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A Message from Susan & Jeff Bridges
Dear friend,
If the Statue of Liberty is our monument to American opportunity, Yellowstone National Park, with its grizzly bears, wolves, and free-roaming buffalo, is our monument to American wilderness. Yellowstone grizzly bears, in particular, stand for something rugged and grand in the American landscape and in the American character it shaped. Unfortunately, the grizzly's image is faring better than the bear itself.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton is now proposing to withdraw federal Endangered Species Act protections that currently protect Yellowstone's small grizzly population from hunting and habitat destruction. Please join us in helping to prevent the Bush Administration from squandering our national investment in recovering Yellowstone grizzly bears.
Yellowstone's grizzly population of only 500-600 bears is too small to survive legalized hunting and too land-starved to withstand oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, road-building, and residential development in the last remaining habitat outside of Yellowstone Park's boundaries.
While many of us would like to think of Yellowstone as a safe refuge for wildlife, the Park alone is much too small to support a healthy population of grizzly bears. As it stands now, Yellowstone grizzlies are "fenced in" by highways, power lines, gas wells, ranchettes, trophy houses, golf courses, and growing mountain towns. Without effective legal checks, development will erode away much of the small "island" where Yellowstone grizzlies now survive. Yet, the Bush Administration is proposing to remove all effective protections for grizzly habitat.
To make matters worse, the major food sources that support Yellowstone grizzly bears are declining. For example, grizzly bears depend on whitebark pine nuts to carry them through winter hibernation, but whitebark pines are dying at alarming rates due to a foreign disease and a massive mountain pine beetle epidemic. Yellowstone's buffalo, another key bear food source, are currently being slaughtered in droves just outside Yellowstone Park boundaries. With these ongoing attacks on the Yellowstone grizzly's essential food supply, this is no time to take grizzly bears off the Endangered Species list.
The grizzly bear is an "umbrella" species. The health of the grizzly population indicates the health of plants and animals that are struggling to survive in their ever-shrinking natural environment.
Won't you please write to Secretary Norton and let her know that now is the time to stand up for Yellowstone's magnificent wildlife, not aid their destruction?
Write your Representatives and ask them to resist efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act. Write a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stating your concerns. With your help we can keep some of it wild!
Thank you!
Susan and Jeff Bridges
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