Hunting for Grizzlies (Excerpt #1)

This is the first of many short excerpts from The Grizzly Manifesto I will be posting until the official book launch on May 25.

Near Yellowstone National Park, 2001: I wake up in the cold and the dark of my Cooke City motel room, the air redolent of two-stroke oil and gasoline. Cooke City, on the eastern edge of Yellowstone National Park, is more village than city. Every winter it is overrun by thrill-seeking snowmobilers, some of whom had obviously used my room as a repair shop. I stumble around for the light switch and immediately put on a pot of coffee before hunting the oil-stained carpet for my clothes. It’s 5:23. I have seven minutes to get ready. We’re on the hunt for grizzlies.

Louisa Willcox had invited me to attend her annual media tour to learn about the plight of Yellowstone’s grizzlies, a population of 600 or so bears that has been listed as endangered since 1975. Now that the population has more than tripled in size, the US government wants to remove the protections afforded it by the US Endangered Species Act. Willcox believes, with the conviction of an evangelical preacher, that this move is a mistake.

As a lowly reporter at a weekly newspaper in Canmore, Alberta, I often covered the lives and deaths of grizzly bears in and around Banff National Park. Willcox, on the other hand, is the grande dame of grizzly bear conservation in North America. Thin and wiry-strong, the former monkey-wrencher and National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) guide has more energy than a wolverine. She has worked to protect Yellowstone’s grizzly bears for more than 25 years. When Willcox found out I often wrote about bears and the politics that decide their fates, she thought I should come down to witness what was happening in Yellowstone.

To my great dismay, I had learned the night before at the “meet and greet” that the best time to locate Yellowstone’s more mythical beasts is during the auroral hinge that joins night and day. Despite my vampire-like aversion to early morning wake-up calls, I manage to find my way into the parking lot before the last vehicle has left. I stumble into a red minivan driven by a genial documentary filmmaker from Bozeman, Montana. As we pull onto US 212 in the tepid daylight, I take a long pull on the coffee steaming from my travel mug. Ten minutes later, we are in the park. As we approach our destination – a roadside pullout near the carcass of a bison killed by wolves the day before – a coyote dashes across the road and a golden eagle glides insouciantly over the car. It feels like we are on an African safari.

The next excerpt – "Arrival of the Great Bear" – will appear
on Monday, May 10.

To order The Grizzly Manifesto in one, easy-to-hold-in-your-hands package, visit Rocky Mountain Books. Or you can wait until May 20, when it will be in your local bookstore. Thanks for your interest.

The Grizzly Bear Manifesto Word Cloud

The Grizzly Manifesto

Well, it's finally happening.

In May 2010, my first book, The Grizzly Manifesto, will be published by Rocky Mountain Books. It is not the first book about bears I started, but it is the first one to see its way into print, and given the importance of the subject matter – namely, grizzly bear conservation in western North America – I’ll be embarking on a book and media tour shortly after its release.

This book is unique, I think, because it blends all that’s special and important about grizzly bears with my personal experiences as a journalist and conservationist. I've spent much of the last ten years learning about the people and political processes that are supposed to preserve grizzly bears and the habitat on which they depend. Sadly, the system seems terribly broken and ineffective, especially in Canada. As it's name suggests, it also provides a blueprint of sorts that will prevent the grizzly’s decline and possible disappearance if we don't change our ways.

The grizzly bear, once the archetype for all that is wild, is quickly becoming a symbol of nature’s fierce but flagging resilience in the face of humanity’s growing appetite for natural resources — and of the difficulty our wealth-addicted society has in changing its ways.

North America’s grizzlies survived the arrival of spear-wielding humans 13,000 years ago, outlived the short-faced bear, the dire wolf and the sabre-tooth cat—not to mention mastodons, mammoths and giant ground sloths the size of elephants—but a growing wave of urbanization and industrialization continues to push the Great Bear further north and west, just as it has since Europeans arrived in its home 400 years ago.

Despite their relatively successful recovery in Yellowstone National Park, the bears’ decline in Canada continues largely unchecked. The front line in this centuries-old battle for survival has shifted to western Alberta and southern BC, where outdated mythologies, rapacious industry and disingenuous governments continue to push the Great Bear into the mountains and toward a future that may not have room for them at all.

I’m hoping to partner with conservation organizations, independent bookstores, and/or universities/colleges in major towns and cities in both the U.S. and Canada. Potential stops include Jackson Hole, Bozeman, Missoula, Lethbridge, Calgary, Edmonton, Jasper, Canmore, Banff, Vancouver, Victoria, and even Seattle. If (you or someone you know) might be interested in helping organize an event in your area in May/June/July, please contact me for more information.