In my first month as an intern with NRDC’s wildlife team in Montana, I had already heard many tales of the complex world of grizzly bear management, where it is safe to say that not everybody sees eye-to-eye with each other, and even fewer people see eye-to-eye with the bears. Adding fuel to the fire, a federal court had recently put grizzly bears back on the endangered species list, as my colleagues Louisa Willcox and Matt Skoglund have discussed.

So it was with quite a bit of curiosity, mixed with a touch of intimidation, that I hopped into a car with NRDC’s three other Montana staff and headed down to Jackson, Wyoming last week, for the latest round of meetings of the Yellowstone Grizzly Bear Coordinating Committee (YGCC). What I found in Jackson was, in some ways, better than I had expected. Everyone at the meeting was cordial despite the tense atmosphere, which I gather is an improvement over some past meetings. But in other ways, this meeting clearly showed me that the current system of grizzly bear management—whether bears are on the endangered species list or not—still leaves much to be desired.

The Yellowstone Grizzly Bear Coordinating Committee is a subcommittee of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, created in 1983 “to lead the effort to recover the grizzly bear in the lower 48 states.” In choosing the members of the committee, an admirable attempt was made to include a range of stakeholders, so the committee now includes representatives from the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, as well as county commissioners (a recent addition) and game and fish officials from the three states and two tribal reservations within the Greater Yellowstone region.

But on such a large committee, there is one glaring absence: the public has no direct representation. NGO’s and the broader public, including many people who have spent decades working on grizzly bears, are left out of the committee and literally relegated to the outer circle of the meeting room, where they are forced to squeeze their suggestions into a twenty-minute public comment period at the end of each day.

This is not for lack of ideas to contribute. With all the recent controversy surrounding the bears’ re-listing, the public was eager to join the discussion at last week’s meeting. I was thoroughly impressed by both the breadth and depth of the thoughts voiced by the public, ranging from the former head of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance listing the reasons why grizzly bears should stay on the endangered species list, to a Teton County attorney explaining how and why he wants to require all hunters to carry bear spray.

With so much experience and such a valuable (and often overlooked) perspective, the public has shown that it deserves to be included in the grizzly bear management process. The Information and Education subcommittee of the YGCC has already taken important steps in this direction, forming an Information and Education Working Group that includes both committee members and NGO representatives. Focusing on areas of common interest between government agencies and the NGO community, the group has been able to make concrete progress and foster collaboration where traditional interactions tended to breed mistrust and animosity. This example shows without a doubt that it is possible for groups with differing perspectives to work together toward common goals, even in the highly contentious atmosphere surrounding grizzly bear management.

Building on this success, I hope that the public may soon be allowed to have a larger voice—on a broader scale—in the world of men and bears. As members of the public, we strive to make bear management process more transparent, someday, and we continue to call for the eventual inclusion of public representatives on the IGBC. Yet even in the meantime, there is great potential for collaboration, and the agencies and the public must be willing to work together to tackle common challenges. As Homo sapiens who are lucky enough to share this beautiful country with grizzlies, we owe it to the bears.

NRDC’s Montana team, enjoying a sunny trip home from Jackson, WY