This guy walked into my office one day, he said, I'm John Tener.

I'm with the Canadian Wildlife Service.

We want to start a polar bear study.

And I hear you know how to work on bears.

So off I went, and I worked for many years with the Canadian Wildlife Service, And we lifted off, and we got to Norwegian Bay, and suddenly, like it tends to do, it's socked in.

We were inside a ping pong ball, half the time we didn't know what was up or what was down, right or left, but we came around this point it was instant white out.

Let's follow the coast anywhere we're flying.

Oh, it's bit clear there.

Opp, let's go there and then clear over there.

So we were sort of zigzagging trying to get out of there.

And remember looking between my feet, and I saw rocks racing under my feet, and I yelled, to What happened?

I said well, we hit the ground.

And so, he was all flustered, and I don't know he was trying to get control, and we hit the ground again, and we were sliding along.

Would have been okay.

We hit a little drift and rolled over.

That was the end of the helicopter.

I'm trying to get out and I couldn't get out.

I couldn't figure out why.

He said, Take your damn seat belt off!

And you know, I hadn’t taken my seat belt off!

I’m trying to lift the whole helicopter!

and Gene’s yelling, she's gonna blow, hurry up, she’s gonna blow!.

bubble was still, you know, was cracked, but it was intact, and none of us was hurt.

And so we were way off course, radio didn't work.

The emergency locator did not work.

The battery was gone dead, because in those days, people didn't pay much attention to that.

So, we they were putting along with the radio turned off, drinking coffee, going real slow, feeling their way along in the weather.

And they went right on by us, and then they started turning.

Chopper crashed, and so they landed beside us, took us in, and flew us straight back to Resolute Bay, where we landed the next morning.

And we got out of that big helicopter at Polar Shelf, and the guy who runs Polar Shelf said, “What are you guys doing here in this I sometimes wonder, if you know , if I did really crack up one of those times and everything that I'm talking about and seeing and doing now is, is that, is that period just before you, before you die, when everything flashes before your eyes, and for all I know, maybe Chuck is one of the founders of polar bear biology.

He was one of the first Canadian Wildlife Service polar bear biologists out tagging and tracking and starting the mark recapture program that continues to this day in the north and also here in the Western Hudson Bay No, it's like any other studies.

Somebody had to think up these things.

And on that basis, of course, it goes on, it goes from Newton to Einstein, but somebody had to do the Newton part first.

And Chuck is in that category.

He's, he's the earliest one who who did systematic polar bear I was actually afraid of polar bears, because the only thing people knew about polar bears, was what they did in zoos, nobody had really been out on the land seeing how polar bears lived and learning about polar bears.

Three different zookeepers who all put their arm Oh, I think the whole polar bear thing is his legacy.

He started the interest in polar bears.

He started the research, the real research in them and he just has to go down it as the, the one who brought that to the forefront.

Dad started a lot of the sort of bear research.

Started the IBA started, almost everything you look out there.

Chuck was one of the early day bear biologists that started all of the pathways that all the bear sciences are following now.

And with the publications, I can't even begin to list the amount of information that in his earlier years, working with Canadian Wildlife Service and the universities that he's published to this day, that is still being cited in almost any paper that's being written about So, if we found a fresh track, or if you know a track that could be followed of a sow and cubs, we used to backtrack it inland and try to find the location of the den, which we're quite successful at.

We were trying to delineate some of the areas of the terrestrial denning area that the polar bears have there, because it's a fairly unique area where the where the pregnant females actually go in and dig dens and earth in the frozen earth, which is quite unusual.

And Chuck and About eight, eight feet high and probably 10-15, feet in diameter.

And it's big, slab of ice like as big as a sofa where he’d been stretched out sleeping in there, and it was just so far down he didn't hear us.

And as my eyes adjusted to the darkness in there, I started to notice that the white wall of permafrost in the second room was moving.

And I realized, of course, it wasn't permafrost.

So, I bolted out of there, and a few minutes later, this great big bear comes out that we And I used to take, whenever I could, I take a local, native person along, because they knew how to read the directions in the snow written in the snow, and they knew things about the sea ice and pressure ridges and what you know, all the ice features, all the pressure Chuck’s name was frequently invoked and in personal conversations I had with the older Inuit who could remember.

Inuit were always asking about, how is Chuck Jonkel doing?

You know?

That rapport that, special rapport that he had with Well, surviving in the Arctic is takes a lot of your day.

