The Grizzly Man

I'm going to be completely honest here. I really don't understand what "The Grizzly Man" has to do with religious studies, but then, I guess that's why I'm the student and not the teacher.

As far as this documentary goes, I get that "the grizzly man" is trying to raise awareness about bears, and that he wants people to realize that bears are misunderstood, that we should respect bears. How living with them and trying to become a bear accomplishes this task is beyond me. Why couldn't he have achieved this goal by observing the bears from a distance? By respecting them in their natural habitat?

It seems ironic to me that the same man who was trying to prove that the common conceptions of bears are erroneous actually died by being eaten by one. I don't know about other people, but this is one of very few cases where I've heard that a bear actually consumed an entire person. You hear of attacks and of people dying from bear attacks, but rarely of their ribcage being found after they were eaten. Doesn't a death like that make any progress he made for naught?