The first problem you confront when saving grizzly bears is that not everyone is convinced they're worth saving. "People fear things with big teeth," says Louisa Willcox, NRDC's wild bears project director. "We prefer to know we're at the top of the food chain."

More than 100,000 of these 600- to 800-pound carnivores once prowled the Lower 48, but as human encounters with bears increased, so did the animal's mortality rate. Poisoned and shot by settlers, their habitat destroyed to make way for logging, mining, and roads, the grizzly numbered just 1,000 individuals in 1975, so few that Ursus arctos horribilis finally was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. More than a quarter century later, the populations have remained virtually the same. Today, grizzlies in the contiguous United States live in just five isolated ecosystems -- areas that represent only 1 to 2 percent of the animals' former range -- and the future of these bears is far from secure.

This past July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved permits for the Sterling Mining Company to build a copper and silver mine beneath 100 square miles of prime grizzly habitat in northern Montana's Cabinet-Yaak wilderness, home to a population of 10 to 15 grizzlies. Lawyers from Earthjustice (including Willcox's husband, Doug Honnold) have filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of NRDC and other groups aimed at stopping the project. Willcox, who lives in Livingston, Montana, has found herself in the role of bear information specialist; she's talked to numerous journalists and handed out scores of fact sheets to the public explaining that roads, heavy truck traffic, and new generators and power lines would not only divide this wilderness area in two, but also snuff out its tiny bear population.

A similarly disastrous scenario could unfold if the Bush administration succeeds in removing the grizzly population in Yellowstone from the endangered species list: The Yellowstone region's remaining wild country would be opened to development that could cut off the area's bears from a diverse genetic pool in Canada and northern Montana. This, in turn, would render the few hundred remaining Yellowstone bears vulnerable to extinction.

Willcox first encountered wild grizzlies in 1974, as an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyoming, and later wrote stories about them for the High Country News. After earning a master's degree in forestry from Yale, she eventually went to work for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an activist group working to protect the area in and around the nation's oldest national park from incursions by developers and mining and energy companies. Grizzlies, which need huge expanses of intact wilderness to thrive, were at the center of those struggles. "There's a saying among conservationists that if you do right by native fish and grizzly bears you will do right by their ecosystems," Willcox says. "Grizzlies are one of the most sensitive barometers of the health of the environment."

Since her early years with the coalition, Willcox has helped Earthjustice win a lawsuit against the Fish and Wildlife Service, whose bear recovery plan failed to protect bear habitat. (Eight years later, the agency is still revising the plan.) She's drummed up support for a plan to cover an open-air dump that was attracting grizzly bears into the town of Cook City near Yellowstone, an action that was critical for protecting human lives and ensuring that bears and people harmoniously coexist. And she's publicly butted heads with state and federal politicians over policies that could threaten the last wild grizzlies in the United States.

If we lose the grizzly, explains Willcox, who joined NRDC last October, we'll lose a lot more than one of nature's most magnificent animals. "When you're walking in bear country, you are awake in a way that humans are not usually awake. You listen to everything -- every snap of a twig," she says. "I am fairly hopeful that the public, if given the right information, will go a long way to protect an animal that has nowhere else to go in the Lower 48."
-- Whitney Royster