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Good Reads  Mammals  Insectivores to Ungulates  Carnivores  Bears, Raccoons & Pandas (Ursidae - Ailuridae)

Eight Bears Mythic Past and Imperiled Future

Coming Soon
By: Gloria Dickie(Author), Arjun Parikh(Illustrator)
250 pages, 8 b/w illustrations
NHBS
This environmental reportage charts why and how bears face an uncertain future in a human-dominated world.
Eight Bears
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  • Eight Bears ISBN: 9781324005087 Hardback Aug 2023 In stock
    £24.99
    #261469
  • Eight Bears ISBN: 9781324086994 Paperback Nov 2024 Available for pre-order
    £14.99
    #264530
Selected version: £24.99
About this book Customer reviews Biography Related titles

About this book

A global exploration of the eight remaining species of bears – and the dangers they face.

Bears have always held a central place in our collective memory, from Indigenous folklore and Greek mythology to nineteenth-century fairytales and the modern toy shop. But as humans and bears come into ever-closer contact, our relationship nears a tipping point. Today, most of the eight remaining bear species are threatened with extinction. Some, such as the panda bear and the polar bear, are icons of the natural world; others, such as the spectacled bear and the sloth bear, are far less known.

In Eight Bears, journalist Gloria Dickie embarks on a globe-trotting journey to explore each bear's story, whisking readers from the cloud forests of the Andes to the ice floes of the Arctic; from the jungles of India to the backwoods of the Rocky Mountain West. She meets with key figures on the frontlines of modern conservation efforts – the head of a rescue center for sun and moon bears freed from bile farms, a biologist known as Papa Panda, who has led China's panda-breeding efforts for almost four decades, a conservationist retraining a military radar system to detect and track polar bears near towns – to reveal the unparalleled challenges bears face as they contend with a rapidly changing climate and encroaching human populations.

Weaving together ecology, history, mythology, and a captivating account of her travels and observations, Dickie offers a closer look at our volatile relationship with these magnificent mammals. Engrossing and deeply reported, Eight Bears delivers a clear warning for what we risk losing if we don't learn to live alongside the animals that have shaped our cultures, geographies, and stories.

Customer Reviews (1)

  • A mighty fine environmental reportage
    By Leon (NHBS Catalogue Editor) 9 Sep 2024 Written for Paperback


    Though bears loom large in our collective imagination, their flesh-and-blood counterparts are increasingly losing ground. Eight Bears, the debut of environmental journalist Gloria Dickie, draws on visits to key hotspots where Earth's remaining bear species come into conflict with humans. By interviewing scores of people, both conservationists and those suffering at the paws of these large predators, this nuanced and thought-provoking reportage asks whether humans and bears can coexist.

    The roots of this book go back to 2013 when Dickie started a master's in environmental journalism and midway settled on bear-human conflicts in the Rocky Mountains. Since then, she has travelled to Asia and the Americas to see first-hand all eight extant bear species. The only obvious regions missing from her story are Alaska, Russia, and Europe, all of which have large populations of bears. Even so, she has visited a formidable list of destinations. As an aside here, kudos to both the stylish bear portraits by Arjun Parikh opening each chapter, and Dickie's meticulous list of notes. The latter mentions the many people she has interviewed or corresponded with over the years and, for some sources, provide additional notes that are too detailed for the main narrative.

    The first half of the book's subtitle promises a look at the bear's mythic past. Though there is mention here of the predominance of bears in northern hemisphere cultures, the so-called circumpolar bear cult tradition, and the rarely discussed role of the bear in Peruvian culture and history, this is a minor motif in the book. Much more can be and has been said about the cultural history of bears.

    Instead, as seems unavoidable when writing about megafauna nowadays, the focus of Eight Bears is on the second half of the subtitle, their imperilled future. The outlook is grim and Dickie early on mentions that "almost everywhere I went, bears seemed to be a shadow of what they once were" (p. 8). Probably the biggest threat is habitat loss, followed closely by hunting and poaching. A historic combination of these two decimated North American bear populations under European settlement. Polar bears have become the poster children of climate change, though the disappearance of sea ice is yet another form of habitat loss. I would be remiss if I did not mention that several whistleblowers have argued that hunting poses a continued but underappreciated threat to polar bears. Asia is additionally home to some particularly grisly practices: sloth bears are beaten into submission to become dancing bears, and moon and sun bears are experiencing years of, what is effectively, surgical torture on bile farms. The former has been outlawed with a reasonable degree of success, the latter less so. From her descriptions, Dickie visits the same bile farmer and speaks to some of the same people that Nuwer interviewed for her 2018 book Poached. Little seems to have improved in the intervening years, unfortunately.

    Though bears are usually at the losing end of human-wildlife conflict, Dickie does not avoid exploring the flipside. Many readers outside of Asia might be surprised to learn that the inappropriately named sloth bear is easily the world's most dangerous bear. In India, more than 100 attacks every year kill or gruesomely injure predominantly poor, rural people, with Dickie seeking out some of the victims. In the USA, where grizzly populations are recovering, she speaks to ranchers and farmers who lose livestock to bears and frequently object that "liberal urbanites are the ones who want predators back on the landscape, but they aren't the ones suffering the consequences" (p. 177). In Canada, she visits the remarkable tourist town of Churchill at the edge of Hudson Bay which is home to equal numbers of humans and polar bears. To keep people safe while avoiding lethal control methods as much as possible, it relies on an unprecedented amount of technology. Even so, human lives are at risk, and Dickie speaks to a woman who survived a mauling.

