California loves its grizzly bears. There’s one on the state flag and on the official state seal. Grizzly bears inspired the mascots of three University of California campuses. Grizzlies are the official state animal.
The Golden State’s worship of these majestic creatures is a bit odd given that no actual grizzlies, also known as brown bears, roam its many wilderness areas. California’s grizzlies were deliberately wiped out — shot, poisoned or trapped, often just for sport — by humans more than 100 years ago.
Is it time to bring them back? That’s a question the state’s lawmakers are facing this summer. A bill in the Legislature sponsored by two California Native American tribes would start the process by tasking state wildlife officials with crafting a roadmap for possible recovery in a handful of wilderness areas that may include Yosemite National Park, the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in the far north, and the Los Padres mountains in Southern California.
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The proposal is undergirded by a feasibility study funded by the California Grizzly Alliance, which supports the legislation, and is based on years of extensive research by an academic team led by Peter Alagona, an environmental studies professor at University of California Santa Barbara and author of the forthcoming book “Start with a Bear: Humans, Grizzlies, and the Power of Stories on a Crowded Planet.”
Alagona told me that years of studying the iconic predator led him to an eye-opening realization. “The previous narrative had been that the grizzly extinction was kind of inevitable in California, and that recovery is impossible,” he said. “And everything I saw said that extinction wasn’t inevitable and that recovery is really a choice.”
The timing for this aspirational proposal is not great — and not just because of the gruesome report of a hiker killed by a brown bear in Montana’s Glacier National Park in May. Conservationists, wildlife advocates, ranchers and lawmakers say that California has done a poor job of managing the predators – particularly gray wolves and black bears – already living within its borders, and conflicts with humans are increasing at a troubling clip, exacerbated by climate change, wildfire and human encroachment.
Karin Klein
Most interactions between California’s large predators and humans are fairly mild, and occasionally humorous: the state’s some 65,000 black bears rooting through trash, frolicking in backyard pools, denning under houses, and cougars wandering into urban neighborhoods — but also, horrifyingly, onto freeways. Collisions with vehicles are the number one cause of death for the state’s big cats, and hundreds of millions in public and private money has been spent on a soon-to-open wildlife crossing across the 101 Freeway near Malibu in an attempt to keep the big cats and other wildlife safe.
But predators, particularly bears, can also be destructive and dangerous. The residents of South Lake Tahoe in northeastern California have long had a problematic relationship with their black bear neighbors, who have become so habituated to humans, and their food, that they regularly raid homes and swipe at people who get in their way. Sadly, when a bear gets aggressive, it usually means a death sentence for them.
All of this raises the obvious question: Is this a good time to throw 800-pound predators into the volatile mix?
Absolutely not, says Heather Hadwick, a Republican state legislator who represents 11 counties in the rural and rugged northeast corner of California that is a potential location for reintroduced brown bears.
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“My district is very, very scared, honestly, for what could happen,” Hadwick said at a June 30 committee hearing for the grizzly reintroduction bill (which followed a hearing on a bill to restore and expand a nascent human-wildlife conflict program that lost its funding in 2024). “We can’t fully fund the coexistence program, wolf depredation, and wildfire mitigation projects. CDFW [California Department of Fish and Wildlife] is running with 30 percent of their law enforcement right now. Why should the state focus on this and fund a study to bring another apex predator in? Like, what is the need?”
Local elected officials in her district feel the same, as do politically powerful livestock and agriculture associations.
Alagona agrees that now is not the time to truck in brown bears from out of state, primarily because of the absence of predator coexistence and education programs. A permanent, and fully funded, predator management structure must be in place before a recovery program can begin.
Mariel Garza
“I would not advocate bringing back grizzlies to California tomorrow,” he said. But that doesn’t mean that state wildlife officials can’t start seriously evaluating how their resources could be used to support this effort. “The whole point of this bill is to think about what it would take in the future to do it.”
Even if this bill passes this year, it will be several years before you might catch a glimpse of a grizzly rambling through Yosemite Valley. But it will probably not succeed this year. Controversial legislation typically requires years of coalition building and meetings with stakeholders and, ultimately, compromise to finally reach the governor’s desk.
But don’t expect the idea to go away. After all, California loves its grizzly bears.
This column originally appeared in the Boston Globe, where I am a contributor to the Opinion section. It is reprinted with permission.
