The bear’s voices

To find the traces of the men who gave these names to so many corners of the Apennines, you need to lose yourself in the distant past. Place names are the imprint an area leaves in the souls of the people living there. And the imprint left by the bear on this land is vivid and deep.

With these simple words, one small town sums up thousands of years of coexistence between humans and bears in their common home. Human populations that over time have found a balance with a nature with which they have been, and still are, often in conflict, but with which they have also established a relationship of profound knowledge and tolerance and thus of mutual practices. The Apennines are a harsh, wild land, where man has tried to make his way with great hardship, often putting his own needs above those of the wildlife. But through his work, he has also shaped it, enriching it with grasslands and orchards, where many animals have found food and space. Here, bears, wolves and chamois have saved themselves from the extinction they faced on most of the European continent. The principles that have guided nature conservation in Italy were born here. In the course of time, what was once a local heritage of knowledge has gradually crossed its borders. Bears, ordinary people, the Park Authority and experts have opened up to the world and the world has been able to observe and learn about this reality. So the voices of those men who gave names to the mountains in that remote past survive not just as an echo, but as a message that still resonates today. In other ways and forms than in the past, the coexistence continues.

Then as now, people live with bears. They cohabit the same territory. They relate to bears on a daily basis, for work, for passion or even just by chance. Those who live in this land are able to observe nature without filters and without the mediation of others. But this opportunity is not just a privilege. It also involves challenges. Coming across deer in front of your school, or wolves and bears in the streets of your village, living in such close contact, can be extraordinary in many ways, but it also opens up a universe of difficulties, a complex sphere of perceptions and values to be managed. The Apennines offer past and present examples of natural coexistence with large carnivores that should be preserved, shared and understood. It is above all those who live in this land whose task it is to tell this unique story and not lose the way. Only by their example will other people truly understand what coexistence is all about.

To tell the story of these protagonists, we need to start with those who have always shared everything with the bear… farmers. Outside its winter den, a bear stretches and points its nose to the sky, searching the air for the scent of the first green grass sprouting on the low pastures still mottled with snow. The sheep on the threshold of the barn does the same. And so does the farmer at his window, looking out over the fields where he’ll soon be back at work. The universe of bear and man are ready to converge again like every spring. Over the next six months, men and bears will observe each other, study each other and devise new and more ingenious ways to trick each other, just as they’ve done for millennia, evolving together in a perpetual motion of antagonism, but also of perfect knowledge.

This is how one farmer describes the double thread binding together bears and those working in the mountains. But what exactly does it mean to share everything? It is not just a matter of sharing the space of a forest, a pasture, or an orchard, but rather of having in common the rules, difficulties and rhythms that underpin their mutual existence. A good year for fruit, or for the pastures, is savoured just as much by humans as by bears: it means having more resources to live on, to raise their offspring. If the bear is the symbol of the Apennine wilderness, then “the sheep and the apple” are its counterpart. Farmers have helped create and maintain the landscape that characterises this part of the world and sustains its high biodiversity, including bears. For its part, the bear is the living testimony to a still intact and functioning ecosystem. Within the Abruzzo National Park and its buffer zone today, there are 944 arable farmers and 1682 livestock farmers who have interacted with the Park Authority for having suffered damage from wildlife, but also for having prevented it with electric fences, protective structures, shelters and guard dogs. So it seems that the story of these protagonists-antagonists has not yet ended with the extinction of one or the other, as has happened in so many other places in the world. It is ongoing and deserves to be told.

