Gordon Wiltsie

Brown bears thrive in the mountains.

ONE DAY IN THE summer of 1999, Christoph and Barbara noticed a sizable construction job under way in the Barsa Valley, some miles upstream from Zarnesti. The foundation was being laid for a hundred-room hotel.

This was not long after Christoph had begun discussions with the town mayor about a vision of sustainable ecotourism for Zarnesti. The crucial premise of that vision was to let the Barsa Valley remain undeveloped while the infrastructure to support visitors would be built as small-scale operations down in the town. If the valley itself were consumed by suburban sprawl and recreational development, Christoph had explained, then the carnivore habitat would be badly fragmented if not destroyed, and the Large Carnivore Project would be forced to move, taking its ecotourism business with it. But if the Barsa habitat were protected, then the project could remain, channeling visitors to whatever small pensiunes might be available in Zarnesti. Everyone had seemed to agree that this was the sensible approach. Yet now the hotel construction revealed that someone else—an investor from the city of Brasov, 50 miles away—intended to exploit the area on an ambitious scale. And belatedly it was revealed that the town council had approved open-development zoning for the entire valley.

"So this was disaster," Christoph remembers thinking. "Absolute disaster."

Christoph himself had to leave the country just then for a short visit back in Germany. He and Andrei Blumer, who joined the project as a specialist in rural development, hastily shaped their best argument for valley protection, so that Andrei could present their case to the mayor.

Zarnesti's mayor at the time was a man named Gheorghe Lupu, formerly an engineer in the bicycle factory before Romanian bicycles lost their tactical military appeal. Bright and unpretentious, his dark hair beginning to go gray, Mr. Lupu wore a black leather jacket at work, kept his office door open to drop-by callers, and described himself jokingly as a "cowboy mayor." About the problems of Zarnesti, though, he was serious. Tax revenues yielded only 10 percent of what they did before the revolution, he could tell you; the pulp mill had laid off 2,000 people, the bicycle factory even more; the sewage system and the gas-supply network needed work; the roads too cried out for repair. There was little basis to assume that this harried man would muster much sympathy for protecting wolf habitat—notwithstanding the fact that his own name, Lupu, translates as "wolf." But would he be able, at least, to grasp the connection between large carnivores, open landscape, and tourism? It was a tense juncture for Christoph, having to absent himself while the whole Barsa Valley stood in jeopardy.

Just before leaving for Germany, he received a terse electronic message on his mobile phone. It was from Andrei, saying: "Lupu stopped everything." The mayor had moved to reverse the council's decision. Let the tourists eat and sleep in Zarnesti, he agreed, and pay their visits to the wild landscape as day-trippers. He had embraced the idea of zoning protection for the valley.