The Stray Bullet is the place to stop in Ovando, Montana. Walking out of that café just a few days ago, midday through a long drive with Jamie Jonkel -- a Montana Fish, Wildlife, & Parks bear management specialist, I was struck by the vitality of the community I was standing in.
Ovando sits in the Blackfoot Valley. The Blackfoot is tucked up just below the Bob Marshall and Scapegoat Wilderness Areas, north of the Garnet Mountains. The valley has a strong agricultural base. There is some small-scale forestry, but ranching is still the most significant land-use. Most of the ranches are family owned cow/calf operations, and the cultural values of the valley’s residents are strongly informed by this way of life. The Blackfoot is unique country, and over the past decade it has been a venue for remarkably fruitful efforts to engage at a community level with the challenges of coexistence with grizzly bears.
Needless to say, grizzlies can pose a challenge for ranchers. Any time that bears come into close proximity with people or livestock, there is the potential for a conflict to develop. The presence of calving areas, beehives, livestock carcass-disposal ‘boneyards’, grain and feed storage facilities, or human garbage can all turn a piece of ground into a hotspot. Dealing with these issues not only helps conserve bears by preventing conflicts, it also protects human safety and reduces the impact of bears on rural ranching livelihoods. But changing practices can carry overt and implicit costs. New practices often require an upfront cash or time investment. They may also challenge traditional norms. As such, bear conflict prevention is often much more nuanced and complicated than it might seem at first glance.
The arena of grizzly bear conservation and management is fraught with conflict. These animals are highly symbolic. Their management is often very personalized and contentious. Battle lines are drawn and salvos -- frequently couched in the rhetoric of scientific argument -- are volleyed back and forth. Researchers, managers, and advocates alike are often subjected to intense pressure and personal criticism. Which has all too often fostered patterns of personal interaction that are contentious and destructive; patterns that cumulatively result in the erection of barriers to dialogue and engagement, rather than amelioration and coexistence.
The irony of the ongoing debate over how best to manage the grizz, arranged as it is around the invocation of "the science" is that science can have remarkably little to do with some of the most vital issues of grizzly management -- which come down to how we, as individuals and communities, define our desires and needs in relation to the landscape around us. Which can be a very subjective thing.
Wildlife management is a technical challenge, but it is also a human challenge. It is as much a matter of people interacting with each other about bears as it is about people interacting with bears.
Riding shotgun for Jamie, listening to him describe the challenges of his work, made that unequivocally clear. The ability of bear managers to reduce patterns of conflict is intimately tied to their ability to cultivate relationships of trust and open dialogue within the communities that they operate. Without those relationships, they simply fall into the role of enforcers, with predictably negative results.
"Coexistence" is a catchphrase that gets heavy use. As often as not it is invoked rather narrowly -- referring to sharing a particular space on the landscape with a particular animal. I think that the substantive issues of grizz conservation really center on how we, as individuals and communities, view ourselves in relation to the land and each other. Coexistence amongst people with differing views on how and why things should be done. Managing grizzlies effectively on the ground is as much about effectively mediating those interpersonal relationships as it is about the technical issues of keeping humans and bears from tangling with each other.
Because at the end of the day what most of us want, I think, is to live in communities that respect our individual values -- communities of like minded concern where we can respect and be respected by our neighbors. And that includes respect for our view of the land and animals like the grizzly. Solutions that subvert the values of some significant proportion of a community will never be sustainable in the longest term.
Which is why the Blackfoot is such a powerful example.
The Blackfoot Challenge is a landowner-based community group that has found success exactly because of the community level at which it operates. The Challenge was organized to conserve the natural and cultural resources of the valley. As an organization, it concerns itself first and foremost with the issue of community dialogue and engagement. With the idea of keeping working landscapes intact and coordinating land and wildlife stewardship so as to conserve a landscape and a way of life that is important to as many of the residents in the valley as possible. It is ultimately about sustaining a community which values its character and history. Within that context, sitting down to talk about how best to resolve this issue of conflicts with bears is relatively straightforward. Because those coming to the table explicitly care about finding common interest solutions that do right by their neighbors, their community, and the land they call home.
So community matters. Without a certain level of trust in a community, without relationships and venues that allow for meaningful engagement and compromise, it is very hard to cultivate sustainable conservation practices. Ultimately, the rubber meets the road in these individual communities. If they cannot become genuinely, positively engaged, then there is little hope of long-term coexistence with predator species like grizzlies. On balance this can be a powerfully positive and self sustaining dynamic. As Jamie described to me, there is often a sort of critical mass that is reached -- where the activities and expectations of individuals can have a real effect on shaping the practices of their neighbors.
Finding this kind of traction in a community does not diminish other challenges. Among other things, conflict prevention programs almost always require cash investments of one kind or another. The enduring engagement of specific individuals also seems like it can be remarkably important. But it is clear that broader community dynamics are highly significant.
Endeavors like the Blackfoot Challenge are valuable examples of how broad-scale community engagement can yield meaningful and tangible results. There has been a 96 percent reduction in reported and verified human-grizzly bear conflicts and a downward trend in known grizzly bear mortalities in the Challenge’s project area since its inception. Hard to argue with those numbers.
But one of the most enduring positive legacies of the Blackfoot Challenge may simply be the contribution it has made to reinforcing the integrity of the human community there in the valley. A valuable investment no matter what issues -- wildlife or otherwise -- confront the people there in the future.
Photo credit: Bitterroot
