The Beauty—and the Beasts—of Coexistence

Story by Hillary Rosner

The following is an adapted excerpt from bioGraphic contributing editor Hillary Rosner’s new book, Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Their Fractured World.

On a late-summer morning in Italy’s Central Apennines, the sun was already blazing down. I was sweating and feeling about a hundred years old as I scrambled to keep up with the fit, young team of European students who were looking at their phones and debating the best path to our destination. “I think we’re going to have to go down and then up the other side,” said a tall Swedish guy named David. I looked where he was pointing. We were standing at the edge of a shallow gash in the hillside, where the land fell away at a near-vertical slope on soft, slippery dirt dotted with thorny dog rose bushes. David was navigating toward a set of GPS coordinates, but the trail seemed to have vanished. I had been blindly following the group, assuming they knew the route rather than simply the end point. Now, apparently, there was nowhere to go but down.

I tried not to lose my sense of humor as I followed a French field biologist named Sarah down the incline, bracing my feet against tree trunks and cursing the thorns that ripped at my clothes. At least down in the ravine it was shady. The scramble up the far side was easier, and from there, finally, we could see the trail we were supposed to have been on all along. To the east, the village of Ortona dei Marsi sat perched beneath the limestone formations of the Central Apennines, rounded and low in the foreground before giving way to more jagged peaks farther afield. The Central Apennines are less dramatic, less snowy, and less internationally famed than the Alps. The highest peak in the chain, the Corno Grande, rises to 2,912 meters (9,553 feet), but most of the mountains stand below 1,829 meters (6,000 feet). They are also arguably less tame. Under two hours’ drive from Rome, it is one of the wildest parts of Italy, home to a significant portion of the country’s gray wolf population and a critically endangered bear that lives nowhere else.

When we think about large mammals moving across a landscape, we tend to picture sweeping vistas: zebra grazing the African savanna, or Amur tigers prowling the Russian steppes, or caribou crossing the tundra. We don’t think about the industrialized environs of Western Europe. At least I didn’t. But that is changing. A rewilding movement has been taking shape around the continent—an effort to restore natural processes and recover wildlife populations so that ecosystems can adapt and thrive. Rewilding is largely about “creating the enabling conditions,” as the organization Rewilding Europe puts it, so that nature can regenerate.

The influential American conservation biologist (and founder of the radical environmental group Earth First!) Dave Foreman, who died in 2022, coined the term “rewilding” in the early 1990s. He and others, including biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss, built a restoration vision around what they called “the three C’s”: cores, carnivores, and corridors. That means core protected areas, linked by corridors, with keystone predators such as wolves and grizzles helping regulate the whole ecosystem. These ideas have been the basis for successful conservation programs in the United States, including the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park—where their absence thanks to human obliteration had altered the landscape and their return allowed trees to regrow along streams and rivers. Beavers also came back and created new wetland habitat for a range of species, and so on.

The rewilding idea took shape in Europe around the same time in the late 20th century, with a Dutch experiment on a previously drained delta of the Rhine River, known as the Oostvaardersplassen, that “involved the reassembly of a guild of large herbivores, including ‘wilded’ horses and cattle and red deer, to create a Serengeti-like landscape,” as one account explains it. (The project was and remains extremely controversial, as the animals, whose herds have grown in size, are left to fend for themselves—and many starve during bitter winters.) More recently, though, as land-use change and climate change collide, rewilding has gained momentum across multiple continents to restore lost wildness, make natural landscapes more resilient, and foster coexistence between humans and other species. Rewilding Europe promotes efforts across 13 countries, covering landscapes from Scottish moors to a Polish delta to Swedish Lapland, and involving recovery efforts for king vultures, European bison, Balkan chamois, white-tailed eagles, and dozens of other species. I had come to Italy not, as many people do, on a pilgrimage in search of art or fashion or pizza. I had come to learn about the bear.

The Marsican brown bear (Ursus arctos marsicanus) is a subspecies of the Eurasian brown bear, which itself is a subspecies of brown bear. (Grizzly bears in North America are also considered a subspecies of brown bear.) Marsican bears once occupied a much larger swath of Italy, from the Sibylline Mountains at the north end of the Apennines, near Perugia, down to Calabria in the country’s south. But over decades and centuries, deforestation for agriculture and the access for hunters that this land conversion wrought—not to mention the advent of guns—spelled disaster for the animals. The last Marsican bear in the Sibyllines is believed to have been shot in 1870. Over time, the bears’ habitat shrunk further and further, until they became isolated in Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise National Park, which was established a century ago.

