Few people -- particularly in the North -- are neutral about grizzly bears. Here almost everyone has a bear story, and strong feelings about these animals.

Grizzlies are powerful symbols, inspiring emotions ranging from reverence and awe to fear and loathing.

This complex stew of emotions and perceptions about grizzlies can pose real challenges for resource managers, who are trained to take a scientific approach to management.

When they set out to conserve grizzly bears, putting the animals' biological needs first, managers can end up being blind-sided by the wide-ranging concerns of humans that live in the same area.

Douglas Clark, now a doctoral candidate at Wilfrid Laurier University, ran into this scenario head-on while working as a warden in Kluane National Park. When he arrived there in 2000, the park was just finishing a major study on grizzly bear ecology and wanted to use the information to develop a plan for managing bears in the region.

"The process started off great and then it fell apart, and that left me wondering why," he says.

That experience made Clark reconsider his own ideas about science-based management, and helped spark the idea for his doctoral thesis. He is studying the mix of social and cultural influences that can make grizzly bear management such a challenge, particularly in the North where many different people have a say in the matter.

This past summer he interviewed people in three different areas where grizzly bear management has become contentious: Jasper National Park; Baker Lake, Nunavut; and the Kluane region. His research is not finished, but some findings are already becoming clear.

"I found a common theme in all of these areas is the definite tension between the viewpoints and values of local people, who live with and interact with bears, and policy makers. In all fairness, it is those local people who are most affected. They are generally asked to bear the risks and costs of having grizzly bears as neighbours."

Grizzly bears are difficult animals to manage at the best of times. They have huge home ranges, which makes habitat protection a challenge, and they do not bear many young, so their populations are particularly susceptible to decline.

There is also a great deal of variation in people's willingness to tolerate grizzly bears. In Baker Lake, people say that the number of grizzlies has increased and the bears are more frequently breaking into cabins and digging into people's hunting caches of caribou meat.

Some people there want hunting quotas on grizzlies increased, so residents are gathering traditional knowledge on bears in the area to help them make such decisions. Clark says their concerns are easy to understand when one learns about the difficult times people in the community have endured.

"People in Baker Lake have known starvation within recent memory. I talked to people who remember being unable to feed their families, and I heard some tragic stories of those times. So competition for food is not something that they want to tolerate."

Clark hopes that grizzly bear management in Canada never deteriorates to the level that it has reached in the United States, where most plans end up gridlocked by controversy.

"Issues are tremendously polarized in the Lower 48 states where bears are managed by the federal government under the Endangered Species Act. Grizzlies take it right on the chin for being a tool of the feds, used to lock up public lands. Some of those problems are creeping into Canada now as well."

Grizzlies in the Jasper area already seem to be the victims of a backlash. Many controversial land use decisions in that area have been based on bear conservation, and around the nearby community of Hinton, at least nine bears have been shot illegally over the last five years.

"It appears that someone feels disenfranchised because bears are being shot at a frightening rate and the majority of those bears are females. It is fairly clear that this is some sort of reprisal," says Clark.

But, despite these problems, Clark is encouraged by the amount of respect and concern that he regularly hears people express for grizzly bears -- regardless of how they think they should be managed. Aboriginal people also have ideas for co-existing with grizzly bears which probably date back to times when people did not have guns for protecting themselves.

"A number of interviewees said that people and bears have to take turns on salmon streams on a daily basis. People should be off the river by late afternoon and then it is the bear's turn."

Clark hopes that his work will give resource managers some extra tools and techniques for helping to protect grizzly bears, and that creative thinking will help assure a future for these animals in Canada.

"I am optimistic that as more people become involved in conservation decisions -- beyond just scientists and managers -- we can learn to collectively open our minds up and we will be able to find solutions. Quite frankly I think that bears and ecosystems are more resilient than we give them credit for."

Douglas Clark can be reached via email at clar2207@wlu.ca.