"Just another flavor of meat"

In the book, you also mention that you're uneasy with the idea that the only way predators can be protected is if they're hunted, whether they're the bears in Romania or the crocodiles of Australia. What about that idea bothers you?

There are some very intelligent and experienced people who would argue that if you want to save any endangered species on the planet, you've got to put a commercial value on it. And that will provide an incentive for people to protect the habitat and to allow this thing to continue to reproduce, and therefore that it will continue to exist. That it's more effective than simply saying: "It's off limits. It's completely protected. We're going to lock people away from it." Because then it has no commercial value, and the protections will erode and be circumvented and the critter will suffer decline and eventual extinction.

So, the forest will be harvested for timber if you don't give people a reason to preserve the forest because you can get something else valuable out of it, like bears for trophy hunting.

Right. Good and intelligent people make that argument. I'm not completely comfortable with that argument, partly on aesthetic as much as rational grounds, and partly because I don't think it necessarily applies to all types of species.

For instance, the Siberian tiger in the Russian Far East. It's a very different kind of creature from the saltwater crocodile. It reproduces much more slowly. It needs big areas of land for habitat that is going to be very valuable in other ways for other potential partial harvest.

And I'm just not persuaded that the notion of auctioning off the rights to kill tigers, and then distributing the money to the local people, is the best way to preserve this ecosystem with the tiger in it.

There are other cases where the commercial-harvest argument has been taken to an extreme, like the bears of Romania, where it's being used and it's working in the sense that there are now 10 times as many brown bears in the mountains of Romania as there are in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

Why are there so many bears there?

The Carpathian Mountains in Romania now support a little over 5,000 brown bears. The greater Yellowstone ecosystem supports maybe 400 or 500. Romania, which we think of as this blighted Eastern bloc, post-communist country -- how could it possibly have 5,000 brown bears?

The answer is complicated. It partially has to do with Nicolae Ceausescu having been dictator there for 25 years and fancying himself a great bear hunter. It partially has to do with the Romanian forest department's long tradition of nurturing bears, essentially farming bears. And it has to do now with the commercial value of those bears when the hunting rights are sold to foreign big-game hunters.

So, bear trophy skins are now an important export product from Romania. There are these 2,200 hunting areas in the Romanian forest, many of which contain bears and bear habitat. In each area there is a gamekeeper responsible for giving the bears supplemental feed, for observing the bears' behavior, and then essentially for targeting the bears and delivering them, almost the way a pimp would, to these foreign hunters.

And it's not hunting in the sense that we would consider hunting in the U.S. It's baiting them to artificial food and then shooting them from a blind.

So is autocratic oppression good for alpha predators?

That's one of the ironies. In this case, and probably in several other cases, democracy is not conducive to conservation, and autocracy has been conducive to conservation. Then, how are we liberal, right-thinking greenies supposed to feel about that? A little bit uncomfortable.

This is a California question, because I'm in California. Do you think that there is any chance that grizzly bears could ever come back to the state?

It's not impossible. Some people thought it would be impossible to bring wolves back to Yellowstone, and then there were a few persistent, very patient, very politic folks who did the necessary political work on the ground to make that happen. There are people now working on something called the Wildlands Project, who are trying to knit together the last well-preserved wild lands throughout North America into a continuous sort of network of interconnected reserves, protected areas and corridors.

One of their projects is the so-called Y-to-Y project, the Yellowstone to Yukon project, which involves connecting land between the great national parks and wilderness areas to establish a continuous corridor of livable wild landscape for big and small animals all the way from the Yellowstone ecosystem to the Yukon. There are also networks in California that could be reconnected. Reconnecting wild landscapes is an important part of preserving any big creature, but especially big predators.

Beyond conserving land, you argue that if these predators are going to survive, we have to learn to live among them, not just preserve separate areas for them.

Right. We have to find models and frames of mind that allow us to share landscape with these creatures, because we want so much landscape, and because they need so much landscape. The cases that I focused on were cases where there had been an overlap between human populations and predator populations. And I tried to suggest that it's possible, but it involves some very particular arrangements and also some altered expectations.

One thing about big predators and humans is that livestock is where the rubber meets the road. That's where the conflict appears more quickly and more severely than anywhere else. So, in North America, for instance, the reason that grizzlies have been eliminated from most of their range, and that wolves were almost entirely exterminated, and that cougars were depleted for a while, although they've come back, was not really because humans were so afraid of these creatures, but because we had populated the landscape with exceptionally stupid, vulnerable prey -- namely, sheep and cows.

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