(melancholy music) - [Edward] I thought of the wilderness, we had left behind us open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one, Edward Abbey.

This wild magnificent land is known as the Yellowstone ecosystem, that vast region surrounding the Nation's first National park.

All the original land animals who lived here before the coming of the white men are still here.

For the tribes the greatest of these was the grizzly bear.

An early arriver to this beautiful green continent eager for the garden that was emerging from the ice land of forest and flowers and blizzards and beauty, the grizzly bear walked alongside us down the Rocky mountain front.

We are at a crossroads.

We now have the unholy power to decide the fate of other species.

The grizzly bears fate and ours, are one.

50 years ago, grizzly bear advocate.

Doug Peacock sought to make a lasting record of their existence in the lower 48.

Along with his best friend, author Terry Tempest Williams, they speak to the power and value of the wild.

- We knew this was coming.

We've been talking about this together, Doug, for 30 years.

I'm surprised.

I didn't think it would come this close.

I didn't think we would be sent home, brought to our knees in this moment of reckoning and awakening.

And I actually think it's a good thing.

And I don't say that lightly.

We almost lost my brother to COVID.

He survived, but 200,000 people haven't and we are not grieving them.

We are not grieving the loss of species.

We are not greeting the fires that are burning.

We just go on as everything is fine.

- And this is really the crucial time that we need our friendship, and we're passing the tipping point right now.

We are just sampling the air from California and a little bit from Pacific Northwest here in Montana.

You know, the greatest threat to grizzlies in this Yellowstone ecosystem is climate change.

- We are incapable of seeing ourselves as the problem.

I think we are the problem, and that's why we have to learn how to live with grizzlies.

That's why we have to learn how to live with coyotes or drought or fire lapping at our door.

- I would not care to live in a world where they're not grizzly bears.

That wouldn't be the final depletion of everything, I love.

Not just in my American West where we are right now, but in the world, it's a final defeat of the wilderness here.

It means in the wilderness, it means that everything is unmistakably, a human landscape.

- You know, I still believe, especially now that when we're all under siege with climate change, that we can connect with the heart of wildness and other species.

So when I see a grizzly, I see the potential of who we really are.

And I don't want to forget that.

And I don't want our children and their children's children to forget that.

(melancholy music) - [Edward] Climate change has obliterated the bear's most critical food source.

The seeds from the whitebark pine cones.

Rising temperatures allowed the deadly mountain pine beetle to destroy the Alpine forests.

The decimation of whitebark is just the first gust of the hot wind blowing across the Rocky mountains.

David Mattson has worked for 35 years studying bears and mountain lions.

- So where you are right here is in our backyard, which is along Seuss Creek, which flows down from the Absaroka mountain.

There's grizzly bears, just a couple miles upstream.

We don't have grizzly bears down here right now.

Haven't seen them yet anyway, but this is emblematic of the kind of situation that more and more people are finding themselves in, where we humans have placed ourselves in the very best bear habitat, especially at lower elevations.

- So guaranteed, we're going to have a grizzly bear wander on down this creek.

Looking for food that we have here in a great plentitude.

Like chokecherry, like buffaloberry, like serviceberry.

So this is a rich environment and that's where we are.

So we need to be prepared and mean we need to be willing to allow bears to come down here and do what they're gonna do.

We have grizzly bears being killed probably two to three times the rate they were 20 years ago.

Which begs the question why?

And that goes back to climate change.

Climate change, which is changing the world for all of us, but it's had a catastrophic effect on grizzly bears or more specifically on grizzly bear human relations.

So what we've seen is a dramatic escalation in the numbers of bears dying because of conflicts over livestock and because of encounters with hunters.

Climate change took out whitebark pine.

Because climate change took out whitebark pine, it forced bears to look for alternate foods.

The other alternative was meat, livestock.

So cattle, sheep, or you can go to where humans are killing animals like elk.

One of the key questions is how do we find a relationship with bears to where we can coexist, bears and people can live in the same places at the same time.

