California once boasted so many grizzly bears that early settlers name-checked the animal when they founded their short-lived Bear Flag Republic. Historians estimate as many as 10,000 grizzlies roamed the state before the Gold Rush brought waves of newcomers who hunted, trapped and pushed the species toward oblivion. By the 1920s, the grizzly was gone from California entirely, leaving behind only its image on the state flag and the smaller black bear as the state’s sole remaining bruin.
Now, more than 100 years later and with California’s population having grown to roughly 34.5 million people, a coalition of tribes and environmental groups wants state lawmakers to at least study whether the grizzly could ever return.
Senate Bill 1305, introduced by state Sen. Laura Richardson, a Democrat from Inglewood, would direct the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to develop a roadmap examining whether reintroducing grizzlies to the state is realistic — and if so, under what circumstances. The bill doesn’t include funding to actually carry out that study, leaving the door open for a future Legislature or outside group to pay for it. Even under the best-case scenario, actually bringing grizzlies back to California would take years and require cooperation from a federal government that may not be inclined to help.
Still, the mere possibility has stirred up strong feelings on both sides, particularly along the state’s familiar urban-rural divide.
Groups representing ranchers, hunters and rural communities argue the idea is simply unworkable. California’s landscapes, they say, are already stressed by drought and wildfire, and rural residents are struggling to cope with rising conflicts involving mountain lions, expanding black bear populations and a growing number of wolves. Adding an 800-pound predator to that mix, they argue, would be reckless.
“I just don’t think that our California today is ready for a grizzly bear,” Assemblymember Heather Hadwick, a Republican, told the Assembly’s wildlife committee last month. Hadwick represents a vast, largely rural district in northeastern California that has already seen years of friction between residents and wolves preying on livestock.
On the other side, more than 40 tribes, environmental organizations and animal welfare groups back the legislation, framing it as both an ecological and cultural correction. The Yurok Tribe and the Tejon Tribe are cosponsoring the bill.
“I can see the ways in which my homeland has suffered from the loss of iconic species such as the grizzly, and that this loss lingers in our heart and in the attenuation of a millennia-old relationship,” Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok Tribe’s wildlife department, told lawmakers last month.
A 2025 feasibility study conducted by a coalition of tribes, environmental groups and university researchers identified several regions that could potentially support grizzlies, including Yurok ancestral lands along the North Coast, the nearby Klamath Mountains and Trinity Alps, the southern Sierra Nevada — encompassing Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks — and the Transverse Ranges stretching from San Bernardino County to Santa Barbara County.
The study estimated those areas combined could theoretically support anywhere from 424 to more than 1,700 grizzlies, though researchers suggested starting cautiously with an initial population of about 25 bears. Grizzly populations currently persist in Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington.
Supporters contend the bears would provide real ecological benefits. As grizzlies dig for food, they naturally till soil in ways that can help restore native forests, prairies and oak woodlands — potentially reducing wildfire risk in the process. Grizzlies also help keep prey populations in check and could indirectly ease human conflicts with black bears, since the larger grizzlies compete with — and sometimes prey on — their smaller relatives.
“The loss of grizzlies might have been one of those contributing factors to that (black bear population) overgrowth,” Williams-Claussen said.
So far, the bill has advanced along party lines, with only Republicans voting against it. It now awaits action in the Assembly Appropriations Committee when lawmakers reconvene Aug. 3. Richardson did not respond to a request for comment, and the bill’s coauthors are largely Democrats from urban Southern California districts.
One of those coauthors, state Sen. Henry Stern of Sherman Oaks, told a Senate committee this spring that a mountain lion recently attacked one of his neighbors — an experience, he said, that gives him some understanding of rural residents’ concerns. Even so, he argued that living alongside wildlife is simply part of what makes California special.
“We want to live in a California where — that risk — there’s some beauty in it,” Stern said. “To have that element in our lives, as opposed to just sterilizing our landscapes and our nature so that nothing else could ever be a risk … I think it makes us more human to have wildness in our lives.”
Not everyone convinced of the ecological case is on board, however. Elizabeth Washoe, a Native American from Modoc County, said she’s skeptical of urban lawmakers’ romanticized vision of grizzly reintroduction.
“There’s nothing I would love more than to see grizzly bears on the beach at Santa Barbara chasing rich people,” she said, only half-joking. But she argued reintroduction would ultimately be unfair to the bears themselves, given how dramatically California’s landscape and population have changed since grizzlies last roamed freely.
“The bears don’t have any say in it,” Washoe said. “Where they’re at, they’re living a pretty good life, and we’d take them and put them here in a landscape that is so dramatically changed from what it was the last time that the bears were truly living a good life here … I understand the idea of it, but to me it feels egotistical.”
Meanwhile, the state agency that would actually be tasked with conducting the feasibility study doesn’t seem eager to take it on. The Department of Fish and Wildlife has not taken an official position on the bill and, per department policy, does not comment on pending legislation, according to spokesperson Peter Tira. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office also declined to weigh in.
But there’s little sign the agency’s underlying stance has shifted since 2023, when a former department spokesperson told the Alta Journal that wildlife officials already struggle to manage existing predator conflicts, let alone plan for a new one.
“Bringing another predator into the state that we would have to manage and come up with some program to figure out what happens when the grizzly attacks a human or kills livestock does not seem feasible for us,” then-spokesperson Jordan Traverso said at the time.
The department’s resources are already stretched thin. A legislative analysis of this year’s bill found that Fish and Wildlife currently has the funding and staffing to complete only about 38% of its existing responsibilities, and warned the agency likely couldn’t absorb the additional workload the grizzly roadmap would require.
David Bess, who recently retired as the department’s top law enforcement official overseeing California’s game wardens, said the agency is already “drowning in work,” much of it tied to managing conflicts with predators that are already present across the state.
“I just don’t see where the department even has the capacity to do it,” Bess said.
Adding another layer of complexity, the Trump administration recently proposed shifting management authority over grizzly bears from the federal government back to individual states, even though the species remains protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. Environmental advocates worry that change could allow more conservative states to loosen protections and permit increased killing of grizzlies to satisfy ranching and hunting interests.
Andrea Zaccardi, carnivore conservation legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity — which supports California’s legislation — said the federal proposal wouldn’t directly affect California’s study, since any actual reintroduction effort would still fall under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s authority. But she said having grizzlies established in a state with strong environmental protections could prove valuable if other states move to aggressively reduce their populations.
“Hopefully, they would be managed more responsibly there,” Zaccardi said. Her organization has previously petitioned federal officials, unsuccessfully, to reintroduce grizzly bears to California.
Original source: CalMatters
