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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to The EcoNews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And we are talking about California grizzlies today. And joining me are two fantastic guests. We have Tiana Williams-Claussen, the Director of the Yurok Wildlife Department. Hey, Tiana. And we have Pete Alagona, who is an Associate Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at UCSB, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of, among other things, After the Grizzly, Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California. Hey, Pete.

All right. So we're talking about grizzlies because there are some radical folks like the three of us, perhaps, that want to see California grizzlies back in the state of California. It's been almost 100 years, or probably about slightly over 100 years, 101 years since the last grizzly was seen in the state. And this is an exciting opportunity for rewilding the state of California. So we're going to talk about grizzlies, their relationship with the state, and their role in the ecosystems here in the past, the extirpation of grizzlies in the state, and this opportunity to bring them back, including a bill that the Yurok Tribe is sponsoring.

So let's start with the historic grizzly. Peter, I was a little shocked to learn today that there were grizzlies across the entire state of California. I always just figured, being a Pacific Northwest supremacist that I am, that it was in the wetter forest, the northwest corner of the state, where we have these abundant salmon runs. But grizzlies were geographically spread all across the state, including down as far as San Diego. So tell us about the historic California grizzly. Roughly, broad picture, then we can start to drill into some specifics.

PETER ALAGONA:

Yeah, sure, so I don't think you're alone, Tom. I mean, I think that, well, there's an important concept that sometimes comes up in history called presentism, and that's where we project what we know from our current lives in the present onto the past, and it turns out that the past was often really, really different. And so I think we tend to think of grizzlies as living in certain places today because that's where they live now, but in the past, they lived in a much wider range of habitats and ecosystems.

Grizzlies arrived in California pretty late, very late in their species evolutionary history. The brown bear evolved largely in Eurasia and then came over to North America in several waves, and California, the U.S. Southwest, and Northern Mexico were some of the very last places they reached in their long journey from continent to continent. They've probably only been in California for maybe something like maybe 10,000 years or less, according to what we know, but when they got here, they really thrived. They spread throughout the state, basically in all of California's ecosystems, except in its hot deserts. They did amazingly well. They're really a generalist species in a lot of ways, so they do a lot of different things pretty well, and they can live in a huge range of habitats, from Mediterranean-style ecosystems to coastlines to wet, temperate forests to seasonal woodlands all the way up into the alpine zone.

And what we know is that, at least in terms of their kind of deep history, by the 19th century, 18th to 19th century, the estimate is that there were something like up to 10,000 grizzlies in California. And just to put that in a little bit of perspective, if you look at Alaska today, it's got maybe something like 35,000 grizzlies. California's about a quarter of the size of Alaska in terms of a land area. California had a, overall, at that state-level scale, had roughly the same population density of grizzlies that Alaska does today.

WHEELER:

California Grizzlies are, of course, also beloved in our state. Despite us hunting them to extinction in the state, they are a prominent feature in our iconography, right? They're on our flag. We have at least two California sports teams or two collegiate sports teams that have the grizzly as their mascot. The Berkeley Golden Bears and the UCLA Bruins are all references to grizzlies. So, can you talk about, perhaps, the Euro-American colonial interaction with this species? What it was like when white folks got to California and started to encounter these great bears and the course of extirpation, which was very rapid.

ALAGONA:

Yeah, sure, as a UCLA Bruin myself, I can definitely tell you a little bit about that. It's a pretty long and complicated story. And I think that the sort of Euro-American version of that really begins in many ways with the expedition of Lewis and Clark in the very beginning of the 19th century, just almost immediately after the United States purchased Louisiana territory from Napoleon's France. On that journey, Lewis and Clark really collected some of the first specimens and first information about the bears. And, you know, they really characterized the bears as these monsters in a way, these big, vicious animals. Although by the end, they were pretty convinced that the rumors they'd heard about them didn't really live up to the reality. But the people who came after them really echoed those things. And that created, I think, an atmosphere of fear in a lot of ways and animosity toward the bears.

In California, the species population really declined from something like 10,000 to really to zero over the course of really just one human lifetime from 1850 to the mid-1920s, so about 70-something years. And that decline was really driven by a few things. It was driven by agricultural expansion and population growth, certainly, but even more than that, it was driven by an effort of settlers in California to really drive out anything that got in the way of commodity production, really. And that included native species, it included wild rivers, it included wetlands, it included, certainly, indigenous people who resisted that takeover of their lands, and it also included the grizzly bear. And so the grizzly bear really got caught up in this much bigger story.