We piled up once, and we had flame outs, and we hit the ground hard and cracked this and that, and there's things that we had to work on and fix, where we were, and because nobody else knew where we were, and we'd be maybe Get in the sleeping bag at night, and you're talking away, and then you knew when it was time for him that he would be going to sleep.

He'd say, goodnight.

Joan, Working with Sucostrin® was the devil, because it was a muscle relaxant.

It was very narrow Chuck and I have given artificial respiration to I don't know how many bears, and it is hellishly hard work.

You know, you pump up and down, up and down, up and down, and when you finally get the bear back to breathing normally, and it's all over, and the bear’s not a Chuck likes bears, you know, so do I. And for us to lose a bear was much more than just say well we lost a bear.

It would have been a personal thing, but Chuck has lost fewer bears in his career than I than some biologists I've known have lost in one year.

But we were still working out the most basic things of trying to handle bears.

Could we safely immobilize them?

What kind of tags would stay on them?

So it was, it was very much a trial and error, sort of a period.

You know, we've had a few close calls of bears suddenly standing up while we were working on them, and luckily, always walking the other direction.

And we had a bear that was more or less immobilized, but quite lively.

Chuck told me to stand on the back of its neck and hold I was sitting on top of a bear, holding them by the ears or by the jowls, so that Chuck could pull a little tooth out of it.

And Chuck would say, hold them still, Hank.

I said,” Chuck, that bear is, he's getting lively.

He's starting to move with jaws way too much.” And He sort of seemed to have this, this way of approaching bears, as if somehow the bears would understand that that he was, he was part bear himself, and, and shouldn't be, shouldn't be and he was never in any danger.

But with most polar bears, they're just so cool, you know, a look at you and Very good natured animals, they didn't get angry like the grizzly bear would really lose patience here with you on something like that.

Well, the Greenlanders say that only the seventh bear is a danger.

But do you, of course, you don't know what the seventh bear is.

I never left the animal until they could get up.

And a lot of people do get done when they leave, but I always would wait until the animal was able to take care of itself.

We wanted to roll the bear over so she would be on her stomach and be able to breathe properly while she was coming out of the drug.

I was rolling the back end.

Chuck was rolling the front end.

So anyhow, I'd done everything just the way it said on the bottle, and this bear had been lying on one of its sides, and I wanted to flip it over so the other lung would would be working, and you wouldn't get fluid built up in the lung that way.

So anyhow, I was about half And he was hitting her across the nose, kind of looking like Inspector Clouseau having fights with his assistant in the Pink Panther movies.

And I thought this was pretty funny, and so I started laughing, but was still trying to turn over my end of the bear.

And then he looked up Well, yeah, I still got, I should have put tattoo ink on it, but I still got a white spot right there.

When he was in cocktail parties, he could show the women who were willing, who were willing to be impressed by the scars on his arm were as Frank Brazzo, if he Well, Frank was up here, he's a French Canadian guy from North of Ottawa, Manuakee, and he was our storage guy, and I needed fuel caches put out.

So, he'd come up with me to put out the fuel caches while I started to work.

But I finished my work day on Friday.

So there, Chuck said, “tomorrow, you're coming and assist me in polar bear tagging.” We were looking for some polar bear dens.

And it looked like she came out of that den.

So anyhow, I was collecting data on the dens, just how did they construct them and how did it work, you know, and what were the parallels, you know, do have system to what they do, which they do.

They have a very good dens, a very But just, I noticed sinking something.

Seen this big head grab me by the by the thighs She's got me, she's got me.

And these big yellow arms come up out the snow, and all of a sudden, Frank disappeared.

She had scraped the ceiling of the den to where it was, light came through, and actually some heat came through, but it was still about 10 inches layer of snow, which was kind of like a greenhouse, it was warm in there and anyhow, she could see him walking.

She could see his Down to hole I went.

Then I got up and I, I start swinging.

I seen fur.

I seen the bear, face to face.

I started swinging, swinging.

And get my shout against I don't, I know I was punching that bear.

I don't know how many times, but I was punching her.

And then I And I went running up there, and he disappeared down hole.

And just as I got to the hole, he popped up again.

And I grabbed his arm and pulled him along, up out of there, but she'd been chewing on him down her in the meantime.

Then I stood, I guess she threw me on the hole.

Then I seen blue sky, and I turned around to my left, and I see, I seen a bear or two her paws on top of snow and just her head trying to come out of the den.

But I don't think she was wanted to come out of the den.