Retracing the history of the Park rangers also means retracing a long chapter of Italian history. To begin this tale, we need to go back a century and take a look at some of the most important events that have changed Italy as much as they have changed the Park and the job of park ranger. When the Park was created in 1923, the first president, Erminio Sipari, envisaged building a corps of 200 rangers, the number he considered necessary for complete surveillance of the area. His ambitions had to contend with a lack of funds and at first only 14 rangers took up duty. In 1933, when the fascist regime abolished all forms of autonomy, the Independent Abruzzo National Park Authority was abolished and the supervisory body came under the control of what was then known as the Milizia Forestale. It was not until 1951, after a bitter battle, that it was reconstituted and could once again effectively control the territory. The new rangers hired in 1954 perfectly embodied the spirit of the times. In addition to having lived through both fascism and war, they also straddled two worlds. One, in decline, was represented by the traditional mountain economy, harsh and poor. The other, about to emerge, was that of the economic boom. The first of these two worlds saw subsistence farming, transhumance to Puglia, lack of education and poverty, with emigration as the only form of emancipation. Many rangers had experienced very hard work and living conditions in their youth. For them, becoming a park ranger was also a matter of social redemption.

From the 1960s, like the whole of Italy, the Park went through a phase of great progress. It was modernised, expanded its competencies and intensified scientific research collaborations. The park rangers began to experience at first hand what would become one of the cardinal principles of good protected area management: the presence of trained personnel and collaboration between surveillance and research. At the end of the day, although without scientific training, park rangers are a researcher’s most valuable asset: they are excellent walkers and custodians of the memories of those who have gone before them, in whose steps they have trod, until they know the mountains perfectly and are able to discover shelters, dens, nests and the habitual paths of the animals.

These were also the years of the tourist boom. And it was precisely the park rangers that also represented the first contact between the urban and natural worlds. Today’s rangers perform their duties in a much more complex world. As a result, the surveillance corps has evolved into a multifaceted structure, better able to cope with modern complexities, consisting of 35 rangers organised into departments spread throughout the area, a coordinating office; a supervisor; five area heads and one liaison officer responsible for relations with the Scientific Service. The romantic figure of the park ranger has of necessity had to somewhat give way to the perhaps less poetic but today indispensable figure of a park ranger more highly trained in regulations, laws and science. But despite the changes, the rangers continue to be witnesses, guardians and interpreters of a history spanning more than a hundred years, during which a black and white world has gradually been enriched with colours and shades. A world that is certainly more difficult to interpret, but full of challenges on the path of nature protection.

There is nothing like metaphors to reduce something complex to its essence. Biologist and wildlife expert Giorgio Boscagli used these particularly effective words to describe the research and conservation work that took place in the 1980s in the Apennines’ first protected area. An icebreaker ship. On closer inspection, this high-flown metaphor indeed effectively describes what research represented for the Park (and the Park for research) well before the 1980s. Scientific research as we understand it today did not exist a century ago when the Abruzzo Park was established. However, as early as the embryonic stages of the Park’s creation, its first president already placed great emphasis on research, appealing to the most distinguished scientists of the time to support him in his difficult undertaking. In his famous report, he hoped for something that sounds obvious to us today, but which was not at all so at the time… to turn the protected area into a scientific laboratory, a study centre for the entire southern Apennines. And that is not all. It is precisely among the allies chosen by the first president that what became the cornerstone of environmental research and management, the ecosystemic approach, germinated.

This complete vision was first held by Prof. Pirotta, Director of the Royal University of Rome Botanical Institute. The partnership between the protected area and research has never been broken since. It has instead been enriched as knowledge has evolved. In 1972, the Centro Studi Ecologici Appenninici (Centre for Apennine Ecological Studies) was founded, the famous “icebreaker ship” and today the Scientific Service. A laboratory with a 360-degree view of environmental issues. In the 1960s, the era when research in the field of wildlife was mostly limited to insects and birds was definitively left behind. Sipari himself, but above all the management team who followed in his wake, already strongly encouraged the study of large wildlife in general and bears in particular. A focus that would later explode in the 1970s. The “Lupo Italia” (1974), “Camoscio Italia” (1978) and “Gruppo Orso Italia” (1983) working groups were created in the Study Centre. Reference points for experts and managers from all over Europe. The road of knowledge about bears has been long and fertile. It began with the research carried out by the Park’s very first Scientific Commission, made up of illustrious zoologists such as Ghigi and Altobello (1923), and culminating with the advanced research carried out by Rome’s La Sapienza University in the early 2000s, giving us a complete picture of the ecology of this species. Research on bears, as on all large carnivores, is today almost entirely focused on experimenting with good practices to be exported elsewhere in the conservation world. Technicians and academics face one of today’s greatest challenges: the coexistence of humans and animals. Their difficult task is to learn the animals’ language and, just like interpreters, decipher their needs and mediate between them and the needs of human society.

