Wild
            You all remember reading a year or so back about that incident down in the southern part of the county where a bear, for the first time in anyone‚s living memory killed a five-month old infant, maybe 20 miles as the crow flies from here.  A bizarre, isolated incident, of course, but also an unimaginable horror.  We‚ll never really know why it happened.  Lots of us had plausible ideas back then but were all just speculating, trying to make sense of something so wildly improbable.
            Our area is, if not the bear capital of New York State, something pretty close to it.    Most hunting seasons more bears are killed in next-door Shandaken than anywhere else in the state. At any given time we might have 40 or more bears here in Olive, maybe twice that number. Nobody knows or is going to say if they do, and we‚ve asked.  If bears could vote, they'd be a significant voting block in town. Now that would be a caucus. Might even be a party we'd like to join if they'd have us.
            Unlike most towns, ours is a place where nearly everyone has their own experiences with bears.  They're not something we watch on TV, they come out at night and drag our garbage around, and in the morning we clean up after them like they were kids. Okay, so they sometimes annoy us.  Yet even here, nothing stops traffic like a bear in an apple tree.  Watching them, watching the graceful, almost liquid quality of their movements, we're always transfixed, always amazed by how much they move like cats, always surprised how black that shade of black really is.   It doesn't matter how many times you've seen it before.  If you stop seeing it something's missing, and it‚s not with the bear.  The other thing that's hard not to see is how much they remind us of us. 
            But they're not us.  Although they may know the garbage pick-up schedule better than you do, they're wild animals.  Projecting our romanticism onto them is as disrespectful to their nature as it is likely to be dangerous.  We have to respect the bears for what they are and we have to fear them for what they are.   Our fear will make us pay attention, and keep a safe and respectful distance.  Paying attention usually does that.
            But it's fear that also makes us want to eliminate whatever we perceive as a threat.  That's true whether it‚s bears or Bin Ladin or people who may not think like us.  Yeah, we can probably eliminate bears if that's what our civilization wants.  Fortunately, over 80 percent of Americans agree that wild creatures have a right to exist in their own time and place.  We might get lucky and eliminate Bin Ladin one day, anything's possible.  But as for making whatever or whomever we perceive as threatening go away, it's not going to happen.  And even if we thought we could make it happen, we have no idea what the result might be.   It‚s just the way complex dynamical systems like ecologies and cultures work.   The more you try to control things, the less you're likely to know how things will turn out.  Besides, as naturalist Aldo Leopold once said, the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the pieces.    
            Civilization isn't about making the world safe and sterile and free of big furry predators and things that scare us.  It's about passing along what we‚ve learned and finding ways to deal with one another.  Maybe we'll find a way to marry our technological sophistication with a Paleolithic awareness of our closeness to the earth and our connectedness with all living things.  Maybe we'll screw everything up and take the rest of the planets' species with us. But if we with all our foibles are civilization, then the bear is the wild.   It‚s not a metaphor for what we think the wild or wilderness is, it‚s the embodiment of it.  In religious language, the bear is the incarnation of the wild.  Intuitively we know that, and respect it for being what it is.    Wildness can't be captured on film or canvas or with words; in fact it can't be captured at all.  That‚s what makes it wild, the fact that it's nature operating under its own rules, free of the application of human wisdom and control. 
            Less than one half of one percent of the United States east of Denver, Colorado is administered under some kind of Wilderness designation.  It's not much, but a decent little chunk of it is here in our neighborhood.  This is our treasure to enjoy every day, and to take care of for ourselves and our children and grandchildren.   Most of us appreciate that we live in a place where you can drink the water from any stream.  But don't try doing it too many other places. Most people realize it‚s the quality of the physical, the visual, and the aesthetic environment that defines our town, along with the cultural and spiritual climate we're creating ourselves. All of those factors draw from its wildness, and from how central that connection with nature is to each of us and to our community.  
            As for the bears, most die young and not of natural causes.  If you want to protect both them and yourself, put the birdfeeder away - till the last leaves have dropped, and find a place for the garbage they can't get into. If you want to protect the wildness of the Olive woods, pay close attention to those who think we have far more wild places  than we should, or need. Sharing a world without bears is far scarier than sharing a world with them.