Beautiful Insecurity: Doug Peacock
Doug Peacock grew up roaming the pine forests and swamps of Michigan, fishing for trout, exploring the encampments of ancient people along the post-glacial beaches of the Great Lakes. He attended the University of Michigan, spending two summers as a research assistant under National Science Foundation grants. The first allowed him to assist archeologists in excavating a site Peacock discovered as a teenager. On the second expedition, he and a professor travelled to Alaska in search of Tertiary non-marine vertebrate fossils.
While at the university Peacock ran a lecture program, personally inviting Martin Luther King, Norman Thomas and Tom Hayden to speak to students. Accordingly, Peacock--though essentially a loner--was involved with what would eventually be called "The New Left." The principal movements then were civil rights and anti-war, especially the approaching war in Southeast Asia.
After two tours as a Special Forces medic in the Central Highlands of Vietnam (for which he received the Soldier’s Medal, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and the Bronze Star), Peacock was repatriated to the Rocky Mountains, the wild deserts and tundras of North America. It was there he met the late author Edward Abbey, who used Peacock to mold his iconic character, George Washington Hayduke.
After the war, Doug crawled back into mountains and found solitude in wilderness to be exactly what he needed to confront the demons of Vietnam. In Grizzly Years, Doug credits grizzly bears with restoring his soul. He has been the most consistent advocate for grizzly bears for the last 40 years, traveling between Yellowstone and Glacier national parks to film them and document their struggles to survive. For the last three decades, he has lectured and written widely about wilderness: from bears to buffalo, from the Sierra Madres of the Sonoran desert to the fjords of British Columbia, from the tigers of Siberia to the blue sheep of Nepal.
