Gloria Dickie is an award-winning journalist and the author of Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future. She is currently a global climate and environment correspondent at Reuters News Agency, based in London. Dickie has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Wired magazine, Scientific American magazine, Al Jazeera, Public Radio International, The Atlantic, Outside, Columbia Journalism Review, Mongabay, Yale Environment 360, and Science News, among others. She was a 2022 finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, a 2021 finalist for the Covering Climate Now awards in the Breaking News category, a 2019 nominee for a National Magazine Award, and the inaugural winner of the 2017 Food Sustainability Media Award, Print. As a foreign correspondent and magazine writer, Dickie has reported from more than 15 countries and six continents, along the way receiving generous support from the United Nations Press Foundation; National Geographic Society; Overseas Press Club; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Oregon State University; University of Alaska Fairbanks; National Tropical Botanical Garden; Fund for Investigative Journalism; Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources; and the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity.
EB: How did you first begin writing about animals? Why bears?
GD: I was always an animal kid. I loved watching the backyard squirrels and the birds coming into the feeders. I grew up in Ontario, near Toronto, in an area without any charismatic megafauna, so I think the lack of big animals really captivated my imagination. As I got older, I knew I wanted to pursue environmental writing and reporting. I wanted to write about animals.
Then I moved to Boulder, Colorado, which luckily did have lots of those big, charismatic animals: black bears, mountain lions, lynx. The city was full of these animals, but it wasn’t in the context I had imagined growing up. These weren’t super wild animals; they were coming into neighborhoods and eating garbage. That was how I first began reporting on black bears—looking at the human-bear conflict over trash throughout the American West. I traveled to all these beautiful places like Lake Tahoe and Aspen and I’d be taking photos of garbage bins destroyed by bears—not the most scenic thing.
That snowballed into looking at other bears. This was in the early 2010s, and at the same time there was this move to take the Yellowstone grizzly bear off the endangered species list. There were lots of flashpoints happening all around the world, and all these conflicts between large animals and people. But I also think I just like bears more than any other animal. They’re a very Northern Hemisphere kind of animal. A very Canadian animal, in a way. So, yeah, I just kind of fell into bears in my early days of journalism. There are a lot of good “cub” reporter jokes too.
EB: [laughing] You know, speaking of human-bear conflict, I wanted to tell you there was just a black bear in my neighborhood [in the suburbs of Boston] last week. They delayed school for an hour. Everyone was freaking out.
GD: Yeah, I was talking to someone who grew up in British Columbia who said they had bear drills in elementary school, like how other kids have fire drills. That would happen in Boulder too—a whole school would go into lockdown because a bear was nearby.
EB: You said you think you like bears more than any other animal. But who are your favorite bears, both in real life and in fiction or pop culture?
GD: [laughing] This is like being asked to choose your favorite child. Though I do really love polar bears. There is something magical about reporting in the Arctic, and I love how polar bears evolved from brown bears by figuring out how to live in such harsh conditions, on sea ice. They figured out how to eke out an existence that seems completely impossible to us. And they’re curious. You look at their inky black eyes and they just seem so intelligent. There is also a sadness and sentimentality with polar bears because they are the species of bear we are most likely to lose.
In terms of fictional bears, I always loved them, even as a kid. I had a Winnie-the-Pooh-themed birthday party once, so I guess those foundational blocks were already there. I also really like Rupert Bear—he is a slightly more fringe British bear—and the Berenstain Bears were great, too. I think the first book that I ever read by myself was a Berenstain Bears book. My dad also does a great Yogi Bear impersonation. Do you have a favorite fictional bear?
EB: I always loved Corduroy, though I guess he was a stuffed bear rather than a real bear? Though once you start to think about it there are just so many bears in kids’ books and movies.
GD: It’s so interesting, there are thousands of children’s books about bears, but relatively few adult books about bears. And while the children’s books are all lovable and kind of cartoony bears, a lot of the adult literature is about bear violence. Like Bear Attacks: Causes and Avoidance by Stephen Herrero, or The Bear’s Embrace by Patricia Van Tighem.
EB: Yeah. I just read In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin.