It doesn't take that much for us to create the kind of space where coexistence can happen.

It takes us a certain amount of prudence.

It's like me maybe being smarter than my dog.

Grizzly bears really don't have that much trouble accommodating humans.

Grizzly bears can live with us just fine.

(melancholy music) - [Edward] When grizzlies leave their sanctuaries and national parks, they must pass through ranches and other private property.

Climate change has driven this migration.

They're looking for new sources of food.

Encounters with livestock can result in dead bears, but they don't have to.

(car engine roaring) - I get extremely emotional about this because like Doug and like my family, we are amongst the bears every day.

And it is not a situation of reading about it and feeling deeply connected, it is being deeply connected.

And what we used to be was the bad guy and we still are to some degree.

But we have a proper capacity to become the good guy.

(melancholy music) - [Edward] Just north of Yellowstone park, a number of ranchers and provided an accommodation for this migration of bears.

One of these ranches is run by three generations of the Anderson family.

- We have a bears.

- We have lots of bears, lots of wolves, couple of foxes.

- And a couple coyotes.

- We've grown, I feel.

(cows mooing) I'd say that With a lot of humility because I think there's a tremendous amount to learn about how to effectively you know coexist with the grizzlies.

I think our biggest learning curve occurred with the wolf reintroduction and we really, we were pressed hard to explore different sorts of strategies on how to really manage our domestic animals more effectively.

- It's fair to say that there are some places on the landscape that might not be great for cattle, and we're aware of that.

And we're just always observing and looking at the changes.

And it allows us to look at community in a different way.

It's not just ranchers and livestock.

It's a really large system already at work that we're really enjoying being a part of.

- I am sad to say, or I just believe that most of what humans do and the design of our systems is not a win-win at all.

It's a win lose, and we've got to find a win-win.

And to do that, we've got to think first of the landscape and then figure out how to make it work for us rather than picking up the pieces later and trying to rationalize our way through it.

- You know, to be honest, don't look at the grizzly bear any different than I look at any other wildlife on this place.

It certainly has a magic to it.

But I think that everything has the same sort of magic.

And we also have that.

And so it's just a great place to watch them and learn from them and remember that they have survived and they're resilient through adaptability and just being able to change with the times.

They're the ultimate teacher of change.

- What made appear to be a small little deal in the world for in and the ecological system, it might be huge.

(melancholy music) - The science is clear on the effect of climate change on the greater Yellowstone ecosystems carrying capacity for grizzly bears.

Leading expert on the outbreak dynamics of pine needles.

Jesse Logan was the project leader for the U.S forest service, and now studies the collapse of whitebark pine one of the Yellowstone grizzlies prime foods.

- When we predicted and published in the scientific literature, what we expected to happen with global warming and whitebark pine, it's really one of the early examples may be the first example of an ecological prediction, well in advance of something that played out almost exactly as our models had predicted.

What we saw was essentially a complete collapse of whitebark pine forest.

But one thing that was different, it happened faster than we had anticipated.

And the thing about whitebark, that was really a valuable food resource is kept them up in the high country, away from people.

Wow, grizzly, claw marks.

Now these claw marks are evidence of grizzlies down here low.

It's becoming more and more common, in fact, really common this time of year in the fall, when they would have been up in the high country, you'd be down in this low country, looking for other food resources, biscuit, root, things like that.

(melancholy music) - [Edward] What do we tell our grandkids?

That we sat idly by while the last of the grizzlies vanished.

As bears adapt, moving from wild to rural landscapes, we need to learn to coexist.

Louisa Willcox has been a fierce advocate for the Yellowstone grizzlies for three decades.

Challenging trophy hunting, challenging delisting from the endangered species list and keeping a broad watch on the lives of bears.

- Under my desk is a huge box of 400 records of grizzly bear deaths in Yellowstone.

In it are a number of stories that tell a lot about how grizzly bears are dying.