The DNA of the science of Conservation Biology includes not only an understanding of how ecosystems work, or knowledge about the ecology of animal and plant species, not only strategies to combat pollution or habitat degradation… it also, and perhaps above all, includes an understanding of the human being as an instrument of change. And the human being is none other than each one of us. In this sense, Conservation Biology is a “cultural science”, because it focuses on man and his relations with the environment, and it is no coincidence that it took its first steps in Italy in the portentous environmentalist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Not only were the central Apennines not immune to this wave, they played a leading role. In the Apennines, fierce battles were waged against building speculation which would have changed the wild face of these mountains. Together, protected area managers, scientists, technicians, journalists and, above all, civil society, mobilised with determination.

This is what passionate environmentalist Antonio Cederna wrote in 1992 after a 20-year battle:

In one of its most uncontaminated areas, amidst beech trees and clearings, the realm of the Marsican bear, some thirty unauthorised villas have been crushed by bulldozers. The rare spectacle in the locality known as Cicerana, at 1,500 metres above sea level, was witnessed live by hundreds of people: naturalists from all over Italy, schoolchildren, citizens and municipal administrators, while a band of the Alpini mountain infantry played the Italian national anthem. It was a celebration of the people, a demonstration that everyone had realised that what had once passed off as tourist development was nothing more than wild speculation.

The environmentalist world is certainly more fragmented now than then, but the legacy of that revolutionary phase is very strong. The idea that, in order to achieve effective environmental protection, it is necessary to inform, educate and above all invite civil society to participate, has become deeply rooted. On one hand, this achievement has been integrated into modern protected area management policies, on the other, it has led to the spontaneous emergence of many associations independently committed to the defence of Nature. The central Apennines have once again been the “icebreaker ship”. The Abruzzo Park Museum was the first in an Italian protected area. Italy’s first visitor centres also originated here. Hundreds of “volunteers for nature” have passed through here over the years, taking home extraordinary experiences and new awareness, thanks to experimentation with environmental interpretation programmes aimed at stimulating direct contact with nature, enhancing all aspects from the scientific to the sensory and aesthetic. For more than 30 years, the Park has had a communication office and an education and didactic service that invest resources and energy in fostering the development of participatory processes involving a range of stakeholders.

Even more exciting are the associations that have sprung up spontaneously among society at large. Some of them have chosen the Marsican brown bear as their banner. Alliances of those fighting to conserve this species, emblem of an intact and wild nature, yet so threatened by extinction. Often engaged in concrete actions, they believe deeply in activism and work for collective awareness. In synergy with the institutions, Rewilding Apennines, Salviamo l’Orso and other small and large realities are building new models of coexistence, in which local communities become active participants.

Models that aspire to introduce a new paradigm, in which protection of bears is not reduced to a series of regulations imposed “from above”, but instead arises from a sense of responsibility and willingness to work together for common goals, emphasising the benefits of living with bears. Following the North American example of “bear smart communities”, the central Apennines therefore continue to play a leading role in initiatives completely innovative in Europe. So the ferment in this area is still very much alive. We hope that the new chapter being written in the central Apennines will once again make Nature Conservation History.

The bestiary of human culture is rich in species. All cultures have elected their own “king”. Just like the lion, the bear is unrivalled in the position it occupies in human imagination, tradition, culture and art history both today and in the past. Although the nature of the rituals, myths and representations differs greatly from people to people, there is one aspect that seems to recur in all times and cultures: identification of the bear with the human being. Coexistence is therefore not only a way of life, but for mankind, it is above all a source of inspiration and aspiration. It is a recognition of the interdependence between us and all other living beings. It is a collective responsibility towards ourselves, others and nature.