Just to add one other thing to that, I mean, I think you're really right that as the bear declined, its legacy was sort of imprinted on the state in too many ways to count. When I go to my classes, I see too many grizzly bear hats and T-shirts and flags on people's clothing to count. There are something like 850 place names in California in Spanish or English, not including indigenous place names, that refer directly to grizzlies or bears. There are post offices, there are schools, there are mascots. And so as the bear declined from the actual landscape, it was imprinted in a way, or its iconography, its image was imprinted into the cultural history of the state.

WHEELER:

So folks living on the North Coast will be familiar with black bears. I've heard that we have some of the highest black bear densities on the planet here in our neck of the woods, and you see them fairly regularly. I've seen more in my short time living in Humboldt than I can probably count. So we are probably all generally familiar with them and their size and their diets and things like that. When you give a comparison of brown bears to black bears, how much bigger is a grizzly and what is the relationship between grizzly bears and black bears?

ALAGONA:

Well, giving an animal a common name after its color is often a bit misleading, right? Because I mean, black bears vary from bleach blonde to jet black, American black bears. And brown bears, we're in a pretty wide gamut too. They used to be called cinnamon bears, silver tips, all of these other names for them that express that.

The name grizzly actually refers to this idea of grizzled fur, like the silver tip frosted fur that many of them have, which is really quite beautiful. So the two species are actually very similar in a lot of ways. And the reason for that is that for most of their evolutionary histories, they lived in different places. And so because they lived in different places, they were able to occupy very similar niches. So brown bears live primarily in Europe and Asia, American black bears have been in North America for a longer time. And so they kind of developed a pretty similar role because they were living in different places that they might not have been developed, might not have developed had they been competing directly.

There are some differences though. So in areas where the two species live together, brown bears tend to exclude black bears from some of the best spots, like the best salmon streams, that kind of thing. Certainly in the best berry patches. So black bears tend to avoid brown bears because they can be a bit bigger. Black bears also are more forest associated, going deep into their evolutionary history, whereas brown bears in Eurasia evolved in a huge range of habitats from steppe, savanna kind of landscapes, brushlands, woodlands, forests, just a wide range. And so black bears are, as a forest species, tend to be much better actually at climbing. Brown bears, grizzlies can climb, but they're not as good at it once they reach adulthood. And this actually affects the way they behave. There's a theory about this. And the idea is that because black bears could escape into trees during a time when they lived, during the Pleistocene, when they lived with a cast of much bigger animals and more formidable animals, like giant short-faced bears and dire wolves and things like that, they could just kind of escape.

Brown bears didn't really have that kind of option in a lot of places where they lived. And so they either had to run away or stand their ground and defend themselves. And so this evolutionary history, at least it's theorized, accounts for the fact that black bears will almost always run away from people, almost always scamper up a tree, unless they've been conditioned not to, right? By being given food or something like that. Brown bears will almost always do the same thing, but every so often they won't, right? And they will stand their ground. And so this is a behavioral difference that probably comes from their deep evolutionary history.

WHEELER:

I want to bring in your perspective from the Yurok Wildlife Department. So the Yurok Tribe has been in Northwest California since the beginning of time, and your tribe then has grown up together with grizzly bears. I'm curious if grizzlies feature into cultural narratives, into stories or songs or part of the Yurok culture and what you are able to share with us.

TIANA WILLIAMS-CLAUSSEN:

Absolutely. So, as you say, Yurok people, you know, we've been here since time immemorial, as we often say. And something that I, as a wildlife biologist, as a tribal member, as someone who's been working actively towards conservation for my entire adult career at this point, what I'm really learning is how, as Yurok people, culturally and perhaps biologically, I'm not sure, can co-evolve with the other plants and animals that existed in this place even before we did. In our stories, in our narratives, we are often looking up to these species as teachers, as elder spirits, as the people who came even before us and taught us how to live in a good way.

And so the grizzly bear, or neek-wech in the Yurok language, is one of those species. And they're one that we have a particularly close relationship with in that we consider them to be a relative, or sometimes we'll call them our aunties. And so I always laugh about it. You respect your aunties. Like, I think that you need to respect grizzly bears. There is a rule that you don't go around talking bad about grizzly bears because they'll hear you. Just like your auntie, if you start talking bad about her, if you don't have respect, she will teach you respect.

