Pyrenees Developers Caught in a Buzz Saw Over All-But-Invisible Bears : Endangered species: Environmentalists say rare colony could be extinct within 20 years unless strict protection guidelines are adopted and obeyed.

This is the story of a dozen bears with pretty names like Papillon, Zoe, Dominique and Camille, who have become the center of one of Europe’s fiercest environmental debates. It also concerns Jojo, a millionaire loner, who is the best-known animal in the Pyrenees.

Jojo is tame and the rest are wild. Fifteen thousand people a year visit the village of Borce, France, under snow-speckled mountains to see Jojo in his cage and be told how he was rescued as an abandoned cub by schoolchildren 19 years ago. He is soon to be given a 1.5 million reserve of his own and his first mate.

One of the reasons for spoiling him is that he justifies the logo of the Aspe Valley, the entrance to the Pyrenees National Park. On tourist brochures, a cuddly teddy clutches a flower, giving the impression that bears are as common as those in America’s Yellowstone and as much loved.

Both themes are wrong. Bears are all but invisible while local people fear that campaigns on their behalf will hold up road, ski station and other building plans that might save a dying valley populated by dairy farmers who have hated bears for centuries.

The Council of Europe’s environmentalists say the bears could be extinct within 20 years unless strict protection guidelines are obeyed.

The head of the national park’s scientific committee, Michel Clin, a Bordeaux geological professor, agreed with this view. He resigned in anger in July, saying that the valley’s 13 local councils were going ahead with development plans that will destroy one of Europe’s last bear colonies.

Visitors to the Pyrenees Park might think that this has already happened. A game warden has just retired after 45 years’ service without ever sighting the animal. Villagers at Urdos or Accous tell thrilling stories of bears attacking the parish priest’s beehive or terrorizing isolated shepherds but the tales date back 10 years or more.

Only men of faith see the bears. A local photographer, Gerard Lopez, camped out every week for six years before he got his picture. But the most persistent bear-tracker is Jean-Jacques Camarra, an official of the National Hunting Office who has identified and named at least a dozen bears although sometimes the only clue was a footprint or a piece of fur.

His whole life is devoted to protecting the animals and he spends seven or eight hours a day walking from forest to forest. He has seen bears only 12 times in 10 years--including cubs playing with butterflies--and has just written a book called “L’Ours Brun” in which he reveals their names for the first time.

In it, he sets out the arguments of environmental lobbies, backed by the minister, Brice Lalonde, who believes the bears must have 250,000 acres of what he calls “tranquility space” to survive beyond 2010. The enormous popularity of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film, “The Bear,” which was pre-released here to a background of violent controversy, has done much to aid his cause.

“It is not just an ecological argument” he said. “The presence of bears and their increase could contribute to bringing back prosperity to the region”.

This is a minority view in a valley of 3,000 people that has lost 75% of its population in 90 years. The bear is a natural enemy of high altitude sheep and cattle farmers. Last year there were 39 cases of bear attacks on sheep, but shepherds say there were many unproved cases where animals died of fright. Turn of the century photographs of villagers tormenting or maltreating 10-foot-high bears show how deep the resentment goes.

In 1982, two bears were shot dead despite fierce protection measures in which large areas are inaccessible to local communities. One village received compensation of 40,000 francs last year because a forest was put out of bounds so that bears would not be disturbed by timber work. Some of the money was spent on flying in food, including half a cow, by helicopter in an attempt to lure the animals away. Helicopters are also used to fly shepherds’ supplies to high mountain pastures so as not to disturb bear trails.

“We can’t collect wood, we can’t graze sheep and we can’t collect berries because of those animals” an irritated farmer said. “Bears, bears . . . they always come first.”

According to Jacques Capdeville, a nature lover who runs the equivalent of a public works cooperative for the 13 village councils, every argument over saving bears is full of contradictions.

“There were more bears in the valley when there were more people” he said, implicitly casting doubt over the immense zone of tranquility that would throw centuries of farming tradition into disarray. “In the adjoining Ariege department bears have disappeared at the same time as the population has drifted away, leaving the area like a desert. Bears appear to thrive in the proximity of humans and it’s not surprising if local people feel they should be left to sort this out by themselves without pressure from outside”.

In the Aspe Valley with its medieval stone villages, the rural drift has been temporarily stopped but new job opportunities are still desperately needed to persuade young people to stay. Local councilors have approved a 25-million franc European Community road-widening scheme, a new road tunnel alongside the park and long-distance skiing facilities and other developments to encourage tourism. The environmental lobby, backed by radicals who have destroyed construction equipment, say that the bears will run away in fright or just lie down and die if the work starts.

But while Zoe, Dominique and Camille play hide and seek, Jojo looks smugger than ever in his cage at Borce. The same farmers who hate the wild bears go sloppy when they talk of the local orphan brought down from the mountains in a haversack. He will be more than ever the center of interest in his own 10-acre reserve from December, which expects to receive 50,000 visitors a year. At 20, he will at last be given a mate. Because of the shortage of candidates in the Aspe Valley, his mate will come from a Paris zoo.