Does a Bear Shit in the Woods? Not in Germany

On a cold day in January, I (along with half of Britain) sat glued to the telly and watched, enchanted, as a Northern Bottlenose whale who had made her way up the Thames and into the heart of Central London several days earlier was harnessed and lifted gingerly onto a barge in an attempt to save her life. The first Bottlenose spotted in the Thames since 1913, the purpose of her impromptu visit to the city was not entirely clear. Some speculated she’d taken a wrong turn at Margate and got lost; others saw it as a rather maudlin suicide attempt; still others surmised she’d come up for a day’s sightseeing, like many an urban tourist before her. Whatever her intent, she was not long for this world. A Herculean rescue effort mounted by the British Divers Marine Life Rescue, observed by thousands of people gathered at points along the Thames and hundreds of thousands more on continuous, multiple-channel news coverage, ended – tragically for those who found the episode ineluctably captivating, none-too-soon for those who found it unbearably twee, and definitively for the whale herself – when she expired in convulsions aboard the barge that was transporting her for release into the Thames Estuary.

With understandably more ambivalence, the German public spent the latter half of June tracking the exploits of a wild brown bear as he toured the Bavarian countryside, snacking on sheep and chickens along the way. Believed to be the first wild bear to wander freely in Germany since the early nineteenth century, “Bruno” sauntered across the Alps from Italy, where he had been released as part of a wildlife restoration project, making for a temporary diversion from the World Cup until he was shot dead on June 26. Initially greeted with enthusiasm by both the public and German authorities, Bruno quickly wore out his welcome when he began tearing into local livestock, belying initial claims that he would keep largely to himself and pose no threat to the human population. After a futile attempt to bring him down with tranquilizers, officials declared open season on the “Problembär,” as Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber aptly called him, and old Bruno was subsequently laid low by a hunter whose identity has not been disclosed.

And with good reason. Bruno’s reckless sojourn across Bavaria quickly elevated him to the status of celebrity with a widespread following, including a website devoted to his adventures in which groupies could follow developing news stories, purchase Bruno-embossed commodities, partake in a Bruno hunt (shooting tranquilizer darts, not bullets), and express their affection (and later, mourning) in a Bruno blog. His execution, while greeted with relief by some, sparked an angry outcry among Bruno’s fans, with several conservation groups calling the shooting both unnecessary and illegal and the regional SPD demanding the resignation of Bavarian Environment Minister Werner Schnappauf.

The untimely demise of both Bruno and the Bottlenose are symptomatic of the fickle relationship between wilderness and people in the West, a relationship that has swung like a pendulum from what philosopher Andrew Light (1995) has called the classical to the romantic: from wilderness as a repository of fear, dread, and corruption, an ancient view reflected in our efforts to tame and civilize wild spaces and their denizens, to wilderness as a place of beauty, purity and innocence, a more recent attitude reflected in our efforts to restore and preserve wilderness and wildlife we previously sought to destroy. In the classical view, we are the noble and civilized ideal, vulnerable to the siren call of the Panpipe and the brutal savagery of the primeval wood. In the romantic view, nature and humanity have exchanged places; we are the threatening and brutal menace, poised to contaminate nature’s purity with our sullying presence. Far from the dehumanized place we often imagine it to be, wilderness is a thoroughly human fabrication in both views, shifting according to our own relationship to it:

Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem (Cronon 1996:69-70).

That nothing is “natural” is a familiar refrain by now, but Roderick Nash (1982) and many others have put materialist legs under this social construction by pointing out that our change of cultural heart stems from a change of geographical circumstance: we couldn’t love wilderness and the various “savages” that inhabit it (from wild bears to wild Indians) until we had tamed it, rendering it docile with the axe, the plough, and the gun. As with so many “others” first neutralized in fear and then embraced in contrition through the process of colonization, wilderness became palatable only once we removed its sting. Yet with the taming comes a certain sense of loss, and wildlife restoration projects such as the one that set Bruno free in the Alps are a product of our niggling fear that taking the unpredictability out of wilderness robs it of its very essence.

Bruno is one of several recent reminders that we can’t often have it both ways: wilderness, if it is to preserve even a semblance of wild, must necessarily retain its bite, or dwindle to a pale mockery of the very idea of itself. The classical and romantic views of wilderness aren’t as mutually exclusive as they might at first seem; the latter requires wilderness to retain some characteristics of the former in order to maintain faith in its own illusion. As a consequence, our uneasy negotiation between the two often turns around and bites us in the ass – sometimes literally, as activist and self-professed “bear-whisperer” Timothy Treadwell learned too late, succumbing to a gruesome death by grizzly attack in Katmai National Park, Alaska: a wilderness romantic caught in the jaws of a classical wilderness menace.

Bruno’s sad tale reminds me of another bear that once wandered the German landscape, if only in the twilight realm of bedtime stories. In the Grimm fairy tale “Snow White and Rose Red,” two sisters befriend a talking bear who comes to their cottage door one stormy night and begs for shelter from the swirling snow. The girls take him in and dust him off, then frolic with him before the fire until he begs them to be gentle and spare his life. He leaves the next morning, but not before catching a bit of his fur on the door handle, revealing a flash of gold beneath. The bear, of course, is no mere bruin, but a prince cursed by a wicked dwarf who has stolen his treasure and bewitched him. At the end of the tale, he kills the dwarf and sets himself free, then marries Snow White and sets his brother up with Rose Red.

Whatever the meaning of this tale in its original context, in the modern world the Bear Prince is an apt metaphor for our ambivalent if hopeful attitude toward wilderness. In Bruno, many saw gold, a princely treasure unjustly stripped from the landscape in the name of “progress” and righteously restored in spirit of paternalistic contrition that accompanies the benevolent dictatorship through which humanity appears to rule this planet. Our own control, of course, is a grand illusion, as we are reminded when nature – whether we call it Bruno or Katrina – escapes the wilderness we have created to contain it, disregards our feeble dictates, and shits wherever it pleases.

Citations:

Cronon, William, 1996. The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. In William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co.

Light, Andrew, 1995. Urban Wilderness. In David Rothenberg, ed. Wild Ideas. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Nash, Roderick,1982. Wilderness and the American Mind. Third Edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.