Contribution short abstract:

Drawing from ethnographic research in a depopulated mountain valley, my contribution shows how grassroots community-making practices with the local endangered brown bear subspecies prove more useful than institutional patterns and scientific protocols for bear conservation.

Contribution long abstract:

Biologists have long now proposed coexistence between humans and nonhumans as the key strategy for biodiversity conservation. In Abruzzo, a mountainous region in central Italy, one of the oldest national parks protects local species, and primarily the about 80 individuals of the Marsican bear, a critically endangered subspecies of the European brown bear. Yet, coexistence results often, and even tragically, in conflict: a female bear was shot dead in late 2023 by a farmer who caught her stealing into his chicken coop. Drawn from ethnographic research in the Giovenco Valley, a depopulated area at the northern entrance of the Park, my contribution explores the community relationship established by some local villagers and activists with bears through several independent ecological projects and intends to show how grassroots practices that effectively create a multispecies community prove more useful than institutional patterns and scientific protocols for bear conservation. Sharing orchards and other food resources is just one of the tactics implemented by local people to mitigate human-bear conflict, whereas the Park interprets multispecies coexistence as an absolute separation. What is more, the space of town, orchards, and forest is renegotiated as a common ground crossed by human and nonhuman agencies and practices that redefine not only physical and social borders, but the very community shape. When I asked the activists the reason for their engagement, the answer was neither moral, nor apocalyptically anxious about the Marsican bear’s future, but as simple as it was astonishingly political: “The bear is one of us”.