2919. Charlie Russell, Who Befriended Bears, Dies at 76

By Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, May 14, 2018 

Charlie Russell in an undated photograph with a young grizzly bear at a lake on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. Photo: Maureen Enns Studio Ltd. 

Charlie Russell, a Canadian naturalist who researched grizzly bears by living among them and argued for a view of the animals based on coexistence rather than fear, died on May 7 in Calgary, Alberta. He was 76.

The cause was complications after surgery, his brother Gordon said.

Mr. Russell was outspoken in his belief that the view most people — including many of his fellow naturalists — held of the bear was wrong.

“I believe that it’s an intelligent, social animal that is completely misunderstood,” he said in a PBS “Nature” documentary about his work. To prove the point, he and his partner at the time, Maureen Enns, a photographer and artist, spent months each year for a decade living among bears in a remote part of eastern Russia.

They wrote several books based on those experiences and were the subject of documentaries and countless articles. Mr. Russell’s ideas, though, were not embraced by everyone.

Some fellow naturalists worried that they might lead people to be unwisely casual around wild animals. And in Russia, Mr. Russell ran afoul of criminal elements and corrupt politicians tied to bear poaching.

His and Ms. Enns’s experiment on the Kamchatka Peninsula ended heartbreakingly. When they returned there for the 2003 season, they found that almost all the bears they had become acquainted with were gone, presumably slaughtered. A bear gallbladder — the prize for poachers, valued in some countries as an aphrodisiac and general health remedy — had been nailed to their cabin wall, like some kind of warning.

“The bears were killed so we would go home,” Mr. Russell told The Globe and Mail in July 2003. “It is a brutal ending to our research.”

But he continued to promote his views, and they have influenced policy and practice in areas where bears and people encounter one another.

“His work with bears was groundbreaking,” Kevin Van Tighem, an author and former superintendent of Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies, said by email, “and he has changed the landscape of possibilities in which bears, and humans will have to find their common future.”

Mr. Russell with a young grizzly. He was outspoken in his belief that the view most people held of bears was wrong.

Andrew Charles Russell was born on Aug. 19, 1941, in Pincher Creek, Alberta. His parents, Andy and Kay (Riggall) Russell, ran an outfitting business; his father led guided horseback adventures into the mountains near the family ranch, trips that might last three weeks.

Andy Russell was also a noted naturalist and writer, and when he decided to make a documentary about the white subspecies of black bears on Princess Royal Island in British Columbia, he took Charlie and his brother Richard along as assistants. The experience, Charlie said later, helped him begin to think differently about bears.

The three found that they were mostly capturing footage of bears’ backsides as the animals ran from them — until they left their rifles behind when they went out to film.

“The three of us eventually came to the conclusion that bears could sense that we were not a threat,” Mr. Russell told The Edmonton Journal in 2002, “that somehow they realized that without a gun, we would do them no harm.”

Mr. Russell became a rancher on the family land in Alberta, and he began to wonder if the traditional rancher view of bears as an enemy was fair. Mr. Van Tighem said that Mr. Russell, who had no college education, was not interested in studying bears in the usual way.

“Anybody can become a bear ‘expert’ by reading about them and sitting through lectures at a university,” Mr. Van Tighem said. “Charlie wasn’t that kind of expert. He didn’t see bears in the way that other bear researchers might — as objects of study. He saw them as his teachers.”

But to really get at the innate nature of bears, he needed to find ones that had no history of negative encounters with people. That is what sent him and Ms. Enns to Kamchatka, which had been off limits to civilians for military reasons during the Cold War and thus was full of bears that had had no contact with humans.

They first scouted the area in 1994. In 1996, Russian officials granted them permission to build a cabin near a remote lake. They flew in every year, using a small plane Mr. Russell had built from a kit, and stay for four or five months.

The bears grew to know them, Mr. Russell said, and became comfortable enough with them that sometimes a few would come to the cabin and linger to see if he and Ms. Enns wanted to go for a walk with them.

The couple also won permission to bring in three orphaned cubs from a Russian zoo to try to reintroduce them to the wild, and they succeeded despite the skepticism of some naturalists. They eventually worked with a total of 10 orphaned cubs.

While elsewhere in the world naturalists were studying bears by tranquilizing them and putting trackers on them, or doing chemical analysis of their blood and bodily wastes, Mr. Russell wanted no part of that.

Mr. Russell said of the bear, “I believe that it’s an intelligent, social animal that is completely misunderstood.”

“I don’t care how many miles a bear walks in a day or how many mouthfuls of grass it eats,” he told Backpacker magazine. He cared, he said, about only two things: what annoyed bears and what didn’t.

His conclusion that bears were not naturally hostile to people earned him enemies among hunters.

