Bears With Us?

We've been beating the drum (jangling the bear bell?) to stop the Bush administration from taking endangered-species protection away from Yellowstone's grizzly bears (the comment period was extended to March 20th, which means you can still sign our petition). So this might be a good time to point you to a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by former Sierra Club President Larry Fahn. Larry does a great job of laying out the case for why unprotecting the bears now is not just a bad idea, it's the wrong idea:

Rather than delisting the grizzly bears, federal, state and local governments should be looking for ways to connect their habitats to those other regions to the north, most of which are in Canada, where small populations of the bears remain. Protecting forests with large roadless tracts, and developing biological corridors between grizzly populations can help ensure genetic diversity and the grizzly's long-term survival.