A long time ago.

Coyote.

He told Grizzly Bear that the human beings were coming and that we were going to share his home with them.

Grizzly bear was angry.

He came across a young boy who was lost.

Grizzly bear was amaze and intrigued by the young boy.

So he took them and he showed them how to live on the land.

He showed them the roots, the berries, the plants.

He showed them how to mark the trail to buffalo country for the Nez Perce.

So he showed us a lot of how to live when we first began to populate our homeland.

For those reasons, we really have a strong affinit to the grizzly bear and wished that he would come home to us.

It's unfortunate that Grizzly Bear has to prove his worth on the land.

I hope that the people can understand that they can take action.

They can let their voices be known, to step forward and say tha they want grizzlies and wolves on the landscape, to help care for the land, to help give something for the generations to come.

The fate of the grizzly bear is in our hands.

If the grizzly is to survive, we need to learn to live together.

This challenge has been accepted by those of us who believe that there is ever more to be learned from the wild.

Friends Doug Peacock and Michael Housman understand this may be our last best chance.

I was there living alone back in the woods of Yellowstone, long enough to realize that the bears themselves were having trouble.

They were the lowes their population had ever been.

And that's when somebody gave me an old 16 millimeter movie camera, and I said I was going to assemble kind of an ethnographic film of the surviving grizzlies.

What attracted you to grizzly bears?

Having been a combat veteran?

Well, first of all the Tet Offensive burned me up.

I saw hundred and hundreds of dead children.

So when I got back here, I was no good around people.

I couldn't even go see my parents, I did.

The only place I wanted to be was where I've always been comfortable.

And that's the wilderness.

I kept a little map in Vietnam and just a little road map of the Northern Rockies, and I look at it every night and look at the blank spots on the map, said, you know, if I ever get out here, I'm going to go there.

And that's what I did.

And I came down with a malaria attack and ended up in, Yellowstone i the middle of a hallucinatory, what they call a paroxysm o malaria with a high temperature.

I thought I was imagining grizzly bears.

Turned out there a real.

And there it was.

And I never got over it.

Never got over it.

You know they allowed me to externalize my own darker thought and experiences and, you know, connect, connect in a real wa with the wood, with the world.

Again.

Part of keeping the wilderness, as you kno it is to protect the grizzlies.

And that's what we got to do.

Now we have a friendship about Buffalo.

We sure do.

I have this house in Montana for 40 years.

I decided to return to Buffalo, who were here way before.

We were way before.

And then you on your side decided to return the Grizzlies.

In contrast to a lot of my neighbors who don't understand the role of the grizzly in American history, would track one dow and probably try and shoot it.

And they have.

I'm perfectly happy having them live in coexistence.

And if on occasion something wou I could understan this is not a rational hatred.

I think that the modern humans fear what they don't know.

And increasingly, we know nothing in the lives of wild, rare animals like wolves and jaguars and bison.

And the more you know about a creature, the less you fear it.

Because what we fear, we really do hate.

You told me that the grizzlies, they move, they have to find a new place to go.

So we have to let that happen until we reconnect that isolated ecosystem with grizzly bears up here.

You know they don't hav a chance of long time survival.

They will go extinct.

We are at a time where every question needs to be opened and turned inside out.

We don't know what our future will be.

We know what our past is.

We know that bears have walked alongside humans from the beginning.

So why would we risk that?

Why not on precaution rather than arrogance?

And the de-listing the grizzly feels like an act of arrogance.

The intent of the law is to preserve our precious wilderness forever, protected by the presence of grizzlies, wolves and buffalo.

Removing the grizzlies from the endangered species list means trophy hunting.

In other words, we have saved them in order to kill them.

Doctor thank you for appearing today.

Grizzly bear you testified to once roamed in huge numbers across the western United States.

Certainly in my home state of Colorado.

But due to hunting and habitat destruction, they've been completely wiped out in all of the lower 48 states.

There are only roughly 1500 grizzly bears left in your expert scientifi opinion, are those numbers high enough to remove protections for the grizzly bear?

My opinion would be that by the science, is that grizzly bears exist in less than 3% of their original numbers.

