Start with a Bear: Humans, Grizzlies, and the Power of Stories on a Crowded Planet

A vivid investigation into the grizzly bear and how understanding these mighty creatures offers the key to restoring ecological harmony on our planet in crisis.

A century ago, prevailing wisdom cast large carnivores as adversaries—pests and threats to be removed for human safety and prosperity. In North America, among the most targeted of these animals were brown bears, or grizzlies, whose population decimation has made them emblematic of this fear-driven approach to wildlife management. In California, where they once roamed the land in the tens of thousands, grizzlys have not been seen in more than 100 years. Modern conservation has evolved, yet it often remains rooted in a separation from nature, a systemic opposition that keeps the wild at arm's length.

In Start with a Bear, historian, ecologist, and bear expert Peter Alagona suggests we must reimagine the very heart of conservation, inviting a new framework for sustainable, reciprocal relations with the wild creatures that remain. Spanning centuries of history and traversing landscapes from California and Spain to the Gobi Desert and Alaska, this work is an epic journey toward a new ecological consciousness. It offers a roadmap for healing the severed ties between species and spaces, guiding us to:

• See brown bears for what they really are
• Examine our storied kinship with bears
• Confront the bitter reality of their continued disappearance
• Discover how to integrate wilderness with human populations
• And to heal the ties between species and spaces on the planet

Through the lens of our largest and perhaps most complex furry neighbors, Alagona illuminates what is at stake in our shared extinction crisis. He asks us to not merely manage these creatures, but to confront the profound question of what it means to genuinely share our planet with the myriad lives that still inhabit it alongside us, to reconsider our place on a warming, crowded earth.