The Race for Survival

The Interior Department came to agree that the polar bear was threatened by climate change, although it took a while for it to get there. "This is cutting-edge science," says Hall, explaining why the department missed the original deadline set in January to rule on Siegel's petition. "I needed time to understand it." That was another way of saying that the decision was not, as some critics have charged, actually delayed to avoid complicating the sale in February of oil and gas leases on 29.4 million acres of polar-bear habitat in the Chukchi Sea. The two matters were "not at all" related, says Kempthorne.

The case for listing the polar bear was, however, complicated by the fact that its numbers are not actually declining across their range; in fact, there are probably more polar bears alive now than a few decades ago, before the United States banned trophy hunting. (It's still allowed in Canada.) But then last year the U.S. Geological Survey—which itself is part of the Interior Department—reported that if sea ice continued melting at the rate projected by current climate models, two thirds of the world's polar-bear population would be wiped out by the middle of the century. At the press conference announcing his decision, Kempthorne showed satellite imagery indicating that the Arctic ice cover last year fell to the lowest level ever recorded, 39 percent below the long-term average. It broke the previous record low, in 2005, by 460,000 square miles, an area larger than Texas and California combined. And although it's still early in the season, there is a 59 percent chance of another record low by the time the ice reaches its minimum in September, says Sheldon Drobot of the University of Colorado's Center for Astrodynamics Research. Viewing images of broken ice in parts of Hudson Bay and the Beaufort Sea last week, he called the situation "anomalous, and a little bit disconcerting."

Polar bears depend on sea ice to hunt for ringed and bearded seals, their main food source. "The ice is a platform to hunt seals, and if they don't have that platform they are in big trouble," says Ian Stirling, research scientist emeritus at Environment Canada in Edmonton. The bears are poor swimmers, and in the open water seals can easily evade them. Steven Amstrup, senior polar-bear scientist at the USGS Alaska Science Center in Anchorage, remembers when in some years the sea ice would never leave the shores of the Beaufort Sea. Now in summer it retreats as far as 600 miles off the coast, putting the seals, who prefer the shallow water near the shore, out of reach of the bears. The one-year survival rate for new cubs has dropped to 40 or 45 percent from 60 to 65 percent two decades ago, which Amstrup believes may result from the presence of more open water (cubs perish after 10 minutes in freezing water) and areas of rough ice that females with new cubs might have difficulty negotiating. Scientists have also witnessed a handful of cases of drowning, cannibalism and starvation among polar bears, things they've rarely—if ever—seen before. "We can't say that those events were definitely caused by global warming or any other particular event," says Amstrup. "But they are consistent with the changes in the environment that we've been seeing."

In accepting the science, however, Kempthorne made it clear he was rejecting Siegel's interpretation of the law. "Endangered" species get the highest level of protection; anything that threatens their survival—or, for that matter, a single individual—is outlawed. By listing the bear as "threatened" instead, Kempthorne gave the department leeway to decide which level of protection to apply. Specifically, he promised not to allow the Endangered Species Act to be "abused" by environmentalists to affect global-warming policy. "This listing," he warned, "will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting." To the Bush administration and to its allies in the business community, it's self-evident that the act was meant to cover the kind of threat a steamroller poses to a Santa Cruz long-toed salamander, not that which an SUV in Atlanta poses to a polar bear, by way of the atmosphere. To Kristina Johnson of the Sierra Club, "it's like the administration has admitted the polar bear to the ER but now is leaving it to die."

Authorities on environmental law don't necessarily agree with the government's interpretation, either. The whole point of the act, they say, is to protect critical ecosystems, not just species in isolation. "It's lawful, and Congress was well aware of that when it enacted the law in 1973," says Patrick Parenteau, a professor at the Vermont Law School. "You can't artificially decide what has an effect on the species. If it's being listed because of climate change, you can't turn around and say, 'We're not going to take climate change into account'." Siegel was disappointed, although hardly surprised, by Kempthorne's position. At least in the short term, the main impact of listing the polar bear will be on American hunters who shoot bears in Canada; they will now be prevented from bringing their trophies back into the United States. "I suppose we're doing what they're accusing us of doing," Siegel says, meaning using the polar bear to achieve a broader environmental goal, "but [the administration] just frames it in this weird, misleading way. They oppose regulation on behalf of industries concerned about short-term profits, not about the future of our children and grandchildren and the world they live in."

The accusation about profits might be a sly reference to a former top official of the Interior, deputy assistant secretary Julie MacDonald, who resigned last year one week before Congress opened an investigation of how she handled Endangered Species listings. The resulting report, issued May 21 by the Government Accountability Office, found that she had consistently ruled against positions advocated by Fish and Wildlife Service biologists. According to the report, MacDonald took a particular interest in a petition to list the white-tailed prairie dog, whose habitat in four Western states is also coveted by ranchers, developers and energy companies. The Center for Native Ecosystems presented research indicating that the animal's range has shrunk by 92 percent from its historical extent. Investigators found that MacDonald—who is not a biologist—deleted and rewrote portions of the report by Fish and Wildlife Service scientists, reducing the extent of the threat that oil and gas drilling posed to the prairie dog. The report also charged that she pressured staffers to make critical-habitat designations smaller than field biologists had recommended. The GAO report did not accuse her of any illegality; it merely raised strong suspicions that under her watch decisions that were supposed to be made on the science were tainted by politics. MacDonald has refused to comment on any of this, including to NEWSWEEK, but in a letter she wrote to the department's inspector general after her resignation, she charged that the department's internal review of her work was based on "inaccurate and incomplete information." MacDonald has not yet responded to the GAO report published last month.