One of the elemental truths that comes with living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—by choice as I do—is the conscious fact that grizzly bears and other large, potentially dangerous mammals roam across the expansive landscape.  Whenever one departs for a hiking trailhead, part of the mental checklist includes identifying where the bear spray is;  it's as automatic as putting a water bottle in your backpack.

The truth is that while hiking I've come in close contact by accident with many different animals in the backcountry besides grizzlies and black bears:  moose, elk, wolves, deer, coyotes, territorial badgers, humans with guns and domestic cows.  I've never been attacked;  I've never found the need to use bear spray except on an aggressive skunk in town.

The reality is that our habits in Greater Yellowstone—the wildest wild area in America's Lower 48 states—are no different from those of counterparts in Africa who share the bush with large quadrupeds, and Alaska, Canada, Europe and other expanses of the boreal-Arctic, and India (with its dwindling tiger and wolf populations), and  the island of Komodo with its meat-eating dragons—or more widely, coastal areas of the world where hundreds of millions of people go swimming willingly in waters that are home to sharks..

On August 26, 2011, the discovery of a 59-year-old Michigan man found dead along a hiking trail in Yellowstone National Park's Hayden Valley, and the ongoing investigation, was another reminder of what wildness means. By all accounts, the victim, John Wallace who was killed by a grizzly bear that has yet to be identified, was drawn to the West for precisely the same sense of exhilaration that all of us are.  And part of that was trekking through grizzly country.

Wallace was the second hiker to die from a grizzly mauling in Yellowstone this year and the fourth to die in the region in the last two years.  To provide context, the last hiker to perish by bear was a photographer who died in an encounter back in 1986. Seven people have died from grizzlies in the entire 139-year history of Yellowstone. This year more than three million tourists will pass through the park.

The vast majority of human-bear incidents involve people ambling into protective bear mothers with cubs.  (Remember, American politician Sarah Palin called herself a "mama grizzly" all insults to Ursus arctos horribilis aside).

More recently, Yellowstone Park spokesman Al Nash said that one bear potentially involved in the Wallace attack  (a 25-year-old, 420-pound boar) was captured, fitted with a GPS collar and released pending the outcome of DNA tests hopefully to show, one way or another, if that bruin was responsible for Wallace's death. If it is the animal responsible, it likely will be recaptured and euthanized.

In the meantime, though, if you don't mind, a few reflections. I have been writing about wildlife issues in the West for a quarter century.  And once again was reminded of how, so often, national media, particularly television, gets stories wrong or oversimplifies its reporting or, in the case of the investigation surrounding Wallace's unfortunate circumstances, sews unnecessary fear.  Why?  Because it seems the urban journalists themselves are out of their element. 

(I started my reporting career as a violent crime reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago and during those years sometimes two to three people a day were murdered by other people in the greater Chicago metro).

In contrast to how a certain major American TV network that shall go unnamed covered the story, news outets close to the ground in the West do so with far less melodrama and hyperbole, in part because they would face the wrath of local knowlegable readers and viewers who understand that the odds of getting killed by an animal are incredibly remote.  And indeed, most of the journalists working for these outlets also go hiking.

Wildness is a magnet for people.  If given a chance, our species swarms toward it.  Read here a story "Bear Watching Mayhem in Yellowstone, Grand Teton" about how that, too, can bring complications and the risk of loving the objects of our affection to death .  And here's another story in The Christian Science Monitor about a group of citizen volunteers called The Grand Teton Wildlife Brigade formed to educate the public and prevent close encounters between people, grizzlies and other wildlife from happening.

Every day, thousands of Westerners and others come in contact with grizzlies throughout the northern Rockies and higher latitudes of the world and nothing happens; in fact, most likely, few even know it, though many hope in some way that they are lucky enough to catch a glimpse of an animals.

But, for the networks, fear sells;  it sells in how political issues are framed the same as how ones involving nature are. 

According to my friend Richard Louv, author of the epoch-defining book, Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder , that kind of irrational fear is actually makingsociety recoil and become more disconnected in its exposure to, and undersanding of, nature. That's the real tragedy.

I mention  this here, on a website where art and news of the natural world is celebrated, because artists (aren't all of us in one way or another artists?) are seekers.  Wildlife artists and those who appreciate pastoral landscapes are seekers of connections with the sentient elements of the outdoors.  Sometimes, they summon a visceral response in which the hair on the back of the neck rises though more often it is subtle.

Journalists can do better. We need to get outdoors more often, away from the concrete and asphalt.  The outback is a far less dangerous and more inspiring environment than the vantage they find in the city.