“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.
Spectacled, sloth, panda, moon, sun, American black, brown and polar bear: so wondrously varied are Dickie’s subjects in physical form, character, diet, range and habitat that it is sometimes hard to fathom that they all belong to the same family. Were you to invite them all to dinner you would need an impossibly varied menu (salmon, seal, insects, bromeliads, bamboo, honey) and impractical seating arrangements (a sun bear may weigh 60lb; a grizzly, 600lb). The sun and spectacled bears, shy tree dwellers, might retire early, while others, notably the sloth bear, might dominate proceedings (sloth bears are prone to aggressive behaviour, possibly due to their precarious position in the food chain, just below India’s leopards and tigers).
Despite our fondness for bears, a vein of cruelty runs through human-ursid relations, and Dickie writes in painful detail about the ways in which we have turned them into entertainment or natural resources: Roman bloodbaths in which bears fought, sometimes reluctantly, against other wild animals or prisoners; bearbaiting, a popular pastime in medieval England, which was only banned by parliament in 1835; and bear “dancing”, a practice from which the Kalandar nomads of northern India historically made their living. In one chapter Dickie travels to Vietnam to learn about bear bile “harvesting”, a practice that resembles a form of torture; Asiatic black and sun bears are held in cages, their bile extracted from punctured gall bladders (it is used in traditional medicine in some Asian countries to reduce inflammation and lower cholesterol).
Although hideous, the destruction wrought by such practices pales in comparison to that caused by habitat loss and climate change. According to Dickie, only three bears – American black, brown and panda – may survive into the next century. Theirs is a future not just characterised by loss, but by uncanny changes in behaviour and biology: Dickie writes of black bears that no longer hibernate, pandas that cannot survive in the wild and “pizzlies” (the offspring of polar bears and grizzlies).
The book is full of brave scientists and conservationists, but their acts seem dwarfed by the scale of these problems – problems that challenge the nature of human heroism and the utility of storytelling itself. Towards the end of the book one Canadian polar bear expert tells Dickie that it is “vainglorious to study the natural history of polar bears” given “how much they are screwed up”; to pause to admire the fur or claws of a bear is akin to lingering on a severed artery. Yet, thankfully for her readers, Dickie does pause to capture the majesty of these creatures as they navigate our crowded and warming world. Even epitaphs can have their beauty.
• Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future by Gloria Dickie is published by WW Norton & Co (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
