Grizzly Bear Recovery: A Search For Balance

a recovery plan was undertaken and efforts begun to identify critical habitat. It soon became painfully obvious that the term "critical habitat" was a Medusa's head that elicited severe reactions from a broad spectrum of public land users. Try as they might to explain that the designation of critical habitat did not retroactively curtail other uses of the public domain, managers could not stem the running tide of public perception. As Thomas McNamee notes in The Grizzly Bear, "the furor that followed the proposed delineation of critical habitat for the Yellowstone grizzly in 1976 provides an excellently depressing illustration of the gulf between legislative idealism and social reality. The law calls for public hearings on critical habitat, and these were humdingers." From the start, establishing a