Polar Bear Population Guessing

Terence Jeffrey, Townhall.com, tries to piece together a puzzle on how polar bear populations are calculated. Perhaps calculated is the use of a word that too accurately describes what takes place.

Most of you who visit the Black Bear Blog often, know that I am, generally speaking, a defender of wildlife biologists. Their work is not easy to begin with and that work is often handcuffed by lack of funds, politics and a general disagreement from the general population of humans.

Jeffrey’s article takes a look at some of the history of making polar bear population estimates dating back as far as the 1950s. What he presents doesn’t give us a lot of hope that anyone really knows just how many polar bears there are or were.

“There was considerable debate and disagreement about the use of point estimates for subpopulations that we really do not know much about,” said the proceedings.

“There was further discussion and some agreement that there should be separate columns for estimates based on science and estimates based on something else,” it said.

We often hear the term “best available science”, which I think is pretty much self-explanatory. We can only assume that when rendering decisions such as the most resent one by the Department of the Interior to list the polar bear as “threatened”, they used “best available science”. My question is this. Is best available science good enough?

I am an advocate for change concerning the Endangered Species Act. The time has come when the Act, as is being administered and interpreted by the courts, is not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States and in many cases the animals it is intended to protect.

The time has come for change. Do we need a complete re-write, total abolishment or some tweaking here and there? One thing we may be learning in the near future is just how devastating this recent decision may be on our economy. I have even thought of the possibility that this decision, whether we like it or not or want to believe it, is aimed at driving environmental policies and can have just the opposite affect. If we examine populations of humans worldwide, we see a general trend that the poorer countries contribute more pollution per capita than wealthy countries like the U.S. Would a devastated U.S. economy, driven at least in part by the listing of a polar bear, actually tend toward increases in environmental pollution here?

Getting back to the polar bear population estimations. Again, we assume the best available science is used to determine bear numbers. Is that good enough? I don’t know of anyone who will argue the fact that we just don’t know how many polar bears there are in the world.

Judging from the information given us in Jeffrey’s article, is there reason for us to feel confident that the present world polar population is between 20,000 and 25,000? If we’re that so unsure, should we be making a decision that could potentially cripple our economy based on the best available guesses?

Experts who are fully familiar with working within the Endangered Species Act repeatedly state that the Act lends itself to be manipulated and abused by environmentalists and animal rights groups, often leaving the courts not a lot of leeway in rendering decisions. This is one reason for the continued onslaught of lawsuits. This has to change.

One suggestion would be to change the ESA so that it would require an accurate count of a species before any listing be done that can have the potential to cripple our economy. It’s a tough enough pill to have to swallow when I sit and begin thinking about what real affects this listing will have but knowing that this decision was reached using a glorified guessing game is unsatisfactory to me.

Yes, getting an accurate count on polar bears or other species will be very expensive but when you consider the future costs of the decision to be made, it just might be money well spent.

I think Jeffrey sums it up nicely at the end of his article when he says this:

Almost 50 years ago, polar bear scientists first estimated there might be as many as 19,000 polar bears. Three years ago, they estimated there might be as few as 20,000.

Who knows? By the time the government decrees polar bears not merely threatened, but endangered, there may be as few as 30,000 roaming the Arctic wastes.

Tom Remington