In the early 1900s, long before smartphones and selfie sticks, tourists flocked to Yellowstone National Park — not for the geysers or scenery, but for a grotesque show: A nightly spectacle of grizzly bears raiding cafeteria scraps from open-pit landfills like desperate, starving pirates.

The bears were in dangerous proximity to humans: Hungry bears tore at open car windows. Tourists posed a little too close with their film cameras. Yellowstone park rangers logged dozens of injuries each year — nearly 50 on average.

Eventually, the Park Service ended the nightly landfill shows: feeding wild animals human food wasn’t just dangerous, it was unnatural. Bears, ecologists argued, should eat berries, nuts, elk — not leftover Twinkies. In 1970, the park finally shut down the landfills for good.

By then, though, grizzlies were in deep trouble. As few as 700 remained in the lower 48 states, down from the estimated 50,000 that once roamed the 18 Western states. Decades of trapping, shooting, and poisoning had brought them to the brink. The ones that clung to survival in Yellowstone National Park learned to take what scraps they could get and when they were forced to forage elsewhere, it didn’t go so well.

More bears died. Their already fragile population in the Yellowstone region dipped to fewer than 250, though one publication says the number could have been as low as 136, according to Frank van Manen, who spent 14 years leading the US Geological Survey’s grizzly bear study team and now serves as an emeritus ecologist.

The Yellowstone bears had been trained to rely on us. And when we cut them off, their population tanked.

And so in 1975, the US Fish and Wildlife Service placed grizzly bears on the endangered species list, the country’s most powerful legal mechanism to stave off extinction.

The grizzly’s place on the list afforded them some important protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Hunting was off limits, as was trapping or poisoning, and the listing included rigorous habitat protections. Grizzlies slowly came back.

Today, more than 1,000 grizzly bears live in and around Yellowstone alone, and tourists who visit the park by the millions every year can observe the bears — no longer desperately feeding on trash but lumbering in and out of meadows with their trailing cubs, or sitting on their haunches feasting on elk carcasses.

The recovery effort was a major success, but it’s brought a whole new slate of issues.

In recent years, grizzlies have spilled out of their stronghold in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem — a broad swath of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming — and into human territory, where coexistence gets messy. In 2024 alone, more than 60 grizzlies were killed in Wyoming, most of them lethally removed by wildlife officials after killing cattle, breaking into cabins and trash cans, or lingering in residential neighborhoods.

It’s the classic species recovery paradox: the more bears succeed and their populations expand, the more trouble they get into with humans.

And now, a controversial debate rages over whether or not to delist the grizzly bear. No species is meant to be a permanent resident on the Endangered Species List. The whole point of the ESA is to help species recover to the point where they’re no longer endangered. A delisting would underscore that the grizzlies didn’t just scrape by in the Yellowstone area — they exceeded every population requirement in becoming a thriving, self-sustaining population of at least 500 bears.

But to remove federal protection would mean grizzly bears would face increasing threats to their survival at a time when some biologists argue the species’ recovery is shaky at best.

The stakes here are bigger than just the grizzly bear alone — what happens next is about proving that the ESA works, and that sustained recovery is possible, and that ESA protection leads to progress. Because if a species like the grizzly, which has met every biological benchmark, still can’t graduate from the list, then what is the list for?

“The [ESA] is literally one of the strictest wildlife protection laws in the world…but in order for people to buy into it, they have to have respect for it,” says Kelly........

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