“A lot of it is because the hunting culture needs to promote an animal as fearful so that people can feel brave about killing it,” he told the Australian newspaper The Age in 2009.

His live-with-the-bears approach also drew criticism from some wildlife officials. “He’s teaching people how to get mauled,” one said.

Sometimes people were indeed mauled — most memorably in 2003, when another bear advocate, Timothy Treadwell, and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed and partly eaten by a bear in Alaska.

Mr. Russell, though, had always advocated taking precautions, like carrying pepper spray or using electric fencing, and had criticized Mr. Treadwell for not doing so.

“I have always understood that for the bears’ sake it was very important that I did not add to their problems by making a mistake myself that caused me to be hurt or killed,” he wrote on his website in response to those deaths. That episode, he said, played into the hands of hunting interests, which were starting to lose the public-relations war as bear-viewing tourism grew.

“Hunters desperately needed Timothy’s blunder to put the danger back into bear encounters,” he wrote.

Books by Mr. Russell and Ms. Enns include “Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka” (2002) and “Grizzly Seasons: Life With the Brown Bears of Kamchatka” (2003).

Their relationship ended in the aftermath of the slaughter of the Kamchatka bears in 2003, which left Mr. Russell with the fear that, by teaching the bears to trust humans, he had inadvertently conditioned them not to run from the hunters.

“I can see how easily they were killed,” he said. “That’s my nightmare image.”

Mr. Russell’s marriage to Margaret Hynde ended in divorce in the early 1970s. In addition to his brothers, he is survived by a sister, Anne Raabe, and a granddaughter.

Mr. Van Tighem said Mr. Russell’s influence went beyond changing views of bears. He said that Mr. Russell also built bridges in Canada between ranchers and conservationists, and between ranchers and park officials, resulting in land preservation initiatives and “a whole new era of collaborative approaches to landscape conservation in the west.”

2649. Under an Elm-Tree, Or, Thoughts in the Country-Side

By William Morris, Commonweal, July 6, 1889

"William Morris, Poet, Artist, Socialist." 
Springfield Republican, 11 Oct. 1896: 13.

Midsummer in the country — here you may walk between the fields and hedges that are as it were one huge nosegay for you, redolent of bean-flowers and clover and sweet hay and elder-blossom. The cottage gardens are bright with flowers, the cottages themselves mostly models of architecture in their way. Above them towers here and there the architecture proper of days bygone, when every craftsman was an artist and brought definite intelligence to bear upon his work. Man in the past, nature in the present, seem to be bent on pleasing you and making all things delightful to your senses; even the burning dusty road has a look of luxury as you lie on the strip of roadside green, and listen to the blackbirds singing, surely for your benefit, and, I was going to say as if they were paid to do it, but I was wrong, for as it is they seem to be doing their best.

And all, or let us say most things, are brilliantly alive. The shadowy bleak in the river down yonder, which is — ignorant of the fate that Barking Reach is preparing for its waters — sapphire blue under this ruffling wind and cloudless sky, and barred across here and there with the pearly white-flowered water-weeds, every yard of its banks a treasure of delicate design, meadowsweet and dewberry and comfrey and bed-straw — from the bleak in the river, amongst the labyrinth of grasses, to the starlings busy in the new shorn fields, or about the grey ridges of the hay, all is eager, and I think all is happy that is not anxious.

What is that thought that has come into one’s head as one turns round in the shadow of the roadside elm? A country-side worth fighting for if that were necessary, worth taking trouble to defend its peace. I raise my head, and betwixt the elm-boughs I see far off a grey buttressed down rising over the sea of green and blue-green meadows and fields, and dim on the flank of it over its buttresses can see a quaint figure made by cutting the short turf away from the chalk of the hill-side; a figure which represents a White Horse according to the heraldry of the period, eleven hundred years ago. Hard by that hill-side the country people of the day did verily fight for the peace and loveliness of this very country where I lie, and coming back from their victory scored the image of the White Horse as a token of their valour, and, who knows? perhaps as an example for their descendants to follow.

For a little time it makes the blood stir in me as I think of that, but as I watch the swallows flitting past me betwixt hedge and hedge, or mounting over the hedge in an easy sweep and hawking over the bean-field beyond, another thought comes over me. These live things I have been speaking of, bleak and swallows and starlings and blackbirds, are all after their kind beautiful and graceful, not one of them is lacking in its due grace and beauty; but yesterday as I was passing by a hay-field there was an old red-roan cart-horse looking seriously but good-humouredly at me from a gap in the hedge, and I stopped to make his acquaintance; and I am sorry to say that in spite of his obvious merits he was ugly, Roman-nosed, shambling, ungainly: yet how useful he had been — for others. Also the same day (but not in the same field) I saw some other animals, male and female, with whom also I made acquaintance, for the male ones at least were thirsty. And these animals, both male and female, were ungraceful, unbeautiful, as ungainly as the roan cart-horse; yet they were obviously useful, for they were making hay before my eyes. Then I bethought me that as I had seen starlings in Hertfordshire that were of the same race as the Thames side starlings, so I had seen or heard of featherless two-legged animals of the same race as the thirsty creatures in the hay-field; they had been sculptured in the frieze of the Parthenon, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, imagined in literature as the heroes and heroines of romance; nay, when people had created in their minds a god of the universe, creator of all that was, is, or shall be, they were driven to represent him as one of that same race to which the thirsty haymakers belonged; as though supreme intelligence and the greatest measure of gracefulness and beauty and majesty were at their highest in the race of those ungainly animals.

