You make too many assumptions. Where I grew up, our driveway was over a kilometer long. That was where "rural" started.

You keep arguing that it is possible, with great care, to be mostly safe around bears unless you get unlucky with an accidental provocation. But I've never disputed that. (You can also be mostly safe around men unless you get unlucky, but that's a different story.)

What I dispute is that provocation is necessary beyond existing and being made out of meat. It is true that I haven't had much experience with bears specifically. But animals have got their own things going on, and that includes things like being driven away from resources by other animals of the same species, being starving and desperate, being aggressive and overconfident 'cause that's just his personality (yes, many animals have personalities), and so on.

You'd expect, as a default, that animals that predate large land vertebrates now and then would, under unusual but not unheard-of conditions, predate humans. Yeah, we're weird, we're scary, our ancestors killed predators who were especially likely to try to prey on us. And black bears are themselves small enough to have historically been potential prey targets for bigger bears, cats, wolves. (Actually, they're still in danger from wolves, if the wolves get hungry enough and there are enough of them.) But desperate times call for desperate measures.

So, when I know that from direct experience, and I see multiple accounts of predatory behavior from bears--very rare, sure, not even most deaths--and I see bear experts saying that black bears will very rarely (but not never) engage in predatory behavior, the sensible thing to do is believe them. Even Lynn Rogers, who proudly shows off claw marks she got as a result of her engaging in "bad bear manners" (her words) admits, "Offensive attacks are very rare [...]. These are generally unprovoked predatory attacks in remote areas where bears have the least contact with people."

So when you are quick to blame men for being stupid around bears, but roughly half the black bear fatalities were women; when you say it's always provocation but the accounts and experts say otherwise and accounts include predation; and when it doesn't comport with my own experience with other wild animals; then I am going to think that you're making the same kind of over-confident under-thoughtful mistake that you did when you decided I didn't have experience living around wild animals.

Bears are pretty safe, from what I can tell. (But I do know of a woman in a small community that I frequent who got attacked.) I don't argue that. I don't argue that there should be no risk, either; yes, lots of things are risky. I only argue that your position is too strongly-stated, because bears are neither demons nor angels; they're large but not the largest at-least-occasionally-predatory omnivores, have a fairly timid disposition but a lot of strength, and they've got their own stuff going on. We can have a big say in how the interaction goes, but we don't always get to choose.

That's the point. You can't make it a zero-risk encounter no matter what you do, if it's just you and a bear. Or if it's just you and another human.