IN THE SPOTLIGHT

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 with our partners to force the administration to take action on that petition. Three years after the petition, in March 2008, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service still hadn’t finalized its decision, so we filed suit again. On April 28, a judge ruled in our favor and ordered the Service to issue a final listing decision by May 15.

Just a day before the new deadline, then-Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced that the polar bear would be listed as threatened — a conservation victory with far-reaching consequences. But at the same time. Kempthorne vowed he wouldn’t let the listing affect U.S. climate policy, executing an illegal interim 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 filed new court papers, which earned the administration’s promise to designate critical habitat for the species. But in December 2008, Kempthorne announced his final 4(d) rule, which was even more damaging than the interim rule. Our lawsuit against the original rule is ongoing, and we continue to defend the bear’s listing from all challenges — including attempts to overturn it by interests such as a trophy-hunting group and the state of Alaska.

The polar bear got a new chance at true protections in March 2009, when Congress gave Interior Secretary Ken Salazar the power to rescind the 4(d) rule with the stroke of a pen. But the day before his deadline to do just 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 our fight to safeguard the species against its two biggest threats.

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