The perilous state of Yellowstone's grizzly-bear population highlights the need for solid science in policy-making, argues Doug Honnold in this guest essay. Honnold, managing attorney of the Earthjustice Northern Rockies office, has been litigating public-interest environmental cases for more than 20 years.

Our ability to protect and preserve wild places like Yellowstone turns in large part on our ability to understand the amazingly complex biological and scientific dynamics at play. We can't fight global warming or protect our families from air pollution unless we understand the science behind these issues and put it to use.

But as we've seen again and again, powerful political forces use corrupted science to support desired political results.

Witness the Bush administration's proposal to remove the Yellowstone grizzly bear population from the list of species protected under the Endangered Species Act. By the basic standards of fundamental ecology, that should be a non-starter because of the relatively small population size and the substantial threats the bear faces.

Dr. Jesse Logan has helped bring to light one significant threat to the Yellowstone grizzly. A scientist who retired from the research arm of the U.S. Forest Service this year, Logan spent 30 years working as a research scientist and entomology professor, studying the forests of the northern Rockies and the insects they house, especially the small but mighty mountain pine beetle.

In the early 1990s, Logan and his collaborators set up a research site in the White Cloud Mountains near Challis, Idaho, to monitor how climate change would affect beetle activity in lodgepole and whitebark pine. Historically, mountain pine beetle and lodgepole pines evolved together, but mountain pine beetle had been an infrequent visitor to whitebark pine habitat. Logan sought to answer what happens to beetle activity under warming conditions.

During the last decade, the northern Rockies have experienced higher than normal temperatures. According to Logan's research data, accumulated by the summer of 2003, those warm temperatures led to a significant mountain pine beetle infestation in lodgepole pine, and, more ominously, to the beetles attacking and killing numerous whitebark pines.

This has profound implications for Yellowstone's grizzlies. When whitebark pine cones—a key source of grizzly food—are abundant in the Yellowstone backcountry, bear mortalities go down and the number of bear cubs goes up.

This also means western forests as we know them today will undergo radical changes. As Logan wrote in one of his seminal papers, "We will probably experience ecological catastrophes such as the loss of high-elevation five-needle pines long before we are paddling sea kayaks in Central Park."

Over the last five years, bark-beetle infestations have intensified throughout the western forests. In Yellowstone an estimated 9 percent of the whitebark pines —18,000 acres—were killed by the end of 2004 in this still ongoing epidemic.

Using the best data available, Logan has modeled what will happen to whitebark pine in the Yellowstone ecosystem with just a few degrees of warmer weather. His most recent work projects that in 20 to 30 years, "whitebark pine could well be eliminated, along with the ecosystems it builds, as a dominant force on the landscape."

How can the FWS justify its proposal to delist Yellowstone grizzlies even as a major source of their food is under unprecedented threat? Well, for starters, they rely on 10-year-old mountain pine beetle data and ignore the most recent data. Then there is the "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" defense: instead of counting the number of whitebark pine killed in recent years, the government studies the number of seed cones produced on living whitebark pine trees. When a tree in their sample is killed, they just exclude it from the study.

Making policy decisions based on this sort of weak science has become all too common. A survey of FWS scientists released in February 2005 illustrated how pervasive the suppression and tainting of science has become. Remarkably, 414 scientists responded to the survey, despite official direction not to do so. The results were staggering: 42 percent of the scientists said they could not openly express concerns about the needs of a species outside the agency for "fear of retaliation"; 56 percent reported cases where "commercial interests have inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of scientific conclusions or decisions through political intervention"; and 71 percent said that FWS cannot be trusted to protect endangered species.

Wrote one survey respondent, a scientist from the Pacific region, "All we can do at the field level is ensure that our administrative record is complete and hope we get sued by an environmental or conservation organization."

Indeed, as Logan's warnings about the loss of whitebark pine have so far fallen on deaf ears, it seems likely that it will take an Earthjustice lawsuit to make FWS face the facts that our forests and the grizzlies and other wildlife they support are under threat and that we need a game plan for addressing that challenge.

A longer version of this story originally appeared on Grist.org, which provides online environmental news and commentary.