All of the subspecies’ reproductive females currently reside in that park, while the males range across a series of adjacent and nearby protected forests. The entire population of Marsican brown bears numbers only around 60 animals. During the past decade, though, their birth rates have been coming up, and an increasing number of bears have been moving between the region’s parks and reserves, using trails and routes between the protected areas.

Local conservation groups have sprung up to help the bears, working with park officials and more recently the European Union to create “coexistence corridors”—safe passageways to help animals move between the forests and recolonize the surrounding natural areas. There are regional parks to the north and west, a series of reserves to the southeast, and another national park to the east, but we aren’t exactly talking about something the scale of Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve, which exceeds 24,000 square kilometers (roughly 9,400 square miles), or even California’s Yosemite National Park, at more than 3,000 square kilometers (about 1,200 square miles). “In Italy, you can be on top of a mountain and you’ll always see a town,” Fabrizio Cordischi, an Abruzzo native, told me. “It’s so small a country, so coexistence is so important.” We were standing on a hillside looking across a valley at a herd of red deer, one of the largest species of deer in the world, on the opposite slope. It was the rutting season, and the males were bugling, making their strange trumpet calls to attract mates. Once our eyes had adjusted to spotting the animals against their rocky backdrop, we could see some males batting antlers. The females seemed oblivious to the males’ questionable charm.

Cordischi is the field manager for Rewilding Apennines, the local chapter of Rewilding Europe. The group was confronting the problem of how to build safe passage for animals across human landscapes in a wealthy and intensely urbanized country—one that’s a haven for fashion, art, coffee, and other urban preoccupations. Sure, there are stunning backdrops and lots of opportunities for outdoor recreation—the Dolomites, a range within the Alps, for one, are a popular hiking destination—but it’s not a country that most travelers generally associate with wide-open spaces and wildlife. Most of Italy was long ago built for humans.

Still, the entire country is wilder than it might seem. As of a 2021 survey, about 2,400 wolves reside in Italy. In the roughly 5,180-square-kilometer (2,000-square-mile) section of the Central Apennines where Rewilding Apennines works, there are about 400 wolves—or a sixth of the country’s wolf population living in about a sixtieth of its land area. There are also red deer, wild boar, Apennine chamois, European wildcats, and griffon vultures, among other iconic species. Over the centuries, though, Italians cleared massive swaths of forest in these mountains for agriculture, using the timber for heating, construction, and railways. In the 1950s and 1960s, the government began widespread reforestation efforts, planting seedlings across millions of hectares of land. You can still find remnant old-growth beech and maple forests, though many of the trees today are conifers brought in by the State Forestry Corps to help prevent soil erosion and employ rural residents who planted the saplings during the difficult post-war era.

The forests eventually regrew, but the villages began emptying out. Industrialization and urbanization sent younger people fleeing the mountains for jobs in the cities. As one recent Italian research paper put it, “Since the 1950s, the Apennines were particularly exposed to a demographic decrease that was fast, virulent, and widespread.” This phenomenon of depopulation has led to a strange mix of circumstances for the local wildlife. While more sparsely populated villages give large mammals more space to roam, there’s a downside: An aging population without younger residents has allowed outdated cultural attitudes about wildlife—that they are a threat, rather than asset—to persist.

In a paper published in 2021, a group of scientists coined the term “anthropogenic resistance.” It refers to the ways in which “human behaviors influence connectivity.” Conservation efforts, they wrote, often consider “resistance surfaces” across a landscape—that is, barriers to wildlife movement such as roads, farms, reservoirs, cities. But they should also consider, the scientists argued, “the direct effects of human behaviors on species’ movement.” While there might be a physical pathway across an area, that does not mean wildlife can necessarily use it; human activities in that area—hunting or trapping, or drug smuggling, or war—might make it a dangerous or inaccessible corridor. Arash Ghoddousi, an Iranian biologist now at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and a coauthor of the study, had been working on a project to understand connectivity for leopards between two national parks in Iran. Inspired by a project investigating jaguar connectivity in the Americas, which used surveys to understand people’s attitudes toward the carnivores, he began collecting similar data. “Let’s see what our habitat models are showing us about where are habitat patches, where could be corridors. But let’s also incorporate conflict risk,” Ghoddousi said. He combined a map of risk from human attitudes with a map of potential corridors and realized that the corridors went through “certain areas of conflict that could be counterintuitive, leaving leopards to areas where they might be killed.”

