ACTION ALERT: Great News! Grizzlies Listed as Threatened

ACT NOW to instantly send a thank-you letter to Minister Mel Knight for this important step!

Grizzly Bears in Alberta can now check off the E in the B.E.A.R.S' Essentials - (endangered species listing).  Thanks to the more than 1200 participants in Action Grizzly Bear and Sierra Club Canada members, including your meetings with, and letters and phone calls to the key decision makers.  Alberta's Minister of Sustainable Resource Development, the Honourable Mel Knight, with the support of Cabinet's internal Resources and the Environment Policy Committee http://alberta.ca/home/250.cfm has listed Alberta's remnant grizzly bears as "Threatened" under Alberta's Wildlife Act.  Details and links are in his news release at http://alberta.ca/acn/201006/28501FF40EEF0-D53C-C48F-6FF952CC62DDEF7C.html

Click here to instantly write and send your thank-you letter to Minister Knight. Click here to donate to keep the momentum going on Action Grizzly Bear or other Sierra Club Canada campaigns. 

Alberta's official listing of the grizzly bears signals that the government has heard the outcry and knows it needs to act.  Although with almost no legal teeth in the Wildlife Act, listing now gives the public a visible tool to hold government politically accountable for action on grizzly bear recovery and to hold industry socially responsible for their own actions in grizzly bear habitat.

Grizzly bears in Alberta are on the eastern edge of Canada's declining northwestern population of grizzlies (Alberta, B.C., N.W.T, Yukon and Nunavut), and are at the rapidly, westward receding range of the grizzly bear.  Federal action is still pending on the 2002 COSEWIC recommendation for federal listing of the great bears as a Species of Special Concern under Canada's Species at Risk Act.  That Act has a limited (when compared to the USA Endangered Species Act), but more robust set of legal requirements for action on recovery than Alberta's Wildlife Act.

For more information on the listing decision:

• Minister's news release & links http://alberta.ca/acn/201006/28501FF40EEF0-D53C-C48F-6FF952CC62DDEF7C.html
• Who's on the Cabinet committee that was part of the decision http://alberta.ca/home/250.cfm