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The Social Life of Arctic Grizzlies

A semi loomed in my rearview mirror as I glimpsed a flash of blond fur by the side of the Dalton Highway. A grizzly! With the juggernaut on my tail, I missed several chances to turn around, before finally skidding into a pull off. Heading back north, I felt exhilarated to see the bear remained visible.

I hung back, giving the animal space, watching through my binoculars as the grizzly tore up the tundra looking for roots of Hedysarum alpinum, known as sweetvetch. These “wild potato” plants thrive in disturbed areas like verges, drawing bears close to the Haul Road, where massive trucks thunder to and from the Prudhoe Bay oilfields.

The bear paused, as if in thought, and ambled over to a pair of orange signs. Sniffing them, the grizzly seemed curious, before returning to its work, pawing at the recently thawed earth.

The next day, after the bear was only a rumor of holes on the landscape, I approached the signs to see what had caught the grizzly’s eye (or nose!): “WARNING BURIED FIBER OPTIC CABLE IN THIS VICINITY: CALL BEFORE YOU DIG.”

Bears loom large in Alaska’s tourism industry as a symbol of wilderness, because Americans see them as, well, wild. Grizzlies are on that other side of “The Last Frontier” – where giant beasts and forbidding mountains remain untamed, beyond humanity. But even in “remote” places like Arctic Alaska, bears’ lives are shaped by their interface with people and vice versa.

Animals pose all kinds of resistances to human plans, policies and regulations – ignoring injunctions against excavating our internet connections. Crews building the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline in the 1970s faced with bears that became habituated to human food, including “property damage, work stoppages and threats to human safety.”

We also disturb Bear Country, meddling with animals’ natural patterns and behaviors. We build highways through their habitat and release carbon emissions that make natural processes in their home ranges more volatile.

But human and bears don’t always work at cross-purposes.

While at Toolik Field Station this summer, I shadowed Washington State University PhD student Ellery Vincent as she collected plants to better understand bears’ diets. Ellery knew what to look for because she’s put video camera collars on several bears in the area. In now , she’s watched grizzly snouts uproot sweetvetch, munch lingonberries and scavenge carcasses. She acknowledges bears are “collaborators” in her innovative research.

Another study, in nearby Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, surprised scientists when GPS-collared grizzlies concentrated around headwaters of the Kobuk and Koyukuk rivers. The bears’ movements looked like they were fishing, but these streams were not on Alaska’s list of salmon-supporting waters, which receive specific environmental protections.

Researchers later verified that the bears had indeed led them to previously unrecognized salmon streams. A described bears as “salmon sleuths,” who provided policymakers with “valuable information to improve conservation efforts.”

As a social scientist, my presence at Toolik Field Station, which is run by University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology, mystified some of my natural science colleagues. Academia mirrors a wider tendency to see human society as separate from nonhuman ecology.

But the lives of people and wildlife of northern Alaska have entwined for innumerable generations. Grizzlies affect human social life by challenging our anthropocentric expectations. Bears can cause problems for us if we don’t plan our policies, infrastructure and waste disposal with them in mind. We can also harm them and the ecologies on which they depend.

If we pay close attention to bears and their habitat, we can find ways to be interspecies partners in science and conservation.

For more reflections on the intersections between humans and bears, check out my new article “” in the peer-reviewed journal Global Policy.

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Matthew Breay Bolton is a professor of political science and environmental studies at Pace University in New York City and author of Political Minefields: The Struggle against Automated Killing. His current work focuses on the challenges and possibilities within bear and human interactions across North America.