Bears, Moose, People Part I - The Narratives

Several bear attacks with graphic front page coverage in the Anchorage Daily News this summer have raised the volume in Anchorage's ongoing discussions about the risks of wildlife in town against the advantages of living in a town with moose and sometimes bears.

A lot of the coverage is breathless reporting of the details of specific attacks and pictures of the victims in their hospital rooms along with interviews with people who like living with wildlife and people who want the bears shot

The way people react to such situations is often related to the narratives they have in their heads. We latch onto any incident that seems to support what we believe and we tend to reject evidence that contradicts the stories we've grown to believe. Environmentalists think that Al Gore's movie proves everything they've been believing while many in the Bush administration see it as flawed propaganda.

Without taking people's stories, their narratives into account, we really can't

• understand how and why people respond the way they do, which allows us to
• begin an authentic discussion that can lead to community action that satisfies most people

So, in this post I'm going to run through some of the narratives that seem to underlie the discussions I've been hearing this summer about bears in Anchorage. (Moose are also an issue, but not like bears. Mostly I'm going to ignore the moose issues here.)

I would also note that people can hold more than one of the narratives at the same time. Some people integrate them into one single story, others compartmentalize them and see the world as one story when it fits and the other story when that one fits and never see a contradiction.


The Possible Stories:

Story 1: Bears are dangerous animals and have no place near urban settings where they can endanger people.

This sounds clear, but where do we draw the line?

• By people at risk:
  Wildlife in Anchorage is not worth risking any people's lives, therefore:
• All dangerous wildlife should be removed from the Anchorage Bowl to protect human life.
• However, wildlife should not be removed to protect adults who stupidly provoke (put in your own definition of this) wildlife.
• Wildlife in Anchorage is not worth risking a child's life, therefore any bear in a neighborhood where children live, should be immediately removed.

• By geography. All bears:
• in Anchorage residential or recreational areas should be removed.
• within 10miles of an Anchorage home should be removed.
• within 2 miles of an Anchorage home should be removed
• in any residential areas should be removed
• in areas zoned for lots of less than one acre should be removed.
• that come within five feet of a home should be removed

• By bear behavior - All bears that:
• show no fear of people should be removed
• have been seen eating garbage should be removed
• threaten people should be removed

Holders of this story include people who did not come here by choice and have tried to recreate the ideal life of where they came from. Bears aren't part of that dream. It includes some hunters. It includes people who strongly believe in order and controlling nature. It also includes people who have grown up in Anchorage and have seen the bear population increase dramatically in recent years and are genuinely concerned about the safety of their family. The ADN earlier wrote about

Hillside resident Scott Gorder has seen so many bears in his yard in recent years that he's nervous about leaving his house come summer.

Since he bought his home in 1990 he's seen the number of bears increase, he said.

"I grew up in town," Gorder said, "but as kids we camped everywhere (on the city's edge). I never saw a bear."

In his youth, he and friends camped and fished along Campbell Creek east of Lake Otis. They never worried about bears being attracted to their fish. They left their camp full of food. In short, they did just about everything one wants to avoid in bear country because of the danger of attracting the animals, Gorder admitted.

If I had kids and lived on the Hillside and bears were pawing my back door regularly, I suspect I'd be thinking more along these lines.




Story 2: Wildlife is a special feature of Anchorage and we can all coexist. Of 73* US cities with populations over 250,000 Anchorage is the only one that has a significant bear and moose population. (Though some have coyotes or pumas or poisonous snakes.) The Municipality has promoted the city in the past with a dancing moose called Seymour and the slogan "Wild About Anchorage." The current Anchorage slogan is "Big Wild Life" and the website that promotes Anchorage has bears representing the 'wild' part of the slogan. Living with wildlife is part of the attraction of Anchorage for many residents. People who don't want moose or bears in their yard have 72  other US cities where they can live. People who want this sort of environment have just one choice: Anchorage. That choice should not be removed. Options:

People who do not want the risk of encounters with bears should:

• Move out of Alaska and let the rest of us enjoy this environment
• Move into a part of town that has a negligent risk of bear encounters

A very vocal section of the Anchorage population has always supported the idea of wildlife, particularly moose, being part of our urban environment. This is not a new issue. Wolfsong's website has a series of letters to the editors from three years ago which show a lot of support for then censured wildlife biologist Rick Sinnot who publicly made some candid remarks about people who attracted bears to a neighborhood with dumped fish waste. I'm not sure if these are all the letters from that day or they picked the ones that fit their stand on the issue.

