Rich Beckman, professor of journalism, specializes in environmental issues. Each of the last five years he has traveled to British Columbia and Alaska to photograph bears. Beckman's work documents the dangers these magnificent animals face from hunting and from habitat loss due to logging. He is producing a multimedia CD-ROM for high school and middle school students.

This bear is not an albino; it is a subspecies of the black bear, often called a “spirit bear” because of its ghostly coloring. It is found only on remote islands off the coast of British Columbia, where one in 10 of the black bears receives both recessive genes and is born white.