The Grizzly in the Driveway: The Return of Bears to a Crowded American West

At their population height, an estimated fifty thousand grizzly bears lived in the Lower 48 states, ambling from Alaska to Mexico and the Great Plains to California’s coast. Over the nineteenth century, humans hunted Ursus arctos horriblis to extinction in most states, and by 1980 only a few hundred remained, mostly around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Endangered Species Act protection gave the bears a chance to claw back from the brink, and now more than two thousand grizzlies hang their hats in the American West, rubbing shoulders with the region’s dominant species, Homo sapiens, sometimes with deadly consequences. Informed by a lifetime of residing, reporting, and hiking in grizzly country, Montana journalist Robert Chaney investigates the growing clash in his broadly researched The Grizzly in the Driveway. With perspectives from mountain bikers, tribal leaders, biologists, technology experts, and North America’s strongest animal, Chaney offers a wholehearted, big-thinking primer on the dilemma of coexistence and the control of nature.