The Arctic Ambassador

Animals are rarely allowed to stand only for themselves.  We have a tendency as a society to affix meanings to them and to make them symbols.  Show anyone, anywhere in the world a bald eagle and they will probably think of the United States.  Doves symbolize peace, while many people associate snakes with the devil or evil.  These days, as soon as you mention polar bears or show people a picture of one, that turns peoples' thoughts to climate change.

Frequently Asked Questions about polar bears, from Polar Bears International

Polar bears are the archetypal animal of global warming.  We hear about how the polar ice caps are melting and how polar bears are starving to death or going out to sea and drowning because they can't find any sea ice, only open water.  Climate change deniers claim it's all bull, that there are more polar bears now then there used to be, and that even if the arctic is warming, polar bears will adapt.  And if they don't adapt, well, that's just natural selection, or something like that.

The reality is that the arctic is warming twice and fast as the rest of the world on average and that polar bears are running out of habitat and hunting grounds.  It's hard to say how many bears there are now compared to how many there once were, because people have only recently actually cared enough to bother counting, and the arctic is not the easiest place to track and survey solitary, wide-ranging animals.   Estimates from decades ago suggested a count of bears that was about a third of what the current estimate is, but it's hard to say just how accurate those early estimates were.

Sometimes, it seems like we put too much weight on the shoulders of polar bears, expecting them to be flagship species for global climate change.  It's easy in one way because they are a beloved species that virtually every on earth can recognize.  At the same time, they live in a corner of the world that is so remote that, as far as many people are concerned, might as well be the dark side of the moon.  The bitter pill is that, if polar bears went extinct, most of us might not really notice.  I would be very sad - the world would be a much sadder, less exciting place without polar bears - but the world would continue to spin on its axis, like it has following the extinction of many other species.

What so many people aren't grasping is that global climate change is not an arctic problem - it's a GLOBAL problem.  It's great to rally people around the polar bear, but there are a lot of species and ecosystems that are in trouble, many of which are much closer to home and which, not to be selfish, are going to have a much bigger direct impact on us than the polar bear.  Perhaps if we focus more on those - the loss of coral reefs due to ocean warming and acidification, which can have serious impacts on fisheries and tourism, or the increasing droughts and forest fires in many parts of the world - we can get more people on board with making an environmental difference. 

In saving the rest of the world, we save the polar bear.