale is reduced, and is made shorter and shorter, the steepness of the curve will appear less and less steep for either the numbers of animal organisms going down or for the numbers of human organisms going up.

Your best bet is not to use graphs at all. The less evidence that one presents, the better. Just use sanitized esoteric technical terms if you are an ecologist. After all you wouldn't want to jeapardize the flow of grant money, would you? If you are some airhead environmentalist you don't want to bite the hands that feed you either. Just use the same old platitudes, cliches, hackneyed phrases and oxymoronic terms that everyone else does. If you are a denialist from the right, just relax. Things are looking good and going your way as it is. If you want to say something, just mention that you support national parks. President Bush and a couple of his cabinet members have used that one to good effect. He even said he liked bears and big cats and wanted children to be able to see them in national parks. Or you could push the most powerful magic button of all, "jobs."

Above all, assiduously ignore the relationships between soaring human population, technological development and

Why let ecological fundamentals cloud your thinking?

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