Under the elm-tree these things puzzle me, and again my thoughts return to the bold men of that very country-side, who, coming back from Ashdown field, scored that White Horse to look down for ever on the valley of the Thames; and I thought it likely that they had this much in common with the starlings and the bleak, that there was more equality amongst them than we are used to now, and that there would have been more models available amongst them for Woden than one would be like to find in the Thames-side meadows.

Under the elm-tree I don’t ask myself whether that is owing to the greater average intelligence of men at the present day, and to the progress of humanity made since the time of the only decent official that England ever had, Alfred the Great, to wit; for indeed the place and time are not favourable to such questions, which seem sheer nonsense amidst of all that waste of superabundant beauty and pleasure held out to men who cannot take it or use it, unless some chance rich idler may happen to stray that way. My thoughts turn back to the haymakers and their hopes, and I remember that yesterday morning I said to a bystander, ‘Mr So-and-so (the farmer) is late in sending his men into the hay-field’.

Quoth he, ‘You see, sir, Mr So-and-so is short-handed’.

‘How’s that?’ said I, pricking up my Socialist ears.

‘Well, sir,’ said he, ‘these men are the old men and women bred in the village, and pretty much past work; and the young men with more work in them, they do think that they ought to have more wages than them, and Mr So-and-so, he won’t pay it. So you see, he be short-handed.’

As I turned away, thinking over all the untold, untellable details of misery that lay within this shabby, sordid story, another one met my ears. A labourer of the village comes to a farmer and says to him that he really can’t work for 9s. a week any more, but must have 10s. Says the farmer, ‘Get your 10s. somewhere else then’. The man turns away to two month’s lack of employment, and then comes back begging for his 9s. slavery.

Commonplace stories of unsupported strikes, you will say. Indeed they are, if not they would be easily remedied; the casual tragedy cut short; the casual wrongdoer branded as a person out of humanity. But since they are so commonplace -

What will happen, say my gloomy thoughts to me under the elm tree, with all this country beauty so tragically incongruous in its richness with the country misery which cannot feel its existence? Well, if we must still be slaves and slaveholders, it will not last long; the Battle of Ashdown will be forgotten for the last commercial crisis; Alfred’s heraldry will yield to the lions of the half crown. The architecture of the crafts-gildsmen will tumble down, or be ‘restored’ for the benefit of the hunters of picturesque, who, hopeless themselves, are incapable of understanding the hopes of past days, or the expression of them. The beauty of the landscape will be exploited and artificialized for the sake of the villa-dweller’s purses where it is striking enough to touch their jaded appetites; but in quiet places like this it will vanish year by year (as indeed it is now doing) under the attacks of the most grovelling commercialism.

Yet think I to myself under the elm-tree, whatever England, once so beautiful, may become, it will be good enough for us if we set no hope before us but the continuance of a population of slaves and slave-holders for the country which we pretend to love, while we use it and our sham love for it as a stalking-horse for robbery of the poor at home and abroad. The worst outward ugliness and vulgarity will be good enough for such sneaks and cowards.

Let me turn the leaf and find a new picture, or my holiday is spoilt; and don’t let some of my Socialist friends with whom I have wrangled about the horrors of London, say, ‘This is all that can come of your country life’. For as the round of the seasons under our system of landlord farmer and labourer produces in the country pinching parsimony and dullness, so does the ‘excitement of intellectual life’ in the cities produce the slum under the capitalist system of turning out and selling market wares not for use but for waste. Turn the page I say. The hayfield is a pretty sight this month seen under the elm, as the work goes forward on the other side of the way opposite to the bean-field, till you look at the haymakers closely. 

Suppose the haymakers were friends working for friends on land which was theirs, as many as were needed, with leisure and hope ahead of them instead of hopeless toil and anxiety, need their useful labour for themselves and their neighbours cripple and disfigure them and knock them out of the shape of men fit to represent the Gods and Heroes? And if under such conditions a new Ashdown had to be fought (against capitalist robbers this time), the new White Horse would look down on the home of men as wise as the starlings in their equality, and so perhaps as happy.