About carelessness and thoughtlessness and people being unprepared to be in grizzly bear country.

There are some dead bear stories that are tragic.

One day, this bear found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When a hunter hunting alone afraid at dusk armed with no bear spray, encountered this bear.

And he shot and killed it.

Some of the most important and wonderful voices for the grizzly bear are tribal people.

270 tribes in traditional societies signed a treaty opposed to trophy hunting, grizzly bears.

And when you look at trying to connect grizzly bear populations that have been long isolated in the Northern Rockies, to connect those populations to each other, and you look at the lands, the tribes either own or have legal claim to, you suddenly get a picture of possibility.

That the tribes have a key that is critical to the grizzly bears future.

(melancholy music) - Yellowstone grizzlies are threatened with extinction.

They're cut off from vital genetic diversity.

We must allow them to reunite with their counterparts in the Northern continental divide ecosystem, if any of them are to survive.

Author, Rick Bass is a passionate defender of all things wild.

He has lived for 34 years with the last remnant of the grizzlies of the Northern Rockies in the Yaak River Ballet.

- I live up the very Northwest part of the state and Yellowstone's grizzlies are trying to get back to the Yaak.

They were there once an unbroken stream of grizzlies moving from one mountain top to the next, raising a family on one mountain, the young going to the next mountain, raising her family there.

Hopscotching from one mountain to the next, to the next down to Yellowstone and back.

It's really hard to be a grizzly right now.

I mean, you've got trails going through their little Meadows up in the Yaak.

We've got mines down in the cabinet mountains.

We've got, you know, Gallatin County subdivision and road building going around Yellowstone.

We've got industrial recreation.

We've got whitebark pine extinction, and yet they're still here.

I mean, they're still trying to connect those five little gardens where they are.

They're still trying to grow back to reclaim, you know, what was once their nation.

To have only 25 left and in the Yaak it's...

They're called the walking dead.

I don't want to see them vanished.

The judge who ruled twice for the Yellowstone grizzlies saying, "We can't hunt them".

The judge had a very simple question for the government.

If you shoot bears when they come out of Yellowstone, how are they going to get to the Yaak?

They're not, are they.

(melancholy music) - So long as people aren't shooting at them, a grizzly bear can live for a long time.

Imagine what they see and do in 30, 40 years, the country, they cover the country, they claim.

Not with our ownership notions of maps and deeds, borders, and boundaries, but claiming instead with lives constructed with dignity, grace and no small amount of joy.

They love it even more than we do, if that's even possible.

As a young grizzly bear researcher in Yellowstone park, Barry Gilbert was severely mauled by a mother grizzly.

Instead of blaming the bear, he devoted his career to studying and defending the species.

- What was surprising about that analysis of the whitebark pine seeds, as they were a perfect food it was, you and I have known that Clark's nutcrackers can subsist almost completely on it.

But when I saw that the analysis showed all of the essential amino acids were in whitebark pine seeds and that was over 50% fat, which is exactly what grizzly bears need.

I thought, man, the loss of the whitebark time is really a big, a big hit.

And many of the thousand other things they eat none of them compares with the importance of that.

- Not only is it this beautiful food resource, but you know, the red squirrel collects all the cones, brings him down from the trees, puts them in mittens and then the grizzly comes along and just scooped them up.

That squirrel does all the work.

And a red squirrel is absolutely no threat to a grizzly.

- The numbers need to be built up or you've got isolated populations in the Northern continental divide, and then west of that.

The Yaak only has 25 bears- - [Jesse] Oh wow yeah.

- And it's cut off from the Selkirks and B.C, and then you have Yellowstone.

So if we don't connect them all we're gonna see a genetic change.

And also one thing that I've never heard anybody talk about is if you keep shooting the explorers that are going up to new habitat, what happens to the population?

I think it's a misinterpretation to say we got so many bears now that they're exploding out of the park.

David Mattson has pointed out that this is consistent with decreased food days, therefore less density for them to sustain themselves.