So definitely we do have a lot of respect for the animal. They are biologically probably one of the most similar species to us. So we eat a lot of the same foods. We travel a lot of the same paths. And so we have evolved to kind of have ways to coexist with them. Everything from our houses, which have a doorway that's specifically designed to keep grizzlies out because they like the same foods as we do, to young women when they're gathering with their elders. You sing or you talk as you're walking down the trail so that you're not startling a bear. There's conversations about how there were people in the old days who knew how to talk to grizzlies, make sounds and actions that would either pacify them or drive them off.

So they were just a part of life and they haven't been here for over a hundred years now. So culturally speaking, they still exist because they exist in stories, because they exist in place names and in language. But it's really hard to have a relationship with a species that hasn't been here for over a hundred years. So that's definitely something that I think Yurok people as well as many tribal nations probably struggle with with any species that has been extirpated post-American contact.

There's also the aspects, and Pete got into this a bit, about kind of their ecological role. And so there's not a lot of differentiation, at least in Yurok culture, I would say between spiritual and physical aspects of the world. So the ecology, the culture, the spirit is all very much tied. We as Yurok people consider ourselves to be world-renewal or fix-the-Earth people. We actively engage in maintaining what was historically a pretty resilient balance. These days is more kind of proactive restoration.

But grizzly would have been one of our partners in keeping the world in balance back in the day because of the way that they interacted with the landscape. People think about the North Coast. They think about our gorgeous redwoods. They think about all of our rivers. What they don't think about a lot of times is what used to be an extensive prairie system. For example, this was a system that was maintained through cultural fire by people, but was also maintained through species like the grizzly. Because there's this idea, I think that's kind of been passed down to us over the last couple of hundred of years.

And again, Pete mentioned it, of grizzly as kind of the scary dude who is a ravening predator and all that sort of thing. But really they have an incredibly diverse and largely vegetarian diet. So in this area, they would have been a big digger of roots. You'd look at those big, scary grizzly claws. It's not because they're scary. It's because they're literally shoveling up the dirt and digging for tubers and things like that.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. And we're talking about bringing back California's grizzlies with Tiana Williams-Claussen of the Yurok Tribe and Pete Algona of UCSB.

WILLIAMS-CLAUSSEN:

One of the things, for example, that the Yurok Tribal Wildlife Department is doing, along with in coordination with our other natural resource divisions, is prairie restoration, something I'm very excited and proud of. And I keep just thinking and joking that this is costing us countless man-hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if we just released four or five grizzlies out here, they'd probably just get the job done, you know, digging things up and aerating the soils. Historically, they would have kept our forests clear, which improves fire resilience and things like that. It reduces the draws on water.

I've got to admit, I had not thought it would ever be possible to bring grizzlies back to California until Peter and his crew started really talking to me about it. But the more and more I learn about how resilient grizzly really is, how adaptable, the more I'm fascinated by the possibilities.

WHEELER:

And I love how it fits in this idea of rewilding and bringing back grizzlies fits in with the fix-A-world culture or religion of the Yurok that we are incomplete without our aunties here and that bringing grizzlies back will have a spiritual rightness to the world, to things. I just introduced the term rewilding. This idea of bringing back species to areas from where they've been extirpated is part of rewilding. Pete, perhaps though you can fill us in with a better idea or a definition of what rewilding might be.

ALAGONA:

Well, sure. I mean, I can't think of a better place to start than with the idea of world renewal that Tiana was talking about there, but I can give you a little bit of a flavor of it from sort of academic and management perspective over the last few decades, which is back in the '90s, folks started talking about this more with regard to the idea of establishing core, conserved large core areas, connecting them with corridors, nature preserves so that animals could travel between them, and then restoring and repopulating those areas with their full suite of native species in a space big enough to accommodate them. And that includes the big ones, but also the small ones too. And so that's really the 1990s view of rewilding.

I think it's expanded a lot since then. And I think that the term is sort of open to interpretation. I think any kind of world healing or renewal efforts certainly fall under it. What I can say specifically about California, at least in terms of my observations, is that the U.S. is a bit further behind, I would say, in rewilding efforts than folks in a lot of other parts of the world who maybe have been more aggressive or maybe have less red tape or all the other things that you could point to around that. California, I think, has emerged in recent years as a sort of U.S. center of rewilding, maybe somewhat ambivalently. I think there's a grassroots, there's a lot of action around this. I think the state often pumps the brakes. We could talk a little bit about that.

