By Dean Maddox, Public Safety & Crime Reporter

Presumably in part because her South LA District is entirely urban and she doesn’t expect the bears to be located in her own backyard, Senator Laura Richardson has introduced legislation to set the groundwork in place to reintroduce grizzly bears to California.

California already has a thriving population of brown bears. In fact, one guy in Altadena found that out the hard way when a bear moved into his basement with wildlife officials refusing to take effective action to remove it. However, California has not had grizzly bears living in the wild for 100+ years. Senate Bill 1305 argues this is a huge loss both to the environment and to Native American culture, stating:

This deliberate extermination represents the most significant loss of a native species in the state’s history and continues to have lasting adverse impacts by eliminating key ecological functions, reducing ecosystem resilience, and impacting California Native American tribes’ abilities to sustain cultural relationships, uphold traditional practices, and maintain reciprocal stewardship of the land.

Connected to this effort is the Center for Biological Diversity, a green organization that also seeks to ban oil. The organization leads a campaign it calls “Bring Back the Bears” and notes that prior to the bears’ “persecution,” and yes they really use that word, there were 10,000 grizzly bears in the State of California.

Will there one day be thousands of grizzly bears roaming the state? If they move forward with this, they should put the bears in Senator Richardson’s district.