Description:
When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father, a wildlife biologist known in Peace River as "the bear guy," brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. This brief but unforgettable encounter spurred Trina's lifelong fascination with Ursus americanus--the most populous bear on the northern landscape, often considered a nuisance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, Brendan, she understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden and worthy of respect. After years of working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear--a keystone species who is as subject to the environmental consequences of the oil economy as humans. At the same time, she searches for common ground with Brendan on the land that bonded them. Impassioned and eloquent, Black Bear is a story of grief and a vision of peaceful coexistence in a divided world. It captures the fragility of our relationships with human and nonhuman species alike, and the imperative to protect the wild--along with the people we hold closest.
Brief description: Trina Moyles is an environmental journalist, creative producer, and author. Her debut book, Women Who Dig: Farming, Feminism, and the Fight to Feed the World was a finalist for the High Plains Literary Awards and is currently being adapted into a documen-tary film. Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest, a memoir about her work as a fire tower lookout in northwestern Alberta, won a National Outdoor Book Prize. In 2022, Moyles received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, the province's highest honor for the arts, for her dedication to writing. She lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, with her partner and their three dogs.