And if grizzlies are to survive as a species genetically, there has to be connectedness between the populations of bears.

Thank you, doctor.

And I would certainly, agree with you.

In my understanding, the British Columbia, just by way of example has a 20 times as many grizzlies as the state of Wyoming.

And British Columbia.

Just last year, I believe, decided to end the practice of trophy hunting.

If you can believe that within two days of seeing the first grizzly bear, I was mauled almost to death for some reason.

Decided I'd continue on with bears eternal explorer there.

I believe I invented it but I was trying to get the idea that there' that leave a population of bears and sometimes go long distances are exploring for new territory for themselves.

So I think what we're seeing with the explorer, there is an attempt to find new habitat, partl because they're food stressed.

They're not successful at finding food.

They haven't even got a territory where they can learn all possible routes to get the seasonal foods.

They're the ones that get into cat foo and bird feeders and horse chow and all these sorts of things are garbage that people leave, though.

So the message is there for people in wild country, especially in places like Montana.

We have to secure our garbage and any foods.

You've got to adjust your behavior to fit the local environment.

We have to come u with some management initiatives that look after those explorer there, because they're very important genetically and for other reasons, because they're they're ones that are going to connect our our desperate populations that we have now and fail in the wilderness in other areas.

I mean, that's the most positive thing you can do.

Protected habitat and having a decent, humane attitude toward our wilderness symbol, the grizzly bear.

What about the adventurous bears who wander out?

How do you make an asset out o the bear that leaves the park?

Go someplace else.

Why should that bear be acutely endangered from being put to death by various forces outside of the park?

Without grizzly bears, the entire region becomes a different place.

It would be a sign that the Northern Rockies was not the wild place it used to be.

If you could face the idea of killing grizzlies or removing grizzlies, I think that would have a sort of a cascade for every other wild thing.

It would say something about the place itself to lose any of these iconic animals.

It's not a world that I'd really want to live in very much if we were missing sandhill cranes or we're missing goshawks, all these kinds of things that seem to stand for the place because they've co-evolved for such a long time.

The idea that we have the capacity to sort of terminate their presence would say something about us as a sort of suicidal people.

Millie gamble to bring her cubs through the bright new world towards a house on the edge of the woods.

There she found a garden of ursine delights with elk hides hung out to dry, and overstuffed garbage cans.

Milli turned to the work of feeding, eating all that she could.

Engrossed, she did not notic the house's screen door opening.

She did not see the long barrel of a 12 gauge shotgun in the dim light.

Millie ended up in the field, and she ended up having to be put down because of getting into conflict with people and being shot in the face with a shotgun.

It's so easy to look a population numbers or look at, you know, this, this idea of range expansion, right?

Bears returning to places where they've been absent for a while.

Every bea that shows up on a trail camera, every bear that you see at the edge of the forest, you know, as as the nights coming up, that bear has essentially performed a series of heroic feats to stay alive until the momen when you see it or encounter it.

And that, for me, is what Millie story really makes clear.

She knew where every single crop, wild or domestic, was ripening, and she moved through the Mission Valley with a stealth and a grace that is truly all inspiring.

And she avoided so many o the temptations that were there, you know, chickens that were left out, garbage that's unsecured, all that stuff.

And yet she came to a bad end because she finally ran afoul of somebod who had no patience for bears.

But where we are today, we'r standing on Thunder Road farm.

We raised cattle and raspberries.

We're doing agriculture at a smaller medium scale, but we're doing it next to a truly wild place.

We do several things that could cause problems with bears.

We keep chickens for our own eggs, and we grow fruit.

We protect all of those things with electric fence, and we maintain that electric fence, and we make sure that it's really hot.

And it's designed to the best practices as we understand them for deterring bears.

We also secure our garbage.

You know, we use a bear resistant bean, and we're just generally watchful in terms of how an where we're grazing our animals.

And so far that's worked really well for us.

But I think overal we have a chance to do something truly amazing here in terms of remembering.

Right?

Not discovering, but remembering and and relearning how to share this landscape.

Protecting the grizzly is goin to take more effort than ever.

Solution to save wildlife and wild places are advancing right under our noses.

Working dogs for conservation is an international group with grass roots ties.

