"Eight Bears" by Gloria Dickie

Journalist Gloria Dickie, based in London where she serves as an environmental correspondent for Reuters, offers a superb study of the eight surviving species of bears with "Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future." Recounting her travels in search of spectacled bears in Ecuador and Peru, sloth bears in rural India, pandas in China, sun and moon bears in South Vietnam, black and grizzly bears in the western U.S., and polar bears in the Canadian arctic, Dickie details the threats faced by each and profiles the conservationists who protect them. Along with describes the horrific conditions under which caged sun and moon bears have their bile harvested for use in traditional Vietnamese medicine, she notes how sloth bears, the most dangerous of all bears, are facing habitat challenges in heavily populated India.While the eight species live in different environments there's one thing they have in common: they're all in trouble. The panda is protected in captivity but is increasingly rare in the wild, she pointed out. The polar bear, meanwhile, is literally on thin ice when it comes to its future.Dickie relates how bears have been mistreated over history despite occupying a special place in the culture. It's hard to come up with a bad bear literary figure with  heroes such as Rupert, Paddington and Winnie the Pooh on the scene.Baloo in Kipling's "Jungle Book" is described as a brown bear but rightfully should have been a sloth bear, states Dickie. "No other bear species inhabits the forests of Madhya Pradesh. He would likely have eaten termites and mahua (flowers), not nuts and roots. And Baloo would have been more inclined to disembowel Mowgli than to teach him the ways of the jungle."Steve Tarter recalled a statement from Dickie's book that sums up the predicament bears face with a habitat that continues to shrink: "Without wilderness the grizzly would cease to exist. And without the grizzly, wilderness is tamed, deprived of its monarch."