Politicizing the Polar Bear

Posted on Jun 30, 2008

Richard Ellis

By Richard Ellis

“I used to work with the dolphins at the Coney Island Aquarium,” said Celia Ackerman, “but when I got here and saw the polar bears, I was immediately converted.” Ackerman has been the bear keeper at the Central Park Zoo since about 1990, and because the only bears on exhibit are the polar bears Gus and Ida, she is, in fact, the polar bear keeper. Until recently, her charges lounged majestically in their spacious, rock-lined enclosure, which has a swimming pool with viewing windows (people looking in; bears not paying much attention to who’s looking in or tapping on the glass), but recently, the bears have become more than giant white plush toys—most visitors, of any and every age, cannot help but call the bears “cute”—they have been politicized.

I went to the zoo to photograph the bears—I needed pictures of captive polar bears for a book I’m working on—and when I got there, Ackerman had just left two “bear toys” in the bears’ enclosure, which were suitcase-size white plastic containers with fish inserted through holes at the corners. After she deposited the toys, she came up onto the viewing platform as the bears were released from their cages. Gus and Ida had no trouble figuring out how to tip the “toys” so the fish would slide out, and Ackerman said, “They’re pretty smart. Look: Gus is pounding on it with his forefeet, just like he would do on the ice if there was a seal den under him.” She laughed when I asked her what would happen if she stayed in the enclosure when the bears came out: “I don’t know, but I’m not about to find out.” Polar bears are the largest of all terrestrial carnivores—yes, taller and heavier than the largest Kodiak brown bears—with the record holder weighing in at more than a ton, and they have a reputation for ferocity that may be undeserved. I wouldn’t want to be there when the hungry bears came out to play either.

More than any other mammal (except of course Mr. Homo sapiens), Ursus maritimus, which translates as maritime bear, has been in the forefront of the news lately, the subject of television specials, lawsuits, congressional debates, and New York Times editorials. Why? Global warming is melting the Arctic ice cap, and as the ice recedes, the seals that breed on the ice are becoming scarcer. Polar bears are, unlike grizzlies and black bears, “obligate carnivores,” which means they eat meat almost exclusively, and on the Arctic ice, meat means seals. If the seals are harder to find, the bears have to wander further offshore, but melting ice means that offshore is getting further and further away.

The Arctic Ocean, which bathes the icy shores of northern Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Russia (the northern coast of Russia is the longest east-west coastline in the world) and the islands of Spitsbergen (which belongs to Norway), surrounds the geographic North Pole, which is actually underwater. (The South Pole is in the middle of the Antarctic continent and is thus on land.) When adventurers like Robert E. Peary tried to reach the North Pole, they walked or sledged across the ice that covered the Arctic Ocean, but nowadays you could reach the pole only by boat or by swimming. I went to the North Pole in 1994 on a Russian icebreaker, and when we arrived at 90 degrees north, we celebrated by going for a quick dip in a hole that the crew had chopped in the 10-foot-thick ice. By the summer of 2000, the ice over the pole was no longer in evidence, and a front-page story in The New York Times was titled “Age-Old Icecap at North Pole Is Now Liquid, Scientists Find.” This was one of the first signs that the polar bears were in trouble, although few people realized it at the time.

By now, Nanook the polar bear has become a morphologically unlikely canary in the coal mine—the worldwide symbol for global warming. In “An Inconvenient Truth” (book and movie) Al Gore chose to illustrate the retreat of the Arctic ice cap by showing that polar bears, unable to find the seals that they had hunted for millenniums, swam in search of ice that was not there, until they drowned. This may have actually happened in a couple of instances, but there probably wasn’t going to be a lemming-like mass migration of polar bears, and a few of the bears turned around and headed inland in search of food, some of them fetching up as far from their usual range as Newfoundland. Still, a decrease in Arctic ice means a decrease in seals, and a decrease in seals means that polar bears can’t get enough to eat. (Don’t even ask about moving the bears to the Antarctic so they can eat penguins.) We can’t protect the bears from global warming, but if we recognize that the bears are in trouble, we might do whatever we can think of to protect them. Some estimates suggest that the polar bear will be extinct in the wild in 2050.

The Endangered Species Act was passed specifically to protect species in trouble, so listing polar bears as endangered would afford them some protection, at least in U.S. territory. In the so-called Polar Bear Nations (the U.S., Canada, Russia, Greenland and Norway), only aboriginal peoples can legally hunt polar bears, but exceptions are made for native people to serve as guides for hunters who are not themselves Eskimos or Inuits. In fact, a considerable proportion—sometimes all—of the income for some native villages come from hunting licenses, so listing the polar bear as endangered would have a catastrophic effect on these native villages. They are therefore opposed to changing the status of Nanook, but their voices are but whimpers compared to the mighty roar of the oil companies. If the polar bear was to be listed, that might mean that the oil companies could not explore for oil in the polar bears’ habitat, and it just so happens that the Department of Minerals Management offered some prime packages of the Chukchi Sea for oil leases in February 2008.

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