They are training rescue dog to get the science that we need in the field.

As grizzlies navigate the wild land and urban interface.

This organization was founded because they wanted to develop techniques that would make it easier to determine populations.

In a lesson invasive way, so we don't have to actually touch the animal to get the results that we're looking for.

We're doing two things.

We're trying to find scat along critical crossings so that we can determin how many bears are crossing in the specific areas to reduce highway collision.

The other project we're working on is determining population sizes in Missoula.

So more urban.

And one of the biggest issues with bears being killed is human conflicts.

I'm very excited about working dogs for conservation and the ability for the dogs to detect bear scouts.

If we could go into, let's say an important wildlife linkage zone, and we're needing to acquire data on the number of bears crossing between point A to point B, I could walk that whole stretch and maybe find 2 or 3 scats.

The dogs could find ten times that amount.

It might surprise us.

It might be some stretch we don't think is even a good linkage zone.

But if the bears are using it then that's what we should serve as that site.

If we don't have grizzly bears in Montana in 40 years, and we haven't figured out a way to connect all of the little Island Forest Service mountain range areas, it's going to be a sad day to me.

You know, we don't want to see these species blink out in the lower 48 like grizzly bears, fishers, wolverines.

It means we aren't doing our job caretaking for the land.

We've got this beautiful network of national forests, BLM lands, federally.

Lands.

If we can just connect them up between some of these island populations, we can have a solid ecosystem of native animals in in Montana and Wyoming and Idaho.

The change I've been seeing the last two years is blowing me away.

I'm really concerned that if we don't get some of these linkage zones protected and in place and get these corrido overpasses, underpasses put in, who will miss that avenue of time?

Things are changing fast and humans aren't going away.

And more and more of them see to be wanting to come out here to the good country, the West.

And it's getting eaten up fast.

My big dream is that I'll have younger people come behind me to keep doing what can be done and what needs to be done for grizzlies and everything really.

For an all inclusive fly fishing lodge.

We've always had just this standard dumpster out here for our trash.

And then for a number of year we kept having issues with bears being able to get into the trash.

We tried to handle it on our own through a number of different means, and ultimately they could just get in.

I reached out to Blake and a whole team of people to help us build this enclosure, and take the steps necessary to keep bears out of our trash and keep our team safe and our guests safe, and as well as be stewards for the land.

We really designated a lot of area that were hotspots for conflict.

And this being such an important wildlife connectivity corridor, this was high up on the list.

And then meeting a propert owner who was willing to engage in the process and and do you know the right type of solution.

We this is how we got here.

I love the thought that if bears are thriving in an area, then the area is thriving in general.

And that means for both animals and humans, healthy bears mean a healthy world.

Interstate highways.

They remain the greatest barrier to grizzly migration.

If grizzlies living in geographically isolated ecosystems are to reconnect.

But the science needed to do that is coming from a homegrown plac at the Montana State University.

We try to reduce collisions with wildlife, specifically large species that are also a threat to our own safety.

And we also try to provide habitat connectivity, provide them a safe passage from one side of the roa to the other side of the road.

Wildlife fences.

They essentially have two functions.

One is to keep wildlife off the road and to guide them towards underpasses and overpasses.

Are we crazy to build these things?

Well, if you look at the economics, we're not crazy.

It is defensible.

But they cost money.

And some people say it costs too much money.

But if you say that, then you make the assumption that there is no cost.

Well, when we hit animals, we have vehicle repair costs.

There's a certain probability that there will be human injuries and human fatalities.

So we know for sure that there is a cost.

If you built fences over long road sections at least three miles.

Then we reduce collision with large mammals 80 to 100%.

So quite effective.

We had about 22,000 successful crossings by wild mammal species, medium sized and large sized mammal species.

Every year.

And in the five years we monitored, there was over 100,000 successful crossings.

It's not just about providing a crossing structure at this road section.

It is about this crossing structures at this location, because further that way is another road that is mitigated in the same context, providing connectivity betwee a core area even further away.

You do it in a much more coordinated level, on a landscape level, in this case even a national level.

It is a choice that you have to make.

Others have done it.

There's no reaso we cannot do it here other than do we want it.