But I would just say maybe to think of it in three ways for folks who are new to the idea. One is just incidental rewilding that happens when lands are abandoned, that happens when grazing permits on public lands, for example, are retired, those sorts of things. That's happened a lot. Or forestry projects wind down or mining mineral rights are relinquished. That's happened a lot in California in recent years. And there are lots of opportunities for that kind of incidental rewilding as the state's economy changes over time.

The second one would be a passive rewilding where you try to protect an area and then let nature do its work, right, in some way. And that's happening too. There's large-scale land management efforts that are going on in that way. They're generally passive but seek to protect areas and allow natural processes to return.

And then there's the more active approaches, which means on-the-ground ecological restoration of ecosystem processes, and then also recovering lost species in areas that they once inhabited where they play an important role. Tiana's been at the forefront of that with the Yurok Tribe's Condor work. There are a lot of other efforts in California around a number of other species to do that, to really bring them back to their old haunts. In a way, the grizzly is probably one of the most challenging for people to wrap their minds around. But I'll just point out that if you go back 10 years, the state of California was calling beavers a non-native nuisance species. And now we're working to actively restore them because we've come to see their benefits. And so I think that that's an example of us moving in a positive direction.

WHEELER:

On cultural acceptance of rewilding, I saw a funny joke online the other day about wolves in Ireland, where Irish farmers were once opposed to this idea of bringing back wolves. And then they were told that there weren't wolves because the British were the ones that killed them. And now the Irish farmers are demanding to bring back those wolves. So I, you know. That's it.

ALAGONA:

Yeah, that says a lot right there that happens in a lot of places in a lot of different ways.

WHEELER:

So sometimes it's a story that we tell ourselves about why species are gone. And I think that we build up narratives about species that inhibit our acceptance generally as a society about bringing them back. This idea that grizzly bears are this big, scary bear, that they're confrontational, has been to their detriment. And starting to tell the stories about how they're vegetarians and how their big, scary paws are actually just big shovels for them to dig into prairies. That's a wonderful story to help folks re-imagine what a grizzly might be.

Okay, so there is talk about bringing grizzlies back to California. This is really in its, like before it's even its infancy stage here. We are in the conceptual dreaming stage, although there is new legislation this year, and that is SB, Senate Bill SB-1305. And Tiana, perhaps you could explain the highlights of SB-1305 for us.

WILLIAMS-CLAUSSEN:

Sure. And I think that's kind of in the way I've been phrasing it is we are talking about talking about it here. This is the current name of it is the California Grizzly Recovery Assessment Act. And so one of the things that we just really want to get across is we are not at this time proposing to bring back grizzlies. What we're trying to do here is do a deep dive into what it would take. Is it feasible? What would it look like? And then in the end, make a suggestion as to what this would actually look like. A very complicated and very involved suggestion, I guess you might say. It would take another action. It would take engagement with the federal government if or when grizzlies should ever return to California.

That said, this bill is pretty incredible, I think, in what it tries to encapsulate. And so I would say that there's roughly about three major components that are really covered in this. And so first and foremost, there is the science. And actually, Peter and a lot of his work has covered a lot of the science already. They've completed a California grizzly feasibility analysis that can be found on the California Grizzly Alliance's website. It is a great document. It also lays out a lot of questions that still need to be answered. And so this is an opportunity to review what's in that and then to also expand on and try and answer some of those hanging questions that they've got.

But some of the things that we want to be looking at is their historical ecology and the ecological roles across the state systems. How and where did they fit in? How did they help shape the landscape? How is the landscape struggling or not in their absence? Even if grizzlies don't come back, and this is something that I feel is really important to continue, what can we learn from their presence at one time that could help us as modern Californians in restoring that landscape, in covering that niche, regardless of whether grizzlies come back or not? But there's a lot of questions about how they might interact with native species, other ecological communities, evaluations of potential reintroduction areas based on their ecology, habitat, connectivity, conflict risk for them and for humans aligned.

The second big component really gets at that there. The second component is consultation. As a Native American, I really appreciate that there's a strong emphasis on engaging with California Native tribes. I think things have been changing for the better over the last while, but historically, we haven't been a part of the conversation for a lot of these things. And so it's really important to me that tribes are front and center in this. But really what we're looking at doing is talking to anybody who knows something as much as we can, whether it's tribes or what you might term the Western scientists, and there's a lot of overlap there, of course. But I think perhaps as importantly, the people who are out there on the land. So landscape managers, recreationalists, law enforcements who are currently dealing with wildlife conflict, and we've had opportunities to sit down with some of these folks. And I think that the conversations that come out of this are going to be some of the most important parts of it.

