I landed in Alaska in July, stepping into Katmai National Park under a sky that never seemed in a hurry to darken. The meadow stretched wide and green, framed by mountains that looked as if they had never known a road, a fence, or a boundary line drawn on a map. Bears moved across it from one side to the other, brown bears of every age and temperament. Mothers with spring cubs clung close. Subadults tested their place in the hierarchy. Old males lumbered through with the confidence of animals that had survived many seasons.

They co-existed the way wild animals always have, cautiously, with an understanding earned through generations. There were no people in sight. No livestock. No threat to human safety. Just bears and wilderness, existing exactly as they evolved to do.

And yet even here, in one of the most iconic strongholds for brown bears on the planet, these animals are not safe.

Not because they are failing.
Not because they are dangerous.
But because of politics and policy.

Alaska is often held up as the last great wild frontier, but wilderness alone does not protect wildlife. Decisions made in boardrooms and legislative chambers reach even the most remote corners of the state. Predator control programs have long been framed as practical necessity, built on the idea that bears and wolves limit caribou and moose populations relied upon by rural communities.

The language is careful. Killing becomes management. Removal becomes balance.

Behind these programs sits a familiar alignment of interests. Wildlife boards influenced by hunting and trapping groups. Political leaders who campaign on resource extraction and access. Industries, particularly oil and gas, that benefit when wildlife is framed as an obstacle rather than a value. Roads follow rigs. Fragmentation follows roads. Wildlife pays the price long after permits are signed.

Standing in that meadow, it is impossible to reconcile the reality in front of you, a functioning ecosystem, bears harming no one, with policies that treat predators as expendable. These animals are not failing Alaska. Policy is.

I drive lonely forest roads in the boreal, scanning the trees for movement, tracks, a shadow that might betray the presence of woodland caribou. They are elusive by necessity. Their numbers are low. Their forest is thick.

But it is no longer intact.

Cutlines slice the forest into straight edges that never existed here before. They catch light differently. Snow drifts deeper. Wolves move faster. What once slowed predators now guides them.

For decades, scientists have documented the cause of boreal caribou decline with clarity. Roads, cutlines, and pipelines fragment habitat and increase predation. The solution is equally clear: protect large connected tracts of forest and allow disturbed areas to regenerate.

What stands in the way is not uncertainty. It is lobbying.

Provincial governments, under pressure from forestry and energy sectors, resist emergency habitat protections required under law. In Alberta, discussions continue around removing the caribou’s threatened status altogether, despite ongoing declines. Instead of adjusting policy to fit reality, reality is being reshaped to fit policy.

Driving those forest roads, the absence becomes the story. Caribou are still there, but barely.

Sometimes policy erodes quietly.

In Alberta, Bill 41 was introduced as modernization. Updated enforcement. Flexibility. Balance. But buried in its language were changes that lifted trapping limits and weakened safeguards for species already under pressure.

Wolverines, slow to reproduce and requiring vast territories, are particularly vulnerable. River otters and mink face increased risk. Cougars are increasingly portrayed as threats rather than apex predators, with fear used to justify expanded lethal control.

These changes were not accidents. They were choices.

Wildlife policy rarely fails loudly. It erodes clause by clause.

I wrote before about whooping cranes, a conservation story nearly a century in the making. Their survival required unprecedented effort because wetlands vanished beneath drainage ditches and development. That story is not over. It is repeating itself.

This year, enforcement under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was rolled back in the United States, removing accountability for the incidental killing of birds by industrial activities. A law born from catastrophe has been hollowed out in the name of regulatory relief.

Standing in a wetland watching fewer ducks lift into the sky, it is hard not to feel how policy decisions compound quietly over time, one weakened protection at a time.

Not all policy stories end in loss.

Measures to protect Southern Resident Killer Whales show what is possible when science leads, and politics follows. Shipping lanes adjusted. Speed limits imposed. Critical habitat acknowledged as more than lines on a map.

This was not charity. It was accountability.

Public support matters here. A clear majority of people want more done to protect wildlife and habitat. When policy reflects that reality, change happens.

The same is true on a global scale. The UN High Seas Treaty exists because decades of advocacy refused to accept that international waters were ungovernable. It is imperfect, but historic. Proof that when science and public pressure align, policy can follow.

The animals in these stories never asked to be symbols.

The bear crossing the Katmai meadow is not making a statement. She is reading the wind. The caribou moving through the boreal does not know its habitat has been divided by policy. It only knows where it can still move. Waterfowl lifting from a shrinking wetland respond not to legislation, but to absence.

Policy may feel distant, but it is written by people. Changed by people. Influenced by who is paying attention.

Wildlife does not vote. It does not lobby. It does not sit at policy tables. But it pays the price for every decision made there.

The meadow in Katmai is still full of bears.
For now.

What happens next will not be decided by the bears, the caribou or the cranes, but by us.