GD: There’s also Grizzly Heart by Charlie Russell. But so many books seem to be about either the cute, cuddly bear or the terrible nightmare bear and nothing in between.
My reporting on bears really grew out of studying the human-black bear conflict over trash in Boulder, and I started to think I wanted to write Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men but about bears. I wanted to look at bear-human relationships and understand them better. A lot of people will ask me if I saw all eight species of bears in the wild, and I didn’t—but that wasn’t the point of the book. I wanted to see how the people live alongside bears, whether that’s a panda breeding facility or a bear bile farm or a dancing bear sanctuary. It’s not necessarily about seeing bears in pristine wilderness.
EB: I loved the structure of the book—it seemed so obvious. There are eight species of bears, so organize it into a chapter about each one.
GD: When I was first shopping the proposal around there were some editors who wanted me to arrange it thematically—climate change, habitat loss, poaching. But I felt really strongly it should be like Bird by Bird but bear by bear. Eventually I found my editor, Matt Weiland at W.W. Norton, who was totally aligned with the vision I had for the book, and I was surprised that actually the order of the bears didn’t even change from my first draft.
EB: So, going back to how you were a freelance journalist while you were reporting this book—what advice do you have for journalists and nonfiction writers who are hoping to travel to study and write about animals in different places? How can you make that dream a reality?
GD: Well, a selfish motivation I had while writing this book was to gain foreign correspondence experience. Previously I had only done reporting from the American West, Canada, and the Arctic, and to write this book I had to go to Asia and South America. In order to travel, I applied for a lot of grants and got magazine assignments that I could then hitch my book research onto, since writing books is not a lucrative industry. I spent three years living out of a backpack. I had a storage unit back in Canada, and I just followed the scientists. I reached out to groups like the International Association for Bear Research and Management, Animals Asia Foundation, and FOUR PAWS International. Their communications people put me in touch with the scientists I shadowed, and I would plan trips a year or more out. Luckily I finished most reporting right before COVID.
EB: Wow, that is lucky.
GD: The book proposal went to auction in 2017, I signed the contract in 2018, and I spent all of 2018 and 2019 reporting it, and lockdown started right when I began writing it. I had wanted to do a little more traveling—I wanted to go back to Yellowstone for more for the grizzly bear chapter, and I also had planned to go to Borneo to study the sun bears, but that didn’t get to happen.
EB: Did writing Eight Bears change your relationship to bears specifically or animals in general in any way?
GD: I’ve always felt a really close connection to and appreciation for animals, though now I think there is a bit more melancholy surrounding it. While reporting, I was always expecting to see these vast swaths of wilderness and the bears thriving in it, but that’s not often the case. Nature documentaries kind of lie to you. Going to India and seeing the habitat where sloth bears live so close to people, or even pandas in reserves—I mean, the captive pandas have a great life, but it’s no The Amazing Panda Adventure. Writing this book made me appreciate how much space these animals need and how that space is disappearing. How can we make enough room for them?
I think the problem with a lot of environmental writing is that it ends with false hope. There is this very American kind of storytelling—almost a knee jerk reaction of, “You are the change, you can fix this.” And after talking to so many scientists for Eight Bears, yeah, they’re pretty sure we are going to lose most polar bears, probably all of them. Even if we stop global warming tomorrow, we can’t instantly regrow sea ice. We’re too far gone. At the same time, there is a lot of hope with pandas—China put all this money into making sure the panda doesn’t go extinct. If only we showed that much compassion and effort towards all species.
EB: What do you think are some of the challenges of writing about subjects you can’t interview directly? What are some of the rewards?
GD: It’s impossible to overcome the anthropocentric viewpoint, right? Thinking about your Non-Fiction by Non-Men series, there is so much emphasis on overcoming biases towards race, sex, gender, but not so much about the sheer bias of humans versus all other species.
Of course a big challenge of science and nature writing is that animals can’t speak for themselves—you have to find someone who can speak for them. And every human has their own motivations and perceptions of the world, which impacts what they say for animals.
EB: In general, what do you think are the biggest challenges and rewards of writing nonfiction, not just nonfiction about animals?
GD: I find describing people very difficult!
EB: I had a professor in grad school that said you can describe someone any way you want, as long as you say they are good-looking.