Then finally, it's going to come down to the actual management. What would it take? What would it look like? What staffing? Where? Coming up with conflict management protocols before bears would ever be released, that sort of thing. It is currently drafted to be wrapped up by the end of 2030. So we've got some time. And I believe, if I understand correctly, it's going through the final phases of review for this law, for this legal process, and we should know how things are looking in a couple of days.

WHEELER:

I believe y'all have a hearing on the bill on the 14th. So if there's new information, you can find that in the show notes of this episode, which can be found on the lostcoastoutpost.com. So Tiana, if folks are enthusiastic grizzly supporters, what are you asking people to do? How can they be helpful in getting SB 1305 across the finish line?

WILLIAMS-CLAUSSEN:

Oh man, I am a baby when it comes to these legislative processes. I know, but I'm a big fan of the letter writing and the calls, talking to your representatives and the like. If you are interested in grizzlies and maybe don't know as much about them, I always encourage people just reach out for the education, just figure out what you can about them. If you've got friends who are concerned about it, you know, maybe share that information with them. Help bridge these distances that have been somewhat artificially created over the last century in order to move forward with the conversation about grizzlies one way or the other.

WHEELER:

So most of the listeners here are going to be in Senator McGuire's district. Do you know how Senator McGuire is feeling about 1305 at this moment? Okay. Well, to me, that means that we should hound Senator McGuire to come out with a full-throated endorsement of 1305, right? He is not a co-sponsor of the legislation yet, but we can still make him one, right? So talk to Senator McGuire if you are able. All right, so I wanted to just end with a visioning. In 100 years, let's say that Grizzlies are able to come back onto the landscape, what will Northwest California look like with Grizzlies? What sort of role would they be able to play?

ALAGONA:

Yeah, sure. Just quickly, the most amazing thing about these animals is that they're incredible teachers. And I know that people who've lived with them for a very long time, millennia, since time immemorial, know that better than anybody. For me, this journey has been one of just learning and the bears still have a lot to teach us. And so I would encourage, like Tiana said, anyone who's interested in this topic to educate yourself, grab the feasibility study, talk to your friends and neighbors, go to the library, do all that stuff you need to do to educate yourself as much as possible about these animals, because they are truly remarkable mentors.

In the feasibility study, what we found was that there are probably three areas of California that we would want to think about, at least initially, as places that could potentially host populations of these bears in the future, well into the future. And those are the southern Sierra Nevada, the Northwest Forest where you all are, and the Los Padres back country near where I am in Santa Barbara County. And so we've got those areas in our backyards. The effects of the bears on the actual landscape, on the ecosystems will determine how many there are, what kind of population densities over time.

But beyond all of the ecological effects, I mean, to me, one of the biggest things about even just talking about this, about changing the narrative to the point where we can have a thoughtful conversation about this, is that the idea is inspiring. I think we're in a state right now where it seems like it's hard to get big things done sometimes. The idea of getting a big thing done, righting a wrong, healing, doing all those things, I think to me, if they were bears on the landscape into the future, people would look back and they would say, wow, this was something that we didn't have to do and we did it. We're probably working through it, but that shows that other big things can be done too.

WHEELER:

Jonah, do you want to just give our closing reflection on what bringing back grizzlies would mean to the Yurok Tribe or to you as an individual?

WILLIAMS-CLAUSSEN:

I know some of our leadership, when we were having these internal conversations, they said, if we call ourselves world-renewal people, then we need to be world-renewal people, even if the conversations are hard. So I think that tribal, non-tribal, however it is, I think that grizzly bears are going to drive that conversation in ways that we haven't had the capacity or reason to do for quite a while now. I think one important thing that will come out of this is hopefully an improved understanding that humans are not the top of the world, which I think is kind of an idea that's been imposed on us, but rather are a part of the world as are grizzlies. And I just feel like we're going to have the opportunity to build a real conversation about how do we really live with our wildlife community members. That's something I'm really excited about.

WHEELER:

That's awesome. Well, Tiana and Pete, thank you so much for joining the Econews. All right. Join us next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.