Today, some threats to the Marsican brown bears are structural: Between 1970 and 2022, 13 bears were hit by cars, largely on the narrow, twisting roads that connect the Apennines’ villages. Another seven were hit by trains. But some threats are cultural, caused by anthropogenic resistance. In 2014, near the village of Pettorano sul Gizio, an elderly man shot and killed a bear that was approaching his chicken coop. The bears are protected; it’s illegal to kill them. The killing triggered outrage, and the man ultimately paid a hefty fine. (In the summer of 2023, another bear was shot and killed—a beloved sow who was raising two cubs, and whom locals had nicknamed Amarena after a variety of black cherry she especially liked. This time, a community uproar ensued, and even the local governor and the country’s environment minister weighed in to express their dismay.)

Mario Cipollone still gets visibly agitated when he talks about the 2014 bear killing—as he did one evening over foraged-mushroom pasta in picturesque Pettorano sul Gizio, which sits inside the boundaries of a regional forest preserve. Cipollone and his wife, Angela Tavone, have lived in Pettorano sul Gizio since 2019, and when I visited in 2022 they were temporarily crammed into a tiny apartment with their young son Lorenzo while they remodeled a larger house higher up the winding village path. Together, they run Rewilding Apennines, whose mission is to protect and grow the wildlife populations there and create sustainable models for thriving local economies that capitalize on—rather than force out—nature. Their aim is to cultivate two types of connectivity—one physical, the other socioeconomic.

Pettorano sul Gizio, built into a steep hillside, was a thriving town of roughly 5,000 people in the early 20th century. Today, around 1,300 people live here, but three-quarters of them live outside of the main village, in what locals call the “suburbs” but Americans would more likely call a rural area, along the road to Sulmona (population 25,000). Because most people shop in Sulmona, the businesses that used to dot Pettorano sul Gizio have largely closed; today, there are two restaurants, two bars, a pharmacy, and a small convenience store at the base of the vertical village. When I visited, in mid-September, the shop and one restaurant were shuttered for vacation, and many of the homes were empty. Tavone told me that a lot of the homes belong to people whose parents and grandparents once lived there full time; today, the descendants are far more likely to live in cities like Rome and come to Pettorano sul Gizio on summer holidays.

In choosing to build a life in the village, Tavone and Cipollone made a conscious commitment to rebooting the local economy as part of the rewilding mission. For the 2022 holidays, Rewilding Apennines and partners from the various parks put together a gift box, the “Bear-Smart Box,” full of locally produced items meant to trace the expansion of the Marsican brown bear. “From the ancient forests and the most inaccessible places of the Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise National Park, it began to colonize other territories,” noted the Rewilding Apennines site. “Currently the bear is crossing the ecological corridors—large territories of connection between one protected area and another.” The products included artisan sheep cheese, small-batch cider, black-cherry liqueur, chocolate-hazelnut nougat, and a pesto made from mugnoli, a local vegetable related to broccoli.

It was just one tiny initiative on a steadily growing list of tiny initiatives that were collectively amounting to something significant. An ecotourism company called Wildlife Adventures received loans from a Rewilding Europe fund aimed at helping small, nature-friendly businesses. The student volunteer program helps generate income for local bars and restaurants by bringing 40 students a year for three-month stints. And Rewilding Apennines built a vulture-feeding station where farmers can bring dead livestock—which they would otherwise pay to incinerate—that helps farmers save money while also promoting conservation. The group’s “enterprise officer,” Valerio Reale, had also recently moved to Pettorano sul Gizio, where he was working in part with local “bear-smart” artisanal businesses. Reale and his wife, who previously worked on an organic farm in the United Kingdom, hoped to start up a bakery in Pettorano sul Gizio. (Once upon a time, the village housed five bakeries, all with “common ovens” that villagers could use to bake their own bread.)

In its efforts to create coexistence corridors for wildlife and people, no idea is too small or too out there for Rewilding Apennines. Coexistence means, on some level, treating wildlife as your neighbors. You might not bring them a pie or loan them a stick of butter, but you should consider how your own actions help or hinder their ability to muddle through.