That is the question.

Do we want it?

I think Americans have evolved to the point where we hate, well, things we hate while rivers, we want to dam them up and we hate, you know, wild animals like grizzlies and wolves and even bison with our fish.

We think that we don't need wild rivers.

We can just breed them i hatcheries and release them and and it's wrong.

We need wild things, but we're afraid of them.

So I think we have to get back to local thinking, because I think in the end, you protect what you love.

We're concerned with maybe protectin a little creek next to our town, and that's about the extent of what we can do.

And we've got to get back to that kind of thinking.

If all of us worldwide thought about protecting our local areas, it would change things a lot.

All these things can be solved with very few people who know what the problems are, and to do something about it.

If you really look into all the problems we have with the natural world, you can get depressed.

But you know, the cure for depression is action.

And I tell people don't get depressed, get angry.

Do something about it.

I am the wildlife program manager for the Confederated Tribes.

We are in charge of wildlife.

All the wildlife species within the reservation, which is about a 1.3 million acre area.

As a tribal member from this area, it's really unique to see how tied the tribes are to the natural environment and the natural resources.

So when you have a bear using the landscape and they come across unprotected garbages or livestock and chicken coops in those areas, they can't differentiate between a natural food source and an unnatural food source.

When we respond to a call, well, initially work with the landowners to really take a thorough walkthrough of their area and identify all the potential attractants that they have on their landscape, whether it's a fruit tree or unsecured chicken coops, or if it's garbage.

And so we'll really just work with them to help remediate that attractant and then remove it as you know, just a source available to the animal.

Our wildlife program you know, does so much to help prevent conflict because we do really want to see grizzly bears and other carnivores persist on the landscape.

It's really working with landowners, working with ranchers and farmers to use tools and practices to help get around and ahead of some of that conflict, to help kill the conflict, and that the carnivore.

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is responding to the perilous time of year known as hyper fascia, when bears need to fatten up before winter denning.

Abrupt climate change is forcing bears to forgo denning in search of the reward of municipal garbage.

A flashback to last year.

There is an unprecedented amount of grizzly conflict in town.

We ended up having six grizzlies put down.

Most of the community was was pretty fed up wit what was happening to our bears.

So I put together a petition on Change.org.

It ended up blowing up.

It got 75,000 signatures, basically asking the county to make bear proof trash cans mandatory.

We wanted to have a bunch of these cans on the street before the bears came down for the fall, and started roaming and looking for unsecured attractants.

Every single one of these trash cans that's out on the street is a conflict that we are avoiding a potential conflict.

We're actively trying to get boots on the ground, people out to save bears.

And so much of this program has been, done by volunteer work of wildlife photographers, wildlife activists, conservationists and just people who love animals.

So it's been a beautiful thing to see the community step up to the plate and actually do the work that it take to save these incredible bears.

Me, as a human approaching this trash can.

I'm going to stick my left hand under here and there's a lever, and you push it to the right.

Lift up.

Throw your trash in.

Drop back down and then it locks in place.

Farms insider started in 2016.

We started picking trees and we picked, you know, five trees and made 30 gallons of cider and then, one of our friends worked for the county, Teton Conservation District, and they were like, guys you may have found the solution to this pretty consistent problem that the county is having.

The idea was to harvest as many trees as we could.

So we focused on just sweet trees, and we harvested 70 trees.

And the county is like, whoa!

Conservation is just like 70 trees.

Like, how many trees do you estimate there?

When we did our final presentation and were like, well, 500, 600 trees, it became clear that this wa a pervasive issue in the county.

I can walk around the town of Jackson and know where every single apple tree is, or at least think I know where every single apple tree is.

This year has been a banner year for apples.

And so I'm walking down the street.

I'm like, I've never seen that apple tree before.

I've never seen that apple tree before.

What we focused largely in these neighborhoods that are of the highest frequency of, bear.

So we talked to the bear biologist and be like, all right where can we take the food away?

So we went in there and jus cleaned it out year after year.

So the bears stopped coming there.

If we can just do one little thing by saving bears, by drinking cider, when we don't see on the front page of the newspaper that, you know, bear, this was euthanized or this was killed last yea with 3.99 cubs coming into town and just fully causing havoc.

