Why should we save grizzly bears?

A woman called a friend of mine the other day. She wanted to know why we should spend any time worrying about grizzly bears when they didn't really seem to make our lives any better. Sure they were magnificent and all that, she said, but they didn't seem to be earning anyone any money. A conservationist working on carnivore issues in Alberta, my friend was aghast. But it is a question worth pondering.

On the surface of things, where most people seem to spend most of their time, she is right, especially when you consider only direct, short-term benefits. Grizzly bears are so few and far between in Alberta, and the habitat to which they have been relegated so thick with trees that you'd go bankrupt in a month if you tried to make a living from a bear-viewing operation.

One could argue that people do choose to visit beautiful natural places like Banff simply because they still boast grizzlies, which there is a chance, however small, of glimpsing from the comfort and safety of your car, a Starbuck's skim milk latte tucked safely between your thighs. However, Yosemite National Park and other tourist hotspots demonstrate that people, especially tourists, are extremely adaptable; beautiful scenery and luxury accommodations seem to compensate rather nicely for the absence of even the most charismatic of critters.

The reality is that grizzly bears in Alberta will never be able to compete with oil & gas development, forestry, or resort tourism as an economic driver. We have to look elsewhere for a rationale for allowing grizzly bears to persist in the face of so many other "social and economic values" (as the Alberta government refers to unrestricted resource development and off-highway recreation) that can be mutually exclusive to the persistence of the Great Bear.

There are three reasons for restraining our activities to share the land with grizzlies. The first is a moral one. It is unconscionable, I think, in this day and age to knowingly allow any species, let alone one as majestic and as symbolic as the grizzly bear, to disappear from the landscapes in which we live and work. As fellow creatures, they deserve to survive, if not each and every one of them, then certainly as a species everywhere they now exist. It is one thing for a starving sailor to eat the last great auk during a pre-combustion-engine sea voyage, or for an aristocratic sycophant to shoot the last passenger pigeon on the continent. Those were different days; they knew little and cared less. But this is the twenty-first century. Millions of people love grizzlies, and we have studied them, almost to death, for two decades. We know what wiped them out and what it takes to keep them on the landscape, even how to recover flagging populations. We've seen it work in the Yellowstone area of the United States. In this affluent, post-industrial world of ours there is no excuse, save greed, to decide otherwise.

The second reason has to do with the kind of world we want to leave for our children and grandchildren. Do we really believe we need to pump every drop of oil, cut every stick of timber as fast as our technology allows us? Should we not consider, for more than a moment, what kind of a world we're going to leave behind? I'm reminded of Dr. Seuss's The Lorax every time I see a press release or hear a spokesperson from the Alberta government. Given current trends, the corridor between Edmonton and Calgary will look like Los Angeles in 50 years, and the entire province will be criss-crossed with roads, riddled with dry wells, and scarred with clearcuts. Climate change will have turned southern Alberta into a (semi) desert and all the ranchers will have sold out to land developers. And there will be no grizzly bears, certainly not south of the Trans-Canada Highway. Do we really want to choose to leave that kind of world for our children?

The third, and perhaps most important reason just might have to do with the health and survival of our own species. Extirpating grizzly bears from Alberta will not in and of itself compromise our ability, as a species, to survive, but it likely will be accompanied by a dramatic decline in the quantity and quality of things like clean water, fresh air, and soul-inspiring wilderness. A canary in a coal mine if there every was one.

You see, this is a test. Albertans and Canadians are being challenged to constrain our activities and behaviours to within limits imposed on us by nature, in this case by grizzly bears. It will require constraint: grizzly bears can co-exist with a strong, vibrant economy, but they cannot compete with unrestricted industrial development. It is not either/or; it is about balance.

To date, we have not proven up to the task. The Alberta Tories, which Albertans vote into power every chance they get, have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt they are not interested in doing what it takes to keep grizzly bears on the landscape. Their decisions over the last 15 years make it clear that the sooner they can be rid of the bears, the better.

But here's the rub: if we refuse to constrain our activities to within the limits of nature, nature will come back to bite us in the ass. If we continue to fail these tests -- grizzly bears, climate change, population, consumption -- nature will unleash its unfeeling power and burn, perhaps extinguish Homo sapiens sapiens, just as it did the dinosaurs. (This would be a bad thing, unless of course you believe, like some U.S. senators and congressmen do, in The Rapture.)

No, we will learn this lesson. Sooner or later, we will realize that our obsessive and compulsive appetites will kill us as surely as they did John Belushi and Jim Morrison and Jimmy Hendrix. Why not kick the addiction now?