Hello. I am a grizzly bear. I make my home in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem within the boundaries of the state of Montana, which contains Glacier National Park, Flathead National Forest, Great Bear Wilderness Area, Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, and Scapegoat Wilderness Area.

Spring is the time of year when I emerge from my winter hibernation seeking food. Sometimes, not being able to read maps very well, and not understanding you humans’ notion of boundaries, I roam just outside of these places in search of food. It would be nice if these extended boundary areas could be considered a buffer area, where I could be allowed to eat the bear foods that naturally grow there, but you humans vigorously prevent me from doing so.

Therein lays my problem. As humans continually encroach into my homeland, I am running out of space and food. I have been reduced to a mere 2 percent of my former range. And yet there is still an insidious human plan underfoot to build roads into my homeland where none have existed before in order to snowmobile in the winter and go logging for timber during the summer.

I have tried to understand humans, and figure out why you are forever taking my lands away from me. As near as I can guess, there are two different core belief systems among you humans:

1. Those that have some biblical sense that people are superior to the other animals, have dominion over them, and are allowed by their creator to do as they wish with the other animals. I don’t like those humans.

2. Those that believe that the creator treats all animals and humans equally as its children, and chose to save the animals, two by two, by having Noah build a massive Ark to house them, while killing any evil people in a massive flood. I like those humans.

Anticipating that I might protest your intrusion into my lands, you people have gathered up many flawed and politically funded research papers justifying your actions against me and my land. There are government organizations who are supposed to protect me from harm, but who now instead side with humans against me when we have close encounters on lands that used to be mine.

The lumber industry is notorious for granting money to researchers that will be beholden to them and publish pseudo-scientific papers that justify their cause to remove me from the Endangered Species List and then have access to log the woods. The timber industry sees tree forests not as homes for animals but as board feet of lumber to be sold for profit.

They are especially well known for using scare tactics that logging trees will somehow, miraculously, mitigate forest fires during current global climate change periods of extreme drought.

My kind has lived in the woods all of our lives and we are very aware that lightning strikes are mathematically random, and will still routinely strike where the trees have been cut down. In fact, when loggers cut down trees they leave behind the branches and tree tops on the ground (slash) which is a far worse fire fuel hazard condition than where the standing trees originally were. At the same time they refuse to acknowledge that global warming exists. Quite a contradiction! They believe you can fool all of the people all of the time. But, you can’t fool a grizzly bear!

Other intrusions into my world are motorized recreational vehicles that scare my forest friends and me. We bears can hear six times more acutely than you humans and the noise is deafening to us. Our females cannot lactate for their cubs due to the noise, even though they may be buried six feet deep under the snow for the winter hibernation.

With such vehicles, people can readily utilize roads to achieve ingress into my domain and shoot my kind to death. Most dead grizzly bears are found near roads in the forest. My writing this story is an attempt to counteract those mortalities. I dearly wish to live.

Publishing my plea in the newspaper may not prove to be a solution to save my friends and me. Hunters and trappers and snowmobilers and loggers are humans who are allowed to cast votes and so find support among politicians who need those votes to get elected and live an opulent life of luxury and popularity.

My only chance is for all “outsider” Americans to come to my rescue here in Montana. The Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem and its components should not be left to local politicians, with their political/financial influence over Fish & Wildlife organizations, national forest organizations, et al., as stewards and caretakers of this land. They want this land for their constituents’ private playgrounds, and for personal profit.

But these lands are a public, national treasure to be non-invasively enjoyed by all Americans on foot and horseback, while still being preserved as wild animal sanctuaries. Please save us!

Bill Baum is a resident of Martin City. He claims to share his BearKat Ranch with Grizzly Bill, a chocolate brown grizzly.