J.R. Jamison is joined by Trina Moyles to explore 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—through her new memoir, Black Bear. 

After years of working for human rights organizations, Trina Moyles returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout, while her brother Brendan worked in the oil sands, vulnerable to a boom-and-bust economy and substance addiction. When she was assigned to a tower in a wildlife corridor, bears were alarmingly visible and plentiful, wandering meters away on the other side of an electrified fence surrounding the tower. 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.