But I I didn't want She came kind of halfway out of the den and looked at us and looked at the helicopter and looked back at the cubs, and looked at us and looked at the helicopter, and then she looked back at the cubs, and then she slowly went back down into the den.

Otherwise, she could have And so they called the on the radio to the nurses station.

They said, make sure that the nurses be there, because there's a guy got mauled by a bear.

So, we got in the helicopter and we, we headed for Resolute.

Funny part was, and once we got back to Resolute and take Frank to be seen at the hospital, and after then the nurses look at it, and they say, well, we wonder, we should give Frank you know a rabies shot.

Have you had your tetanus and everything else?

And I remember at the The work that he did on the International Polar Bear Conservation Agreement stands out in my mind as being a singular achievement of Chuck so he.

He wanted to have something like that from the moment he started working on polar bears in 1966, he could see the need They had read this book by Peter Pederson, a Dane, and that said that, you know, since the polar ice moves seven miles an hour around the pole in a clockwise manner, that even if a polar bear sat down, he would float all the way around the whole polar basin.

Chuck saw many, many sub populations, but still, he looked at the whole species and wanted to thought it would be advantageous to polar bears everywhere if we had an international agreement.

And when they got down to a negotiating an agreement in 1972 The long term use of polar bears by Aboriginal people Inuit in particular, very important part of both the culture and the economy.

Nobody wants to see polar bears be over-harvested, whether you're a white person from the south or an Inuit from the north.

And so, the quota Natives never overhunted, for a very simple reason, that if they did, they’d starve to death.

You know, to find that balance, you need somebody like Chuck, and he was one of the first to see it.

And I really credit him for probably single greatest contribution to that, to the achievement of that agreement and having it come to fruition.

And I think it was his foresight that allowed that to happen.

And so I think that's one of his greatest achievements.

Incredible joy and opportunity to sit there and listen to Chuck Jonkel and Andy Russell and Charlie and Dick and, and John and debate different philosophies.

We had many an evening out on the porch here talking philosophizing, right?

Lots of political discussions, how, mainly how it pertains to environment.

When I think of the Russell's, I almost always think of Chuck in the same mindset, the same conversation.

There they for they set new trails together in terms of the thinking about bears.

They must be cut from the same cloth of philosophy.

And we thought so much alike.

My dream was to work do research on polar bears, because I had worked with my brother Charlie and my dad on film, in filming grizzly bears in Alaska, on the coast of British Columbia, in the Rocky Mountains here on the ranch.

So I got to work on polar So there's a direct connection from the Hawks Nest and from Montana, incidentally, right from that area, right out to Hudson Bay into the food chain of all the polar bears.

Chuck always said that sunset sunrises and full moons are the key to a happy and healthy life.

When my mom was born, my grandmother was down in this sweet corn patch, picking the sweet corn my two uncles then could go with this little cart and sell, door to door, and she felt a baby coming, but she didn't make it up to the house.

So basically, my mom was born in And we roamed the woods a lot.

When we were kids, we hunted a lot.

When I was five and my brother was seven, he got his first .22 and we'd hunt squirrels and bring them home for red meat.

We poached our first deer when he was nine.

I was seven.

The interest in wildlife, I think, came from interest in farming.

In those days, there was no such Bears kept falling in my lap and the last week of school, a teacher at the University of Montana, PL Wright, came walking up behind me one day, and he said he ever thought going to graduate school?

And I said, “hell no!” He said, “well, you better think about it.

I need, I Chuck really has a special relationship to the natural world he's interested in.

He's worked on bears for over 50 years.

That's quite a long career on bears.

Well, everyone was sort of produced from Chuck's litter, and I got to be in the litter.

So, you know, all of the peers I work with all look at Chuck, you know, as like the person that started them out.

But those first years, when we were in the field together, I was, I was able to kind of soak up a lot of his attitude towards work.

That's pretty important to somebody who's 19 and 20, which is the ages I was then and then Chuck’s as a role model for working in the field, attitudes, Chuck has influenced my work in many ways, but he is the one who brought me here to Churchill originally, but it also helped me, in many ways, to focus on what I wanted to accomplish working with bears as well.

We use foot snares often to catch, capture the polar bears and then drug them and put radio collars on them and tagged them and so on.

So, I got to learn that end of biological business, and that was my introduction to the high Arctic.

And it was great.

It was wonderful Then we quite often had way in the older days, early 70s, had a guy, Fred Brummer, along, who used to be quite well known photographer.

