Today as I write in my home office a large black bear is sleeping restlessly in a tree 15 yards from where I sit. How rare that we can have this opportunity!

My house was built 60-odd years ago, at a time when town leaders wisely created corridors of trees and bushes that followed the streams and gave wild creatures safe corridors to move safely. Each year we watch a parade of wildlife stream through our neighborhood, which is located just a few blocks from 16,000 Montana State University students.

Will we be able to maintain these wild spaces? I knew wild country before moving in Bozeman in 1994 to run the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, the largest environmental group in the three-state area of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. My ancestral home in western North Carolina was located one mile

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