A female black bear and two cubs look for food inside a tent on Wednesday, June 29, 2022, at Centennial Park in Anchorage, Alaska. The campground was abruptly chosen by Mayor Dave Bronson as a sanctioned area for camping by people experiencing homelessness, despite its proximity to bears and its relative lack of resources as compared to the previous mass care site at the Sullivan Arena. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News via AP)

As bad as things have gotten at Anchorage’s Centennial Park campground this summer, the situation could be much worse. Imagine, for instance, what might happen if a brown bear family were to wander into our city’s newest homeless camp, say at night and undetected.

By nature, brown bears, or grizzlies, are much more aggressive creatures than black bears, particularly females with cubs. If one were to enter an occupied tent in search of food, the resulting encounter could have — and very likely would have — disastrous, perhaps deadly, consequences.

As I write these words in late July, brown bears have so far stayed clear of that repurposed municipal campground. But there’s a good possibility that a brown bear will be lured into the city-sanctioned homeless camp by the smells of human food and garbage, before Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration ends its badly planned and executed experiment sometime this fall.

If done properly and with forethought, a secure and supervised homeless camp could have merit. But the way this one was thrown together, and given its placement along the city’s eastern edge, near forested land that is known to be prime bear habitat, the Centennial camp has proved to be an awful and yes, dangerous, strategy.

Besides all the other problems reported by local media, it’s shameful — and, I would argue, unconscionable — that our mayor and his staff would create a situation that ignores and, even worse, contradicts many of the guidelines and regulations that the city and other government agencies, both state and federal, have put in place to minimize bear-human conflicts in the Anchorage area.

Above all else, there’s been a long and ongoing local campaign to prevent bears from getting into human food and waste, for the simple fact that once bears learn to associate food with people, all bets are off. Animals that are normally wary of people — and that includes both black and brown bears — almost inevitably become bolder and more aggressive after they’ve become what wildlife biologists call “food conditioned.”

Bears, after all, are “opportunistic omnivores” and will naturally go for easy meals when they’re available. Every year, Anchorage-area bears are killed once they’ve learned they can easily obtain food from human neighborhoods, because of the potential danger such bears present.

There’s a reason for the saying, “A fed bear is a dead bear.” Local authorities, whether employed by the state’s departments of Fish and Game and Public Safety or the municipality’s police department, will kill any bear that’s shown it has lost its innate wariness of people because the animal has been rewarded with easy food.

As state wildlife manager Dave Battle recently explained to Alaska Public Media, city Parks and Recreation staff are normally able to monitor the Centennial Park campground and ensure that campers follow “clean camping” rules. Those who refuse to do so are required to leave. That’s no longer the case, now that it’s become a homeless camp. Again, to quote Battle, “We know there’s food in a lot of the tents in Centennial, and there doesn’t seem to be anything anybody can do about it.”

Yes, some number of bear-resistant food containers have been provided and campers instructed to use them. But all the evidence suggests that plenty of Centennial Park’s homeless campers are ignoring such instructions. And some, perhaps many, are keeping unsecured food in their tents, an invitation to a hungry bear to check out what’s available.

Almost from the moment his administration removed the last of Sullivan Arena’s homeless occupants — and despite all evidence to the contrary — Mayor Bronson has insisted the Centennial Park campground is not part of the city’s homelessness strategy. And he’s refused to accept responsibility for the campers’ well-being.

This is simply one in a series of irresponsible actions — or inactions — by our mayor.

I understand that our city’s homeless, including those camped at Centennial Park, face many other challenges beside hungry bears. But because I care deeply about our species’ complicated relationships with other creatures, I am particularly disturbed that the mayor has placed both humans and bears in harm’s way by the manner in which his administration has mismanaged its Centennial Park campground “solution.” And I’m incredulous that he can say it’s safer than the Sullivan Arena or other homeless camps, considering the violence and death that have already occurred there, beyond the human-bear conflicts that have arisen.

It disturbs and saddens me when animals are killed because we humans act ignorantly, neglectfully or mean-spiritedly. In the case of bears, what we often call a “bear problem” is in fact usually a people problem, directly connected to our own bad behavior. This seems especially true at Centennial Park.

Instead of a being positive role models for our city’s residents, the mayor and his staff have been the worst possible examples of behavior that sets up bear-human conflicts and leads to the unnecessary death of bears, including cubs.

The only remaining question, I suppose, is whether the mayor’s Centennial Park strategy will lead to human injury or even death because of the continued bear-human encounters that are almost certain to happen. As Battle has noted, bears will continue being drawn to the Centennial Park campground by the promise of food, and some “are going to try to come into tents, and those people that are there are going to be put in danger.”

The only proper solution is to end this campground’s use as a dedicated homeless camp and move its current residents to a safer place away from the city’s edge. But that’s not likely to happen given our mayor’s stubborn and reckless ways. I’m not sure even a mauling would be enough to change his mind.

I’d wager that our mayor doesn’t give a damn about bears. The question is whether he really cares about Anchorage’s homeless people.

Anchorage nature writer and wildlife/wildlands advocate Bill Sherwonit is a widely published essayist and the author of more than a dozen books, including “Living with Wildness: An Alaskan Odyssey” and “Animal Stories: Encounters with Alaska’s Wildlife.” He also writes a weekly “City Wilds” column for the Anchorage Press.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

Anchorage nature writer Bill Sherwonit is the author of more than a dozen books, including "Alaska's Bears" and "Animal Stories: Encounters with Alaska's Wildlife."

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