Along the winding roads of Abruzzo, the region surrounding Pettorano sul Gizio, the group’s staff and volunteers have installed devices that make loud noises like fireworks when cars are near—designed to scare bears and avert deadly collisions. They have also installed electric fencing around local beekeepers’ hives, to keep the bears out and the anti-bear sentiment that might result from honey theft at bay. They have taken down barbed-wire fencing that was installed in the 1950s and ’60s to protect the newly planted trees. “Many of those plantations didn’t grow,” said Tavone. “Results weren’t the same everywhere. But a common theme was that no one removed the barbed wire that was used to protect the seedlings.” The team has been removing the wire since 2018 and has taken out more than 110 kilometers (about 70 miles) of fencing. “No one will go there and rebuild these fences,” she said. “It’s like a permanent restoration action.”

Rewilding Apennines workers have also installed some new fences: They’ve put electric fencing around apple orchards to reduce the risk of conflict from bears helping themselves to farmers’ fruit. But they haven’t left the bears high and dry. In a move that seems bizarre from an American perspective, they have pruned some fruit trees—apple, wild cherry, and wild pear—specifically to feed bears. Once upon a time, said Tavone, “agriculture reached high up in the mountains. But after the 1950s and ’60s it was abandoned, as people moved to the cities. A large number of these fruit trees are still alive and are productive.” Keeping those trees healthy and yielding food that bears and other wildlife can access may prevent the animals from raiding still-in-use orchards elsewhere. “In order to not lose this important food source for wildlife, we are going to the mountains to check the state of health of these plants, to free them of competition from other plants, and prune them in autumn, to guarantee additional food for wildlife—food that is far away from the towns,” Tavone told me.

Rewilding Apennines has a small staff. But the group runs largely through the labor of an army of volunteers, mostly students from around Europe and the UK, like the ones I was hiking with, who are taking a gap year or need an internship to graduate. These unpaid interns patrol the trails, looking for signs of bears—and also of other species of interest for regulating the ecosystem, like European wildcats and griffon vultures. The interns monitor roads for wildlife killed by cars, as a way to identify problem points and work to find solutions. They help maintain camera traps—a network of wildlife cameras installed throughout the region, mostly strapped to trees in the forest. They walk transects beneath wind turbines, looking for any flying creatures that might have been killed by the blades. They participate in vulture counts run by the national parks. And they do a host of other activities, like looking for uncovered wells out on the hillsides—which is what we were doing the morning we got lost.

Built throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the wells were used to supply water for cattle grazing. Older ones contained “clinging points,” or even staircases, but those constructed in the 1960s and ’70s, said Cipollone, “are bigger, deeper concrete reservoirs without any escape ways.” Many of these wells were not covered; they were simply holes in the ground in remote areas, “that could really turn into traps for wildlife.” In recent years, five bears have died in wells—two mothers and their cubs. So, Rewilding Apennines set out to find and cover every single opening. Each time someone finds one, they measure it and mark its GPS coordinates. Then they recruit a local metal fabricator to custom-cut a grate, and they carry the grate to the wall and install it. So far, they have covered 27 open shafts.

On the Monday morning when I tagged along, the volunteers had set out from the tiny village of Ortona dei Marsi, west of Pettorano sul Gizio, to take measurements of one open well that they’d learned about, and to scout for any others. Eventually, we arrived at the well, though what should have been perhaps a 20-minute walk had taken more than three times that long. After measuring the concrete opening, the group decided to split up to save time. My small faction followed a path to the west, back toward the village; we found two more open wells along the way. Grace, a British student who was studying environmental photography, took measurements while David, the Swede, marked the coordinates. Eventually we reached the road, and just a few moments later a white pickup truck bearing the organization’s logo magically appeared and pulled over to collect us. There were already four men inside, but we crammed in and headed up a narrow dirt path. They had just come from picking up a grate that a local welder had made, and the next task was to install it.

It was midday by this point, and the sun was searing. Everyone in the group grabbed something that needed carrying—toolboxes, a drill—and two of the guys hoisted the metal grate up to their shoulders. We trudged uphill across a shadeless meadow until we found the well, and the group set to work drilling holes in the concrete and securing the grate on top. I drank the last of my water in a meager shade patch behind a dog rose, listening to the whine of metal cutting concrete. I had to admit that all this seemed like a lot of effort just to cover up a hole on a hillside. Then again, when you’re working to save an animal with just five dozen individuals left on Earth, you become keenly aware of how much each life counts, and how any intervention, however farfetched or trivial it seems, might help fend off extinction.