So the ones that can't get enough food are going outside the park.

- It is so critical to get that connection, that genetic connection, that genetic change.

And to do that, it's up to us to learn to live with barriers.

- People start tolerating them.

And then we get some pathways that go under highways.

Then we'll probably be in better shape.

(melancholy music) - [Edward] Cubs stay with their mothers for nearly three years.

She teaches them where to go when the berries are ripe, how to deal with wolves and wasps, how to avoid people and cars.

Filmmaker Brad Orsted followed one such family for years.

(footsteps pattering) - In 2015, I was following a couple of grizzly bear cubs with their mom.

She was shot in the back of a basin by a hunter for standing up, she move is not aggressive.

And we thought those cubs were doomed.

There was no way they were going to make it through a Montana winter.

And low and behold, summer of 2016, those cubs came out by themselves.

So they fought to survive.

It was with great, great honor and pleasure that I'd get up in the morning and race down there to find the orphans.

And those little orphans had that fight and that drive.

They had to do it by themselves.

They didn't have all of the lessons that their mom had taught them yet.

They wandered out of the safety and sanctuary of the basin, where they had spent their whole lives and came across a community that was ill-prepared and not tolerant of grizzly bears moving through.

And the state killed both of those bears after I'd followed them for days and days and days.

And it broke my heart.

(melancholy music) It almost broke me.

It almost broke.

- Native people, we didn't grow up with mirrors.

That my ancestors 200 years ago, my great, great grandmothers didn't have mirrors.

What they had around them was the landscape where their animals looking back at them to look at and they were reflected back to themselves and this beauty in this country, in this wildness, in this landscape.

So it dances in our stories, they were about what we saw.

And we started bears and elk and mountain lions and minks, and that's how we saw ourselves.

- [Edward] Cindy Fuhrman is a poet, author and co-editor of "Native Voices".

A collection of poetry and prose.

- The grizzly bear, who is slowly disappearing from this land is not being represented, is not being counted, is being forgotten as something that used to exist here that doesn't exist anymore.

That is part of a historical past, but not important to the ecosystem.

When we finally make the decision to save these places to save the black bear and bull trout and the salmon turn down our rivers, to save the Yellowstone grizzly, we will ultimately be saving ourselves.

So when we think about the west, when we think about this continent that we're on, that we call North America now, we have to start seeing ourselves as part of this very delicate ecosystem that is hurting right now, and realize that that it can't hold us forever, if we don't start giving something back.

- [Edward] The survival of the species depends on crossing barriers like freeways and railroads.

It also requires a measure of human understanding and tolerance.

Leading the freeway crossing effort is Lance Craighead of the famous Craighead family pioneers of modern grizzly bear biology.

(engine roaring) - I've been working with Doug Peacock and save the Yellowstone grizzlies on trying to get grizzlies across I-90 out of Yellowstone to areas further north.

And this'll be more and more of a pressing need with climate change as animals need to move across the landscape to find better living conditions.

- It's absolutely critical bears be able to pass from one mountain range to the next even if they're island ranges.

You know, Yellowstone's an island ecosystem.

There are grizzlies at the north end of those mountains right there.

A culture like ours loves to build power lines and pipelines and freeways, absolute barriers to migration.

- [Lance] And you can improve an existing bridge or underpass for a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

So it's really cost effective.

Just put some fencing in there, could do a little landscaping and it's already pretty nice for animals, but it's noisy and they can still get scared and run up on the highway.

- Maybe we can pipe bear friendly music, you know, to the freeway under the freeway there and you know, have a little Solo Bach or something.

- If I was a bear, I could see that butte and I could smell it if the wind was right and it looks like a nice place to go to.

(melancholy music) - [Edward] The grizzly is our ally in our defense of our shared wilderness home.

They're calling out a warning by example.

Climate change knows no boundaries spares no life.

If we shun their warning, the consequences will be severe.

We know what we have to do.

The grizzlies fate and ours are one.

(melancholy music)