* I took the number from a Lexington website. Various sources give different ways to talk about how many other cities there are. Tucson's website mentions 141 metropolitan areas in the US and Canada with more than 250,000 people. Demographia identifies 96 principal metropolitan areas (in the US) with populations over 500,000.


Story 3: People's perception of risk is skewed. Bears are a minor risk compared to other causes.

Top five causes of death in Anchorage in 2006 were:

• Malignant Neoplasms (Neoplasm =tumor; any new and abnormal growth, specifically one in which cell multiplication is uncontrolled and progressive. Neoplasms may be benign or malignant.)
• Heart Disease
• Unintentional Injuries
• Cerebrovascular Disease (Disease of the blood vessels and, especially, the arteries that supply the brain.)
• Diabetes

The state chart above doesn't identify the unintentional causes. We know that only two people have ever been killed in Anchorage by bears - Marcie Trent and her adult son while jogging a wooded path past a bear kill at McHugh Creek, technically in the city limits, but pretty much out of town - in 1995. (The stories I found said hiking, but they were early news stories. I remember the day well because we were headed right there to hike, but got headed off by someone who called to say it was closed.) So bears are not in the top five, top ten, or even a cause of death in Anchorage for any year except 1995.

[Note, I had to take this story from the New York Times because Google gave me an Anchorage Daily News story that begins " A bear attack Saturday..." but is dated April 17, 2007. The NYT article is dated July 4, 1995. This raises a giant question about the integrity of digital newspaper files that can be changed - intentionally or unintentionally - after the fact. This one is obviously in error - it even has the "last modified" time as earlier than the published time. I'm posting a screen shot at the bottom of the post as documentation in case they change it. An Alaskan Abroad has recently criticized the ADN for changing digitial stories without acknowledging the change. But also reported that they did later follow up with a correction.]

1990-1994 stats from the Municipality of Anchorage (I know you guys are short handed, but those stats are 14 years old and older) lists the ten top causes of death and breaks out motor vehicle accidents from other unintentional causes.

This narrative would go on to suggest that death by bear is a low risk and that if people want to prevent human deaths, they should work on preventing obesity (diabetes was the 5th highest cause of death in 2006 in Anchorage) and various traffic violations that lead to death. Some radical bicyclists who believe this story might advocate banning all cars like the radical safety people might advocate killing all bears. The 1990-94 stats also suggest that we work on suicide (number 7 back then) prevention and crime prevention (homicide was number 8).

Perception of risk is not necessarily related to actual risk. Certainly the ADN front page, big pictures coverage of bear maulings is far more graphic and attention grabbing than its coverage of traffic deaths. And how many of the cancer or heart disease or diabetes deaths get front page coverage with pictures? Every non-lethal bear mauling does.

There are certainly other stories/narratives people carry in their heads about bears in the city.

• The Timothy Treadwell story was about how humans and bears can live together in complete harmony. One of his bear friends ate him, but only in the 13th summer that he lived with bears in the wild.
• As humans moved from the pre-modern to the modern world, they moved from being part of nature to being conquerors of nature. But today we are finding out that many of those conquests - dams, DDT, automobiles, for example - were short term fixes with long term negative side effects. People holding this story would argue that we need to get back into balance with nature, to understand nature. If we do this, we can probably live fairly safely with a limited bear population.
• No one and no thing should restrict my freedom to do as I please. I'm going where I want to go, when I want. I've got a gun and if I run into a threatening bear, I'll shoot it.

People sometimes take anger or frustration about something in their life that they can't overcome and redirect it toward something they feel safer attacking. I'm sure you all know couples who are in bad marriages but take out their anger on some 'legitimate' cause rather than confront each other. I'm sure there are spouses who rant and rave against bears because they really resent having been dragged up to Alaska by a spouse.

So those are some of the narratives. Did I get yours? Part of yours? If not add it on in the comments. Even if the narratives aren't completely accurate, just talking them out helps people become aware of stories in their heads that they've acquired along the way without seriously examining. It also helps people understand that sane, reasonable people can hold contradictory stories.

In the next post on this topic, I'll try to identify the various components of this issue that can be manipulated (in the positive sense) to effect changes.



* Here's the ADN story with the incorrect dates I mentioned above. All photos can be double clicked to enlarge.