This is a really good article about bears. Although it hasn't got anything to do with His Dark Materials, I'll use the excuse that it mentions Philip Pullman's Panserbjornar (correct plural of panserbjorne?) to post it here...
This is going to be a story with a horrible ending and, unless you're a Canadian, you won't be able to guess it. It contains no war, no religion, and no lies that I know of. It seems to be about grizzly bears.
The Kamchatka peninsula, which hangs off Siberia like a frostbitten toe, contains the last really large wilderness where grizzly bears can roam. This isn't the result of deliberate conservation: like most of the rest of Siberia, Kamchatka's economy went gangrenous with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was in any case a part of the world to which people came by deportation or conscription rather than emigration. So for lovers of the wilderness, it has one of the most promising and romantic names in the world; and in 1997, a couple of Canadian biologists, Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, set up a research station, to study how bears and people might live together. They raised three orphan grizzly cubs, and turned them out into the wilderness.
The experiment seems to have been a huge success. By cautious, well-informed and thoughtful behaviour, the couple managed to gain the trust of wild grizzlies: not just the ones they had reared, but twenty or more from the surrounding region. They set up a ranger programme to protect to the bears from poachers - for grizzly bear gall bladder is regarded as powerful medicine in the Far East. They filmed and photographed the bears, and even made a television documentary about them, shown on American public service television. There are some astonishing photographs on the web site: if ever Philip Pullman's Panserbjornar walked this earth, it is in Kamchatka, where we see them lolling in the berry fields in summer.
This spring, the couple returned for their eighth summer in Siberia. One of the bears they had first adopted was pregnant. The year's plan was set out on their web site: "Demonstrate and prove that Biscuit's relationship with us will not change with the arrival of her first cubs.
"...Continue to monitor and supervise the poaching control programme ... Assist the Kronotsky State Biosphere Preserve in strategising to create Kurilskoy Lake as a world class bear/salmon eco-tourist centre. ... Work on an agreement that our study area of Kambalnoye Lake will become isolated from people once we are finished with our study, to give our study animals protection from people who might not understand how to respond to them."
Their cabin had been swept and cleaned. There were helicopter marks on the ground outside. Nailed to the wall was a unexpected and hideous token; the gall bladder of a baby grizzly bear. As the snow around them slowly thawed, no adults emerged to greet them, as they had done every summer before. They came to realise, slowly, that every single bear had been shot in their absence.
What makes this almost unbearable is that it wasn't a case of simple poaching. On the contrary, it was a testament to the success of the ranger programme they had set up to keep poaching under control. This, it seems, had grown so effective that it had disrupted some local mafioso's salmon-poaching operation. The bears were killed not for their own value, but to frighten the two Canadians off.
"I can only say that it is not simply a case of poaching. Ironically, the reason our bears are dead is because our ranger program became a threat to someone who knew if he killed our bears we would probably go home," Russell wrote on his web site. And so they have indeed gone home, and won't be returning to Kamchatka.
In the end, this isn't a story about grizzlies. It's a story about human beings, and what horrible animals we are. (One aspect of this horribleness is that I'm prepared to bet this story shocked you much more than a bomb explosion killing fifty humans in Bombay). We need wilderness, and we need there to be wild creatures. But there really is nowhere, however remote, where any animal much larger than a rat now lives except on human sufferance, and nowhere that wild animals can continue to live without serving deliberate human purposes. This isn't entirely terrible news: I'm sure that the mafia would be happy to run a genuine wild bear sanctuary in Kamchatka if it were more profitable than killing them.
But the illusion that the wilderness is bigger than we are, though it was still true for Wilfred Thesiger, turns out for the rest of us to be like all other religious illusions: necessary, perhaps, but not to be relied upon. This is such a miserable thought that it puts all others into perspective.
Charlie Russell and Maureen Enn's site.
[The Guardian, 28/8/03]
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