“Bears are made of the same dust as we, and breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters.” So wrote John Muir in his journal in 1871 after finding a dead bear in Yosemite – presumably Ursus arctos horribilis, a grizzly. If one considers the characteristics of the grizzly, this is quite a remarkable thing to write. We are not closely related to bears (their closest living relative is a seal), and grizzlies make for terrible company. And yet Muir was not alone in feeling that bears are somehow kin: we (or at least we in the west) tell stories about friendly bears; we fall asleep beside toys formed in their image; some have even tried to keep them as pets or live with them in the wild.
This imagined kinship forms just one thread in Gloria Dickie’s book Eight Bears. It’s a family album of the remaining varieties of bear, but the book does more than its title suggests. Just like a good photography critic, Dickie is attuned to the person behind the camera: how we have framed bears over the centuries, enmeshing them in the stories that we tell about ourselves. As Dickie shows, bears are in deep trouble, and her book is a compelling attempt to see through their eyes: to explore what it means to be a bear in a warming world that is short on space.