He used to make beautiful coffee table books about the north, the people and the wildlife.

Because how do people down south lay people Well, I needed some help in the summer, you know, I'll hire you, and you can come up and learn the Arctic on your on your time off, you can take photographs.

From my standpoint, it was beautiful relationship because he's such a hard worker.

And it lasted, as you may know, for all that summer and late in the fall, we went all over the north.

So it was a very, very good season.

And Chuck was a wonderful person to be in the field with.

He had lots of field experience.

He knew what he was doing and, and he was fun to be It worked out great for him.

He started getting a collection of photographs, and it worked great for me.

I really could field help.

When I first knew Brenda, she was coming down into Connecticut and into the southwest and doing typical sell it on the highway art I could hire you on.

Well, it was like a dream come true.

It was so pristine.

It was everything I had expected, and more that I more than I'd hoped for.

Gradually became quite an expert on Arctic birds and such, in a way, she kind of picked up on something that I talked to her about, and I had complained that a lot a lot of wildlife art, people put the animal up front, and a lot of times there wasn't any habitat.

And far as I'm But I did go, and I guess I was one of the first, and it was due to Chuck that I really got, got a piece of the pie, or got in because he didn't believe that there should be a disparity between male and female.

Other people in the Canadian Wildlife Service were really, really nasty about it.

They didn't want me to introduce a woman to the Arctic, but I did integrate the Canadian Wildlife Service and to a degree, I integrated the Arctic so women could go to the Arctic.

But when Then when I was 14 and got to work with all the young, budding bear biologists.

So now, even though I'm younger than most of the guys working on bears, now I fit in, because I, you know, was there learning with them at a young age.

So I was lucky that dad let me do that.

And there were a lot of polar bears on North Twin Island, dens all over the place, just hundreds and hundreds of summer dens.

And I had a nice camp there.

I built two little shacks.

I thought it'd be great to take Jamie up.

The manager out of Moosenee was a friend of He had a little motorcycle there.

And so for a 14 year old, 13 year old, whatever, with a motorcycle, I got to go up and down the shore fishing, looking for things, stuff washed up on the beach.

And at that time, it was extremely wild, wild area.

And there were, there were polar Eight miles by about three miles side to side had like about 40 or 50 polar bears on it at any given time.

And here's this little kid running around.

He was his father's son, for sure, Everything we look at is through bear glasses.

And every time there's a conversation, we always relate those conversations to those bear sunglasses.

And Chuck would advise us as our elder, as our philosopher.

I think he's a very unifying force.

In the community, in many communities that he's been a part of, because he just embraces people.

He's kind of like the all-encompassing Grandfather, I guess, and he kind of gives us an umbrella under which we feel safe.

And Chuck's been kind of a pied piper for many younger people, and now I'm one of the older generation, and perhaps many younger folks who have followed Chuck's example into the woods, into the research arena, but also into conservation.

So So, Chuck is an icon in the community, as well as with the Study Center.

You can mention his name to anyone on the train or in town, and a lot of people know him and look forward to visiting with him every year.

When he comes to visit.

He was a wealth of information, biologically, but more important was his courage.

I think a lot of people heave kind of a sigh of relief, knowing that somebody is out there, still keeping optimistic, still looking at the big picture and fighting for those things.

And he said for me an example, which I'll never forget, which is, you must speak truth to power if you know that truth.

Able to voice his opinion, especially now that he's tied to only his own organizations and not a specific university or government agency.

So, he has been able to speak freely on his opinions and what he thinks needs to be done.

And part of my being inspired by grizzly bears, part of my initiating that Great Bear Rainforest campaign with Greenpeace in 1996 and 1990 that was, that part that was inspired by Chuck, I think, one of the greatest persons I ever met, to motivate other people and get other people interested what he's interested in.

An inspiration for both of us in our lives, to sort of redirect our values and our awareness, and not only that, for ourselves, but probably even more significantly, to be able to share and expand on those values to our, our kiddos.

I mean, I really have tended to think of him as being a kind of a patriarchal kind of grandfather figure when it comes to those of us who are coming up in the generations behind.

Um, very, very interesting man.

He’s the one who's been pushing it the last 30-40, years, all the time.

And this is his main objective, not just polar bears, but bears in general.

But he was the prime mover for the polar bear movement.

Read about Chuck, and you hear about Chuck doing all this Arctic work, and, you know, he was doing that before I was born.

