I'm a stocky hairy fellow, a guy known in the gay community as a bear. Last weekend, I came eye-to-eye with another bear, in this case a black bear who was wandering through the Murie Ranch in Moose, Wyoming. (For an insightful take on the gay bear culture, check out Andrew Sullivan's article on Salon.com, "I am Bear, Hear me Roar!" But I digress…)

Back to Wyoming, I too was wandering through those famed woods accompanied by my husband Tim and co-NRDC blogger Jon Coifman on a somewhat desperate final attempt to see a bear before flying back to the east coast. All weekend, I was forced to endure the taunts of my husband and colleagues, each of whom had viewed all sorts of wildlife, from great gray owls to moose, from osprey to bears, both black and grizzly. Me? I saw many chipmunks and a pretty awesome flock (herd?) of bats that shared the Murie House with us.

Until that last evening as we crunched through the woods. First Jon and Tim saw a bear cub. But for the life of me, I couldn't spot the youngster in the dimming light. Then, as we walked along and my hope was fading, we heard another rustling in the woods and even my lousy eyes couldn't miss momma bear calmly staring out at us as her cub scurried up a tree and started to cry. Momma stayed quiet for several minutes but then made a long grunting noise. Again a period of peaceful calm but then she grunted again and Jon wisely suggested we slowly but decisively leave the area. We did.

The walk we took that night was introduced to us by author Terry Tempest Williams and her husband Brooke Williams who serves as executive director of the Murie Center. Terry is a beautiful soul whose writing made more than one of us cry over the weekend. Brooke is a genuinely nice guy whose love for the Murie Ranch and all it represents in the history of the conservation movement shines through his every action.

For the uninitiated like me, Mardy and Olaus Murie were legends in struggle to protect wild places in America in the 20th century. In presenting Mardy with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, President Clinton cited her for blazing trails for generations of conservationists, many of whom spent hours sitting in the same cabin on the edges of the Grand Tetons as we did that weekend. Terry and Brooke knew Mardy and assured us that our discussions and debates over the weekend were just as intense as those hosted by the Muries in the decades they lived in Moose.

I can only imagine the strategies that the Muries discussed with their colleagues as they struggled to win protection for what would become the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and win passage of the Wilderness Act. For my colleagues and I, what we were discussing seemed less momentous, but perhaps not.

We had gathered for a weekend workshop and discussion on how to better tell our stories, on how to return our movement to its human roots and passions. Almost four decades ago, when there were no laws to protect the air and the water and the modern environmental movement was in its infancy, giants like the Muries and their conspirators had amazing stories to tell about their work and all they fought to restore and preserve.

Today, in contrast, environmental organizations have become too comfortable being just that: faceless organizations. While critically important to our movement, do legal briefs generally incite passion? Reports and fact sheets are also important advocacy tools, but can pages and pages of scientific data and facts inspire? Does a press release move us?

The answer is no. What typically inspires people are other people, people who come to the environmental movement from very different places with very different reasons. For me, it is a love of animals like the brown bear and her cub and the sea turtle I saw a few years ago emerge from the ocean to lay her eggs (in Miami Beach of all places!) For others of my colleagues, it is a strong sense of fairness, of a need to speak out for what cannot speak for itself. I'll allow my colleagues to tell their own stories, but I will end with a plea that those of us fortunate enough to be professional environmentalists come out from behind our legal briefs and reports and press releases and start to talk about the passion that drives us.

It makes no difference whether the passion is for energy efficiency measures and carbon trading laws that may just stop global warming. Or for those bears, grizzlies and wolves who cannot speak for themselves. It may be our stories that save them -- and us.