    The chapters focusing on bears in the USA offer some of the most remarkable case studies of people attempting to live alongside bears. The century-long history of black bear management around Yosemite National Park offers "a full-scale experiment of all the ways people and bears can clash" (p. 153). After decades of park management doing things wrong (making a tourist attraction out of bears scavenging on garbage dumps, thus inadvertently training a generation of them how not to forage in the wild), they spent decades trying to do things right. A combination of bear-resistant food storage containers on campgrounds and strict enforcement of rules has trained tourists to be more mindful.

    Eight Bears becomes more thought-provoking as it progresses. Here is how it provoked mine. Dickie puts down several relevant dots on paper at different points in the book (mentioning human population growth, climate change, and the resource-hungry global supply chain) but she does not explicitly connect them to draw the contours of the larger challenge ahead. So, here be a tangent, and my attempt to connect those dots, triggered by her repeated interviewing of grizzly bear recovery coordinator Chris Servheen. Upon retirement in 2015, with grizzlies sufficiently recovered, he supported their delisting. However, by 2021, seeing how states were failing to manage grizzly populations "with maturity and grace" (p. 180), he changed his mind. This raises fundamental questions. What is the point of all our conservation efforts if we do not address the root causes that got threatened species in trouble in the first place? For me, books such as Abundant Earth and Alfie & Me have really driven home the point that, unless we change our relationship with the natural world and stop treating it as a bottomless larder, conservation is little more than a palliative solution, a stay of execution. If we restore animals to an increasingly degraded environment, to a human population that does not want to share the world with them, they will have to remain on permanent life support. To be clear, I do not think conservation is futile; it is vital. So long as it is not an end unto itself. We cannot lose sight of the bigger picture: a world hospitable to non-human animals. Servheen's call for "maturity and grace" in the context of grizzly bear management can just as well be applied to our tenancy of this planet.

    Even if you were to come away from this book without having your thoughts similarly provoked, Eight Bears is a mighty fine environmental reportage that is nuanced and well-researched. Given the often regional nature of books on bears and people, Dickie's globetrotting overview of the challenges faced by all extant bears is very welcome.
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Biography

Gloria Dickie is an award-winning journalist and is currently a global climate and environment correspondent at Reuters News Agency. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, National Geographic, Scientific American, and Wired, among others. She was nominated for a National Magazine Award, was named a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in international reporting, and has served on the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Originally from Canada, she now lives in London, England.

Coming Soon
By: Gloria Dickie(Author), Arjun Parikh(Illustrator)
250 pages, 8 b/w illustrations
NHBS
This environmental reportage charts why and how bears face an uncertain future in a human-dominated world.
Media reviews

– An Economist Best Book of 2023
– An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick
– A Science News Favorite Science Books of 2023
– A Scientific American Best Staff Read of 2023

"Vivid and engrossing [...] [Eight Bears] is not only a celebration of beardom, it is also, alas, a warning."
– Richard Adams Carey, Wall Street Journal

"A captivating and carefully considered mosaic of stories that will engross any reader interested in wildlife and wilderness."
– Jake Buehler, Science News

"A family album of the remaining varieties of bear [...] As Dickie shows, bears are in deep trouble, and her book is a compelling attempt to see through their eyes."
– Edward Posnett, Guardian

"Eight Bears explores the wonder and friction that characterise the relationship between bruins and people [...] Gloria Dickie travels around the world, bringing readers on a riveting and unique sort of bear hunt."
The Economist

"This book is not just a bear encyclopedia. Dickie wants to ask what it means to conserve a species, and in some cases how much conservation is 'enough.'"
– Katrina Gulliver, The Spectator (UK)

"Wonderful [...] [O]ffers travel to Asia and South America, exchanges with purveyors of bear bile, quotes from ursine luminaries, and an engaging mix of science and experience."
– Bill Streever, EcoLit Books

"Superb [...] [T]he crisp prose will transport readers [...] [Eight Bears] is a winning combination of travel and environmental reporting."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A cleareyed view of the world's bears and the many threats they face."
Kirkus Reviews

"Eight Bears roars about the majesty and charisma of these remarkable creatures while illuminating their escalating vulnerability in a changing environment."
Library Journal

"Laced with climate change warnings as [Gloria Dickie] explores all the ways humans both love and endanger these creatures."
Book Page

"A definitive and magisterial account. [...] This book is essential reading about the ongoing Anthropocene collision between humanity and the rest of the natural world."
– James Balog, director of Earth Vision Institute and A.D. White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University

"Eight Bears is science journalism at its best: thoroughly researched, carefully conceived, and vividly written. Highly recommended!"
– Nate Blakeslee, author of The Wolf

"Written with deep compassion and striking humor, Eight Bears provides a deep and clarifying understanding of our history of ursine kinship."
– Lyndsie Bourgon, author of Tree Thieves

"At once heartbreaking and hopeful, steeped in science and rich in poetry, Eight Bears is an intrepid investigation into the harms we've inflicted upon bears – and proof that we still have the power to save our ursine brethren."
– Ben Goldfarb, award-winning author of Eager

"With deep, on-the-ground reporting and vivid writing, Gloria Dickie takes readers from the historic mythologies that have made bears the most charismatic of megafauna to the lairs and laboratories where the future for each of the world's eight ursine species is being written. Her book is as magnificent as the animals we meet in it."
– Michael Kodas, author of Megafire

"In this insightful, absorbing book, Gloria Dickie not only introduces us to the eight remaining species of bears themselves but deftly connects the plight of each species to a much larger story: the story of our ancient, fraught, irreplaceable relationship with these astonishing animals."
– Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts

"Gloria Dickie takes us on an intimate global journey into our tangled and absorbing relationship with bears, where fur brushes close to skin, where the stakes are high, and in which the future of bears is our future as well."
– Harley Rustad, author of Lost in the Valley of Death

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