Now people are interested in actually doing something about it.

If we figure out a way to make it so sustainable, other communities can do this too.

Like, this has to be a community wide effort, and we're getting closer to that as time goes on.

It's like as all things perfection is never achieved, it's only sort.

She was born in th den near Pilgrim Creek, inside Grand Teton National Park in the winter of 1996.

Her name, 399, was given to her by bear researchers because of the images capture by Tom Mendelson over 16 years, 399 and her cubs have become an inspiration to millions of us worldwide.

I've seen literally thousands of bears, grizzly bears in my lifetime, counting ones in Alaska and Canada.

And here.

And there's no bear like 399 that I've ever seen or witnessed her live here.

She lives here basically in my backyard, so to speak.

For sure.

399 is the coolest grizzly I've ever seen.

It's always remarkable that she's able to go through this landscape of park and millions of tourists going to Yellowstone and being here.

It's just surviving.

She's magical that she's taught her cubs to be magical, to.

For some reason, she's very good.

And there's a lot of berries down there.

And she was hanging out around, you know, suburbs and housing areas, and she got into some bird feeders and beehives.

So more and more concern came around and the Fish and Wildlife decided that they should trap and call her three, nine and nine.

And her cubs, and they would have a way to follow them by G.P.S.

and see where they were.

And she got into trouble or something, maybe circumvented an issue.

I'm not big on trapping at all.

And coloring and tagging which is, you know, so redundant and so painful for the bear and so risky for bears who might get killed or displaced.

But there was all kind of underground when I heard about it.

I drove down there quickly and the operation was just over.

But there are probably 2520 official car from the different agencies, so it was kind of like a Swat team, but they had five traps set up, which she stood on the hill for a little while, sat on the hills waiting for the cubs to catch up.

She didn't realize that they were in a trap in a culvert trap.

That was pretty sad, but apparently she said on the hill, waiting for them to catch up.

And then she went over the hill and she kept going.

Those three cubs would be probably lost.

One way or another would be in a zoo or doesn't really to do with them.

You can't really release them.

Had botched trapping basically.

And I'm glad three, nine nine didn't get caught.

She'd been trapped so many times.

What we have to instill in people that if you really want animals like bears and wolves around, we need to coexist.

We need tell others in that this is important.

You know, nature heals all of us.

What have we lost?

If we can only imagine a grizzly bear instead of.

No.

It's there.

We have lost so much because we have lost the very thing, the very spirit that allows us to be in this place.

And it is okay to have that fear of an apex predator, of something bigger and greater than us.

To create humility.

To make us humble.

Because I believe that all, all of that, the right words and the right inspiration come from that place of openness, o vulnerable ability and humility.

And I think the bear, for me, teaches that over and over again.

I think that the biggest lesson that we can learn of reciprocity with any creature, the bear does things within the ecosyste that help an ecosystem flourish.

What are we doing?

What are we doin to help the ecosystem flourish?

What are we doing that doesn't kill it?

It's like we're standing on the edge of a branch and we're saying it off the tree, and pretty soon we're going to have nothing left to hold on to.

What do we learn from nature?

That it can give back as much as it takes?

We have to be this place where we're giving back.

Now we've taken all we can from the west, and it's starting to die.

What do we do, Dougie?

Just two old Montana boys.

What do we d to convince the people around us that bison and grizzlies should coexist with us?

You know I think you share your own life and your own love of the animal and your experiences with them to show how vital they are to everyday life.

This is what I absolutely believe that due to climate change, our chances of survival in the grizzly bears are exactly the same right now.

Extinction should be on everybody's slate, and I know people don't want to chew on that, but that's exactly the state of the world now.

We're not just fighting for ourselves.

We'r fighting for every piece of wild natural habitat which has inspired my entire life is, you know, chasing and trying to preserve wild places and wild animals.

If the great bear is to survive, we need to find human tolerance in our Western wild lands.

The lives of grizzlies are in the crosshairs in the State where they are still hanging on.

We need to find the courage to defend our public lands and wildlife.

The courage to fight for what we love in the natural world, beginning in our own backyard.