GD: There are some amazingly handsome scientists! [Laughing] It’s funny, I got into reporting because I loved reading and writing, but I was shy and I didn’t initially like talking to people. But somewhere it flipped and now I really relish the reporting experience. I love accompanying people in their lives and work. In contrast, the actual writing part is so lonely. I was writing this book in COVID lockdown. I had all these ideas about these residencies where I would write the book—like beautiful cabins in the woods. But then I was just alone, at home, in a tiny room writing my book. The isolation was quite challenging, especially in such contrast to meeting dozens of people, traveling everywhere. I also didn’t turn in chapters along the way to my editor—I just gave him the full draft when it was done, so I had a lot of anxiety that it actually wouldn’t get accepted, that I’d been writing it wrong all along.
EB: Well, it didn’t get rejected! And now Eight Bears is out in the world. Congratulations! So, why should people read Eight Bears? And why do you think it is important that humans read and write about non-humans?
GD: It’s humbling. We’re so out of touch with nature and other living creatures. Right now I live in the middle of central London and people think Hampstead Heath is wilderness. I think reading about non-humans shifts our perceptions of ourselves and our world. It’s important to consider other species that have been here—much longer than us in some cases. And it’s important to see ourselves as part of a larger ecosystem. It makes you feel more connected. I think being able to perceive yourself as part of a more integrated system where you’re not necessarily always the top of the food chain is important.
Something I love about bears is how, when you encounter one, it behaves unpredictably. It could attack you, or it could be a really cute moment where it just bumbles away. Bears mirror human behavior in that way. There are all these stories about bears and humans being shapeshifters. And bears are a really interesting animal to compare our own experience to because humans and bears have often spread out into the same places geographically. There are these really interesting studies that have been done that show indigenous languages in British Columbia mirror where bears have been. It’s like you have this other being accompanying you on your own journey for millennia. It’d be a shame to lose that.
EB: Who are some other writers that you admire who write nonfiction about non-humans?
GD: I love The Tiger by John Vaillant, though that does go into the animal attack genre. Speaking of Bears by Rachel Mazur. Also The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, though that is a depressing one. It’s interesting to me to see which animals get written about, too—there are so many bird books. There are also different trends of wildlife, like there was that big tree book phase. Actually while I was writing my book I met this guy who was also writing a book about bears—The Loneliest Polar Bear by Kale Williams. Oh, I also love A Libertarian Walks into a Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, which is about an anti-government town in New Hampshire that gets overtaken by black bears. Though it’s interesting to me that there are so many more wolf and big cat books than bear books. There is Search for the Golden Moon Bear by Sy Montgomery. I’m also really excited about Gator Country by Rebecca Renner which comes out in November. Maybe we are in an apex predator phase right now, actually.
For a while I had all this insecurity about writing about charismatic megafauna. Like I felt bad I wasn’t writing about slugs, that I had fallen into some large animal trap. But I love their role as a keystone species and how they act as umbrella species, protecting smaller animals.
EB: How did you come up with the title Eight Bears?
GD: I had proposed the title Bear Country and my editor said no. He proposed Eight Bears in the same vein as Four Fish by Paul Greenberg. I wasn’t totally sold on it, but overtime I realized that saying your book is called Eight Bears very quickly turns it into a trivia game because people want to guess what the eight bear species are. So, it’s a really engaging title in that way, and seeing people’s reactions to the tentative title won me over.
EB: When my husband saw me reading your book, he immediately quizzed himself to see if he could name all eight. He got six.
GD: There is also this childlike whimsy in counting animals. Four fish, eight bears. It has a fairy-tale feel. And there is also the question of how many of the eight will be left.
EB: Finally, who are the non-humans in your life right now?
GD: There are currently a bunch of seagulls nesting on top of my building. There are wood pigeons in the courtyard and snails on the sidewalk. I’ve also seen foxes around London. I always wanted to have a lot of pets but as a journalist who works internationally, I’m always traveling, and moving, and so I don’t have that domestic animal fulfillment. It’s difficult. Maybe the bear is like kind of filling that void?
Also, my parents have a cat named Oscar who they treat like their third child, so they might want him to have a shout out. He’s very cute.