To understand how climate changes can affect entire areas in ways that most humans might not notice, all one must do is look at the whitebark pines in the Yellowstone area. For over a hundred years, whitebark pines have taken a beating. Disease, overcrowding, and outbreaks of mountain pine beetles have threatened the pines for over a century to varying degrees. Climate change and warmer winters have meant more and more mountain beetle outbreaks—as extreme cold used to help with killing off such outbreaks. In 2009, over 3,000 square miles of whitebark pines were destroyed in a beetle outbreak. Why does this kind of deforestation matter? Animals need those whitebark pines for a healthy ecosystem. Animals like grizzly bears.
Grizzlies eat the food caches left by squirrels in the whitebark pines. No pines means no squirrel caches of food, which means grizzlies have to move on. Grizzlies have been moving into human-inhabited areas, more and more in order to survive. According to the Missoula Current, 2018 saw the highest number of grizzly deaths in years, 51. The top two reasons: grizzlies hit by cars crossing highways or eating roadkill, and interventions by state wildlife agencies, needing to euthanize grizzlies who have wandered dangerously into areas where people like to camp and live.
Conservationists have tried to get the pines put under federal protection for decades, finally getting the pines put on the “priority” list in 2011. But according to High Country News, whitebark pines have stayed on that “priority” list without real federal protection since due to a lack of funds.
The reason came down to a funding shortage: listing whitebark pine as endangered would have required the agency to devote resources to saving it. Without enough money to care for all disappearing species, the agency focuses on listing species that are part of legal settlements, for example.
All of this does not help the grizzly, and our climate continues to change, our planet getting hotter, compounding the problems further. Inside Climate News points to the decreases in cutthroat trout and elk populations over the past decades as another red flag for the grizzlies—both animals a big part of the bear’s diet. Grizzlies also have the problem that they are not quick to reproduce, and losing dozens of bears every year is not necessarily sustainable over a long stretch. After growing the population under federal protection after 1975, the Trump administration, under corrupt millionaire cowboy Ryan Zinke, removed the grizzlies' federal protections in the Greater Yellowstone area. The general tenor of the Trump administration has been anti-science, and the handling of our fish and wildlife agency follows this big business interests only mindset.
Right now Fish and Wildlife officials say they aren’t too worried about the long-term “viability” of the grizzly species, but conservationists are worried that the increases in grizzly bear deaths over the past few years do not bode well.