SAVING THE POLAR BEAR

The great white polar bear is the youngest and largest of the world’s bear species — a mighty hunter and fierce defender of its young that’s among the world’s most vulnerable animals. Polar bears could be extinct by 2050 if greenhouse gas-fueled global warming keeps melting their Arctic sea-ice habitat.

The Center has led the charge to save polar bears from extinction. We wrote the 2005 scientific petition calling for the bear’s protection under the Endangered Species Act, and we filed suit twice with our partners to force the administration to take action on that petition. In May 2008, our work paid off when the bear was finally listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The next year, our work spurred the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to propose the protection for more than 128 million acres of the species’ habitat: the largest critical habitat proposal in Endangered Species Act history.

Unfortunately, the polar bear still doesn’t have complete federal protection. When former Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced that the polar bear would be listed as threatened, he simultaneously vowed he wouldn’t let the listing affect U.S. climate policy, executing an illegal final “4(d)” rule exempting greenhouse gas emissions and oil development — by far the two leading threats to the bear — from regulation under the Endangered Species Act. We immediately challenged the rule, made final in December 2008, and our suit is ongoing even as we defend the bear’s listing from those who would reverse it, including a trophy-hunting group and the state of Alaska.

The polar bear got a new chance at more meaningful protections in March 2009, when Congress gave Interior Secretary Ken Salazar the power to revoke the 4(d) rule with the stroke of a pen. But the day before his deadline to do that, Salazar announced he would turn his back on the polar bear and leave the rule in place, ignoring hundreds of thousands of citizen petitions to save the bear (94,000 from Center supporters) — as well as requests from more than 1,300 scientists, more than 50 prominent legal experts, dozens of lawmakers, and more than 130 conservation organizations. Armed with this support and our own drive to save the bear, the Center will continue its fight for the species’ survival.

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