`` There are moments of clarity in life, instances that so completely focus the senses, there is no yesterday or tomorrow öonly the here and now. Such a moment came for me in the spring of 2000, on the coast of British Columbia, when my guide reached for the oar in the bottom of our boat and accidentally spooked a grizzly cub on shore. The ... three year old bawled and temporarily lost his footing. His mother, grazing sedge nearby, spun around and stopped mid-chew. We were so close, I could see the foamy, green saliva at the corners of her mouth öso close I could see her eyes focus on me. Several heart pounding seconds passed as we stared at one another, reading body language, plotting possible outcomes. Then all at once she turned and sat down. Seemingly unconcerned with our presence, she kept her back to us and her cub as she continued munching on stems and blades.'' Brian Payton (2006, page 1) I first heard about the `Great Bear Rainforest' (GBR) öwhere the grizzly mother and her cubs meet journalist Payton öin 1996 in an environmental studies course, where my fellow students introduced a new campaign to protect the large swath of what they called the `last temperate rainforest'on earth (figure 1). The GBR soon went from our classroom onto the world stage. In only a couple of years this once unheard of place gained celebrity status; in 1999 the GBR was named the year's most important envi- ronmental campaign by Time Magazine. By 2006 the intense political struggle was resolved with substantial land-use changes, including 113 new protected areas over 2 million ha. How are we to understand the environmental politics of this region? British Columbian forest politics are not underrepresented in the academic litera- ture (ie Barnes and Hayter, 1997; Braun, 2002; Hayter, 2003; Shaw, 2004; Wilson, 1998), often characterized as a `War in the Woods' with environmentalists, First Nations, the government, and the forest industry each staking a claim in the forests. This essay takes a different cut into understanding this particular political event, in that it tracks Tracking grizzly bears in British Columbia's environmental politics Jessica Dempsey Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall,Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada; e-mail: jdempsey@interchange.ubc.ca Received 13 June 2009; in revised form 20 October 2009 Environment and Planning A 2010, volume 42, pages 1138 ^ 1156 Abstract. Geographers and others have written many words about British Columbian environmental politics. Stories about this place often revolve around conflicts between the government, the forest industry, First Nations, and environmentalists, battling it out to secure their vision of appropriate land use on the ground. This paper examines a particularly heated conflict over land use in the Great Bear Rainforest region, a large tract of temperate rainforest blanketing the central and north coasts of British Columbia. But this essay takes a different cut into understanding this particular political event, in that it tracks an often-unrecognized actor through the politics there: the grizzly bear. Drawing inspiration from scholarship that challenges the primacy of humans in our understandings of politics and social life, I argue that the grizzly bear influences and inflects BC's coastal forest politics; it is an important player in the transformation of the Great Bear Rainforest. I tell the story of environmental politics there by tracing the grizzly bear's shifting relationships with others, including with settlers, conservation biologists, environmentalists and money, all of which are consequential for the grizzly bear, and for others in the region. doi:10.1068/a42214