California petition:
http://action.biologicaldiversity.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=17314
Gone Too Long: It's Time to Return Grizzly
Bears Across the American West
By Noah Greenwald
A symbol of great power and majesty, the grizzly bear is the centerpiece of California's state flag, the mascot for both the University of Montana and the University of California, Berkeley and namesake for a popular Brooklyn based indie-rock band.
But the ever-constant popularity of these iconic symbols of the American wild masks a disturbing reality about the bear's continued precarious status in the continental United States.
With the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moving toward dropping Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears that live in and around Yellowstone National Park, few Americans likely realize the bears occupy a mere 4 percent of their historic range in the lower 48 states.
And that's simply not good enough to make sure grizzly bears are around for centuries to come.
With their small, isolated populations in Yellowstone and elsewhere in the northern Rockies increasingly threatened by inbreeding, climate change and ongoing human population growth, grizzlies face an uncertain future at best.
To make sure the bears are given a fair chance of surviving these relentless pressures, I filed a legal petition last week on behalf of the organization I work for, the Center for Biological Diversity, calling on the Fish and Wildlife Service to greatly expand its plans for recovering grizzly bears.
The petition identifies 110,000 square miles of potential grizzly habitat in places like California's Sierra Nevada, the Gila/Mogollon complex in Arizona and New Mexico, Utah's Uinta Mountains, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona -- areas that have the potential to triple the bear's population to 6,000. ...
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