Bear with Me 2.0

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating (pun fully intended).

The seasons roll round as they inevitably do, flipping like advertising cards for local businesses in those old restaurant clocks that used to hang in the wood-paneled eateries we ate in as kids, when we traveled across rural Canada or to small town America when that was a thing, careful to order French fries versus chips. 

Here we are again in late spring eliding into summer, mercifully having just received some well-needed rain. This year our shoulder season was almost nonexistent, skiing one weekend and mountain biking the next. And, as we shift into our spring and summer activities our cohabitants on this spectacular landscape are doing the same, most notably bears. 

Wildlife interactions are not unique to Fernie. Drive through residential Cranbrook or Kimberley and see how the deer have been conditioned to use crosswalks. We do, as a blessing and as a challenge of living in this amazing environment, share the landscape with a significant number of bears, both black bears and grizzlies. Regrettably over the years some of our bear population, mostly black bears, but not exclusively, have become habituated to the snatch and grab opportunity of municipal garbage cans. 

Fifty years ago, it was a common evening’s entertainment to travel to the dump as a family and watch the bears roaming over the mounded garbage, no fences, no separation. Occasionally a fight would break out between animals. I remember feeling queasy at the unfiltered instinctual violence of it. The power and speed and unmitigated aggression of animals that moments earlier looked so docile, cuddly and friend-shaped even. I expect witnessing these displays of raw power had a significant impact on the imagination of ten-year-old me and have played no small part in the bear anxiety I feel on the trails today. 

The management of solid waste has evolved significantly, if incrementally, over the decades since the gladiatorial displays of bears on the town dump. There has been significant evolution, from fencing the landfill to ultimately moving to the RDEK-run transfer station, from standard trash cans through to animal resistant containers to our current tripartite arrangement of animal-resistant waste bins, recycling bins, and new bear-resistant organics bins. There are a couple of things to me that have always held true: the system is not perfect, but it has become incrementally better over time, and that people have always played the most important role in municipal waste management.

Responsibility in a safe and civil society is a matrix. While the City of Fernie has ultimate responsibility for solid waste collection it, like many of our processes, relies on the responsible behaviour of residents in compliance with a bylaw which provides guidance on the expectation of household waste management and that is designed to do things like helping us avoid creating bear attractants. This is also why we have bylaws governing water usage, noise, and unsightly premises and a host of others that help us collectively share this space at the wild valley bottom with each other and our wild cohabitants. 

Bears were resident in this valley long before these mining and tourist towns sprung up to take advantage of everything this area has to offer. But like everything—resource extraction, tourism, residential development—if we do not act responsibly, we risk squandering what brought us here and what keeps us here. Securing your residential waste and organics (to a post even if you do not have garage or a shed) and putting it out at the appropriate time are the first steps in avoiding a dire outcome for our long residing neighbours.