This Podcast is for the Bears
After a four-year hiatus, GrizzCast is back to share lessons from, and in defense of, BC’s grizzly bear teachers.
When most people think about grizzly bears, they’re likely to feel fear. Yet for Lindsay Marie Stewart—who grew up in Nelson, BC, where grizzlies are no uncommon sight—they’ve always meant something different.
“You know, a lot of Indigenous cultures connect to grizzly bears as teachers,” says Stewart. For example, she says, she’s heard stories of humans learning what to eat because of seeing what a grizzly chose.
“I’ve always been inspired by that human connection to the natural world,” Stewart continues. “About a year and a half ago I became a mother, and so I want my son and the next generation to grow up and be aware of what the grizzly bear is to people, to our world, and how we’re not separate from the natural world.”
For the last five years, Stewart has worked toward that goal in her role as the creative and development producer at the BC-based Grizzly Bear Foundation. Part of her work for the foundation includes serving as the producer, writer, and editor of GrizzCast, a podcast exploring grizzly bear conservation efforts in an accessible and educational manner.
After an almost four-year hiatus—the result of other work at the foundation taking priority—the podcast is set to return with its second season later this year, says Stewart.
Approximately 15,000 grizzlies call BC home, which amounts to approximately a quarter of the species’ North American population. Threats to that population include loss of habitats, fatal human interactions, and the bears’ own notoriously slow and selective reproduction habits.
The Grizzly Bear Foundation was founded by Vancouver, BC, property developer and philanthropist Michael Audain. According to the foundation’s website, Audain had a dream in 2014 of being visited by a grizzly bear and her cubs. Inspired, he headed to the Great Bear Rainforest on BC’s north Pacific coast between Prince Rupert and Bella Bella, where he had the opportunity to see the animals up close.
Two years later, he established the foundation, determined to shield grizzlies from hunting and protect their habitats. In 2017, the foundation released a report recommending that the province ban hunting the bear, and a few months later BC did institute a ban on trophy hunting grizzlies, a practice that was killing 250 to 300 bears a year in the province.
The foundation’s mission is further enacted through efforts such as Project Rewild, a research program aiming at understanding the rearing methods that maximize the well-being and survival of orphaned cubs post-release. Another initiative from the foundation, the Indigenous Roundtable, is a consulting mechanism aimed at reframing conservation policy conversations through an Indigenous lens.
The organization also endeavours to raise awareness through its storytelling initiatives. GrizzCast was launched in 2020 when the foundation’s executive director, Nicholas Scapillati, was looking for the best way to make use of interviews he had conducted with some of his conservation heroes, according to Stewart. Season 1’s five episodes run anywhere from 24 to 40-plus minutes, and consist of sit-down interviews with experts working on the front lines of grizzly conservation.
In Episode 1, naturalist Doug Peacock—a Vietnam War veteran who retreated into Yellowstone National Park to deal with his PTSD—recounts his first run-in with a mother grizzly bear and her cubs while he soaked in a hot spring. In Episode 5, veterinarian and former zoo director Ken Macquisten speaks on the importance of putting kindness at the forefront of conservation.
Dispatches episodes are aimed at highlighting urgent conservation stories, such as the story of the killing of a young grizzly bear known as Tex.
The podcast has been an additional opportunity to expand Stewart’s lifelong fascination with storytelling. After studying photojournalism, print media, and eventually communications, Stewart went on to produce documentaries, short films, and photography. The relationship between humanity and nature is one she has returned to often, such as in the short film The Art of Wild—featuring five experimental BC artists experiencing wilderness—which was an official selection at the 2016 Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival.
Stewart describes her career as “a bit of a journey.”
“But it was always centred around storytelling,” she says, “and how to express science and conservation in a way that is going to engage people, versus … academia or science which sometimes can be kind of dry.”
The podcast is one more step in that storytelling journey. Stewart’s experience as a visual storyteller has led her to create a “cinematic” experience for GrizzCast listeners through sound.
“What we really want to do with these [episodes] is have it heavily researched and stand strong,” Stewart says. “Then there’s the creative side of it, where we’re bringing in footsteps on the gravel, the rushing streams—really pulling people into these stories.”
While the second season is in production, a new series called GrizzCast Dispatches launched in June. Running about 20 minutes, Dispatches episodes are aimed at highlighting urgent conservation stories, such as the story of the killing of a young grizzly bear known as Tex after he swam across BC’s Salish Sea to Texada Island. (The BC Conservation Officer Service recently charged two residents of the island with failing to report the wounding or killing of the grizzly bear.)
“Those episodes were a way to say, ‘Hey, let’s produce things faster, quicker, and very time-dependent,’ because there are stories that are constantly going on around grizzly bears,” Stewart says.
“I think we all wish we could release more GrizzCast episodes,” she says. “I’m happy we have done some Dispatch episodes, but unfortunately, all of our other work just takes precedence sometimes.”
Although other aspects of the organization’s mission can take priority, the ability to shine a light on the work of conservationists is what motivates Stewart and her colleagues.
“It’s a way for us to connect with people who have been working in different conservation capacities for a really long time,” she says. “It allows us to uplift those voices.”
For Stewart and her colleagues, the focus on the grizzly bear is not a matter of favouring them over other animals, but an acknowledgment of the crucial role they have in the larger ecosystems they inhabit.
“The grizzly bear is an umbrella species,” says Stewart, “So everything that we do to protect the grizzly bears, it protects them, and it protects ecosystems.”
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