It's been said that if you're having lunch with people who agree with you, you're wasting your time. If that's the case, Chris Servheen hasn't wasted much of his 26 years as Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“The greatest gains,” he says, “are to be made with people who have the greatest problem with what you're trying to achieve.”

Chris is responsible for coordinating private, state, federal, and tribal grizzly bear research and management in the Lower 48 states, and also works with biologists in Alberta and British Columbia. He often finds himself in the middle of heated public debates, but he's willing to tough it out because that's where progress is made, and change happens. It's hard to find anyone who works and lives in the West who doesn't have an opinion about grizzly bears, and by extension the Endangered Species Act. This is a pertinent detail, Chris points out, because the future of bears depends on what people think.

“No amount of litigation, court action, agency direction, or that kind of thing,” he says, “is going to mean nearly as much as what is in the hearts and minds of people who live, work, and recreate in grizzly bear habitat.”

When talking with competing advocacy groups, Chris tries to separate discussions of position from discussions of interest. “If I ask someone what their position is, they might say they're against grizzly bear recovery. But if we talk about their interests, it may be access to firewood cutting, or the economic survival of their community. A give-and-take understanding of interests can often allow a pretty good discussion.”

Given the dire straits of grizzlies in the Lower 48 when Chris was an undergraduate working with John Craighead, he points to huge gains since. When Lower 48 grizzly bears were added to the federal Endangered Species list in 1973, there were somewhere between 130 and 300 of the bears in Yellowstone. In March 2007, when the Yellowstone population was removed from the list, there were more than 575. Outside the park, bears are showing up in places they haven't been seen in half a century. “It's a great thing to see,” Chris says. “It's why I'm still here.”

He views habitat connectivity as critical, and his relationship with Y2Y has its roots in a cooperative linkage effort he leads among U.S. state and federal and Canadian agencies. The effort focuses on understanding how human activities impact animals like grizzly bears, then uses the information it gathers to increase connectivity across public and private lands and highways. “This is the most important issue I work on,” he says, citing its ecosystem-wide benefits for multiple species. “It's made a big difference so far.”

Chris was recently awarded the esteemed Meritorious Service Citation from the U.S. Department of Interior, as well as the prestigious George Rabb Conservation Award from the Chicago Zoological Society. After nearly three decades of immersion in grizzly bear conservation, biology, and politics, Chris still holds Ursus arctos in wonder. “People who have seen a grizzly bear can tell you exactly what they were doing and what time of day it was, even if it was 20, 30 years ago, because of the magic of the grizzly bear.”