d were protected as a provincial park, with an additional 666, 000 hectares added through the Mackenzie LRMP this year (Pynn, 2000). The protected area of the Muskwa-Kechika prohibits mining activities that have threatened the area, as well as blocking a proposed mining access road from Fort Ware north to the Alaska highway. This protected wilderness area has been trumpeted by the provincial government as a major step in linking protected areas for grizzly bears from the Rockies to the coast, although part of that corridor of protected area is very narrow areas along the Stikine River. Other areas identified as having potential to serve as GBMAs are the Mitchell Lake/Niagara PA (which connects Bowron and Wells Gray parks), Sustut-Babine, and Koeye-Namu. With the additions to protected areas in B.C. now at 12% of the total land base, it is possible that government and industry could stop creating new protected areas, yet for grizzly bears, the productive low elevation rainforest that they favor on the coast has less than 6% protected (Thomas, 1998). A great deal of the new protected areas were classified as high alpine rock and ice, which offers very little use to grizzly bears, or many other species for that matter. Land use decisions such as the creation of the Khutzeymateen sanctuary must be continued if the grizzly bear is not to be reduced to small, isolated populations which will be even more sensitive to encroachment and the so called ‘edge effect’ (Jeo, Sanjayan, and Sizemore,1999). Unfortunately, it appears that the 1995 Conservation Strategy could quite possibly do just that. An independent report in 1998 by three American scientists concluded that the strategy was likely to “...reduce grizzly populations into islands of habitat or refugia from which large, wide-ranging carnivores like the grizzly are the first to disappear” (Hume, 2000). The government policy of establishing GBMAs will likely accomplish...