And so ,it's worlds away, but then to see him up there in that element, you know, with his open coat and his chest hanging out and wind blowing 40 miles an I owe a lot to Chuck.

You know, just by he made me watch certain things that I wouldn't have been watching, like, you know, the workings of governmental agencies.

Throughout my history with grizzly bears.

It was, it was Chuck, who was always the valuable independent who I knew Even if there were one more person in this world of billions of people, that was more like Chuck Jonkel, the world would be a much better place.

In Montana, there's a saying that A River Runs Through It.

I think a century from now, when people dig through grizzly bear science and grizzly bear conservation, they'll see that Chuck, Jonkel ran through it.

He's just chuck, and he kind of looks like a bear with his bear I think that's his signature achievement, right from the get go, we had concerns about the direction the world is heading on an environmental front, policies centering on environment and, and I think I was influenced a great deal by Chuck.

Can you pretend to stand back from the world and objectively study anything?

I mean, everything is a part of anything else, and it always has been.

But now with, I mean, with, with human impact upon global ecosystems, which is collectively referred to as Chuck is a controversial figure, and he's always wanted to be he's always wanted to stir the pot.

And I think he's viewed, he's taken a longer view of grizzly bear conservation than most people.

All of us need to redouble our efforts.

We're really in trouble here.

There's Never underestimate what a single person can accomplish.

I think is probably more important than most people realize is that David Suzuki, who everybody's heard of these days, came to UBC as a young professor in those days, and he was very hypothesis and scientifically and research minded and not the least bit That we're all linked, whether we're humans or bears or this little fly that keeps biting me on the knee right now, it's a wonderful thing to feel kinship to all living things, and I think that's one of the greatest gifts Chuck Jonkel has shared with us.

I think Chuck has a little bit darker view of humanity, but he's seen more of it than I have.

There isn't any hope, but there is something beyond hope.

I haven't figured out what it is yet.

Save the world.

Despite his pessimism, that there is no hope.

I don't think polar bears have a chance of adapting to climate change.

They, they became polar bears over the course of several 100,000 years.

They're not going to change back into grizzly bears or become land animals in a few generations, three or four at the most.

They're simply not, It's hard to ignore climate change as the main culprit.

But we know that the average date of breakup of the sea ice in in Hudson Bay now is is a full three weeks earlier than it was only 30 years ago.

And that's really important, because the major time that polar bears feed.

The most important time for taking on energy is in that And rather than fight about, is it mom nature, or is it us?

I wish people would recognize that it's both mom nature and us.

We can't do much about mom nature, but we can do things about our our portion of the impact.

So when bears start to get lighter and they're running out of stored energy before freeze up.

They don't just lie down under a tree and starve to death like a caribou or a rabbit might.

They're going to go looking for alternate food sources.

And the main alternate And there are now more aggressive ones around places like Churchill, where there isn’t a lot of them, but some of them have learned bad habits towards people.

The bears used to call the shots.

For a long, long time in North America, they were dominant critter and now Chuck Jonkel, Frank Ponikvar, Bill Callaghan and Lance Olson founded the Great Bear Foundation in 1981 to give voice to the bear.

The intention was to raise funds for research, education and habitat protections to benefit the North American grizzly, first and Our main interest in film was that it would be accurate and that it teach people things about management, about research and such.

A lot of filmmakers have never been all that happy with our judgments and, and uh sometimes they were very unhappy with our judgments.

Mostly, of Everything passes, you know, but he leaves such a legacy, such a legacy with all of us, and we were all talking about it, how much of us are doing the things that we do because of what he taught us?

but I think we better figure it out.

Because I don't know.

I don't like, what's going on on planet Earth.

I'm worried, and it's pretty much all funneled to Madeline.

I don't give a damn about me at this point.

You know but I do about Madeline?

Years of waiting become centered north as you leave warm reservation to travel unknown trails, guided by knowing you are the center of the universe.

Wherever you are, you try to walk with all beings, knowing you do your best to do what is right.

Your feet are light as I think we're being enormously destructive to the planet earth.

Hard to believe people could destroy a planet, but seems like we're trying real hard to destroy our own planet.

I've got my den picked out on North twin Island already.

You go to the east side of North Chuck's always been a grizzly bear to me.

I was very glad to give the old polar bear a hug a few minutes ago.

He can be very fast and very fierce, which is like a grizzly.

I think Chuck is a grizzly bear.

In my heart.

I just think.

Well, I'm a two legged bear.

(music, Chuck singing the Tennessee Waltz in Japanese)